Bloch - The Principle of Hope 3

Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought
Thomas McCarthy, General Editor

Theodor W. Adorno, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique
Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms
Karl-Otto Apel, Understanding and Explanation: A TranscendentalPragmatic Perspective
Richard J. Bernstein, editor, Habermas and Modernity
Ernst Bloch, Natural Law and Human Dignity
Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope
Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age
Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth
Helmut Dubiel, Theory and Politics: Studies in the Development of
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John Forester, editor, Critical Theory and Public Life
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Apprenticeships
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science
Jiirgen Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles
jurgen Habermas, editor, Observations on "The Spiritual Situation
of the Age"
Hans joas, G. H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-examination of
His Thought
Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time
Claus Offe, Contradictions of the Welfare State
Claus Offe, Disorganized Capitalism: Contemporary Transformations of
Work and Politics
Helmut Peukert, Science, Action and Fundamental Theology: Toward a
Theology of Communicative Action
Joachim Ritter, Hegel and the French Revolution: Essays on the
Philosophy of Right
Alfred Schmidt, History and Structure: An Essay on Hegelian-Marxist
and Structuralist Theories of History
Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy
Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of
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Michael Theunissen, The Other: Studies in the Social Ontology of
Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Buber
Ernst Tugendhat, Self-Consciousness and SelfDetermination
THE PRINCIPLE
OF HOPE
Ernst Bloch
Translated by Neville Plaice,
Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight
The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts
Written in the USA 1938-1947

revised 1953 and 1959;
first American edition published by The MIT Press, 1986
English translation 1986 by Basil Blackwell, Ltd.
Originally published as Das Prinzip Hoffnung, 1959 by
Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, Federal Republic of Germany.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by
any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or
information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the
publisher.
Library of Congress Caealcging-In-Publicarion Data

Bloch, Ernst, 1885-1977
The principle of hope.
(Studies in contemporary German social thought)
Translation of Das Prinzip Hoffnung.
Includes index.
1. Hope. 2. Imagination. 3. Utopias. 4. Creation
(Literary, artistic, etc.) I. Title.
II. Series.
B3209.B753P7513 1986
193
85- 2381
ISBN 0-262-02250-8 (volume I)
0-262-02251-6 (volume 2)
0-262-02252-4 (volume 3)
0-262-02248-6 (3-volume set)
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32.e<f
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Printed and bound in Great Britain
CONTENTS
PART FIV:6
(Identity)
WISHFUL IMAGES OF THE FULFILLED MOMENT

(MORALITY, MUSIC, IMAGES OF DEATH, RE~IGION.
MORNING-LAND OF NATURE, HIGHEST GOOD)
43- NOT STRAIGHT WITH ONESELF
9 27
44. HOME AND SCHOOL GUIDE THE WAY
928
45- GUIDING IMAGES THEMSELVES, TO BECOME LIKE PROPER

HUMAN BEINGS
930
46. GUIDING PANELS OF DANGEROUS AND HAPPY LIFE
934
Much still open 934 Too warmly dressed 934 Wild, bold
hunt 935 French happiness and joy 937 Adventures of
happiness 938
47. GUIDING PANELS OF WILL TEMPI AND OF

CONTEMPLATION, OF SOLITUDE AND FRIENDSHIP, OF
INDIVIDUAL AND COMMUNITY
939
A decent person 939 Fabius or the hesitant man of action 940
Sorel, Machiavelli or energy and the wheel of fortune 942
Problem of breaking, Hercules at the crossroads, DionysusApollo 948 Vita activa, vita contemplativa or the world of the chosen
good part 953 Double light of solitude and friendship 958 Double
light of individual and collective 965 Salvation of the individual
through community 969
48. YOUNG GOETHE, NON-RENUNCIATION, ARIEL

The wish to smash things 973 Wertherian happiness and
suffering 974 The demand, Prometheus, Ur-Tass~ 975 Intention
973
vi
CONTENTS
of sublimity, Faust Gothic and metamorphosis 980 Ariel and poetic

imagination 985 The demonic, and the allegorical-symbolic
sealedness which expresses itself 989 Just those who know such
longing: Mignon 993 Wishes as presentiments of our capacities 997
49. GUIDING FIGURES OF VENTURING BEYOND THE LIMITS;
FAUST AND THE WAGER OF THE FULFILLED MOMENT
1000
No wet straw 1000 Play the lute and drain the glasses 1001 Don
Giovanni, all women and the wedding 1004 Faust, macrocosm, Stay
awhile you are so fair 1011 Faust, Hegel's Phenomenology and the
event 1016 Odysseus did not die in Ithaca, hejoumeyed to the
unpeopled world 1023 Hamlet, sealed will; Prospero, groundless
joy 1027
50. GUIDING PANELS OF ABSTRACT AND MEDIATED
VENTURING BEYOND THE LIMITS, ILLUSTRATED BY THE

CASESOF DON QUIXOTE AND FAUST
1034
The fermenting will 1034 Don Quixote's Rueful Countenance and
golden illusion 1035 A related question: the wrongs and rights of
Tasso versus Antonio 1051 The Luciferian-Promethean and the layer
of sound 1053
51. VENTURING BEYOND AND MOST INTENSE WORLD OF
MAN IN MUSIC
Happiness of the blind loS8 The nymph Syrinx 1058 Bizarre hero
and nymph: Symphonie fantastique 1060 Human expression as
inseparable from music 1062 Music as canon and world of laws;
harmony of the spheres, more humane lode-stars 1070 Tonepainting, work of nature once again, the intensity and morality of
music 1081 The hollow space; subject of the sonata and fugue 1089
Funeral march, requiem, cortege behind death 1097
Marseillaise and the moment in Fidelio 1101
IOS7
52. SELF AND GRAVE-LAMP OR IMAGES OF HOPE AGAINST THE

POWER OF THE STRONGEST NON-UTOPIA: DEATH
1103
I. Introduction/No talk of dying 1104 Utopias of the night with no
morning any more in this world 1105
II. Religious Counterpoints from Death and Victory/Only good of the
dead 1109 Shades and Greek twilight 1111 Affirmation of
recurrence; Orphic wheel 1112 Elixirs of the soul and the gnostic
journey to heaven 1116 Egyptian heaven in the tomb 112.1 Biblical
resurrection and apocalypse 1125 Mohammedan heaven, strength of
the flesh, magic garden 1133 Sheer repose seeks deliverance even from
CONTENTS
vii
heaven, the wishful image of nirvana 1136

III. Enlightened and Romantic Euthanasias/The freethinker as strong
thinker 1142 Youth with the reversed torch and with the newly
lighted torch 1143 Dissolution in the universe, lethal return to
nature 1148 Glacier, earth-mother and world-spirit 1152
IV. Further Secularized Counter-moves, Nihilism, House of Humanity/
Still the dyeing of nothingness 1156 Four signs of a borrowed
faith 1157 Metaphorical immortality: in the work 1161 Death as
the chisel in tragedy 1167 Disappearance of lethal nothingness in
socialist consciousness 117.2
V. Joy of Life and Fragment in All Things/Journey of discovery into
death 1176 The moment as not-being-here; extra-territoriality to
death 1178
53. GROWING HUMAN COMMITMENT TO RELIGIOUS
MYSTERY, TO ASTRAL MYTH, EXODUS, KINGDOM; ATHEISM
1183
AND THE UTOPIA OF THE KINGDOM
I. Introduction/In good hands 1183 Lunatics again, occult
path 1184 Chiefs and magicians; every religion has
founders 1189 A numinous element, even in the religious
Humanum 1193
II. Founders, Glad Tidings and Cur Deus Homo/The stranger as
teacher: Cadmus 1203 Singer of ecstatic salvation:
Orpheus 1204 Poets of Apollonian gods and their attendance:
Homer and Hesiod; Roman state gods 1205 The unblossomed
belief in Prometheus and the tragic liturgy: Aeschylus 1212
Fish-man and moon-scribe of astral myth: Oannes, Hermes
Trismegistus-Thoth 1216 Glad tidings of earthly-heavenly balance
and of the inconspicuous world-rhythm [Tao]: Confucius, Lao
Tzu 1220 A founder who is himself part of the glad tidings:
Moses, his god of exodus 1230 Moses or consciousness of utopia
in religion, of religion in utopia 1235 Warlike self-commitment,
mingled with astral light: Zoroaster, Mani 12.41 Redemptive selfcommitment, limited to acosmos, related to nirvana:
Buddha 1249 Founder from the spirit of Moses and the exodus,
completely identical with his glad tidings: Jesus, apocalypse,
kingdom 1256 Jesus and the father; the serpent of paradise as
saviour; the three wishful mysteries: resurrection, ascension,
return 1265' Fanaticism and submission to Allah's will:
Mohammed 1274
III. The Core of the Earth as Real Extra-territoriality/The road of the
non-existent What For 1278 Inavertible and avertible fate, or
Vlll
CONTENTS
Cassandra and Isaiah 1280 God as utopian hypostatized ideal of the

unknown man; Feuerbach, Cur Deus homo again 1283 Recourse to
atheism; problem of the space into which God was imagined and
utopianized 1290 Stay awhile in the religious layer: the unity of the
instant in mysticism 12.98 Miracles and the miraculous; moment as
the foot of Nike 1303
54. THE LAST WISHFUL CONTENT AND THE HIGHEST GOOD
1312
Drive and food 1312 Three wishes and the best 1313 Value-images
as variations of the highest good; Cicero and the philosophers 1315
Stay awhile and highest good, problem of a guiding image in the
world process 1321 Drive and food once again or subjectivity,
objectivity of goods, of values and of the highest good 1325
Hovering and severity with reference to the highest good (evening
wind, statue of Buddha, figure of the kingdom) 1334 Number and
cipher of qualities; meaning of the highest good in nature 1347
55. KARL MARX AND HUMANITY; STUFF OF HOPE
1354
The true architect 1354 'To overturn all circumstances in which
man is a degraded, a subjugated, a forsaken, a contemptible
being' 1355 Secularization and the power of setting things on their
feet 1359 Forward dream, sobriety, enthusiasm and their
unity 136S Certainty, unfinished world, homeland 137 0
Glossary of Foreign Terms
1377
Name and Title Index
1390
PART FIVE
(Identity)

(MORALITY, MUSIC, IMAGES OF DEATH,
RELIGION, MORNING-LAND OF NATURE,
HIGHEST GOOD)
The All in the identifying sense is the Absolute of that which people basically
want. Thus this identity lies in the dark ground of all waking dreams, hopes,
utopias themselves and is also the gold ground on to which the concrete utopias
ar~ applied. Every solid daydream intends this double ground as homeland;
it is the still unfound, the experienced N ot- Yet-Experience in every experience
that has previously become.
The Principle of Hope, Vol. I, p. 316
NOT STRAIGHT WITH ONESELF
Go where you will.
43
Saying
From early on we want to get to ourselves. But we do not know who

we are. All that seems clear is that nobody is what he would like to be
or could be. Hence the common envy, namely of those who seem to have,
in fact to be, what we are entitled to. But hence also the desire to start
something new which begins with ourselves. Attempts have always been
made to live commensurately with ourselves.
We have in us what we could become. This announces itself in the unrest
at not being sufficiently defined. Youth is only the most visible, not the
sole manifestation of this feeling. It includes the girl who adorns herself
for the special boy she does not know. It includes the boy who feels called
upon to be this special one, to achieve great things; only he does not yet
know in what field. In this state people are on the tip of their own tongue,
only they do not yet know what they taste like. All that has previously
become acts as an inhibition or at best a temporary husk, so it falls away.
The inside seeks to get going, seeks the action which shapes it genuinely
and outwardly. But youth just blurts things out, and the same is true
wherever a man is not yet finished. Even the grown man, unless he is
paltry or coarse, will often round, never close his life; he neither wants
to, nor is he in a position to. We also wish to bring what is ours, what
we obscurely are and intend, out into the open and to possess it. This
business is attempted alone or in couples or in a group, what we want is
always a life which is not driven away from our inclinations and strengths.
This is vague, because most people are not even familiar with their inclinations, above all because nobody can get himself straight when all relations
between people are in a mess. Nevertheless the question of what to seek,
what to flee, is still asked here, in the sphere of personal attitude. A person
presents himself as he would like to be effective, and the fact that mostly
he would like to be just this also makes it possible for others to persuade
him how he would like to be. Everywhere he is far from being in form.
But everyone can get out of his skin, because no one is wearing it yet.
HOME AND SCHOOL GUIDE THE WAY

Before every man stands an image of what he is to become.
44
Ruckert
The boy is -going to be someone, to be made into something. The young

have to be educated, raw meat is not palatable. So it is minced or cooked,
turned into the items you see on the menu. A decent man, a respectable
fellow, all right, there is nothing to be said against that, a lot to be said
for it. No communal entity could survive without them, there has to be
solid hard work. But the man usable in bourgeois terms is required to
be little, especially scaled-down, artificially faceless and totally devoid of
colour. Does not smoke, does not drink" does not play cards, does not
look at girls, is meant to breed and be bred as moral kitsch. The decent
man thinks of himself last, so little man what now" is the rule. And he
is still expected to keep his head, even when the clock has struck thirteen
for him.
Nobody is born to this, everyone is first made into it in stables. Essentially
there are many bold things going on in young people, still without a clear
direction. But they are standardized at home and at school; nobody starts
curving early, because nobody wants to be a hook. t However, trainers
at home and at school aim actually to achieve the improbable: to make
people put up with what will later be done to them. The will is pleasantly
diverted or broken strictly until it passes into smiling and nodding. The
mind is drilled so that it never breaks out of the pre-arranged questioning
and answering of the life that awaits the employee. Usually only servants
are intended in bourgeois society and not of course what would be so
natural for the oppressed: avengers. In general, the pupil is meant to be
reduced to the denominator of the time into which he is born, in particular
to the denominator of the class to which he belongs through his parents;
of course, for a long time, the third estate was scarcely considered fit for
reading and writing, let alone the fourth. And if bourgeois society, which
needs far more schooled workers- than feudal society, has established a more
common ground in reading, writing and arithmetic, it is a ground on
* 'Kleiner Mann was nun?', a novel
by Hans Fallada (1893-1947).
l Bloch has reversed a German saying here which is the equivalent of: 'There's nothing like
starting young'.
HOME AND SCHOOL GUIDE THE WAY
929
which the worker is supposed to stay put, while his betters progress to
languages and higher things. However, everything culminates in the guiding
image of the employee, the most faded there is. All education, of course,
is directed towards a guiding image, and it is only from this that the kind
of discipline comes, only towards it that the kind of educational path goes.
The discipline in its laxer form comes from the disintegrating bourgeois
type who has become insecure, in its strict form from the older type who
still imitated or counterfeited a noblesse which obliges. The lax discipline
has also lately been called progressive, one which does not bite anyone
but does not get its teeth into anything either. It makes people superficial
and ignorant under a veneer of knowledge; it is this kind of school which
produces the playboy. Whereas the strict, old-fashioned, shoulder-tothe-wheel school does at least produce the tried and tested man. The
educational path in both corresponds in the case of the technical school to
direct capitalist life, and in that of the so-called humanistic grammar school
almost invariably to the departed, plaster muses which have to be created
around or handed down to this life so that it does not look quite so unlovely
and soulless. But the goal of this preparation, whether it is pursued more
through practicalities or more through Greek verses, always remains the
compliant member of bourgeois society. One who never regrets what he
has learned, but also never makes use of it to find out and to learn what
could be awkward for those who invigilate from above. This schooling
does not stop even for adults, man, says a Roman proverb, and it should
know, is always a recruit. Above everything the well-paid gentleman
beckons, he alone has become the substantial citizen. The Germans also
looked up to the corps-student, * to the officer, yearning for their sons
to attain this glory shining ahead. The last knights jangled through dreams
which add the final polish, through emulation which never arrives. The
average petit bourgeois always has a pious respect for such images, he looks
upwards to a higher, more decisive life. There is nothing in itself contemptible about this look; after all, his secondary school teachers were
not much of an example, and in later working-life the lamb does not exactly rule. However, it depends on the kind of more decisive life, on it
really being higher than everything before. As it is though, education
remains to the end the most conformist of operations, not a single one
of its guiding images is yet one of tomorrow. The latest trend to announce
itself is so-calledsociallyeducational work, moulding people into citizens of
* A member of exclusive duelling-fraternities at German universities.
930
the state and the like. Useful membership of society is aimed at more than
ever here, but it is least useful for the oppressed class, for its own comprehended wilL Rather, this will as class-consciouswill must be prevented,
and so in bourgeois adult education not only blunted knowledge, but also
increasingly sharpened lies are served up. But people can only truly be
educated towards the guiding image of the comrade, as is already the case
in one great country. This is also the only kind of education which is
utopian in the good sense, i.e. which grasps and-learns the old from the
new, and not vice versa, and which does not bring the canonical kind
of wanting and knowing back into what is antiquated or consciously
inhibited. Walking upright appears here, being oneself in communal being, pupils and teachers live ahead, on a continually advancing frontier.
They live where the goal itself is young, towards which the learner brightens
and comes into form.
GUIDING IMAGES THEMSELVES, TO BECOME

LIKE PROPER HUMAN BEINGS
4S
A man who does not carry within him a kind of vision of his perfection is just
as monstrous as a man without a nose.
Chesterton
There is not one of us who could not also be someone else. A shrub is
content for the time being to remain one. But people can, so to speak,
become anything, incomplete as they are. Dark and indefinite as they are in
themselves, in their folds. A woman who is feeling bad, left alone, becomes
capable of anything, as it were. A man in a precarious situation or suddenly
removed from his previous situation is nevertheless immediately capable of
going amongst the dragons. Examples of this are as numberless as the sands
on which they are built. They fall on the dismal side of look-before-you..leap
as well as on a genuinely amazing side. Of course, some of the ground has
already been prepared here, no person is entirely wax, and nobody is a wheel
which rolls freely by itself. Instead of wax, there are hereditary dispositions,
though more of talent than of character. Instead of the wheel rolling freely
by itself, there is the class, the respective structures of the society and time
into which people with their dispositions are born. And here there are
traditional guiding images of specificbeing, historically shaped, which first
GUIDING IMAGES
931
make the dream of our own role palpable. Good youth, in particular, which
has not been misled, wishes to become like steadfast and forceful human
beings. It is precisely because human beings as such are still undefined
that they need a cross between a mirror and a painted picture when they
look inside. Then, as noble counselor even as obligation, the intensified
image stares back at them of what, according to their disposition and their
time, they ought to become in order to be full of a peace that is not only
inner peace.
But this directing is possible only because no one is yet like himself.
Our core remains dark and indefinite, does not know its name. But equally
it is definable; in terms of attitude, within the will which appears in an
ordered form, this means morally definable. Only because of the underlying wax is so much pressing possible in education, and so much forcing
into the mould in later life too. But also it is only becauseof the unconcluded
definability of men that so many of their possible faces have already been
able to appear socio..historically speaking, and so many new definitions
still lie in the future. Definition considered both as deflnitio and as destinatio
of the human X; there is still room for experiment with man's true face.
Together with the goal for which the attitude and the action logically
corresponding to it occur, in short, for which the character formed in
accordance with the guiding image works. The goal has today become
visible as socialist liberation; and what this freedom contains, a freedom
not merely from but chiefly for, still remains happily open to defining
moral work. In the Americanized countries the guiding image held up
for most people to imitate is precisely the worst and most faded: the
employee. However, in bourgeois terms there have been nobler types and
desirably more appropriate ones, for example in the trades, in the model
of the proficient master craftsman. There have been finer types, even some
which strove for real destinatio, though always with the constant minus
of the food-providing labourer below them. Previous history has thus produced the spell, but also the wealth of those respective canonical types, which
can be distinguished as the respective guiding images which are moving
ahead. The warrior, the wise man, the gentleman and especially the citoyen
are figures of this kind. All these guiding images carried a kind of scroll,
a kind of appealing and commanding motto; and a perfect man in any
given age had to be or was expected to be fashioned after them. These
guiding images condense that element in humanly visible, developing
formation which was called virtue in any given age, i.e. behaviour which
is not naturally given to the human creature, but which is his given task.
932
Thus guiding images as images of attitude do not stand in the merely

inward space of a formally good mentality. Nor do they stand in the equally
ahistorical space of an apersonal collection of virtues or a doctrine of moral
goods as such. The separate guiding images show virtues as being active
in a socially fully shaped manner but at the same time in a utopian manner
that continues to impose obligation. Above all, despite their class basis,
which may be a long-lost one, these guiding images have still partly retained
an appeal as if the virtue desired in them was not yet wholly done or done
for. This content, which is not attached to its time, and is thus refunctionable and quite capable of new things, means that there is a possible
heritage even of attitudes and of their virtue, not only of cultural works.
It means that the image of a knight or a monk can still awaken a kind
of loss, a kind of rediscovery, a kind of obligation which arouses longing;
the Horseman of Bamberg * for example, or Durer's St jerome in his Cell.
And thus wishful portraits of being truly human rise above their social
location, in experimenting variety, in exemplariness which is not everywhere
discharged. They rise up as far as the citoyen, a particularly utopian selfimage - like the 'Christian Man' of the Peasant Wars. The citoyen is
the entity which has remained the most general or disembodied, but also
that which is least inhabited and used by class society. He rose up in contrast
to the contemporary socio-economic basis as a kind of distant comrade,
and is therefore far more glorified than even the monk, but also far more
utopian. He rose up in contrast to the egotistical individual member of
bourgeois society, who was then called L'homme pure and simple, a guiding
image which then revealed itself as the bourgeois citizen, but which nevertheless in its beginnings was the subject of bourgeois-revolutionary human
rights. The citoyen on the other hand, as Marx first distinguished him
from L'homme, was conceived as a member of a non-egotistical and
therefore still imaginary polis. He was idealized as the other side of the
bourgeois, and thus, in his non-egotistical dreamlike beauty, not subject
to the division of labour and not reified, he was idealized with particular
force. The possibility of this guiding image, which was not only estateless
but also prematurely classless, could therefore only be sought in disguisewishes or in necessarily pathetic, even rhetorical literature. The pathos
of the citoyen side extends in literature from Addison and Alfieri to Schiller,
where it culminates; it does not decline, but becomes - after the victory
* The Horseman of Bamberg: a medieval sculpture in Bamberg Cathedral. It is not known
who carved it nor whom it represented.
GUIDING IMAGES
933
of the bourgeois has occurred - pessimistic in Holderlin and finally in

Shelley. Wherea.s the wishful costume of the citoyen appears in the middle
of the accomplishment of the French Revolution itself, as the utopia of
the man of the polis, of the politically elevated man, and analogously
according to a rather classicallyromanticized model. Madame Roland wept
because she had not been born a Spartan; Brissot considered himself to
be the French Cicero, Robespierre identified with Aristides, and also with
Cato, Desmoulins with Brutus. Lessing's Emilia and Odoardo, * Schiller's
Verrina] , are also clearly derived from classical models; but the true model
was abstract-utopian. The citoyen's guiding image was the only one which
did not come from the line of extension of existing human types, of existing
social persons of worth, but almost entirely from an intelligible society.
From one which, given the enduring class basis, is bound to seem abstract
and therefore rhetorical or costume-like, but which nonetheless sends ahead
of it a glimmer of morning light - 'in noble, proud manliness'. The citoyen
is the penultimate person of worth who has appeared historically, preceding
in however overblown and general a way the guiding image of the
comrade. So much for guiding images in general, to become like proper
human beings; they arise and succeed one another socio-economically,
but they are also pictured in a utopian-ideal way and in at least one of
their characteristics still impose obligation, are undischarged. Of course,
if the still hovering aspect of our true destinatio is drawn on a field, then
instead of various persons of worth and, as it were, above them entire guiding
panels emerge, notin succession, but juxtaposed. They therefore show frequent
ambivalence in the form of life which beckons and hovers before us as
desirable. Quid quaerendum, quid fugendum.I in this fine, Ciceronian,
discursive-moral wishful question, guiding panels, unlike guiding images,
often stand at a crossroads. For example between active or contemplative
life, joy of the senses or peace of mind and other prospects; how easily
this kind of thing is filled with burning concern. Thus not merely a juxtaposition develops out of the succession of guiding images, but in fact an
ambivalence in the juxtaposition where the guiding panels stand. Certainly,
it would be incurably idealistic to try to dispel conceptually contradictions
or even ambiguities which have their origin in the class society and can
therefore only end with that society. But all guiding images of class society
* Characters in Lessing's play 'Emilia Galotti'.
t In Schiller's Piesco'.
: What to seek, what to flee.
934
no more vanish with it than do all double seductions in its guiding panels.
Guiding images, especially guiding figures together with guiding panels
first contain the wishful questions of better specific being in terms of attitude
and morality; they contain the mutual correction of these questions. They
border and structure the line of the old fleeing and seeking questions about
the right way to become like proper human beings, in such a way that
the line is true.
GUIDING PANELS OF DANGEROUS AND
46
HAPPY LIFE
On the saddle the bride before you.
Carmen toJose
If he only knew how, he would set all his sails for a journey to the Spanish
sea of life.
Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne
Much still open

So the path to ourselvesis never narrow. Even the bourgeois style, however
constricted, is bound to shimmer on it. It slowly shakes its head from
side to side, sees a choice at least in little things. Is it desirable to put
"-down roots or conversely to change one's place, one's position? Change
of place keeps one younger, but the sedentary person is more likely to
reach a ripe old age. Is it better to heat one's children in anger or in cold
blood? Is it better for the nerves always to expect the worst or always
to hope for the best? So even the simple, when one does it, is far from
easy, each step poses a further question.
Too warmly dressed

Furthermore, and above all, should the fur we choose be comfortable?
When you have made your bed you have to lie on it, but do we want
to lie in the first place and, if so, how? The early riser gets through a
GUIDING PANELS OF DANGEROUS AND HAPPY LIFE
935
lot early on and soon has the satisfaction of work done. But we can also
start too hastily, and in the evening of the day or even of our life comes
regret at having expended ourselves, tied ourselves down immaturely. If
on the other hand we do not start until the evening of the day or indeed
the evening of life, there is less occasion for regret about hasty or immature
achievement but in return there is little time left and the thought of the
door closing on so much uncompleted work can be torturing. Moreover,
it is good to rest when the work is done, but does work itself intend
rest as its goal? And does not the quiet life enervate, is not exciting, stirring,
and even dangerous life more desirable? In itself, the soft bed seems best,
but a soft body, soft muscles, a soft man too? Certainly not, too much
butter and too much wool are bad, spare the rod and spoil the child.
Nonetheless, domestic bliss and the toughening, the tough and the
adventure-seeking can appeal equally and promise our place; the featherbed and steel both undoubtedly have their lure. There are two paths
here, and it has even been said, in a way which is itself so precarious,
that the comfort-seeker strives for soft happiness, the brave man seeks the
dangerous life. But does not the latter also make its followers happy; where
does it say that only soft happiness is true happiness? This is a question
that already concerns the pupil when he is taken in hand and ends up enjoying tough discipline. And is not danger something by which precisely
the brave man sets no store, which must be overcome precisely by him?
Nothing is then sweeter than to stretch out on the fur, beside the warming
stove.
Wild, bold hunt Yet every situation where the going is tough appeals. The call to the
dangerous life is again being heard, the Nazi has revived it. Of course,
life for the victims of fascism is incomparably more dangerous than for
the murderers themselves. But because the fascist protects exploitation,
happiness is the last thing he can offer his henchmen and petit-bourgeois
fellow-travellers, and so he was obliged to decry it. Here, too, the Nazi
did not invent or create anything, he falsified older virtues or borrowed
on virtues for which the bourgeois conformist as hero, the butcher of the
defenceless had not originally been foreseen. Beyond the murderers an
authentic wishful image of dangerous life is at work: that of the soldierly
life. It is diametrically opposed to the soft, submissive person, the coward
who is never prepared to risk all or nothing. The bold is opposed to that
which is insured on all sides, to the wretch who even wants a guarantee
that his chamberpot will be warmed up. The Babbitt walks only welltrodden paths, and when the world is changing he thinks of his Sunday
trousers. No writer sounded a more dubious call to the soldierly life-will
than Nietzsche, barbarically and decadently heralding in early imperialism,
yet at the same time no one warned more compellingly against the dubious
aspect of 'small-scale happiness'. This kind of thing is simply despised here,
whether it takes the form of the 'happiness of the greatest number' or
of 'miserable cosiness adeux'. Nietzsche guessed well at 'all your fly-like
happiness and buzzing around sunny window-panes'. Of the philistine
he writes with disgust: 'We have our little pleasures for the day and our
little pleasures for the night, but we respect health.' Happiness for him
is womanish, serf-like, mish-mash for the mob, indeed happiness and fear,
as emotions of weakness, are related. They belong to the jackal: 'But courage
and adventure, love of the uncertain, the undared - courage, I believe,
is man's whole prehistory. He envied and stole away all the virtues of
the most savage, most courageous animals: only thus did he become man.' Zarathustra's call thus resounded into the etiquette lessons, into
the age of chastely hypocritical family happiness. He called out art nouveau
- until the colourful-empty, muscular phrases were declared fit in time
for fascist service and the 'superior' as opposed to the good logically turned
out to be the capitalist mob plus murder. But quite apart from this interpretation of Nietzsche, the anti-bourgeois-conformist Nietzsche indisputably
belongs elsewhere. The genuine, upright soldierly bearing was, after all,
never wholly unrelated to the revolutionary one. This is also alien to the
'tick-tock of small-scale happiness' and contentment with it; but only
because of the fact and to the end that great happiness is being sought.
For the revolutionary, the appeal of the dangerous life is not an end in
itself, and abstract love of the uncertain for its own sake even less so.
Nonetheless, revolutionary bearing has far more in common with courage
and adventure than with concern for good living and mahogany cabinets
for everyone. The sofa corner with the slowly smoked cigar may be a
hiding-place but it is not a watchful post. The fact that the adventure
must be solid if it is to be revolutionary rather than putsch-like does not
change the dangerous will in it.
GUIDING PANELS OF DANGEROUS AND HAPPY LIFE
937
French happiness and joy

But, it was asked, is it certain that only soft happiness is happiness? To
limit happiness thus would be the same as reducing dangerous life completely
to brutality. This is not true, and it is even less true that happiness and.
contentment are modest or necessarily middle-of-the-road. The graceless
Babbitt has ruined everything, the courage of the struggle as well as the
gaiety. But there are forms which have not become small, when they are
adept at moderation, the pleasures of the home and above all friendliness,
and which, unlike the dangerous life, certainly cannot drip blood. These
are the forms of French happiness, step by step, rural-ancient and full of
Epicurean attentiveness, content in body and in soul. Wine was the educator
here, Graeco-Roman wine; hence the taste for refinements everywhere
- in the bottle, in food, in woman and in conversation. Even the traces
of years of past service under Cupid's banner do not frighten, and even
the farewell from it is as cheerful as from a banquet. This French sheltered
space appears most impressively in - Horace; and though the space has
the effect of scaling down, it is not in the least scanty, on the contrary.
Horace describes his life on the farm of the escaped Sabines, he describes
it by inviting us to it; by welcoming his friend at the door; by praising
country cooking, the cool Falemian wine and 'carefree conversations, lasting
through the night'. The image of this intensive ease can be more symptomatic of a man who is trying to be than the song of war, which merely
makes a man beside himself. For the sign of happiness, as opposed to
dangerous life, is that it is a wholehearted yes to man and to his collection.
It contains, as long as it has no paunch, that quality of having turned
out well, that harmonious relation between the inner and the outer life,
the glorious expression of which isjoy. Joy is the aristocracy of happiness,
nothing can any longer challenge its claim to the status of happy life. It
stands above eternal action as such, above the far from glorious seriousness
of the man who again and again, in endless danger, has to - prove himself.
Hence we see at last, without astonishment, that even a Nietzsche does
not end in dangerous life. The detester of soft happiness becomes at a later
stage the admonisher, though the still hectic admonisher, to be of good
cheer. He praisesdance and the readiness to dance, he describes the superman
as one 'whose happiness makes him turn'. If the striving for work is played
off against the striving for happiness, the work itself has become a sermon
against gloom and rainclouds; 'where the work is, there are happy isles'.
If pleasure vulgarizes, and dangerous life for its own sake makes a person
harassed and empty, depth is discovered in joy and in joy alone: 'Desire
seeks eternity, seeks deep, seeks deep eternity.' With Dionysus, this is
no little pleasure any more, no tick-tack or miserable cosiness. No Babbittfeeling of a bad soldier who judges the success of a battle by his wounds.
And is not great desire even called blessed? - it certainly is, and so for
ages it has befitted the wise and the even better, smiling, not seeking
quarrels. It is no coincidence that this smile seems French, constraint has
disappeared from it, precise serenity shines through. But even less intense
joy shares with blessed joy that utopian brightness which even the most
colourfully-spotted beasts of prey lack. Brutality is contrasted by French
happiness, but joy does not contrast with French happiness; instead it raises
the glass of burgundy. If all men had their chicken in the pot and knew
how to enjoy it, this would not result in diminution but in appetite for
more. The advice to despise happiness comes not from the hero but from
the exploiter. It is difficult for danger to cease, although it should. It is
easy for joy to cease, although it should not.
Adventures of happiness
As we know, good days can be dangerous in a different way. They are
reckoned to be scarcely tolerable, whisky is too cheap, there is too much
peace and quiet, too much harmony. The likelihood of such a state is of
course slight, concern about it is premature and sermons against it
reactionary. But, sporadically at least, a succession of good days can seem
simply boring and therefore a danger to happiness and it is a fact that
too many cheerful things end up being regarded sorrowfully. The reasons
lie not in happiness but in the person who experiences it. In the workhorse,
no longer capable of enjoying idleness, in bourgeois idleness itself, which
corresponds as exactly to everyday bourgeois experience as a cavity to the
shape of the former tooth. On the lower level, the working man feels
too out of sorts to enjoy happiness, and in better cases he does not feel
ready for it. Hence precisely from the will to happiness a new, newly
embracing glance falls on the soldierlylife. It certainly respects the dangerous
life, never for its own sake but in order that it can be applied to happiness.
In order for it to come through the shallows of happiness, keeping all
the mud off it and conquering its depths, which are anyway inaccessible
to merely passive, merely relaxed enjoyment. Dangerous life, as our Being-
WILL TEMPI, CONTEMPLATION. SOLITUDE
939
Beside-Ourselves, never has the last word, but it can have the penultimate
word, in happiness itself and on the way to it. In the outflow of happiness
there are adventures and careers of which the sedentary day or the vapidly
relaxed evening notices nothing. Hence the relation of dangerous life to
the happy life, correctly perceived, is like that of fire to light; precisely
happiness shows the flash of outflowing fire. Where there is danger, rescue.
also grows, * but when this rescue is happiness it grows better beyond
danger. But it must never be forgotten that happiness, unlike rapture,
is a sign that a man is not beside himself but is coming to himself and
to his Own, to our Now and Day.
GUIDING PANELS OF WILL TEMPI AND

47
OF CONTEMPLATION, OF SOLITUDE AND
FRIENDSHIP, OF INDIVIDUAL AND COMMUNITY
Of all our ordinary actions not one in a thousand concerns us. That man there,
beside himself with rage, climbing up a pitted wall, exposed to the fiery mouths
of so many cannon: do you think he is there for his own interest? And this
man coming out of his study after midnight, do you think he is studying
how to be an ever more honest man, more content and wiser? Wrong - his
ambition is to teach posterity the metre of Plautus' poetry.
Montaigne, Essays
A decent person
The path to ourselves is also full of ambiguities. It is said that to be free
is to be able to choose between two or several things. But the so-called
free person has very seldom selected the things from which he has to choose.
And then what is the chooser to do after he has made his decision? It
would then be a matter of remaining committed to what had been given
heartfelt affirmation. Of course, the soup is not eaten as hot as it is served, t
which may be good, but also, and this may be less good, a lot of water
* From Holderlin's poem 'Patmos", See also Vol. It P:
112.
r The metaphorical meaning of this expression is equivalent to the English 'Things are never
as bad as they seem t
940
is poured into the wine. The wiser man gives in is one counsel here; this
may even be exaggerated into the highly dubious proposition that a cause
may be recognized more in being combatted than in being espoused. But
this may very quickly lead to running with the pack or even to becoming
a traitor. The other, nobler counsel is to stick to one's task through thick
and thin. It is addressed not to the wiser but to the absolutely loyal man,
the man who is utterly without guile, of course also in the sense that
he suspects no guile in others. But then again this loyalty can be abstract,
can go hand in hand with stubbornness and even - far less loyal to the
cause itself than it appears - with the fool who goes it alone. Thus it
is already clear here that none of these attitudes can be consolidated. Not
even loyalty, as long as it is supplied as the right and substantial kind
by those who have no right to loyalty. And precisely where the cause
is the right one, giving way and giving in can be a means of fighting
it through. He who decides to do this may if necessary give in on small
points in order to gain victory in the main cause. All this must, of course,
be limited to small things and even within this limitation must always
occur only for the sake of the great, the serious. For there are prices that
one does not pay, not even tactically. Such a price is obviously anything
connected with the cause itself, for the sake of which and only for the
sake of which tactical and temporary concessions may be made. The dividing
line here is thin, and the decent man walks along it, if it cannot be avoided,
both cleverly and unwaveringly. Otherwise, as can easilybe seen, the clever
man would not also be the best man who has the last laugh.
Fabius or the hesitant man of action

The man who decides too quickly often wishes that he had not done so.
But also the apprehensive man who delays and reflects too long is not
always an inspiring sight. His panel is inscribed more haste less speed,
around it are missed opportunities. Fabius was the first who became famous
and immediately also notorious as a hesitator; because of him, Rome came
close to destruction. This consul reflected for too long, missedopportunities,
but Hannibal was not worn down. Many Fabians have appeared since then,
and very rarely have they achieved anything. In will pondered and contemplated too long the will itself at last dies out, diminishes like anger
contemplated. This also applies to the revolutionary act and its anger, it
becomes temporizing, agreeable to the lukewarm. Then along comes the
WILL TEMPI, CONTEMPLATION, SOLITUDE
941
creeping revolutionary movement or the upheaval which leaves everything

as it was before. The right name for this is that of the English Fabian
Society or of the Labour Party, which is full of its sweet lemonade. The
Fabian Society, founded in 1884 by Sidney Webb, at least did not need to
apply the brakes at the time, it merely expressed English slow-movingness;
but German social democracy from 1918 onwards chose Fabius definitely
as a preventer. Upheaval then takes place gently and is merely called
evolution, private property is abolished when the time for it is as safe as
a man with a bank account. Thus the decisive act is again and again left
to children and grandchildren, and it is characteristic of this kind of
postponement that the path becomes all, the goal nothing. 'I don't know
what this means,' says Fontane's Kommerzienrat Treibel, 'it's the kind
of question that probably comes up many times, especially on excursions
to the country.' Socialism for the preachers of wine and drinkers of water
is or was always only future, always only a country for their children,
and the path itself knows no decisions but only a thousand provisos. Until
the end, when the eternal discusser, with the goal at hand, recoils in dread
from it. This dread is due not only to the guiding image of delay but
to bourgeois infection: reformists then shun not merely the act but also
the content of revolution like sin. Thus Fabius is always most unpleasantly
surprised when a buyer decides quickly and clinches the deal. The hesitator
protects himself against many follies but not the greatest: arriving too
late. This would not be an objective misfortune if the Fabians merely stood
apart, kept well behind in their stagnant backwater. But the Fabians also
produced among other things the so-called level-headed sections of the
working class and preside over them. They thus served the interests of
those dashing protagonists who represented the violence of which the
hesitators said that they would bow to it and to it alone. It was not, as
we know, red violence but that of the quick putsch, the unscrupulous
murder, the reactionary decision. Thus the hesitators of the good gave
the putschists of evil a leg up into the saddle; a historical example which
stands for many. The slow have almost always been in league with the
swift on the other side, against their will, but sometimes, in their heart
of hearts, together with them. Soft-pedalling is just as abstract as smashing
down doors, of which more shortly, and corresponds to it, though it must
certainly be added that the fascist smashing down of doors occurred only
at huts but was extremely adept at hesitating in the case of the palaces.
This robs the swift heroic deed of a good deal of its abstractness; even
more than in the case of the cunningly slow Fabians. Because the Fabians
94 2
suffered rather than acted, all those they led now really had to become
long-sufferers and nothing else.
Sorel, Machiavelli or energy and the wheel offortune

The strong man operates quite differently, he strikes with genuine power.
Does not beat about the bush, rather acts suddenly, leaps forth like a wolf
in the night. Acts even in unfavourable circumstances, and against them;
for him, 'circumstances' are merely things which stand around the cause.
Thus the swift heroic deed and the fascist attitude appear pure, but not only
these. The panel with the motto: 'Fortune favours the brave' or with the
picture of opportunity grasped by the forelock because it is bald at the back,
this panel is widespread. It is carried by anarchists and syndicalists too, by
all movements which utopianize violence as creative. The pure activist and
the impure fascist both have at least this notion in mind: that they must take
by surprise. For such action in itself most, if not all, things seem possible
at all times. If necessary it must wait until the enemy has reached the right
place, but then comes the attack, comes rather too soon than too late. It comes
with the blinding force of fear which paralyses, with a suddenness which, at
least in the beginning, that is all-important here, simplifies the obstacles. The
world is regarded essentially as a game of chance, and if the trump card is not
already in it, it can be conjured in at any time. The fascist takes his chances,
external chances, like every capitalist criminal, he is after all a master of
capitalist reality, but where the chances are weak and the goal lures he is far
from disdaining flagrantly dirty tricks. The old warhorse, the old-fashioned'
heroic exploit here find themselves mingled in with the desperado and his
corriger la fortune: 'Here are the dice for the tremendous game', exclaimed
Spengler, 'who dares to cast them?' An out-and-out gambler is called upon,
a habitue of double-dealing fortune, who, by the power of his resolution and
of his loaded dice, hopes to bewitch lucky chance, which everything here
seems to be. Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor and forger of the Ems Telegram, *
said that fruits do not ripen faster if you put an oil lamp under them. But the
* The Ems Telegram: the royal telegram from the promenade at Ems, sent by Wilhehn I to
Bismarck, in which the Prussian King gave an account of his refusal to provide the French
Ambassador with guarantees that a Hohenzollem would not accept the Spanish crOWD. Bismarck
doctored this telegram for the German press, presenting the French demands as an affront to the
Prussian monarchy and a challenge to war. He thus engineered the outbreak of the Pranco-Prussian
war in 1870.
WILL TEMPI. CONTEMfLATION. SOLITUDE
943
age in which the swift heroic deed coincides so uniquely with the tempo
of bourgeois softening and the softening seems to erode even the law of
becoming, this age encourages the ruling class to all kinds of relativism,
including even uninhibited crime. Gentile, * the Italian quasi-theorist of
fascism, logically replaced historical connections with a 'unity of the pure
spirit', as the actively founding or grounding unity. Its signs are supposed
to be presence of mind and the technique of mass control; the unity of
this so-called spirit lives in the grande animatore, the Fuhrer. Presence
of mind can thus immediately transform an unfavourable into a favourable
tum of events, and control of the massesmakes the will of the mob uniform
at a stroke - whether by brute force or by magnetism. The present, even
objectively, is everything, past and future, inhibitions as well as tendencies,
officially count for nothing in this undetermined, breakable world of chance,
politics is 'creation from unformed primal matter'. In the German version,
the world is not wholly unformed only because the time to be used is
always a time of wolves and the space to be used contains so-called
geopolitical structures which calculation, as calculation of world domination,
despite all 'irrationalism', certainly has to reckon with. The mass movement
here too is pervaded by chance, but by means of the race theory this chance
was also interpreted in terms of a heroically trivialized Darwinism. Thus
a number of speciously lawful lines came into allegedly amorphous world
substance, quite apart from the wholly unfantastic capitalist lines which
were really being followed. Nonetheless, the belief in a generally boundless
will-power and its miracle-working remained; it re-surfaced not least at
the end of the Nazi period, precisely at the graveside. The struggle for
existence rages on endlessly, without legal or other forms of hair-splitting,
with the 'eternal natural right of the stronger' as its sense and content.
This kind of activism, evil activism of course, obviously derives its theory
of the all-powerful 'atto puro' not only from Gentile. It derives it from
Sorel and also from Nietzsche, although in places to a different text. Above
all there is a connection, established through long popularization, with
the main teacher of the technique of power: with Machiavelli. Yet neither
Sorel nor Nietzsche consciously intended their use by fascism; to this extent
their wishful images of power are still ante rem. Sorel's theory of action
was even revolutionary and syndicalist in intention and in 1919, in the
last edition of 'Reflections on violence', he hailed Lenin as the accomplisher; Nietzsche's will to power had already turned away from Bismarck's
,., GiovanniGentile (1875-1944). Italian Idealistphilosopherand Mussolini'sministerof education.
944
empire, and fascism for him would perhaps have been ridiculous and a
painful shame. Nonetheless, both philosophies were usable by fascism; Sorel
in particular, with his political elan vital into the empty, the unpreordered,
influenced fascism. This kind of belief in the will, which is psychotechnological, has already been noted within the technological utopias (d.
Vol. II, p. 683); the belief that the will has no limits. This belief now most
definitely pays off, as the hope of moving mountains by political decision.
'Force individualiste dans les masses soulevees', 'accumulation d'exploits
heroiques' * are, in this still proletarian theory of activity, expected to go
on general strike, at any time, immediately, everywhere. Proletarian
'violence creatrice' together with intuition are to topple capitalism; success
depends solely on the 'etat de guerre auquel les hommes acceptent de
participer et qui se traduit en mythes precis.' t (Reflexions sur la violence,
1919, p. 319). The proletarian element here, however, obviously lies only
in the impulse, not in a clear class content and in the economic-historical
mediations of its path. On the contrary, Sorel, all spontaneity in this respect,
wants thunderstorms everywhere, but nowhere electric power stations,
wires laid. The elan political and its wishful will are therefore so broad
or so empty in their enthusiasm that Sorel in choosing his models combines
movements with quite divergent social mandates. In the same breath he
praises the warlike will to glory of the Spartans and Romans, the revolutionary wars of 1792, the German wars of liberation of 1813; the heroic
storm here seems to be almost sufficient in itself. On top of these come
the 'rnythes precis', probably also archetypes in which Again and Again
appears, history is submerged. A mythical image of freedom takes its place,
is that which enthuses and drives the enthusiastic mass forward. It is that
which gives the strength for martyrdom as well as the courage for vertu,
for the unlimited use of violence, for the inevitable triumph. According
to Sorel, it is only through this impulse in itself that a class becomes a
historical motor; it certainly does not become one through party offices
and manifestos. Sorel with his hope in the power of shock tactics is clearly
attacking not only social democracy, the bureaucratization of a would-be
revolution. Nor is he merely attacking the incorporation of the revolution into liberal Fabianism, into endless chatter, into discussion which is
endlessly putting things off, into parliamentarianism (with 'truth in the
middle'). Rather Sorel is objecting to all so-called schemata which master
'Individualist force in the risen masses' t accumulation of heroic exploits'.
r 'state of war in which men agree to participate and which is translated into precise myths.'
WILL TEMPI. CONTEMPLATION, SOLITUDE
945
and rationalize life from outside, indeed he even turns the dream of the actus
purus against - utopia. This too is rejected as the product of reasoning stipulation, as the invention of intellectuals and literati; not because it contains
too little but because it contains too much science. Engels of all people, with
his progress from utopia to science, is described as a typical rationalist; despite
the fact that Sorel believed himself to be a Marxist. Of course, his Marxism
is denuded of everything except the subjective volitional factor, which he
makes totally absolute. Finally only Bakunin peeps out of this isolated putsch
theory, as well as a Bergson injected into the will: as elan vital made thelic.
The swift heroic act shares with the elan vital rational indeterminability and
lack of content; this is why the myth of the general strike could so easily
be exploited for reactionary purposes. This is why pure belief in will, as action
for its own sake, could both approve of Lenin and pave the way for Mussolini.
Just as Bergson's elan vital could be used in different ways, simultaneously
to justify a return to the Catholic church and atheistic anarchism. In Sorel's
call to violence there is so little trust in any co-operative element in history
that history does not even appear amorphous, as it later does in Gentile.
Rather for Sorel it is the same as matter for Bergson: sinking life which finally
petrifies into a caput mortuum. History left to itself is nothing but decay
and decline; consequently even from here nothing approaches from the will
to power but that which calls it up: the enemy. 'La deterioration, c'est le
sew mouvement dans Ie monde'; * here is the extreme antithesis to Fabianism,
which, with arms folded, anticipated a cheap, indeed a gratis sunrise. But here
also is the most untenable antithesis to the historical-dialectical factor with
which Marxists are in alliance. Anarcho-syndicalist energy thus inevitably
becomes spasm and minority; for in the face of external tendencies to
deterioration movements towards greatness would always be forced, and
only movements towards chance would then be natural. The day of radical
negation, of sovereign assertion, would thus require no ripening, for example
of productive forces; it would always come in time to dawn and to break
in with violence. The stroke against the current would supposedly always
be necessary; thus the proletarian appears here with regard to the fate of
decline as fate himself, as the blind workhorse of the necessary transition.
As for pure violence, the western bourgeois unfortunately always had far
more of it at his disposal than the proletariat; thus the actus purus became
not general strike but coup d'etat.
The strong man must always be careful to maintain his power. For this
'Decay is the only movement in the world:
purpose any means will do, what is sought is merely the best choice and
application of these means. The main theorist of this cold and not, as in Sorel,
hot-blooded dream of violence is and remains Machiavelli. Every form of
fascist trickery has prided itself on Machiavelli, though without 'proletarian'demagogic detours. Yet shabby dishonesty is utterly alien to Machiavelli's
grand style, and unscrupulousness could also be studied elsewhere, among
the Jesuits for instance. Besides, Machiavelli is no hypocrite, he invoked
neither an old nor a new morality, he omitted' considerations of morality
from the world of violence of which he wrote. It had never been there
anyway, and now the mask falls too; what is taught is the technique of pure,
irresistible success. Machiavelli's book is about the prince, not the man, and
it is simply a theory of the art of conquest and domination. Morality has
no place here because it serves no purpose; it has no more place than absentmindedness in fencing or the order of columns in the building of fortifications.
No admittance to this site for unauthorized persons; and for Machiavelli
moral considerations have always been unauthorized in the power sphere
with which his 'Prince' is concerned. The rationalized technique of political
victory, this is the subject of this book of methodology, a book which is
not so much cynical as artificially isolated. And if, as in this specific case,
the victory is that of an Italian nation-state, Machiavelli even abandons the
virtue which in itself, outside this purpose, he holds most dear: republican
virtue. In the 'Discourses' on Livy he is a fanatical republican, in the 'Prince'
he posits princely absolutism. For this appears to him the best machine of
violence (especially against the Church) in the national conflict of interests.
But the art of fencing of the will has here too an apparently lawless world
before it, one on which, for this very reason, the more disciplined will can
impose itself. In two ways, according to the humanly visible or conversely
anonymous disposition of the adversary: either by intrigue or by iron
manliness, by virtu. All these guiding panels themselves presuppose a world
of will-matter which is not disciplined but drive-based and therefore
controllable. Intrigue, which deals with a humanly visible adversary, can
at least still observe the emotions which it plays off against one another;
indeed, calculation is the essence of the intriguer. However, the rest of
the works of people and of history, the anonymous world, is so thoroughly
emotion-ridden that it does not even represent a mechanism consisting
of emotions, a mechanism which would be calculable if not comprehensible,
but merely - a wheel of fortune. The antithesis of virtu is fortuna; in
the face of which the only counsel is to use one's energy and strike
regardless. Hence Machiavelli's contempt for the dilettante, 'who performs
947
his task half-heartedly, with half-cruelties and half-virtues'; hence the Either
- Or: Virtu ordinata or the unsupervised world of chance. The world
becomes a battlefield between virtus-ingenium and fortuna: 'Fate is mighty
where no power is ready to resist it, and it rolls on relentlessly where
there are no dykes and dams to check it' (11 Principe, 1532, ch. 25). Thus
the new bourgeois man of action appears most vigorously in Machiavelli
but even more the pure power-hope in the chaotic background which this
presupposes. Distrust of objective tendencies connects Machiavelli with
fascism, just as it abstractly connects the beginning and the end of the
bourgeois era. In both cases the world is seen as a pile of passions and
contingencies; with the difference that in the Renaissance the concept of
its law was still knocking on the door whereas in fascism it is thrown
out of the door. Furthermore, Machiavelli wishes to be Roman in his
virtus, like Cato.Sulla, Caesar; but in his fortuna, which is typically anarchic
and alien to man, he is not at all Roman but medieval. Precisely Sulla
felt himself to be, and called himself, Sulla Felix by virtue of the special
connection he believed he had with Fortuna-Tyche, which for the Romans
and the Stoics was still the same as providence, indeed grace. Precisely
in the heyday of Rome the element of chance had increasinglybeen thought
away, felt away from Fortuna; the changeable fortunes of war, where the
fate of empires could hang on an unoccupied or occupied hill, also seemed
to have been eliminated in the Pax Romana as necessity. It was only in
late Rome that, for obvious socio-political reasons, Tyche, and especially
Ananke, the once so highly rated necessity, were demonized. It was not
until the Middle Ages that Fortuna was completely reduced to the wheel
of fortune, the capricious up land down of the world; as in Machiavelli.
All that remain are caprice and approximation, a world-woman who needs
the whip, a wheel of fortune which can be stopped by energetic action.
The swift heroic act everywhere presupposes this Fortuna, just as Fabius
or the hesitant man of action conversely presupposes the mills of God,
secularizedinto a spirit of progress which grinds by its own power. Things
are in a bad way with the latter though, as we know. Indeed the Fabian,
with his lack of subjective factor, first invited the technician of violence
on to the scene. This time no Prince, but a gangster who stops the wheel
of fortune. And the answer to the double question of the best form of
political action is: neither non-violent hesitation nor cunning abstractness
of violence, but violence concretely mediated, as the 'midwife of the new
society which the old carries in its womb'. This decision by Marx is
comforting; it does not, like the impotent vacillators and Fabians, demand
of history a virgin birth, nor does it, like the advocates of violence, regard
history as a barren whore. There is the great moment and the fainthearted
generation * which is unable to grasp it; perhaps there is also the reverse.
But only when strength and the ripe opportunity coincide, a double stroke
of good fortune, with men ready for action and the time fulfilled, does
the cause have the blessing of history, which makes victory inevitable.
This is then not the victory of the tamer or even of the idle belief in progress
as such which will simply dry all tears of its own accord; here is necessity
at the same time obeyed and controlled.
I
Problem of breaking, Hercules at the crossroads, Dionysus-Apollo

People are divided to the same extent that they are dark and indefinite.
The will itself is split within them, sometimes aiming so to speak
downwards, sometimes so to speak upwards. This is an old to and fro,
pre-dating Christianity, between the flesh and the soul and an old restlessness
about which of the two is better. The flesh is considered not only susceptible
to attack but also attacking and thus egotistical. The soul is frequently
pictured as noble and precious, altruistic wishes about our own behaviour
and particularly the behaviour of others reverberate within it. Ever since
Adam Smith and even earlier, attempts have often been made to reconcile
selfishness and benevolence, these competing impulses, by the advantage
of others seeming to be an extension of our own, especially in doings and
dealings, and vice versa. But even in bourgeois society, not only in medieval
society, the so-calledjoy of the senses and so-called peace of soul are directly
opposed. And according to Schiller men have only the anxious choice
between them. This is a theme with many variations, one of the will at
the crossroads in its search for the most profitable but also the most pacified
specific being. It is this division to which the old fable of Hercules at the
crossroads owes its widespread popularity, which was clearly pre-Christian.
Lust and virtue beckon here from the future, both standing on one leg,
each with a value and a hope which sometimes one figure lacks, sometimes
the other. The fable of this choice ranges from Prodikos, the Sophist who
first told it, through Xenophon to Christoph Wieland (whose extolled
choice of harsh virtue one cannot quite believe). The divided Hercules is
also found in the puppet play Doctor Faustus; on the left below the doctor
* Cf. Goethe/Schiller, 'Xenien', 31.
WILL TEMPI. CONTEMPLATION. SOLITUDE
949
earthly delights call, on the right above him heavenly delights, on his left
evil flames and roars, on his right the good shines and calms. These are
the two souls that dwell in Faust's breast *, the earthly and the heavenly,
the soul of the body and that of his noble ancestors, of the super-ego which
comforts spiritually. In erotic terms, with so many interesting or banal
variants, this is the wishful tension between Carmen and Elisabeth. And
even here the crossroads image still holds good because not only earthly .
delights entice but also the inscription promising rest, the joys of the mind
and peace. Above all in the north, in the world of bad weather and of
cooler desires or at least of more barren springs, there is a converse enticement: to return to the cell, where the lamp glows cheerfully again. The
cloister is less ascetic here than in the south, but on the other hand the
northern type can find carefree sensual pleasure as difficult as asceticism,
especiallysince capitalism and Protestantism have deprived him of all naivety
and holiday potency. This is why here the advice to follow the path of
pleasure can contain just as much renunciation and just as much propaganda
as the advice to enter a monastery in the south. Nietzsche, for example,
when he urges profit zealots but also brooding Fausts to become 'laughing
lions', certainly had the incipient imperialist age on his side, with its mandate
and transition towards the irrational, but his Dionysus-Apollo antithesis,
occurring in the north, presents the Dionysian as equally non-given and
celebrated it as a distant, even tropical wishful entity. And this further
meant that even the full creature for which the Dionysian stands does not
here seem self-evident, so that men need merely to rise above it, as something
given, to attain peace of soul; but the Dionysian, too, is utopian. Precisely
Nietzsche, with his Dionysus-Apollo antithesis, gave new utopian life to the
tension between sensual pleasure and peace of soul, which had become
philistine and commonplace. And he gave it, not to the frenzy, as a glowing
fermentation, but against his will also to the Apollonian light, because this
contains the conquered Dionysus within it; both have to be worked on,
both are incomplete. The incomplete Dionysus, in Nietzsche's work, is that
which rebels against reduction, domestication, suppression of wild drives.
It is the supposedly Primal, consisting of blood, night, frenzy, cymbals and
the beating of gongs, but this pre-logical god is also the becoming-unbecome
god. As such, he is only now supposed to posit spring: 'He who has become
wise from old origins, behold, he will at last search for the sources of
the future and for new origins' (Zarathustra, On old and new tables, 25).
Cf. Faust, Part I,
1112:
"There are two souls, alas! within my breast.'
950
Thus the Dionysian wishful image does not end with the beast of prey and
colourfully spotted regressio, it also knows the lust of the future, stands
beside an enigmatic god of becoming. It has incomplete sealedness within it,
but this does not of course disappear in Nietzsche's image of Apollo, because,
contrary to the agreement and the historical evidence, Apollo is completely
omitted from the process of Becoming. Apollo for Zarathustra-Antichrist
is merely the patron of taming and reduction, all perverters of instinct
and slanderers of life are close to him. Socrates and Jesus are slandered
and reduced along with this Apollo, and Apollo becomes pale intellect,
domesticating moderation: all this is supposedly only the decline of life
and of the still unlived golden resonance in the human creature himself.
Nietzsche thus removes the Apollonian wishful image and its god from the
sun, which is forever being highly praised in Zarathustra: 'When I created
the superman, I arranged around him the great veil of Becoming and made
the sun stand above him at noon.' The sun-god Apollo in Nietzsche is
therefore not used as the expression of the light which shines in the sky
above the frenzied sea, as the language god of Becoming - 'like the sun,
which talks the sea into reaching its height'. But by introducing the guiding
image height-sun-noon over the sea, Nietzsche had to make Apollo the
spokesman of Dionysus after all and thus made him the opposite of mere flat
intellect. Apollo is the 'abyss in the heights', one who contains the abyss
of the depths and who, like it, is incomplete. The Greeks had as unexhausted
a feeling for the image of Apollo as for the Dionysian, they clothed it
in Nietzsche's veil of Becoming as dialectical ambiguity. Not without malice
towards the philistine masters of moderation, the Greek legend says that
when Apollo was born an oracle prophesied to his mother that her son would
one day be given many names; he who strikes from afar, this name which
is certainly neither relaxing nor relaxed was his first. In fact even today
the naming, the categorial history of Apollo is still uncompleted, indeed
it is the Dionysian ferment, the ferment of the will itself which continues
in the clarification, in the always transfinite determination. Precisely the
excess of frenzied possibility and indeterminateness which is signified by
the word Dionysus indicates how much subject-illumination, how much
- Apollo, still remains to be done in men. The Dionysian fire and its wishful
image, like the flame, is both still and moving, but the Apollonian light
has careers far beyond the standstills of reduction or of historical fixation.
Hard though the tension between flesh and spirit is, it has become, in
this form alone, tedious. This is due to the fixity of each one, only the
choice has not been fixed, but it always seems to be one between the same
WILL TEMPI.
CONTEMPLATION~
SOLITUDE
951
two paths. It is just this which seems philistine, like a change which
alternates only between known quantities, seeing if the coin turns up heads
or tails. Nietzsche was mentioned above because instead of pleasure of
the senses - peace of the soul he posited the more utopian Dionysus-Apollo,
yet the rigid choice remained. Again and again one guiding panel has been
played off against the other, again and again the creaturely panel has been
smashed by the moral or conversely, in would-be paganism, a so-called'
liberation of the flesh from the spirit has been brought in, literarized. Again
and again attempts have also been made at synthesis, so that morality is
possible and developable not as a break with, but as a blossoming of the
human creature; for example, in contrast to Puritan and Kantian dualism,
in the works of Shaftesbury, Rousseau, Schiller. However ~ this blossoming
theory also proves narrow and static by limiting the human creature to
mere so-called egotism and morality to mere so-called altruism; after which,
in supposed harmony of interests, two blurred guiding panels can easily
be made into one. Dualism, on the other hand, retains the sharpness of
a crossroads, makes no combination out of it, but it pays for its interpretation of the creaturely or the intelligible man with even greater statics
of both and with an antithesis kept completely undialectical. As a result,
the two souls that dwell in Faust's breast merely rub narrowly and falsely
self-righteously against each other; hence Kant's dualism is sour, Nietzsche's
dualism wild. Hence an isolated, antithetical Dionysus gives off little more
than fermenting will-matter, though with the exhortation of the fire. Hence
an isolated, antithetical Apollo finally seems devoid of content, and his
purity, abstracted from all abyss, lives only in pale skies. In all, it is clear
that Dionysus and Apollo are far from being grasped in sufficiently
processual, processual-utopian terms. They are, like all earlier and similar
antitheses, reified. They are still not in the utopian current to which men
in body and in spirit are called, have not passed the mere vestibule in which
they linger. The vestibule to still-unknown self-hood, self-identity, where
there is no more division. The very fact that there is a choice between
these guiding panels, and that neither choice satisfies, points to the lasting
X with which both are struggling: the incompleteness and the incognito
of the human essence. Only as themselves incomplete, not as fixed answers
which can be played off against one another, are the alternating concepts
of flesh-spirit, Dionysus-Apollo thus also meaningful. They form not a
crossroads but an intertwined experimental path, and the sought and wishedfor goal does not coincide with either of the alternatives. Except in the
dialectical resolution of both, in the Dionysian determined in Apollonian
952
terms, in the Apollonian which has the entire Dionysian content. This
kind of thing can only even begin to happen in a society which no longer
behaves competitively, not even in the choice between the pleasure of the
senses and peace of soul. Where wholeness appears and melts down reified
particularities, and where partial elements of a moving wholeness no longer
contrast and struggle with one another as fetishes. Ultimately the whole
question of the relation between natural and moral man is class-historical
illusion, and as such transparent and already antiquated. Neither is the
pre-domesticated type of man so wonderfully complete that he only needs
to be unpacked and unleashed, nor has domestication in historical class
society, despite the many names of Apollo to which it has advanced,
established a morality so perfect in content as to justify suppressing
everything in the human creature which does not correspond to it. Even
the new kingdom which Jesus' sermon against the old Adam and about
him has opened up has not yet revealed the human incognito to the extent
that there is now no doubt about our final and essential face. Now as
before it still appears in a glass darkly," and Paul impresses on his Christians
that they too have yet to be changed into the 'open face'. Man is by
no means, as the catechism hoped, an angel riding a tamed beast; for it
is neither settled that the human X of determinability is a beast nor that
the currently valid norm image of the rider is an angel. Thus precisely
Apollo's utopia, nurtured on the unopened and on Dionysus himself, intends
this third term, beyond the sterile sensuality-morality pair and the anxious
choice which dualism left between them. And on the path to this still
only approaching third element, that of undistorted Being-With-Ourselves,
Dionysus is regarded as nothing but the caretaker of that which is burning
and unresolved in man; he remains the dark fire in the abyss. Apollo
is regarded as nothing but the continuing determination of fermenting
matter designated as Dionysus; he remains the abyss on high, the abyss
brought up on high. Both remain unfinished, as is the human content
which they intend and to which - here in the will and the flesh, there
in the spirit - they are moving. Man himself has not yet been found, either
as Dionysian or as Apollonian, indeed his incognito is still so great that
the Dionysian and the Apollonian song and wishful image before him are
both right and wrong. Drive-will and spirit oscillate, and that which they
'For now we see through a glass darkly;' 1 Corinthians 13, 12.

'But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into
the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord', 2. Corinthians, 3, 18.
953
reciprocally form, in dialectical wholeness, will itself have only one name.
It is the last name of Apollo, but also the first name of Dionysus; after
which both alternatives disappear.
Vita actiua, vita contemplative

or the world of th-e chosen good part
The rivalry between the glowing and the bright song continues in highly
outward form. In two desirable forms of the right life: that of action and
that of contemplative stillness. The two forms may alternate directly' with
one another (as in the sequence workday-Sunday) or they may permeate
one another (which will only be possible after the abolition of forced labour).
But the question remains: which wishful image predominates, even in
possible permeation, which more evidently contains that which is man's?
An Arab proverb says that beautiful women are good for a week, good
women are beautiful for a lifetime. The good woman may be the active
one, in the sense of running the household, the beautiful woman the one
worth contemplating and probably devoted to contemplating herself. But
what if activity or contemplation can be weighed up simultaneously, next
to each other, alternately? A much-interpreted saying of Jesus on his
wanderings with his disciples deals with this searching question of what
is our better part: 'Now it came to pass, as they went, that he entered
into a certain village: and a certain woman named Martha received him
into her house. And she had a sister called Mary, which also sat at Jesus'
feet, and heard his word. But Martha was cumbered about much serving,
and came to him, and said, Lord, dost thou not care that my sister hath
left me to serve alone? bid her therefore that she help me. And Jesus
answered and said unto her, Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled
about many things: But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that
good part, which shall not be taken away from her' (Luke 10, 38-42).
This judgement seems quite clearly to set the contemplative person above
the active. Of course, contemplation was always especiallygiven precedence
over toil wherever slavery 'was the dominant mode of production, and
labour, this predominantly slavish activity, was thus degrading for the
free man. Yet even the noble life of action, with predominance of the
will and the emotions, never held sway unchallenged. The controversy
about this, once formulated, flared up in the high and late Middle Ages:
between the 'theoretical' Christianity of the Dominicans and the 'practical'
954
Christianity of the Franciscans. And the Martha-Mary problem seemed so

tremendous that it touched the medieval heaven itself. The question: action
or contemplation, primacy of the will or of the intellect, was ultimately
extended to include the medieval scholastic God himself. Duns Scotus, the
doctor subtilis of the Franciscans, taught the universal primacy of the activity
of the will over the spirit, Thomas Aquinas, the doctor angelicus of the
Dominicans, taught the equally universal primacy of the spirit over the will.
God is thus, like Jesus in Martha's room, first and most supremely grasped in
the former case by love, in the latter by contemplative cognition. Accordingly
Thomas puts intellect above will-power in men too, as their guide, indeed
their ideal content-related determination, and the theoretical virtues - here
not least following the example of Aristotle - above the practical. Martha
is lingering in the vestibule of perfect life, but Mary, says Thomas, already
enjoys the 'angelic bread of contemplation' - pars mentis aeterna est
intellectus," and its fruit is peace (Quaest. 79). Thus there appears in Thomas
the same order of priority which Dante establishes between two sisters from
the Old Testament: Leah as oprare, Rachel as vedere (Purg. XXVII, 1. 108).
The mystic of the Dominicans, Eckhart, also praised the contemplative life,
though not of course in quite the same way as Thomas. Eckhart wrote a
sermon on the passage in Luke, praises Martha's 'steadfast diligence' whereas
he merely respects Mary's 'freedom from works'. Thus Eckhart reinterprets
Jesus' answer by means of many additions: 'Martha feared that her sister
would stick fast in ecstasy and in fine feelings and wanted her to become
like herself. Christ's answer means: be content, Martha, she too has chosen
the best part, which shall not be taken away from her. This excess' (what
is meant is the excess of contemplation) 'will pass; the highest good that
a creature can be granted will be her portion, she will become holy like you. '
The Dominican Eckhart, with this interpretation, reinterpretation, falls out
of line with the intellectualism of his order, but not for long. For in his
teaching as a whole the master of reading thoroughly wins the day over the
master of living: the soul which sets forth and returns home, the coming
forth of the world from God and its return to him, all these activities and
hopes consist of various steps in a process ofcognition and are therefore due
after all to an ultimate primacy of theoretical virtues. In principle only the
Franciscans thus put vita activa above vita contemplativa, a vita activa which
aimed at being love and caritas, not yet anything else. Orcagna, on the
predella panel of his altar-piece in S. Maria Novella, depicted the vita activa in
"" 'the intellect is the eternal part of the mind.'
9SS
the form of the - sacrifice of the mass. Although of course the love which
never ceasescame closer and closer to bourgeois efficiency towards the end of
the Middle Ages. In subtle transitions to homo oeconomicus, to homo faber
and to capitalist industry, where of course love certainly did cease. Nevertheless, the old alternative did not disappear at all in the new conditions,
always undergoing far more concrete modifications than the inward-static
alternative between flesh and spirit, worldliness and spirituality. It now runs,
as a double voice, through the bourgeois person's day - all the more so
because the ruling class had now abolished the maxim that work degrades.
This is the Protestant or workday line of ever-striving effort; though close
to capitalist efficiency, it nonetheless comes from its better times. Significant
here is Lessing's observation on truth: that it is God's alone, and that the
striving for truth is the prerogative of man alone and remains desirable for
him alone. But next to or above this runs the Sunday line, a Catholic one,
even where no Catholics have followed it; along it the old primacy of contemplation and vision, of the fruitio veritatis as the highest good, applies. This
thoroughly theoretical consciousness, with its equally theoretical content,
therefore culminates in Spinoza, even more so ultimately in Hegel; even arnor
Dei here is understanding, and the last word in wisdom is again only the
mind which knows itself to be mind. And yet even with these essentially
contemplative thinkers, as bourgeois thinkers, active 'fortitude", the
'practical mind' come right up close to the ethereal sphere of contemplative
intellectuality, gaining it for the first time. For bourgeois production and
the bourgeois world of work no longer allow Mary or contemplation unquestioned primacy over Martha or the life accomplished in activity. On the
whole, the workday line cannot be mediated at all with the Sunday line in
class society, especially as interest in work has"increasingly dropped out of
the working day and the art of rest and of fulfilling contemplativeness have
increasingly dropped out of Sunday. Revolutionary movements certainly
do not permit any relieved stretching out on a bed of ease, even though their
goal is nothing but life beyond work. Thus the ambivalence between practical
and theoretical virtue also shows how much experimentingly unfinished
material still lies in both. How little one or the other already contains a sheer
human content capable of the answer. How intensively the dark glass in
which the human incognito looks at itself again and again puts Martha and
Mary one behind the other, behind each other in the mere foreground.
Even the frequently low forms in which this double life can appear are
connected with this. These would not be possible if activity or contemplation already clearly contained that which is man's. Both Martha and Mary
956
appear distorted in capitalist existence, but they are also still capable of
this distortion. Active life has become the drudgery of the exploited and
the incessant bustle which profiteers make for themselves. It is even a selfdeception here that the capitalist really acts and decides in his business.
He is tied to unfathomed and uncontrolled movements of commodities
which stand opposite him and permit only the taking of chances. The
contemplative life, on the other hand, is based largely on a system of
sinecures or, equally dubious, on alms, and thus, imagining itself to be free
intelligence, it adorns the alleged freedom from interest of pure theory. But
in reality this is highly interested, namely in the justification of existing
conditions or in withdrawal into the antiquarian museum. Consequently
the difference on both guiding panels spins emptily and both point in
capitalism to an empty, an ever emptier land. Consequently Marxists, as
lovers of humane contents and their promotion, have become especially
suspicious of vita contemplativa. For them the world has far too long merely
been interpreted in different ways; whereas the duty of science, as conscience, is to change it fundamentally, i.e. from the finally moving
foundations. At the same time, however, this Marxist decision contains
a way out of the undialectical dualism which has so far kept spellbound
even the vita activa - vita contemplativa guiding panels. A new level is at
last reached in Marxist terms, that of revolutionary practice; it is already
preparing the resolution of the workday-Sunday duality. And it would not
be revolutionary practice at all if it did not contain contemplation as well as
action as elements, united and resolved in the oscillation of theory-practice.
Nowhere is there more genuine theoretical objectivity, greater emphasis on
intellectual virtue than in Marxism, nowhere is the decision, on the basis of
cognition and its staying power, more actively put into effect. The low
types, the caricatures which have equally trivialized and degraded Martha
and Mary alike, especially in the capitalist area, now disappear. How many
wrigglers stand or stood under the merely active guiding panel, how many
crude and intellectually empty individuals: types incapable of a minute of collection, acting from a worm's-eye view and acting only because of it. As if
there were no other insight than that which leads to a rapid turnover, or as
if the Milky Way were there to be turned into butter. On the other hand,
how many spineless types stand or stood under the merely contemplative
guiding panel, how many intellectually incestuous, educated nonentities:
types incapable of a decision, collectors of unsystematized, unflowing,
aimless knowledge. Even when it is systematized, this kind of contemplation, if it remains detached, dispatches that which is its own into the
957
indifference of the museum; it still contains vision, but only of things which
have become corpses. Bertram, the disciple of Stefan George, attacks the
cheaply active, the bustling riff-raff when he asks: 'Who made the noble,
slow, exalted vision/Into the swift rescuer's glance? is this already death?'
- certainly not, but death is closer to degenerate vision than to degenerate
activity. On the other hand - and Marxism is fully aware of this aspect
of the problem of cultural inheritance -, on the other hand past ages were
not without the only sublime kind of contemplativeness. The expression
of concentration, which is or was so closelyconnected with vita contemplativa, is captured in Holbein's painting of Erasmus, the expression of studious
elapsion time and again in Durer's CSt Jerome in his Cell'. An element
of the Thomist primacy of the intellect appears, undischarged precisely
in theory-practice, as does an expression of wisdom, precisely in the restful,
rest-assigned manner, which Dehio describes in Durer's so highly collected
depiction that has elapsed from 'Melencolia' itself: 'He (Ierome) sits, a
small figure, in the background; if all the lines of perspective did not lead
to him one might miss him; but his spirit is communicated to the whole
room, immersing everything in it in contentment and peace: one seems
to hear nothing in this holy silence but the rustling of the pen as it moves
over the parchment, the animals are asleep, and the skull, looking almost
friendly, promises a deeper, final rest.' The language of the monastery
is in Durer's engraving, the language of the studious cloister, the language
of the humaniora and of their university, which, preciselyfrom the perspective of activity, are closer to Marxism than all the shoddy pragmatisms
of profit. And its practice itself has life beyond work in its foundations
and therefore a depth and a rest which does not pale in comparison with
Jerome's. The whole relation seems so complicated only because, even in
and precisely in theory-practice, rebus sic stantibus it is still copied from
the old dualism of practical and theoretical virtues. This very dualism is
ultimately groundless or the reified division of mere elements; in existence
without forced labour and in mere exemption from forced labour the entire
question of precedence disappears. Just as a classless condition leavesbehind
it the creature-discipline, Dionysus-Apollo antithesis as it advances in selfmovement, self-identification, so also the tension between theoretical and
practical virtues. The good part, ultimately, is chosen neither by Martha
nor Mary, it is the authentic element which shows activity its centre of rest
from which it comes, to which it moves. Thus in Greek legend the men
of action Achilles, Asclepius, Hercules and Jason at least had as their tutor
the centaur Cheiron, the allegory of wisdom and action in one.
Double light of solitude and friendship

Men have always been born alone and die alone. Even afterwards, in body
and ego, they remain the most immediately dearest thing to themselves. *
This kind of thing can easily be blown back into itself again by the wind
of outside alien, even hostile, stimuli. And one of the most driven-back
manifestations of the will to the ego has here its narcissistic origin: the
wishful image of solitude. With the qualification that solitude is not in
all situations a wishful image, on the contrary, it may be feared, a misery.
This depends on a person's age, on the society and the era from which
an ego is withdrawn. Of course the ego is older than the individualistic
economy, as has been noted, but its solitude is not older than society itself
and not real outside it. Solitude in youth or far from Madrid is just as
much a social condition as sociability or friendship, though in the form
of absence or antithesis. Shunning, isolating, detaching are just as much
social acts as binding and uniting; solitude in fact exists only as a distant
image of society, whether it be imposed withdrawal, with longing or
bitterness, or voluntary withdrawal, with hatred or relieved happiness.
The relation to the ego is always determined by the relation to society,
without which there would be no loneliness, let alone the emotion of
loneliness as pain. To youth, for which an hour lasts as long as twelve
in old age, solitude is absolutely torturing, is only ever chosen briefly after
bitter disappointment. Equally painful are the gloomy evenings of lonely
women, the dreary Sunday, suffering that goes unnoticed but is especially
devastating in its length. Sexual restlessness increases this anguish,
monotonous existence between four walls imposed too early on a woman
still young or which fear of being left on the shelf makes particularly
harrowing. Solitude is far gloomier still for the person forcibly deprived
of his once familiar or appropriate environment. Solitary confinement for
most prisoners means despair, the languor of loneliness even more than
the deprivation of liberty causes prison psychosis. Yet even a glasshouse
existence in a very foreign land, chosen by people who could be their own
best company but who need the multiplication of themselves in the pierglasses of society, even this solitude causes them only homesickness. If
Bloch is echoing a German saying here, the equivalent of which is 'It's every man for himself'.
f As well as 'misery', the German 'Elend' can also mean 'exile', and Bloch obviously has
this resonance in mind here.
WILL TEMPI. CONTEMPLATION. SOLITUDE
959
exile comes on top of this, the result is a monk in hell. Ovid, in exile
at Tomi, wrote only one important work, the "Tristia", and spring on
the Black Sea inspired him only to a begging poem to Augustus. It is
the affirmed splendour of the age and the society which makes solitude
here on the whole black, which cancels out or at least suspends its narcissistic happiness. All these states are enough to make one sell one's soul
to the devil, and thus extremely undesirable; they ought to be called
abandonment, not solitude. However it is different, crucially different, when
solitude as voluntary, as an authentic wishful image, namely offreedom from
disturbance, finds its introverted ground. It is precisely here that narcissism,
with which Freud regards the body-ego as being primarily filled, announces
itself: a mottled self-examination withdraws from objects to the ego. The
wish for a subdued external world may appear subjectively all the more
urgent, objectively all the more valuable, the more concentration protects
a lamp which burns with a more than mere inward light. Solitudo musis
arnica," says a classical proverb; in its illumination another archetype is
also at work, that of the nest, of incubation, of safely maturing
development. Rural seclusion, winter which reinforces it, the quiet of the
house and the night add to this a powerful wishful dream; and the lamplight
shines in it as a literal aura around the manuscript. Writing in the country,
writing at night, unite the southern and northern landscape in the same
pleasant chthonics of production: Horace's Tibur, Cicero's Tusculum, even
Nietzsche's Sils Maria, despite the worlds between them, have become
allegories. Actual poetic creations of solitude do not quite belong here,
as in George, with his claim that the heights are lonely, as in Rilke, with
his communication that the depths are lonely. But at least from Epicurean
or Stoic withdrawnness and the manifold Studio 'around it, praise of solitude
began also in more modest cases, combined with collection and again with
longing for vita contemplativa. Of course the praise ofsolitude depends not
only on the disposition of the person who knows how to use it but equally
again on the state of the social world within which the solitary person
prospers. If a subject feels attracted and summoned by the tendencies of
this state or if the state is even affirmed as such, then solitude is as closely
linked to the time as an atelier to the city of Paris. If on the other hand
the time is felt to be downright hostile, and seems to have no place in
it for the person who thinks he is superior to it, the result is solitude
as the happiness of escape, as asylum. To some extent even Tibur,
* 'Solitude is friend to the muse'.
Tusculum, Sils Maria had this character; it became abstract and exclusive
in the Robinsonades of the eighteenth century, Communion with plants,
animals, nature, books helped the solitary individual to forget people, i.e,
society as it was; no court ball could compete with this. Even the agents
and proprietors of corrupt social Being then fled into coquettish hermitages
and solitary bowers; and non-agents all the more so. This age blossomed
in more or lessjustified, more or lessself-righteous narcissism. In I7ss,johann
Zimmermann's famous work 'On Solitude' appeared, it was translated into
almost as many European languages as 'Werther' later was. And it preaches
a democratic kind of withdrawnness, as Tusculum even without Cicero in
it. This both long-winded and excited book devotes its tenth chapter to the
especially fervent young men of the time, to their disgust with boring
company, the taste and inclination for dignified aloofness, the 'unhurried
escape into the enjoyment of deserted nature, where the soul resounds
endlessly'. This sensitive solipsism, a strange mixture of inactivity and
enthusiasm, formed an alliance with the individualism of bourgeois society
which was breaking through, with the urge to freedom of the capitalist
economic individual. Bene qui latuit bene vixit" - this late Roman maxim
applies to all declining societies, but in the eighteenth century another element
was added to this isolation: the economic atom pathos, the person pathos,
which both fled and cancelled out an old collective. The retreat had of course
always been older, more powerful, the Christian tradition of inwardness,
this feeling which pierced not so much the outer world as itself. Before and
after the rebellion of the eighteenth century it was above all the Lutheran
Christian who had his dwelling here. The solitary soul and its God, in the
overall, now specifically northern and wintry solitude, form the essential
location of Christian adventure and salvation. And so precisely the will of
the last truly Protestant Christian, the existential recourse of Kierkegaard,
is subjectively and objectively one of solitude, indeed it is the Christian,
exhaustion of it. Never before had its narrowness been so desperately longed
for, never before enjoyed with such meek vanity, never before had the attempt
been made to provide it with such a wide arc to the existence of the human.
From the perspective of solitude, all Kierkegaard's moral questions are
monological; they have as their unreflected foundation the privateness of
the small rentier, but their Object is an enormous one: to be as an individual
in necessary solitude yet at the same time to be with the Absolute. To understand oneself to be in existence - this slogan calling to subjectivity would not
"The man who has lain low lives well.'
have come about without Protestant solitude; in Kierkegaard, however,

it becomes the language of a totally paradoxical flight from the object:
into the innermost mine of the most distant heaven. This became joy in
sorrow, furnished the cave as an interior and placed it on high: 'My sorrow
is my knight's castle; like an eyrie it stands on a mountain-top and towers
high into the clouds ... From this dwelling I swoop down into reality and
~ pounce on my prey. But I do not stay down below; I bring it back up
to my castle. Pictures are what I catch; these I work into a tapestry which
I hang on the walls of my rooms. Thus I live like a recluse, with every
experience I perform the baptism of oblivion and consecrateit to the eternity
of memory' (Either/Or). No communication is possible on this soil, except
among sheer solitaries from castle to castle of their lasting solitude; thus
the Christian-narcissistic wishful image breaks up here. And thus it does
after all become egotism, though of a sublime kind; the solitary soul and
its God cannot live with complete impunity in capitalist anarchy. It attains
not quite guiltlessly from here part of its desperation and its temptation,
of its sorrow-happiness and plausibility. From the beginning, private enterprise promoted the extreme sharpening of egotism; this was the soul of
business, it prescribed the escape route for even the most determined nonbusiness-souls - into particularly extreme or particularly engrossed isolation.
Solitude has even so overwhelmed the active entrepreneur in the world
that he has become a hermit of his interest. Free competition capitalism
has set up a profusion of negative stylites, it has set up real demon stylites
of their company. Yet however much private enterprise has rewarded the
private in the fullest sense, it did not invent solitude, let alone the flight
into it as into collection or into an asylum, let alone the very old wishful
image of corporeal concentratedness, undisturbed Being-With-Self. It has
been exaggerated like the individual himself, but it is not only artificial
or reified, not only clotted abstraction. Unlike the pleasure of the senses
and peace of soul, solitude as the alternative to sociability will remain even
in an ordered society, for the time being. Of course, with a changed function
and with a wishful image which will no longer need to be one of escape.
But rather one of that cell-spacewithout which not even the most happily
socialized person can come to himself. If resources and recourses of this
kind remained unoccupied, community would become almost as empty
as solitude without community is blind. The true dream image of solitude,
neither oldish nor ivory-towered but creating powerfully refreshing pauses,
voluntary and not hostile to man, still has much work ahead of it.
All children are born alone but always grow up together. The earliest
men lived sociably, formed a group. The individual here was the outcast,
and in times of utter wilderness this meant that he was condemned to
death. The tribe was the mainstay of the body, the content of the scarcely
developed ego. Consequently a self-centred body-ego stands at the organic
beginning, but at the historical beginning stands community. And at times
when the community is threatened, the wishes directed towards it are
just as fervent as those for solitude. Wishes for security, which then need
not necessarily even conflict with solitude but include it, at least in the
small warm circle of friendship. This is also the most important element
in love based on permanence and habit; thus most marriages break up not
from lack of love but from lack of friendship. This develops later, but
here it is, as Werther says, that 'which bears fruit instead of withered
leaves'. Even the individual who rejected large social bodies celebrated and
idealizedthe collective in his small circle. Where society had become suspect,
the wishful image of friendship emerged at the same time as that of solitude,
not as an escape from society but as a substitute for it, its better garden
form. Towards the end of the eighteenth century the subtle Christian Garve
wrote his double or alternating reflections 'On Sociability and Solitude',
and friendship won the day over seclusion: 'Air when unchanged always
becomes mephitic; the temperament which is not changed by external
sensations, of which those which come from people are always only the
strongest and liveliest, always becomes rather sad.' And although friendship
at first wished to replace the collective, it clearly, unlike solitude, became
associated with it, especially in times of unbroken belief in the polis. The
most elaborate celebration of friendship is that of Aristotle, a philosopher
who defined man as a zoon politikon, indeed saw the ethics of friendship
as definitely flowing into that of the state. Admittedly he wrote no utopia
of the state, but he did write one of friendship, with an image of beauty
which further elaborated friendship in its then existing form. The eighth
and ninth books of the Nicomachean Ethics are devoted to this concrete
idealization; here the zoon politikon is above all and primarily in friendship seen as a human one. For friendship, as the pillow and archive of
With-Us, it is essential 'that all wish one another well and that this mutual
benevolence does not remain hidden'. The latter means that friendship
begins where it proves itself, i.e. in most cases, where it goes to some
expense; which is why Aristotle, both in the Nicomachean Ethics and
even in his Politics (II, S), quotes a proverb which was later often used
for monastic communism: 'Friends hold everything in common' or 'Friends'
goods, common goods'. Yet this equality as an element of friendship does
not leap beyond the small circle; Aristotle recommends private property
for the simple reason that otherwise the virtue of - generosity would
disappear. The circle of friends itself, because of its completion, is in any
case smaller than the smallest polis: 'Friendship in the perfect sense cannot
be with many, any more than one can be in love with many at the same
time.' And friendship, as social completion, ranks higher than love. 'For
there is also love of the inanimate, of wine and gold; friendship, however,
exists only between people; it presupposes reciprocation.' Finally the ideal
of the small collective even provides the bond for the large, in an astonishing
manner: 'Friendship is also that which maintains states and which is closer
to the legislator's heart than - justice. For harmony is clearly related to
it, and it is the main goal of rulers, whereas they endeavour most to banish
discord as hostility' (Nicomachean Ethics, VIII, I). What justice can merely
demand, friendship freely grants; it brings about that harmony in which
violation of mutual rights no longer occurs and so there is no longer any
occasion even to think of justice. Again, as with the principle of inter
amicos omnia communia, Aristotelian utopia runs into the circle of friends
before the state; political agreement, an undisputed good which not even
slave-owning society could produce, found its place of shelter in friendship.
And soon also its place of declamation; as in Cicero's 'Laelius de amicitia'
or Castor and Pollux as a Golden Age for two which could be relived
at any time. The three qualities which Aristotle attributed to friendship:
benevolence, harmony, beneficence, made it very clearly utopian; accordingly friendship between more than two people mostly lasted only in groups
which were themselves of utopian character or of utopian intent. It existed
in alliances, sects, conventicles which attempted not merely to replace the
collective but to model it on a smaller scale or to facilitate it in regional
form. Hence the dream of friendship in all anarchist and federative utopias,
in the breaking down of the social structure into acts of mutual help. Into
small, self-governing communities where all members know one another
and the fine liqueur flavour of old friendship runs peacefully through
everything. A cut-price version of this longed-for brotherliness still appears
in Philadelphias of nothing but small settlements, in the neighbourhood
ethic of early America: the feudal world had been left behind, the struggle
for existence was even more with the wilderness than with people. The
collective seemed still almost tangibly to be made from the material which
the Bible, on a not wholly unrelated, peasant-democratic foundation, had
called the neighbour. Of course, in America it soon turned out, despite
a remaining community gesture, that all this could not survive in the face
of the naked compulsion to pay; in Europe the mere dream image of

friendship manifested itself partly as the bitterness with which the reality
of friendship was measured. The familiar conversation about the absent
person, even if he belongs to the circle of friends, showed the tension with
the ideal, far greater than in the case of clean solitude; La Rochefoucauld's
ice-cold observation also belongs here: 'Dans I'adversite de nos meilleurs
amis nous trouvons toujours quelque chose qui ne nous deplatt pas. ,. And
on this occasion Schopenhauer is not completely exaggerating his pessimism
when he remarks of the union of souls: 'This is so alien to the selfishness
of human nature that true friendship, like colossal sea-serpents, is one of
those things where we do not know whether they are fabulous or exist
somewhere.' Particularly in capitalism empirical friendship became rare,
because when people relate to one another mostly only through buying
and selling and exploitation fills the dominant consciousness, in this society
of competitors even friendship in a small circle becomes an anomaly. The
feelings of sympathy and hopes of harmony with which private enterprise
originally believed itself to be allied - as in its ideological matins with
Adam Smith - changed nothing here. Not only interest but also sympathy
was regarded here as the driving force in human action; and just as market
trading of interests seemed to flow out into the affluence of all, so too
the exchange of sympathies was supposed to produce the social balancing
out of all other individual differences. But although the selfish system,
like the earth, turned on its own axis, it did not at the same time revolve
around the social sun; - the socially extended dream image of friendship
continued to gleam from afar in the capitalist system but it was less effective
here than anywhere else. Whereas Aristotle was still able to bring together
in friendship the group of slave-owners who constituted the ancient polis,
with mutual benevolence among them as a high but by no means rare
or thwarted ideal, the capitalist collective, if it can be so called, is nothing
but homo homini lupus, ultimately the struggle between monopolies. This
became so much hectic activity and mechanical response as well that
friendship is no longer even a substitute but almost like solitude an escape.
The associative-federative utopias seek the birth of the new collective from
among a group of friends, as noted; this is the highly substitutive element
in social utopias of this kind. Marxism, though radically opposed to the
wolf-state, has no reason to expect salvation or even upheaval from
friendship, the commune and the small business resuscitated in it. Marxism
* 'We still find something not displeasing even in the adversity of our best friends.'
thinks in highly developed categories of production dialectically arising

from capitalism, indeed even the power-state must, before it dies out, be
conquered, must be used against the enemies of the revolution. And yet
the old hope of friendship lives on, precisely in the image of a classless
society it unfolds with new wishful and life dimensions. Although by its
nature confined to groups and only very figuratively applicable to a wide
national or even international collective, a collective of unknown people,
it nonetheless possesses in this its potentially existing groups and circles,
in brief the soviets of fraternity which is so vaguely and vainly invoked
everywhere else. Like solitude, friendship in groups is by no means only
reified or in this case made absolute as a substitute which disappears with
the true collective. Andjust as solitude does not vanish from the community,
on pain of social emptiness, so friendship - ultimately a counterpart and
not an abstract alternative to solitude - gives the collective its warmth, indeed
its in each case concentrated and tangible concretion. It remains even in
classless society as the wishful and life condition of the With-Us of nearness,
it fills broad, no longer alienated inter-subjective relations with concrete
We and Being Together. The accepted socialist triad of liberty, equality
and fraternity has this fraternity as its undoubted, though so far particularly
dull and blotchy ground colour. Whatever remains fresh and unsentimental
about the brotherhood of mankind, this old and somewhat old-fashioned
sounding social image, comes from the guiding panel of friendship; but
here too its indicated path-goal or essence are yet to come.
Double light of individual and collective

It is too much to expect that people will ever appear on the scene lacking
in ego. No one ceases to be an individual in this, his own framework,
however weakly or incidentally. The wish to stand on one's own feet
is closely related to the wish to walk upright. In every person there is

a will, however often frustrated, which wishes to be independent and not
subservient. This will lives in a room of its own, or longs for it, all the
more the less it is actually there. Private enterprise, with so-called free
competition, is certainly nearing its end, precisely within capitalism. But
all the more intensely even here, in sport, in war, are the few areas sought
where the individual man is worth something, where he can distinguish
himself. And just as an ego-containing, ego-preserving entity existed even
before the individualistic economy, so too it will exist, though completely
966
changed, after it. It is even improbable that the particular sharpening which
the exaggeratedly individualistic era has brought about will disappear
without trace. Even when laissez faire, laissez aller has been unlearned
except as a memory, a sound lad, a grown character will be unwilling
to accept tutelage. Even when personality is no longer the greatest happiness, it will certainly not see itself as a misfortune or - a living colour
in the social space - be felt as such. Greatness is by no means necessary
in order for a developed individual to regard himself as distinctive, as
indissoluble. Around every single person there is a colourful cloud of
feelings, hopes, which he feels in himself but only rarely in others, although
they are also surrounded by it; and around every single person there is
a Quale which does not survive when added up in the group. Of course
it goes without saying that it does not survive in the groups of mere
capitalistic functional association. But there is no doubt that part of the
very human life-light around the individual is especially lost where a so
to speak organic collective appears solely as a herd. As fascism has shown,
the raging of the crowd is not always sublime; here too it depends on
the people who compose it and how much, in independently formed
judgement, they know. In corpore there emerged here, from absolutely
extinguished individuals, individuals deprived of responsibility, not only
a fool but a beast which was in every sense nameless, namelessly terrifying. And as part of the process of bringing him to his senses the individual
himself must be shown a mirror so that he can see what he looked like
then. So that he can grasp by his own efforts how his human face was
destroyed at that time and how it can be reborn. In an utterly different
group, one which preciselydoes not consist of zeros and the panic of brutes.
Dubious though ego and nothing but ego is, the merely general can
be equally paltry or equally terrifying. The ego-being which is still mainly
current today comes from the entrepreneur, but so too does the mere empty
non-ego, and, as the Night of the Long Knives showed, even when raging
it is useful to the entrepreneur. Thus the collective as such, independently
of the individuals above whom, indeed against whom, it rises, cannot simply
be played off against individuals per se. First of all, the most barren kind
of generality, that of the soulless business concern, thoroughly corresponds
to the ego which has degenerated into mere private enterprise. If the
capitalist ego is not beautiful, the capitalist collective, which also exists,
is even less so; it is futile to give this word a golden resonance because
it forms a numerical and thus often illusory antithesis to private capitalist
industry. It forms an antithesis to it in so far as factory labour is collective,
as opposed to the private form of appropriation of its surplus value, but

this does not exhaust the so to speak supra-individual units in capitalism.
It does not exhaust those collectivisms in late capitalism which are not
at all progressive in themselves. In any case, the increasing uncertainty
which the capitalist crisis has brought with it has already intensified the
herd instinct. In any case, the formation of trusts has increasingly turned
the former middle classes into an army of office workers, all dilutedly alike,
anxiously trying to be without responsibility. Just as the herd instinct in
times of danger drives people together, but in panic, not revolutionary
courage, so the trend towards the office worker creates a collective of mere
cogs, a collective far tougher than the socialist one will ever be. And most
importantly, with reference to the Night of the Long Knives: was not
the wish to abandon ego and to become a collective as such precisely
exploitable as the most powerful means of maintaining capitalism, i.e. in
the totalitarian state? Since the fascist 'national community' has come into
being, individuality has no longer had to face the accusation that it is purely
allied with private capital: collectivism in itselfis as compatible with business
as individualism is. It is as useful as the individualistic in capitalism, even
in the crisis, even in the fears of life of the late capitalist era, precisely
here. It is noteworthy that even countries without idolization of the state,
purely capitalist-democratic countries, have always had their specific collectives which balance out individualism without detriment to business.
Tocqueville, himself a great democrat, foreign minister of the French
Republic of 1849, was the first to sense and to denounce this bourgeois
collective in its most despotic form, namely in America (On democracy
in America, 1835-1840). In the land of the most uninhibited private enterprise Tocqueville came to the conclusion: 'The absence of a single despot
in democratic tyranny does not compensate for the collectiveand anonymous
despotism which is all the more repressive and stupefying because it
penetrates unnoticed into every cell of the socialorganism.' The 'guarantees
of personal liberty' which the liberal democrat suggested building into
equality are not so interesting, but they also show that in the midst of
the freest competition there was a collective, one which certainly did not
resemble the socialist collective. The collective becomes socialist only when
it is proletarian and class-conscious and, in its highest form, classless. Here
the individual, far from disappearing, himself first becomes free because
he is capable of becoming human. The collective of the militant proletariat
is a protest against private capitalist appropriation of its production. But
this very protest, as subjective contradiction, cannot dispense with the
always individual forms of existence and of operation of subjectivity.
Individual and collective, both relunctioned, are therefore uniquely intertwined

in revolutionary class consciousness; again not as alternatives, as vulgar
Marxists claim, but as interacting elements. The Being-Beside-Oneself of
individuals in an enthusiastically coalescing collective, even in revolutions,
was limited to a very short period; it occurred far more frequently in bogus
revolutions such as the fascist one or in reactionary dervish movements.
The prose of the social revolution shows and demands individual courage,
visible leaders right down to the smallest groups, personal manliness in
solidarity. Manliness which in the Soviet Union, for example, is so strongly
stressed that there exists not only a right but a duty to criticize, and this
duty ~ with a dialectic which has scarcely yet been grasped in the West
- is precisely an element of discipline, a function of convinced, genuine
and unswerving solidarity. The individual here is not a bacterium nor even
a prating windbag, the collective is not indolence, stagnation, conformism
and guardians of morality; on the contrary, the class-conscious or even
classless collective again constitutes a third element, a third between or rather
above previous individuals and previous collectives. Just as there have so far been
no true individuals, so too there has been no true collective; but the true
one lies on the trodden path of a solidarity which isrich inpersons and extremely
many-voiced. The inscription over the concrete-utopian collective reads,
as is well-known and agreed: Each person producing according to his
abilities, consuming according to his needs. Communism is nothing but
this, its collective is freedom within the framework of final order, it is
not a termite hill, not the standardization of a majority of yesterday. With
reference to socialutopias it was noted above: 'The very referenceof concrete
order to the will-content of concrete freedom maintains the legacy of Natural
Right against every collective conceived in merely abstract and isolated
terms, against a collective which is contrasted with individuals instead of
springing from them, from classless individuals' (Vol. II, p. 547). This
legacy is entered upon in solidarity which is both individual and collective,
in solidarity oriented by final consciousness (creation of the classless
society and of its ramifications). Similarly, equality, the major battlecry of democracy, which since 1789 has been placed between liberty and
fraternity t cannot in Marxist terms be confused with levelling down (which
made Tocqueville so indignant). Engels, pointing the way, defines this
as follows: 'The proletariat's call for equality has ... a twofold meaning.
It is either - and this is especially the case in the early stages, for example
in the Peasant War - the natural reaction to blatant social inequalities,
WILL TEMPI t CONTEMPLATION t SOLITUDE
to the contrast between rich and poor, between lords and serfs, gluttons
and starvelings; as such it is simply the expression of the revolutionary
instinct, in which and in which alone it has its justification. Or else it
has arisen as a reaction against the bourgeois call for equality, draws more
or less correct, more far-ranging demands from this, serves as a means
of agitation to stir up workers against capitalists with the capitalists' own
assertions, and in this case it stands or falls with bourgeois equality itself.
In both cases the real content of the proletarian demand for equality is
the demand for the abolition of classes. Any demand for equality which
goes beyond this inevitably lapses into absurdity' (Anti-Diihring, Dietz,
p. 129). And even more sharply, turning towards a coming, positively
differentiated order of freedom: 'The axiom of equality is ... that there
should be no privileges. It is therefore essentially negative, declaring all
history up to :DOW to be bad. Because of its lack of positive content and
its out-of-hand rejection of all previous history it is equally suited to being
set up by a great revolution, as in 1789-96, as for later system-devising
numskulls. But to claim equality = justice as the highest principle and
ultimate truth is absurd. Equality exists merely as the antithesis of inequality,
justice as that of injustice, both are still tainted with the antithesis to the
old history to date and therefore with the old society itself' (l.c., P: 427).
This clarification removes any possibility of confusion with levelling from
the classless collective; such levelling would in fact be the dictatorship of
mediocrity. And levelling down to an existing proletarian world is also
eliminated. Marx warns against this static perspective when he writes:
'When the proletariat wins, it will by no means thereby become the absolute
side of society, for it wins only when it resolves itself and its antithesis.'
The classless collective does of course justifiably have preponderance over
its individuals because it turns their faces in a common direction and is the
marching order in this direction. But it is the individuals who provide the
weight for this preponderance; thus the ideal collective is never again one
of the herd, the mass, and certainly not of the business concern, it works
precisely as inter-subjective solidarity, a many-voiced unity of direction
of wills which are filled with the same humane-concrete goal-content.
Salvation of the individual through community

Likewise: so far neither authentic egos nor an authentic We have appeared
on the scene. Neither has yet had its time of blossoming, and if it does corne
970
then the old forms will also be changed with the new content. The ego
is to be retained but not the so-called unity of person of which the bourgeois
individual was so proud. Instead it turns out that precisely the person is
open, just as a good gardener, precisely because he is good, does not always
make up the same bouquet. No ego is already so fixed in what it is and
in what it can do that its core cannot be renewed, that it cannot surprise
itself at its edges; or else it becomes its own epitaph. Likewise the collective,
after achieving its socialist content, will have a fundamentally changed
form. It need hardly be stressed that this will have nothing in common
with functional associations, let alone with the state in bourgeois society;
for in the latter generality existed only in abstract form and as a phrase.
The bourgeois state, allegedly above party politics, is in reality the repressive
apparatus of the ruling class, as has become clear. And because the repressive
apparatus was always present, corresponding to the division of labour and
the class structure, even the greater generalities which were made possible
by the tied economy of the pre-capitalist era cannot provide a model for
the collective. Since Novalis and, more well-foundedly, since Saint-Simon
it has become common to look nostalgically at life as a whole in the Middle
Ages. Indeed there have even been dreams of moving towards a new Middle
Ages precisely via socialism: a futile dream, and where it was not futile
it arrived in clerico-fascistic fonn only as an attempt to establish a corporative
state, not as collectivization. However, in the classless collective repression,
an essential element in every class-based and therefore ostensible generality,
will no longer have any occasion or any object. Accordingly, even from
this perspective a new social generality will not exclude the new individuals;
on the contrary, after classes have disappeared, individuals on their way
to a commonalty friendly to man will for the first time find space - there
are many mansions in this house. * An arc will be described between I
and We, will be described when the collective mode of production has
finally rebelled against the private mode of appropriation and exchange;
when the individual is no longer the individual capitalist or an obstructive
quibble. When instead the collective has truly become total, i.e. when
it embraces new individuals in a kind of community which has never before
existed. Never has the salvation of the individual been worked for more
intensively than in Marx's 'Kapital', and from the - Totum as it also applies
to the individual person. It is only from here that the struggle begins,
against the division of labour and against the stunting of human beings
'In my Father's house are many mansions', John 14,
2.
971
which it brings in its wake: 'Not only are specific partial tasks divided
among different individuals, the individual himself is divided, transformed
into the automatic mechanism of a partial task .... Life-long specialization
in using a partial tool becomes the life-long specialization of serving a partial
machine. Machinery is misused in order to transform the worker from
childhood onwards into part of a partial machine' (Das Kapital I, Dietz,
p. 378 and 443). And after completing his analysis of the capitalist factory
collective it becomes a matter of life and death for Marx 'to replace the
partial individual, the mere bearer of a social detailed function, by the totally
developed individual for whom different social functions are modes of
activity which alternate with one another' (l.c., p. 513). And again
and again this totally to be developed individual requires the Totum of
a society in which individual interest is not only granted by the general
interest but, in its substantial goals, coincides with it. Only then will the
fine phrases which class society has coined about the dignity ofthe individual
or about the generality of true morality also become meaningful. There is
the longing for independent Being-With-Self which the Cynics tried to
satisfy by modesty in their needs; it will no longer need a barrel. There is
the birth of humane, culture-saturated individuality which occurred in the
circle of the younger Scipio (it is here that the word humanitas was first
used), it was repeated, mutatis mutandis, in the ideal of the person in
the Renaissance, in- English and German classicism; this self-esteem, existing
only on an individual level (persona proprie singulis tributa, says Cicero *),
will nolonger need anaristocracy. There is, on the side of generality, generality
in the commandments of Stoic, Christian and Kantian morality; general
both in the fact that they are equally binding on all and in their classhumane goal. Kant established the most formal but also the most radical
guiding panel of the moral collective in the categorical imperative, in the
moral law which commands without exception. The generality of the
juridical law, which bourgeois society had established, bureaucratically
established, to replace the chequered class and local rights of the feudal
period, was here morally enhanced. On top of this, most important of
all, came the guiding image of the citoyen, as a tribute to general humanity
in every person, as the collective commandment of the good or citoyen
world in the empirical world. Seldom has generality spoken more sublimely,
seldom has the principle of general legislation in the maxim of every will
been more rigorously anticipated. Yet at the same time it has never been
* 'personality is attributed correctly to individuals.'
972
clearer that here in facto a passing ideology of French bourgeois society

was made absolute and that - particularly in facto - there cannot be any
principle whatever of concrete-general moral legislation as long as class
society, which is essentially ungeneral and antithetical, lasts. Which is why
the moral collective only becomes meaningful in a classless collective; and
the moral act of will will then no longer need the casuistry of its universally
validjudgement. If, as Kant demands, man ought to make his own perfection
and the happiness of others the purpose of his actions, this does not mean,
rebus sic stantibus, the happiness of the exploiter, for which he is anyway
being used as a means. Precisely the moral effectiveness of the categorical
imperative presupposes a society which is no longer split into classes. Or
to quote the scarcely mystical words of the mystic Sebastian Franck: 'If
there were no selfishness the gospel would not be so hard'; there is no
ethics except without property. Thus it is only the new or real collective
which guarantees the dignity of every person, and in the same act the
new real person guarantees a collective without repression, without empty
and therefore easily abusable generality. It is the utopian-content-based
goal which invigorates in this way; and this goal, in Being-With-Self and
in Being Together, is the revealing of the human incognito, the identification
of our Self and We. It is only for this that solidarity is on its way, and
only because of a rehearsal on this model that solidarity cannot be manyvoiced enough, that the collective cannot be rich enough. Again, as with
solitude and friendship, the individual and the collective are not alternatives;
the alternative, as illusion, is confined to the abstract-reified antitheses of
the pleasure of the senses and the peace of the soul, and also vita activa vita contemplativa. And classless society leaves these reified elements in
progressing self-encounter behind it, fuses them. But like solitude and
friendship, individual and collective also survive in classless society, as counterparts, not as crossroads. The third element which circulates dialectically in
both and which preserves and enhances each, this living synthesis is itself
nothing but the classless collective, as noted. But it is new, classless, and
open-utopian, so that partial individuals, partial collective can no longer
appear in dualistically reified form, as rigid equivalents. This synthesis
between individuals and collective, the resolution of these falsely reified
and dualized social elements, can however itselfonly be the collective again,
the classless collective, because it represents the triumph of community,
therefore the absolute side of society; but this triumph is equally the
salvation of the individual. In the classless synthesis the sought-for Totum
is at work, that which according to Marx liberates both the totally developed
YOUNG GOETHE. NON-RENUNCIATION. ARIEL
973
individual and real generality. And ultimately it is a Totum because it

is a Totum of the goal-content, of the human content which is still
circulating but has not yet been fixed. Within it resounds or dawns the
general, that which concerns every human being and constitutes the hope
of final content: identity of the We with its self and with its world, instead
of alienation.
YOUNG GOETHE, NON-RENUNCIATION, ARIEL
48
Sound it out! You will recover;

Trust new sight of day.
Goethe, Faust II,
I,
Chorus
The wish to smash things

Even the child, forced to be well-behaved, hardly felt at ease. An urge
to destroy exists, as a small child Goethe brought it into play. It impelled
the boy, one fine afternoon when all in the house was quiet, to keep
throwing crockery on to the road because it "shattered so delightfully'.
On top of this delight came a less definite impulsion towards something,
which awoke quite appropriately in a secluded room. 'This, as I grew
up, was my favourite place, not sad but full of longing.' But great things
took place beyond the windows, the plain, thunderstorms, the setting sun,
a strange world which at the same time was pleasant and near. The child
saw children playing, neighbours strolling in their gardens and tending
their flowers, groups of people enjoying themselves. Goethe continues,
summarizes the effect of all this: ' ... this very early aroused in me a feeling
of loneliness and a longing arising from this which ... soon showed its
influence and was to do so even more later.' The adolescent prowled around
in dubious company, found a hidden way into and out of the house, and
learnt to tell lies. His breezy, cheerful, young, warm-hearted mother
certainly did not force him into this but his father, who was too strict,
and a narrowly circumscribed life encouraged him not to be too serious
about everything. His fine breeding did not last either, even less so the
closer the longed-for student time came. Goethe left his parental home
with the following feeling: "The secretjoy of a prisoner when he has taken
974
off his chains and has almost filed through the prison bars cannot be greater
than mine was as I saw the days dwindling and October approaching.'
Thoroughly dissatisfied, the departing son sought a life that was more
commensurate with him, equal to him.
Wertherian happiness and suffering

The dangerously seeking element now set out in the strange world, against
it. The I-do-not-know-what of childhood now clothes and reveals itself
at the same time: it is, in everything, the beautiful girl. This appeared
almost ununderstood in the childhood love of Gretchen, now the disturbing
happiness roams the country in forms which have become burning. 'As
in morning brightness/You glow around me,/Springtime, beloved!' - this
is purest revelation of youth. 'The nightingale calls/Lovingly from the
hazy vale./I follow, follow!/Where to? Ah, where to?' - this is sheer
consuming cloudiness in the primal haze of youth. The lover who is still
untrue to himself and restless even at rest writes to Friederike:t 'I am
not contented, I am happy! I feel it, and yet the whole content of my
joy is a surging longing for something that I do not have, for something
that I do not know.' The feeling of these years remains unmeasured, indeed
despite its objects almost objectless. Its place is between extremes, it enthuses
to the extremest limits of suffering and of joy. The real girl is easily confused
with and overshone by the imagined girl: the young Schiller thus wrote
melancholia to Minna and fantasies to Laura, to whom there was scarcely
a trace of an equivalent in reality. This utopian state of feeling (containing
'brother Death and sister Lustfulness') is never alien to the young Goethe,
who is so much more concrete; excess of erotic fantasy found its most
precise and bitter document in 'Werther'. The rapids of this feeling of
love flow into utopian regions; they have no place in the mere tearful
tricklings of sentimentalism. 'My only prayer is to her; no other figure
but hers appears to my imagination, and everything in the world around
me I see only in relation to her'. And the boundless love for this girl itself
appears as the boundlessness in Lotte, in the happiness 'of searching with
her for more distant, more secret joys of the world.' The extremest force
of an overhauling, utopian-completed but of course also idolatrous love
consumes itself solitarily in its contrast to reality, grows weak and founders
* Both quotations are from 'Ganymed' which Goethe wrote in his mid-twenties, c. 1774.
t Friederike Brion, with whom Goethe had an early love affair.
975
on it. Werther's suicide, however, is only one side, the so to speak passive
manner in which the fullness of youthful dreams is paid for. The erotic
poetry also had in it social prose, at least as a setting: as disgust with a
very particular world, one represented by bourgeois conformists and by a
frivolous, shameless aristocracy. This politically directed disgust, not only
self-destruction for utopian love, is youth in Werther; thus immense bitterness, occurring around 1770, mingles with socially aggressive Sturm und
Drang. With aggression against a hostile society in which love, personality,
strength, authenticity, freedom, beauty, premonition were blocked and
frustrated. Goethe, for whom the erotic Werther experience was scarcely
present any more when he wrote 'Poetry and Truth' (it was only the
experience described in the 'Marienbad Elegy' which evoked again the
'much-lamented shade'), - even the courtier Goethe also recalls the Werther
era politically in the thirteenth book of 'Poetry and Truth'. He talks of
the disgust which everything regularly and compulsively recurring can
cause, and sums up: 'In such an element and such an environment... ,
tortured by unsatisfied passions, certainly not spurred on to important
actions from outside, with the sole prospect of having to drag on in a slowmoving, spiritless bourgeois life, we came in our uncourageous exuberance
to accept the idea that we could if need be put an end to our lives at will
if they did not suit us any more and thus we managed to get through
the tribulations and boredom of the days scrappily enough. This attitude
was so universal that "Werther" had the great effect it did because it
struck home everywhere and openly and lucidly presented the inmost nature
of a sick, youthful delusion. ' The collision of the utopian feeling was thus
not only one within the world of love, and the feeling itself was not only
erotic. The tears which the young wept over Werther came from hearts
troubled on all sides. They were wishes unsatisfied, activity inhibited,
happiness prevented, suffering embittered. Suffering at their own inadequacy
in the face of their own waking dreams and at the inadequacy of the world,
suffering 'at fate, the old dumb rock' as Werther himself calls it.
The demand, Prometheus, Ur-Tasso

Sharper drives now broke forth, and they did not renounce life. German
youth in around 1770 was also not prepared to accept things as they were,
to endure violence. Soon the emotions were completely unloaded, they
left behind the timidity, the overloadedness of the merely suffering, i.e.
passive kind. They vented themselves in the demanding turmoil of Sturm
und Drang, in protest. Thus the fervour of youth was joined by the new
and special fervour of a time of change, by bourgeois-revolutionary unrest
which rose up against serfdom, regulation, despotism and 'uri-nature".
The Sturm und Drang writers as a whole had the good fortune to be not
only subjectively but also objectively as old as their age and to feel themselves
in tune with the tendencies of the finally awakening German bourgeoisie.
If, in Lessing's words, physiological youth may be intoxication without
wine, then in 1770 it was more than that: the external situation itself
provided youth with its own urgent cause for intoxication, indeed almost
too much cause, namely for intoxication which was often still without
conception. A bourgeois revolution seemed to be getting under way in
Germany, which did not then come after all; and with the country's low
level of capitalist development, it did not use the calculating, regulating
intellect. It appealed to wild-vague feelings of freedom and patriotism,
irrational fanaticism which came naturally to a still semi-baroque, i.e.
pietistic petit bourgeoisie and also to youth. Strong emotional accents were
also to be found among the politically clear-headed, long-since rational
Third Estate in France; Rousseau brought them precisely with decisive
impetus to the masses and they spurred particularly intensely to revolution. However, in economically backward, politically unschooled Germany
the emotions did not automatically ally themselves with the bourgeoisofficial Enlightenment which often became stolid immediately after
Thomasius, but turned in their expression against it. Against the barrenness
of the old, of the Gottsched era, * above all of what seemed to be the same
wig, the same regulations that they saw in the despotic police state. Of
course it was only the amalgam of a regimented conformist bourgeoisie
and of regimenting duodecimo despotism which the Sturm und Drang
opposed. In reality the Sturm and Drang in its entire content is wholly
part of the Enlightenment, even though it rejected this term for the reasons
given above. It is its most active part and is completely allied to it in all
its themes: the education of youth, freedom, humanization of the legal
system, Natural Right and so on. The rejection of intellect overlooked
the then progressive role of the bureaucracy and of general law as a whole;
but a wild Apollo and the liberation of the bourgeoisie merged in a unique
immediacy in the young Germany of the time. Hence also the richly varied
ensemble which was nonetheless, under the militant heading of 'nature',
* For a discussion of Goethe and the reactionary German scholar and writer Johann Christoph
Gottsched (1700-76), see Vol. I, pp. 424-5.
977
felt to be uniform: the sentimental alongside the old German; the protest
against the pigtail alongside archaism; the democracy of the popular song
alongside Hamann's solitary storm-Christianity, with strife, clouds,
lightning around the red dawn. Seldom had so much 'Lord, make space for
me in this narrow breast' appeared, so much shaking at the bars in man,
so much youth as would-be lion-god, so much anti-philistinism per se
uncertain whether breaking out into wilderness or the bright sun, for both
lay in the Sturm und Drang. This was the German, highly German turning
point, mixed time of change which surrounded Goethe's youth - a
bourgeois revolution, despite the lack of a bourgeoisie behind it, despite the
burning unclearness. From a narrow phenomenon, confined to the avantgarde and youth, emerged this exaggerated but also comprehensible category
of Sturm und Drang, as that of youth and utopian overfullness together.
Hence the enterprising man lived here, before setting about a very
different kind of business. The blokish, as it was called, becomes in Lenz, *
utterly lost to himself: 'Thus he dragged out his existence' , and in young
Goethe, utterly and completely healthy, driving him to write: 'Leapt from
bed like a madman reeling,/Never before so full of soulful feeling.'
Something powerfully overexcited, seeking a different space, rages and
complains in Klinger: 'I want to stretch myself across a drum to gain a
new dimension .... Oh if I could exist in the space of this pistol until
a hand fired me into the air. Oh vagueness! How far and how astray you
lead man' (Sturm und Drang, I, I). Something utopian, far more humanly
sore and impetuous, ferments in a movingly genuine way in Maler Muller,
the rider from the Palatinate: 'With how many inclinations we come into
the world! And for most of them to what purpose? Seen from afar, they
lie, like the children of hope, having scarcely entered into life; they are
instruments whose sound has faded, that are neither used nor understood;
swords rusting in their sheaths. Why is this being with five senses so
limitless in feeling and so restricted in his power to achieve? When the
evening often bears my imagination aloft on golden clouds, there is nothing,
nothing I cannot do! I am the master of all the arts, I stretch, feel high
up, feel awakening in my breast all the gods who divide this world in
* 'Lenz": Georg Buchner's story about the madness of the poet and dramatist Jakob Michael
Reinhold Lenz (1751-92). After meeting Goethe in Strasbourg, the real Lenz attempted to
follow in his footsteps, imitated his poetry, and even tried to court Friederike Brion. See also
Vol. I, p. 301.
t Friedrich Maximilian Klinger's play 'Sturm und Drang" lent its name to the eighteenthcentury literary movement.
978
glorious lots among themselves like booty. Painter, poet, musician, thinker,
everything that Hyperion's rays kiss into more life and from which
Prometheus' torch steals heat, I long to be yet cannot; in my soul I vanquish
all, yet I am a mere child when I begin the physical execution, I feel the
god flaming in my veins who hesitates under the muscles of the man.
Why this impulse without satisfaction? Oh they must all come forth, the
gods pent up within me, come forth with a hundred tongues and proclaim
their existence to the world! I want to blossom out fully in all my tendrils
and buds, fully, so fully! There are stirrings like a sea-storm over my soul,
they consume me utterly. What then? Shall I dare to reach out for it?
I must, I must get close to it! You idol in which my inmost soul is mirrored!
Who cries it out! Skill, power of intellect, honour, glory, knowledge,
achievement, power, riches, everything, to play the god of this world the god!' (Life of Faust, Monologue). Something utopian, the 'new dimension', wild-vague yet conjuring, a republic without cowards, exclaims itself
in Schiller's 'Robbers', seeks partisans for revenge, freedom, nature: 'No,
I can't bear to think of it! - Am I to press my body into a corset and
bind my will in laws. The law has slowed down to snail's pace what would
have been the soaring of an eagle. The law has not yet produced a great
man, but freedom hatches out colossi ~nd extremities ... Put me at the
head of an army of fellows like myself and Germany shall be a republic
to make Rome and Sparta look like nunneries.' Certainly this is not
Goethe's part, and even more' certainly revolution in 'The Robbers'
appeared only as a kind of poetic arson with a guilty conscience. Anarchic
irratio even in the later Sturm und Drang showed the backwardness and
indeed the thwartedness of revolutionary consciousness in Germany at that
time. But the revolutionary-utopian emotion as such is unmistakable, its
strength works its way through the braggadocio, its subjective absoluteness
is clear beside the unclear goal-setting. From the beginning Goethe's
'titanism' had, in 'Gotz' and 'Egmont', its surveyable material, which
was made liberal in the former, and was national-revolutionary in the latter.
On top of this came symbolic understanding of the mythology of rebellion,
of the long-suffering hut unrefuted enemies of Zeus. Thus Prometheus,
inherently already the Gotz von Berlichingen among the gods, became
Goethe's god, the true demiurge of man, the all-willer, all-dreamer, the
rebel of light who brought fire to men, who is indeed himself fire.
Prometheus is the blazing element, the considerer of the future, he is raging
resignation on the rock and that immortal hope to which a Hercules comes.
He is the victim whose liver, the organ of prophecy, is gnawed to pieces
979
by the vulture or eagle of Zeus, this age-old heraldic emblem of oppression.

He above all others is the imprisoned god in man; as such he made the
mythology of Sturm und Drang and filled its favourite SOD, Doctor Faust.
Goethe, in the fifteenth chapter of 'Poetry and Truth', stresses the very
late, very surprising continuing influence of this Promethean phenomenon
- even in 'Tasso', indeed even in the world of 'Iphigenie'. Now himself
an Olympian, Goethe, asserted the 'peaceful, plastic, at most long-suffering
reluctance' and this alone of his present sympathy, writes: 'But the bolder
characters of that race, Tantalus, Ixion, Sisyphus, were also my saints... I
pitied them, their state was recognized by the ancients as truly tragic,
and if I presented them as members of an immense opposition in the
background of my "Iphigenie", then I certainly owe to them part of the
effect which my play had the good fortune to produce.' Opposition to
authority can also be merely a palace revolution - and the later Goethe
confined himself to the idea of palace revolution -, but around 1770, in
the rising epoch of the bourgeoisie, the opposition contained a life that
was not prepared to stop at a mere switching of facades. A life that at least as anti-philistinism - continued to influence Goethe's work even
well into his later period of moderation, a moderation which, despite
conservatism, was by no means played out, which could, as he put it,
always think its way to what was right. 'Tasso' still shows breaks which
stem from the first version, revised in Italy. The 'Ur-Tasso' of 1779 wholly
affirmed the rights and the superiority of its dream-filled, though also libertine hero. And Antonio, his adversary, is portrayed in the first version
with all the characteristics of his hated origins in the anti-world of Sturm
und Drang, in the philistine even in high office and in absolutist reason
of state; and even in the revised version he appears at the beginning as
brusque, malicious, arrogant and envious. Only in the third act does he
come across as sympathetic and positive, a calm, level-headed man of the
world, whereas at the same break-point Tasso only here begins to play
the vain fantast, unstable and at odds with himself. And similarly the
'Ur-Meister", with the hero's theatrical mission, continues to influence
the 'Lehrjahre', the curing from the mission, the realistic Erziehungsroman. * Here too the first book, full of effusiveness, still presents Meister's
self-created world, overcrowded with ideas, full of poetry and drama. Here
too it is only the sequel which brings correction and sophrosyne; what
* Erziehungsroman: a novel that describes the gradual education of a young man in the world.
A genre of German fiction that flourished in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.
WiSHFUL IMAGES OF THE FULFILLED MOMENT
in Tasso was madness is here, in far lower characters, the misery of the
wandering player's life, the hollowness of aesthetic illusion. But when
the hero, taught by experience, returns to active, real life, one which is
truly praisable and thus praised, then - with obvious repugnance - it is
not into a philistine existence such as that of Werner, that of the practical man and man of experience who has never known the element of
exuberance, whose practice is therefore spiritless and whose realism is itself
the most incomplete. Admittedly in 'Meister' only the "TheatricalMission'
contains a lingering trace of Sturm und Drang, but it is this which keeps
the hero - however average he may be ;. . alive and which keeps philistinism,
which is both unfree and unartistic, away from Wilhelm. Thus the wild
Apollo lived on for a long time, even when the god, in Goethe's middle
period, had partly turned into classical marble (but not during Goethe's
symbolic old age). It was the many-toned category of freedom which kept
exuberance alive, which destined it for "Gotz", for 'Egmont", for 'Faust'.
In the long polar winter as which the Enlightenment and the Sturm und
Drang regarded all feudal history, the effect of the wild Apollo was like
that of the sun at last beginning to rise from below the horizon. 'Air
of heaven - freedom! freedom!' are the last words of the dying Gptz;
and Egmont, the national-revolutionary hero, dies with a vision which
hurls the entire ocean in tyrannos: 'Brave people! the goddess of victory
leads you! And as the sea breaks through your dams, break and pull down
the walls of tyranny and sweep it away in drowning waters from the ground
which it usurps.' Rage and hope, these were and are here the two utopian
emotions of a sharper kind, and they govern all others in the consciousness
which feels itself to be full of a new figure.
Intention of sublimity,
Faust Gothic and metamorphosis
But the whole man must sound, and at that time he was whole only when
he was writing. What was fermenting in young Goethe looked out at
fermentation, tried in a related manner to assure itself of it creatively. Here
especially was an extremely dawning Being Ahead and calling across, from
the Across itself:
An inexplicable sweet yearning
Drove me to wander over wood and lea,
YOUNG GOETHE, NON-RENUNCIATION. ARIEL
And as a thousand tears were burning

I felt a world arise in me.
This is not only the fermentation of youth and time of change but the new
fermentation of production; this kind of forward dawning has scarcely ever
been expressed in a more experienced way. With all the deep morning red
that seeks to come to light, both hesistant and exuberant. The hesitant does'
not coincide with the immaturity of the Sturm und Drang, nor the exuberant
with its obsessive animation; for both - as already audible in the monologue
of Maler Muller, of the poet who scarcely became one, of greatness ante rem
- are part of productive incubation. Hence the torment, indeed the guilt-feeling
of still wordless overfullness in 'Werther': 'Why so limitless in feeling and
why so restricted in the power to achieve? Why this sweet enlivening of my
budding ideas and its dull fading amidst the impotence of men? That I feel
so high up and yet cannot say' 'you are all that you can be" , this, this is my
torment.' And the same sultriness of the New, right at the will to expression
itself, before Werther..Goethe can already found, has already founded his later
landscape: ' ...my friend, when dusk falls around my eyes, and the world
around me and the heavens rest completely in my soul like the form of a lover;
then I often yearn and think: oh if only you could express that again, if only
you couldbreatheinto paper that which lives so fully, so ardently in you,

so that it became the mirror of your soul as your soul is the mirror of the
infinite God!' The desiderium is the most certain Being and the only
honourable quality of all men; the desiderium to give shape to that which
foredawns so clearly, which questions in objects themselves and seeksits poet,
with an as it were demanding gaze, is Having and Not..Having itself.
Werther's Not-Having in Having therefore constitutes the entire unrest in
a different, now so unfathomably broader, deeper sphere, in Faust: at his desk,
beginning around midnight, just beyond an earlier world of statement which
had already collapsed, a world which had not become a statement, in efficacity
and seed, either of inner or of external nature. But hesitation, even
catastrophe, is also paralleled in production by its converse element: Having
in Not..Having or the unerring power of exuberance. The power leads us
into the Novum towards construction, hence the Weimar confession to
Lavater: 'This ambition to point the pyramid ofmy existence, the foundation
of which is given to me and grounded for me, as high as possible into the
air, this ambition outweighs everything else and scarcelyallows me to forget
it for a moment. I must not fail myself, I am already advanced in years, and
'Faust', Part I, 775-8.
perhaps fate will break me in the middle of it and the Tower of Babel
will remain bluntly uncompleted. I want people at least to say that it was
boldly conceived and, if I live, my powers, God willing, should reach up
to it.' Production in this power for the Unbecome already sees the end,
which articulates and brings home; the morning red which saw so much
new world slipping away from and arising within it already contains the
built-saved element and Lynkeus, who declares it at the end of Goethe's life:
The sun is sinking and the final ships
are sailing gaily harbourwards.
A heavy barge here slowly slips
along the channel to the wharves.
The flags are brightly fluttering
from rigid masts where rigging climbs;
in you the bos'un counts his blessings
and fortune greets you in highest time. *
The highest time is that of the fulfilled moment, and around this, around
the opening up of its sign, unloading of its content, all these faces of creation
were moved or positioned, around the utopia of the fully stated Here and
Now. Every production intends an element of the seventh day of creation,
as the statement of the previously unsaid, the human hearing of the
previously unheard. And 'Wanderer's Storm-song', very close to the source
of Goethe's production, is arresting both because the storm carries away
and because it abates, around a continually creating centre, around the
'brightly shining, warmth-giving fire' of the house, around 'inner warmth,
warmth of soul, centre! .... heart of the waters, marrow of the earth',
in man and in nature.
External images had to respond to the inner ones, otherwise neither
emerged. For the young Goethe, a 'thin and meagre environment' was
not suitable for this reciprocal echo. The older Goethe recalls this significantly in Book Six of 'Poetry and Truth': 'This much however is certain,
that the vague, far-reaching feelings of the young and of certain primitive
peoples are alone suited for the sublime, which, when it is to be excited
in us by external things, formless, or shaped into intangible forms, must
surround us with a greatness which is too much for us.' And with similar
deviation in the eighth book of 'Meister': 'The inclination of youth to
mystery, to ceremonies and to fine words is extraordinary and often a sign
* 'Faust', Part II, 11143-50. These lines are spoken by Lynkeus, the watchman.
of a certain depth of character. In these years one wants to feel one's whole
being moved and affected, even if only obscurely and vaguely. The youth
who senses many things believes that he finds a great deal in a mystery,
puts a great deal into a mystery and that he is bound to have an effect
through this.' This refers to the so-called hermetic societies, to Rosicrucianism with which Goethe came into contact as a student, to the sal
philosophicum and the world of Fraulein von Klettenberg, * but it refers
equally to the dash of confusion without which young productivity would
find no form at all. Or only the slick form of the gallant period of the
time, or the epigonally polished form of the classical age or even the falsely,
i.e. banally naturalistic style, which are all mere cliches, not forms of reality,
which is much-intertwined, richly edged. Sublimity and legitimate mystery,
as the answering counterpart of his own 'cloud trail and far-radiating Too
Much', the young Goethe discovered only in works which included clouds,
forests, intensifications, fruitful darknesses: in the poems of Pindar and
the plays of Shakespeare. Hence even Goethe's statement in his remarks
on Diderot's 'Rameau', which applies to far more than Shakespeare and
Calderon, unmistakably referring to the necessary barbarization in Faust,
the deeply humane, not at all classicistic-imperialistic sounding statement:
'To remain courageously at the height of these barbaric advantages, as we
will probably never attain the classical advantages, this is our duty.' In
architecture, Goethe's harmony with the Gothic, then most definitely considered barbaric, had long since awoken at the sight of Strasbourg Cathedral,
its forest world, its tremendous aspect as Humanum: 'Few have been privileged to create a Babel idea in their souls, entire, great and even in its
smallest part necessarily beautiful, like trees of God; and fewer still have
then found a thousand willing hands to dig the rock, conjured up steep
heights on it and then, dying, said to their sons: I remain with you, in the
works of my mind; complete what I have begun, build it into the clouds!'
(On German architecture, 1773). Subject-object immanence in all this as
far as it goes out, even in those truly protoplastic elective affinities where
production andearth-spirit help into, indeed exchange placeswith, each other:
And when the storm in the forest roars and creaks,
The giant spruce collapses bringing down
The trees around it, crushing boughs and trunks,
A fall that thunders hollow from the hill,
You lead me to the safety of the cave,
* See Vol. II, p. 642.n.
You show me to myself, and in my heart

Most deep and secret wonders are revealed. *
Here the sublimity of familiarized shaping-reshaping draws away into the
distance, into the unexhausted measure and excessof the genius or of nature,
no matter which here. This reshaping does not abate even in the cooler
transition from the protoplastic to the plastic insight. It is, as metamorphosis,
the formative drive towards perfection of the species which is identical
with production. 'Stamped form which develops as it lives', certainly there
is in this something pre-ordered, a statics which repels the Novum:
Yet at heart the power of the nobler creatures
Is contained in the holy circle of living formation.
No god can extend these bounds, which nature honours:
For only thus limited was the perfect ever possible.
These lines are from the didactic poem 'Metamorphosis of the Animals',
which sets limits, a conservative version of Aristotelian entelechy. But even
in the late Goethe stamped form is always only developing, never manifestly
given; it is not a ready-made framework for shaping-reshaping, but a latent
goal working from a latent idea of shape. Just as much as the conservatism
of the late Goethe feared all violent production, so that he did not understand Kleist and Beethoven, indeed did not want to believe in vulcanism in
nature, despite volcanoes, equally the primal phenomenon in every entelechy
was never without shaping-reshaping; stamped form is no mummy. Goethe's
theory of metamorphosis always gives the reflection of his own life-long production, one which was unbelieving even in the face of death, which was
often rounded, never closed. Existence is drawn in circles here, there is
a law according to which all living things come to be, but the Goethean
circles do not press phenomena, and the truly entelechetic outline, not only
conserving hut also developing, is always drawn in utopian dotted lines.
Right at the end of his life, in the 'Notebooks on Morphology', Goethe
set the following dialectically-open sentences against the statics so easily
associated with the word shape: 'For the complex of the existence of an
actual being the German uses the word "shape". In this word he abstracts
from the mobile, he assumes that a common feature is established, completed
and ... fixed. If however we consider all shapes... we find that nowhere does
* 'Faust', Part I, 32.2.8-34.
The German word is 'Gestalt' here.
a constant, nowhere does a resting, nowhere does a completed entity occur,

that on the contrary everything is swaying in constant movement. Hence
our language, appropriately enough, tends to use the word "formation";"
both for what has been produced and for that which is being produced.
If therefore we wish to establish a morphology, we must not speak of
shape; but when we use the word we should think at the most of the
idea, the concept or of something in experience fixed for a moment only.
That which has been formed is immediately re-formed, and if we wish
to achieve anything like a living perception of nature we must remain
as mobile and malleable, according to the example with which she precedes
us.' Accordingly even Faust in shaped heaven gives no rest; indeed there
is if anything too much rather than too little drawing on t here which
even in paradise still has an eternal utopia. For the young Goethe production
had an elective affinity with every formation full of sap, for the older Goethe
it was the viceregency of the objective imagination and of its significant,
i.e. entelechy-containing Objects. And Aristotle's theorem that movement
was 'uncompleted entelechy' would have been highly acceptable to Goethe.
That a creation full of sap should well from his fingers, this was the youth's
desire. That this welling, as it is nature, should also be a forming like
nature, with the inner necessity of the shaping of nature and of its products
(an antique room, mysterious in the broad daylight), this was the ambition
of the man. The world itself is here productivity towards its full content
or a material Faust, who changes in all his metamorphoses because the distant
identity whose name is not only Gretchen moves on ahead of him.
Ariel and poetic imagination

The old masters led sober lives and worked as craftsmen. Poets, on the
other hand, were never in a guild, even where they were not as free as
the birds in the air. Sometimes they were exposed, pensioners of the powerful, sometimes poetry, unlike the craft of painting, was considered a knightly
art. But the peculiarly free-floating (or so it appeared to itself) art of poetry
was in fact even objectively less tied to traditions of craftsmanship. Poetic
* The German word is 'Bildung" here.
t Cf.
'Faust', Part II, 12.110-11:

'The Eternal-Female
Draws us on.'
The last lines of 'Faust'.
production does not require the grinding of colours and the joint efforts
of masters and journeymen in the workshops. Much as poetry in every
point includes handicraft in the sense of technical skill and knowledge,
craft handed down, further developed by the master himself: the imagination here is far more thrusting, outgoing. For unlike the plastic arts it
has the long road of time on its side and along it the adventure, even
in the mediated sense, of a fullness of action moving onwards. It is this
which is carried on by poetic ability itself and which is both inscribed
on and pre-ordered in it. The poetic rules of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries certainly restricted the poetic imagination, but they have a very
different origin from the old rules of the handicrafts. And it was Shakespeare,
the star of the highest height, who produced a very light-winged symbol
of poetic ability: Ariel. Pro spero in 'The Tempest' has his magic wand
but the best helper is Ariel, who loves his master:
All hail, great master! Grave sir, hail! I come
To answer thy best pleasure; be't to fly,
To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride
On the curl'd clouds: to thy strong bidding task
Ariel and all his quality.
Ariel is the pneuma and metamorphosis who can even make the world
shoot beyond its respective entelechies, with thoroughly delectable raptures.
Ariel, the most graceful of all the spirits of freedom, plays on Shakespeare's
fairytale level and thus he phantasmagorizes and helps to bring about a
cheerful ending almost limitlessly. At Prospera's command he causes the
imaginary shipwreck, changes into storm and fire, he joins the butterflies
and swallows, changes into a water nymph, He creates the music which
Ferdinand hears, with all the uncertain topics peculiar to the purest timeart: 'Where should this music be?' asks Ferdinand, bemused. 'I' th' air
or th' earth?' It is this freedom of Ariel by which great poetic abductors
have violated the laws of time and place for the sake of richer or more
concentrated encounters. So that Shakespeare's Hector speaks of Aristotle,
and Theseus can be connected with Oberon and Titania. So that we see
Goethe's Faust and Helen married in a Gothic Sparta after Faust, as a
Norman duke, has just defended Helen, newly returned from Troy, against
an attack by Menelaus. Thus time and space are enchanted here - a most
powerful interlocking of poetic imagination and - for all their distinctiveness - its intertwining shapes of meaning. Probably no one has yet
attempted to produce an outline of all these dream worlds of the poetic

imagination; with the constantly flowing relations between all its archetypes
and entelechies it would probably be most complicated, resembling a
kaleidoscope more than an outline. It is no coincidence that Goethe invoked
Ariel when he switched from typical to allegorical-symbolic representation:
Ariel also stands at the gate of the second part of 'Faust'. And he is also
at work in Goethe's 'Pandora', unnamed, but as imagination, this particular
eros which, though it does not begin everything, completes it in lovelier
images. Ariel, changing from air into a coloured cloud, animates the gifts
of Pandora, the content of her box, the simply beautiful magic:
And merrily a starry flash came from the steam,
And then another one; and others followed fiercely.
Then I looked up, and on the cloud already hovered
All fluttering a coloured crowd of lovely gods.
Pandora showed and named to me the hovering forms:
Up there you see, she said, shines happiness of love!
And next to this, she carried on, delight in jewels
Fast follows on the wavy train of billowing gowns.
But higher climbs, with steady serious ruler's gaze,
A shape of awesome power that presses ever forwards.
And others too melt into one another circling,
Responding to the smoke, which surges back and forth,
But all obliged to be the pleasure of your days.
And this Ariel appears not only as 'smoke-formed, desirable delusion',
as the airy spirit of illusion, but behind him beauty itself: Pandora, the
imaginary figure created and sent by the gods, stands and bows down.
The world in itself for Goethe is a universal life in which beauty inheres,
to which the joy of contemplation of art is most closely assigned. From
this contemplation and certainly in it Goethe's imagination constructs its
second world: not enigmatic and leaving phenomena behind it but shining
through, bringing out, indeed rescuing phenomena into what is significant
in them. Here an overshooting of what has already been stamped is
inevitable, both in the subject and the restless characters (Tasso, Faust,
even Wilhelm Meister) and especially in objectivity itself which has been
thoroughly shaped in art. The Romantics were not far wide of the mark
in feeling close not only to the young Goethe of the popular ballads but
also to the late Goethe with his symbolism or 'the infinity which inheres
in things'; in this one entity Goethe said what they could not articulate,
he achieved where they, for the most part, merely fluttered around or
indeed declaimed. And the imagination itself, that of the popular ballads
and of rich symbolism, retains with Ariel its naivety, without which no
creation whatsoever but only laboured work or flapping comes about. In
this respect Ariel certainly resembles the divine child Krishna in Indian
legend, whose mother happens to open his mouth; inside his body she
sees the immeasurable splendour of heaven and of the entire world; but
the child goes on playing peacefully and seems to know nothing of it.
Such is the naivety with which Goethe endowed even those of his characters
who are most sentimental in the Schillerian sense: Mignon, Tasso and even
Faust. The great poet does not have the alternative of being nature or
not being nature and seeking it - the antithesis which Schiller established
to define the naive and the sentimental writer. But as a great poet he is
nature and will at the same time seek it, namely that which is glimpsed
poetically, which in actions and in characters is immanently driven beyond
the incidental, the faltering and the undecided. What then comes about
is not for example whimsical as in the case of those poets who have made
only half of Ariel, and certainly only half of Minerva their own, as the
ancients used to say, i.e, a whimsicality which does not overtake the course
of things but merely veers subjectively and arbitrarily away from it. Yet
exact imagination such ~s Shakespeare and Goethe possessedis never directed
simply at something which is arbitrarily possible but at the objectively
possible Possible; in such a way that their theatre-lights make characters,
passions and situations not more arbitrary but more consistent, so that
Faust's magic cloak leads to adventures which mediate the world with
its tendency, multiply the world in artistic pre-appearance, but do not
leave it behind. The poetic imagination, leaving nothing half-shaped, thus
endows each of its Objects with the capacity to pursue its metier fully,
its love, courage, suffering, happiness, victory, sometimes even its weakness
and absurdity, and precisely for this reason it is immanent-concrete. Indeed
even Ariel's poetic miracles remain connected with shipwrecks, storms,
fire and the happiness of love in this world and they perfect this world
without fragmentation. This faithfulness to the world despite all superabundance, this superabundance held in check by faithfulness to the world
are the aesthetic measure itself; and if this measure is not adhered to then
imagination either degenerates, as noted above, into whimsicality by merely

veering away from the real subjectively and arbitrarily, or else - and this
of course is a completely different kind of veering away, with a leap out
of the entire aesthetic-entelechized world - imagination transcends into
religion. Into the no-longer-creature of the breakthrough, into the nolonger-world of the transcendently miraculous. But poetic imagination
itself is and remains in league with Ariel, the airy spirit who moves in
the easily displaceable element above the earth but never leaves it and never
bursts through it even in his fire. In its coloured reflection this imagination
has life which is driven to its immanent-perfected end. This is the nature
of the free-floating but world-faithful utopia of its own kind, from whose
dream of transformation poetic production comes, to whose world without
disappointment it goes.
The demonic, and the allegorical-symbolic sealedness

which expresses itself
For all this, creative power remains uncanny, both for itself and for
others. Goethe said that its origin was a place where light does not burn
or does not readily burn, and he called it the demonic. For him the demonic
is not the dark per se but the dark which exercises power. Seductive.
or dominating power and a power of fascination, which causes terror
and desire together, attraction through terror. The serpent has always
been the symbol of this aspect of the demonic, but so too has fire.
Another important thing about this darkness which exercises power is
that it is sealed, i.e. that despite its undeniable and often intense influence
on others it does not come out of itself, indeed at its worst extreme is
reserved to the point of being gloomy kitsch. Because of this sealedness
even the vitality so often associated with the demonic, for all its radiance,
has a nocturnal aura about it. Typical of this dark radiance is the character
of Don Juan, the arch-demonic; something manic, which operates most
powerfully on the outside world, is here imprisoned in itself; thus, for
all the emanations of the demonic, it is also incarcerated in unspeakable
inwardness. As Kierkegaard, who ought to know, remarks narrowly - i.e.
pastorally - but aptly: 'This is the profound element in existence - that
unfreedom takes itself prisoner. Freedom is constantly communicating ... ,
unfreedom becomes more and more sealed and does not want communication'. The opposite of sealedness is manifestation, but in almost all
990
cases the demonic does not express itself but merely breaks out atavistically.
And not in words; its easiest and most frequent monstrosity-creating
expressionis not even, as one might expect because of its inwardness,
individual, occurring only in and around the strange person, but mass
delirium, although it is usually caused by such persons. This ranges from
the frenzies of the maenads and the berserks to the pogroms of the crusades
and the inverted aggression of flagellants, from the intoxication of battle
to white terror. In all this the demonic does not communicate, not even
when it goes to the masses or even becomes collective. On the contrary,
the old sealedness remains even in its collective eruption; what appears
to be communication is merely infection, and at the bottom of it all is
the same loneliness as mass. The non-manifestation of the sealedis paralleled
in demonic mass delirium by the fundamental absence of intellect, criticism,
self-control and judgement; this is why it is also the perfect time for that
quality least accessible to communication and to illumination: stupidity.
But of course there is also - and this is crucial for the phenomenon stressed
by Goethe - a kind of positive demonism, one which, without losing its
unfathomable and powerful elements, is also adept at manifestation. Its
locations are the liberating revolution and productive genius which gives
shape to the New, celebrated by Goethe as early as 'Wanderer's Stormsong'; its symptom is not intoxication but enthusiasm. Intoxication only
exhibits the urge to sacrifice, whereas enthusiasm possesses the courage
of self-sacrifice, intoxication loses all hold on things and on reality, whereas
enthusiasm possesses consciousness, knowledge of the content of the matter,
communicative loyalty to the goal. Even in art, negative demonism which
remains sinister is met by no glance which it itself casts, but only by an
atavistically numinous element like itself, monstrous rather than aweinspiring, an object of fear not of awe. Whereas positive demonism, the
demonism of light, on the other hand, appears wherever terror is the beginning of the beautiful instead of its end; * where the numinous, like
consolation at the border, is commensurate with Goethe's words: 'Distant
and heavy hangs a veil of awe.' It is therefore this positive demonism which
finally governs the manifold revelations of demonic human and productive
experience in Goethe's work itself.
This is instructive because here yet another tone is added to that of the
harp. Ariel, the light, golden, wafting mode of playing which, even to
Bloch is referring to Rilke's First Duino Elegy: 'For the beautiful is nothing but the beginning
of the terrible'.
991
itself, is uncanny, is joined by a sphinx, which does not of course always

remain one. Now appears the element of what was called power, not only
by the Sturm und Drang; a hoof-beat of the winged horse and only then
the source. Goethe, however, sometimes fuses the dark and the positive
demonic in a value-free manner: he defines as demonic everything which
erupts with the force of immediate nature, regardless of whether it .is
terrifyingly monstrous or prophetically divine. He even refuses at first to
apply the term to himself: 'It is not in my nature, but I am subject to
it.' He does not even apply it essentially to the excellent or to the productively significant. His words here sound terrifyingly prophetic: 'But this
demonic element is most terrifying when it emerges predominantly in one
person ... They are not always the finest people, either in mind or in talent,
they are seldom noted for goodness of heart; but a tremendous power
radiates from them, and they exercise an incredible fascination over all
creatures and even over the elements. Who can say how far this influence
can extend? All moral forces combined are helpless against them; the
brighter part of mankind tries in vain to cast doubt on them as deceived
or deceivers, the mass is still drawn to them. ' But if Goethe is here seeking
to keep the demonic away from himself, indeed to place it at a certain
cautious distance from the excellent per se, he later revoked both reservations; for he assigned both great natures and above all highest productivity,
i.e. his own, to the demonic. Frederick II, Peter the Great, Napoleon,
Byron, Mirabeau: Goethe called them all demonic, not only in their passion
and their energy but also in their unsurpassable assurance. However the
connection with the demonic - on the side of lucid obsession - becomes
complete only in the case of poetic production: 'There is definitely
something demonic in poetry, and primarily in-unconscious poetry in which
all intellect and all reason fall short, and which therefore operates over
and above all ideas.' And absolutely emphatically to Eckermann in March
1828, in connection with the recurrence of puberty: 'All productivity of the
highest kind, every important aper~u, every invention, every great thought
which bears fruit and has consequences is in no man's power and is above
all earthly power ... It is related to the demonic, which overpoweringly
does with it what it will, to which it unknowingly submits while believing
that it is acting on its own initiative.' Here, in connection with the lightning
flash of inspiration which overwhelms the consciousness, Goethe recalls
the myth of 'unhoped-for gifts from above'; accordingly he describes the
productive as 'a vessel found worthy to receive a divine influence.' Goethe
adds more conventional explanations to these interpretations, which,
992
however, also seek to define positive communicative-manifesting sealedness,

the category ofproductive depth both upwards and downwards, as opposed
to the demonism which remains darkly below. Significant here is his definition
of the all-embracing, work-sure, fruit-bearing assurance which is connected
with positive demonism and gives direction. Direction away from the urge,
the sense of mission, of an inescapably productive nature and direction from
the star which chaos seeks to bring forth and on which all the dominants
of his development are trained throughout his life. And the works themselves
which are so necessarily produced are assigned to the star just as they stress
and perceive it as Stella nova before all else. Goethe's demon finds and forms
its basic material in 'Faust', that of Beethoven in the 'Eroica' and in 'Fidelio' ,
that ofDante. in the 'Divine Comedy'; indeed, as Goethe maintains in 'Primal
Words. Orphic', it is even part of the law by which such natures embark
on their careers that they must inescapably be true to themselves and therefore
also to their time. The time in which their own basic material is ideologically
available and also, in its Goethean, Beethovenian and Dantean ramifications,
latent in utopian terms. Thus the positive demonic here determines the
unerringness of the productive goal and principle which are newly posited,
articulated for the first time. The sealed quality which manifests itself or the
self-manifesting quality which is sealed finally makes such works necessarily
allegorical-symbolical in all their central sections. In other words it makes them
meaningful in terms of meanings which are themselves founded in the world
of their Objects and therefore also correspond objectively to the sealed-lucid
quality of demonic production. Thus a subject-object relation is founded
which extends not only to the rising social contents of the time but to the
advancing announcements sounding through in the object-world as a whole;
to that in it which Goethe, with a thus only dawning sense, sense of nature,
called 'mysterious in the broad daylight' or even 'holy public mystery' . Inside
and outside, inside as manifestation which is of a high order and presupposes
sealedness, outside, in the Objects to be uttered, as sealedness in which
manifestation still expresses these Objects. Both, language as well as material
content of such production, contain the constant interaction between
sealedness and Aurora rising: 'Poems are painted window-panes' - and thus,
like their Objects, like the colours of the Goethean world- and colour-theory
as a whole, they lie between darkness and light. Consequently the form of
representation and the form ofobjectivity of this public mystery, of this lucid
demonism, can be none other than the allegorical-symbolic; in the early works
* The title of a late short lyric poem by Goethe first published in 1827.
993
of Goethe in the straightforward manner of simile, in the late works in

an often re-figured, indeed paradoxical manner. Thus meaning contents
of this kind are not already written out so that an interpreter need only
hold the pages up to the light for the finished writing to appear - rather
the world itself has not yet brought forth, brought out its meaning content
in finished form; hence the world itself is in this fermenting process of
figural moulding, hence productive genius itself stands at the most advanced
post of figural development. Productive genius for Goethe is the demonic
brightened up, is the urbanization of the demonic, and for him the productivity of the world is the same, with its living, developing entelechies;
for they are all so many living, objectively existing allegories and symbols.
This and nothing else is Goethe's realism, everywhere seeking, finding,
stressing 'significant Objects'; it is not the realism of the reproduced surface
but of the Real which in every one of its figures is the simile of an
intensifying Being. Its perfection is certainly to be found in Goethe's
writing, even in his 'cherishing self in nature, nature in self'. Here, in
the pantheistic Whole, the book of nature certainly is written out fully
for him, as in Giordano Bruno, and especially in Spinoza. But in the Onthe-way of the figures, of the true Goethean world, a constantly changing,
inter-related and thus allegorical figure creation manifests itself, and inside
it a symbolical constant star; called the Eternal-Female, it is itself not fixed,
but hovers, still hovers.
Just those who know such longing: Mignon

There is no experienced Abroad as such, every Abroad is merely far from
something. The longing towards it is measured in terms of the distance
and beauty of this Something, multiplies with them. But a shy, quite
enigmatically artful seeking also lives in it; its Where To must then itself
stand for something else. Goethe described this type in the remotest, most
homeless of his characters, in Mignon. Kidnapped as a child by a troupe
of acrobats, then snatched by Wilhelm Meister from the leader of the band
who cruelly maltreats her, she remains even after her rescue the pure subject
of lonely, unfulfilled longing. This longing has no feet on the ground,
is therefore not female-sexual, despite the appearance of puberty and of
its confusions. The ethereal-enigmatic creature is nowhere and never
woman; otherwise she could not be so unconnected. Even her relationship to Wilhelm is questionable: he is not her lover, despite being called
994
this in the poem, nor is he her protector and father, he is the man as
homeland, with whom she first experienced warmth, and he is not even
loved as a person but because in him shimmers and operates that which
is longed for as Italy, or rather not even as Italy but as the 'solid house'
which is there. Her only ties, apart from the unreal ones with Wilhelm,
those with Felix and the harpist, are those of a sometimes similar situation,
nothing more. The lonely child among adults feels drawn to Felix, the
other child, the naive to the naive. The isolated creature, marked by pain,
feels drawn towards the isolated old man marked by fate, the musical being
to the musician. There is no motherliness, no womanliness in these relations;
Mignon remains sexless, a completely free-floating subject of longing, even
in her outward struggle against sexual determination, for the right to wear
boys' clothes. That nothing bisexual or hermaphroditic is meant here, but
the sign of a departure from all sexual colouring of longing, is shown
in Mignon's last song: 'And as for those celestial figures,/They do not
ask if man or woman.' Nor is Mignon's longing passive in contrast to
the adventuring-active longing of a Tasso, Faust, even Wilhelm Meister;
as passive longing of this kind it could still exist alongside the female.
Instead, Mignon's is a longing which even in the sphere of love is nameless
as it were, which is therefore altogether disparate to the man-woman relationship. Disparate, but not ascetic; which is why Mignon can be destroyed
by the failure of an erotic relationship with Wilhelm. However, she is
destroyed not by and through eroticism but solely by the total free floating
of her longing, the transparency of her eroticism, the constant unendingness
of her Not-Having and Having at the same time. This state never breaks
out of distance, its emotion can never land on the earth, remains unreal
and always merely a Seeming, never a Becoming towards Being. Thus
the doctor, shortly before Mignon's death, diagnoses her to Wilhelm as
follows: 'The peculiar nature of the good child ... consists almost entirely
of a deep longing; the yearning to see her country again and the yearning
for you, my friend, is, I am almost inclined to say, the only thing that
is earthly about her; both merely reach out into an endless distance, both
objects lie unattainable before her unique nature.' Because of its silence
and its spellbinding being-spellbound this longing, like Mignon's whole
character, unnatural though it is, is still undoubtedly demonic. Natalie
recognized the obsessiveness in Mignon's scarcely developed ego and recalled
it for Wilhelm: 'She told him of Mignon's sickness in general, that the
child was gradually being consumed by a few deep feelings, that because
of her great excitability, which she concealed, she was often and dangerously
YOUNG GOETHE,
NONRENUNCIATION~
ARIEL
995
afflicted with spasms in her poor heart ... But once these anxious spasms
were over, the force of nature manifested itself again in violent pulsations
and now frightened the child by excess where previously she had suffered
because of deficiency.' But again nothing could be falser than to constrict
this kind of demonism to child-women and other kinds of intermediate
beings, to Klingsor's" flower-girls or the soullessly Undine-like] simply.
seeking a soul. On the contrary, Mignon is nothing but soul, and she
roams far into the distance, far beyond the man. This longing always tends
towards the unconditional; thus the subject of longing per se, of nameless
longing, becomes in the delicate image of Mignon a freely rising symbol,
an archetypal symbol rolling from within itself. The late explanation of
Mignon's origin at her exequies by her uncle ex machina is no explanation
at all but a break in the conception of this figure, a transition to another
genus; this does not concern Mignon any longer anyway, she is dead. But
the archetype of Mignon is a living one, the most delicately utopian one
that has ever arisen from youth. And it surrounds, overshoots, all the
seemingly fixed persons and entelechies of the Goethean world. In 'Wilhelm
Meister' it is outside bohemia, outside society, cannot be accommodated
socially, is not perceivable in the Become as a whole. It is primally known
in the radical experience of longing of almost every human being, first
of all in youth, and there it is disparate to everything that is already shaped
as known, has become known. Mignon's archetype is thus precisely
appraised and experienced, therefore not at all romantically extravagant
or, as inexperience claims, even a so-called irony on Romanticism. (What
then are Mignon's songs, which are among Goethe's most typical, most
beautiful?) Mignon's quest does not have or does not yet have years of
apprenticeship, but that does not detract from this very existing, very
delicate prophetic warning which has found a place in Goethe's work,
precisely in this work - speaking an as yet Unknown, Unbecome truly
under the rose. Wilhelm Meister's certificate of apprenticeship, which ends
the 'Apprenticeship', closes with the words: 'The true apprentice learns
to develop the unknown from the known.' Certainly this is Goethean,
but Mignon as a symbol of longing and its content show a tracecirculating
which at least cannot be developed from, is not accommodated in what has
already become known. This is also Goethean, otherwise there would not,
Klingsor's fairytale appears in Novalis' unfinished novel 'Heinrich von Ofterdingen', and
is used by Wagner in 'Parsifal'.
t Undine: a water nymph, also the title of a fairytale by La Motte-Fouque.
besides Mignon, also be the incomparably more defined Tasso, not even
the Un-At-Home of Faust. If this intended trace is called 'unsatisfied every
moment' in other places, full of breaking out and moulding, is called Tasso,
even Faust, then here, where it is quiet and restrained, it is justifiably
called Mignon or the here so little excelling longing par excellence.
It is significant that everything in her comes out in song, and thus only
in this form is not sealed. She sings her songs, she seldom speaks them, and
then only 'with great expression', which holds back everything in it: 'Do
not bid me speak, bid me be silent.' Absolute longing is denied not just love
but friendship, the dialogue in it: CA single oath now keeps my lips quite
sealed/And now aGod alone can open them.' In three songs Mignon sings
out the eros which began everything, in which she ends. 'just those who
know such longing/Know what I suffer' - a burning and a pulling which
follows the beloved into the distance, which pulls much further and is yet
spellbound, powerless, in the Here. Then the Song of Italy, enchantingly
concrete in the opening stanza, description which is pure poetry, phenomenon
which is the teaching itself: CAmong dark leaves the golden oranges glow, / A
gentle wind blows down from deep blue sky,/ The myrtle stands so still,
the laurel high/ ... There! There! /With you, my dearest love, I long to go. '
But it is also an Italy which does not exist or which exists as such only in
her soul, it is etat d'ame, the landscape of this longing itself, its Orplid. *
Thus not only is Italy recognized as this landscape by Mignon, but Italy itself,
the object as subject, sees again and recognizes Mignon as she comes: 'And
marble images stand and look at me: /What have they done, oh my poor child,
to thee?' They are compassionate marble statues, like protectors and fathers,
and in them longing is a support for itself. Not the last, for in the Mignonspace of Italy there is another: the 'hall of the past' in which she is buried,
in which 'life and eternity' are supposed to have blended. Mignon's last song
is about this other space: CSo let me seem till I become,/Do not take off my
dress so white': the white dress is not dissimilar to Faust's 'ethereal garment'
in his final wishful landscape. Mignon's three songs thus sing out three intensifications of longing and a triply intensified reception by their own, ever
more undistracted content. The content remains distant homeland, it is to
this that all wishes in Mignon, the finest, stillest, purest subject of Goethean
longing, are directed; without the by-ways and world-ways of the great, the
titanic Goethean figures of longing. And this shows that Goethe not only,
as he said, always conceived the ideal in female form but also that, as Mignon
* See Vol. I, p. 96.
YOUNG GOETHE, NONRENUNCIATION, ARIEL
997
or unconditional longing is after all primarily a girl, he saw the striving

for the ideal in this form. Although the ideal itself, in its attraction, never
appears to him as such asexual passion as Mignon's eros appeared to him
and as it appears to Mignon. In the end Goethe's celestial figures certainly
do ask if man or woman, i.e. they do not perhaps ask about the man,
but they answer him - as the sensed Gretchen, as Helen, as Pandora - .
in the form of woman. Mignon, the pure subject of longing, cannot for
the poet become an object of longing, but the Marian in her certainly comes
out even in 'Meister' with that gracefulness which comes from grace. Not
of course as Mignon, but again precisely representative of that which is
signified in her, exemplified by one who understood her, namely the lovely
horsewoman who comes to Wilhelm's aid when, wounded by robbers,
he is lying on the ground. 'At that moment the vivid impression of her
presence operated so strangely on his already reeling senses that it suddenly
seemed to him that her head was surrounded by rays of light and that
a brilliant light was gradually spreading over her entire form ... He still saw
the coat hanging down from her shoulders, the noblest form, surrounded
by rays of light, standing before him, and his soul hastened through rocks
and woods on the heels of the vanished woman.' The lovely lady is met
again later and revealed as Natalie, the same person who first recognized
and described the all-powerful obsession in Mignon, just as rest recognizes
and describes restlessness. In the vision of the rays we can already see the
influence of devout, South German carving at work, the Catholicizing
element for which the poet of the Faust heaven has been so naively criticized.
This could already have been perceived in the long, light, white, winged
angel's robe which Mignon likes to wear and has to wear before her death.
Longing, as Goethe's Mignon, has attained its long look, its figure - in
Mignon, the nun in the Trappist monastery of love.
Wishes as presentiments of our capacities

Yet the living morning is not only full of longing but actively dawning.
Here there is a Becoming in Seeming itself, in such a way that real 'powers
light up'. Goethe even posits this as the distinguishing feature of the male:
'The girl is loved for what she is, and the boy for what he promises to
be.' Goethe's saying that what one wishes for in youth one has in abundance in old age is explained gratefully and hopefully in the ninth book
of 'Poetry and Truth': 'Our wishes are presentiments of the capacities
which lie within us, harbingers of that which we will be capable of

achieving. What we are capable of and wish to do presents itself to our
imagination as outside us and in the future; we feel a longing for that
which we already secretly possess. Thus passionate anticipation transforms
the truly possible into an imaginary reality. If such a direction is a definite
part of our nature, then with every step of our development part of the
first wish will be fulfilled, in favourable circumstances on a straight path,
in unfavourable on by-ways, from which we return again and again to
the straight.' This Goethean feeling overlooks the fact that not all blossomdreams ripen, * it seeks to free itself from guilt of omission by suffering
from it and recognizing it, seeks to make up for the by-ways of that which
remained plan, which was not carried out, by the well-ordered diversity
of what is harvested. To make up for it all the more satisfyingly because
Goethe's old age, marked by recurrent puberties, at least never dissociated
itself from his youth, despite renunciation. The young Goethe wrote to
Salzmann in 1771: 'My nisus forwards is so strong that I can seldom force
myself to draw breath and look backwards.' And in 1823, the old man
told Chancellor von Muller: 'There is no past which we ought to long
to have back, there is only an eternally New which is formed from the
expanded elements of what is past, and true longing must always be
productive, must create a new Better.' Thi~\~s the same as that attitude
and presence of productivity which did not diminish in the old age of
any brilliantly talented individual. The exceptions (for example Klopstock,
Schopenhauer) are few, the rule (with such astonishing prodigalities as
Verdi) is one of masterly youthful force. Outstanding talent in its autumn
both puts forth blossoms and bears fruit; even the plans and projects of
his youth, which Goethe increasingly, with more interruptions than any
other, left for his later years, were not only revised, not only mediated
with the world-breadth of his middle years and with the depth of his old
age, but they were transformed, ultimately by sourceswhich first murmured
in his youth, fertilized to become an allegory-symbolism in which only
especially classicistic professors of literature have failed to find sensuous
freshness. No poem from Goethe's early period can equal 'Blissful Longing',
* Cf. Goethe's poem 'Prometheus':
'Did you suppose

I should come to hate life,
Slink off into the desert wastes
Because not all the morning dreams
Of my boyhood blossomed?'
999
the 'Marienbad Elegy', 'Pandora', the Helen and heaven scenes in 'Faust'.
Everywhere here the young Goethe is at work in the old, in a far more lively
way than in his middle period; the seeing poet isjoined by the visionary, the
freshness of emotional expression by the transparency of the knowing expression. Gretchen is not less essential, but she is certainly no more essential than
Helen; the landlady of the Lion Inn in 'Hermann and Dorothea', the
Demeter-like woman, is - unless the reader can understand only the Homeric
in great writing - no more formed than even Makarie, the Uranian woman
in the 'Wandering Years'. The style of old age is itself a Novum, as with
Rembrandt, Beethoven, Plato, so with Goethe. It marks a now quite unexpected Venturing Beyond, a utopian element quite paradoxical for old age,
which precisely because of this circulates in particularly remote, strange and
certainly not rounded-off figures. In 'Werther' the attitude and defiance of
productivity was: 'Why does the river of genius break out so seldom, so
seldom roar in with high waves and shake your astonished souls? - Dear
friends, there are calm gentlemen living on both sides of the river whose
summer-houses, tulip beds and vegetable gardens would be destroyed, who
therefore know how to dam and drain the land in good time to ward off the
impending danger.' The mature Goethe heard and fructified this river by
no means only at its mouth; despite his own summer house, despite his fear
of the July revolution and his aversion to vulcanism (minus his own nature,
Napoleon and Byron). Precisely Goethe's late works disturbed those living
by the river throughout the last century and beyond, those who wanted to
read into Goethe a refined bourgeois idyll or a kind of animalist-cosmic, if
possible vapid classicism, a so-called ball of force. Not only this Georgian *
classicism but also the completely petit-bourgeois classicism of the last, not
yet entirely dead century, is wrecked by the real, i.e . the deep Goethe . The
old Goethe in particular, with his powerful allegory-symbolism, has nothing
in common with this kind of great simplicity, quiet smallness,beauty in retirement, and eternal rest for him is only in the Lord God. But Goethe says of
the evening of his life: 'In the composed mind thoughts arise, hitherto
unthinkable; they are like blessed demons which settle brilliantly on the peak
of the past.' And settle not only in the past, because as every past which has
been great has peaks, it too, with them, like all that rises up and is mountainlike, stands in the future, and all mountains constantly get on well with early
light, new day. Just as the downward and the upward path, when it is a matter
of brightening, of its real Carpe diem, are one and the same. And nowhere was
* Bloch is again referring to Stefan George here.
1000
this present, again precisely this, more intensely experienced than by Goethe.
Because he did not devalue it for the sake of a future which was moving
away from it; as early as 'Werther', the 'great dawning whole' was for
him a path to every structure of nearness, inscribed in this nearness.
GUIDING FIGURES OF VENTURING

BEYOND THE LIMITS;
FAUST AND THE WAGER OF THE FULFILLED
MOMENT
49
When Karl performed for him tragic storm-clouds from Shakespeare, Goethe,
Klinger, Schiller and gazed at life colossally in the poetic magnifying mirror,
then all the sleeping giants of his inner life rose up, his father appeared and
his future, even his friend stood new before him as if lifted out of that brilliant,
fantastic childhood period when he had dreamt of him playing these parts,
and even the cloud floating in the sky and the troop of sentries marching across
the market-place were included in this inner procession of heroes.
Jean Paul, Titan, 54th Cycle

Such natures can be regarded as intellectual winged men who with their
vehement utterances hint at that which is certainly inscribed in every human
heart, though often only in faint and indecipherable characters.
Goethe, Appendix to Benvenuto Cellini
No wet straw
Yet there is the fear of not being there. And in it the nagging feeling
that what has become of us is not right either. This can manifest itself
as pushiness, but also as strength which makes space for itself. It rises
with a leap out of the monotony which cannot even be well retained.
A quite different colour, undispersed, coloured with its own wish, now
begins and buds. This is what is already meant in the tale of the little
tree that wanted different leaves. They did not take, the foliage was still
not right. It is a matter of the right greening, now, at last.
This requires the strength to get out into the open. In life this is not
so easy, but on patient paper people, characters in fiction, are more easily
impatient. Andersen, in the tale of the tinderbox, tells of a soldier, one,
two, one, two, he comes marching along the country road. Thanks to
VENTURING BEYOND THE LIMITS
1001
a witch he becomes rich, he keeps for himself the rare tinderbox which
he fetched for her. Which he only needs to touch and three huge dogs
fulfil his every wish. The people on the march of whom we are about
to speak all act as if they had, indeed as if they were, the tinderbox. There
are poor devils and great men among them, but they all venture beyond
what is apportioned to them, flare up high like fire. They pursue, in foolish
fashion or in one which concerns us all, the intention which they are and
which they have also set for themselves. The little tree that wanted different
leaves is frequent enough among people, but only a few keep this up so
insatiably through life. In most cases this kind of thing appears more as
fictional painting itself in a colourful light on the wall. But in such a way
that, boldly venturing beyond, it very easily steps out of the book to the
reader, also always without a tame ending. Attempters of living-life-tothe-full, living-to-the-end have their place here, attempting in the sense
of mere tempting but above all of departure, of the Nevertheless against
the Becauseof the habitual and the merely conditioning as habitual. Figures
of this kind travel, remain true to unrest, as long as what could still it
remains unfound. And because this very thing is not there, such unrestrained
characters do not turn back.
Play the lute and drain the glasses

What is first shown here is being on the alert as such. With a picturesque
rejection of the bourgeois conformist which ranges from the merely gipsylike to that with an individual, sometimes all too individual face. Even
the vague word life could provide the watchword here, and it did so around
the turn of the century. A rift opened up within the bourgeoisie between
the parental home and its interesting sons or daughters. The Art Nouveau
period marks the heyday of these human paintings, strutting about in secessionist fashion or reclining among cheap anemones one moment and
expensive orchids the next. But the demand for an individual face and
a life commensurate with it could also have very little to do with the arts
and crafts. As in the look.and negative backward look which Pontoppidan's
many-layered, all-losing, strangely winning hero takes in 'Lucky Jack'.
Trapped in a fusty world, as a youth he makes up lost ground through
freethinking: 'And truly he had never yet felt as clearly as at this moment
that he did not belong down there in the dim, oppressive room where
his father and his brothers and sisters were now sitting singing hymns
1002
and saying timid prayers amidst the faery splendour of winter - a species
of subterranean beings, blind to the brilliance of light, full of dread at
life and its glory. Thus he felt thousands of miles away from them, in
an utterly different clime, in league with the sun and the stars and the
sailing clouds.' Here speaks a type in which the personal, all too personal
desire to escape seeks to be one of power, height, great status, even of
sensuality and money, and all this genuinely, not decoratively. 'Lucky Jack'
is a very upright piece of existence against the ghouls, and one which,
as the sequel shows, is too good and too deep not to go astray in the
capitalist world, unfortunately every world. It is quite different with the
polished figures of living-life-to-the-full at that time, especially where a
by no means still fresh venturing beyond but the incipient imperialist one
was reflected in the personal sphere. As in several wildly stretched or draped
images of artists at the turn of the century: the great actress, the great
writer, below these nothing counts. D' Annunzio's novel 'The Fire' thus
depicts the Art Nouveau hero quite exaggeratedly, in an opaline but
bombastic surge. 'Ah, all that trembles, weeps, hopes and yearningly
strives', says the writer Stelio to the actress Foscarina, 'raves in the vastness
of life.' Even in the vague phrase in which the word cosmic extends the
word modern, the peculiar, the emptily over-filled gong-tone of secession
is at work. All willing to be nervous, a gesture of living life to the full
at any cost, as if it could be bought like this.
What the late bourgeois sought once again had, in the early bourgeoisie,
been truly fresh. Leading one's own life in an unrestrictedly new way,
this was then almost always progressive. The entrepreneur running his
business individually announced himself here, the previously existent became
a burden. Subject, which certainly does not wish to sow its wild oats,
appeared and was varyingly praised in the Sturm und Drang and then in
the period of so-called titanic world-weariness. In tyrannos, certainly, but
there was also in this, with a simultaneous, often dangerously unclear
substitution, the cry: against the philistines. And so on up to early
anarchistic supermen, but also to the new revolutionary revulsion at the
bourgeois juste milieu, especially when it posed as the so to speak normalhuman. The Swiss psychiatrist Bleuler, as we know, defined the model
philistine thus: 'If we had had to create Adam, we would have formed
him syntonic, with a very slight manic complaint, which would have
stamped him as a sunny nature.' How far the dolled-up, let alone the
genuine frontier figures of the still revolutionary, even romantic bourgeoisie
are from. this, how much more like a proper human being even their excesses
10 0 3
appear. Unrestrained demanders and bitter originals found space and, even
more so, no space at the frontier: Hoffmann's conductor Kreisler, Jean
Paul's Schoppe and Vult belong here. Grabbe's plays, without exception,
bring together artists of exaggeration and, characteristically, those who
are utterly guiltless: it is always only external causes, the dull resistance
of the world, through which they are overthrown. These Gothlands, Sullas..
Hannibals, even Don Juan and Faust must be eccentric in Grabbe's plays,
precisely because they rotate so completely around themselves. This is the
time when the life-picture of interestingness arises, venturing beyond the
temperate zone; the lonelier the more decorative, the more tropical the
more it seems subject. But real breaking-out occurs where the writer himself
appears on the scene as if he were fictional, where he comes into the play
not just from the back, with a lantern, like Grabbe in 'Joke, Satire, Irony
and Deeper Meaning'. Where also - far from the reflected man of letters
- the subject cannot cast a comic shadow, but moves us powerfully, causing
us to regret all that is sedentary. The true subject-genius of this period,
Byron, casts his uninhibited figures not only in literature, he is so much
those figures himself that it is almost only the verse which distinguishes
Childe Harold, even Manfred, from their astonishing lord. The same melancholy, the same rich despair, the same solitary boredom moves formlessly
among these forms; and the same genius of enthusiasm is flung against
the mist. A man formed from disdain, pleasure and the drive to be abroad
comes to meet himself from his figures in the mirror, in a world completely
freed of rabble. Byron's Venetian harem and even more so his death in
Missolunghi could be sung. Almost every figure is repeated, yet none is
typical, all have the ardent individuality which can stand itself until the
end. 'Eternal spirit of the chainless mind!' his hymn to freedom exclaims;
although of course the chainless mind is always in league with solitude,
as is its Manfred with the high mountains. Individual fullness of life of
this kind inevitably creates the stranger. 'From my youth upwards',
Manfred confesses,
My spirit walked not with the souls of men,

Nor look'd upon the earth with human eyes;
The thirst of their ambition was not mine,
The aim of their existence was not mine;
My joys, my griefs, my passions and my powers
Made me a stranger -
1004
and only a storm-laden sky can accommodate such despair. Of course the
defiantly solitary, too, the further away they moved from their clear social
adversary, inevitably turned out ambiguous. Admittedly they had not yet
become the barbaric-elegant, live-life-to-the-full figures of the fin de siecle,
paving the way for a refined fascio. * But this continuingly individual kind
of venturing beyond could become simply anti-social; as far as the criminal
with the nerve, the Stirner] and the Nietzsche to pose as a destroyer.
Even before this, Lermontov's Petchorin and then Dostoevsky's
Raskolnikov and Dolgoruky had superbly epitomized these characters, they
too derive from an after-image of the Byronic, combined with the cult
of N apoleon. Yet the seduction of that which was meant by the Byronic
did not cease here, any more than the brilliance of a radical personal specific
being. With the system of individual enterprise, bourgeois society first
produced the taste for adventurous and gigantic subject-stimuli; and at
the same time these appeared to it to be 'unbourgeois' when measured
against the real citizen, the bourgeois. And a Manfredian tone, both gloomy
and splendid, carried over even to the last figure of this kind: Thomas
Mann's composer Adrian Leverkiihn. It is now time to tum to the originals
of venturing beyond: Don Giovanni and above all Faust.
Don Giovanni, all women and the wedding

The fear of not being there certainly does not remain within itself. For
who appears here as music, hunts and shines? A man, impetuous, faithless,
wields his sword like no other, enjoys. Only to abandon this pleasure
immediately afterwards, for in the next girl an untried pleasure beckons.
Don Giovanni is hunted to this by a wish and drive which seems entirely
his own. It is carried to the uttermost extreme in him and pierces whatever
comes his way. Every pretty woman is all right by him because none is
yet the right one, at every one the seducer casts his line, in every one
the line is cast for a fish which does not get away but does not satisfy
either. Yet all girls and women took particularly great pleasure in his
company. Sex shows, with the highest attainable cultivation, in all its byways, what it can do; nothing else can compare with it. Even the so soulful
glances are part of its pleasure, must, as it is an absolutely mutual pleasure,
Symbol of the axe and bundle of rods carried by the Roman magistrates to illustrate their
power to beat and execute. The symbol was revived by the Italian fascists.
Bloch is punning here on 'Stirn' - 'nerve', and the name of the philosopher, Stirner. He
is also contrasting 'Verbrecher' - criminal with 'Zerbrecher' - destroyer .
1005
serve it for the best. Time and again the cavalier tackles another lady,
hurts, amuses, forgets.
The audience itself is plunged abruptly into the action, right into the
middle. Here we have no hero slowly planning deeds, entangling himself
in them only gradually. Instead Mozart opens with Don Giovanni in his
prime, in the prime of his sins. Hence the first scene: Leporello dashing to .
and fro, dismal night, uproar in the house, Don Giovanni storms down the
stairs, is seized, flings the woman aside, the escapade has gone wrong. Donna
Anna has not succumbed to him, or not yet, the abduction fails, the Commendatore throws himself between them, a grey-haired old man, still daring.
Screams, a duel, murder, escape, grief at the father's death in tones almost
plucked from madness, a vow of revenge - what suspense! Like a surge of
blood the music rises, violation, death and guilt remain along the way. And
at the same time as the cavalier's advance the retrograde movement also starts
up, one which is no longer diverted and for which, in the graveyard, at the
highly disturbed banquet, no sentry is a match. Against the quest and the
enjoyment of the Now the past gathers, against the sword the stone now rises,
absolutely antithetically. Their tone-figures were already in the overture: their
first tones are the past or the guest of stone as the deep majestic voice which
rings out at the beginning; there follows, contrasted as lightly and frivolously
as possible. brilliantly rapid pleasure in the form of the flashing violin run
which here moves away from the stone. In other respects too the Don
Giovanni tone-figures and those of the other side are sharply differentiated
in rhythm and melody; they relate to each other in general as do movement
and memory, action and Becomeness. What goes with the stone is music
of faith, of a past which Don Giovanni never enters, which thus comes
towards him from outside and buries him.
But after the first escape the cavalier is fresh again, fresh for many things.
He entices Zerlina with the sweetest song that has ever tempted a girl. 'Ah,
lasciate mi andar via', the girl pleads. 'No, no rests, gioja mia', sings the
seducer or unconditional dissipation. * Life itselfis thrusting at Zerlina, and
its castle is not far from here, it is Cythera. A demon of pleasure glows in
the champagne aria, in the solitary presto which is exactly appropriate to him.
The cavalier becomes forgetful to the point ofcallousnessin the disguise scene
with Elvira, and unrepentant, matter-of-fact to the point of sublimity as he
pays the bill before the Commendatore's statue. But all this Carpe diem takes
placein a spaceno longer free, Don Giovanni's path darkens with the suffering
* 'Oh, let me go.' 'No, no, stay, my joy.'
1006
of others which now no longer remains behind him. More and more clearly
the tension between the sword (penis) and the stone becomes the basic
structure, thus it stratifies itself. The line of this antithesis now runs through
all the manifold complications, intermezzi and fight-scenes, buffooneries
and serenades; indeed it orders the complex interweaving of opera buffa and
tragic opera which makes Mozart's work, in this respect, the musical
equivalent of a Shakespearean work. At the end of the first act the counterblow comes: the banquet scene presents it for the listener, with an
incomparable counterpoint between the joy of life and blood revenge. The
music is in C major, but not all rhythms and chords are consonant with
it - not the stiff trio of the conspirators, not their rock-like homophony.
Don Giovanni himself is not affected until the chorale which resounds into
the graveyard from the Commendatore's statue; and in the encounter when
the guest of stone appears, the clash between the two tone-figures finally
occurs. The structure of the overture is thus reversed in the action of the
opera: the majestic andante of the first theme now stands at the end, comes
from the end towards the cavalier. 'Don Giovanni, al cena teco m'invitasti
e son venuto", * the guest of stone calls out, and' finds Don Giovanni undaunted. There is no music dramatically more effective than this, none with
such precise antiphons. As we have seen, the champagne aria, its almost
spaceless presto of pure intensity, is the most appropriate figure for Don
Giovanni. But now the starry space of the Commendatore's song looms,
in Mozart's broad intervals, and with an accompanying world-law which
crushes the individual. Against the demonic force of nature, erupting here
as boundless hetairism in an individual, another, later demonism arises: that
of law, with crime and punishment. Because the force of nature no longer
appears nameless but manifests itselfin an individual, because law measures
it by the standards of the order which has become and not for example by
its strength or its beauty, the sexual force of nature itself appears as hubris,
though of course in its precise sense as Dionysian. Don Juan becomes the
most brilliant wishful image, the guiding image of seduction, the most unquestionable erotic power-person. And as such, though a man in his potency
and precisely because of this, he belongs with the women's god Dionysus,
who has rebelled against marriage and order. The sword and the stone met
on equal terms in the No! and the Yes! of the final scene, and the No to
restricting morality does not capitulate. Its unconditionalness does not repent,
does not mend its ways, chooses rather destruction than this: no longer to be
'Don Giovanni, you invited me to dine with you and I have come'.
1007
Don Giovanni. Unbroken sexuality, with the Absolutum of its love-drive,

has no Ash Wednesday, does not buy it, certainly does not seek the highest
moment in heaven. Don Giovanni shows himself to be at all times in
command of the moment, i.e. in command of that moment in which the
man is, in which he is as man. Precisely in his downfall, Don Giovanni's
presto becomes completely metallic and therefore just as indestructible, just.
as eternal, as the Commendatore's stone. It is this kind of dynamism which
at one point, in one person, perturbs even the opposing side, and, with Donna
Anna, perturbs the music of piety (to her father and her bridegroom). Donna
Anna, the only character on a par with Don Giovanni, seduces herself
through the cavalier, she loves him and is in conflict. This is not only the
posthumous interpretation of E. T. A. Hoffmann, in his famous novella;
already a hundred years previously Goldoni, in his play 'Don Giovanni',
had hit upon the truth: Donna Anna is engaged to Ottavio without any
particular affection for him and is captivated by the great lover. In Mozart's
music, too, Ottavio quite clearly does not come across as a worthy object
of the love in Donna Anna's song, of the conflict-laden vehemence of its
excess. Nor does her mourning for her father conceal the unhappiness of
a different allegiance; this mourning is all the more revealing precisely because
its music is formed more from the fiery material of the Don Giovanni world
than from the world of piety. In Donna Anna's last great aria: '10 crudele?
no, mio caro"," mourning for her father quite clearly merges into pain
of longing, into a flaming of coloratura which leaves nothing at all of Ottavio,
and behind which Don Giovanni looms gigantically. Don Giovanni in his
sudden flaring contains an element of depth which Donna Anna well
understood, which ultimately could not be completely rejected even by the
maestoso of the Commendatore, which is one of Becomeness and of its law.
Turmoil from an as yet unilluminated natural force here takes on moderately
elucidated history; morality has proscribed or at best halved eros, hut it has
not incorporated it or blasted it apart. And so it announces itself subversively;
Don Giovanni himself, not just the Commendatore, thus gives a - prophetic
warning. The Commendatore gives his warning from the heaven of the
existing moral law and he makes it come true. But Don Giovanni gives his
warning from an abyss which he not only races over but makes manifest
by a demonic eruption: it is the abyss of the classical Dionysus.
But can clearly evaluating words be used, moving all, for this kind of
unrest? This is the question, especially when we consider the time in which
* 'I, cruel? 0 no, my dear.'
1008
the cavalier appeared aslifeitself. Don Giovanni, or rather the perception of

him, hasundergone many a transformation, similar to that of Faust though
not so fundamental. The Don Juan legend goes back to the fourteenth
century, it formed, probablyin Seville, around the historicallysubstantiated
personof a wild beau and seducer. The motif of the guest of stone is older, it
possiblyderivesfrom fear of the pagan gods excavated from time to time,
which were believed to be only apparentlydeador only apparentlyof marble.
Yet the guest of stone, transformed into the statue of a good man, was
included in the action from the beginning; the lecher displayed his bold
courage against it. The first dramatic treatment, Molina's 'EI Burlador de
Sevilla' (The Mocker of Seville), 1630, heightens the medieval antithesis
between the flesh and the spirit to authentically Baroquecontrasts;on the one
hand the most voluptuous enjoyment ofHfe, and on the other God'sjudgement, damnation, the jaws of hell. Don Juan, apart from his sensuality,
appears asa mocker,but at the end hebegs, in vainrepentance, for a confessor.
Nonetheless he is stilla powerful piece of nature; hisdelight in mockeryitself
comesfrom force, not from intellect, and naturallybelieves the other world,
against which it measures itself,to be real. But the cavalier comes across quite
differently in Moliere'sslightlylaterversion, 'Don juan or the Feast of Stone',
1645; its hero is unlovable and nothing else. The play is a bitter-bourgeois
satire, not one on the lust of the flesh in generalbut on French court society.
In Moliere's handsthe seducer becomes the type of the beau of the time, fearless but a coldrationalist, full only of egotism, without passion. He conquers
also by the extraordinary sword of love, by domineering or witty charm,
but evenmore by the social power which he canbring to bear and bring into
play, and, with ladies of rank, by his promises of fidelity and marriage.
MoreoverDon Juan - in lineherewith the incipientbourgeoisenlightenment
- is an atheist, no longer a blasphemer;thus his finalchallengeloses its background, and his courage - against supernatural forces in which he does not
believe - becomesmore a provocation of the religiousthan strong thinking.
Moliere's play had little influence compared with his great plays; the antithetical material was more closely preserved throughout the eighteenth
centuryin puppet plays and folk plays; 'with Kaspar'smerry pranks', * which
replaces Leporello, with the seducer who rightly, but alsouprightly, goes to
hell. And Da Ponte, Mozart's librettist, regained for this ambiguous, brilliant
* Kaspar, sometimes 'black Kaspar', the name possibly derived from one of the Three Kings,
was originally a cobold or folk-devil in German dialects. Via the popular comedies of the Viennese
actor Laroche, in the eighteenth century, he became the central figure in the Kasperletheater,
the German equivalent of the Punch and Judy show.
1009
character all the dimensions which Mozart's music needed in order to depict
the villainous as well as the utopian-moving element. The villainous as well
as the utopian-moving element, we said, an antithesis therefore, and here
the far from clear aspect of this kind of venturing beyond and unrest, here
Mozart's Don Giovanni problem arises, as that of a strangely speckled tiklnism.
Is Don Giovanni as Mozart portrays him a wolf or a human face among
nothing but masks? Does he belong entirely to the society of the ancien
regime, as its most immoral representative, or is there a trace in him, in
his erotically explosive turmoil, of an element of return to nature? Does
Don Giovanni, if he is recognized as an explosive phenomenon, epitomize
mere blighted nature which breaks forth, itself corrupt, from collapsing
feudalism, or does he provide unadulterated, in itself musical and thus
certainly not corrupt nature for Mozart's music? Is Mozart's Don Giovanni
therefore simply ancien regime and rococo or does this turn against itself,
not only in his downfall, in the final act and the threats which prepare
for it, but in a kind of pre-Byronic manner of the hero, who cannot bind
his will in stunting laws? But again Don Giovanni's frivolity contradicts
this, even more so the exploitation of feudal monopolies for the love register,
monopolies not connected with Priapus and Sturm und Drang but with
velvet, silk, castle, beau; as in the case of Zerlina when the gracious master
steals her away from the peasant Masetto. Doubts enough for a single
character and about it, especially for the most brilliant guiding image of
orgiastic and hence of Dionysian venturing beyond the limits.
Since time began pleasure has after all only been for the gentleman, who
does not work. An adventure leads the rich man to a bar, it lands the
poor man in prison. And before 1789 Carmens, girls from the common
people, were always possible, as were a few adventurers, but Don Juan,
who is brilliant in every way, had to be presentable at court precisely for
this reason. And this side of the seducer, that of the aristocratic lecher,
unquestionably appears in Mozart too, although it again is very crossed.
The abandoned Elvira speaks for all the dishonoured and deceived when
she calls on-the gods of revenge and the burning flash of lightning, although
it is Don Giovanni himself who, without revenge, within desire, storms
most powerfully. At first the libretto and music in Mozart are against
the seducer, still contain much of Moliere's interpretation, which saw Don
Juan as a roue only. Consequently the familiar revolutionary accents are
heard only from the peasant Masetto, his antagonist, and perhaps also in
Leporello's surly grousing, according to which his master would be sure
to end up on the guillotine. In the case of this libertine it seems hopeless
1010
and futile to talk of revolt, against tradition, against bigotry, for the Natural
Right of passion. The French Revolution, the bourgeois-moral revolution,
was clearly meant for Masetto, not for a privilege or Natural Right primae
noctis. The beau is not repressed, he has only his utterly unrepressed
lasciviousness behind him, the people are behind him only to avenge their
ravished daughters. So this is one aspect of Don Giovanni, deriving from
Moliere and partially preserved in Mozart's work. Yet against this stands
the other Don Giovanni, the forceful nature, very much after the hearts of
the bourgeois Sturmer und Dranger, Mozart certainly celebrates him, in
the champagne aria and above all in the final scene, and was not the French
Revolution, apart from its often resentful bourgeois morality, also versed
in burgundy and free love? Did it not have beside its Robespierre its Danton,
a veritable lion of pleasure and a highly popular one too? Has not thisworldly pleasure, so popularly at home in France anyway, been an ancestral
part of materialism since Epicurus and Lucretius? In fact the image of Don
Juan changed precisely through the French Revolution; the aristocratic
lecher now completely joined the ranks of the free or of the ver sacrum
against the mumbling priests - as with a democrat such as Lenau, an anarchistic rebel such as Grabbe, and the kindred genius of Byron. Instead of
the cold egotist, the bringer of joy or the absolutist of a single boundless
feeling now appears; Byron's 'Don Juan', certainly intended as a satire
against cant, reaction and bigotry, precisely for this reason ('to sail in the
wind's eye') can identify the Titan ofjoy:- 'There's not a meteor in the polar
sky/Of such transcendent and more fleeting flight.' With the Romantic
transformation his affinity with all other types of defiancenow also emerged,
i.e. not merely of insistence on individual specific being but on an unconditional drive aiming at the unconditional. Don Juan's affinity with Faust
emerged, the radical love-drive in the former, the radical drive for knowledge
and experience in the latter. Indeed the two passions did not even remain
separated from each other and thus confined to their respective types: Faust
is completely organically connected with the Gretchen material, and Don
Juan, at least in Lenau's deep version, displays a drive for knowledge. What
he is simply seeking here is the One, the idea of woman, and his empirical
unfaithfulness is the highest faithfulness to love, i.e. against the being with
whom he could stay. Lenau depicts Don Juan as being as universal in his
way and as in need of landing as Faust: 'The mind which seeks to grasp
all things must feel/Imprisoned and forlorn in each detail; -/This is what
makes me thirst eternally/And drags me from woman to woman fatally.'
And so this other Don Juan rushes through 'The magic circle, so immensely
1011
wide,/Of lovely women, all the charms they hide' ,just as Faust journeys
through his world circles; both in pursuit of the moment which does not
tum to disgust or boredom once it is entered. Though, of course, Don
Juan's stops on this quest are both more numerous and more incomplete,
indeed more incompletable. In Spain alone he makes one thousand and
three such stops (Kierkegaard very acutely points out that this is an uneven.
number), and as for the end, it comes through Don Juan's death alone,
not through a presentiment of a highest happiness, as we know. Nevertheless, Lenau's Don Juan, in his magic circle of women, provides - though
in a far narrower field - the unmistakable counterpart, one which has since
been clearly worked out, to Faust's drive for fulfilment. The eccentric
Grabbe even coupled Don Juan and Faust in a single play, dividing the
two souls in Faust's breast among two unconditional absolutists. Grabbe's
Don Juan became Faust in the region of 'the south of life' ,Grabbe's Faust
is Don Juan 'in the cold zone'. The memory of Moliere's courtly villain
has thus vanished altogether: 'Oh tropic land of hottest powers of lovell
Oh magic wilds where deepest passions move!' - this is not the court
of the ancien regime or the joys of vice seen through the eyes of bourgeois
morality. A curious shifting indeed, a shifting of the beau to become a
titanic bohemian, ambiguously titanizing against the reduction which has
come about and is known as the bourgeois. It was precisely against the
latter that the new image of Don Juan rose up, above all E. T. A.
Hoffmann's: as yes to joy, no to embourgeoisement and to all the statues
of an extinguished past. This is the most prominent motif of this figure,
one which even combines Carpe diem with impietas towards the dead
(father, ancestors). The living to the full of the Now, the standing stream
of happiness are sought, not abdication of the most natural of all excesses
in the face of tradition, habit, Becomeness and alienation. Don Juan and
Faust seek instead, in boundless setting forth, the moment when at last
wedding could be, at last high time. * The lightning flash in which Don
Giovanni appears and remains is certainly not the brightest light for the
incommensurate in man, but it is the most dazzling.
Faust, macrocosm, Stay awhile you are so fair

The urge to the Here and Now is never confined to its own, inner place.
It is only felt first here, and releasedhere, but in such a way that everything
Bloch is playing on the literal meaning of 'Hochzeir' - wedding, which is 'high time'.
1012
outside is to be well and truly collected and prepared in this nearness. This
unites the figures of unrest as soon as they make and have space around them.
En route to fullness they are equally world-experiencing, churning women
and everything else up in search of what can still their longing. Most visibly
the maestro of unrest, who now appears at the peak above and in the midst
of all others: Doctor Faust, or unconditionalness which is both intensive and
extensive. He is the venturer beyond the limits par excellence, yet always
enriched by his experience when he has ventured beyond it, and finally saved
in his striving. He thus represents the highest example of utopian man, his
name remains the best, the most instructive. This hero had certainly not
seemed destined for such a role, on the contrary, the first Faust-book condemned 'the arch-sorcerer who tried to grow eagle's wings to explore the
secrets of heaven and earth'. The later puppet plays were no exception either,
they performed the execution of his sentence to hell in a manner which,
though moving, was also forbidding. And the Ur-Faust of 1587* was not
the later Sturmer und Dranger, the free, questing, unconditional man, he
was caricatured as a Catholic scholastic. The presentation, though not the
hero, of the first Faust-book was Protestant, in the dark Lutheran sense.
Luther had taught the complete unfreedom of the will and he hated 'foolish
reason': both were meant to appear as forbidding as possible in the sorcerer
Faust. Faust, with his haughtiness and his scholastic diabolical knowledge,
was even meant to serve as the exact black foil to Luther, the plain, god-fearing
man of faith, and this in the same town, Wittenberg. Obviously it is a long
way from here to the Faust-image of later Protestantism, to the affirmed excess
of the thirst of will and the thirst for knowledge. An ideological scene-shift
took place, corresponding to the emerging individualistic economy, which
was delayed in Germany. In England, where no more feudal barriers stood
in the way of entrepreneurial activity, the re-interpretation of the sorcerer
was easier. Marlowe's Faustus of 1604, though the jaws of hell also await
him, already appears not as a sinner but as a kind of complex martyr. The
martyr of his intellectual excessiveness, his denial of God, his will to the unattainable; in short, the conquistador in Faust found sympathy. But Lessing
was the first to conceive the plan of transforming the 'in aeternum damnatus'
into a salvation, indeed into a triumph; also the motif of the wager by which
the alliance with the devil is kept hanging in the balance, so to speak, this
* 'Historia von D. Johann Pausten", chapbook which appeared in Frankfurt in this year.
r Bloch is giving the first publication date here (of the contested CA' text). Marlowe drew on
P. F. (Gent)'s English translation of the 'Historia' and wrote his play possibly in the late 15805,
but certainly by 1593, i.e, the year of his murder.
1013
momentous motif is first found here. Lessing's Faust fragment opens up

the new standpoint, in keeping with the eighteenth century's individualistic
drive to perfection. Faust's soul is still consigned to hell, but only in a
vision; a voice from on high calls out to the hoodwinked devils: 'You
shall not triumph. God has not given man the noblest of drives in order
to make him eternally unhappy.' Thus the path to the salvation of Faust's .
soul was clear, as in heaven so on earth, at least in literature; the widely
decried sorcerer becomes canonical. In Goethe's hands, his individual case
becomes universal, a representative of that subjectivity which despite its
finiteness seeks to grasp the infinite. In appearance and not-yet-appearance,
before it the day, behind it the night, beneath it the waves To venture out into the world I dare
The woes of earth, the joys of earth to bear,
To fight with storms without a care
And in the grinding shipwreck not despair" a representative of the exodus to powerful surprise. The will of an intention
not confinable to its bourgeois shape remains glorious as on the first day:
the intention to experience subject-mediation in the world and through
it - with the problem of fulfilled moment at bottom. This moment of full Being-There and its Intentional-Absolute - is experimented with
throughout the entire work, from Auerbach's cellar to 'free people on
free ground't and beyond: it works on in the Faustian question and in
the respectively answering, respectively re-transcended counterparts of the
world. The theme of the Here and Now or of the self-presenting moment
was already given in 'Werther': 'How can you say: this is! when everything
passes? When everything rolls past with the speed of clouds, the whole
power of its existence so seldom lasts, alas! is swept into the torrent,
submerged and smashed against the rock?' The theme of the fulfilled
moment, i.e. the moment which is made to stay, the emptied-out, attained
moment, constitutes Faust's wager. Certainly not in the sense of an abstract
idea and its thin thread, which Goethe ridiculed, foreseeing schematists
and intellectualists ignorant of art. The life-poem Faust, on the contrary,
moves towards a very concrete idea, one so concrete that it is no longer
an idea at all but an experiment, though one with a goal, directed at the
fulfilling. This is sought by a man among men, beginning in Auerbach's
'Pausr', Part I, 464-7.
CFaust', Part II, 11580.
t Cf.
IOJ4
cellar and on to 'free people on free ground' and beyond, but - to remove
all doubts about its equally totally outside-world character - the striving
and resolve for the highest existence is kept in line with that of nature.
Above all with its morning, its significant morning:
You, earth, were also constant on this night
And at my feet refreshed you breathe anew,
Now you begin with pleasure to surround me,
A strong resolve is moved and stirred by you
To strive for highest existence constantly. *
Thus for Faust there is no longer any subjectivism in self-fulfilment but
an eye-opening of the world he has thoroughly experienced; hence the
complete outward look in the inward look, indeed in-dwelling of the Faust
subject. The incognito of the driving content in the spacious gallery of
states and attempted final states which Faust strides through just as it moves
through him: this existing incognito is here extended from the person
to the world and at the same time circumscribed with world-figures. Faust
in the magic cloak which carries him through the air lives and ventures
beyond everything which has been granted to him out of the most concentrated and extensive will for the moment - the same will which determines
the wager. The Faustian centre goes through world and heaven, both work
in progressive mediation as symbols around it, but of course in the end
neither the world nor its heaven yet enclose this eccentric centre.
So this ego is everywhere on its way, does not remove its cloak till the
very end. Faust tests himself, learns en route, a route constantly animated with
Objects. He extends his selfboth to the existence which is apportioned, could
be apportioned to all men, and to comradeship with wood, meadow, storm,
me, star. He who ventures in all directions attains the infinite; thus the subject
enters ever new world-circles and leavesthem both enriched and - unsatisfied.
The action of Faust is that of a dialectical journey in which every pleasure
attained is deleted by a separate new desire which awakens within it. And
every attained arrival is refuted by a new movement opposing it; for something
is missing, the fair moment is yet to come. From his experience in Auerbach's
cellar Faust realizes that pleasure debases, in the Gretchen tragedy love gives
rise to guilt, and war irrupts into the Helen of Troy scene: nothing unconditional is at its goal. The final scene-on earth is prophetically capitalistic,
describing the foundation of land mingled with robbery and murder - 'My
'Pausr', Part II, 4681-5-
lOIS
most prized possession is not pure.' Faust's dialectical world-tour, with

its continual corrections, has only one parallel: Hegel's 'Phenomenology
of Mind'. Faust changes with his world, the world changes with its Faust,
a test and an essentiation in ever new layers until ego and Other could
harmonize purely. In Hegel this is the ascending mutual determination
of subject by object, of object by subject until the subject is no longer
tainted with the object as with something alien. It is from this will to
the fulfilled Now and Being-For-Itself that the agent of the wager stems,
as it carries the self- and world-movement of the poem usque ad finem.
Goethe gave the wager a precise legal formulation and the profoundest
utopian formulation: the 'Stay awhile, you are so fair', spoken to the moment,
describes the utopia of Being..There parexcellence. Everywhere the rest-giving
moment, Being-There which stays to objectify itself, is still absent: in the
creation of a paradisialland the Stay Awhile itself appears as land. In its
presentiment the real Ithaca, the Ithaca congruent with our longing, the
identity of the impulse of human intention with its content, is touched
on. Such presence has nothing in common, not even at its edges, with
the transience which lives from day to day or from moment to moment.
Grasping of self, power over being, is not Carpe diem; otherwise Faust
would have been finished as early as Auerbach's cellar. And it has also
become clear that even the consummate and penetrating desire, the lust
embodied in Don Giovanni - a figure so closely related to Faust - even
la nuit et Ie moment still remain in the forecourt of the real moment.
Faust at least in the arms of Gretchen, of Helen, even in the presence of
classical beauty, did not - utter the presentiment which causes him to
lose the wager and gain bliss. The motive for the enjoyment of the highest
moment is added - though merely vicariously - only at the end, as an
act of reclaiming land, but in fact paradisial land, its foundation from what
was once swamp, is intertwined with it. A ship is signalled that is at last
slowly slipping to the wharves, a 'masterpiece of the human mind' is
supposed to be signified, a portion of the seventh day of creation. If Don
Juan diffuses a Dionysian aura, then Prometheus is alive in Faust: not merely
the Titan but the one devoted to man. Paust's final action is undertaken
wholly in the spirit of this devotion, i.e. human nearness, indeed it is this;
the macrocosm becomes free people on free ground, a purely human drama.
And in it the macrocosm or Faust's cosmological extension curves towards
the one thing that is needful - morality. Everything that is really unconditionallands in morality and has in it its graspable practice, gathering
up the entire world to a final point. The unconditional aspect of striving
1016
is not the infinite, neither the bad infinite, as eternal, empty, formal
continuance, as flight over the restricted, which, as Hegel says, 'does not
gather itself within itself and cannot bring the negative back to the positive',
nor is the unconditional aspect of striving a content-based infinite which,
when called God, is supposed to be located somewhere in a strange
transcendence. The purely human drama which Faust finally stages and
in which he experiences a presentiment of the highest moment is, on the
contrary, morality of the end; for all end, if there is anything substantial
going on in it, is morality. That which is conceived as God or highest
good, for Faust too, as in every genuine intention of the unconditional,
tends towards the regnum hominis. It is this unconditional aspect and
its re-connection with human nearness which emerges at the end of Faust,
and which leads Kant to say: 'God and the other world are the only goal
of all philosophical investigations', but also leads him to conclude: 'And
if God and the other world were not connected with morality they would
be of no use.' It is because the Faustian moment lacks a supernatural
background that the utopian-humane character of nearness emerges so unmistakably. Regardless of the heavenly sequel or the higher spheres or
the higher unrest: for even in the transcendental high mountains of the
Faustian heaven, Gretchen carries the moment with her. Goethe, in the
Eternally Female, describes both the eros which began everything and the
loveliest Humanum in which the element of unrest of the all-beginning
symbolizes a landing. In the goal-content of Faust's wager Goethe thus
identified the human-worldly final problem per se; the adequation of the
most deeply intending, intensifying, realizing, into the Here and Now
(the fulfilled moment) of its content. The moment is the That-enigma
of being which itself is hidden in every moment as this moment and which
finally wishes to urge itself on to its What-solution or content-solution.
'Stay awhile, you are so fair', spoken to the moment: here is the metaphysical
guiding panelforfull existence and without hinterworld. To shudder is the best
part of mankind, i.e. when the figures of unrest harmonize with the cantus
firmus of Hie et nunc in the world, in this intended - Nunc stans.
Faust, Hegel's Phenomenology and the event

The hunger for a fulfilled life did not- wait until it had been described.
But the rising bourgeois movement made it particularly varied", resounding
in broad youth. It is no coincidence that from Marlowe to Lenau the Faust
1017
theme itself was tackled restlessly. It is no coincidence that as the Sturm

und Drang ego began to learn from experience the Faust theme established contact with the emerging Erziehungsroman. Goethe's dramatic
poem lives from both, from storm against the world and from restorative
education by the world; during its genesis it grew of itself from one into
the other. Apart from its subject-matter it has little in common with
Marlowe's power-hungry Faustus, and only the final tone coincides with
that of Calderon's drama of grace, in which striving endeavour is crowned.
On the other hand, Goethe's Faust was illuminated by the good, by the
best of what, chronologically and factually, lay so close to him, regardless
of whether Goethe knew it: by the idea which the path {rom Sturm
und Drang to the Erziehungsroman arrived at. As we have stressed
in the previous section, the dynamic of Faust is closest to that in Hegel's
'Phenomenology of Mind'. The movement of the restless consciousness through the spacious gallery of the world, the inadequate as Becoming
the event: this stormy history of work and formation between subject
and object connects Faust with the Phenomenology. Most visibly in the
characteristic style of immanent mediation which occurs on ever higher
levels between the way of man and the way of the world. Underlying it is the journeying forth or setting forth of the bourgeois subject
from the narrow conditions granted to it into the wide world. At least
Sturm und Drang offers opposition in Germany, and so Gotz, Karl Moor,
delight in letting off steam, the infinite prerogative of the heart, and
self-commitment come into their own. But a counterforce to this is
increasing grown-upness in the bourgeois world, together with the growth
of this world itself: the course of the world works against the immediate,
ill-mannered character. This reaction is expressed in the Erziehungsroman,
with the subject as receptivity and progression through years of apprenticeship. 'Wilhelm Meister' thus in parts became anti-Werther and
anti-Gotz, to the same extent as existing society acquired a good, even
a commanding, conscience or even as the feudal rallied against the Jacobin.
The historical-social object rallied against the subject, though in such
a way that the subject remained present in it. With the departure from
self which it had acquired, with the index of journeying forth and thorough
experiencing which it had brought into play, with the Ratio now becoming
'concrete' to which the Become-worldly had to show its credentials.. The
structure of Faust and the Phenomenology is now incessantly formed from
setting-forth and the way of the world. Faust 'paces out the whole circle
of creation on the narrow stage'; Hegel's Mind partakes in re-membering
1018
WISHFUL IMAGES OF THE
FULFI~LW MOMENT
of all world figures. It reconstitutes for the world-mind the adventure

of necessity, or the patience 'to pass through all these forms in the long
extension of time and to take over the enormous labour of world history,
in which it has fashioned its entire content' (Werke, 1832, II, p. 24). Hegel
in the Phenomenology goes on the philosophical grand tour to the courts
of the world, and though he lacks Faust's magic cloak he does have the
'seven-league boots of the idea'. In Faust as in the Mind of the
Phenomenology the desire is again and again aroused to perceive oneself
as the question, the world as the answer, but also the world as the
question and oneself as the answer. Again and again the subject travels
through the object as to an answering Object to the respective kind of
subject, again and again, by means of the object itself, in its thoroughexperiencing, a new level of subject is attained. It is not the same Faust
who starts off in Auerbach's cellar or in the Emperor's palace. 'When
therefore the mind,' thus ends Hegel' s Phenomenology, 'appearing to depart
solely from itself, starts its creation again from the beginning, it is on
a higher level that it starts. The realm of minds which has thus formed
in existence constitutes a succession in which one replaced the other and
each one took over the realm of the world from its predecessor. Its goal
is the revelation of depth, and this is the absolute idea; this revelation is
thus the cancellation of its depth or its extension, the negativity of this
ego being-within-itself, which is its disposal or substance, - and its time,
that this disposal disposes itself on itself, and thus in its extension as well
as its depth is to the self' (l.c., p. 611). It is a powerfully related intention
which runs through the action of Faust, which extends Faust's self to
become that of mankind. And this subject seeks to be related to every
travelling force in things, related even to the earth spirit: the agent of the
entire world is Faust, and Faust develops in allforms of this world-agent. The
journey is out of the inadequate, which is eternally thirsting, to the event,
which ends disposal.
The ego, freshly and fittingly, always starts out here anew, its eye
changes. The man stands as another before the mug from which he drinks
and again as another before the woman, the job and everything that is
meant to satisfyhim. This adaptation, whether Faust is entering Auerbach's
cellar or other places, has its prehistory, which is that of the gradually
comprehending subject. The gradation of the ego in relation to the respective
non-egos mediating with it is reflected world conduct. Goethe's dramatic
poem implicitly contains this gradation, the Phenomenology contains it
explicitly, in its ordered structure. And its prehistory clearly begins in
1019
medieval mysticism, in its travel books (itineraria) to God. The traveller

himself here changes his equipment and preparation according to the terrain
and the object he has to cope with. The first Faustian and knowledge-seeking
soul to emerge clearly was Augustine, and the Augustinian Hugh ofSt Victor
was the first to map out the succession of stages through which a religious
Faust approaches his religious Eritis sicut deus. These are cogitatio, meditatio,
contemplatio, the three eyes through which we know; the objects corresponding to them are: matter, soul, God. Nicholas of Cusa, on the same journey,
writes of four stages for the subject of cognition: sensus, ratio, intellectus,
visio; the objects corresponding to them are: individual things, the distinct
genera, the dialectical world ofnumbers and the mystical union ofall opposites,
including subject and object. And it is again an itinerarium, this time without
theology, which graduates the various starting points in the Faust poem. As
rejuvenation, as renewal stressed again and again: in the meadow of flowers
after Gretchen, in the high mountains after Helen, as blindness before the
active vision, as the heavenly chrysalis state. * And it is the itinerarium of
the Idea which in the Phenomenology connects starting points of scientific fonn
to one another, together with sheer world-terraces: sensory certainty or the
This - perception or the Thing - self-consciousness, reason, mind, absolute
knowledge. Indeed it is instructive that the above-mentioned gradual
itinerarium which makes Faust and the Phenomenology methodologically
similar has at the same time two smaller parallels or even counterparts. One
in a poem of Schiller's, strung together on the progress of a walk, the other
in a treatise by Schelling where academic study forms the main thread of the
development. Faust's magic cloak appears in milder form in Schiller's 'The
Walk' of1795, Hegel's seven-league boots of the Idea - stamping right across
the land of knowledge - appear in miniature formin Schelling's 'Lectures
on the Method of Academic Study' of 1803. The wanderer in Schiller's poem
enters, in seemingly haphazard order, places which come after one another
in history. The subject is so to speak decked out with the elements of the
meadow, the wood, the blue mountains, the fields and villages, the town
with its various occupations, the river and the distant treasures which it brings
with it; the chamber of the wise man is glimpsed and again, high above, the
pure altar of nature. All this is linked with rich associations, starting from and
again returning to the wanderer, a didactic poem of history emerging, in a
sequence of perspectives. Schelling's vade-mecum, on the other hand, moves
entirely in the town itself, indeed in the shades of the lecture hall. But in
* Cf. Faust, Part II, 11981-8.
1020
such a way that he gives the shades blood to drink and now, as if they
were departed souls, they give an abbreviated account of the remembered
world. * The sole location is the universitas litterarum, the main theme
is the sequence of lectures, which journeys into the process of the world
like the universitas into the universe. From self-knowledge the primal
knowledge of the universe is supposed to be developed, the world of
numbers opens up, the world, fuller in ideas, of the philosophical Idea,
the various branches of knowledge appear with their world, theology,
law, physics, medicine, and finally the study of the fine arts. The entire
progress takes place within the framework of study, or more precisely
of the construction of a primal knowledge which on its way through the
faculties is supposed to remember and unfold itself. The sequence of the
faculties is so disposed as if it recapitulated an idea-sequence of the world
itself; the subjects of scholarship become the same as opened writings,
indeed mountains in which essentialbeing sparkles. But to return to Faust,
his line is not only that of the paced-out world but of the wager which
strikes into the moment. The perfect moment remains the fundamental
problem of the Faust-subject, the powerful moment which no longer pulls
him into alienation. But here the newness of the Goethe version also appears,
it appears precisely in what the form of Faust has in common with the
Phenomenology in so many ways. In what it also has in common with
Schiller's wandering poem and with Schelling's transparent pedagogy and
at all points with the merging or succession of Sturm und Drang and the
Erziehungsroman. The Stay Awhile, spoken to the moment, is as original
as origin and its end itelf, it remains the unique, so long uncomprehended
metaphysics of the Faust poem. So that light is shed on previous philosophy
only from the content of the wager, no longer vice-versa. Even meanings
striking powerfully into the existere are illuminated more by Faust than
Faust by them; .here the wager has a monopoly. The journey to the spheres
itself, in which Faust transforms and identifies himself, is related to the
Phenomenology, and the Faust poem has in this a philosophy of its action,
but in the philosophy of its core the relation is reversed: Hegel's Being-ForItself is illuminated and made important solely by the backgrounds of the
wager. The form of action in Faust is legitimated in Hegelian terms, i.e.
by the constant dialectical relation of consciousness to its Object, by which
both continually determine each other more precisely until an identity
Cf. Homer, 'Odyssey', Bk. II, where the shades cannot speak to Odysseus until they have
drunk the sheep's blood.
1021
between subject and object is developed. But the core dialectic of the
Phenomenology is legitimated only by Faust's self-fulfilling intensity and
morality of the intended moment; it is only 'here, strikingly, that what
Hegel posits as the superior knowledge of Being-For-Itself proves itself.
It is only the wager which makes Being-For-Itself cancelled reflection or
involved reality; it is only on the path to the moment that Phenomenology
really becomes that which Hegel celebrates: 'Progress to this goal is
therefore inexorable and at no earlier stage is satisfaction to be found.'
Phenomenology, outside mere mirror-consciousness, becomes an appearing, namely of the Absolute in self and world, it becomes in reality 'the
path of the soul, which passes through the series of its fashionings, as
stages staked out by its nature, so that it may refine itself into mind,
attaining by the complete experiencing of itself the knowledge of what
it is in itself' [l.c., p. 63). For Faust the act, most emphatically the act
of pursued identity, is not only at the beginning but also at the end.
Kierkegaard, and before him Schelling, criticized Hegel for his merely
conceptual processing-out of self from immediateness; an exaggerated
criticism, for within the cadre of the Idea Hegel never talks of anything
but the fact that mind becomes for itself, comes to itself, unites with
itself. It is not Kierkegaard but the central key-phrase 'Stay awhile you
are so fair' which cancels out the eternally distant thought of consciousness.
It not only interprets but ignites, which is what the Phenomenology
ultimately wants of the course of consciousness: 'By driving itself on to
its true existence it will reach a point where it casts off its appearance,
of being burdened with the extraneous, which is only for it and as
something different, or where appearance becomes identical with essence'
(l.c., p. 72). The Faust plan, in its constantly recurring sequence: topical
Now - historically ramified sphere of figures - informed yet unsatisfied
existence, this subject-object-subject plan is the basic model of the dialecticalutopian system of material truth. And the event" of the moment, of the
all-driving, all-containing moment, remains the conscience of this plan;
the attainment" of the That or of the striving itself. Goethe's poem described
its content together with the speculationof the time and above it; it describes
the stages in the world tour to the fulfilled moment, i.e, to a world like
Being-For-Itself. Equally it is in the content of the Faust wager and only
in it that the precisely striking metaphysics of nearness at which venturings
beyond the limit aim is described. A metaphysics which is no longer duped
* Bloch is playing here on 'Ereignis' (event) and 'Erreichnis' (attainment).
1022
by so many distant hinterworlds or superworlds; the further then seemingly

the better, the higher then seemingly the more sublime. Genuine utopian
metaphysics is latent preciselyin Faust's immanent key-phrase, a metaphysics
which is versed not only in what the poodle contains * but also in what
heaven contains. It leads from the other world into the deepest, i.e. most
this-worldly This-world, just as it also uses the entire long tubus of unrest,
world-width and world utopia to glimpse what is really nearest - the
moment. In order, in the moment, to make sure of the real world-knot
and therefore also of the great joy which possibly seals its loosening. And
another point, almost the most important: Goethe's Faust certainly does
not, as is finally the case in Hegel's Phenomenology, sense and touch the
Being-Far-Itself of the fulfilled moment, as loss of Objectivity itself, as
resolution of all objectiveness, therefore not only of alienated objectiveness,
into the subject, one which has finally become worldless. On the contrary,
precisely Faust's contact with the fulfilled moment is such because at the
same time it has around it the sphere, no longer alienated from this moment,
of an at last adequately contacted object-basedness (reclamation of land, eternal
realms). The moment of this Being-For-Itself is therefore certainly no
withdrawnness, although of course it settles in the border-condition and
the border-ideal of a life- and world-situation which no longer has any
situation. Faust as one of the extremest guiding figures of venturing beyond
the limits intends purely in the human moment and its world against the
status of mere situationalities towards the cry: land. Stay awhile, spoken
to the moment, thus becomes a symbol of true, utterly immanent homecoming, of the real Ithaca. Only a symbol; because the poem and the
philosophy succeed only in shaping as existent the utopian intention, not
the utopian content. 'Rejoice! it is achieved', or 'Science shows itself to
be a circle coiled within itself': this is not the high-point of Faust or of
the Phenomenology. The high-point of Faust is the unerring presentiment
of the highest moment, in the right place, with Carpe diem nostrum in
mundo nostro in it. That this striving endeavour could not yet end in
any figure of venturing beyond makes it great. Not only has it not lain
down on a bed of ease, but even the Faustian heaven knows only movement
and as yet no finite rest-symbol of landing.
'des Pudels Kern': a colloquial phrase meaning 'the heart of the matter', but Bloch may
also have in mind the poodle in whose guise Mephisto first appears in 'Faust'.
t 'Faust', Part II, II9S3.
102 3
VENtURING BEYOND THE LIMITS
Odysseus did not die in Ithaca, he journeyed to the unpeopled world

Oh reach out further, further, storm,
And take upon your wings so vast
The highest star, the lowest worm,
To bring us all back home at last!
Lenau, Faust
For the hungry man it is more than right to long for food. The man who
is freezing wants to get to the stove, the lost man to his house, the traveller
looks forward to seeing wife and child. But when the wandering father
of the house is called Odysseus or something similar, the return does not
become so clear, nor that everything is finished now he is in his own bed
again. The lost man was not only the long-sufferer, he was also the voyager
who had seen the cities and lands of many peoples, Calypso and Nausicaa
as well. Silly interpretations have seen the moral of this story in the fact
that an honest father despite all dangers always strives to return to house
and home. But Daumier depicted this Odysseus wearing a night-cap, sitting
beside his pointed-nosed wife, his helmet and sword hung up as decorations
on the wall - et habet bonam pacem, qui sedet post fornacem *. Homecoming is certainly an important category; all the greater, though, are
its perils and corruptions, similar to those of rest. If Ithaca were not a
symbol, it would be a problem, and Homer brings down the curtain on
it, once the master of the house has re-asserted his rights. But the legend
did not remain silent, it worked on in a kind of Flying Dutchman motif
about Odysseus, a late, wild, unknown Odysseus. According to this legend,
Odysseus does not even return safelyto Ithaca but sailsout further, into the
uncharted, he makes his previous fate into the metier of his character. This
astonishing twist appears in the Divine Comedy (Inf. XXVI, 11. 79-142);
the reluctant long-sufferer thus attains a far from reluctant daring, indeed
he becomes a sea-Faust. Virgil asks the figure enveloped in flames about
the end of his earthly life. Odysseus replies that he found no rest after
he left Circe, neither affection for his son, nor filial piety towards his old
father, nor the love of Penelope had overcome him:
'and the man who sits behind the stove has found peace'.
1024
nor did they douse the restless flame

to see the world and fathom all
that man possesses there of worth and blame.
And so Odysseus and a company of sailors took to their ships again; with
sails braced four-square, they sailed with a glorious breeze behind them
out to the open sea, to the African coast, to Spain, to the Pillarsof Hercules,
the old limits of the ancient world. There, though now old and heavy,
he called his sailors to the boldest voyage of all - to an Ithaca of trial
and fullness:
'0 brothers' I said, 'you have reached the west
through dangers hundred thousandfold,
with this brief vigil you are blest
before your senses lose their hold,
do not that new experience forego
that tracks the sun to the unpeopled world.
(di retro al sol, del Mondo senza gente).
Consider how your seed must grow:
you were not made to live as chewing brutes,
but made to follow virtue and to know.'
(Considerate la vostra semenza:
Patti non foste a viver come bruti
Ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza).
The journey took them out into the Atlantic, due west, then south, and
after five months Odysseus saw land, a high mountain in the distance,
in th..e Mondo senza gente, on the other side of the world. But a whirlwind
rises up from the mountain; for this is Mount Purgatory, which no living
man enters and the pagan Odysseus not even as a dead man. The human
venturing beyond the limits comes to an end, the Purgatory land of the
other world, with the earthly paradise at its peak, remains glimpsed but
unentered. Thus far the astonishing version; from the perspective of
adventure a quite different, a Gothic Odysseus appears. A Sinbad for whom
the perils of the sea and marvels had become a natural element was also
inherent in the long-sufferer of antiquity, but he was not acknowledged.
And the defiance towards Poseidon, who had plotted against him, was
missing, together with the huge distant horizon alien to antiquity. The
Flying Dutchman of Baroque legend wanted to sail round Cape Horn,
1025
despite heavenly headwinds; so he was condemned to sail the seas till the
end of time. Odysseus, the captain of Hubris, dies, but in Dante he is
the first titanic man, derived from the knight, not the long-sufferer. He
is the first to emerge from the monomania, above all from the unconditionalness which later appears in Don Juan and Faust, which casts its comic
,
shadow in Don Quixote.
This voyager is strange, indeed he not only has his own gnarl in him.
For together with Faust a real person is also foreseen here: Columbus.
Neither the Homeric Odysseus nor its later Hellenistic and Roman interpretation gave rise to either of these. The Homeric voyager was of course
extended, M. Terentius Varro wrote an 'Odysseus and a half' who went
on wandering for a further five years. Lucian made the phantast Odysseus
vouch for the authenticity of the Vera historia, his travel satire about
fabulous western lands. But this was all satire, not admiration, the literary
after-ripening of the long-sufferer was that of a Munchhausen, not of an
extravagant courage. In Homer, too, Odysseus again set off on ajourney,
this time certainly not voluntary, to fulfil the task which the seer Teiresias
had given him in Hades (Od. XI, 119ff.): to set out once again with an
oar on his shoulder and to keep wandering until someone asked him what
was the strange corn shovel he was carrying, and then to make a sacrifice
to Poseidon. But what he tells Penelope, reminiscing, and announces as
yet another parting (Od. XXIII, p. 267ff.), although it also means ajourney
into the very distant, the unknown, does not refer at all to sea-faring,
let alone the desire to track the sun, as in Dante. Instead, the journey
is to a country so alien to sea-faring that its people take an oar for a comshovel, and above all there is no hubris whatever at work. On the contrary,
a powerful god is to be appeased, perhaps even his cult is to be spread;
that is the main motif of this conformist expedition (d. Dornseiff, Odysseus'
letzte Pahrt, Hermes, 1937, p. 35Iff.). There is therefore no connection
whatever between the rural passage in Homer and the purely maritime,
highly billowing passage in Dante, unless, as Philalethes supposes, it is
the formal one (Gottliche Komodie, German translation, 1868, p. 199, note
22) that Dante darkly blended Odysseus' descent into hell with the later
journey Teiresias prophesied he would make. This so-called blending,
however, brought the above-mentioned Novum of a sea-Faust, to see the
world and fathom all, even as far as the mountain which no living man
may enter. Whereas Homer's Odysseus returns from his mere Poseidon
wandering to old Ithaca again, and death comes to him, in accordance
with Teiresias' prophecy, as a wealthy ruler and father in the midst of
1026
his people (Od. XXIII, 28Iff.). The Odyssey itself was almost unknown in
detail in Dante's time; in Dante the new picture of an Atlantic explorer leapt
into the general picture of this seafarer. Non plus ultra was written on the
Pillars of Hercules, Dante's Odysseus passes beyond them and thus, highly
astonishingly, he is an anticipation of Columbus' voyage. That this Odysseus
- discovered America, so to speak, is clear from his course, though not yet
from the term mondo senza gente, which in medieval geography was applied
to the entire supposedly unpeopled world south of the equator. Thus also,
of course, to deeper Africa; in 1291 an expedition led by Vivaldi of Genoa
sailed beyond Ceuta to circumnavigate Africa, and was lost. Dante may
perhaps have attributed this contemporary heroic exploit to his Odysseus.
But quite apart from the westerly direction, di retro al sol, the stressed
boldness of the dream-voyage, the five months of solitude and the failure to
sight land all conflict with the Africa theory. Finally, the fact that Dante
located Mount Purgatory on an island contradicts this theory; the giant continent of Africa, which even then was believed to be one mass of land even
in its southern part, could not possibly rise up like a mountain from the sea.
The land of Purgatory lies on the other side of the globe, only this distance
is appropriate to the boldness and venturing beyond the limits with which
Dante endowed the later Odysseus. No news of the discovery of America
by the Greenlander Leif Ericson three hundred years before could have reached
Florence; even in Greenland it was soon forgotten. Yet there was in classical
Rome a striking attempt to reach beyond the known world, in a passage of
Seneca, often cited by Columbus (cf. Vol. II, p. 773). The passage from the
chorus in Seneca's Medea was demonstrably known in Dante's time: 'Venient
annis saecula seris/Quibus oceanus vincula rerum/Laxet et ingens pateat
tellus/Thetisque novos detegat orbes/Nee sit terns ultima Thule.' The future
centuries which Senecamentions are assigned to Dante's Odysseus: 'in which
the ocean breaks its chains and the earth opens up, when the sea-goddess Thetis
reveals new lands and Thule will no longer be the outermost limit of the
earth' . Odysseus himself broke the chains which would have made him a king
in a obscure corner, a retired sea-captain so to speak. He not only has this
impatience to seethe world, he is this impatience, it contains his own definitive
being-here. Life here too becomes the same as sustained venturing beyond
the limits, per seguir virtute e conoscenza; thus in the midst of the medieval
world Dante gives the early bourgeois catchphrase: trepassar del segno. *
* 'To venture beyond the limits'. Dante calls the Pillars of Hercules 'Ercule segno in the
'Inferno' (XXVI, 1. 108).
10 2 7
Furthermore, Odysseus was understood as a kind of knight of an unknown

Arthurian circle, or rather with this circle on his ship. He does not set forth
as a Christian, so he is all the more unprotected on his wondrous journey
beyond the known world; his courage is even greater than Gawain's or
Roland's. And he casts no comic shadow like many of the rigid-sublime
Arthurian heroes even in their original versions, let alone the last great dreamer
of knight-errantry, Don Quixote. For the goal of the Dantean Odysseus:
to know oneselfin action, towards the unknown earth, cannot, like a chivalric
ideal, become obsolete. In mondo senza gente, in a world which is not yet
man's, among men who do not yet have a world adequate to them, the goal
has yet to be reached; despite and because of the hazardous straits.
Hamlet, sealed will; Prospero, groundless joy

But thus the fear always lives anew of not being able to be there at all.
External deprivation is more than sufficient here, more refined cares about
survival strike it as mockery. But not more profound cares, these remain
grounded in shadowy life itself and for a long time. People of this kind,
although sharply distinct and peculiar, never emerge from the shadow of
the not-here. Their unrest does not set out, it is dispersed, actionless.
Hamlet is the fictional example of this, he is, although definitely will,
the inward counter-phenomenon of all setters-out. The will to hold one's
own, to hold one's Now, remains sealed here, conscience drives him to
action, lonely brooding prevents it. He is so much his own prisoner that
even his mission of revenge, in so far as it is linked to a deed, does not
break through this existence at distance. Hamlet is surfeited with consciousness in the sense of a distance, of a medium which does not allow him
to come to himself or to things. He is a concave, dispersing character,
in contrast to all Shakespeare's other characters, who are collected. His
distance from being-here makes him the friend of the actors, and he himself
is capable of acting madness. His world remains gloom, melancholy,
Saturnian being-Iocked-within-oneself, it is this kind of shutting off in
potency, i.e. the graveyard; only here does Hamlet, who is everywhere
slowed down, become lively, cheerful and clear. He too is, on the whole,
a dreamer of the great, utopianizing kind, but the subject of this dream
is not fired by anticipation of the goal, indeed he is not even paralysed
by too much anticipation (substitute for action) of the goal. His indecisiveness stems rather from a particular exaggeration of the distance of consciousness, that which is here called the pale cast of thought. Of course
1028
with this so famous and so general diagnosis the question must be asked:
what is the specific nature of the thought which pales here, and above
all in what period does its paralysing quality emerge? It is a time which
is 'out of joint', i.e. the difficult time of contemporary transition with
its uneasy mixture of the bourgeois and the neo-feudal. Man was beginning
more than ever to be a wolf to man, and perspicacity taught men to trust
court circles as much as they trusted rattlesnakes. The pale cast of thought
quoted above is certainly not that of the fresh bourgeois Ratio at the same
time, not that of Renaissance ideas such as those of Bruno or the highly
unparalysed Bacon. Hamlet's philosophy does however largely correspond
to the moods of night, indeed of nothingness, which typified mannerism,
the disjointed style of life and art after the Renaissance, in the midst of
the Baroque. The consciousness of death as being very close to life was
part of mannerism; these allegories of memento mori lit by the pale cast
of this thought belong here. One of them, a head portrayed as divided,
the left half a living face, the right half a skull, accurately reflects Hamlet's
world-picture, the same that again philosophically justifies the melancholy
man's being locked within himself. For against the death background of
life there can be no permanently meaningful setting-out, no action; the
place of fulfilment which at the same time devalues everything is then
none other than the graveyard. Here at the same time the neo-medieval
element in mannerism manifests itself in Hamlet's attitude, i.e. no liberation
by the materialism germinating in the bourgeois Ratio but on the contrary
a religious horror at its own irreligion. In other words, the extinguished
other world sends only its coldness across to the poorly demystified; it
increases its distance now even cosmically from the real, the meaningfully
realizable. Thus the reaction to the unclerical approach which Shakespeare's
prince learnt at his universities is nothing but a double memento mori,
totally devaluing life and action. Hence the sole final prospect is 'how
a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar' or: 'Imperious
Caesar, dead and turned to clay,/Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.'
World-matter here certainly does not smile at man with sensory freshness,
as in Bacon, indeed in Bruno; on the contrary, it is what Bruno bitterly
rejected, 'a cesspit of chemical substances'. This belief, which has now
become entirely negative, utterly paralyses any surfacing into being-here:
'0 cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right!' And not only the
private revenge for his father but also the existing plans to reform the
world come to a standstill; world-weariness even prevents any possible
approach to the achieved Here and Now, to presence in being-here. This
1029
is what constitutes Hamlet's contemplative nature, at the same time

showing all the features of what was manneristically known as a weeping
contemplation. This, together with the nihilistic content, means that
Hamlet speaks daggers but uses none, an Orestes manque, indeed a reformer
manque. Hamlet, by means of weeping contemplation, finally heightens
even his own distance of consciousness to distance of the idea from the
world, to a hopeless distance. Thus the will becomes doubly paralysed
and sealed, its unconditional aspect, amid general appearance, becomes
doubly melancholic. What is 'a vice of kings, a cut-purse of the empire
and the rule', what does the private revenge with which the ghost charges
him mean, against revenge and correction of the whole world? But of
a world where all men are villains, all women whores, where appearance
is a lie and the rest is silence. Hamlet thus becomes the paradox of a great
dreamer who does not believe in his hopes and goals; of a venturer beyond
the limits who believes that beyond the become limits is nothingness, which
is finally disparate to all plans and actions. The goal pursued with utter
commitment, because it never steps out of the shadows itself, is at the
same time the goal avoided with utter commitment. Thus the saving deed,
when it occurs in spite of everything, comes almost incidentally and
accidentally; it occurs as an uncourageous stab in his death-throes. The
dying prince, when he has nothing more to lose, not even his melancholy,
stabs the guilty king. Hamlet's sealed-heightened distance is thus the
opposite of the Faustian pull towards the arrested moment, the moment
plucked from indecisiveness. Fortinbras, who asserts that the prince was
likely to have proved most royally, bids the soldiers shoot. The proving,
nowhere is this clearer, still faced the test of being-here, and nowhere
else is it more negatively clear what this kind of pent-up setting-out is
and what it is about.
Beside the fear of not being here, there is the form of not affirming
it. This happens in the dream, which moves with itself, in renouncingly
beautiful, groundlessly fiery colours. Hamlet avoided the Here and Now,
but Prospero in 'The Tempest' wants it to blossom all around precisely
in the dream, in the poetic dream. The figures of unrest which truly
break out lie between the two, narrow, sharp, unconditional, utopian.
Shakespeare's time certainly knew them, both as adventurers and as
immoderate characters, phantasts, men obsessed. Tirso de Molina wrote
Don Juan, Marlowe wrote Faustus, Cervantes created Don Quixote, but
no figures from this lineage occur in Shakespeare. Such figures would have
been too abstract in the space of the great Pan-creator's world, but also
1030
too pointed, too tearing. They have nothing unless they have everything,
and this is something different from the universe, indeed it is not even
necessarily contained in it; abundance is not unconditionalness. The
everything towards which the venturers beyond the limits push is not the
universe of Pan to which Shakespeare's profusion belongs, with repletion
everywhere. However true Schlegel's assertion that the lost earth could
be reconstructed from Shakespeare's works, the adventurers of the unconditional, precisely because of this Pan-like quality, are not to be found
in this hugely animated space. But the marginalfigures of the unconditional
are all the more intensively depicted: Hamlet and Prospero, sealed will
in the former, groundlessly sparkling delight in beauty in the latter, and
both before the night, i.e. before the silence which Shakespeare saw for
Hamlet and for Prospero around the world stage; now darkening the
venturing beyond the limits, now surrounding it with the most colourful
dreams, indeed amusements. But the insatiable is missing, Prospera means
the favoured, prosperous, he is no wrestler. True, Prospero in particular
has often been compared with Faust; the magic wand, wisdom, the founded
community of happiness and worth lent themselves to this comparison.
But Prospero's Faustland appears entirely without questions and temptations, no devil sticks his nose into Faust's solitude, no bliss is wagered
for the sake of the darling veritas, existence comes as a gift after an escape
and remains in fairyland, never emerging from it. Here no Richmond is
needed either to right wrongs, no Fortinbras to establish reality; Shakespeare
no longer assigns them this function. His three last plays tum to 'romance',
i.e. to the fairy-tale solution, as if all were well, to aesthetic grace.
'Cymbeline', "The Winter's Tale', 'The Tempest', in constant dreamappearance, provide magic means of making the impossible possible. This
magical element, in 'The Tempest', is precisely fictional being-here,
appearing-here become as it were spotless, dwelling easily beside each
other. Prospero and his daughter Miranda flee their homeland, where wicked
men have usurped power, they escape to a solitude where virtue as existent
can preserve and also prove itself. The chosen place is a distant island,
in keeping with the old utopian tradition, but not of course to praise and
imitate the original goodness of the inhabitants. This Shakespeare had
undertaken even in 'Cymbeline', indeed there the drama as a whole was
constructed on the contrast between corrupt civilization and unspoilt nature.
But not even in 'Cymbeline', let alone in 'The Tempest', is unspoilt nature
equated with the common people. Caliban, the savage, is also the ingredient
of the mob, differing from an animal only in his wickedness. Precisely
1031
the land of beauty, in its stressed lightness, knows the common people
only as ugly, just as in 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', where the antics
of ghosts and spirits are similar, it serves only for the boorish scenes and
the artisans are not even enchanted on Midsummer's Eve. Admittedly,
Prospero's former minister Gonzalo praises a natural state, free of property,
civilization and letters, but Prospero's brother and of course also the usurper
of his throne observes that this state would produce only idlers, whores
and knaves. Prospero himself regards Calibans as born to drudgery, for
him the ideal state in which the blossoms of culture are preserved and
its diseases purged can only be built on total inequality. But even this
reactionary, scarcely tolerable attitude, stemming from Shakespeare's
courtliness, is ultimately sustained by aesthetic dream-appearance, by the
realm of Flora which in 'The Tempest' both conceals and blossoms all
around the real Here and Now; Goethe, in the Helen of Troy scenes, with
similar aesthetic autarky, posits very similar injustice, against the chorus.
Pro spero has his books with him, the finest creations of noble minds, and
only beings with such minds are invited to partake in the new alliance.
People who are themselves like works of art form their exodus to another
drawing-out, to the extract: art at its goal. This noble ideal includes the
common people only if they recognize the moral law, which is pleasantly
binding; for the good is also part of the beautiful, of kalokagathia * in
the land of romance. The marriage of Miranda and Ferdinand adds to this
prospect the High Pair, art and moral strength marry. And Prospera's
art as such always comes at the end, as a stage of glowing appearing-there,
in a resounding world. Thus drama and music are at work again and again
in this intended blossoming all around of high and highest moments. Dreamappearance emerges hovering, and in it, though not enterable in corporeal
form, a beautiful land of elapsed lightness, served by the airy spirit Ariel. Art
at its goal, not as appearing pre-appearance, is at work here; for as in Hamlet
all appearance is a lie and the rest is silence, even here. But appearance,
precisely in its aesthetic perfection, provides this groundlessly sparkling
joy in beauty, which is here all the more rare and precious as it occurs
against the background of utter silence, sleep, night. Artistic fullness is
here nothing but a trump-card against nihilism; its silence here is not at
all devaluing, indeed no longer nihilism but incognito. Yet of such a kind
that every step from the unconditionalness of artistic fullness leads from
the Flora-realm of its Here and Now to something which is unmediatedly
* A combination of the beautiful and the good. an ancient Greek educational ideal.
103 2
non-human. Thus venturing beyond the limits comes to its end here, the
unconditional, which is attainable by men, rises up as an aesthetic magic
island in the ocean of incognito. Hence Prospero's final words of wisdom:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
Dreams everywhere, nothing but gulls, as even Falstaff says, and even
the noble circle, precisely this, is rounded with a sleep. Is then this powerful,
glittering-dark world-picture a legacy from Hamlet's hopeless-total dream,
from his hopeless hope, his utopia suspended within itself? Yes and no;
yes because no breakthrough occurs; no because the above-mentioned lack
of meaning still does not devalue the magically airy goal-appearance.
Hamlet's graveyard melancholy does not come up to or close to the rapid,
flashing evanescences on the magic island; Prospero is so far from being
melancholic that even his renunciation effervesces. Spirits stage this performance, the baseless fabric of this vision, and then dissolve again into
air, indeed the paradise which they cause to appear has no foundation or
permanence: nevertheless, the Ariel-world in which Prospero and his
followers live can be called a Stay Awhile, a staying in a Land of Appearance
which, though fleeting, rests in its beauty. This is no victorious foothold
such as Faust sought, far beyond the related spirits of the fields and the
air in the Helen of Troy scenes; the Nike of existence has no absolute
foot on Prospero's island. Nonetheless, even Prospero's renunciation would
not be so indifferent to the transient, and his wisdom would not be so
cheering in the face of the cheerless, if the dream-appearancewhich emerges
here did not likewise have its potency. Indeed it finally becomes clear that
the enigmatic lightness even in Prospero's renunciation is certainly not
attended on only by airy spirits and theatricallarks, it is ultimately farfrom
mere dream- and magical-sphere. Even the melancholy of the farewell when
Pro spero lays down his wand does not enter into the sleep with which
he says that our little life as well as great art is rounded; on the contrary,
in the seriousness of renunciation the seriousness of amusement remains.
1033
This is precisely described as the landing which has no ground; it is described

as the groundless joy of humour. With it Pro spero does not after all ultimately
remain in aesthetic autarky, in fireworks before the night sky;- humour
does not remain the goal in art or even in illusion. Humour is different
from aesthetic grace, and if its seriousness does not take even nothingness
seriously, there is ultimately a pre-appearance even here: not of art but
of smiling. This goes along with enigmatically remote, never guaranteed
landing; with utterly unpossessed landing in his possession, Prospero can
lay down his magic wand, the airy spirit Ariel can be freed. Yet no despair
remains, lightness comes, staying happens - not merely in a being-beautiful
which is not refuted by nothingness, but also in a faith whose scepticism
makes even nothingness wrong. At Prospero's entrance and exit stands
groundless, unguaranteed joy; only Mozart could have written the music
for it. There is an entrance in this exit in which there are no longer any
appearances and the non-appearing, in its great refinement, dispenses with
the thunder and lightning of fulfilment. But all figures of venturing beyond
the limits: the fire of youth, Odysseus, Faust and also Prospero's deepaiming humour want to escape from the other world of the wish into
its this-world. Into power over the moment, where more is plucked than
the given day, into the powerfulness of a conquered being-here. Of a
gradual emergence from appearance, as the older Goethe said, into true,
existent appearance which has become powerfully-light. Where the fine,
deep contacts which humour in particular maintains with this powerfulness
do not seem conquering at all, or even loud any more. On the contrary,
they seem fleetingly fine, like Ariel in this thick world, they work with
unpathetic grace.
1034
GUIDING PANELS OF ABSTRACT AND

SO
MEDIATED VENTURING BEYOND THE LIMITS,
ILLUSTRATED BY THE CASES OF DON QUIXOTE
AND FAUST
What distant spheres a ship, suspended between heaven and earth, evokes.
The flapping sails, the ship constantly rocking, the roaring waves, the scudding
clouds, the distant, unending horizon! On earth one is pinned to a dead point
and locked in the narrow circle of a situation.
Herder, Travelogue 1769
Now in practice in life it is far more important that the whole should be
uniformly good than that an individual part should be accidentally divine and thus if the idealist is a more skilful exponent of awakening a broad idea
of mankind's capability and inculcating respect for its destiny, only the realist
can carry this out consistently in experience.
Schiller, On naive and sentimental poetry

Spanish humanism is not content with the motto: Nihil humani mihi alienum.
From the requirement that nothing human should remain strange, it goes
on to the realization that everything strange, weird and wonderful affects us
as human beings.
Vofiler, Introduction to Spanish poetry
The fermenting will

The weak kind merely dreams, stays within itself. The brave acts, its
strength goes outwards. But if the brave man is not merely lashing out,
he also has his dreams. He shifts wishes and goals, which to begin with
are only in his head, outwards. But this is often an empty gesture, because
no one is alone, because life has already begun long before him. Because
youth does not possess the benefit of old age, i.e, has neither experienced
what is, nor what can and wishes to become outside itself. Thus the deed
is often loneliest where it would like to be most universal.
A juice which is fermenting cannot immediately be clear. And so too
a will not yet mediated with the outside, still fermenting with itself, remains
clouded. And the more unconditionally so it is, the more it is at first trapped
in caprice. Precisely where the beginning is unmediated, particularly in
the impetuous, indeed quixotic outbreaks of later years. When a man wants
DON QUIXOTE AND FAUST
1035
to make up for what he has missed, where an entire life, till then tepid, is
to be exchanged. Where a love appears which makes everything new again,
but also a goal which can be approached not only unmediatedly but also
undistractedly. And it is already evident here that because such unmediatedness
can also present itself at times as if it were undistractedness, the matter is
not simple, there is more to it than caprice. Action which is merely
unmediated is abstract and nothing else, and its downfall mostly seems
ridiculous. But if it also partakes of undistracted action, then it presents itself
as abstract-moral and its downfall mostly appears moving. But of course
mediated-balanced action is capable of also being objective-moral and thus truly
venturing beyond the limits, not into what is empty or expired. It is lessheroic
in its stance but more manly in its thrust; it has lessblossom, but more fruit.
Nonetheless, unmediated dreams, precisely in so far as they are undistracted,
constantly lure us on. For they act not only as a warning but also as a reminder:
never to take things as they are. Although, at the risk of a failure which is
avoidable and therefore ridiculous, things certainly must be taken as they
are, i.e. with experience, acting with worldly wisdom, concretely. The
unmediated, the headlong rush at obstacles, has its disadvantages, its honour
and its youth: the mediated, with circumspection and mastered experience,
has its advantages, its dignity and its maturity. Whereas the latter leads, the
former misleads, hut also shows undaunted courage and a fiery conscience.
At this point we may therefore cast a very penetrating glance at Don Quixote.
Of all unconditional dreamers, he was the most inflexible, thus his actions
are as laughable as they are great, he is at once a warning and a heartening
reminder. Unworldly, old and utopian, he pursues an image that has partly
passed away, partly never been.
Don Quixote's Rueful Countenance andgolden illusion

The man meant well and never stopped doing so. But wherever he lays his
helping hand he knocks something over. He even looks like badly damaged
goods himself, offers maidens his sympathetic protection, this Don Quixote
who himself arouses sympathy most of all, a lonely fool. Long, gaunt, sallow,
with 'cheeks which seemed to touch inside', wasted with delusions. Thus
he has left house and home, his foolish niece, his limited life, to be what he
has dreamt, to do what he has read. At an age when others are reaching the
bottom of the barrel, he becomes a new man, a textbook knight-errant.
Delusory though these dreams are, he carries them out, body and soul an
unconditional man of action. But he got only thrashings for his pains, as we
1036
know; the man who could never see the joke became the joke for others
wherever he went. The noble dream fitted him badly and the world,
unlovely as it was, never even tried the dream on.
Everything about the foolish hero is half-baked but, within these
limitations, decisive. As he appears to himself more than he is and can
do, he is restlessly overdoing himself, he stretches himself taller than he
actually is. He immediately awards himself three counts' titles one on top
of the other; Don Quixote is not troubled by the slightest doubt about
his vocation. But this vocation was taken only from books, they first gave
voice to his inexpressible longing and its contrast to the express banality
around him. When the spark of folly started to burn in Don Quixote's
brain, it was caused by a spontaneous combustion of accumulated reading
matter. With the result that even after his fantastic departure the emotions
became literary, indeed sometimes consist of nothing but over-subtle
emulation of scenes he has read. Thus Don Quixote, when presented, in
a pause between deeds, with a good opportunity to mortify himself for
the sake of his beloved, deliberated whether it would be better to follow
the example of Amadis in his melancholy or Roland in his frenzy, finally
opting for Amadis and his elegiac solitude after all. Thus the Junker was
brought even further back into the past, to the belief that chivalric gestures,
images of combat, images of love, images of loyalty, social forms, were
still valid in his own very changed period. The caballero on principle always
sets off without money, not just because he has none but, as he tells Sancho
Panza, becausehe had never read in any story of a knight-errant ever paying.
The principle of cash payment is thus everywhere opposed by a great heart,
of yesteryear and taken from the anatomy of chivalric romances. It is his
misfortune to believe knight-errantry and its ideal to be compatible with
every economic form of society. But the old spear in the domestic umbrellastand or even the lance-holder could no longer serve for the best, even
if wielded with the greatest vigour; what in the thirteenth century was
the spirit of the age became in the sixteenth century a spectre, a harmless
phenomenon reduced to a mere game. If Don Quixote had been just the
vigour and not also the ghost of the old era, Jensen would have been right
in his novel 'The Wheel', where he interprets the hidalgo precisely the
other way round, as an - American left behind in Europe. Thus he is
out of place, he says, not because he wears armour but because the old
world no longer knows what to do with energy and adventure: 'The Goths
have moved OD, are clearing forests in Connecticut and Rhode Island, only
Don Quixote, their brother, still livesin Europe and so he becomes strange.'
1037
But the so-called Goths in Connecticut became capitalists, whereas Don

Quixote, even in scarcely capitalistic Spain, stood out as a revenant, as
a chivalric apparition in everyday life. Part and parcel of the revenant is
his unbroken faith in sorcerers and fairies, a faith which his age largely
shared but which it applied to witch trials, not to doing and dealing in
broad daylight. By taking an other-world from his antiquarian reading
even in everday life, Don Quixote went around as a ghost on two counts,
and a ghost of flesh and blood seems crazy. The knight himself is crazy
in comparison with his age, crazed by the uncomprehended change of
ideology, the uncomprehended absenceof God; where the knights of legend
appeared to succeed, Don Quixote could succeed no longer. His legend
lacked the helping miracle, the magic stones from the Arthurian world
which would have served to complete the crumbling arch of hallucinatory
perfection. The belief in this highest superstructure of the Middle Ages
also belongs in Don Quixote's case to Romanticism, to one which is all
the more perfect because the knight understood this darkened other world
even less than vanished feudalism. The knight's remote home did the rest,
the desolate plateau of La Mancha, of the 'dry earth' (manxa), as the Arabs
called this South Castilian desert. Here this unworldliness and fantasy
flourished, Don Quixote's tropical-utopian flower of chivalry. For no
Gothic hero, especially when he was acting, was the world more vividly
animated with spirits. Thick pandemonium all around, and the star of
knight-errantry apparently shines from the motionless old heavens.
But it is also true that this delusion was not sustained by reading and
books alone. It also met with incomparable hope; this helped to animate
the barren field of the age with foaming images. Faith in the unconditional
makes the stalest reading, which nurtures it, into another faith, an
antiquarian-utopian one. Such active hope resulted in Don Quixote, the
reader of a thousand chivalric romances, himself becoming the staunchest
of the genre's heroes. Thus the reader of Amadis became the hero of a
new chivalric romance J the most curious of all, one whose richness puts
Amadis in the shade. Don Quixote, by becoming the doer of what he
had read, the faithful hero of his reading matter, now really, as Cervantes
says, 'plunges his hands up to his elbows in adventures', into a book of
adventures in which no fewer than six hundred characters appear, and
the leading figure in this strictly action-based entity is always utopia,
equestrian utopia. Confronted with the onset of this utopia, the . real, in
so far as it was commonplace or even banal, could not survive, could not
even be perceived: sheep become soldiers, clouds castles, windmill-sails
1038
giants, half a barber's basin glinting in the sun becomes Mambrino's helmet.
The chivalric wishful dream is crammed full of winged horses and winged
lions, of burning lakes, floating islands and palaces of crystal. This ventures
beyond mere social anachronism, it is also archaic-utopian, permanently connected with the anachronism of a future world, one which is thus more
noble and more colourful. Existing facts as such, even when they are not
completely altered by the fantast, simply weigh nothing compared with
the magic-utopian entity that solely constitutes truth here. Thus Don
Quixote remains incurable even by experience, all the more so because
it often confronts him in exaggerated, even coordinated-negative fashion,
in the shape of endless thrashings, dupings, swindles and disappointments.
This wretched reality is no match for the dream-layer, the only enlightening
one, which lies buried and waiting: 'For you must know, friend Sancho,
that heaven put me on earth to reawaken the Golden Age in our iron
age' (I, Chap. 20). On one occasion experience gave the knight such a
severe battering that his whole body had to be covered with plasters and
he could hardly move with back pains. But in the attic of the miserable
inn he had crawled into there now appeared a cow-girl, sneaking to a
mule-driver to indulge in her usual nocturnal pastime with him, and Don
Quixote stretched out his hands to receive the consoling maiden: 'He
immediately caught hold of her shift, which, although it was of sackcloth,
seemed to him like the finest and softest batiste. The glass beads she wore
on her arm shone for him with the brilliance of finest oriental pearls. Her
hair, only slightly inferior to a horse's mane, to him was like strands of
finest Arabian gold, the brilliance of which eclipsed the sun, and her breath,
which smelt of the stale salad of the previous night, brought the scent
of spices and fragrant aromas to his nose. In short, his imagination depicted
her to him as that princess in his books who, overwhelmed by love, came
to visit her wounded knight injust such jewellery and finery'(I, Chap. 16).
As Don Quixote is at his most perceptive when he is most unrealistic,
his imagination still does not swerve from the hallucinatory golden image
even when another dreadful and interminable thrashing brings home his'
mistake. But instead of recognizing the mule-driver who had come in and
struck the love-smitten knight such a fierce blow on the chin that his mouth
filled with blood, he invents the figure of an enchanted Moor under whose
protection the cow-girl princess stood; and the inn itself, which the day
before he had taken for a castle, 'with four towers and silver-gleaming
battlements, which did not lack the drawbridge and the deep moats and
all the accessories with which such strongholds are always depicted' becomes
1039
an enchanted fort. Such transformations of reality are Don Quixote's staple

diet, indeed when the knight wakes up for once and is assailed by scepticism about what is going on, the damaged delusion is not replaced for
example by empirical reality, on the contrary it is repaired by a new, far
greater delusion. On one occasion the knight almost drowned when he
attempted to take a mill by storm on an enchanted punt and fell between
the mill wheels. But the dousing did not bring him to his senses, instead,
to go along with the first spirit who provided the enchanted punt he invents
a second who smashes the punt and prevents the heroic deed. Another
state of scepticism broke through when the knight, between two deeds,
on a hot country road, reflected on the wondrous account of how Amadis
killed ten thousand enemies in a single hour. The knight pulls up his steed
and Sancho Panza behind him his mule, critical awakening in empirical
terms begins with the reflection that Amadis, even endowed with the
greatest strength, would have taken a week instead of an hour to kill ten
thousand enemies with blows of his sword. Thus doubt about the shrine
of Don Quixote's credulity, the chivalric books themselves, sets in, and
the Junker seems to be on the way to coming to his senses, to an understanding of the empirical world. But at the very moment when this
threatens, Don Quixote hits on the following solution to his problem:
the ten thousand enemies of Amadis were not of flesh and blood but spirits,
enchanted spirits, therefore of gelatinous substance; that is precisely why
Amadis' sword blows could go through several bodies, many bodies at
once, and the incredible heroic deed was done. Thus idolatry, precisely
when reason intervenes, entangles Don Quixote in far greater delusion.
The physical nature of spirits, spirit statistics, come to the aid of this faith
in heroes, and empirical reality, both in the case of the thrashing and in
subsequent disillusionment, has no truth. The same phenomenon appears
in even stranger form in another disillusionment, by not becoming one
at all; for if abstract utopia, world-blind hope, has no limit, nor does it
have any means of correcting its fantastic notions. Precisely when Don
Quixote takes sheep for soldiers, a flock of sheep for a foreign army, and
even discerns coats of arms and colours, with martial music, mottoes and
devices at their head, preciselyhere there is no lack of hypotheses to enchant
a boring world, indeed to present an already disenchanted world as itself
illusion again, indeed an illusion particularly easy to see through. For when
Sancho instead of martial music hears only the bleating of ewes and rams,
his master declares this to be a delusion of fear; this, he says, is a drug
which numbs the senses and never allows things to appear as they really
1040
are. And when the knight, soon afterwards, struck by stones from
shepherds' slings, is lying on the ground in a most pitiful condition and
might now be convinced of the reality of the sheep and the shepherds
which Sancho saw, he is not convinced at all. On the contrary, again and
again he introduces a sorcerer as a new drug: the sorcerer is envious, has
turned what were squadrons into flocks of sheep, but he can do nothing
to stop them reassuming their former shape a little further off. Their true,
real, human shape, the only army worthy of engaging with chivalric utopia.
Indeed the hope in which Don Quixote travels has no petty objects at
all; it does not perceive them, or else it suffuses them with gigantically
transforming hallucination. Medieval land of legend on all sides, a fixed
world of a traditional and rigid kind, with utopian spirit nonetheless casting
around in it.
The Junker becomes utterly effusive in the case of the woman he has
imagined for himself. This too is partly read, acquired through reading,
but only in its general outline and the role the beloved plays for him.
Dulcinea's role is to be the perfect maid, at the same time protectress and
voyeuse through whom the knight can look at his deeds. It is part of
the all-encompassing dream, and also of the fear of awakening, that Don
Quixote never seriously wishes to see Dulcinea. In courtly love in general
sexual vigour had waned, as it has in this epigone. In courtly love no
woman was considered perfect except the one who had never been possessed;
this hoping at the gate, enjoyment without empirical reality, becomes
grotesque in Don Quixote's case; for he has intercourse only with Dulcinea's
image. What he praises about the knights errant is precisely their idolatry
of love in which the fair lady remains unattainable: 'Love is as essentially
natural and proper to them as the stars to heaven' (I, Chap. 13). With
stars there is no hasty rencontre; which means that everywhere else Don
Quixote feels close to the reality of deeds, albeit to his own conception
of it, a predominantly contemplative exception appears only in the case
of Dulcinea. He even avoids the lady when she is supposedly nearby, on
the pretext that she has banished him and he is not yet worthy of her
beauty. He is so far from being keen on the Being-There of his dream
that he can completely disregard the hideous sight of the real Dulcinea
in Toboso. He even remains remarkably cool when a supposed Dulcinea,
veiled and in torchlight, is played before him in all her radiance at the
Duke's palace. His dream-beloved is so beautiful that even the features of a
theatre princess are nowhere near good enough, pearl eyes are inadequate,
only those of an idol will do: 'Dulcinea's eyes must be like green emeralds,
1041
finely slit, with two rainbows for brows' (II, Chap. II) . Here everything
inhabits the interior of a reflexive though overpowering utopia, a fantasizing
which spurs, carries away, consumes and replaces the thirst for action,
and when we hear the words Tieck puts in the mouth of the troubadour
Jeoffroy then we hear Don Quixote's confession: that he has never seen
his beloved, but when he does see her then the reality must surpass his
premonition, as with all beauty when it one day appears unveiled to our
disembodied eye. Except that in Don Quixote's case the premonition itself
already uses a disembodied eye and thus has no organ for perceiving reality
where Dulcinea is concerned, nor indeed can any merely real woman
anywhere be classed with the dream-star Dulcinea. In fact ultimately we
see that on the whole Don Quixote has his existence proved in the waking
dream, his vigour, too, occurs only within that dream and also the energetic
desire-to-be-present in the significant moment occurs exclusively in the Ideal,
seen as existent. Don Quixote's hope-world is for him already so to speak
the real world, namely that of chivalric legend and its ladies; it is only
in and on this world that Don Quixote can impose his presence, a presence
which - with this limitation - is certainly extraordinary. Thus in reality
even Dulcinea, la femme introuvable, is not after all so much the contemplative exception she appears to be; but rather Dulcinea is also presence
in the dream, if only in the untouchable dream of the star. It is just that
the fear of awakening at this point, that of the fantasized highest fulfilment,
is also the most active; so that wicked sorcerers at this point must serve
as an explanation and a device to keep the land of legend intact. A land
of legend which the knight-errant never leaves, which seems to him the
natural, the already natural state of things. The moment in Faust's sense,
as the landing of something unconditional and its intention in the present
unconditional, for Don Quixote, during his utopian period, does not exist
at all as an object of intention but always as supposedly real in the paradise
of his fantasies which hallucinate the intended as already fulfilled. It is
touched on only once, though in a deeply moving manner; right at the
end of the dream-journey, paradoxically right in the middle of the
catastrophe of awakening, on his death-bed. Thus, when an empirical selfidentification finally breaks through in place of that which was permanently
suffused in an antiquarian-utopian way, the dying knight says: 'I have
been a fool but now I have come to my senses, I was Don Quixote de
la Mancha, but now I am Alonso Quixano the Good.' Alonso el Bueno:
it is the quietest, most heart-rending name; not just a delusion, also an
incognito in him is cleared up in this death-scene. Till then the present
1042
had been everywhere and nowhere, i.e. the illusory present of a buriedexisting, transcendent-existing heaven in the dream. Its reality: legend-utopia
asBeing andBeing already as legend-utopia had, as noted above, for the Junker
only been temporarily suspended from view by abnormal incursions of
enemies and demons. Even Dulcinea, la femme introuvable, does not need
to be sought, let alone wooed, she does not even need to be discovered;
only the obstacle must be removed that has come between the loveliest
Here and Now and its knight. The perfectly achieved is available, in the
waking dream and the antiquarian-utopian world that has come down to
it and is suffused by it. Don Quixote thus re-established for himself a relation
which had become utterly untenable, the relation between anticipation
and past, between an unparalleled power of hope and the now deaf heaven
of a now dead class world. The heroic feat of goodness, the gigantic dream
of a future world, was layered into the superstructure of the Middle Ages,
into a fixed, simply prevented, other world. The result was a caricature
of utopia - a pathos to itself, a comedy to others, in practice a history
of the thrashings suffered by the abstractly unconditional. Quixotry is a
bearing which learns nothing and acknowledges nothing changed, which
is never mediated, which fails to see that medieval times have shifted, even
in Spain and especially in its healthy people who are so fond of laughter
and alive to irony, and therefore because of its abstract idealism it is the
caricature of a phantasma bene fundatum and of its constitutive content.
That content is goodness, indeed a golden age, as Don Quixote himself
says, but the road to it is paved with the craziest and most battered abstractions the world has ever known. It is this, this collision, which constitutes
Don Quixote's madness, from this stems his tragi-comic fate. He is the
greatest utopian in fiction but at the same time the travesty of a utopian;
and Cervantes first, foremost and ostensibly has subjected him to nothing
but mockery. But this mockery certainly does not have the last word,
Don Quixote remains a too moving example of utopian-active conscience
for that, one of the initiators of utopia, with huge cloud-castles over the
plain; but the mockery makes clear what a merely abstract dream triggers
off and releases. Self-exaggeration, antiquarian reading and its imitation, hope
with its head in legends, vigour in permanent abstractions: all this in the first
place combines to form a warning against the utopian knight of the lions.
Every dream which skips over things and keeps itself vague belongs
to him. Thus every will to a life which ventures beyond and a full existence
can see in the example of Don Quixote its danger zone, the perspective
of a crazy downfall. It is not the overhauling which constitutes the delusion,
1043
but this: that the overhauling goes into the vacantlyexaggerated, disregarding
the obstacles, unallied with the driving forces of the age before it.
Monuments to Don Quixote could stand in all bohemian quarters, he is
the patron of inadequate, of self-deluding greatness. But this Don Quixote,
transformed from the harmless into the reactionary and then into the
reactionary-terrible, also lives on in the dizzy, politically fraudulent
masquerades of modern times, in political romanticism asa whole. In historical
costume and the knight's armour which no longer comes to the aid only
of the distressed, on the contrary. Here the feudal magic charms: loyalty,
honour, leader, allegiance, are not compatible with the socio-economic
tendency, but rather with tinsel and deception. Even Sancho Panza, at
least the earlier, easily misled Sancho if not the later governor Sancho with
so much sound common sense, even Sancho Panza, as the believer as well
as the object of the deception, has his place here, transformed to suit the
times. It is no accident that the homespun-crafty petit bourgeois became
the squire of the maddest man; it is precisely his utopia (he always has
a vision of a purse of doubloons before him and he wishes to get at it
in the quickest, shortest way) which makes him the Hegeman of delusive
romanticism. A homespun character alone is no safeguard against folly,
indeed because of its short-sightedness and gullibility, which stems partly
from lack of education and partly fromunrectified deficiencies, it is especially
likely to fall for false prophets. In the original of Cervantes, Sancho Panza
falls for a false prophet who is himself without guile, a seducer with a
pure soul; in reality, many a decent fellow has fallen prey to impostors
and political mystification. 'The Return of Don Quixote' is the title of
a remarkable masquerade and prophetic novel by Chesterton: his return
aided and abetted fascism, political romanticism became draped exploitation,
indeed chloroform. And yet from a quite different angle, from the angle
of abstract purity, Don Quixote is clearly the patron saint of honest-abstract
social idealists. In so far as they drag the high, usually the all too high,
down into the lower regions, to remedy morally or indeed to overthrow
what can only be tackled economically, in the homogeneous dirt of the
matter. The seven-armed candlestick is not designed to be taken into the
privies of this world, i.e. social ideals cannot be preached among profiteers.
Even if the revolutionary work must always bear in mind the whole and
the highest ideal of its goal in order to be more than reform, the better
society does not come about through fanaticism or ideal propaganda from
above. Not through a pure soul without habitation in the movements of
the world and without knowledge of the less pure interests which move
1044
the world. Thus almost all idealistic social utopians were and are of Don
Quixote's breed, above all those who recalled lost ideals to the conscience
of the powerful. In fiction, Marquis Posa * belongs here, so too, absolutely,
does Gregers Werle in Ibsen's 'Wild Duck' - a Don Quixote figure under
other stars, calling in ideal debts with no eye for the insolvent, indeed vanished
debtors. In history even such great utopians as Fourier and Owen come close
to the world of Don Quixote in terms of their abstractness. As organizers
of a better - though not an antiquarian-better - world to be installed
immediately, with an abstract plan of construction, in the old. Marx took
exception to Don Quixote precisely because of this kind of utopia; he interpreted the caballero as a complete world-view and as its fate. In the sense,
as Marx says, that Don Quixote himself paid for the error of believing knighterrantry to be equally compatible with all economic forms of society. For
which reason Marx also represents Don Quixote as an incarnation of false
consciousness, of the interpretation of the world by abstract principles. And
it is abstractness which finally makes the resourceful Junker unique even as
poetic unconditionality - in instructive contrast to the other dream-figure of
setting-forth, Faust. Faust, too, was restless, world-weary and full of uncertain premonition, but he attempts to come to terms with the regions
through which he travels, he strengthens and instructs his subjectivity by
means of them. His magic-cloak ride through the world proves to be a progressive concretion, the magic cloak becomes the vehicle of finding and
leaving, of thorough objective experience. Nonetheless, Faust's will to full
existence does not yield, it does not capitulate, the great moment is never
confused with its footprints in the dirt, not even with its legend or its
cathedral. Quixotry, on the other hand, almost everywhere remains in the
pre-world, whether of bohemia, of political romanticism, or of idealistic
utopia; the dream does not land here, or only for a short time, when abused
or legendary. It is true that in the dream of the unconditional, especiallywith
Don Quixote, there lives the complete religious conviction that the given
cannot be the illuminatingly true, that above the logic of facts as they stand
a lost and buried evidence is valid in which alone the hope-truth, as world
for us, dwells. But in Quixotry as method even the passion of purity which
seeks to bring out a world in keeping with itself sinks back into the harmless
or overblown, the inessential and the extravagant. The purpose here is not
to practise pedantry on the comic antics of the resourceful]unker, except
for that which Cervantes himself practises in his countless humorous
* In Schiller's
play 'Don Carlos'.
1045
exegeses.. Everywhere it is the haze of an inappropriate dream-content which

causes a magnificent man and a goldenintention to lapse into comedy. Into
comedy there and then, into politicalromanticism later, when monopoly capitalism puts on armour and captains of industry pretend to be knights of heaven.
Much about the Junker looks melancholy and yet we can laugh about
it. All the more so, the greater his aspiration and the more he overreaches
himself in all his pretensions and intentions. The grand entrance, the
significant background, are crucial for every comic impression; without
a significant goal and a correspondingly miserable failure to reach it there
would be no comic effect. Hence apples, because they are what they are,
cannot be comically caricatured, whereas even animals can, because they
lie along the same line towards human beings or can at least be regarded
as such; and this is all the more true of semi-heroic people, knights of
the rueful countenance. The bourgeois conformist, gloating and maliciously
revelling in the misfortune and downfall of a problematically significant
type, is not the only one to laugh here. Also laughing here is a different
kind of self-assurance, a worthy streak in man, one which takes the goal
itself too seriously to take Don Quixotes seriously as its warriors, in short
which does not and must not tolerate even honourable shadow-boxers.
What Don Quixote himself intended was done better by the real knights,
and so it is superfluous. What Don Quixote intended with the background
of his dreams: the realm of justice, has never been furthered but often
discredited by abstract heart-thumping for the good of humanity; for
ignorant magnanimity is no stalwart fighter in this realm. Thus not even
Don QUixote's moving death can make us forget the comedy he has performed. Even he now knows that he was a comic hero, but by this he
ceases of course to be one; for only the tragic hero knows and can bear
the knowledge that he is tragic, the comic hero never knows, or if he
does realize it, the comedy ceases for the spectator too. Yet the entire
comedy of his previous performances remains; the falling-away of folly
from the dying Don Quixote as described by Cervantes, with a seriousness
which brings on tears, does not in itself put Don Quixote on to the tragic
plane. It does, of course, put him on to the level of the tragic play: *
compassion, weeping contemplation, painful sympathy now become available for him with this ending. For Alonso Quixano the Good, as the dying
man now calls himself, for the nobly defenceless victim of such endless
* Bloch is again distinguishing between tragedy (Tragedie) and the tragic play (Trauerspiel),
see Vol. 1_ p. 42.9n.
torment, nastiness and disappointment in this world. Don Quixote can nonetheless be understood in individual-comic terms, in the full callous pleasure of
measuring the distance between desire and ability, the direction and the goal.
Seen as a whole, an individual conducting himself gloriously, heroically, goes
under in his exaggerated and foolish antics, a doer without deeds, a quester
without an answer. Because the helpful Junker carries on like this, because
Don Quixote masters nothing, is crushed by the merest bagatelles and yet
ultimately finds that his exaggerated ego goes under in the naked truth of
his emptiness, as his messianic dream does in conjuring the ghosts of history,
this same retarded character, rejected by earth and by heaven, can do nothing
but perform a harmless act, which represents no one, is comic and therefore
humiliatingly indulged, before unmoved nothingness, before the unblinking
lion of fate. Almost everything sublime here turned to folly and chimera, even
though it is the folly of a full existence and the chimera of a messianic ideal.
And yet the last, most telling word about the convoluted man has not
yet been spoken. No figure seems so much of a piece, but none becomes
more ambiguous when contemplated for a long time. The laughter is joined
by the radiance which emanates from Don Quixote, and it is not simply
refuted by the laughter, by the warning. The Junker is a half-wise fool,
a very perforated fool, with patches of light in his head. He acts within
his delusion circumspectly, indeed he sometimes astonishes with his sober
judgements, almost as if the delusion was only feigned. Don Quixote says
on his deathbed, when urged by Sancho Panza to return to further chivalric
nonsense, with the people around him indulgently playing along: 'Steady
on, gentlemen, it's no good looking for birds in last year's nests' (II,
Chap. 74). In this sentence he anticipated the entire later socio-economic
refutation of chivalry. Granted, he spoke this sentence only after he had
come to his senses, but had not Don Quixote known even beforehand
that several of his birds of paradise were notin the nest at all? He took them
from the past, but only because the past seemed more human, more fit
for human beings than a present stripped of all chivalrousness. Don Quixote
did not extract from the feudal age the holy tithe and its ideology as political
romanticism did, he saw the knight-errantry of yore as nonetheless a nobler
guiding image than the budding bourgeoisie. The later bourgeoisie, in
its still revolutionary stance against the 'dark Middle Ages', certainly
transformed Cervantes into a liberal, and his ironic-ostensible intention:
'to hold up to ridicule the fabulous and senseless stories in the books of
chivalry throughout the world' - was made absolute. It is certainly a
1047
different matter altogether, as Marx suggests, to condemn Don Quixote

from a belief in concrete utopia itself, both on account of his antiquarium
and above all of his abstract a priori. But then not because the knighterrant was no Hegelian or as though the utopian space itself is abandoned.
On the contrary, the humorous critique, if it is any good, is always directed
against and ends with the phenomenon of utopian will and unconditionalness: as, ambiguously or cryptically, with the great composer of dreams
Cervantes himself. This merging of great amusement and great melancholy,
indeed of both warning and obligation has repeatedly made itself evident in
the ways later centuries have been affected by Don Quixote. When a Spanish
king looked out of the window of his castle and saw a man reading
convulsed with laughter, he said: the man is either insane or he is reading
Don Quixote. But Dostoevsky, from a different window and with a
different view, remarks of Don Quixote: 'When the Last judgement comes,
men will not forget to take this saddest of all books with them.' Both
reactions are right, and on top of these, as the last or penultimate one,
comes the melancholy-frenetic response expressed by Andre Suarez: 'King
of the noble-hearted, lord of the distressed, crowned with the golden helmet
of illusion, none has been able to defeat you, for the shield on your arm
is all imagination and your lowered lance is all magnanimity.' A man like
Kant, who can hardly be accused of the least inclination to chivalric romanticism, most certainly did feel affected by the unconditional aspect of Don
Quixote, so much so that, in this respect no perfect reader, he even
reproached the author for his humour. As in this remarkable sentence from
Kant's posthumously published writings: 'Cervantes would have done
better if, instead of ridiculing the fantastic and romantic passion, he had
directed it better' (Werke, Hartenstein, VIII, P: -612). Clearly comic is
the effect on all impartial readers of the endless thrashings which the Junker,
like a clown in the circus, receives throughout the first part of the novel.
But in the second part, where the thrashing scenes characteristically disappear, even in the reader the amusement which these scenes rightly caused
is reversed. For the thrashings, with a powerfully revealing switch from
quantity to quality (II, Chap. 68), are now replaced by - a herd of swine
which tramples over Don Quixote. This occurs after the renunciation of
chivalry, shortly before his death, when his receding folly no longer provided
a protective layer. Is this bristly adventure, as Cervantes calls it, now also
a reaction, an amused acceptable reaction of the world, especially of the
world-background, to the inadequate reformer? Or is the trampling herd
of swine on the contrary a synonym for the usual way of the world and
for Alonso Quixano the Good's defencelessness in every region? An uncanny

affinity threatens to be recalledhere, one which has been latent throughout
the whole account and which now appears: an affinity between this other
Don Quixote and - Jesus, both in terms of the mockery they are subjected
to and the abruptly introduced ideal. Don Quixote experiences only a
harmless and distorted miniature of this, and yet the mocking faces around
Christ on the way of the cross and the herd of swine, Pilate's amused
query: 'Are you the king of the Jews?' and the duke who uses Don Quixote
as a court jester - all these faces are not so very different. There is an
ecce homo in the knight's derided purity, a kind of reflection of Christ
even in this debased caricature. Dostoevsky certainly understood Don
Quixote thus, and Turgenev, in his sombre essay on Don Quixote and
Hamlet, openly interprets the bristly adventure as the 'final tribute all Don
Quixotes must pay to indifferent and impudent misjudgement'. In such
manifold ways Quixotry is able to break out of the comic as if it were
no more its essential part than the tomfoolery of enchantments and spirits.
The half-wise fool, the dreamer who is trampled by swine, the uncanny
reminder of Jesus, the aura of magnanimity and of fantasy surrounding
the knight of the rueful countenance and his golden illusion; these are
so many iridescences of this comic hero which bring out from the warning
the hearty reminder, something not to be forgotten. The comedy remains
and the implicit rejection within it, but at its end comes an evening red
which sheds a very serious light on Don Quixote. Indeed a morning red,
cancelling everything agreed to be antiquarian; and within it there is the
quintessential basic utopian shape, with all the dangers, all the legacies
of overhauling unconditionalness. Concrete utopia does after all delineate
itself against the abstract kind, just as sharply as it honours its frontier
life and the power of its waking dream.
So it is not simply a matter of how mad we consider the Junker to
be. But of how correct we consider the facts in which and against which
he rides. He is fighting for a lost cause, certainly, but is the laughter which
engulfs him really a triumphant cry of life? The emerging bourgeois world
which Don Quixote combatted with lance couched is not so glorious as
to make even a futile struggle incomprehensible. The age of chivalry was
somewhat nobler, less alienated, and what is more: in the second part of
the novel, at the duke's court, Don Quixote does not even appear entirely
as a revenant from this age or the romanticism about this age. For though
at the duke's court and in Spain itself he was still caught up in unexpired
conserved feudalism, corrupt feudalism, the knight shines here if anything
1049
even more strangely than among innkeepers and policemen. As against

the courtiers, as against the vulgar frivolity of the ducal couple, Don
Quixote comes across not just as a fool, a court-jester, a court-buffoon;
in fact his dream does not end feudal-romantically at all. The flower and
essenceof all knight-errantry, as the duke styles Don Quixote with a grin,
has another very different essence, even within himself. For in the final
analysis this dreamer does not only wish to restore the authentic chivalry
of old (although this in itself would be a criticism of its corrupt remnants).
In his chivalric dream, the dream of a Golden Age keeps coming back:
'There were so many wrongs for him to put a stop to, so many injustices
to be redressed, so many abuses to be remedied, crimes to be avenged,
duties to be fulfilled' (I, Chap. 2). However lopsidedly and inappropriately
this dream was launched, however easily it could be defeated by the world
in all its abstract-romantic positions: martyrs for such a cause are never
utterly refuted. Even mere utopian land of legend, even the caricature of
a phantasma bene fundatum need not feel embarrassed by the vulgarity
which now constituted feudal pleasure. How empty is even the illusion
or art with which bored vacuity fills its time, along with the traces of
too lengthy a service beneath the banner of love, compared to the illusion
with which Don Quixote now envelops himself and the world. Schelling
says at one point in his 'Philosophy of Art' that the duchess has everything in common with Circe except her beauty; in fact everything here
is a world of masquerade, Don Quixote is the only one who is not turned
into a swine. In fact the theatrical performance at the court is utterly
cynical, a bathing in froth and fraud; Don Quixote, on the other hand,
who does not need this kind of theatre at all, sees even here nothing but
the embodiment of the wishful dreams in which he believes. Here the
wonderful is and remains reality for him; veils and sparkling diamonds
in the theatre of fulfilment which the duke puts on for him point in this
direction, and chis vision outdoes both. In it dwells Dulcinea, and Don
Quixote surrounds this imago with an adoration no real girl has ever
experienced more intensely. It is true that this is hallucinatory thinking
of terrifying unreality but also of the most faithful ideality. Dulcinea is
incomparably more beautiful than the most beautiful women who have
ever appeared in life or even in literature. With this fantasy-love, Cervantes,
establishing pure ens perfectissimum, causes even the ideal to split into
an as it were empirical and a utopian layer, and Dulcinea dwells completely
on the utopian-superutopian side. It is only the latter's formlessness which
prevents even the Trojan Helen from being reduced to the mundane level
1050
of the Egyptian Helen in comparison with Dulcinea. Thus Dulcinea is

la femme introuvable even in the existing wish- and fantasy-layer ~ not just
in existing reality. But of course Don Quixote builds himself a bridge
between existing reality and fulfilment: precisely the mythical bridge
afforded by legend. The world is enchanted by black magic, precisely in
its hardest places it is spellbound; and not for a moment does the frenzied
optimist doubt that the great moment can come and the crust will crack.
This is what he was seeking when he rode out on his fantastic expedition,
and still seeking in his rueful homecoming: fulfilment must come. On
his deathbed, the great moment was morality, during the dream it hovered
ahead, the bright glade of the world: 'Prom behind every turning the
wonderful can come forth like a silver-gleaming nymph.' In the transportable dream-cell he lives in, Don Quixote sees no really existing world,
yet he is also far from a belief in fate~ a belief in a naturally given or divinely
imposed necessity. Quixotry, when combined with worldly-wisdom,
certainly can make the lion of fate blink very hard indeed; just as surely
as this lion remains unmoved by the deluded elan of a merely unworldly
Don Quixote. Realpolitik with a dash of this re-defined quixotry: this
enthusiastic dash of unconditionalness in the shrewdness of the conditional
does not make the impossible possible, but nor either does it weaken in
the face of what is difficult to achieve, of objective possibility. Indeed as
long as the historical world consists of objective possibility and the subjective
factor, then the subjective factor, if it is to avoid being defeatist, will always
possess an element of correctly understood-quixotry. With that knowledge
of time and the world so utterly lacking in Don Quixote the fool, with
that belief in obstructed magnificence of which Don Quixote the dreamer
possesses too much. The expedition on the nag, with an inadequate
personality, grotesque delusions and an outdated ideology, is and remains
comic. But the will with which this subject sets out: CBy his strong arm
to drive away/Injustice from the world' is as great as the world's reaction
is coarse and despicable; and the goal - an order without galley slaves and
dullness - is serious. All guiding figures of unrest have a path with them
which in the course of time does not simply remain crooked, and the
venturing beyond the temperate zones also ventures beyond antiquarian
ideals, in the present case the chivalric ideal. Even the wistful yearning
hunger for the unattainable has music of the absolute moment within it:
the unattainable here is undoubtedly intended as an event, in the most
present sense. Figures of the unconditional risk their plus ultra here, as
living utopians they follow their dream of the perfect life. Mediated
IOSI
venturing beyond in the manner of Faust or of actually occurring experience,

this realism is the correct one; but the other Don Quixote, who can also
be interpreted positively, reminds us, after Faust in the world has become
cleverer than the cleverest man, to act even against this cleverness, that
is, without making peace with the merely existing world which parades
as complete.
A related question: the wrongs and rights of Tasso versus Antonio

All this fits into the old struggle between enthusing and maturing. In
a disparaging sense one can be described as the inwardly blustering fool
and the other as the withered, earth-bound bourgeois conformist.
Enthusiasm and maturity of this kind coincide by committing their error
only in the opposite directions. The enthuser raises even dogs to infinity,
with the bourgeois conformist even the infinite goes to the dogs. But both
the overstating enthuser and the understating philistine are mere caricatures
of a serious state, an alternating phenomenon. One state reflects easily
co-existing wishes, occasionally also thoughts, the other reflects restricting,
sometimes seemingly completed matters, accomplished matters of fact which
bump hard against one another in space. Schiller stressed this alternation
of the subjective or of the objective factor in the bourgeois person poetically,
in his distinction between sentimental and naive poetry. Here again two
veritable fields of vision are in competition, that of the ideally suffusing
character and that of the character with experience of the real. 'One can
best arrive', says Schiller, 'at a true idea of this contrast by isolating from
the naive and the sentimental character what is poetic in each. Nothing
then remains of the former, as regards the theoretical, but a sober spirit
of observation and a firm allegiance to the uniform testimony of the senses;
as regards the practical, a resigned submission to the necessity (but not
the blind compulsion) of nature; a surrender therefore to what is and must
be. Of the sentimental character nothing remains (in the theoretical sphere)
but a restless spirit of speculation which stresses the unconditional element
in all knowledge, in the practical sphere a moral rigour which insists on
the unconditional element in acts of the will.' Thus the idealist and the
realist are delineated against each other here or, to keep within our
framework, a large element oEDon Quixote (unconditionalness of feeling,
Marquis Posa) and an equally large element of coming to terms with the
world (Erziehungsroman, Mephisto's constant cooling-down of Faust, the
1052
nature of experience in Faust). The antagonism between the idealist and

the realist, using both terms in the moral sense, appears in almost Schillerian
form in Goethe's 'Tasso', expressed in the simile of the wave and the
rock. Tasso is completely unruly, bursting with the urge from within,
blindly overflowing, he calls himself a wave, but Antonio, the man of
the world, he finally calls the firm, silent rock. Tasso rants out solely his
own inner images, images both passionate and high-spirited: 'And can
the beaker's rim contain a wine/That frothing wells and foaming overflows?' (Act V, sc. iv). Tasso remains the unmediated. He walks in his
own magic circle, and whatever reality breaks into it is understood,
misunderstood not as a lesson but only as persecution, conspiracy. Beside
him, with his feet firmly on the ground, stands Antonio, beside the absolute
poet the soundly-reasoning secretary of state, experienced, cautious, cool,
not without malice, wise in the ways of the world. And Tasso, when
his vision proves bankrupt, capitulates to the enemy who in the end is
not an enemy at all, finds mediation through Antonio: 'So in the end
the shipwrecked sailor clings/To just that rock on which he should have
foundered' (Act V, sc. v). Here is the transition from fervour to insight,
from unmediatedness to mediation, from spontaneity to action in andwith
the world. But yet again at the risk of a compromise: thus ambivalence
arises again, the choice between two guiding panels; in this case between the
radicalism of the unconditional and the ordinariness, but also the lessons,
of manly prose, the objectivity of the way of the world. In contrast to
the joy of the senses and the peace of the soul, Schiller of course did not
set up a simple choice between his moral poetic idealist and his realist,
he expressed no normative preference for the one to the exclusion of the
other. A remark towards the end of 'Naive and Sentimental Poetry'
expounds this: CIt is precisely this exclusion which occurs in experience
that I am combatting; and the result of the present reflections will be the
proof that only the completely equal inclusion of both can satisfy mankind's
concept of reason.' And in fact the dialectical wholeness which the TassoAntonio problem takes up is rather one of permeation, of the prophetic
plus process realism, as will become clear in what follows. But the unconditional retains itsprimacy here, as long as it has only entered into process
mediation, into concrete instruction and armament. This primacy of the
unconditional prevents precisely the compromise in mediation, indeed it
makes even temporary compromise into the method that leads the way
to the victory of what is right. Permeating mediation is indispensable for
such ultimately undistracted essence; its political form, against every kind
IOS3
of putschism and abstract monomania, is Marxist. The enthusers, however,

with the isolated, infinite Tasso, who is allowed to do as he pleases, are
impatient in their merely abstract immediacy, and empty freedom without
tectonic virtue crumbles anarchistically into destruction as petrified desire.
Immediacy which skips over society, over the pages of history and the
world, to achieve its goal more rapidly thus becomes abstract utopia in
the highest abstraction. It is haste and omission which for this very reason
is bound to revert to the mere emptiness of immediacy; in contrast to
concrete utopia, with its path, compass, order. This is why in this respect
Faust rises so far above Don Quixote, a subject of mediation and its
phenomenology, without abstract fantasizing. This is why mediation, with
analysis of the situation and constant time-dialectic, constant subject-object
dialectic, is so unquestionably superior to pure spontaneity. The guiding
panel of mediatedness is higher than that of immediacy, but it is only higher
in that it has put on the radical conscience ofimmediacy, as mindfulness in every

mediation. On this condition, precisely in such permeation and in it alone,
Tasso retains the last word with Don Quixote against Antonio and becomes
true. Cervantes gave his hero this epitaph: 'Once as a bogeyman he entered
the fray/By his strong arm to drive away/Injustice from the world'. There
is no doubt that he is a bogeyman, but there is even less doubt, beyond
the ridiculous means he uses, about their sublime goal. No doubt about
the greatness of the intention, the melody of salvationwhich runs unerringly
here through mockery and through defeats which are not always discrediting. There is even less doubt about the determining goal itself, about
the dictate: to free the world of injustice, of its alienation, of suffocating
triviality. this kind of unconditionalness is not true when action consists
of rushing headlong at a wall, but it is true when it is the most energetic
refusal to recognize that a wall has to be there.
The Luciferian-Promethean and the layer of sound

The way to what is better is primarily a human path and this means here
a bold path. It leads out of our inborn circumstances and out of those
which stand around our lives. Even though they may fit our lives, they
are not permanently attuned or only when the head is no longer held up
high but nods at every step like a horse. Animals with all their actions
and sensations are locked within their fixed generic nature and its environment; man can raise himself beyond his. Animals and their organization
1054
are completed at a very early age and almost as complete is the arena assigned
to them, indeed the fate assigned to them, within the group-like framework
of which, for all their mobility, they behave as if spellbound. Man on
the other hand, seen from the animal's perspective, is a helpless premature
birth with long-lasting malleability, long-obstructed maturation and rigidity,
and just as open as his organization remains his environment, remain the
limits of mankind. The animal is complete when it can maintain the species,
with man the decisive development only begins with puberty. The animal
is actually as if pressed into its surroundings, and the surroundings in turn,
with a correspondence bordering on mimicry, are entered on to the animal's
own design; the human being changes his environment through work,
it is only through it that he becomes a human being, i.e, a subject of
the changing of the world. He can thus lose his connection with the
primeval human subject and even more so with the primeval natural arena
to which animals, each after its fashion, are attuned in such an amazing
and multiply protected way; whereas the human imprint on history is so
old and so powerful that the primeval human subject and the primeval
environment from which homo sapiens started out and has since drifted
away are now scarcely known. The metamorphosis of man, through socioeconomic causes, is the same as the real, irreversible history of mankind
itself. And the 'most highly bred' or front types are not the most decadent as in the animal kingdom but those with the healthiest capacity for
becoming: human becoming, entering into the Novum. These are the
venturers beyond the limits or pioneers, often allied to the best that men
want at a given time or at all times, and its emissaries. They are therefore
utopian types; and in this character they are also united as fictional, as
ideally presented types. The Quixotic and the Faustian is united in a
previously drawn firing-line, despite the differences, clear as in any didactic
play, between abstractness in the former and the workings of the world
in the latter. Only man has the freedom of this transition, one into the
seventh day where otherwise everything rests except him. This is why
animals can be demonic or 'venturers beyond the limits' in the manner
of the dinosaurs of the Jurassic period, venturers beyond the limits into
the monstrous-tropical, but they cannot be - Luciferian, i.e. makers of
consciousness, creators of light, changers of the world. This involves
remaining for a time at the transition, at the bridge of the transition and
of human aurora: this new day beckons to new shores, consequently a
day unlike any other that has yet shone forth upon the world. Man in
society thus forms around him an environment different from what was
lOSS
biologically assigned to him, he brings with his work a contribution and

modification into the existing or towards it. But: with this contribution,
if it is not to remain subjective-abstract and therefore to be no contribution
at all, a contact with the world will always be made. Not with the world
of becomeness, which surrounds like a ring and, in the animal as well
as the human being poor in subject, is as fixed as the physiognomy of
his body. But a contact is made with the world as the workings of the
world and with its tendency-filled physiognomy; that which is truly lightbringing never remains in itself or alone. In his essay on Winckelmann,
Goethe speaks of the people of antiquity and describes their essence as 'an
unfragmented nature which works as a whole, knows it is one with the
world and therefore does not experience the objective external world as
something alien which is added to man's inner world, but recognizes in
it the counterparts responding to its own sensations'. This is especially
true of the tendency-figures of history, of process-mediation which gives
sustenance to the will of inner freedom and strength against abstraction
to the will of the unconditional. The light-bringing, Luciferian element
is in Greek terms the Promethean, and it always forms even the most distant
regnum humanum from the clay of this world.
But what if a still invisible kind of material is easier to will and to believe
than material far more visible? If the will to it, as in Faust's style, informs
itself in the workings of the world but equally, as will to the moment, lies
beyond attained Visibility? Manifestations of this kind, manifestations of a
quixotry of the highest order (with Dulcinea as its hallmark) certainly
are not lacking in Faust; otherwise he would not be the one who abandons
everything again, the urge based on utopian loyalty. Hence the lines from
the beginning:
Who teaches me? what should I shun?
Should I obey that sudden urge?
Not just our sufferings, what we ourselves have done
Hold back our own life's onward surge. *
And immediately the turning away from all that is stagnant in the world
of things:
'Faust', Part I, 630-3.
105 6
The finest things the spirit could receive

By strange and stranger matter are besieged;
All those fine feelings which once gave us life
Grow rigid in the earthly, jostling strife. *
Then in the invocation of the Mothers, of shaping, reshaping in the limitless:
No rigid salvation do I seek to find,
To shudder is the best part of mankind;
Although the world may price his feelings dear,
He feels the monstrous depths, still gripped with fear. t
Gripping emotion and the limitless are correspondences in such hidden
overhauling of the world; indeed only in that which Mephisto calls
empirically Nothing, but in which Faust hopes to find his All, is there
the counterpart responding to this feeling which has not been priced dear.
Thus visible world no longer stands before invading-overhauling intention
of this kind, let alone the fine, agreeable habit of existing and operating
in it: the realist, on the contrary, now becomes a driver-out of the highest
order. This must be conceded, even Mephisto here speaks, with regard
to the here responding counterparts, of desolation and loneliness, of the
untrodden, unwished-for, of flight from what has arisen, of unleashed
spaces, but of course equally of shaping, reshaping, of the eternal entertainment of the eternal sense; therefore even in this highest-reaching
breakthrough intention the Promethean does not remain in itself or alone.
But its still invisible element appears again in a material and in its still
utterly distinct appearance. And we should not fail to see, still less fail
to hear: this material of the Promethean, all that has been denoted by
venturing beyond, Don Giovanni, Don Quixote, Faust, now approaches
in its further developed form, though still thoroughly within the world
of art, in musical light. Thus the next formation of poetic venturing beyond
the limits which contradicts available existence occurs in the layer of
sound and its shaping, reshaping, in the tonal figures which it nevertheless
foreshadows of a world-figure, however distant. Hence the still undetermined
element in the layer of sound, but hence also the remarkably near and
festive atmosphere when Faust brings back what he has grasped from his
marvellous experience:
* Paust' , Part I, 634-9.
t Faust', Part II, 6271-4.
VENTURING BEYOND IN MUSIC
1057
From airy tones there streams a know-not-how;

And as they drift, all seems melodious flow.
The columns sound, the fluted triglyph rings,
I even think the very temple sings!"
It sings as unrestrained exodus and as extract, music is the supreme art
of utopian venturing beyond, whether it drifts or builds. The layer of
sound is certainly not always unrestrained, otherwise no triglyph could
ring, but more than anywhere else all figures of venturing beyond the
limits are accommodated, indeed even arrive in it. The world of sound,
even in the unrestrained, is certainly not demonic, or only with exceptions
(as can be found in Berlioz and Wagner), it is no dinosaur excess in the
field of the arts, but like no other art it incorporates the Luciferian, the
Promethean; all venturers beyond the limits to theabsolute moment are also tonal
characters. The Luciferian guiding panel is inscribed with the name of
Beethoven, venturers beyond the limits all belong to Beethoven's realm,
in Beethoven all music becomes a Prometheus overture, far beyond the
early, pioneering work which bears this name. The venturers beyond the
limits cross into this sphere from their moral sphere; provided that the
tonal layer has not become a linguistic and depictive space sui generis,
part of a different creation of environment. This is especially true in the
approach to the fulfilled moment in itself, with a head which outgrows
the world which has arisen, with the identity of the We and its world,
to which the Don Quixote and the Faust longing ultimately intends, instead
of alienation.
VENTURING BEYOND
AND MOST INTENSE WORLD OF MAN
IN MUSIC
51
If I could wish for something, I would wish for neither wealth nor power,
but the passion of possibility; I would wish only for an eye which, eternally
young, eternally burns with the longing to see possibility.
Kierkegaard, The Moment
'Faust', Part II, 6445-8. These lines are spoken by the Astrologer.
loS8
The tone goes with us and is We, not only as the graphic arts merely go
with us to the grave, though they previously seemed to point so far beyond
us into the severe, the objective, the cosmic, but as good works also go with
us beyond the grave; and this is precisely becausethe new, no longer pedagogical
but real symbol in music seems so very low, seems so much only a fiery outburst
in our atmosphere, although it is in fact a light in the most distant, but the
innermost heaven of fixed stars.
Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia

There is something overhauling and unconcluded in music which no poetry
can satisfy, unless it be the poetry which possibly develops music from itself.
At the same time the openness of this art shows in a particularly striking way
that even in the content-relation of other arts it is not yet the evening to end
all days.
Ernst Bloch, Subject-Object, Commentaries on Hegel
Happiness of the blind

To know itself, for this the mere I must go to others. In itself it is sunk
in itself, the inside lacks someone opposite it. But in this other person,
in whom an otherwise opaque interior grasps itself, it can easily go into
the alien again, away from itself. Only sounding, that which expresses
itself in sounds, is at all events also related back to an I or We. The eyes
roll back in this, it becomes significantly dark, so that the external at first
sinks and only a fountain appears to speak. It is very often the same one
which wells up and froths in attempted Being-Self, this restlessness now
hears itself. As a shaped longing and driving in itself, as a song which
runs on solitarily or entwines itself with others and always represents
invisible human features. Happiness of the blind begins with this, beneath
and above the things which exist. At the same time the tone expresses
what in man himself is still dumb.
The nymph Syrinx

It is not possible to avoid hearing a call in singing. This call began as
a cry, which expresses a drive and calms it at the same time. The human
cry was originally accompanied only by noise, by whirring, drumming,
rattling. This deafens and remains dull, an opposition of high and deep
arises, but nowhere a first move towards fixed pitch, let alone the creation
159
of a scale. This, i.e. music, began modestly, it came about only with the
invention of the shepherd's pipe or panpipe. This handy instrument, which
could be carried anywhere, comes from a different social class than the noiseproducing, frighteningly cultic musical instruments. Used mostly by
shepherds, the panpipe served for closer, more human feelings and their expression. It does not have to deafen or perform magic like the twirling stick,
cymbals, or the magically painted, itself magically worshipped drum. On
the contrary it remains, apart from pure entertainment, on the level of lovelonging and, where traces of magic remained, of love-enchantment. The
sound of the shepherd's pipe, the panpipe, or of the syrinx as the Greeks called
it (it means the same in all these cases),is supposed to reach the distant beloved.
Thus music begins longingly and already definitely as a call to that which is
missing. Among the Indians of the Rocky Mountains this belief is still
widespread today: the young Indian goes out on to the plain and laments
his love on the panpipe, at which the girl is supposed to weep, however far
away she is. The panpipe has sincecome a long way, it is the primeval ancestor
of the organ, but far more than this: it is the birthplace of music as a human
expression, a sounding wishful dream. To this not only an Indian beliefbears
witness but - precisely in its place - one of the loveliest tales of antiquity.
The origin and content of music are charmingly and allegorically indicated
in this tale. It was told by Ovid, who relates the following of the Arcadian
pipe and its content (Metam. I, 689-712): Pan was disporting with nymphs
and chased after one of them, the tree-nymph Syrinx. She flees from him,
she sees her way blocked by a river, she implores the waves, her 'Iiquidas
sorores', to transform her, Pan grabs for her and finds nothing but reeds in
his hands. During Pan's lamentations for his lost beloved, the breeze produces
sounds in the reeds, and their harmony moves the god. Pan breaks the reeds,
longer, then shorter ones, sticks the finely graded pipes together with wax
and plays the first tones, like the breeze, but with living breath and as a lament.
Thus the panpipe came into being, playing gives Pan the consolation of a
union with the nymph ('hoc mihi conloquium tecum manebit'*) who has
vanished and yet not vanished, who remained in his hands as the sound of
the flute. Thus far Ovid; memory of primeval times, of the primeval history
of music, as a pathos of lament for the absent, is intended in this tale, makes
it unsentimental and, along with true allegories, matter-of-fact. Quite apartfrom Pan, even geographically the panpipe did not originate in 'Greece but
in Eastern Asia in the third millennium B.C., it rapidly spread across
* 'this conversation with you will continue forever".
1060
the whole earth, especially among pastoral tribes. But gracefully and deeply
though the need for music is indicated in this tale, it describes just as truly
the small, momentous invention of music as human expression. Precisely
in the contrast of the syrinx with cult instruments and sound instruments,
with noises of the dull, screaming, howling, rattling kind. Into this cultic
world of sound the instrument now enters, which causes a well-ordered
tone series to be heard; and with the unity of syrinx and nymph Ovid
described the goal towards which the tone series moves, which has always
been a drawing of lines in the invisible. It is a contradictory-utopian goal:
this pipe-playing is the presence of the vanished; that which has passed
beyond the limit is caught up again by this lament, captured in this
consolation. The vanished nymph has remained behind as sound, she adorns
and prepares herself within it, plays to need. The sound comes from a
hollow space, is produced by the fecundating breeze and still remains in
the hollow spacewhich it causes to resound. The nymph became the reeds,
the instrument, like her, is called syrinx. Only even today it is still not
rightly known what music itself is called and who it is.
Bizarre hero and nymph: Symphonie fantastique

Something is lacking, the sound at least clearly expresses this lack. There
is something dark and thirsty about the sound itself, it wafts, does not
stick in one place like paint. This wafting and gliding can also be bad,
so that longing, as music, melts away, becomes marrowless. But if the
tone does not sit precisely in space, it can be set all the more sharply in
time, in the bar, in the well-aimed song. Precisely the sharp figures of
restlessness are unmistakably tuned in music, the familiar figures, the
venturers beyond the limits. Hoffmann's Conductor Kreisler plays the music
of that which, in all trees, wanted golden leaves, that which circulates
in all the starvelings of the unconditional. Most recognizably, i.e. erotically,
this unrestrained desire recurs in Berlioz, in his youthful 'Symphonie
fantastique'. It may therefore stand at the beginning, with its own nymph,
its bizarre nymph. The figures of venturing beyond all have an especially
strong utopian ferment, in Berlioz it is musically-erotically isolated. Again
the nymph Syrinx appears, as the maiden-theme she runs through the five
movements of the 'Symphonie fantastique'. This youthful work as a whole
is certainly not the best music, but it is very significant in its point of
longing. It is music which, in a sensational way, has utopian idee fixe in
1061
its head and carries it out in a bizarre hero, in a strange Helen. The
programme outlines the intention of the composer and the outermost,
as it were still extra-musical, doors of the work: a young artist sees the
girl who embodies in her person all his dreams. The beloved image never
appears to him except accompanied by a musical idea, a theme passionate
but noble and shy in character; this melody forms the idee fixe, one both
pursuing and pursued. The countersubject to the main theme comes in
the central movement, this second theme does not appear, as is usually
the case, in softness, but as blurredness, sleep, standstill. Out of the shrill,
often spasmodic developments the idea of the first theme returns, at first
darkened, sinking into ever deeper notes, then with great magnificence,
but always the magnificence of a mere image of longing, which has become
sharp and significant, vanishing. The return of the theme in C major at
the end of the first movement is happiness, but happiness unattained, it
is the star, but like the star in the distance. And Stella leaves the first
movement, entitled 'Dreams, Sufferings', goes through the scherzo, 'A
Ball', through an adagio, 'Scene in the Fields', which is certainly unique,
through the march-finale: 'On the Way to the Place of Execution', through
the fugue-finale: 'Dream on a Sabbath Night'. The scherzo brings the
theme into dance rhythms, the adagio transforms it into solitary recitatives,
into dialogue in audible fields - a voice alone, the other no longer answers,
complete stillness - there is distant thunder below the horizon. There is
a tremendous plain between the melos of the theme and the distant, sealed,
disparate thunder; in this adagio Berlioz produced a pastorale which is
equalled only in the mysticism of Chinese landscape paintings. The march
of the fourth and the bacchanale of the fifth movement, with a double
fugue consisting of Dies irae and witches' sabbath; cut to pieces and play
havoc with the theme; finally the beloved melody appears once again, rattled
off on the clarinet, limp, dirty and common. But always, even in the final
movement, Stella remains both absent and musically present. She sounds
even among the grimaces, the bacchanalian death-knells, the parodied Dies
irae with which the 'Symphonie fantastique' ends. It is the unenjoyed which
fills this great colportage of music; the Not-Yet, indeed even the Never,
likewise has its most characteristic existence from the air-roots of sound.
The pneumatic mesh of sound forms the location of the idee fixe or the
jungle through which the hunt towards it goes, Voices, which to others
are silent, Merlin hears gliding past; Berlioz, also one of the magicians
among composers, makes them loud. The above-mentioned drawing of
lines in the invisible in Berlioz becomes shrill, and the lament for Syrinx
1062
demonic. Here that which is absent, indeed unconditional, dwells not in the
finale, which is the most dubious part of every symphony anyway. It is
in the faint thunder of the scene in the fields, in the answer which is no
answer but which contains the unfound answer in the context which the
significant pause before the thunder produces in this coda. And this with
fine adagio and its evening-like, long-drawn-out, distantly defamiliarized
heath of sound, with a rest which is not silence.
Human expression as inseparable from music

The tone is not there to be sentimental or merely to be fiddled. Its purpose
is not to flood the listener, melting, womanish. When a violin sobs like
a human breast, this is not only a bad image but the violin is playing badly
or playing bad music. A sequence of tones whose expression fades in clear,
sober performance has never had any expression but a fraudulent one. But
as for the merely fiddled: the aversion to the languorous, to a sentimental
swamp of sound, must not deny the psychically charged nature of the
entire machinery of music. The mental as the volitional is so composed
with tone sequence that the latter even in its primal forms sets a striving
or a pull. There is a clear fall from the keynote after the fifth, the seventh
wants to be led downwards, the third to be led upwards, there is an
inclination of chords to combine with one another. Our sensitivity does
not do all the work here because there is already also an objective factor
in the relation of tones which invariably determines this sensitivity in one
way or another. Already the relation of the vibrating strings is heard
emotionally, this itself determines the first attraction as well as the first
pleasant consonance of tones. That which began so physically is carried
further by independent playing and by the even more independent social
art, otherwise the tone-life would not get beyond the fall of the fifth.
The tension of sound passes from being physical to being psychical, and
the most characteristic feature of melody: that in each one of its tones
the next one is latently audible, lies in the anticipating person, therefore
in the expression, which is here above all a humanized expression. There
would perhaps be music even if there were no ears, but there certainly
would be none if there were no musicianswho first composed the movement
of sound and its psychical energy, Faust-energy. They make music not
only their own expression but that of the time and the society in which
it arises, and thus an expression which is not only romantic or even
ostensibly-arbitrarily subjective. Innumerable human tensions come on top
1063
of the tension of the fifth and now make a more complicated cadence, i.e.
history of music. Social tendencies themselves have been reflected and have been
uttered in sound material, far beyond the unchanging facts of nature and far
beyond the merely romantic expressivo. No art is as socially conditioned as
the supposedly spontaneous, indeed mechanically self-righteous art of music;
it teems with historical materialism, precisely with the historical kind. To
incipient free enterprise corresponds the dominance of the melody-leading
treble and the mobility of the other voices,just as cantus firmus in the middle
and graded polyphony corresponded to societydivided into estates. No Haydn
and Mozart, no Handel and Bach, no Beethoven and Brahms, without their
respective precisely varied social mandate; it extends from the form of the
performance right to the characteristic style of the tonal material and its composition, to the expression, the meaning of the content. Handel's oratorios
in their festive pride reflect rising imperialist England, its aptness to be the
chosen people. No Brahms without the bourgeois concert society and even
no music of 'new objectivity' , * of supposed expressionlessness, without the
gigantic rise of alienation, objectification and reification in late capitalism.
It is the consumer class and its mandate, it is the emotional and goal-world
of the respective ruling class, which in each casebecomes expressive in music.
And at the same time music, by virtue ofits so immediately human capacity
of expression, has more than other arts the quality of incorporating the
numerous sufferings, the wishes and the spots of light of the oppressed class.
And again no art has so much surplus over the respective time and ideology
in which it exists, a surplus which of course certainly does not abandon the
human layer. It is the surplus of hope-material, even in the resounding
suffering occasioned by time, society, world, even in death; the 'Strike, 0
longed-for hour, longed-for hour, strike' of the Bach cantata goes through
the darkness and, as sound, by the fact that it can be there, gives an incomprehensible consolation. Expression ofa human content is therefore clearly not confined
to the Romantic, as if this were everything and everything else mere tonemachine. As if only Beethoven, in some of his slower movements, and then
most exorbitantly Wagner, had added this element to music: so that expression
in Wagner in places turns into a true sale, a selling-off of soul. Instead
it turns out, as will now have to be shown, that pre-Romantic music intended,
in connection with social content, an expression which confesses itself far
more naively than the modern. For the Greeks regarded even the panpipe
cr.
Vol. II, p. 73Sn.

The New Grove dictionary (1980) suggests cantata 53 is a spurious attribution to Bach.
as exciting, the lyre as idyllic, the Dorian key was regarded as powerful and
well-disposed, the Lydian as female, as that of passive feelings. Then the
vocalises* and jubilations of medieval music, they were not only flourishes
and melismatic sweeps, they overhauled precisely the word for the sake of
an utterly exalted expression. Hence Augustine says of the jubilus of the
hallelujah: 'When man is moved in the exaltation of joy, after a few sounds
which are not part of language and have no real meaning, he breaks into a
rejoicing without words, so that it appears that he is moved in such a song
ofjoy but cannot put into words what moves him.' Even the recitatives of
Peri and Monteverdi, in the first operas around 1600, took up medieval
vocalises and tropes, precisely as expressive. And the earlier, so much more
complicated art, the contrapuntal mesh of movement of the Dutch, certainly
did not preclude an expression sui generis, namely the late Gothic-Christian
one. That which is criticized in the work of the Dutch contrapuntalists as
'artificiality' or even as 'show-score', that which has been called the
formalism of decadent late Gothic, may be partly so only because its reanimation, in purely technical terms, has not yet been achieved. josquin
wrote a motet for 24 voices, containing a sixfold strict canon in every one of
the four parts, and nonetheless his contemporary Luther, in other respects an
enemy of scholasticism, says: 'Josquin is the master of notes; they had to do
what he wanted; other composers have to do what the notes want to do. '
This sentence can only refer to the rule of will and of expression which
permeated Josquin's gigantic filigree or many-tiered gigantic construction.
In the work of Palestrina and of Orlando di Lasso, as the harmonic style
begins to emerge, the unity of anima christiana and its tonal structure,
Raphaelite in the former, early Baroque in the latter, is quite evident. Indeed
Bach, the most learned and at the same time the most deeply soulful music,
makes the antithesis between expression and canon meaningless. Utterly
wrong though the romanticizing which occurred in Mendelssohn's rendering
of Bach is, equally an understanding of Bach cannot be achieved by mere
dead dismissal of Romanticism, as if nothing remained after it but reified
form. Bach- certainly cannot be used by interested enemies of all meaning as
lattice as such, let alone as a model of the apparatization which late capitalism
has certainly achieved. Here this 'new objectivity' in relation to Bach
reproduces with a supposedly positive significance the judgement which
was common half a century after Bach's death and which in fact submerged
him as the greatest musician. The judgement that Bach is mere music of the
* Vocalise: a musical passage sung on one vowel.
1065
intellect and uri-nature, is 'sexton's music without a spiritual tone' and a

mere bewigged arithmetical sum; a judgement incidentally which has many
similaritieswith that which is still passedon the great Dutch contrapuntalists.
This is now supposedly positively celebrated in Bach as 'absolute music',
and always with a polemical antithesis to the merely Romantic espressivo
which is quite unimportant for the nature of Bach's work and its specifIC
espressivo. The same antithesis had already filled and misguided Spitta's Bach
monograph in the eighteen seventies, the same unfruitful denial of all
affective lines, expressive lines, although almost all Bach's music consists of
these. And poorly overcome romanticism took revenge by again introducing
expressiveinterpretation allthe same, but now not even in the Mendelssohnian
style but in the style of the sentimental bower, of the supposedly pure
form with bower. As in the case of the symphonia at the beginning of
the second part of the Christmas Oratorio: according to Spitta, who is
otherwise so absolute-musical, 'the loveliness of the oriental idyll and the
solemnity of the starlit northern winter night' form 'the atmospheric
background to this symphonia', which, given the rough and lively flute and
violin music in this piece, is untenable even associatively, not only technically.
And it is instructive that Albert Schweitzer's later analysis of Bach, based
completely on the practice of playing Bach, substantiated the specific
espressivo of this music down to the finest detail. Schweitzer demonstrates,
right down to the visual pattern of the notes, down to the overheard gesture
of action and of emotion, what Bach's espressivo is about: in cantatas, in
chorales, in instrumental music. An inventory of documented expression
appears and precisely in it the melodic-rhythmic figures now grow and
develop, figures of emotion and also of its external movement. Such as the
figures of weariness, of pain, both agonizing and proud, ofjoy, both lively
and transfigured, of fear, ofjubilation. An unparalleled scale of expression
in Bach's work ranges from fear of death, longing for death to consolation,
confidence, peace, victory. No form, however closed, can stop it, no
continuo here can prevent the leap between extremes which, except in
love, appear and contrast only in the realm of religious emotion. It is the
contrast of '0 Golgotha, unhappy Golgotha' and 'The hero from Juda
conquers with power' in which this expressive Baroque moves, Baroque
in the abrupt peripeteia, Baroque above all in the turbulent Christian content
of feeling. Not least the dialogue cantatas between Jesus and the soul belong
here or those between consolation and despair t in resounding allegory.
Indeed so powerful is the prevalenceof Bachian expression that the following
diagnosis by Schweitzer of the choral movements in Bach's cantatas and
1066
Passions may not even appear extravagant: 'From the viewpoint of pure
music, Bach's harmonizations are completely mysterious, because he does
not set out in search of a sequence of tones which forms an aesthetic whole
in itselfbut allows himself to be led by the poetry and the verbal expression.
How far he dares to depart in this endeavour from the natural principles of
the pure movement can be seen in the harmonization of "Should it ever be
that punishment and pain" in the cantata' 'Who will redeem such a wretched
man as me" (No. 48), which as pure music seems almost unbearable because
Bach is trying to express the entire wild pain of sin in the words ... Rather
than resigning himself simply to writing beautiful music for the text, he
attempts the possible and the impossible in order to discover a feeling in the
words which, multiplied by a certain heightening emotion, becomes portrayable in music' (A. Schweitzer, '}. S. Bach', I9SI, pp. 403, 408).Although
this is written still too powerfully under the spellof neo-Romantic expression,
Schweitzer is completely right in terms of the centre, in that of the ruling
musical precept of language. Indeed on top of the expressive power of the
individual tone-sketches which Schweitzer quotes in especiallylarge number
comes not least that of true tone-paintings, particularly in terms oflegendary
diffusions of emotion. Modulations of key frequently occur purely for the
sake of reflecting mythical processes ofjubilation, most clearly in the theme
of the Resurrection. As in the music to the 'Et exspecto resurrectionem
mortuorum'" in the Mass in B minor, the exspecto appears hesitant,
doubting, the bass sings six notes down the scale, then comes a stop, and
now follows the transformation which confirms the expectation: the keys
run through their modulations from G minor to A major to D minor to the
D major of a vivace allegro in which the trumpets come in, Bach's invariable
tone-colour of victory. And the primacy ofexpression merely operates more
covertly in Bach's purely instrumental music, which is not opened to emotion
by any text-world. Certainly the fugue contains no lyrical-emotional, but
instead dynamic tension of expression, it is compressed in the theme, the
exposition raises the theme contrapuntally up to eight voices and resolves
it victoriously. So here too there can be no question of observance of laws
for their own sake or even of a formalistic isolation from the Humanum which
at that time carried a heavy burden but protested all the more hotly in the
heights. Equally expressive in its nature, although in its final expression still
unconquered, is the crystal-music in the organ fugues, with all their crystal;
it is here least autarkical of all. And the more worldly works from Bach's
* 'And I await the resurrection of the dead. '
1067
Cothen period, above all the Brandenburg Concertos, their magnificent and
elegant structure, their variations and their thematic intensification of fullness,
display a highly sociable-dynamic expression; it does not blossom out of arithmetical sums, Thus expressionis also part of pre-Romantic music, is immanent
to good musical form and pinned only on bad musical form. It is not blown
into good musical form by expressive performance, rather the rendering, however much it has to make the spirit of the lines and forms sound, finds it in the
lines and forms themselves, and of course only in these. In the forms not
as reification and an end in themselves but as means towards a word-surpassing
or wordless statement, ultimately always towards the shaping of a - call.
When people go into the meadows of Biedermeier" , the sentimental voice
often breaks in. It exaggerates or overheats greatly, emits soul free of charge,
is effect without cause. It is found in Romantic music, only in this, but
significantly never in its well-worked passages. And it is not desire for expressionlessness but for genuine musically-founded expression which objects to
an addition which makes the nymph Syrinx greasy and the ancestral
desiderium in music cheap. Yet better origins of this falsefeeling are certainly
not lacking, they are probably connected with a warm popular tone as the
popular ballad began to disappear. The damage begins as early as the intonation of the count in the last act of The Marriage of Figaro: '0 Angel, forgive
me'; it continues in Florestan's 'In the Spring Days of Life' . It culminates,
among other things, in the prize-song of the otherwise so robustly-powerful
'Meistersinger', it makes itself deeply felt in the 'Recordare Jesu pie't of
Verdi's otherwise so thoroughly authentic Requiem; finally it presents itself
with all the heat of the cello, if not cynically, in the heartfelt tone of the dyer:
'You are entrusted to my care' , in Strauss' 'Woman without a Shadow' .
All these are mere side-examples, but in pre-Romantic music their pastoso
would have had no place at all, and in Romantic music it is a danger. In
Wagner, for example, in many passages, particularly in 'The Ring', shrill
or with Wotan-mellifluousness, for all the genius. The unique expressive
advance, the sleep-motif, Erda-motif in 'The Ring', the madness and
Midsummer Day motif in the 'Meistersinger', and so many treasures, deep
insights, the unrest-homesickness power of this music and of its articulations
were too often paid for by long indulgence in autarkical sing-song rhetoric.
Among great poets only Schiller was dogged by the spell of a lopsided.,
Biedenneier: the period of bourgeois culture in Gennany before 1848, characterized by its
domestic style. See Vol. I, p. 324".
t 'Holy Jesus remember'. From Thomas de Celano's thirteenth-century sacred poem 'Dies
Irae", the text for the 'Requiem'.
~o68
expressiveness, one which by no means coincides with pathos, not even With
false pathos. The alien element is manifold, it lies in the meaningless languor
of the Romantic violin tone, in the bombastic, threatening songs of Wagner
heroines, it is everywhere effect from affects or affect from effects.
Undoubtedly the music of high Romanticism was particularly at risk here,
and undoubtedly there were causesfor this which in more progressive regions
have at least been seen through and are no longer affirmed. The social cause
was the broad bourgeoisie of the large towns with its need for amorphous
nerve-stimulation, and on top of this above all the petit bourgeoisie with
its cut-price consumption of feeling. Technically, the psychical, all too
psychical alien element was promoted by middle parts used in pictorial rather
than plastic fashion, by heavy instrumentation, rhythm which was
languorous or over-heated on principle. Tchaikovsky is frequently an entire
monument to this kind of espressivo (not forgetting the first act of The
Valkyrie). But of course such extravagance is neither the real expression of
Romantic music nor even in this music is its real expression divorced from
great technical structure or pinned to it. Expression is and remains so much
the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quem of music that good music shapes
it as necessarily as bad music trumps it up and makes the espressivo into its
opposite: meaninglessness. All unformed, illegal expression in Romanticism,
which discredited it, is not under discussion, the mere body-heat, stableheat, cow-heat of music, as Thomas Mann says, which lacks strict regulation
and delight in laws. This is the refuse of Romanticism, not the classicism
which Romanticism represents precisely in music. The quartet in 'Fidelia',
the quintet in the 'Meistersinger', contain canonical-Romantic expressive
music; both, for this very reason, are also the best-constructed. It is just
as impossible not to hear their voice-control because of their spiritualization
as it is conversely impossible not to hear the pathos immanent for example
in the Crucifixus of Bach's Mass in B minor because of its magnificent contrapuntal miraculous construction. It is true that Romantic music has sometimes
also given its expression literary signposts which are superfluous (Beethoven's
Pastoral Symphony's title) or which in fact do not lead to the best (elaborate
programme symphonies from Berlioz to Strauss). But even here an intramusical business was still being run: music was to be educated through
the already given imaginary sequence to ever greater expressive definiteness.
It was of course again a danger that music, contrary to its latent expressive
power which goes far beyond all known words, was interpreted as the
mere illustration of literary aids to imagination. However, even here and
all the more so in all higher settings of texts to music, the textual expressive
1069
stimulus serves only the most characteristic aspiration of music: to be,

to find, to become, language sui generis. Indeed because the expressive
power of music lies beyond all known names, in the end expression in
music is no longer under discussion at all but music itselfas expression. This
means the entirety of its intending, signifying, depicting and of that which it
depicts in such a clouded but, in both senses ofthe word, moving way. And music
- in its polyphonic form such a young art - goes towards this alone, towards
the hour of its own language, of its poesis a se which is pre-formed in
powerful expression and nonetheless still unknown. This language of course
comes exclusively from absolute music, not from any fixed text superimposed on it. To use a comparison of Wagner's, all literature set to great
music bears the same relation to the nameless expressive power of music
as a commentary by Gervinus to a play by Shakespeare. Musical expression
as a whole is thus ultimately a vice-regent for an articulation which goes much
further than anything so far known. This has already occurred, with varying
reference, in all great music, but even in this it is only fully audible when
the hour of language has come in a music which breaks through into
language. Brangane still takes for the sounding of horns what Isolde in
the silence of the night hears as a spring; that is to say that every form
of music so far will, if by virtue of achieved musical poesis a se such keenness
of hearing was to be achieved, later cause to be heard and publish expressive
content quite different from allexpressive content it has so farproduced. In contrast,
the expression of music heard so far might appear like the babbling of
a child, like a language of a final kind seeking to form itself but which
has only approximately formed itself in a few highest places; no one can
yet understand it, although it can happen that people sense what it means.
But no one has yet heard Mozart, Beethoven, Bach asthey truly call, name, teach;
this will happen only much later, in the fullest after-ripening of these and
of all great works. Hence without the veil over the ears and throughout
music at its own time and place, the veil which is there because the tone
does not yet have or allow to be heard the full speaking light of its
understanding. Among the arts, music has a very special juice, * suitable
for the invocation of that still wordless something which is added instrumentally to the song and in the sung word may also penetrate to its undertone
and surplus. The utopian art of music, in its polyphonic fonn still so young,
is thus itself moving towards its own utopian career, of thoroughly
developed exprimatio (in the and instead of the sentimental or even
* Cf. 'Faust' Part I, 1740.
I
1070
descriptive espressivo). The utopicum of this expression is the hour of

language in music, understood as keenly hearing; is a poesis a se with passwords
allowing entry into the material tone-nature of all that wells up while,
indeed after, it has become to a greater or lesserextent adequate appearance.
This adequateness to our own core and to all other cores has not yet come
out; its affectively, but not only affectively, beating conscience, its rhythmicmelodic calling which occurs in the works of great masters: this means
at this end music. 'If we could name ourselves, our true head would appear,
and music is one great subjective theurgy' (Ernst Bloch, Geist der Utopie,
1918, p. 234), in other words a theurgy which proposes to sing, to invoke,
that which is essential and most like proper human beings. This song and
its expression are subjective, far more so than in other arts apart from
lyric poetry; to this extent experience of music provides the best access
to the hermeneutics of the emotions, especially the expectant emotions.
But music is also subjective in a significantly different sense in that its
expression not only mirrors the affective mirror which in the emotions referred
to mirrors society in each case andworld as it is happening, but in that it comes
close to the subject-based hearth and agent of that which is happening, to
a subject-based Outside. This agent is still fermenting beneath everything
that is already determined, and that has not yet come out in pronounced,
objective form; therefore the expression of music is also still fermenting,
has not yet come out in complete, definable form. This objectiveundetermined element in the expressed, depicted content of music is the
(provisional) shadow of its virtue. Thus music is that art of pre-appearance
which relates most intensively to the welling core of existence (moment)
of That-Which-Is and relates most expansively to its horizon; - cantus
essentiam fontis vocat. *
Music as canon and world of laws; harmony of

the spheres, more humane lode-stars
It was all the more necessary to work very soberly and drily with the
wafting element in the tone. Craft continued to be highly honoured here,
even when among painters it declined or was completely forgotten. Even
playing the recorder has to be learnt, the waltz, jazz, have rules which
must be known, every mistake is audible. Nonetheless musical craft, which
* 'singing summons the existence of the fountain'.
~NTURING
BEYOND IN MUSIC
1071
is so far removed from sentimental spectres, never existed independently

or in abstract form. It has, from its very beginnings with Syrinx, human
needs, socially changing mandates behind it. It is clear how greatly the
very means and techniques of such a sociable art are determined by the
respective social conditions; how deeply society extends even into soundmaterial, material which is certainly not spontaneous or naturally given.
The equally suspended temperament which is confined within octaves is
so clearly historically produced that it is only a few centuries old. The
sonata form, with the conflict of two subjects, with keynote, development,
recapitulation, presupposes capitalist dynamics; the stratified, completely
undramatic fugue presupposes class, static society. So-called atonal music
would not be possible in any other periods than those of late-bourgeois
decline, it responded to this as bold helplessness. The twelve-tone technique,
which leaves the dynamic relation between dissonance and consonance,
modulation and cadence behind it to form still, severe sequences, would
have been unthinkable in the age of free competition. Indeed it was only
from 1600 onwards, in fact only from 1750 to 1900, that the history of
music was a history of dissonance and cadence. Even the musical forms,
not only their expression, are therefore dependent on the respective relation
of men to men, are its reflection. Often a reified reflection of course, one
strangely detached from the heard expression, even the Humanum of music.
Precisely because of this the illusion could arise that there were two kinds
of music: that of the fully sung-out feeling of the soul and that of the
pure, almost mechanically autarkical form. Thus the controversy between
the two appears not only in the musical work but also in various apparently
incompatible interpretations of the meaning of the word music. Sometimes
it has to designate the utterly inchoate, the mere mood, and the eeriness
of the tone is appropriate to this; whereas at other times it conversely
designates combinatory-schooled mastery, in the control of voice, not of
mood. Sometimes the musical is regarded as diffuse vagueness, along the
lines of Schiller's self-observation: 'A certain musical state of mind comes
first, and with me it is only then that the poetic idea follows.' The Hegelian
Christian WeiBe expressed this in his aesthetics by assigning music the
lowest place among the arts; so that the spirit of the ideal in the world
of sound still weaves, formless, within itself, and it is only in the plastic
arts that it unfolds, only in poetry that it expresses itself in concentrated
form (cf. Lotze, Geschichte der Asthetik, 1868, p. 455f.). Whereas at other
times the musical is regarded as the highest structuredness, indeed as a
piece of mathematical Ratio that almost by a kind of misunderstanding
1072
has entered into the unsound machinery of art, like Saul among the prophets.
The subject status of music in the quadrivium of medieval university courses
remains influential here: music, together with arithmetic, geometry and
astronomy, consituted a science. It was the Pythagorean, mathematicalastronomical theory of music which gave this art its place in the quadrivium,
which indeed exalted it into a very superior, cosmically regulated science.
According to this view, music was anything but a shapeless roaring or
warm foggy fulfilment; on the contrary, Kepler connected it to the heavenly
bodies, to the realm of purest revolutions, to the most objective realm
in the world. Here it does not surge from feeling but pours down from
the planets, primarily on to the earth and only then on to men: "The work
and the destiny of the earth-soul is to stimulate the perspiration of the
earth, so that rain may be produced and the earth moistened for our benefit.
To this work it is driven by the stimulus of the aspects, as it were a heavenly
music; it does not do a stroke unless heaven calls the tune ... But the reason
for the comparison of the astronomical aspects with music is that the circle
divided according to aspects and the monochord divided according to
harmonies have the same divisions' Qohannes Kepler in seinen Briefen,
1930, I, p. 289f.).Thus while music in the sense of mood is lodged entirely
in vagueness, music in the sense of proportion, the art of composition,
has from the earliest times been mathematicized. While music as mood
is supposed to cease to be music once it has .been arranged comprehensibly, and therefore passed over into plastic art, into poetry, music as form,
as proportion, is supposed to become all the more itself the more it expresses
itself in accordance with laws and is cosmographic. While music as mood
remains in the shaft of the soul, indeed seems the most chthonic of all
arts, so-called musica mathematica becomes completely Uranian, lands in
heaven. These are therefore utterly different controversies than those
between expression and form, although they are related to them, on a
higher theoreticalleveI. And the effect is that the great sophistication of
musical craft particularly easily becomes reified at times when expressive
contents are rare. It has been said that the composer combines in his person
the shaman and the engineer; but only the engineer, now that Romantic
exuberance is discredited, seems more modern. Thus precisely the craft
of music is denied its expressive mandate, it is utterly allied with the physics
of sound, though this is highly developed. Not only melos without
expression arises as a problem here but - from the perspective of the ideal
and the image of perfection of the autarkical canon - melos without ego at
all, music based on laws. Again and again the Pythagorean, indeed the
1073
Keplerian background darkly announces itself: music appears as a structure

of voices which follow or circle in extra-human order. This order may
itself be the most matter-of-fact, indeed a law about mere contingency;
Scarlatti's Cat Fugue is most often cited here because it was given its theme
from the keys pressed down by a cat running across a piano. In particular
the order may be extra-human in a more sublime way; then the delight
in laws is so great that even the appearance of these laws in expressive
music is not disdained, as for example in the adagio of Bruckner's Sixth
Symphony, where a scale passes itself the golden pails" slowly through
three octaves - a popular example of music existence (even Beethoven does
something similar in the finale of the Pastoral Symphony) from welltempered physics of sound and ostensibly nothing else. In general, through
a supposedly extra-human order music as expression is not so much rejected
as surpassed, or at least replaced. Instead of being psychical expression,
it now appears as cosmic impression, as the depiction of cosmic conditions;
approximately as architecture believed it was becoming greatest, most
perfect, when it was imitating the structure of the world. Though
formalistic music may lack the structure of the world as its model, it
does not lack the belief in subjectless order, in music as law instead of
music as existence. From this perspective harmonic theory and counterpoint
seem to be as autarkical as they are transparent, and always transparent to
the mathematical-physical. Since numbers and formulae cannot be heard, at
least forces are supposed to be discerned in music which can also be found
in mechanical processes, in dynamics and statics; such as gradient, discharge,
balance and the like. However, there is less talk of the dialectic of nature
here, despite the division in the topic and structure of the sonata. Even
nature as a human cipher, heard through music, is left out of consideration
by an external series which has become one-sided; for in such merely reified
law-theory only mechanics then appears on the horizon, a mere reflection
of apparatization in a secularized former Keplerian nature. Thus, with clear
relation to the base, the extra-human in the late bourgeois anti-expression
theory of music and of its forrn-reification can very easily become antihuman; objectivity then interprets itself exclusively as accordance with
alien law. 'If music be the food of love', says Shakespeare; but from the
hypostatized Cat Fugue there is no path to the nymph Syrinx and none
to venturing beyond self, to the utopian wellspring- and existence-sound.
However this distinction is also artificial, just as artificial and abstract as
* Cf. Goethe's 'Faust', Part I, 4S0. See also Vol. II,
p. 846.
174
that between expression and good form, which in reality are one and gladly
stand by each other. Likewise music as a harmonic-contrapuntal world of
laws only conflictswith music asa utopian existence-soundwhen the world
of laws, i.e. the specific perfection of its means, has been reified and made
absolute; when the goal-image: best musicis lost in musicwithout an epithet,
in the mere self-guaranteeof melodic-contrapuntal consequence; when the
counterpoint has become a kind of auditory formal fetish. But the moment
this making absolute is avoided and neither musicin which nothing expressive
can be felt occurs nor the science corresponding to it is rampant in which
nothing revealing can be thought of, then the sodeepandfar-aiming intention
of music blossoms out and sets out on its way preciselyin its theory ofform.
Against the merelywafting, againstthe unlocalized warmth of tone, the craft
then mediates definitely a world of laws, not an automatic one but that of the
Mozartian, Bachian, amdBeethovenian humanities which have not yet become
the canon but havebecome canonical. And here even the last transparencyof
a craft made absolute: the cosmos-reference of music, i.e. the harmony of the
spheres secularized againand again,ultimatelyno longercauses damage,indeed
has to servefor the best. For the best and the pre-depictive, which precisely
also causes nature to sound as a - pastorale, in a humanely signficant way.
Thus the tone now goes out a long way, and it has armed itself for the
journey. The formed tone hasprecise rule and finn understanding- for which
painters have always envied it. The musical craft was of all guild trades the
earliest to be rationalized, it consisted not only of empirically tested tricks of
the trade and professional secrets of the masters. The art of measurement and
the rule of true proportion with which Leonardo and Durer experimented had
already, mutatis mutandis, long existedin the musical canon. One mainreason
for this salutary rationalization was the classical tradition which introduced
music as a science. Thus music becameone of the sevenartes liberalesof the
medievaluniversity and was included in the quadrivium. * Certainly a high
pricewas paid for this tradition, through the exaggeration of numericalproportion, and it was almost without connection to musical practice, indeed
Pythagorean speculations were a hindrance to this practice. Nonetheless, the
traditional rationalization was a blessing for the polyphony which began in
the eleventh century; it was not Pythagoras but rather the closeness to the
scholasticmode of thinking and teaching which made possiblethe miracles
of subtletyconstructedby the Burgundian-Flemish contrapuntalists. Painters
The higher division of the seven liberal arts in the Middle Ages. The quadrivium consisted
of the mathematical sciences, i.e, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music.
1075
made their empirical way through the workshops, stonemasons had their
lodge, with an often mysterious interweaving of the art of measurement
and Gnosis passed on through oral tradition, but at the same time as richer
polyphony its rational books of theory are already found, a 'Speculum
musicae' by Jean de Muris, by Jacob ofLiege in 1330, as well as an 'Ars nova'
and'Ars contrapuncti' by Philipp of Vitry. And a connection appeared which .
so far has not been pursued at all and yet maintains the proud rationality of
counterpoint even today: the connection with scholastic logic, ormore precisely
with itsforms of combination. It is significant that Boethius, the same writer
who in his' Ars musica' handed down the Greek science of music, translated
and commented on Aristotle's Logic for the same world and in many cases
for the same people. Abelard praised Boethius as the epitome of all insight
in matters of music; and although this judgment changed in the contrapuntal
centuries after Abelard, it was supported by the authority of the various conversiones and contrapositiones of a proposition in logic which Boethius had
likewise been the first to mediate. The difference between rules of art in
counterpoint and rules of truth in logic did not stand in the way of this crossconnection. For apart from the status of musie in the quadrivium as one of
the seven artes liberales, scholastic logic had long since ceased to be
epistemologically targeted, asAristotelianlogichad been. On the contrary,

it had largely developed into a formal theory of consequence, especially in
the conversions ofjudgments, for example in textbooks from Petrus Hispanus
onwards. Counterpoint is the variation of the theme in severalvoices, ex una
voce plures faciens; by inversion, imitation, reversion and so on. Scholastic
logic taught variations and combinations of formal elements of judgment, ex
uno judicio plures faciens; -through conversion, contraposition, subalternation, modal consequence and so on. On top of these deductions come modes
of conclusion or those modi of the conclusive figures which are based on the
various combinatory possibilitiesof premises; the theory of combination itself
had been borrowed from mathematics even in Alexandria. Ofcourse it is not
possible to compare the 'arithmetical sum' of the fugue (it was also known as
conseguenza in fourteenth-century Italy) and the 'jigsaw puzzle' of scholastic
logic more closely; the material is too different for this. But the spirit, which
even in logic from Petrus Hispanus onwards was essentially one of formalcorrect exposition, is strikingly similar in both fields. It is the rationalism oJunfolding and subsumption, in contrast to the newer rationalism ofdevelopment and production. This inheritance gives musical form, apart from the
danger mentioned above, a significant dignity, especially when this is linked
with the articulated expression for the embodiment of which it exclusively
1076
serves. And now again we come to the most famous support of the entire
musical delight in laws: theharmony of thespheres anditsdaughter, thecosmic
theory of music. For there is in its mythical-utopian archetype yet another
essence besides that which the half..P ythagoras, namely the ostensible
correlate of mere laws of music as such, has become. And the task is now
to break open this other essence in a humane way, in a connection, itself
broken, with the cosmic theory of music. This theory ruled for all too
long, but it taught the work of music to think very highly of itself. With
the Pythagorean prohibition of the third and the sixth it hindered the
development of music, but it provided the music which arose in spite of
this with ambition towards a tremendous correlate. It is incurable astral
myth, but it gave the dream of musical perfection a counterpart to what
the supposed canon of the world structure had been in architecture for
so long (cf. Vol. II, p. 714ff.). Indeed whereas this latter canon (right
up to Solomon's temple) often operated only poetically or in secret schools,
the music of the spheres, precisely in scholastic Ratio itself, from its
beginnings until far beyond it, was assigned to earthly..learned music as
its ideal model: 'Early medieval musical theory was as faithful a follower
of the music of the spheres as the Pythagorean school itself... Thus the
proposition of the Church Fathers that church music came from God and
had its model in the singing of the heavenly hosts found as it were
philosophical support' (Abert, Die Musikanschauung des Mittelalters, 195,
p. 154). The Solomon's temple of music was called the song of the planets,
from Augustine onwards the song of angels; the intervals, which the
Pythagoreans had equated with the distances between the planets, now
corresponded to the ordines angelorum. Although even in Christianity
the connection with the planets never broke: Ambrosius, who founded
Christian church music, taught precisely the mysterious music of the
universe as the prototype and model of earthly music; he said that King
David had introduced the art of psalmody (the heavens sing the glory of
the eternal God)" in imitation of the music of the planets. The Carolingian
scholar of music Aurelian of Reome, one of the most influential renewers
of Greek keys, certainly established a connection between the eight keys
and the planetary movements; hut at the same time his musical discipline
taught: 'In hoc (sc. cantandi officio) angelorum choros imitamus. 't Thus
the framework of music became a cosmic as well as a holy one, with
Cf. Gellert, Geistliche Oden und Lieder, I7S7.
r 'In this [i.e. the discipline of singing) we imitate the choirs of the angels.'
177
gradations in which Ptolemy and mystical emanation met. Boethius had

already taught the following order, going from above to below: musica
mundana, the movement of the universe attuned according to proportion
and number; musica humana, the ensemble playing of body and soul; musica
instrumentalis as the lowest, audible emanation. The heavenly heptachord
was assigned to the intervals and keys, the chorus of angels to early Christian
antiphonal and responsorial music, but even the Novum: the polyphonic
canon, did not grow up without the guiding image of the music of the
spheres. From Arabian musical theory (Alfarabi) had come the simile of
the blossoming tree, whose branches by virtue of. their numbers are in
beautiful proportion, whose blossoms are the various consonances, whose
fruits the sweet harmonies (cf. Abert, l.c., p. 17S). The simile of the worldtree is an age-old oriental one, probably far older than that of the planetary
spheres, but it was now able to combine with the incipient Gothic latticework of music. When of all people the mensuralist Marchettus of Padua
uses it around 1300, then not without connection to the art
of singing several differently mensurated tones in descant against one, i.e
the emerging art of counterpoint. If music thus itself becomes a richly
subdivided structure and a many-branched tree, this polyphony and its
entwinement does not depart from the astral order: choirs of angels are
also in the polyrhythmic, polyphonic continuo. This in spite of the
completely new musical form, even in spite of the scepticism towards the
harmony of the spheres which begins towards the close of the Middle Ages.
A deliberate imitation of musica mundana, as the best, is found in the
motets of Philipp of Vitry, the contrapuntalist mentioned above. Although
it appeared as ks nova, i.e. as a bourgeois, free, imaginative art, its melodies
proceed in strict uniformity and periodically, without change of rhythm,
a conscious 'imitation' of the revolutions of the planets. This kind of thing
was theoretically substantiated in the above-mentioned, contemporaneous,
'Speculum musicae' ofJacob of Liege, a complete summary of the graded
world-picture in tones. The universality of music is defended and
scholastically ordered; it now ranges from the 'res transcendentales et
divinae', through stars, people, animals, plants, stones, down through
the entire cathedral of the world. And when the hierarchical world-picture
reflected in heaven was shattered, the harmonies of the spheres did not
cease to resound in art. Not the 'touches of sweet harmony' which, as
Lorenzo explains and shows to Shylock's daughter, * are the stars; not
*
CE. 'The Merchant of Venice", V, i.
these sublime sound-figures of memory: 'The sun resounds with its old
song/Competing with its brother spheres.' * And natural science, which
removed such gods from the world, was in its early stages still deeply
embedded in Pythagoreanism. Kepler himself, one of the shatterers of the
old world-picture, clung to the music of the spheres, even described it
according to the counterpoint of his age. In Kepler, the 'lyra Apollinis
vel Solis' has become a Baroque orchestra, in full polyphony: 'The planetary
motions are therefore nothing but a continuing harmony ... all in a sixvoiced movement as it were' (with the six planets as individual voices)
'organizing and interrupting the infinity of time with these notes. And
thus moreover it is not remarkable that man, the imitator of his creator,
has arrived at the understanding of this polyphonic music which was sealed
to the ancients, so that in the brief fraction of an hour he-depicts the constant
flow of world history with an elaborate polyphonic structure of sound
and thus enjoys, in the sweetest feeling of bliss, something like the creative
joy of God in his work, a feeling which music, imitating God, imparts
to him' (Harmonices mundi V, chap. 7). Finally, as might be expected,
the Romantic philosophy of nature made a further contribution to the
old magic of heaven, most audibly in Schelling: his 'Philosophy of Art'
seeks 'to fix the highest meaning of rhythm, harmony and melody'
astronomically once again. Here, rhythm and one-voice melody such as
the classical world possessed are assigned to the world of the planets, whereas
harmony and counterpoint, as supposedly intricate movement, are assigned
to the - comets. But otherwise the entire astronomical theory of music
is renewed again here, though of course it was already as alien to contemporary music as it was cosmically constructed: 'On the wings of harmony
and of rhythm the heavenly bodies hover; what has been called centripetal
and centrifugal force is nothing but - rhythm in the latter, harmony in
the former. Borne up by the same wings, music hovers in space, in order
to weave an audible universe from the transparent body of sound and tone'
(Werke V\ p. 503). Therefore, the history of the harmony of the spheres
remains the history of the canonical structure of the world in music, and then of
the Solomon's temple in music, hence of the most highly intended formutopia. Of course this form-utopia is utopian only as one remote in space,
its wishful dream is regarded as already existing in another place. Wishful
time, and consequently real utopia, enters into these variations on the
harmony of the spheres, into the supposed harmonic completeness of
* 'Faust't Prologue, 2.43-4.
1079
creation, only in so far as its wishful space is not thought of as being filled
with the music of angels per se but with the music of a future Jerusalem.
This occurs in older accounts of - a happy death, where the departing
soul, passing away in a state of grace, believes he can hear the joy to come
singing from the Beyond. This lives on in the various references to - musical
miracles until well into the Baroque, one which stands for many others
being in the book 'On the three seculis', 1660, by the Joachite and
Rosicrucian Sperber: 'When in 1596 a chapel without a door was
unexpectedly found in Jerusalem, a lovely harmony was .heard within,
like an angelic or heavenly musica. Thus there was no doubt that the
new saeculum and the joyful time would then begin in a few years, when
with eternal joy of heart we will hear the entire heavenly musicam of
which the earthly is only the beginning.' And in connection with this
we recall, in a region which is certainly not heretical, the above-mentioned
exclamation of Pius IV on hearing Palestrina's Marcellus Mass: 'Here a
John in the earthly Jerusalem gives us a sensation of that song heard by
John the apostle in the heavenly Jerusalem, prophetically enraptured.' (cf.
Vol. II, p. 833). An epigonic echo of this kind is to be found in Pfitzner's
'Palestrina', at the end of the first act, where the creation of the Marcellus
Mass is portrayed: one angel's voice, then several, then dizzying depths
of angelic choirs sing the movement to the 'inspired' composer. A truly
still believed background of heavenly enthronement is intended in
Bruckner's majestic triads, a reverberation of cherub voices seems to be
reflected in the octave leap, divided into fifths, which runs through his
Te Deum. And now: the hypostatized mythic element in the astral as well
asthe Christian-astral wishful orientation is clear beyond all discussion, although
even theoretically it still has not died out to- this day. Nevertheless, the
positive aspect in this incurable astral myth of music should not be denied,
the positive element which denotes its breaking-down, humane-utopian
breaking-open and this only. The positive element of a very greatly
conceived form-correlate of true music should be correctly estimated, but
with concrete-utopian rejunctioning into macranthropos. There certainly are
stars in music, but they are stars which have formed only as human names.
There certainly are sublime orders in harmonic theory and counterpoint,
but they are called Mozart or Bach or Beethoven, and their substance is
the existere expressed through these categories, in the close medium of
sound. There certainly is a transparent relation, if not of harmony then
of rhythm and of counterpoint, but it does not operate from some detached
structure of these forms itself, let alone from the so long believed-in music
1080
of the universe, but from the great composers and their All, which has
objectified itself in these forms. After such objectification has occurred,
a counterpoint can certainly be applied, not to a kingdom of higher laws
but to the sounding-utopian subject-object content as it is articulated by
Mozart or Bach or Beethoven; - by virtue of this inward force a universe
also sounds. And the supposed world-temple which resounds as music?
It was useful because it prevented this seemingly so subject-bound art from
becoming sounding privateness. Precisely this is the best for which the
harmony of the spheres did serve and could serve: it wrested music from
the mere inner light, especially from mere psychology. But if even architecture according to 'cosmic proportions' never let people forget that it was
primarily and ultimately oriented to social needs and human proportions,
then this was even more true of music which, like no other art, is related
to the latent subject and to the object which entirely corresponds to it.
The language sought and intended in music therefore lies much further
beyond existing designations and even beyond the Becomenesses designated
in them than any other art. It overhauls the settled known facts of the
contents of feeling and every already clear, fixed Becomeness of scenery;
it does so even where music, in the song, the oratorio and the opera, seems
merely to provide an accompaniment to a text. Music reflects reality in
the aura-appearances of its 'naturing' which have not yet been controlled
or grasped in pictorial or even often in poetic terms. What skilled music
thus conveys, in utterance as emotional as it is illuminating, is intensive
root, signalled social tendency, or - in the varied pastorale - a newly
de-reified world of nature overheard as a sound-figure. Thus music, even
as the delight in laws of composition and precisely as such, talks the
premonitory language of that which fills the human and the humanly related
bosom of all existence, therefore belongs largely to the thrusting unrest and
dawning possibility in realitate. Here music is undoubtedly just as much
threatened by mere animal blood-warmth with regard to its intensiveness
as by all too great openness, by a still general lack of clarity with regard
to its gigantic horizons, but both precisely are the (provisional) dark side
of its expressive virtue which ventures forward so deeply and so far. And
above all: from the Gregorian chant onwards, music is applied to the
tendency to moral order and to a harmony which sounds up - even without
the myth of the spheres and the stars. Music therefore, historically and
objectively, proves itself to be essentially Christian art, its harmony of
the spheres breaks down and at the same time reveals itself: towards the
wellspring sound of as yet unachieved se!fshaping in the world.
1081
Tone-painting, work of nature once again,

the intensity and morality of music
It is not self-evident that the tone should be able to indicate anything
external and be related to it. For it dwells precisely where the eyes have
no say any more, where a different round dance begins. Nonetheless, the
sound does not only remain within, on the contrary its interior has a
subterranean relation to that outwardness which is more than mere
outwardness. This is true of all tone-painting, in so far as it is not confined
to mere silly copying of a few existing noises or voices, such as trickling,
thunder, the nightingale. Good music in its tone-painting always reproduces
something other than surface, rather it draws out a sounding and showing
which remains over beside the thing which has become. And this kind
of tone-painting is as old as good music, nor is it an embarrassment in
such music. Tone-painting also has the lowest forms, certainly, and the
thinner the instrument and the more trivial the music and the more vulgar
the listener, the more certain was its popularity. It is recounted of the Greek
cithara virtuoso Timotheus that he reproduced the sounds of battles; for
which, rightly, he was expelled even from Sparta. English spinet virtuosi
of the sixteenth century were already copying the songs of birds, lightning
and thunder, but of course also bright weather, which always required
more than mere aping. But at a very early stage music other than virtuoso
music entered into the tone side of the outside world, with a different
wish from that for a little joke, for effects, for wax-figure. jannequin,
a pupil of Josquin, even made tone-painting (which even the powerful
Josquin had not disdained) into a genre in its own right: he wrote hunt,
bird and battle pieces with copy and counterpoint. In IS29 he wrote the
once-famous 'Cries of Paris' in which the noises of the street and the cries
of the street-vendors appear in music; in 1910 Eric Satie wrote an equally
legitimate work entitled 'People Dining on the Terrace of the Hall at the
Spa', in 'Pacific 231' Honegger used a locomotive as a musicae persona.
And if a kind of exception still clings to such creations, even a mere
enlivening of music by noises rather than by new tones, then this exception
immediately becomes the rule when it appears throughout the work of
the greatest composer. Bach not only practises tone-painting, he literally
produces tone-graphics, i.e. he sets the sound-figure to that described in
the text, to that which has become in the visible world, and he makes
this Become speak again in sound, turns it into the uncongealed flow of
1082
language of its content. Hence the musical images of striding, collapsing,

descending, ascending and so on in the cantatas and Passions, a constant
bringing before the ears of the scene, in fluxu nascendi of course. Cantata 39
can serve as an example for many, with its setting of the text: 'Misfortune
surrounds me on all sides with its heavy chains'; a helping hand, the light
of consolation approach from nearness, from the distance. Bach's music
now uses three descriptive figures: there is not only the soaring figure
of the rescuing, upward-helping hand, not only the flickering figure of
a light typical in his work, but also being surrounded with a heavy chain
is symbolized by a characteristic figure of movement of wrapping around.
Such tone-graphics could easily seem comical in lesser music, in Bach it
is part of the de-reifying tone-movement. Thus the sound-image was made
audible, one which corresponds to the visible or congealed image as still
flowing, still only forming.
This did not -break off in the new, even more mobile form, although
this form appeared to withdraw somewhat from description. But it was
as a game after Bachian seriousness that tone-painting continued, almost
incessantly, in Haydn's 'Creation'. And now there follows from the notion
of mood the new musical nature-style, from the characteristic genre-picture
to the characteristic fresco. This style now causes entire coherent emotional
processes to be musically related to its occasions and consequently also
to its objects. The needle aria in 'Figaro' belongs here, as does, in highlyprovoked form, Beethoven's burlesque: 'Rage over a Lost Penny' and even
Rocco's aria in 'Fidelio', in which even without words gold jingles in
the orchestra and drives men about. Here above all, with an utterly manly
style, belongs the 'Awakening of Cheerful Feelings on Arriving in the
Country', as this holiday-country itself; his 'Scene by the Stream' belongs
here, and especially the description of the storm in the same Pastoral
Symphony, heard by the elective affinity of its own nature. The sulphuryellow signal tone in the sultriness, which warns and interrupts the dance
of the country people, the double crashing of the lightning (not of the
thunder), these are electricity such as only music, the art which is itself
agent-like, can sound out, meet with artistically, beneath the appearance.
A world of sound awoken thus has never been attained since; beside unimportant detail and instead of it, charming and violent nature is reproduced
in it from the fluidity of its sound. But thereby at the same time, several
layers deeper (even in the chthonic sense), the cue was given for the
Romantic tone-painting which now began. For the sometimes dubious,
sometimes powerfully befogging, upward-dawning invocation by dark
1083
registers, by night-sides of nature. After which via the Wolf's Glen * music
this ghostliness and magic culminated in Wagner, now hardly in curves
of movement at all but in ferment, thunder, phosphorus, glow and urge.
Hence the no longer graphic but birth-giving or adjacently floating foggy
and spring music, the heavily rumbling storm at the beginning of the
'Valkyrie', the rough-decorative ride of the Valkyries, the fire-magic. But
hence also the primal beginning like the E flat major triad of the streaming
depths of the Rhine from which the music of the Nibelungen rises, or
the glittering-murmuring, confused-jagged music of the Erda scene, which
is one of the most powerful audibilities of the subterranean. All these are
vaguely illuminated places, imitations of nature from something surging
and towards something dreamt-of and mythical: despite the 'naturalism'
with which Hans Sachs taps on Beckmesser's shoes and Alberich's dwarves
on their anvils. In Wagner, tone-painting remains essentially chthonic,
the light in which it takes place is the glow of fire from the depths and
this remains more powerful even when it overflows into the popular jubilation of spring or into the spring light of the meadows. In contrast again
to late-Romantic nature-tones or tone-natures, which are located far more
on the surface or in the light. As in Strauss, the master of the surface,
for example in the strange sounds of his 'Don Quixote' , which represent
the bleating of the flock of sheep. As in Mahler, the master of cosmic
Christmas, even in spring, when he allows the voices of nature to break
in, always with a ray of hope or the light of a saviour. Uniquely nonWagnerian, despite all the Romantic affinities, are the high Alps here in
the first movement of Mahler's Sixth Symphony, which is otherwise so
highly tragic: over an underlying bass keyless chords, third inversions of
the seventh chord which alternate with triads, interspersed with cow-bells,
flutes, drums; a tone-image of the solitude of nature high above. Wagner's
relation to nature is nowhere attuned to these Aeolian harps, but neither
to a signal of liberation which breaks the spell of nature. For almost all
the characters in Wagner belong after all to the volcanic world of the
drives, to the Schopenhauerian will, they act and they speak from this
dream of nature. Not only the magnetic Senta and Elsa, also the rutting
poetry of most of the Ring characters, even Eva and Walter belong to
the glow-worm which finds or does not find its female (in the words of
Sachs himself); at this price the - converse of music of the spheres was
achieved here, namely music from the belly of nature. Men here are of
The Wolrs Glen: a scene from Carl Maria von Weber's opera 'Der Preischutz".
the same lineage as unilluminated nature, which acts and sounds through
them, sounds in unheard-of surging or undulating flames. Thus in harmony
with the painting of the elements through music, Wagner's musical
characters all too often become 'dancing ships, unresistingly taking part
in the suffering, the struggle, the love, the yearning for redemption of
their sub-human sea and over which, at every decisive moment, instead
of encounter with one another and instead of the depth of their own fate
only the world-surge of the Schopenhauerian will passes' (Geist der Utopie,
1923, p. 110). At this price, then, there occurred in Romantic music the
lastingly curious phenomenon of an imitation of nature 4S excavation ofnature,
namely as tone-painting only of its night-side.. Bach had made the soundfigure of visible or congealed nature audible, in fluxu nascendi, as noted;
Romanticism painted natura naturans not as diagram, but as phosphorus .
At any rate the sub-real as pre-real was also in Bach; it is well described
in Goethe's famous words on Bach: 'I expressed it to myself as if eternal
harmony were conversing with itself, as may have happened in God's bosom
shortly before the creation of the world. So it also moved within me, and
it seemed as if I neither had nor needed ears, least of all eyes or any other
senses.' But precisely this latter regressio or excavation is far from being
chthonic; its ear is not Schopenhauer (by whom significantly Bach is not
mentioned at all) but rather Hegel (who significantly praises in Bach precisely his 'robust genius'). The excavation of nature in Romantic music,
in Wagner oriented even theoretically towards Schopenhauer and his ground
of will, operates quite differently. What is painted and reproduced here
is the wild marrow of things pure and simple, and what drives up from
this is then, however, only the inhuman world again, the Norn world,
the fate world, from which this music knows no way out. When Siegfried,
himself a child of nature, breaks the spell, even here he is only accomplishing
a pre-determined fate. If Parsifal stands out against the rest, then it is again
and again the general world-will which is changing; with that voluptuous
sound of harps and bells, with the sweet theatre of bliss which, even beyond
kitsch, still belongs entirely to the world-libido. Natura naturans in
Romantic music thus becomes natura naturata once again, endowed with
the better splendour which heardness gives, with the archaizing utopia
which is characteristic of regressio in the dreamt-of myth. This rebirth
of existing world also occurred in accordance with Schopenhauer's philosophy of music, or more precisely with the world-correlate with which he
provided music. Music here admittedly grasps the root which is sprouting in
dark seclusion, but it ends in the portrayal of the unilluminated world-tree,
1085
it is finally oriented to the mere 'objectivations of the will'. Even the

orchestra here, in strikingly cosmomorphic fashion, is related to realms
of nature, with a stony ground bass below, voices of wind instruments
in the organic middle, and above this the melodic treble. Although
Schopenhauer's analogy. is based essentially only on the opera style in the
Italian taste, it does teach over and above this: precisely the all too nocturnal
rooting in will of music, such as Schopenhauer carried out, remained in
natura naturata. It is always only the existing world of the will which
appears here, not a new birth, except through the immateriality of the
sounding. For Schopenhauer not even Beethoven's symphonies break out
of the old will and the known coastal trip, despite all division: 'It is rerum
concordia discors, a true and complete depiction of the world, which rolls
onward in the confused tangle of countless forms and by constant destruction preserves itself' (Werke II, p. 528). However, it was not to be
prevented that the welling desire or stressed fermentation of Romantic
music, although it seldom left behind nature myth or myth nature, did
after all come to a differently bubbling world - in the midst of the sounding
archaism of its nature. Natura naturans or the subject of nature, when it is
intended in music, always makes the tone-painting derived from it transparent. Not in the sense of a way out or of freedom, this is nowhere found
in Wagner, not even in his Christian-theatrical parts, perhaps least of all
here, but rather in the sense of a constant boiling-over into the archaicutopian, into unbecome meanings of mythical-encapsulated nature. Though
the authentic, namely the human will is completely missing in this work of
nature, if we discount Sachs and the rebellious dying Siegmund. 'Drowning,
sinking oblivious down, highest bliss is found', this underworld-relation is,
despite all the utopia encapsulated in it, the counter-move to Beethoven or
to the manly world of will. But where music is related to man as the core of
nature it also inevitably becomes relation to a cracked, cracked-open nature,
a nature illuminable into regnum hominis. And it is fitting that Wagner,
because of his nearness to wellspring-sound, has this not only in drowning
form but in important places also as a kind of super-naturing nearness in the
midst of nature itself. That is, as the transparency of a characteristic reverberation which is only found here, thrown far into the horizon and beyond
it, a reverberating pastorale which has in it not so much Schopenhauer
will as that which circles to a homeland. As in Brunhilde's finale, with
the Far-Beyond of its hugely sweeping, returning arcs at the end. But
even this nature in Wagner still remains indefinitely captivating unless
one hears in its echoing a reverberation, something Beethovenian, true
1086
to man, for which a sounding wellspring-space, in huge format, cracks

open. Instead of deadening effect ethical effect, then appears, and depiction
through music, instead of the powerful tone-painting of a primevallynocturnal dream of nature morality of music appears.
The man among men also wanted to be painted, and how could this
be done in a closer, better, more bettered way than in music? Thus the
sound returns again from its expeditions, puts its own house in order and
warms the house. Tone-painting and what is more deeply connected with
it has its counterpart in the self-portrait through music, in an exemplary
cooperation. Such a moral effect of music has been hoped for since the
earliest times, just as if wild animals were to be tamed or the dull to be
enlivened even in man. Such hope ranges from Orpheus to the Magic Flute;
the ladies of the Queen of the Night sing of it: 'With this you can almighty
things perform,/The passions of all men transform.' This hope ranges,
less magically, from Plato throughout the entire Middle Ages and kept
the ancient, controversial classification of the beautiful with the good with
significantly greater style than was possible in literature, especially in the
musty creations of moralistic literature. Essentially the art of an age always
looked better than its mere sermonizing, and if it lent itself to sermonizing
all that emerged was Gottsched or a cast-iron broom. But art did not look
better than the respective unphilistine energy of humanity, and if it lent
itself to this, then Schiller emerged and Beethoven, the morality of music
par excellence. Indeed even mere sermonizing was forced on to a higher
plane by the capacity of music to be morality. There is a difference between
the philistine demand for fig-leaves and the Platonic struggle of the Church
Fathers against sensuous music, the struggle of Pope Marcellus against
over-ornate music. Plato was the first who seriously began to take music
seriously, in accordance with his scarcelyliberal state utopia; for he regards
the enervating effect of music as a stumbling block, not a foolishness
('Republic', Bk. III). The plaintive and soft tones are eliminated, 'the
tones of the powerful and the right-minded, who can best imitate the
voices of the unhappy and the happy, of the circumspect and the brave'
are praised. All this is based on a respect which at least corresponds more
closely to the object of music than does the harmony of the spheres; or
rather which makes right its human part, the harmony between body and
soul. From the perspective of this wishful image, Plato says that 'musical
education is of the highest importance, because rhythm and harmony
descend right into the depths of the soul, grasp it with all their power,
they already bring beautiful form- with them and impart beauty to the
1087
soul, if it has received the right education'. The Church Fathers adopted
this strict ethos of music, now re-oriented from the goal-image of a disciplined polis into that of a salvation-bringing civitas Dei. Here music was
always regarded as dangerous and hence requiring supervision; there are
'songs of the devil' (they are described as if they were a Tannhauser
bacchanale), there is 'true music', namely healing, purifying, praeludium
vitae aeternae, as Augustine extols it. The image of David, who cured
Saul of madness by his playing of the lyre, runs through the entire patristic
and medieval ethics of music; 'true music' supposedly organizes the rapport
with the salvation of the world in Christlike reproduction and imitation.
Pseudo-Justinus lays down the following guidelines for moral, psalmodic
music: 'Music awakens fervent longings, connected with pleasant sensations,
soothes evil emotions aroused by the flesh, banishes bad thoughts inspired
by invisible enemies, irrigates the soul so that the divine goods bear rich
fruit, makes the pioneers of piety fit to hold out in dangers, and for the
holy becomes a cure for the distress of earthly life.' The supreme purpose
of the singing of the psalms became the compunctio cordis, the repentant
remorse of the sinner, but also conformity with the music of angels; thus
'true music' seemed to implant the greatly longed-for in the turbulent
soul. Likewise the tone-relation, with ethical change and effect, guides
entirely towards human grounds, the self-portrait is put forward as one
which pulls upward into the realm of essential being, as one which draws
out our essence. And no great composer proved himselfcloser to this than
Beethoven, his music is pervaded by moral passion, by that will which
is a will to Becoming Bright, not to mindless life. Hence Beethoven's
confessions: 'Few people realize what a throne of passion every single
movement in music is, and few know that passion itself is the throne of
music'; or: 'Few attain this, for just as thousands marry for the sake of
love and love in these thousands does not even reveal itself, so thousands
have dealings with music and yet do not have its revelation; as with every
art, high signs of morality underlie music, too, all genuine invention is
a moral advance.' And thus this art which is closest to men, beside the
chaotic, the darkly burrowing element in which its form of inwardness
is certainly not lacking, and which houses itself in myth-nature, definitely
shows the human face which rises up above the spell; music shows it
precisely also in the great moments of the Romantic-spellbound relation
to nature, and despite itself. The world-root which sprouts on in music
is ultimately the human root of a world-being adequate to it, a human
root which is certainly utopian-tending, not archaic-fixed. And the creative
1088
darkness in which it is still shrouded is not the gloom of the Schopenhauerian

will, but the incognito of the Now which drives through everything, is
hidden in the world itself. Music in its unsurpassable nearness to existence is
the most closely related and most public voice ofthis incognito, that of the welling
existere which in concentric preludes seeks to be clarified here. And the
world or outwardness to which the moralitas musicae has its subterranean
relation, the relation of a constant under-stream or of a tone-flow of the
ante rem: this world is not that which has already become but that which
circulates within it, which, as the regnum horninis, is imminent only in
future, anxiety, hope. The relation to this world makes music, particularly
in social terms, seismographic, it reflects cracks under the social surface,
expresses wishes for change, bids us to hope. The music of angels certainly
does not rise up here, not even compunctio cordis, as the Church Fathers
hoped in their great time of change, but always a self-encounter with
disorder under the surface or with diagrams of a different order in which
consciousness is no longer burdened with any object as with something
alien. This is the position of music in the world and the position of the
world in music, even during the relation of music to nature. There is no
water- and fire-music, no music of the Romantic wilderness which does
not necessarily contain in it, through the tone-material itself, the fifth
element: man. Music posits nature with the elusive, sought-for, homelike Syrinx in it, with the lamp of Hero over the waters of the Hellespont;
indeed even the brightest music of the morning sets its nature against
evening, when the world goes out and music itself passes over as if into
the pre-appearance of its future homeliness. Where the wellspring character
of the subject-ground and of the searching world-ground work together,
in a pre-appearance which, unlike that of the other arts, constantly has
apocalyptic momentum in it. Painting, even literature, with their
appearance-sated language which is already or still to a large extent localized,
can avoid this momentum; music, with its open flow, full of the beginnings
of something still indesignable, necessarily posits something extraterritorial
at the same time. No relation to nature is a match for this, unless one
with the realism of humane ciphers and real symbols in nature; at the limits
of visible knownness. Thus it is only towards these that the counterpoint
named after and containing Mozart, Bach, Beethoven moves. And only
in a layer where material existing nowhere else, and most certainly fully
formed nowhere else, passes over into another cosmos, are the categories
of Mozart, Bach, Beethoven at home. These are the figures of venturing beyond
the limits in tone-spheres: they are articulations of human existing in a
VENTllRING BEYOND IN MUSIC
1089
developing language of intensity which, in a world which has come to

itself, seeks to gain its entire essence by hearing its way keenly and expanding.
In this way therefore music contains the morality and universality of a
central point, a pervading and pervaded intensive central point. Melody
works this out lyrically, fugue epically, sonata dialecticallyand dramatically,
but the experiment of the Hearing-in-Existence of itself and of the world
remains common to-all forms of music, especially the severe forms. A still
fermenting utopian figuring-out in fonte hominum et rerum is depicted,
in a space of intensity which is open only to music in this way.
The hollow space; subject of the sonata and fugue

The tone started out as a roaming and exciting one, but does it want to
remain this in the long run? Certainly it wants to and it will, only the
question is whether it will do so on the old path, which has become both
easy and difficult. Does the chordal tension and relaxation which for so
long has seemed inscribed in the tone wish to remain? In the familiar
fashion, dissonant-consonant, from the dominant via the subdominant back
to the tonic. But precisely this fashion has expired, as is well-known, it
ran out of social and consequently out of technical breath. The competitive,
conflict-laden society which expressed itself in classical-Romantic tonality
has expired. It was replaced, ahead at the Front, first by so-called atonal
music, with the keynote removed. Then, with newly elaborated soundmaterial, came music which no longer produced cadence, Schonberg's
twelve-tone technique. Twelve-tone technique has no relation to the keynote
either, and consequently it does not have the harmonic tension-relaxation
which results from this and which was essential in the sonata. Dissonance
and consonance have become meaningless, the dynamic relation between
modulation and cadence has given way to a more gliding, muted and strict
sequence-connection. The tempered scale remains, in principle all twelve
tones in the traditional octave space are drawn on (therefore no quavers
or crotchets), but with the consciousness of key eliminated. Thus a limited,
well-ordered diversity of basic sequences is produced; and in each case one
of these takes musical precedence, with continued, uninterrupted, always
repeated sequence. Monotony as a result of this repetition is not ultimately
inevitable for the simple reason that all twelve tones of the scaleare available
for transposition. Nor is it by any means only the monotony about which
the unprepared listener complains, on the contrary, he reacts with a shock.
1090
Monotony would be more likely to induce sleep, and even the famous
expressionlessness which has been talked into new music by the abovementioned New Objectivity would not produce a shock. This shock is
more of a response to the absolutely abandoned than to the approach of
an uncomprehended future, not explorable by any habit. Schonberg's
'Theory of Harmony' from the period before twelve-tone technique already
reflected this as follows: 'Melody closes with New, Infinite or Unfulfilled',
harmony ceases to communicate land of departure, but also the goal
of the journey. Even the achieved twelve-tone technique, by acknowledging the equality of all tones and making every chord possible, no longer
knows a tonal point of reference and therefore knows no tonic homeland
in which, as in the sonata, cadence and theme have already been located.
No theme, as the background of a recognizability, can be placed at the
beginning, as in the sonata and especially in the fugue: music becomes
a kind of existence which forms itself only as it happens: "Hence", Krenek
rightly observes (Ober neue Musik, 1937, p. 89), 'hence the design of the
new music has something fragmentary about it, with all the consequences
of sadness and unsatisfiedness of the impression which the fragmentary
leaves behind.' But hence also the hard existence of an Infinite in this
Unfulfilled; twelve.. tone music, in its most authentic technical nature,
represents both. Schonberg's music thus definitely remains expression, in
particular it remains the expression of the subject-state of this transitional
age, a state which is unclear but is not denied or repressed. If the atonal
era has not removed this espressivo (an example of this is Schonberg's
monodrama 'Expectation'), then neither has twelve-tone technique,
however rational its principles of construction. It too is 'weather music",
not 'machine music' such as that which, along with rigid neo-classicism,
is intended by Stravinsky. Schonberg's art is emphatically not the familiar
machinism of this age, masked with equally familiar neo-classicism; on
the contrary, it reflects the hollow space of this age and the atmosphere
brewing in it, noiseless dynamite, long anticipations, suspended arrival.
Schonberg's music is thus certainly not uplifting, indeed it has been criticized
for lacking the capacity to express the sublime as well as for its obvious
incapacity to express the officially approved, run-of-the-mill stuff of aesthetic
enjoyment. It has even been said that the only keynote which remains
in this music is that of despair, indeed of that merely temporary and
ephemeral despair which reflects the hopelessness of the bourgeoisie and
ultimately its interest in sapping all will for change among its victims.
But all this is itself incurable exaggeration; the only truth in it is that
1091
this music, which by its boldness and Ratio alone differs from total nihilism,
is full of the scars of a hard, far from paradisial period of transition, but
is equally full of the undefined or still undefined spark-figure of its face.
If this face had come out socially, then Schonberg's art would also
immediately be more intoxicated with beauty and simpler; however, for
this, music must form an alliance with moralities which are muscular in
a very different way. Rebus sic fluentibus there is in this work a completely
honest and productive, a time-legitimate light, the only light through which
the germinatingly substantial element in new music can thrive at all; in
the hollow space with sparks. The new music, even before it was conscious
of itself, shows mastery in the expanse of motif-based relations, in the
unhoused power of roving chords; its expressive character was one of
complete openness. Already in Schonberg's first string quartet and in his
first chamber symphony the music develops in such a way that it detaches
itself from its point of departure. Motif-based relations become the vehicles
of the context, the theme material arises freely from the germ cell of a
single idea. In the three piano pieces, especiallyin the third, even the motifbased connection ceases, no theme is repeated, new themes are constantly
coming in. In the monodrama 'Expectation', thematics is altogether abandoned, here begins the fundamentally athematic style which Alois Haba
and his school have since developed further on the basis of a retention
of atonality. But the twelve-tone technique, even with sequential structures
as in the second chamber symphony and its unhappy mysticism, does not
lose complete openness forwards; the retrogression of sequences is quite
different from thematic recapitulation. Sonata form with this recapitulation
is sealed off to twelve-tone technique, and the attempt from the wind
quintet onwards (which also appeared as a veritable sonata for violin and
piano) to renew the sonata form remains superficial compared with
Schonberg's orchestral variations. Of the old forms only variation and suite
correspond to the straight line, without circle, towards the New, Infinite,
Unfulfilled. And it is only from here, from the fragmentary-infinite that
the opposite of the shock now also occurs: namely a reunion with the
new-born Old, newly-heard and used into openness. Here there is no
variation technique and not only the deliberate radical release of a purely
contrapuntal polyphony, but music, which is only forming, from its
expressive content even has a form-relation to the last classical-Romantic
artistic aspiration and the law according to which it did not begin, but
ends. In so far as this artistic aspiration, that of the sonata, as one of set
thematic exposition and of its confirming recapitulation, is the most alien
1092
WISHFUL IMAGES Of THE FULFILLED MOMENT
to the sequential form, but as a final aspiration flows just as increasingly

out into openness. The Beethovenian theme, in contrast to that of Mozart,
or in particular to the theme of fugue, is, from the Eroica onwards, itself
not developed; instead it experiences itself only in the development and
only in this does it fully dialecticize itself. Mahler, as the last, often already
transparent composer of the old tonality, did not compose anything at
all with a development of a theme from a set beginning. Precisely for this
reason his espressivo is not one from something but one towards something,
the familiarity of the expression of tension and of feeling disappears,
recapitulation and the usually very broad coda (Seventh Symphony) live
on a new field, on remote fields. Long, suggestive introductory movements
often precede the theme-group, 'from airy tones there streams a knownot-how', * the development section is rich in evasions, motif-based new
formations (the first movement of the third, the last movement of the
seventh symphony), the coda is Christmas, but also Advent. A selfapproaching is thus there, it is Mahler's music itself, mingled with the
calls of the watch, roll-calls, corteges, signals, with a kind of melismatic
dispatch from a distant headquarters, Its last word, the 'Song of the Earth' ,
moves with an unresolved suspension into an immense Eternal, eternal;
despite the retained and finally omitted keynote. The new music no longer
contains the dynamism of the Romantic, it appears so to speak as the
paradox of a highly extroverted adagio, but it intends just as much
Unattained as the dynamic, if not more.
And now that which was handed down historically as the old tone also
sounds up in a new way. Precisely because no work can be done with
it except by insignificant imitators, it becomes lovelier from day to day.
Here is a tremendous inheritance, one that, because it attains after-ripening,
does not take a rest and become dulled. The wandering and the weatherlike element do not expire, struggle and discord certainly do not expire,
even when they are no longer carried out entrepreneurially. When they
are no longer called free competition but on the contrary revolutionary
work, which tackles this discord. Thus the tone-form of essence which
is rich in conflict, the sonata, is also heard anew: not heated up for
enjoyment, but explosive. Crucially its style, its bourgeois-revolutionary
style, was already indicated, even revealed, by an absolutely changed form
of the recital, of the orchestral style. When Stamitz, in around 1750, taught
his Mannheim orchestra to perform Brightening, Shifting, Darkening,
* 'Faust', II, 6445. See also Vol. Ill,
p. 1057.
1093
together with the art of the diminuendo and crescendo, the path to the
sonata style became free. Instead of terraced dynamism, which was based
on the sequence of a contrasting but in itself immobile forte and piano,
came curved dynamism, and with it the atmospheric essence. But then,
very much later, in Beethoven, the objective principle of construction of
the sonata, the double thematics and its conflict, was brought to maturity,
one can also say to consciousness. Thus the sonata ab ovo already detached
itself from its forebears, the orchestral suite and the Bachian concerto,
especially from its opposite: the fugue, by virtue of its weather-like quality,
by its performance in dynamic curves. The weather-light by itself alone
would of course have become chaotic or, as the language of Sturm und
Drang is missing in the music contemporaneous with it, with the exception
of an astonishingly early musical prefiguring in Stamitz, it would have
become merely the medium of musically-composed hysteria. On the other
hand, the incipient social antagonism was sublimated to the conflict of
the two souls in one breast, a conflict which was certainly contemporaneous
with music, and: it became dialectical in the sonata. As we know, in the
latter the main theme in the fundamental key is followed by a softer,
melodious, contrasting secondary theme (in dull symphonic composers like
Schumann this is often merely a kind of oil-stain). The development is
the product of a thematic discord, of aberrations, of highly-charged excesses;
the recapitulation, with the principal key now restored, leads back to the
first theme as to a victory. In the Eroica 'the two principles' of the thematics
are thoroughly set to work, the antagonism supplied by society is here
at the same time one of the very blasting away of the barriers which first
led to the conflict, or of the French Revolution. The Eroica thus for the
same reason became the first conscious and the most perfect sonatasymphony. Its first movement in particular is the Lucifer world of the
Beethovenian sonata, and hence not the will of the entrepreneur, which
sets free its subject at variance with others, but the highest overshooting
beyond this, and from a much older layer: the Promethean will. The afterripening of Beethoven, which more than with any other composer enables
us to apperceive explosion, music of revolution, has its ground in this
legitimate titanism. It was only later that the subject of the sonata could
pass over into an elan which had become clever and ambiguous, like that
of Siegfried in the' Ring of the Nibelungen'; until in Strauss' 'Don Juan'
and especially in 'Ein Heldenleben' only the zest of the entrepreneur came
to light and disposed of all Promethean overshooting. But the genuine
subject of the sonata: in musical-technical terms this means the power factor
1094
of developing and shaping all the possibilities thematically implied in it.

Subject of the sonata: in terms of musical content this means the category
of Beethoven as the venturing beyond which expresses itself particularly
precisely and canonically in this power factor. In the medium of sound
it is of the lineage of Faust, a hugely charged hugely forward-pressing
essence, and as it were not in civilian clothes like Faust but completely
rhythmized throughout and strategic.. This also gives the sonata form that
forward-pressing quality with which it not only, as goes without saying,
surpasses post-Romantic music, this unpolar formation of sequences and
parallel translation, but also that great work in the monothematic style,
the fugue. For the sonata, apart from the variously competing heated elan
in it, was full of revolutionary tension set by the contrasting double themes
and the antithesis of their harmonic zones; this kind of tension, however,
as noted, no longer exists in the new music. It is therefore imperatively
necessaryfor music in this age of struggle to achieve a new kind of tension,
and as the external adoption of the sonata form is not sufficient, other
means must be found. Precisely in order to hold its own against the revolutionary elan of the genuine sonata, though at the expense of such refined
values as elegance or faultless compactness. Atonal music sought to preserve
tension in the form of sheer catastrophes; more legitimately the necessary
force of tendency is available through an element which certainly did not
disappear with the decline of the old tonality: through rhythm. This is
not disturbed when composition is ametrical (with the bar line erased),
it works in polyrhythmics as adopted from primitive music, independently
of abandoned harmonic polyrhythmics and outside it. There is even a
characteristic, very deep-seated, still scarcely discovered rhythmic tonic relation;
if it were discovered, not only would the huge, tense expeditionary essence
of the sonata be attained again, but also its other, definitely non-fragmentary
essence: that which is designated by the victory of the theme. The new
music no longer has a recapitulation, with a principal key restored, in which
victory can be recognized, its greatness and its future lies in the fact that
it no longer has a theme which is placed at the beginning and as it were
decided, but is music which is only forming itself, which takes seriously
the New and the Infinite of the end. But the recapitulation in the sonata
signified not only return but also arrival, i.e. precisely that element without
which the revolutionary tension would remain meaningless. In the
recapitulation was the high time of the sonata; particularly only rhythmic
tonic relation can help to gain this without the memory aid of the recapitulation. But the sonata remains for tension as well asrelaxation - on a new level-
1095
the model: thus it circulates not only in the after-ripening of listening

but also in the continuing production as living inheritance. And the other
model, now with respect to being-here, to granting of music, is and remains
the linear polyphony of the old counterpoin t before the sonata style, especially
therefore thefugue. As we know, this is monodic, a single theme, Dux
with Comes, a roaming of one theme through the voices in which it
undividedly and without struggle reveals itself. Even in double and triple
fugues, with two and three themes, these themes are never set antithetically,
and the dynamic exposition remains seamless, without impatience. Certainly, the lower tension and the more intense composure reflect an order
of society divided into estates which as such is past and far from canonical.
Certainly therefore the fugue form, by overcoming dynamism without
having known it, ranks lower than the sonata as reality; and the sonata,
with its erupted dialectic, surpasses it, as noted. But it is equally striking
that the fugue, precisely within the sonata form, was able to break away
from its old ground and that it then contains no pacified continuo whatever.
The fugato, which only approximates to the fugue form, produces or can
produce a restless rigid effect, most uncannily in the fugued chorale of
the armoured men in 'The Magic Flute'. A new expression is formed here,
it continues in the fugato of the funeral march in the Eroica, which would
scarcely have been written without Mozart's example and, now absolutely
a dynamic cortege, is not quietas in fuga. It is even more curious that
the fugue form proper, when used in a symphonic context, also develops
a powerful element of impatience, namely feud, as in the fighting fugue
in the 'Meistersinger' and the veritable bickering fugue in Strauss' 'Sinfonia
domestica'; both fugues, moreover, are especially learned and complicated.
Or within new music itself: Berg's 'Wozzeck', this extremely atmosphericdramatic work, has inventions and passacaglias built into it, and precisely
the singing voice which is heightened to the highest dramatic expression
is dynamically involved, without any stylistic incongruity at all, in the
exposition of a double fugue. The fact that this is possible indicates how
much the after-ripening of the fugue form brings out an element in the
fugue which is not confined to composed, revealed structure, with Dux
and nothing but Comes in the voices. And the old fugue itself, the art
of the fugue masters, not of the fugue schoolmasters, the organ fugue of
Bach, filled with sursum corda? Its final expression, as stated above (Vol.
III, p. 1069), is still unconquered, and if it contains composure, then it
is the paradox of a heaven-storming composure, one without drama but
with the building of a tower. Therefore even if the fugue has no impatience
1096
in its monodically appointed continuo, it does have a goal, indeed it is

a goal, more precisely it is its corrective ante rem. The inheritance of the
sonata style will never disappear again, will be entered into in new form,
without any Romantic debts whatever in this inheritance, but thegranting
or being..here of music, as represented by architectonic counterpoint, remains
and has primacy. Remains a corrective-primacy of space over time, of the
kingdom-like over the situational, here too. Remains a primacy of that
distant being-simultaneous which within music and in harmonic-linear terms
is epitomized in Palestrina, as a corrective of seraphic balance. For even
in art the order of freedom ranks higher than the freedom which has not
yet created this space for itself, beyond change. Change, the atmospheric
as a whole, belong to time, not to being-achieved: only discord is real
in time, in musical time as in historical time, but only the kingdom-like
aspect of revealed monody is real as result. In future music everything
depends on the ability to allow the theme of this monody to form in
orbitings. This however is, in ever new experiments and fragments, the
main theme which now finally speaks: the core of human intensity. It
is the subject of the fugue striving to become situationless, indicated by
the category of Bach and its afterripening, as the building of a tower into
the order of kingdom. The two traditional musical forms of sonata and
fugue therefore point towards struggle against fate and towards ultimately
intended situationlessness, and therefore towards fatelessness. Indeed even
in the struggle of the sonata at least the quiet movement rests, the andante
and adagio rest from conflict. They already show the slowly flying arrow
of beauty and, as in Schubert, musical substance which simply cannot cease
to remain and to give. Indeed they contain in their most powerful appearances something which is still sealed to the main movement of the sonata and
also to the fugue: sojourn in the Unheard. The adagio of the Hammerklaviersonata, that of recuperation in the A minor quartet, the adagio with variations in the Ninth Symphony: this is a hearkening of the subject in a place
which neither the triumph-recapitulation of the theme nor even any finale
achieved until now can reach. The great adagio is thus the true finale of the
symphony, is a farewell celebration which leads towards music, not away
from it. The adagio does not boom towards a prearranged final point, on the
contrary: it draws the aerial perspective of the finale, even before it comes,
together into the best, into a kind of highest good in music, It is legitimate for
great adagio movements to cross the region of a figured chorale or to contain
it within themselves behind their slight, non-violent caesuras; as regards
spirit the adagio in the symphony is the chorale of its intensity. The slow
1097
miracles of music with regard to their object are also the deepest; they
roam and aim beyond time, therefore also beyond passing away. And it
becomes clear in the true - finale, yet again: music excavates its treasure
on that gold ground of a most distantly-immediate mindfulness which
strikes into the most closely Intensive and to which literature and painting
are only applied: the treasure of intensive essence.
Funeral march, requiem, cortege behind death

Here the tone itself kindles the light which it needs. It does not need an
outer light, it can stand the darkness, indeed it seeks its silence. Silently,
in the night, treasures are raised, music does not disturb this silence, it
is well-versed in the vault, as the light in the vault. Hence its nearness
not only to the happiness of the blind but to death, or rather: to the depths
of the wishes which attempt to cast light on death. If death, conceived
as the axe of nothingness, is the harshest non-utopia, then music measures
itself against it as the most utopian of all arts. It measures itself against
it in a way which is all the more awed because the un-land of death is
filled with that night which, as birth-giving night, seems so deeply familiar
to music within this world. However decidedly the night of death may
be different from all others, music, rightly or wrongly, feels itself to be
the Greek fire which still burns even in the Styx. And if Orpheus plucks
the harp against death; and does so victoriously, he plucks it so victoriously
only in death, namely in Hades. It may be a legend that the dying, in
their sinking state, hear music. Or perhaps more a figurative expression,
like the opposite, significantly more matter-of-fact one according to which
a person in pain hears the angels whistling in' heaven. An expression which,
like so much in the world, slaps the harmony of the spheres right in the
face, just as conversely the legendary Aeolian harp heard by the dying often
takes this old myth too conventionally again. But if it still remains to
be seen whether the dying hear music, the living, with great electiveaffinity,
certainly do hear dying in music; death-space borders mediatedly on music.
It borders on its frequent introvertedness, it borders above all on its clouded
material, on its constant tendency to designate a universe without externality in the invisible in which it begins and towards which it continues
to aim. This kind of thing may be merely sentimental and is then in itself
alone little more than negation or general Outwards or Upwards which
surges uncontrolled, if not itself destined for death. But unsentimentally,
J098
with position, music really does go to face death, intends - in accordance

with the content of the biblical saying - to have swallowed it in victory. * The
love-song, which first expressed longing for union despite all obstacles or gave
consolation in hope, hope in consolation, goes as productive death-music into
the future night, lights the lamps of something nevertheless not prevented.
Rain, storm, clouds, lightning, even collapse become for this homeland a
mysterious path or a mysterious concordant environment. How much deep
music has its darkness, indeed its light from this ingredient, the night of death,
and from its black there burns a brightness different from that which otherwise already exists. That which withholds itself from almost every attempt
to picture it is so far from withholding itself from music that a reticent cortege,
the most serious mode of the slow tempo, is placed even before the Sostenuto
assaiof its highest happiness. And now the many unreticent modes of lament,
of the obsession with death with the conquest of death within it, of the funeral
march, of the turning magic of fear, of the suddenly changing dialectic of
terror in the requiem. 'Strike, 0 longed-for hour, longed-for hour, strike':
in this Bach cantata man, with homesickness, goes through the final fear.
Beethoven's funeral march in the Eroica dares something absolutely overhauling, and it returns to some extent in the funeral march of the Gotter-dammerung: Beethoven dares Heraclitus' wishful dream paradox that the
path up and the path down are one and the same. The dully closed C minor
of the beginning, the C major of the central movement, with its bright oboe
theme, the dance of the triplets, the decision to return to the funeral theme,
the timid, oscillating, unrepeated happiness-melisma of the violin shortly
before the end: this exposedness and this azure behave as two appearances
of the same content. And not for example as if the dark appearance were
cancelled out by the bright one, i.e. cheaply apotheosized by an otherworldly
transfiguration. For the bright appearance withdraws again after the great
forte to a single violin part sounding in the pianissimo, into the darkness of
the funeral march as one which is collapsing. The successionis in fact meandering or a continuation of the same in death as horror and as friend. The Baroque
sequence: lamento e trionfo is cancelled out in the funeral march which the
Eroica sets as its adagio. Both are present, both, the usual element of the
lamento and the truly external element of a trionfo, kept strictly apart from
each other, have become invalid in the light of death and the unprearranged
remoteness on which it shines (allegretto of the Seventh Symphony). The interweaving of the concept ofdepth also proves effective in the grave t of music,
Cf. Isaiah 2.S, 8.
f Bloch is using the word here in the musical, Italian sense.
1099
precisely in this: as De Profundis and as that depth as which ether was

conceived, as depth of the heights.
Dying has itselfdevelopeddark-bright images, which set a puzzle for the
tone. They arenot sealed in themselves and thisworldlylikethe death of a hero
and the funeral march or even the nenia* which accompanies it. Rather the
Church presented elaborated imagesof death, and it is againstthese, asimages.
which have.become cryptic, apocalyptic, that the requiem measures itself. The
Church text presents contrasts before which the meandering element of a
death-foe, death-friend relationship is dispersed. Whereby the music of the
requiem does, however, appear to preservea religious conviction which no
longerexistsin thisfonn andwhich in anyevent hasnothing in common with
the bemused profundity of the above-mentioned meandering. In fact: most
people haveno longerbelieved the Church text about death and damnationfor
the past hundred, almost two hundred years; neverthelessit lives in music.
Nevertheless, Mozart, Cherubini, Berlioz and Verdi wrote their requiem
masses in the grand style-- and they were penetratinglygenuineworks. There
is no trace of decorative illusion in these great works, not even in Verdi, in
whom a sense of theatre would first be appropriate. This is, however, a
problem, and it is not solved by bringing in the so-called illusorynature of art,
which allowsus to enjoy at a reducedpricewhat was formerlybelieved at the
full price, with fear and trembling. So that a curious thing seems to happen,
namelythat the samequinquilation which onceovergrew the Church text and
because of this was forbiddenby the Church asa distraction, now rescues the
Church text and makesit palatable. But this is not the true reasonfor the late
blossoming of the requiem; for Cherubini, the strict, Berlioz, the bold and
expressively precise, did not produceillusion. The musicof the great requiems
doesnot provideaesthetic pleasure but awe and deepemotion; and the Church
text, arising from the early period of chiliastic fear and longing, surrenders
to musicits great archetypes, independentlyof their transitory patristicforms.
Thus music itself brings forth again the symbols of expectation which are
at work in the requiem; theseare inscribedin music. And the reasonwhy the
LastJudgment for music is no mere mythological subjectand no mere motif
of upward movement as in Rubens, the reason for this morality lies in the
death, contra-death, utopia problem which is constantly present for music. Consequently apocalypse arises even where, precisely where, there is anything but
Church text; Beethoven gave the exampleand the proof of this. Beethoven,
who wrote no requiem, did write one in Fidelia, a completely unequivocal
* 'Nenia': an ancient Roman lament for the dead.
1100
requiem, with Dies irae for Pizarro, with Tuba mirum spargens sonum * for
Florestan. This world of spirits is not sealed to music, as the world of spirits in
revolution; the archetype of apocalypse is not sealed to music. Even the
thunderclap in Cherubini's requiem which indicates the bursting of the
universe is not externality for music; music is well-versed in the end. Mystical
brutality is not missing either in Berlioz or in Verdi: in Berlioz it rises in the
trumpets of the apocalyptic horsemen which come crashing down on the
audience from the four corners of the earth; in Verdi in the explosive
drumbeats, the fathomlessly plunging screams of the Dies irae. But now the
contrasting Sed in Verdi, in the offertory of his requiem, the Sed before
Signifer sanctus Michael, sustained for seven bars, and also the heavenly
melody playing around it without triumph, with hope hovering upwards.
Thus music, with a final Baroque, works out despairs and salvations; they
are not tied to the Baroque, nor to the judge-theology of the Church text.
But they are tied to a death-consciousness and to a wishful consciousness of
anti-death, which here stretches more genuinely than anywhere else into
music. As such, now free of the traditional Church text, it last appeared in
Brahms, in the German Requiem. If one seeks musical initiations into the truth
of utopia, the first, all-containing light is Pidelio, the second - with veiled
illusion, at an appropriate distance - is the German Requiem, which sings 'For
here have we no continuing city, hut we seek one to come"] - and below
the chorus a faltering of searching steps, a path-line into the unknown, into
awakening. 'Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we
shall all be changed, In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last
trurnp'T - the mysterious music of these words of St Paul in Brahms'
Requiem brings from within itself the sound of the last trumpet into a
hearing-keenly, into a metaphysical counterpoint of hell and victory, of hell
swallowed in victory. Not without the restraint and, which comes to the
same thing in Brahms, not without the precious depth which as such avoids
apotheoses. Which does not permit evenJubal's harp or Miriam's tone and
sound to make the light easy for themselves or even merely to present it as
consonant. The second movement of the German Requiem takes for its text:
'Therefore the redeemed of the Lord shall return, and come with singing
unto Zion; and everlastingjoy shall be upon their head'; but the music to the
'The trumpet scattering its amazing sound'. This is from the text of Verdi's 'Requiem',
Thomas de Celano's poem 'Dies Irae'.
t Hebrews 13, 14.
I Corinthians IS, 51-2.
Isaiah 51, II.
1101
eternal joy goes in the fortissimo towards G minor and therefore certainly
not towards sheer-radiant consonance. This is because the way Brahms
deals with joy is even more complicated than the way Kant deals with
pathos (and for the same uncatholic reasons), because heaven here has the
salt within it which does not make it conventional or foolish. These are
certainly not pale joys - Nietzsche misunderstood Brahms here - nor are
they 'October light over all joys', they are, in the midst of the doubtful
darkness, far too burning for this. The happiness which becomes a mystery
does of course appear dissonantly cloaked, indeed in itself dissonance may
be its more powerful expression than a triad from the familiar world. Music
here indicates that there is one shoot, no more, but also no less, which
could blossom into eternal joy and which continues to exist in darkness,
which indeed binds darkness within it. This does not mean anything certain
with 'regard to the harshest non-utopia, but a capacity to deny it on its
own ground. Doubtless with nothing .but still drifting sound-formations,
but these contain livelinesses of an end' which would not be possible if
in the end nothing else were possible but transience and death. A freedom
from pressure, death and fate is expressed in the Still.. Nowhere medium
of the tone, a freedom which has not expressed itself and cannot yet express
itself in definite visibility. Precisely for this reason all music of annihilation
points towards a robust core which, because it has not yet blossomed,
cannot pass away either; it points to a non omnis confundar. In the darkness
of this music gleam the treasures which will not be corrupted by moth
and rust, the lasting treasures in which will and goal, hope and its content,
virtue and happiness could be united as in a world without frustration,
as in the highest good: - the requiem circles the secret landscape of the highest
good.
Marseillaise and the moment in Fidelio
There is a work in which the tone quite remarkably charges and aims
at the same time. It is 'Fidelio', the task is to make a call audible within
it, towards it every bar is tensed. Even in the light, open..air prelude between
Marzelline and jaquino there is unrest, a knocking not only from outside.
Everything is geared to future, 'then we will rest from our troubles', every
tone represents. 'Do you think I cannot see into your heart?', Rocco asks
Leonora; and now the scene draws in, four voices construct pure Inside.
'How wondrous the emotion, my heart feels confined', the quartet begins,
1102
andante sostenuto of a song which sings out nothing but its Wondrous,
applied to sheer darkness. Marzelline sings it for Leonora, hope illuminates
the goal, in great danger. 'A rainbow, resting brightly on dark clouds,
shines on, and guides my way', in this light Leonora speaks herself, in
the truest aria of hope, up and down over gloomy movements of sound,
turned towards the star of the weary. The star was already at work in the
timid Wondrous with which the quartet began, it is at work in Leonora's
aria, in the prisoners' chorus, when not only Leonora and Florestan, when
all the damned of this earth look up to the light of tomorrow. But the
star stands dazzling and high in Florestan's feverish ecstasy, as Leonora
herself; to it belongs the visionary exclamation 'to freedom, to freedom,
into the heavenly kingdom', rising up with superhuman cadences,
shattering, fading in powerlessness. Until then the subterranean monodrama
begins, the wildest scene of tension altogether, Pizarro before Florestan,
'a murderer, a murderer stands before me', Leonora covers Florestan with
her body, thus she reveals herself, a renewed onslaught of murder, the
pistol held to Pizarro, 'one more step and you are dead'. If nothing else
happened, from the spirit and the action-space of this music, then the shot
would be the symbol and the act of salvation, its tonic would be the answer
to what is called and the call from the beginning. But this tonic, because
of the necessarily apocalyptic spirit and action-space of this music, finds
a symbol from the requiem, more than this: from the secret Easter in the
Dies irae; it is the trumpet signal. This signal, if it is interpreted superficially,
in terms of Pizarro's earlier instructions to blow it from the battlements
as a warning to him, literally announces only the arrival of the minister
on the road from Seville, but as tuba mirum spargens sonum in Beethoven
it announces the arrival of the Messiah. Thus it resounds down into the
dungeon, into the torches and lights which accompany the governor
upwards. Into the name-, nameless joy in which Beethoven's music no
longer uses a suspension, into the 'Hallowed be the day, hallowed be the
hour', in the transformed courtyard of the fortress. It was an inspired idea
on Mahler's part to play the third Leonora overture between the dungeon
and the final act of freedom, the overture which in reality is a utopian
memory, a legend of fulfilled hope, concentric around the trumpet signal.
The signal now sounds, without the scene, after the scene, the music replies
with a melody of rest which cannot be played slowly enough, the signal
now sounds a second time, and the same melody replies, mysteriously
modulated, in a distant key from an already changed world. And now
back to the freedom act, to the Marseillaise on the fallen Bastille. The
HOPEFUL IMAGES AGAINST DEATH
113
great moment is there, the star of fulfilled hope in the Now and Here. Leonora
releases Florestan from his chains: '0 God, what a moment' - precisely
through these words, raised by Beethoven into metaphysics, a music arises
which, in any case a Staying itself, would be worthy never to put an end
to its arrival. An abruptly transporting change of key at the beginning;
an oboe melody which expresses fulfilment; the sostenuto assai of time
which is standing still, which has risen to the moment. Every future
storming of the Bastille is intended in Fidelio, an incipient matter of human
identity fills the space in the sostenuto assai, the presto of the final chorus
merely adds the reflection, the jubilation about Leonora-Maria militans.
Beethoven's music is chiliastic, and the form of the opera of salvation,
which was not uncommon at the time, merely provided the external
material for the morality of this music. Does not the musical figure of
Pizarro bear all the features of Pharaoh, Herod, Gessler, the winter demon,
indeed of the gnostic Satan himself, who brought man into the worlddungeon and keeps him prisoner in it? But more than anywhere else music
here becomes morning red, militant-religious, whose day becomes as audible
as if it were already more than mere hope. It shines as pure work of man,
as one which had not yet appeared in the entire environment of Beethoven
independent of man. Thus music as a whole stands at the frontiers of
mankind, but at those where mankind, with new language and the call..
aura around captured intensity, attained We..World, is still only forming. And
precisely the order in musical expression intends a house, indeed a crystal,
but from future freedom, a star, hut as a new earth.
SELF AND GRA VB-LAMP
52
OR IMAGES OF HOPE AGAINST THE POWER

OF THE STRONGEST NON-UTOPIA: DEATH
The last coat has no pockets.
Proverb
Every person confronted with the possibility of an accident immediately thinks

of the iron ration which he carries with him. This iron ration for one man
may be his idea, for another his faith, a third thinks only of his family.
Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross
1104
I feel1ike one who has done work for the day to retire awhile,
I receive now again of my many translations, from my avatars ascending,
while others doubtless await me,
An unknown sphere more real than I dream'd, more direct, darts awakening
rays about me, So long!
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Anyone who could remain indifferent to these questions must as it were have
divested himself of his humanity: to what goal is all history moving, what
final last state is destined for the entire race, or is there even here only the
sad, ever-recurring circle of appearances? The view of the mysteries has therefore
certainly been extremely restricted because no one hit on the idea that they
also contained as it were a revelation about the future of the human
race ... Dionysus in his highest potency was the goal, the ultimate meaning
of the entire teaching of the mysteries.
Schelling, Philosophy of Revelation

And then the spirit brings hope, hope in the strictest Christian sense, hope
which is hoping against hope. For an immediate hope exists in every person;
it may be more powerfully alive in one person than in another; but in death
every hope of this kind dies and turns into hopelessness. Into this night of
hopelessness (it is death that we are describing) comes the life-giving spirit
and brings hope, the hope of eternity. It is against hope, for there was no
longer any hope for that merely natural hope; this hope is therefore a hope
contrary to hope.
Kierkegaard, For Se/fExamination

Je m'en vais chercher un grand Peut-etre."
Last words of the dying Rabelais
I. Introduction
No talk of dying
How do we shake off the final fear? Today many no longer find this as
difficult as in unenlightened days. The clock strikes, it is another hour
nearer to the grave. But our view of it is diverted or else made artificially
short-sighted. As things stand at the moment, fear of old age has become more
tormenting than the thought of death. Death must not be remembered,
* 'I am going out in search of a great Perhaps.'
1105
cheap images push it out of mind. One of these says that man is snuffed
out like a candle. This can be the case, of course, but not because man
resembles a candle. He does not resemble one before his extinction, is not,
for example, headless, and so the comparison is not compelling afterwards
either. Men have never been anxious to count their ever dwindling years,
yet what is bourgeois and merely lives from one day to the next is.
encouraged, among other things, not to look to the end at all. So everything
is piled back on to a rosy-cheeked beginning, and when this is no longer
there false youth is painted on. Dying is pushed away, not because we
enjoy life so much nor because somewhere we would gladly see or cause
others to see into something coming, not even at this personal closing
point. Thus we live from one day to the next and into the night, no thought
must ever be given to the worst end which is yet to come. The wish is
simply to hear and to see nothing of it, even when the end is here. Thus
fear at least shrinks, becomes flat, like so much else.
Utopias of the night with no morning any more in this world

But nothing is as strange and grim as the blow which fells everyone. Life
is not right either, but at least we are at home in it and present, it can
be improved. But no one has yet been seen as present behind death, unless
as a corpse. Horror is not the only feeling the corpse inspires, however,
not the only feeling appropriate to this strange departure of our self. But
even grinning enters into it, like that of the death's head itself; that longscheming man should die like cattle is also, as it were, comical. And there
was even more place for that highest seriousness of all, which causesdespair
and which in the face of death lies even closer to youth than it does to
old age, because youth is more final. This means: not only the corpse is
pale but our striving sees itself bled white and devalued for bad and all
by its end. The grave, darkness, decay and worms had and still have,
whenever they are not pushed out of mind, a kind of retrospectively
devaluing force. Even the businessman returning from a friend's funeral
takes up his correspondence with somewhat subdued elan and does not
merely think of the insurance for his wife and child. On top of this comes
the increasing disparity that has arisen between the movement and length
of our ranks of purpose and the unchanging brevity of life. This disparity
was not always so great, the long pre-capitalist era did not know it, or
only vaguely, history seemed more static to that era, more cyclical, as it
1106
were more seasonal than today. Marcus Aurelius even observes in his
'Meditations' that a forty year old man with his eyes open and ina sufficiently high position has seen everything that happened before his time
and all that will happen afterwards because it is the same as what he himself
has experienced. Today the train of events is so very much longer than
our life, the march of history towards the New is both geometrically and
dynamically so different from the naturally declining curve of our life that
no worthy man can still die sated with life in the historical sense. The
grave destroys the witness who has become more curious, and in his short
life he has seen too little of the outcome, let alone the victory, of events
that are already in motion. Like the youth in Wedekind's 'Spring
Awakening' who dies without experiencing thejoys of love and who shouts
with such scornful significance: 'Been in Egypt and never saw the pyramids',
it could appear, mutatis mutandis and at least partially, to many dying
in exciting times that they had perceived and achieved nothing but historical
patchwork. This feeling seems only completely overcome where by sacrificing one's own life for the future cause the subject-based experiencing
of it is deliberately and consciously eliminated from the outset, first and
foremost in the martyr. But even what this most moral person of all rejects
for himself does not deprive others of the right to complain that they will
not be present at the victory, that they will not know themselves to be
unbroken subjects of victory. The fact that the name of the martyr is
enshrined in the heart of the working class does not restore to this name
its eyes, its corporeally present existence - it too lies, a corpse, far from
the intended goal. How far too this suffered martyrdom is from the later
day ofjustice which - if it occurs at all - will be experienced by completely
different people. The world is full of slaughtered goodness and of successful
criminals enjoying a long and peaceful old age; martyrs do not experience
their resurrection, the criminals of white terror are seldom brought to
judgement, in both cases death makes everything irreparable. And even
where something has got into order the final axe falls on happiness, which
was always only temporary. Even the utopian reflected happiness of fairytale
characters lasts only until 'the destroyer of all joys and the sunderer of
all fellowship came to them', as death is called and must be called in the
Arabian Nights, despite Islam and submission. The last fiasco does not
remain a frame or dark ground against which the brief sunny day stands
out all the more consciously; memento mori is bankruptcy in consciousness
itself. Even the hectic joy of living, as in times of plague, is inverted despair
or gallows humour, contains no answer to nothingness, no overcoming;
1107
- desire seeks rather for eternity. What does even the highest moment
mean, the 'Stay awhile, you are so fair' intended in the most central utopia,
when death, without itself being affected, cancels from the capacity for
experience with the greatest command of existence its - existence? So no
enemy seemed more central, none was so inescapably positioned, no
certainty in this thoroughly uncertain life and its formations of purpose
is even remotely comparable with that of death. Nothing stands as
finalistically as death does at the end, and nothing shatters the work of
the subjects of historical purpose-setting so anti-finalistically into fragments.
The jaws of death grind everything and the maw of corruption devours
every teleology, death is the great forwarding agent of the organic world
- but to its catastrophe. Thus no disappointment can compare with its
negative outlook, no treachery shortly before the goal seems to equal that
of exitus letalis. But all the more powerful is the necessity to set wishful
evidence against this so little illuminating certainty, against a mere factual
truth in the world unmediated with man. Thus guiding images of the
after..life correspond to guiding images of life, figure-formations against
the peace of the graveyard to the guiding figures of unrest, and an older,
religious death-magic to the deep death-magic of music. The following
section deals with the varying utopias of death in the great world religions;
these are followed by the no longer so religious image ofdeath. Namely that
which was secularized or rationally modified from the former manifold
beliefs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the manifold images
of the afterlife mankind has brought to light and into the night not only
its egotism and ignorance, but also the undeniable dignity in refusing to
accept the cadaver. Thus in the chapter on death the inventory of human
wishful dreams also contains certain pictorial, poetic and musical wishful
landscapes of the paradisial, but under a different aspect, related to 'to
be or not to be', as utopian anti-death. To speak only of wishes, there
certainly was and still is here much sticky-shabby desire to cling to the
little ego; Shaw rightly compared this with miserliness. The obscurantist
interest of the ruling classes and their spouting clergy in transcendental
fraud was and is most definitely at work here, intimidating the people
with otherworldly images of terror, consoling them with empty promises,
otherworldly images of heaven. The realm of shades is anyway, as Kant
says, the paradise of visionaries; and it is not just Holy Rome which has
lucrative provinces there. Yet it should also not be overlooked that beside
Rome, in which precisely the worst effusions of transcendental fantasy
proved highly experienced and worldly-wise, there were, to speak only
1108
of wishes again, also different, rebelliously different motifs, not least a

religious motif of pride, transformation and breaking out, which in Paul's
case shakes the bars of this death. Whether such overreaching - this means
of course also of the humblest, not only of the masters - into the postmortal
sphere and indeed that which changes into all recognition was the opium
of the people or rather a strengthening of the sense of the infinite value
of their own souls and thus a strengthening of the will not to be treated
like cattle here and now: this depends on the men among whom and
the circumstances in which sermons on heaven were preached. Thomas
Munzer's sermons, for example, though often referring to 'heavenly
servants', was no opium of the people. Whether every shining of the dream
lantern into the realm of shades is sheer fantasy and as such appears indiscriminate depends again on the conceptual definition and demarcation of
the real which has been arrived at. Even a definition which does not stop
at so-called factuality, which instead of this recognizes unreified processes
and open spaces, will not allow these spaces to be occupied by more or
less fatuous pieties. At any rate, such a definition will not reject as wholly
unreal or incapable of reality contents of which we know nothing simply
because, next to miracles, immortality is the dearest child of faith and because,
instead of this, human metamorphosis into nothingness is regarded as a
certainty not only by existentialists. But it is for this reason alone that
the more humane wishful images of the 'Non ornnis confundar' have not
yet been abolished in the fundamental problem of their dignity, i.e, they
have not forfeited this problem and its world in every - not necessarily fantastic
- form. For Kant, the real coincided with the objects of Newtonian physics;
everything beyond it was either a bad thing or a mere reflexive postulate.
For dialectical-materialist cognition, which does not recognize such dualism,
which comprehends a postulation (an unclosed tendency) in the real itself,
and in postulation a possible reality, the world does not end with Newtonian
mechanics. The world has no Beyond (materialism is ana remains the
comprehending of the world in its own terms), but it also has no barrier
in this life or rather none but that which is posited in the direction of
dialectical process. Dialectical materialism thus no more knows a naturally
ordained order and closedness than mechanical materialism knew or
recognized one which was divinely ordained. Everything particular and
fixed among the death-defying wishes and rituals, the Greek, Egyptian
and Christian death-hopes, is sheer fantasy, but the sphere of this specific
hope itself, which is recalled in the following section, is more than
legitimate; for no man yet knows whether the life process does not contain
1109
or admit of transformation, however obscure. The bald No, however

empirical it may have been to date, does not settle the question; it is the No
of mere blind necessity, not of necessity understood, therefore controlled,
therefore mediated with the human realm of purpose. The only reason
why this No does not have a completely paralysing effect on the purposewill is that this, as we will ultimately have to show, still borrows from
post-mortal symbols, even when they are no longer believed and their
substance has disappeared. Death today can still (nobody knows how much
longer) be hidden behind life because new life was once hidden behind,
i.e. dreamt into death. These dreams also belong to utopia, though to
one which is primarily rooted in mythology, and they continue the dots
where ranks of purpose have been broken off, as if the grave and the
inorganic universe to which the corpse also belongs could be humanely
illuminated. These dreams of illumination have not resigned themselves
to fate in its grimmest form; this constitutes, this founds their glory. And,
with an overwhelming paradox of non-renunciation, they have connected
precisely to the most extreme annihilation, alongside a terrible afterlife,
the joyful image of an awakening, of a heavenly identity; this is the case
in Islam and in Christianity. Where this heightening did not occur,
something postulated as incorruptible did descend into the realm of shades,
but never into the grave together with the body. The wishes for immortality
aspired to give the self the grave-lamp, one free of sepsis, still shining into
the strangest night; they have often overlaid death with lies, but they have
also overshone it.
II. Religious Counterpoints from Death

and Victory
Only good of the dead

Fear of dying oppressed us early and so remains primal. The corpse shows
to feeling and to thought what awaits everyone, dread of the corpse is
the oldest dread of all. Yet the first wish was not so much to live on,
to live on outside the corpse, this was taken for granted. Death was regarded
anyway only as a departure by all primitive peoples, as it still is today
by children. They wished simply to protect themselves from the dead by
1110
giving them a safe or comfortable home on the other side. This of course
was to everyone's benefit, as everyone was ultimately gathered to the
corpses. Service to the corpse, the embellishment of its night, were an
invitation to all to protect themselves against the threat to themselves.
The dead man himself had moved into the unearthly darkness from which
all evil and little good came. He was in the night, in the land without
fire and light, outside the round huts, longing to return. But to bar his
return was the purpose of all death rites, including the ancestor cult. The
corpse is carried feet first out of the village so that it cannot find its way
back, or else, as in the case of the bushmen, its nails are cut, hands and
feet bound, even its eyes put out. Sometimes the dead man's hut is also
burnt to the ground; the place he is attached to, where he feels good,
so to speak, must be the grave. Even in German areas tramps were for
a long time bound and buried, to stop them coming back. Though there
is no evidence to date of graves in the early Stone Age, those from the
late Stone Age are all the more numerous, above and below ground. And
the custom of putting food and drink into the grave for the corpse also
dates from this period; so that the dead who long to return or suck blood
are supposed to be replacedby the placated dead, indeed, as is still discernible
in many fairytales, the grateful dead. This food and drink was not of course
intended for the grave, any more than the women and slaves offered up
with the nobles, i.e. slaughtered at their graveside. But all these offerings
were intended for consumption and use in another place, so that the soul
of the dead man did not roam unhonoured about the grave and the village,
and so that the grave really bound the corpse. Its soul, that is here its
last breath, lived on peacefully in the other place, as soon as the body
was given the honour of burial or cremation. It lived on no longer as
a ghost but as a shade, a shade which independently went on living the
life to which the body had been accustomed. Among hunting peoples the
other world too is still the same for all, but among tillers of the soil and
raisers of cattle not even death makes all equal. The distinctions between
rich and poor persisted, with no levelling whatever. Even in the other
world, the best places are reserved for the nobles, the bad and worst places
for the common people. In Tonga, only the chief goes to the blessed land
Bolotu, the common folk. stand in the dark, as on earth. A similardistinction
is made in Hawaii between a heaven for princes and nobles and an underworld for the lower classes. Thus even in the afterlife Elysian and infernal
fields correspond to class divisions, with which they certainly first arose.
Punishment for high-ranking wrong-doers and reward for the poor, though
1111
only for those who were also well-behaved in the ruling class sense, this
wished-for levelling is, so to speak, forced through only later. It is first
found in the feuding, divided clan, where the chief is no longer regarded
as an undisputed head ape who remains such in the other world regardless
of whether he was good or bad. Every dead man was honoured by his
family as an ancestor in any case as soon as he was buried.
Shades and Greek twilight

Man lived on, even where his afterlife seemed quite pale. The Greeks more
than all other peoples saw the corpse as ageing, turning into a shade. But
the shade itself survives, even the Enlightenment seldom teaches annihilation
here, or only in the sense that the familiar ego ceases to be. Thus a semivoid appears behind death, namely the opposite of what is in store for
men under the SUD. An epitaph in Pompeii reads: 'After death there is
nothing, man is only what you see.' Another says: 'You who read this,
my friend, lead a good life, for after death there is no laughter, joking
or joy.' So much for the rather dull melancholy of these sayings, which
was probably not even confined to the later Roman period and the country
towns. Yet despite all this man was certainly not extinguished, nor had
he fallen into an inconceivable state of utter nothingness. He retained the
curious existence of his shade, which was after all freed from suffering,
agitation and frailty, and he entered a milky night which was on the edge
of life, but not utterly deathly. Night occurs in life, too, in ebbing life;
impeded or spellbound people experience it, who linger in the Hades of
their selves anyway. Utter desolation and purposelessness fills them, so
powerful and at the same time so hollow that the Greek Hades seems
unequivocally mild, as it were healthy in comparison, though it sometimes
borders on this state. In Homer, death is after all the brother, even the
twin brother, of sleep; in Hesiod, death and sleepdwell together in a palace
at the entrance to the underworld. Below, Lethe awaits (those who wanted
to drink oblivion had already drunk and no longer needed Lethe), the Styx
separates for good, Charon, with grey hair and dirty cloak, but eyes of
fire, ferries the dead across. And it was not as if the grey of Hades excluded
differences and distinctions between its inhabitants; as if there were no
kind of hell in it or Elysian fields. The other world of the Greeks, like
the Egyptian and later the Christian one, has a judgement of the dead
at its entrance; wishful images of retaliation and levelling are certainly
1112
at work here. Likewise they extend from Hades, from its highly structured
twilight, to influence life on earth; hence the moral thoughtfulness of the
final hour, noticeable even among the Greeks. When Pericles was dying,
he gathered his friends around him, asked each one for forgiveness for
the wrongs he might have done them and would hear nothing of his deeds
except that he had never given a citizen cause for grief. The Greek hell,
however, darkens the realm of shades most curiously towards the bottom,
predominantly to futile monotony, to the torment of futile repetition of
the same task; as with Sisyphus, Tantalus and the Danaids. The Elysian
fields quietly improve the grey of Hades towards the top, into the congenial
quality of pleasant twilight, the twilight of an eternal spring evening. Things
certainly do not go with a swing in this Elysium, the atmosphere is not
golden as at life's feasts, but silver, i.e. without passions and without
boredom. The Greek heaven was originally intended only for the favourites
of the gods, not for all good people as such. It was not until Elysium
was transferred from the western ocean to the underworld in the post-feudal,
post-Homeric era that it seemed suitable for good people too, as was
neighbouring Tartarus for the wicked. Life in this other world, however
pale, nonetheless seems highly wishful: the dead are thought of as living in
a dream world full of silhouettes, the wicked in the unchanged, inescapable
world of the nightmare, the good in the powerless but also effortless
sweetness of picture-life. And something else, most important of all, makes
the other world of the Greeks meaningful on a different level. For beside
the popular image of Hades another image persisted from the PelasgianOrphic era: that of the mysteries. Its image is the wheel: man rises to
life with the ascending spokes and sinks to death as they descend; but
above all it is not only the same wheel but also the same man who rises,
descends and rises again along with the wheel, the transmigration of souls
is taught here. And purification is also taught, drawing the best out of
revolving death so that man comes through death with his essentialsubstance
intact and returns on a higher level. This happens in the Eleusinian mysteries,
and, with Dionysian accent, in the Orphic mysteries; both sought exclusively
to initiate into death, .not for its nothingness, but for its overcoming.
Affirmation of recurrence; Orphic wheel

The grave was now to be spoken with, even to be moved. It was regarded
as seed beneath the ground, the fruit therefore comes back above ground.
1113
The aim was to step from Hades into life again, the same person as before,
though now more fully conscious of himself. The Eleusinian rites, the
mysteries of Persephone served to keep alive this consciousness and this
certainty. The legend on which they were based contained, from the first,
as much growth magic as death magic. Corresponding to the unity in
which matrilineal times had revered the earth both as the field for corn
and for the dead; and Eleusis served Demeter, the matrilineal goddess.
When her daughter Persephone revolves between the realm of the dead
and the upper world, in winter below, in summer above, this was seen
as more than a symbol of vegetable growth. It very soon came to be seen
as the wishful image of resurrection: the corn Persephone was also the
human soul stolen from Hades. These correlations, preserved in the
Eleusinian mysteries, are age-old, Demeter herself once held the office of
Pluto, she did not dwell on Olympus as in the later Greek era. She was
the goddess of matriliny, and the grave, which devours all births, was
as much a part of the womb and its world as birth. The earth-mother
as the ruler of the dead was a fearsome and wrathful power, yet this gravegoddess was also the goddess of the cradle of life, a kindly, fruit-giving
mother. Thus the functions of birth and death were still closely intertwined in pre-Homeric, Pelasgian myth, Gaia-Demeter dominated religious
belief, the gods of Homer, the new gods, are the first to belong to the
patrilineal era, they do not preside over birth or over death and they
themselves are remote from death. But preciselyin the Eleusinian mysteries
Demeter was invoked inher old dual function, and her daughter Persephone
was the dying human being, bound to the chthonic cycle. The best now
had to be made of this: the art of death rites, the art of happy rebirth
as the morality of Persephone. Thus the mystes, in the simile of the seed,
were reconciled with death: destruction bears a thousand-fold fruit, it is
necessaryfor a richer recurrence. A comforting alternation of life and death
now begins: Persephone escapes again and again from Hades, though she
returns there again and again; Eleusis taught the transmigration of souls,
a life-affirming transmigration which moves upwards from ever-renewed
immersions in Hades, and which brings with it not just womb and grave
but also grave and birth. According to the belief of the mystes, bodily
well-being is the reward which the mysteries 'bestow for the duration of
life, but the higher reward is the hope they give of a better rebirth in
the time after death. Instead of drinking from Lethe, they drink from the
well of memory of earlier births, this is to pave the way to anew, improved
birth. The transmigration of souls is thus interpreted highly optimistically,
1114
as a medium to ascent; the wheel of recurrence is affirmed.

And the dead man, by the very fact of being buried, seemed to be well
cocooned. The grave does not contain, it ripens, the shadow in the cave
is to be reborn from the cave. In the Eleusinian formula, age-old and
matrilineal, the crouched burial of the Stone Age survives, in which the
corpse, doubled up into an embryo, awaits its new birth. Yet the Eleusinian
hope also includes man in the image of spring, in which the earth itself
emerges again from its corpse-like form. Demeter-Gaia is thus joined by
Dionysus, who bears the dialectical name ~p,fea JlV"Tfe""~, nocturnal
day, light in the earth and from it. This wholly earth-revering, consolatory
and dual character survives, inherited from the Etruscans, even in extremely
patrilineal Rome. The Roman florealia were both a commemoration of
the dead and a celebration of spring, Bacchus is the lord of the dead souls
who rise up in swarms from the earth at the beginning of spring, in the
same breath he makes the earth blossom. This is why the walls of Etruscan'
burial chambers are full of lewd scenes, the demon of death in Etruscan
funeral games appears in the form of a satyr, likewise Bacchanalian scenes
survive on Roman sarcophagi, with the phallus as a grave-ornament. Far
from fading, the dialectical memory of Demeter-Dionysus, indeed PlutoDionysus, grew ever more powerful, even in Apollonian Greece; the
Eleusinian mysteries themselves, from the ninth century and emphatically
from the sixth century onwards, joined forces with Dionysus and his rebirthgiving, orphically purifying fire. The statue of Dionysus was carried from
Athens to the temple of Demeter in Eleusis, he was regarded as her son,
he outshone her daughter Persephone, he was regarded, in the emphatic
sense, as 'his mother's son', as the lord of the moist, fecundating life of
nature. This was how he appeared to the Maenads, he appeared to those
love-crazed butchers as a bull-god, and, dying and rising from the dead,
he was tom to pieces; to the Maenads, as familiar with death and the lament
for the transitoriness of life as with orgasm and lust, he represented the
unity of life and death. Dionysus is the path from Demeter to the male life
of nature, from the female cave to the phallus; and it is in him, not only
in the unity of grave and cradle, that the hope of immortality and rebirth
now seeks its emblem. Bachofen was the first to recall these associations:
'Man is in the unlamented lower creation, but final victory belongs to
the phallic natural power and its revealed symbol. In the magic of lavish
paradisial pleasures all demands on life and all hope of the other world
are satisfied' - the nature-lament of the ancient world falls silent. Dionysus,
ousting grim Pluto, is as it were solar: 'He is, as Macrobius describes him,
ms
the sun of the earth's lower hemisphere (sol in inferno hemisphaerio), i.e.
the solar principle of the dark earth which, far removed from its distant
home, illuminates the sealed depths of matter' (Bachofen, Die Unsterblichkeitslehre der orphischen Theologie, 1867, p. 26). As this chthonic
Helios, Dionysus now brings the souls out of Hades, without compulsion
to return, but - and this is the second Novum compared with DemeterPersephone - also without the necessity ofbeing reborn. The compelling wheel
of recurrence was affirmed in Eleusis before or outside the Orphic reformation; within Orphism, it is denied. An extended wishful image now appears,
one directed not only against Hades but against Hades and equally against
birth. An ascetic wishful image, though one which is no longer compatible
with Dionysus as the god of spring, the original fertility god. In fact
Orphism, when it did break in, followed the tradition ofa second Dionysus,
a Dionysus himself reborn . This is Dionysus-Zagreus, who was torn limb
from limb by the Titans and who, after Zeus has eaten his heart which
remained intact, comes to life again in the second Dionysus. This resurrected
god has lost nothing of the ardour and joy which he embodies, to which
he leads; in the mysteries he was proclaimed as Dionysus-Iacchus, i.e. the
jubilant one. But he no longer lives in his old body, indeed no longer
at all in the body of death and of birth which alternates with it; XVXAOS
"'IE JlfC1WS, the cycle of birth, as Orphism calls it with a truly Indian expression, is broken together with death. The second Dionysus therefore does
not in any way become transcendental or even Olympian, he remains the
highest fullness of life, but now it is fullness of a second nature, free of
the cycle. And finally the Orphic mystes followed him, the wish becomes
exodus from the (Jwp,a-ufj/UX, from the body-grave altogether, to experience
neither death nor corporeal rebirth; but this exodus never goes into what
is hostile to life, into spirit. Though asceticism was clearly present here,
in connection with the decline of the Greek ecopomy and polis, it is only
hostile to life in so far as it removes the joys of the body from this susceptible, unsteady being and transfers them to the soul. It is wrong to see
Orphic hostility to the body as renunciation; or how could Dionysus be
their god? The body as the prison of the soul - this means here that it
hinders the butterfly Psyche, this upward effervescence. Not the practice
of civic virtues, not discipline nor moral reformation of the character were
required in Orphism, but solely dedication to the orgiastic god. Orphic
asceticism certainly did not involve mortification of the body t on the
contrary it rescued as it were the joys of the body from their transitoryrevolving setting. Though there are unmistakable Indian echoes in the
1116
hatred of the birth-wheel, the second Dionysus nonetheless remains of

this world. Wine and love bring on ecstasy, which derives its essencefrom
the body itself and is inspired from this essence. In Eleusinian terms, the
alternation between birth and death, assumed to be constant, appeared
to be bearable, the possible transition from death to a better birth appeared
to be consoling. In Orphic terms, an attempt is made to draw an entire
final salvation and its salutary wholeness into the soul, which has now
escaped from all transmigration, both from that towards death and that
towards birth, and which already seeks to fill with blood on earth that
which in the conception of Hades was mere shade.
Elixirs of the soul and the gnostic journey to heaven

To be freed from the body of this death, this was longed for in ever wilder
and stranger ways. Disintegrating late classical society fostered in all its
circles a fear which had scarcely ever been felt as intensely till then. It
was focussed most heavily, in almost concentrated form, on death, even
though this seemed to put an end to sad life. Yet death was in no way
felt to be an end, least of all an escape; on the contrary, it seemed to be
a perpetual slaughterhouse. The age of Stoic, composed suicide and its
consolation, however grim, was now past; death appeared as the most
sinister part of all that was corruptible. All in all, Eleusis had still been
a feast, and most of the initiates had prayed for earthly rather than otherworldy bliss. But in the late classical period this feast turned into a cry
for help; fear of life and dread of death then came together into the world,
deliverance from both was sought. It was only then that the Greek
mysteries, augmented by an almost wholesale import of oriental mysteries,
came to form a huge escape and evasion route. Never had there been such
despair, such remarkable longing, throughout all classes, for a remedy
against death, never such a powerful longing for immortality, the passport
out of the slaughterhouse. From Hadrian onwards, the wishful image of
the mysteries (the certainty of resurrection) went hand in hand with all
kinds of superstition; amulets, spirit seals, all the fish-hooks of invocation
were tried out to grasp immortality. What seemed great or worthy of
emulation about the gods was not that they are powerful, wise or even
happy, but that they are immortal, this was their desirable ambrosial quality.
It was to acquire this that the initiations, rites, liturgies anfl procedures of
late classical mystery religion most predominantly served. Moral purification
1117
was certainly also sought here, in the form of strength, seclusion, brotherly
love, but such things were not considered crucial. More important than
the cleansing from sin was the tincturing with that magic substance by
means of which the initiate could be baptized and freed from the mortal
body. Even in the Orphic mysteries, the sacrificial bull representing Dionysus
and torn to pieces and eaten by the Maenads was regarded as the dying ,
year-god who would awake to new life; Dionysus takes those who are
drunk with his blood with him into immortality. Clearly connected with
this were the later 'taurobolia': the mystes stood in a pit above which
a bull was slaughtered, let the gushing blood stream over him and he thus
attained baptism, indeed a kind of pagan communion of hoped-for immortality. Those who were thus baptized subsequently wore their blood-stiff
clothes in the streets and in the shops, partly objects of mockery, partly
of awe. Paul (1 Cor. 10, ISff.) pointed, not without reason, to the analogy
between pagan sacrifice and communion; when he calls the pagan sacrifice
(to which the taurobolia also belonged) 'the table', 'the cup', 'the fellowship
of devils' , this antithesis confirms precisely their correspondence and affinity
in the history of religion. Even Jesus triumphed in competition with the
mysteries not as the Messiah of those who labour and are heavy-laden but
as the 'first among the dead', and his character was 'the resurrection and
the life'. Baptism at that time was on the whole a magical sacrament,
the waters of baptism were regarded as the water of life, Christ redeemed
mankind from death. The Christ of Gnosticism in particular was primarily
the antidote to death; nor were all the faithful by any means regarded
as redeemed unless they had first received the baptism of the dead. There
was a gnostic baptism of the dead, a major sacrament, in the cults of St
Mark the dead man's head was anointed with water and oil, in order,
according to Irenaeus, 'to make him invisible to the archons and powers'.
It was just as ardently hoped that Jesus, too, would provide such a magic
cap against evil after death; even among the Christians of Corinth in Paul's
time a baptism of the dead was still common (I Cor. IS, 29), which showed
why they thought the God of Life had come. In Gnostic terms the baptismal
elixirs were complemented by elixirs of knowledge, not accessible to
everyone and so all the more eagerly sought in the future aeon; the Gnostic
Christ was a learned redeemer. He eliminated ignorance, revealing himself
fully only to the 'Pneumatics', i.e. intellectual aristocrats, or we might
almost say that he abolished death only for doctors of the Ascension. Of
course the gnostic and even the philosophical knowledge of this time was
certainly not divorced from will, emotions and also the agitated, gloomy
IllS
folklore of the age. Proclos, one of the most perceptive thinkers of this
time, collected folk-tales wherever he could find them and, as if the two
went together, had himself initiated into all the mysteries, thus combining
- in a manner that certainly was not intellectually aristocratic - the popular
and the hermetic, both equally inviting, with the distinction of the concept.
Gnosticism, whether pagan or Christian, certainly was not a religion of
the withered classical mind. On the contrary, it was the first and last great
incursion of wishful mythology into the mind, as is proved above all by
one of its strangest yet also one of its most magnificent phantasmagoria:
the doctrine of the soul's heavenly journey.
It followed the baptism of blood, in order to make itself invisible against
dying. Yet it clearly also provided the passport which enabled the traveller
to come unscathed through a journey beyond death which was fully mapped
out, mapped out in good and evil. The story of this ascent or heavenly
journey and the necessity to be prepared for it is as follows: between heaven
and earth lie the seven planetary circles, ruled by evil spirits, the lords
of this world. These are the archons or demons of fate, and in gnostic
terms they were depicted as demons with animal heads -lion, bull, dragon,
eagle, bear, dog, ass; they enslave man and set up a blockade between
him and heaven. This is why the archons in this negatively evaluated
astrology are described as tollmen, as 'guardians of the sorrowful road';
the circle of planets itself appears as the 'fence of wickedness'. Thus the
classical confidence in the world, so powerful and optimistic right up to
the middle Stoics, was now bedevilled. Nero and Caracalla appeared to
be ideologically embedded in star-demons, the defencelessness of the
individual, the engulfing whirlpool of declining late Rome were projected
on to the universe. Not only life itself but even more so its pre-existence
and post-existence, the state of the soul before birth and after death, were
now drawn into the powerful-sinister locality of the archon system. For
when the soul descended from heaven to earth (the moon was regarded
as the gate for descent) it passed the seven spheres, each of which gave
it a part of the spell, for its earthly destiny. After death, the soul in its
ascent to heaven has to pass the same archons (the sun was regarded as
the gate for ascent) and at every stage the old archon, 'the god of destruction
and second death', steps forward, barring its way. Not only the planets
but also the twelve zodiacal signs of the sphere of fixed stars and the twelve
constellations of the zodiac were included among the demons of destruction;
the entire firmament was aset of devil's fangs, the whole universe a tyranny.
Sun, moon and stars are together the fatal sphere, the sphere of destiny,
1119
the sphere of the heimarmene; * the world regent is the devil. This was
the point at which Gnosis deployed its myth of the heavenly journey, in
the technical sense so to speak, as the breaking of the astral blockade. The
mystes was taught the password which enabled him to pass the seven
archons and deprived the 'fence of wickedness' of its power. Some
passwords, consisting of utterly incomprehensible howling sounds, imitated
the names of the respective archons; knowledge of a name, according to
ancient belief, is identical with power over the person named. The specific
doctrine of the password also goes back a long way: in the I2Sth chapter
of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the god guarding each gate of Hades
requires the dead man to know his name before he lets him pass. Perhaps
this Egyptian tradition is still at work when in the Coptic writings of
Gnosticism passwords are especially classified: in the first rank the solemn
revelation of the demons' names, then the symbols and signs to be shown,
then the formulae and magic words to be spoken to ward off the archons.
And the imagined successful outcome was that the soul casts off the ugly
veils and blemishes it once received on its journey through the planetary
circles. In the later Persian-gnostic system of Mani the soul even casts
off all the determinants of the lower world, not just its definite vices:
to the moon it returns its vital and nourishing power, to Mercury greed,
to Venus lust, to the sun intellect, to Mars courage, to Jupiter ambition,
to Saturn lethargy. Here, too, every archon is watched over by an angel
of the Persian light-god Ormuzd, who does the rest to ensure that the
soul, free of ballast, finds its way home to the primal light. And at the
entrance to this thejust man's own soul comes towards him, 'in the form
of a virgin', who receives him and leads him into the uppermost heaven;
thus in Mani no-one else springs from behind the last planet, but in fact
(later recalled in Dante's Beatrice) the 'form of a virgin', as a pure human
form and heavenly guide. Probably the Persian-Roman Mithras mysteries
not only already furthered the cult of the Sol invictus but also the help
he gave to the dead. The seven-stepped staircase, which in the cave of
these mysteries, in complete harmony with the heavenly journey, was built
of seven metals representing the planetary signs, symbolized not only the
cosmos but the password-journey through the seven planetary circles, up
to Mithras the life-giver. But the perspective always remains most turbulent
of all in Judaeo-Christian Gnosis, in keeping with its total intertwining
of wishful myth against death with world and the Son of Man who is
* 'Heimarmene': originally a concept of fate in ancient Greek philosophy.
1120
WISHFUL IMAGFS OF THE FULFILLED MOMENT
better than the world. Among the Peratians, the transition is expressed
in images from the Old Testament; the passage in Hippolitos reads: 'Death
seizes the Egyptians in the Red Sea, together with their chariots; all people
without Gnosis are Egyptians. And this is the meaning of the exodus from
Egypt, namely exodus from the body, which is a little Egypt. The crossing
of the Red Sea, however, means the crossing of the water of transience,
which is Saturn: and the other side of the Red Sea is the desert, where
all the gods of destruction are together with the God of Redemption.
But the gods of destruction are the stars, which impose on creatures the
necessity of changeful birth' (Hippolitos, Blenchos V, 16). In 'Pistis Sophia',
till recently the only extant Gnostic book, a kind of Pneumatic novel,
Jesus himself deprives the archons of 'a third of their power', turning 'their
heads and their course towards half the year, so that they cannot look
upon men' and God alone determines fate as well as ascent. 'Truly', says
Jesus, 'if I had not turned their course a multitude of souls would have
been destroyed, and they would have languished for a long time if the
archons of the aeons and the archons of the heimarmene and of the sphaira
and all their places and all their heavens and all their eons had not been
destroyed, and the souls would have languished for a long time outside
here, and the completion of the number of perfect souls would have been
delayed who are reckoned among the inheritors of the heights through
the mysteries and who will be in the treasury of light' (Pistis Sophia,
ch. 23). Here the password is joined by the gnostic saviour himself, and
he makes this password superfluous, not as a teacher but already as a
Pantocrator, as lord against the archons. Against the same archons who
are believed to be 'Cosmocrators' even in the New Testament, at least
in the Epistle to the Ephesians, though Paul's authorship is not certain.
'Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against
the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but
against principalities, against powers, against the rulers * of the darkness
of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places' (Eph. 6, IIf.).
Thus Jesus redeems not only from sin but also from astrally imposed fate
(which subsequently survived in the notion of Saturn as .the wicked fairy
in fairytales and as the unlucky seven in astrology), he supplants the rule
of the stars, or as Augustine, in the true spirit of the heavenly journey,
stresses: 'Christianity is superior to pagan philosophy because it exorcizes
The word translated as 'rulers' in the Authorized Version is translated 'cosmocrators' in
the German.
HOPEFUL IMAGFS AGAINST DEATH
1121
the evil spirits beneath the heavens and frees the soul from them' (cf. De
civ. Dei, X). So high and pervasive was the influence of this utopianpedantic image of a journey, the first image that did not lead downwards
into Hades but upwards into the light. The first to elaborate the fantasy
of death not as a sinking but as a flight, protected and sealed too, with
a timetable and highly vivid extravagance. A memory of the gnostic
ascension seems to linger on even into Dante's Mount Purgatory - without'
demons of course but with a graduated ascent through seven gates. In
Gnosis, they open on to the primal light, in Dante on to the Garden of
Eden and the wondrous tree. In Gnosis they are the evil planetary spheres,
in Dante they have long been purified and incorporated, they themselves
constitute the guiding topology. But the soul's seven-stepped journey
through Purgatory certainly survives, closest to Mani's version, even though
the planetary spheres in Dante's Paradiso did not remain those of the gnostic
heavenly journey. And as in Mani, at the end of the journey through
Purgatory a beautiful virgin appears, the woman who leads the soul to
heaven; Beatrice in Dante, Gretchen in Faust. If the late classical period
had produced a great writer, the substance of the heavenly journey would
have been more brilliantly apparent than is the case in the accounts of
its opponents or even the muddled 'Pistis Sophia'. Or even in -several,
partly still extant hymns and liturgical writings, which were collected in
the hymn-book of the Manichaean Church. Yet even as it is, this journeymyth contains one of the most-wide-ranging, though also one of the
wildest, images of adventure against death and one of the strangest liberation
myths against the idea - projected into star-emperors - of fate.
Egyptian heaven in the tomb

There was a time when the final fear could be dissuaded more quietly,
indeed more intimately. Namely where the whole of life was already
transformed into a pre-death. This was the case with the tribes who from
the earliest times lived on the lower Nile, they were the first to envy the
peaceful tomb. Even before the ancient empire, they had curiously pallid,
macabre signs and idols. In the delta, for instance, a tree stripped of its
leaves was worshipped, as was the sloughed skin of a snake. No other
race has since been so incessantly obsessed with death as the Egyptians,
or has so absurdly-wishfully accepted it as the true life. None lavished
so much preparation on the art of dying, none paid so much attention
1122
to provision for the dead in the other world. None had so much time
and expense to spare on building tombs, none mapped out the Beyond
with such meticulous love and care. The Egyptians were also the first to
associate moral ideas with those of a good death. As early as the fifth
dynasty, a nobleman emphasizes on his tomb: 'I built this tomb, as my
rightful property, I have never taken what belonged to another, I have
never done violence to anyone.' There were of course indulgences that
could be purchased from priests, magic formulae on the inside of the coffin
or on the sacred scarab which was carved in stone and placed under the
mummy's breast-band. Yet even the magic formulae began with the telling
sentence: 'My heart, do not rise up as a witness against me.' For the first
time in history t a thousand years before the Greeks and more elaborately
than in Israel, the wishful thought appears that the fate of the dead should
not be merely a continuation of their earthly well-being but should depend
on their moral conduct. Judges consign the dead to the good place or the
bad, the divine scribe Thoth records the judgement once the dead man's
heart has been weighed, Osiris himself presides. What was lasting in man,
however, was not only his soul, this inconstant and so to speak still
immature being. It was pictured as a bird with a man's head, fluttering
about at night, a very long way from blessed peace. What is lasting is
the primal image of the bodily person himself, the Ka; this solid entelechy
went with the person through life and entered the other world after death.
It was only for mediation with the Ka that corpses were mummified, and
in a higher form of mummification they were immortalized in sculpted
form: the art of sculpture was regarded by the rich and powerful as an
aid on the path to their immortalization in the other world. The sculpted
portrait contained the Ka and was erected in the burial chamber. Thus
Diodorus writes: 'Greater care is devoted to the dwellings of the dead
than to those of the living; the Egyptians regard the tombs alone as their
true and lasting domicile for all time.' Their aspiration is thus not only
to prolong earthly existence into eternity, but eternal existence itself appears
as life in death, indeed fundamentally so. It was to this end that life itself
seemed, without decrescendo, to mature or rather to become heavy, acquire
dignity; for the child dies shallowly and is barely immersed, whereas the
old man sinks deep, finds death-life, schooled by age itself in the consciousness of death. A culture of death was thus completely sounded out
in Egypt, by deep immersion in death, far below the superficial life-line
and sun-line, down to the perfection of that which man only incompletely
is on earth, down to the living corpse and the depth of age, of the kingdom
of the dead. With the Ka, a utopianized rigidity extends just as much
into life as life is meant to extend into a situationless form. The Ka, which
is gathered to Osiris, was already on earth the chiselled person, the person
of peace, gravity and closedness, who underlies the entire hieratic sculpture
of Egypt. As a dry mummy, stitched up for eternity, the person attains
his first external form, as geometrical rigidity in stone he attains his true
form. The desire to become like stone is, as we have seen, the wishful
landscape of Egyptian art in general, and precisely this 'crystal of death
as foreseen perfection' (cf. Vol. II, p. 723) derives from the desire to become
like the dead person himself, has an inorganic goaljonn. Not only the tombs
themselves, the pyramids and mastabas, are a crystal in which a dead man
dwells, as Hegel puts it, hieratic sculpture also conceives the Ka as
crystalline, in the block-unity alien to movement, absolutely concordant
with the stone. The sense of history, memory, tradition, unprecedented
faithfulness to habit fits in with this very well: Egypt as a whole is the
wishful land of a space without time, of a sacred geometry.
The land to which the dead person now travelled was pleasant but as
it were only rigidly animated. Yet it certainly did not seem lightless or,
as secluded and as mere underworld, averted from the sun itself. This would
have conflicted both with permanently visible calm and with the reverence
which was shown to the sun, the setting, not the disappearing sun. The
kingdom of the dead was bordered by the subterranean waterway in which
the sun-barque, after plunging into the sea, sailedfrom west to east beneath
the earth's disc. For the heaven above the earth's disc was also imagined
as a land with water, with islands, canals and a sea on which the sun,
moon and stars sailed in barques. To this Egypt of the day-heaven corresponded the Egypt of the night-shine of the sun - but of course it
corresponded with gravity, with grave. * The continual, cheerfully depicted
labours in which the common people are engaged in the other world should
not blind us to the living corpses. And the colourful scenes on the inside
of feudal coffin-walls or the details in the Egyptian Book of the Dead about
ploughing, harvesting, sailing and other activities of an otherworldly plebs,
no longer misera but contribuens, cannot conceal the immortality in the
immobile ageing style of death more highly suited to people desired to
be statuesque. Certainly the king receives from his divine father the sign
of 'life', the phrase 'gifted with life' was from the earliest days one of
the Pharaoh's titles. "The hieroglyph of life - not of ordinary earthly life
* This is grave in the musical sense here.
112 4
but of higher divine life - is the ansate cross which innumerable pictures
show the god presenting to the king, often bringing it close to the king's
face so that he can inhale through his nose the aura which emanates from
the symbol. Thereby the gods transmit their unique pneuma, the divine
breath of life, to the kings, their beloved sons' (Cf. Norden, Die Geburt
des Kindes, 1924, p. 119). But the 'life' thus stressed is by no: means
comparable with earthly life, which is mobile and expresses itself in movement, nor does such life suit the Pharaoh as such, who has so to speak
died even before his death, i.e. has statuesquely become space instead of
time. This is why, alongside the 'life' hieroglyph which the god hands
the Pharaoh, another hieroglyph is always set signifying the idea of
'permanence', permanence such, as Osiris, the god who is himself dead,
holds ready for Sesostris IlIon the stele in Abydos or such as Ptah, god
of mummies and sculptors alike, grants Rameses II. And what is highly
peculiar to the Pharaoh is peculiar to every Egyptian who is capable of
understanding gravity and its grave, * peculiar as office and goal, as deathoffice and dignified official death. In order that his 'life' does not flow
out into a dying which is still subject to change but into sacred rigidity,
by the Nile of immortalization. Osiris himself is motionless, he was merely
awoken to consciousness of death by Isis, it was precisely as the most perfect
corpse that he was worshipped along with the sun. This king of the underworld was probably a grave-god even in the oldest form in which he was
revered, later he also came to be associated with the subterranean course
of the sun, as the ruling statue in its kingdom of tombs, its kingdom of
the west. So from time immemorial images of Osiris were always macabre;
indeed the above-mentioned prehistoric fetish of the tree stripped of its
leaveswas applied to Osiris, as his hieroglyph. The official art of the ancient
empire always depicts this god as a corpse swathed in mummy's bands,
indeed the middle empire and particularly the late period even enshrined
Ptah, the highest god. He too was finally depicted as a grave-figure, as
the mummy of a bald priest; thus Ptah, the creator of the world, became
the tutelary god of the royal tombs, finally merging with Osiris. Osiris
himself was and remained 'the first of those in the west', the powerful
magic formulae of his wife Isis freed him from the paralysis of physical
death, but only for him to represent living death, resurrection into happy
death. From the middle empire onwards, the dead person is simply referred
to as Osiris N. N., as if he were the god himself (Cf. Erman, Agypten
This is grave in the musical sense again here.
II 2 S
und agyptisches Leben im Altertum, 1923, p. 347); so unquestionably did

the wishful image of perfection lie for the Egyptians in the wishful land
of a divine corpse-existence. No speech, no song reached this far, Osiris
was the silent god par excellence, it was forbidden to make music in his
temple at Abydos. The image of the peace of death came into the world
via Egypt, and significantly this peace consisted neither in extinction nor
conversely in a kind of higher, intensified life. The peace of Osiris was
rather that of a changeless, permanent state, of death without paralysis,
yet also without the drama of hell and heaven. In short, the Egyptian
wishful death was petrification in undisturbed doing and being, it was
for this that the dead Osiris and the sun of the underworld shone. The
myths of repetition which for the Greeks signified damnation, with an
added element of futility (Tantalus, Sisyphus, the Danaides), here signify
everlasting bliss, The definite element, which is hence eternally the same,
is the same in the Egyptian death-wish as actions of the Ka, as the joys
of the finally perfected statue.
Biblical resurrection and apocalypse

It is surprising that for a very long time among the Jews the final fear
was not considered or dreamt over. This race was as this-worldly as the
Greeks, but its life was directed incomparably more towards future things,
towards goals. Nonetheless, the wish for and images of the afterlifeemerged
only slowly, although they were then cheerful about it, vengeful about
it. Until then long life and well-being on earth put off and pushed down
the end, down into Sheol, the distant underworld. There was in ancient
Israel an ancestor cult and a cult of the dead, which presupposes belief
in an afterlife, but this still belonged to the magical practices adopted by
the Canaanites, not to the true faith. When Saul invokes the dead spirit
of Samuel through the witch of Endor, he commits a sin; moreover, the
ascending spirit is described not as a man but as 'Blohim' (I Samuel 28, 13),
therefore as a supernatural being, not a soul. The same applies to a remarkable
and evidently very early passage on Enoch: 'And Enoch walked with God;
and he was not; for God took him' (Genesis S, 24). These, like the translation of Elijah, are great exceptions and are distinguished as such. But
above all: it is Elohirn, not men, who are behind these immortal names.
It is even possible that Enoch, who was 365 years old, was the name of
an earlier sun-god; Elijah, too, rode in a 'chariot of fire'. Sheol, the
1126
underworld of the grave, remained instead for a long time man's lot, as
in the Book of Job (around 400 B.C.), though here with a note of
Promethean revolt: 'If I wait, the grave is mine house: I have made my
bed in the darkness. I have said to corruption, Thou art my father: to
the worm, Thou art my mother and my sister' (Job 17, 13f.). The breakthrough of immortality in Judaism came only with the prophet Daniel
(around 160 B.C.), and the impetus behind it did not come from the old
wish for long life, for well-being on earth, now transcendentally prolonged.
On the contrary, it came from Job and the prophets, from a thirstforjustice;
thus the wish became a postulate, the post-mortal scene became an outand-out tribunal. Belief in the afterlife here became one of the means of
allaying doubts about God's justice on earth; above all the hope of resurrection itselfbecame a legal-moral hope. As we have seen, there had already
been a much more elaborate judgement of the dead in Egypt, but a crucial
new element, designed to shake the composure of the rich and of the
masters, was introduced in late Israel. For the basic motif of the demanded
resurrection now becomes threatening, it is to make upfor the absence of
an earthlyjudgement: 'And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth
shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting
contempt. And they that shall be wise shall shine as the brightness of the
firmament; and they that tum many to righteousness as the stars for ever
and ever.' (Dan. 12, 2ff.). This is the moral incursion of the hope of
resurrection into the true faith, independent of the cult of the dead, magic
rites, gods made men; and it is the first incursion. The ostensibly earlier
revelation in some Psalms - notably in Psalm 49, IS: 'But God will redeem
my soul from the power of the grave: * for he shall receive me', and the
verse in Isaiah 26, 19: 'Thy dead men shall live, together with my dead
body shall they arise' - in fact dates from a period as late as Daniel, is
interpolated like the complex of Isaiah chapters 24-27. Yet even according
to Daniel not all, only many will awaken, i.e. only the godly Jewish martyrs
and only the worst bloodhounds among the wicked. Even the latter will
not yet awaken to hell-fire but to shame and everlasting contempt, so
that they witness the triumph of the just. Universal resurrection itself, that
of all mankind, is first pronounced in the picture-speeches of the Ethiopian
Book of Enoch, towards the end of the first century B.C. Some of the
colour of the Egyptian judgement of the dead and the Persian- teaching
of the world conflagration rubbed off here. The Book of Enoch not only
* The word translated as 'grave' in the Authorized version is 'Sheol' in the German.
1127
made Daniel's promise universal, it also introduced into it, for the first time,
the extravagantly depicted sceneof hell, heaven and the LastJudgement. And
the Apocalypse of Ezra in the first century A.D. turns this Last]udgement
into a last revelation: 'For after death, shall the judgement come, when we
shall live again: and then shall the names of the righteous be manifest, and the
works of the ungodly shall be declared' (2 Ezra 14, 35). The age-old Egyptian
idea of the Book of Life in which the weight of human deeds is recorded made
its influence felt here. The scribe-god Thoth who held this office at the
Egyptian Judgement of the Dead returns as the angel of Yahweh, indeed as
Yahweh himself. The record is opened every year on the Jewish New Year's
Day and closed on the Day of Atonement, the highest and most solemn]ewish
holy day. It is a post-mortally focussed day of repentance for which, significantly, there is no textual evidence whatever in pre-exile]udaism, it is not
mentioned in the so-called Book of the Covenant in the section in which the
order of feasts is laid down (Exodus 23). The Book of]udgement myth itself
was, after all, interpolated into an old text, as in Exodus 32, 32. The first
Isaiah also mentions it: 'And it shall come to pass, that he that is left in Zion,
and he that remaineth in]erusalem, shall be called holy, even every one that
is written among the living in]erusalem' (Isaiah 4, 3). This has survived in
Luke 10, 20: 'but rather rejoice because your names are written in heaven',
it continues to resound in the church requiem: 'Liber scriptus proferetur in
quo totum continetur. ,* With the wishful and dream prospect of the justice
of at least a Day of Judgement or Last Judgement and its aftermath gaining
strength, the time of course now came for a reinterpretation of supposedly
earlier accounts. In particular the Genesisaccount of the antediluvian patriarch
Enoch and his translation now aroused great interest; in late Jewish literature
he was regarded as the first of those who had escaped Sheol, indeed escaped
death itself. A 'Book of Enoch ,, a 'Book of the Mysteries of Enoch , was now
written in which the mysteries of the next world, which the patriarch had
seen, were extensively fantasized: the Epistle of Jude in the New Testament
celebrates Enoch, 'the seventh from Adam', as the prophet of the Last
Judgement (Ep. Jud. 14f.). The utopia of resurrection thus finally became
orthodox, despite evident resistance, probably from 'Epicurean' Sadducee
circles ('which deny that there is any resurrection', Luke 20, 27). In Christ's
time a Sanhedrin decree was published: 'Nobody has any part in the future
world who says that the revival of the dead cannot be proved from the
* 'The written book will be brought forward in which everything is contained.' From Thomas
de Celano's poem 'Dies Irae".
1128
Torah.' Hence from the Pentateuch, where there is definitely no such article
of faith to be found: unless in the above-mentioned ancestor cult which,
apart from its magical rites, scarcely went beyond the scale of a localized
grave-cult. Soon very silly images of the end were puffing themselves up,
and some even found their way into the Talmud, as for example a future
Leviathan: 'This is the fish-monster whose flesh the elect will eat after
the twilight of the world and from whose skin a tent will be made beneath
which the just of all races will dwell in bliss'; the sea-beast thus became
a kind of other-worldly manna. One that does not diminish with eating,
which shows that even the awesome giant Leviathan Oob 41, 2-26) will
one day serve the blessed for the best. With renewed dogmatic force,
Maimonides, in the thirteen articles of his credo, ordained the immortality
of the soul and the resurrection of the body. In his 'Orpheus', Salomon
Reinach observes, not quite correctly, that these articles are as far removed
from biblical Judaism as the Catholicism of the Council of Trent from
the gospels. As for the resurrection in Maimonides, there had been emotional preparation for it in post-exile Judaism and, from the time of Daniel
onwards, legal-moral preparation. Above the fear of physical death loomed
the terror of a second death, the damnation which awaited the wicked.
Jesus himself shared this belief, which had become deeply rooted among
the popular classes, and he spoke from within it, as a threatener as well
as a saviour. He referred to the resurrection as a self-evident act, one which
would be dangerous for most (Matt. 11, 24, Luke to, 12); in Jesus' sect,
belief in the resurrection and judgement was part of the doctrine of the
beginning of Christian life in general (Hebr. 6, rf.), The heavens therefore
had to shine all the more radiantly, all the more powerful, over and above
the political promise of the Lord's Anointed, was the influence of the
promise of eternal life. As victory over the second death, beyond the first,
beyond merely physical annihilation, which leaves the soul to heaven or
to hell. Thus from Daniel onwards, finally also under Iranian influences,
immortality was introduced into a drama of the most enormous power,
a not only individual-future but cosmic-future drama; into world conflagration with sheer night, sheer light behind it. All men are present during
this, this is the new meaning of the Day of Judgement, it does not take
place in front of a random last generation and an unpeopled nature. Indeed
the world of the apocalypse in which lateJudaism arriveswould have seemed
futile and subjectless to the faithful if it had not concerned and rewarded
a resurrected gathering of all mankind since Adam.
All the more burning the will to get on the right, the victorious side.
1129
Jesus first appeared as a healer, and it was as a healer, not yet politically
or even as a deliverer from sins, that he attracted followers. He fights
against the first death and the sickness unto it, he first cures the lame,
the blind, the bleeding, he raises a man from the dead. The early, utterly
sorcerous accounts of miracles are filled with such things; not yet with
repentance. This came only later, in sermons, as the heritage of John the
Baptist, and then again in connection with raising from the second death.
Thus these not at all inward but magical-material words are uttered:
'Whether is easier, to say, thy sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Rise up
and walk?' (Luke S, 23). According to the already Pneumatic interpretation of Luke, it was to show people that the Son of Man had the power
to forgive sins that the Jesus of this passage healed, but he was influential
as the bread of life, not only as the forgiver of sins. And he triumphed,
after the baptism into his death, most emphatically as the resurrection and
the life. As the first among those believed to have risen from the dead,
the bringer of the second or heavenly life against the second death or hell.
Redemption from deadly sin was the root or the stem, but redemption
from death was the eagerly sought fruit of Judaeo- and even more so of
pagan Christianity at that time. Hence the word of an as it were sacred
taurobolium: 'Whoso eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood, hath eternal
life; and I will raise him up at the last day' (John 6, 54). Hence in particular
the definition which, in the least factual and most Pneumatic of the gospels,
summarizes all the signs and miracles: '1 am the resurrection, and the Life:
he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live' (John
II, 2S). What a difference from the classical gods, who are strangers to
death but also to resurrection. They may indeed appear at the last hour,
in Euripides for instance Artemis comes to Hippolytus' deathbed, yet she
certainly does not promise him immortality but a temple and fame after
death, and then the goddess, who has herself never tasted death, leaves
him to die. 'Into thy hands I commend my spirit":" no Greek could say
this to one of his gods. Yahweh of course had till then scarcely been
associated with immortality; and with Jesus we even find the following
outbidding: 'Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead ... I
am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of
this bread, he shall live for ever' (John 6, 49 and 51). Nonetheless, the
substance of eternal life itself, the substance hitherto posited as unknown, is
now claimed and posited in the Father too, having been made known by
* Luke 23, 46.
1130
Jesus: 'But is now made manifest by the appearing of our Saviour Jesus
Christ, who hath abolished death, and hath brought life and immortality
to light through the gospel' (2 Tim. I, 10). Jesus leads a second exodus
from Egypt, away from the spirit of Osiris: 'For he is not a god of the
dead, but of the living: for all live unto him' (Luke, 20, 38). And the
miracle of Easter is believed in, even without the Pauline idea of Christ's
sacrifice, in the incipient communion with this substance: 'For as the Father
hath life in himself; so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself'
(Johns, 26). Precisely those baptized into Christ's death are now also to
be baptized into his resurrection, into the real Enoch or the real 'first among
those who have risen from the dead' . And it is from here that the impulse
or Easter-utopia of Christian art communicates itself, especially, as we have
seen, of organic, meta-organic and Gothic art. It is not the desire to become
like stone, on the contrary: 'The tree of life as forseen perfection, reproduced
in a Christ-like way' (cf. Vol. II, p. 726); this becomes the final wishful
landscape of Gothic art. Life has supposedly escaped from death, although
always only for those justified through Christ, never in the second death
for the damned, never in hell. The latter was in fact made just as inevitable
as heaven; hell and heaven together constitute the locale ofexitus, now completely
universalized. Nothing remains of the whole of creation except the duality
of punishment and reward, of shrieking and singing, of hell and heaven.
As for the moment of entry into one or the other, two ideas, impatient
and patient, stand side by side, although excluding one another. For as
soon as the second of death coincided with the end of the world, man
could be consigned to hell or heaven immediately, not just oil the Day of
Judgement. Hell in particular was thought of as the near future, already
standing behind the sinner's deathbed, with claws open, hungry eyes and
gaping maw. Moreover, in the later Christian era the savage punishments
meted out by courts incorporated and anticipated pure hell; breaking on
the wheel, impaling, quartering, the burning of witches did not have to
wait for the devil. In other ways, too, the Christian other world, as
damnation, obtruded into life on all sides, attics and crossroads, ravines
and the largely uncleared forests were full of ghostly spirits which could
find no peace, of an already immediate postmortal dreadfulness. Dogma
puts purgatory immediately after the end of life, but in Dante heaven and
hell are decisions that have already been taken, a Last Judgement can no
longer alter these iron conditions. The tombs in the Inferno have simply
not been closed, the rectangular sarcophagi in that silent, dismally burning
hall, filled with people and torments, are simply waiting to be sealed for
1131
eternity on the Day of Judgement. Otherwise the end of the world scarcely
adds anything to Dante's brimstone caves or circles of light, the Book
of Life already seems to be opened. True, Jesus himself loads all terror,
all deliverance, essentially on to a future day only, though one which is
close at hand; all the same, there are anticipations of paradise. For the
good thief on the cross, for Lazarus, who is carried by angels straight
to the bosom of Abraham, without grave or resurrection (Luke 16, 22).
The only unanimous point here is that our condition in the future world
depends on our behaviour and our permeation by Christ in this world;
after death the sowing is over, only the harvest follows. And it is absolutely
dualistic: inconceivable torment, inconceivable joy crown short life, in a
contrast which no expectations of the other world, not even those of Egypt,
had previously known, It is the Manichaean antithesis between night and
light, which, as one between two independent super-powers, was rejected
by the Church everywhere else, but makes itself absolute in its other world.
The antithesis had not been so permanent from the beginning, in I Corinthians IS, 21-29 Paul denied the eternity of hell, in Romans 6, 23 he affirmed
it; Origen, founder of the doctrine of purgatory, said that all spirits, even
demons, would one day return purified to God. But the Church, in one
of the harshest of its dogmas, ruled that the punishments of hell were
eternal; precisely the new God of Love concealed in this place a far deeper
quagmire of cruelty than even Ahriman. The state of punishment for sin,
aversio a Deo, was of course always regarded by dogma only as a reverse
image oftransfiguration. If heaven is the transformation of nature into light,
then hell is transformation into the blaze of a world conflagration, so that
negatively transfigured nature constantly feels on the verge of annihilation.
Indeed in Catholic revenge-utopia, hell is attributed to the different sight
of the same God: the damned also apperceive divine love, but, because
they have rejected it, only as loss and wrath (cf. Scheeben, Die Mysterien
des Christentums, 1912, p. 587). Paradise appears all the more sublime,
as vita aeterna above the contrasting dungeons of mors aeterna: 'Eye hath
not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the
things which God hath prepared for them that love him' (1 Cor. 2, 9).
Literal Becoming-God is inscribed on the supreme wishful image against
death, not only in heretical mysticism but in the most correct place of
all so to speak, in the Catechismus Romanus (I, ch. 13, qUe 6): 'Those
who enjoy the sight of God, although they retain their own substance,
put on a single and almost divine form, so that they seem more like gods
than men (tamen quandam et prope divinam formam induunt, ut dii potius
1132
quam homines videantur).' It was through such great images of hope that
the future apocalypse gained victory over the first individual-postmortal one
which allowed the soul to be in paradise this day, * without the end of the
world. The dead are now, apart from purgatory, no nearer the mysteries of
transposed, mythologized revenge- and triumph-utopia than the living; on
the contrary, their bodies sleep against them. The period of advent, for the
living and the dead, ends only with Christ's second coming, even though
the records of the dead have already been logged and the opened book at the
end of the world merely reveals their contents. Doubt in divine justice, which
had been placated in so many ways, now found its final and at least no longer
empirically refutable placation: retribution on the Day ofJudgement. The
Church of course simply used the Apocalypse as an instrument of control
(i.e. as the future image of the ecclesia triumphans), and not as the victory
of the strangled over the great Babylon which it had itself become.
Nonetheless, retribution for all the living after death, for allthe dead after
the last trumpet, retained a wishful revolutionary meaning for those that
labour and are heavy laden, who could not help themselves in reality or were
defeated in the struggle. Postponed ad calendas apocalypticas, the Day of
Judgement was still expected at any hour, and later it carne to be expected
soonest in revolutionary times, during the Albigensian wars and during the
German Peasants' War. Here Christ's Daniel-like sermon sounded different
than in the churches, and so too did the 'Dies irae, dies illa, solvet saeclum
in favilla', t the 'Iudex ergo cum sedebit, quidquid latet, apparebit, nil inultum
remanebit'v [ Nothing will remain unavenged: here Daniel's postulate of
immortality is at work, as a legal-moral and not as a comfortably-persevering
one, and it became great. The crucifiedJesus himself not only rises from the
dead but returns as a judge at the end of time: with the same archetype
that has accompanied so many defeated revolutions. With the cry: we
shall return, with the meaning: as avenger and complete victory.the former
martyrdom will return. This is an arch-utopian archetype, even though
the apocalypse which contains it, with its fixed duality of hell and heaven,
also reproduced and perpetuated the duality of the old class society. Here
the returning Jesus is definitely no longer depicted as gentle and longsuffering, nor are his disciples: 'And I saw heaven opened, and behold
Cf. Luke 23, 43.
'The day of wrath, that day will reduce the world to ashes.' From Thomas of Celano's
thirteenth-century poem 'Dies Irae'. Cf. Zephaniah I, IS.
t 'So when the judge is in session, whatever is hidden will be made evident, and nothing
will remain unavenged.' A further stanza from Celano's poem.
1133
a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True,
and in righteousness he doth judge and make war. His eyes were as a
flame of fire and on his head were many crowns; and he had a name written
that no man knew, but he himself' (Rev. 19, nf.). Death, the old enemy,
is nowhere to be found in the New Jerusalem, not even as a memory:
'And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be
no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more
pain: for the former things are passed away' (Rev. 21, 4). In Egypt the
absence of suffering and tears coincided with death, the stony bliss of Osiris;
in Christianity the kingdom is preached not to the dead but the living,
and children could be raised up even from stones (Matt. 3, 9). In place
of the Styx, Hades, Osiris, the angel of the Apocalypse shows the purely
organic: 'And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal,
proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. In the midst of
the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life,
which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month'
(Rev. 22, rf.), Permeated though it is with Babylonian astral myths, and
thus with inorganic images, the Apocalypse nonetheless contains the most
emphatic equation of basic New Testament categories: Phos - Zoe, light
- life. Beside the hideous quagmire of hell, later to prove so useful to
the Church, stood the highest of all castles in the air, the pure light-castle
of paradise. Christ's Ascension was considered the highway to it; in
Christianity, this Easter myth became absolute, that of the end.
Mohammedan heaven, strength of the flesh, magic garden

For a long time it was considered noble to die at the hands of the enemy.
Such a death ostensibly seems more light-hearted than the so-called 'straw
death' in bed. Many aggressive drives released in battle aim not only at
the opponent, they also drag in the combatant's own body. An often
indiscriminate mixture thus results, a raging in general death, becoming
faceless as it were. This is the frenzy of battle; once it erupts, nothing
is more alien to it than the cold sweat of fear. The brave soldier who
dies at the hands of the enemy immediately enters, among all warlike races,
a happy other world, further painted as orgiastic. Where the use of arms
continues as a game, and the other joys, such as carousing, booty, women,
fill the warrior's convalescence. Islam, since the time Mohammed drew
his sword against Mecca, has brought at least the glow of war into peace,
1134
into the warrior's convalescence and the enjoyment of peace which this
other world represents. Before the battle of Bedr, Mohammed told his
troops that none would die without entering paradise immediately:
'Between heaven and us is nothing but the enemy.' As for this heaven
itself: all forms of war, all the eternal hunting grounds and all the battles
of Valhalla are absent from it, yet a heaven of the victorious battle remains,
and it gleams fanatically. Precisely its pleasure, its often-invoked sensuality,
are as insatiable as the frenzy of war, and its repose is that which follows
a hot day. Seven hells open to engulf traitors and the unjust, seven heavens
await the steadfast and the faithful; the wishful quality of these heavens
is only hinted at in the Koran, but legend and commentators later elaborated
it all the more richly, partly in accordance with Talmudic legends. But
as the missionary wars waned and the enjoyment of Arab merchant and
princely capital increased, the paradise of the green flags began to wane;
it changed more and more into a peace which no longer needs victory,
and into a seraglio. Yet precisely for this reason bliss and ardour remain,
as emotions which still clearly come from battle; they ensure that the blessed
ride with fanaticism, not with weakness, into woman and into peace.
Heavenly maidens who never tire receive them, they are borne like thoughts
on sweet winds, and they appear - a sublime motif - in the form of those
favourite women most loved in life. Behind the seven planets are the gates
of the seven paradises, and when they open we find that the highest wishful
dream is the harem. But it is now one of lasting virginity, of ecstasy with
evening coolness and purity: 'On embroidered cushions the blessed rest,
attended by youths with cups, bowls and dishes of the clear liquid which
does not intoxicate and does not make gloomy, with all the fruits that
they desire and all the flesh of birds that they wish for. Attended by houris,
with big eyes like pearls in the shell, as a reward for good deeds. The
blessed there hear no idle words nor sin, only peace, peace, peace' (Koran,
Sura 56). The religious folklore of Islam was tireless in producing further,
more detailed wishful images from those of the Koran. The moment of
pleasure is prolonged for a thousand years, paradise lies in the lap of the
lovely ones, in an embrace in which earthly love merges into heavenly.
Even sleep is enlivened by the singing of angels and by the harmonies of
trees from which hang bells stirred by a wind sent from the throne of
Allah. The music of the spheres is recognizable here and the world-tree
of ancient oriental myth from which the stars hang as fruit or bells. But
towering above all other trees is the tree of happiness, whose trunk stands
in the palace of the prophet, whose boughs extend into the dwellings of
II3S
the blessed; everything the heart could wish for grows on its branches.
This is the garden of Allah: clearly it borders closest on ideas of the earthly
paradise formulated throughout the Middle Ages. The Arab paradise also
became the model for every Cythera, and it is Armida's magic garden
in Tasso. It is the Isle of Venus on which the brave Portuguese land in
Camoes's 'Lusiads', an Elysium which masquerades as Greek, but is
thoroughly oriental. How far all this is from Christ's cool sentence about
the blessed: 'For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given
in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven' (Matt. 22, 30 ) .
Consequently the Arab paradise lingers on as a counterpart to the Castle
of the Grail in Klingsor's magic garden: the flower-maidens in 'Parsifal'
are the houris before the cross withers them. Indeed even real mysticism
was never repelled by such so-called crudely sensual depictions of the other
world, not even by paradise in the lap of a houri. Because almost more
than the Mohammedan, the Christian and Jewish love of God incorporated
voluptuous images, without wishful maidens but with Allah himself. The
Cabbala heightened the mysticism of the Song of Songs even to the pious
blasphemy of a divine harem: 'In the most mysterious and exalted place
in heaven towers a castle of love; there deep miracles take place; there
the souls most loved by the heavenly king are gathered; there lives the
heavenly king and unites with the holy souls in the kisses of love.' So
says the Book of Sohar in the Cabbala, which nevertheless handsomely
outdoes the so-called crudely material happiness of the Mohammedan
paradise. Matter, according to the Arab notion, is uncreated, therefore
everlasting, Allah is uncreated, therefore everlasting; both thus fill paradise.
Alongside this, however, stood pure doctrines of the soul, immortalities
without resurrection of the body, as in Avicenna; Averroes moreover denied
the survival of the individual soul, allowing only the immortality of a
general intellect common to all men. But these doctrines, half materialisms,
half spiritualizations, did not penetrate into the Mohammedan church,
let alone into popular belief; it was precisely because of its rejection of
corporeal paradise that this enlightenment could be discredited. Its writings
were destroyed, its doctrines were regarded as emanations of the Sheitan,
i.e. the destroyer and death-bringer himself. Allah is he who never sleeps,
and similar enjoyment is had by his disciples, whom he has chosen to enjoy
consciousness of an utterly pure and present happiness. These images of
happiness in the other world retain their characteristic sensual-supersensual
tone, they corresponded to the powerful nature of their founder, indeed
despite all their transcendence they contained more than enough water
1136
of life, in that wishful image of love's awakening, eternal spring of love,

which resounds in Goethe's 'West-ostlicher Divan'. 'He who sent down
water from the heavens in the measure with which we awakened the fields,
the dead fields, even thus shall you come out of your graves' (Koran,
Sura 43). Everything becomes oasis, including the bones of the body, and
the dry, hot desert, also inconceivably intensified, goes to hell. Earthly
and spiritual paradise coincide in this kind of other world, after death the
weakness of the flesh is removed from the brave and the just, the strength
of the spirit is dreamt and led into a Sabbath of pure garden and woman.
Sheer repose seeks deliverance even from heaven,

the wishful image of nirvana
But what if life is feared more than dying? If death itself appears only
as a part of restless and unloved life? Then it is taken for granted that
beyond death this restless existence immediately continues, as being reborn
or also as resurrection. Yet this survival does not seem a consolation, for
it is precisely changeful existence that is feared, and dying, most of all,
is part of it. Birth and death, death and' birth or resurrection then appear
as alternating forms in the same Being. Fear of death is then replaced by
fear of life or more precisely by fear of Being, of which life and death
are only parts. This man wishes away death only because he wishes away
the rebirth which he fears beyond death; we have already encountered
something similar in the Orphic hatred of the cycle of births, although
here there was also the will to attain unconsciousness and non-being
drunkenly, enthusiastically. The uniform life-death hatred works quite
differently, where the very 'thirst' of Being itself has to be overcome;
where an exit pure and Simple is wished for. Despite great differences in
detail, the entire religious instruction of India, from the Vedas to Buddha,
promotes this. Virtues are also included as means to this end, but by no
means fundamentally and definitively. For even virtuous craving still binds
a person to life, even the passion for the good belongs for the most part
to the world of 'clinging', of the will. It would be too much to claim
that no private morality was taught in India, there too there are certainly
religious, even sanctified virtues. They are grouped around mildness,
patience, compassion, indeed the Bhagavad-Gita, long before Buddha,
contains the most moving guiding image of mildness, Krishna says:
'Fearlessness and purity, the will to freedom, fullness of love for all that
1137
lives, endurance, the spirit of self-sacrifice, seclusion and self-control,

renunciation, innocence, love of truth, goodness, generosity, mercifulness,
patience, modesty and serenity, inner repose, constancy, ajoyful temperament, wrathlessness, chastity and strength, clearness of understanding and
a peaceful heart: these are the qualities of all beings who are destined for
a heavenly birth.' Yet sin is not the power which is ultimately hostile
to redemption, and virtue alone does not redeem; on the contrary, ascetiscism
and passive contemplation are decisive here. This world-fleeing and thus
thoroughly spiritual instruction was in the long run only slightly affected
by the existing irreligious, materialistic thinkers in India. For better than
anything else it kept the people long-suffering, for the benefit of a very
long-lived, despotic, slave-owning society, and equally quietism (into which
even the fabulous willpower technique of yoga finally flowed) distracted
the intelligentsia from any desire for social change. This is already so in
the Upanishads and even more so in the instructions of Buddha, alien to
every act and worldly. Morality here does improve the karma, i.e. the
causality of retribution and reward which exists between the deeds of a
previous incarnation and the state, indeed the rank, of a later incarnation;
however, morality does not yet end the cycle of rebirths itself. Only
illumination will end this, so that with the will in general the evil will
also ceases, indeed becomes indifferent, so that with overall indifference
to the world moral indifference also arises: the holy man may do wrong,
for he can do no wrong. He has escaped from the ethical retribution
mechanics of the karma, and therefore from ethical requirement, 'to the
holy man no deed clings' . Of course this is combined, in Buddhism though
not in Hindu teaching, with an even more sublime indifference: apathy
towards gods. The holy man leaves the gods behind .him too, with regard
to the heavenly world too - acosmism proves itself even more radically.
For the heavenly world is still world, and thus the wishful image of
nirvana set up against death as well as life becomes, in its way, atheistic.
And it becomes atheistic because it is acosmic, because to the holy man
world and world beyond are both illusions. When Buddha stood up from
the tree under which he received illumination, the gods bowed down before
him, indeed a pupil of the exalted one later instructed the king of gods
about the laws of transitoriness, to which even the heavenly ones are subject.
The Indian holy man certainly did not achieve his status by grace and ranks
not only, like the Christian saint, above angels; rather he is the 'Tathagata',
he who redeems himself, whereas even the king of heaven and all the gods
right down to the swarm of local and functional deities belong to Samsara,
the illusory world, which lies at the holy man's feet, which indeed for
him has already passed away. Even paradise, which, according to Hindu
teaching, receives the almost-perfect ones" is finite, along with the 'fivehundred-voiced heavenly music', and it passes away along with the
ignorance to which Samsara owes its existence. Hell, however, is - Samsara
itself, changeful existence, the infinite realm of rebirths, the depiction of
which in Indian art certainly represents the Inferno. Shiva, the demon in
the Hindu trinity, as well as wearing the necklace of skulls, also holds
the lingam as the symbol of procreation, and Krishna, in the eleventh song
of the Bhagavad-Gita, shows to Ardjuna the river of life as a horrific mixture
of the the slaughterhouse and the maternity home, as the jaws of hell which
devour their children, give birth to their food. And it is this pessimism,
now more anticosmic than acosmic, which gives rise to the difference
between the Indian doctrine of the transmigration of souls and its European
revivals, especially in the Cabbala, with its affirmation of recurrence. What
to the Indians appears as hell, 'the repeated transposition of souls', the
Cabbala conversely calls a 'mercy of God over Israel'. A mercy in that
man, through the transmigration of souls, is given more than one life
for the active perfection of his talents. However, this moral-instrumental
evaluation of the birth-wheel is completely alien to Buddhism, which of
course does not recognize any god capable of showing mercy to one
following the path of perfection. Nirvana ends once and for all life and
death, history and rebirth, earthly morality and heavenly reward; true
immortality is the extinguishing of mortality and immortality at the root
which is seen as identical for both: the 'thirst', or the 'urge'. Only
Hinduism knows a number of wishful goals outside nirvana, within world
and world beyond. So that here too the wishes are finally directed towards
repose, indeed the rewards for the holy are graduated according to the
measure of repose. Hindu teaching promises, at the bottom of the scale,
rebirth in a happier position than the present; higher up, rebirth in a creative
paradise, but for a limited time and so that later a birth occurs on earth
again; higher still, absorption with no time limit into the blissful presence
of a heavenly god (Vishnu), i.e. immortality of the individual existence
in the One or in nirvana (though the latter wishful goal is not wholly
orthodox within Hinduism). Buddhism, on the other hand, confines innerworldly and outer-worldly goods to devout laymen; it sees the goal itself
as simply detached from this. Precisely as that radical abstraction which
levels That-Which-Is and theistic illusion - as if they were both the same
- into the appearance of a noise, leaving only the omission itself as truth.
1139
Nirvana remains nothing but destruction ofexistence in both forms: extinction

of earth and heaven.
How does this state, if it is already reached before death, differ frommere deep sleep? The Indian control, even turning off, of the will has
various stages, but only the last leads out of the 'thirst'. The Yogis exercise
astonishing power over respiration and circulation, they know outer rigidity
and 'inner stillness of the body' . Yet all this is striven for only to give
the Yogi extraordinary power, especially that of telepathy, real or faked,
it does not matter here. All this remains in the world of the will, one
which is especially intensified, and moreover it remains connected with
the ego, though of course not in the European sense of the word. Real
meditation, as taught by Buddhism, means something utterly different:
the emptying of consciousness to create space for the 'atma', i.e. for the
Self which is superior to the individual soul and which is always essentially
identical and one. Buddhism knows no ego in the fixed European sense,
even the being that is incarnated in new births is not the former human
person. It cannot be, if only for the reason that the Buddhist doctrine
of the transmigration of souls also envisages a fall into the animal world
for great sinners, right down to the lowest incarnation: the worm in a
dog's anus; where such violent changes are to occur, the human ego cannot
be or remain a carrier. That which carries and underlies all is merely the
'thirst' for existence, and it is this alone which, as soon as an individual
disintegrates in death, causes a new one to come together, burdened with
the karma of its predecessor. The ego itself is also a hallucination, just
as the experiences of the supposed ego after death are described as hallucinations, regardless of the fact that it is certainly part of the priestly function
to record them. Precisely the pictured 'hallucination is used in Buddhism
as a signpost through hallucinations. An example of this is the practice
of Kundalinu yoga, initiation into the events of dying, so that the lethal
man can rapidly rise above its illusory images. Particularly instructive here
is the recently edited Tibetan Book of the Dead, a late manual or communication not exactly filled with the spirit of the Illuminated One, but
nonetheless an astonishing document of Indian faith in the welfare of the
soul beyond death, on the basis of the doctrine of hallucination. The Book
of the Dead (Bardo Thodol) dates from the eighth century A.D., was
written by the founder of Lamaism, the Buddhist priest Padma Sambhava,
and it intends nothing less than a guided tour of the corpse-ego through
'the forty-nine days between death and rebirth'. The guided tour consists
of the priest continually whispering to the dead man a kind of travel
1140
information on the terrors and temptations which recur daily in this interim
state; with the priest interpreting these experiences to him as pure hallucinations. Thus the dead person is freed from his postmortal nightmares, thus
he is above all to be protected from the temptations of a bad rebirth, which
clothes itself in luring appearances, appearances all the more false, voluptuous
and dangerous the closer the soul, in the arc of reincarnation, again
approaches earthly Samsara. Classical Buddhism knew nothing of the
practices of such a Book of the Dead, but the hallucination doctrine of
the ego and of Samsara, which paints delusions for the ego even in death,
is nonetheless classical in origin. And with Buddha the hallucination of
personality disintegrates not with death but with the end of wanting: 'The
complete and utter dissolution, repulsion, driving out, cancellation, extermination of this very thirst, brother Visakho, this is the dissolution of
personality, the exalted one said' (Die Reden Gotamo Buddhos, German
translation by Neumann, I, p. 692). And that which follows this dissolution, nirvana, certainly cannot be equated with, or even interpreted'
in terms of, states of bodily existence, i.e. of the complex of individuation.
Nirvana is not deep sleep, least of all death; for death comes to men anyway,
and exclusively from the will to life. Buddha is not called the one who
has fallen asleep but 'the completely awoken one', and nirvana promises
man no other world either, no divine heaven, has nothing more in common
with the earthly aspect on to death and after-death. It is the wishful image
of wishes forgotten, eliminated at their roots, it is the prize of the man
who has turned away 'who without self-torment, without tormenting
others, has already burnt out in his lifetime, become extinguished, cool,
who feels well, has become holy in heart' (Reden II, p. 160). Deep
sleep can .be enjoyed by the Hindu gods who are part of the world, and
whenever it appears here it comes across as primitive and comic, not
elapsed. What a contrast of values between the unworldly absorbed Buddha
and the Hindu god who has alsobeen slumbering for aeons, but in a slumber
of worldly indolence: his head, his body, his feet repose in the lap of his
women, a lake of milk and sugar flows unceasingly into this god;- it is
as if deep sleep is held up in this godly grotesque as a contrast to nirvana,
which does not recover for anything or in anything. Precisely because of
its acosmism and the incomparability which is founded on it, nirvana is
left so completely vague. In constantly repeated negations which again
cancel one another out, it is described merely as 'dispersal' or 'extinction'
or 'dissolving of illusions' or 'drying up of thirst'. At the very most Buddha
causes a reflection' from an empty water surface or ether to fall into this
114 1
repose; thus nirvana is also called 'inner calm of the sea' or 'blissful serenity
in the unity of the mind'. Yet this last definition is simply confined to
the way to nirvana; it therefore applies to mystical psychology in general,
which is everywhere related, and as 'unity of mind' may remind us of
Eckhart's 'sparks' or 'castle in the depths of the soul', but it certainly does
not apply to Buddha's mystical content. Buddha, despite his teaching that
the 'illusion of not knowing' was the worst of all, rejected all thoughtfulness
in the mystical sphere as detrimental to salvation; the study of nirvana
in particular was regarded almost as heresy by correct Buddhism. It cannot
ultimately even be thought of in terms of mysticism any more, beyond
its mere mystical psychology. In terms which are familiar from the
mysticism of all regions, and which in Europe were formulated above all
by Plotinus, it is called the simple, the uncompounded, above all the
inexpressible. But nirvana is different from the inexpressible of mysticism
if only because, in Plotinus, the Sufis and Meister Eckhart, rapture at 'sheer
nothingness' is ecstatic, whereas nirvana is coolness itself. Thus as an antiwishful image the most remote wishful image is meant to console here,
which men have set up against death or rather against that changeful
existence which includes death as its other side. The apparent reference
to the mere conquest of death is also meant in just the same way, when
Buddha, pedagogically revealing coolness, i.e, without coolness, shouts
to the monks to whom he first brings his teaching: 'Lend me your ears,
you monks, immortality is found'; or when unmistakable jubilation gives
the password: 'Let the drum of immortality boom out in the dark world'
(Reden II, P: 58Iff.). However, this kind of awakening has nothing at
all in common with conquest of death and immortality as a resurrection,
let alone as a life. Here instead is that immortality without mortality and
immortality, which Buddha claims to be the first to have found, as a reposeNovum above death and life and heaven. 'Dried up is birth, ended is
asceticism, the work is done, this world is no more': that is, as immortality in absolute nothingness, wishful overcoming of the worthless
nothingness which life is for Buddha and the fraudulent nothingness which
death represents for Buddha.
114 2
III. Enlightened and Romantic

Euthanasias
The freethinker as strong thinker

Everyone has often already stood up from the table and gone to rest. To
the enlightened mind it seemed wise to become accustomed to this when
dying too. It seemed not only wise, but pleasant; for if life is snuffed out
like a candle in a room and one becomes a sleeper over whom no-one has
power, then uneasiness about what may be to come also falls away. So
gentle-shallow is the relief which the enlightened mind began to feel and
which sweetened the end of his self. It seemed senseless to believe that
a man, who only a short time before had arisen from nothingness, should
be immortal. It seemed particularly intolerable to believe that finite deeds
are requited by infinite punishments or even rewards. If the prospect of
being compensated after death for his good behaviour disappeared, so too
did the far greater and more widespreadfear of the wages of sin. Freethinkers
were thus freed from a fear which had furthermore broken into the ordinary
fear of death and far outweighed it. They considered it no bad exchange
to earn immeasurably long repose in return for the brief shock of dying.
Today, when the quagmire of hell no longer steams before the eyes, the
dying eyes, it is scarcely possible any more to imagine adequately how
great this relief was. The second or infernal death disappeared, only the
first, natural death remained, and that nothing elseremained, that all afterlife
was spooks and fables, was what the freethinker had to put to the test
in his last hour. This was why he was also called a strong thinker, he
proved himself by not creeping to the cross even when dying. Of course,
it remained bitter to be nothing but lord of one's own corruption, but
the posthumous person thus felt sure that he would not be tortured by
flames or even permanently boiled in the brimstone of the other world.
The nothingness that was believed to be at hand, that was even hoped
for, was thus not merely the nothingness in which life ends. The dread
of being disturbed in the grave, and even more after the grave than before,
now disappeared.
1143
Youth with the reversed torch and with the newly lighted torch
The further drive was even to make dying beautiful. This was most
successful when death was simply invoked as the brother of sleep. If the
last coat has no pockets, they were now sewn on, and bright poppies put
into them. Upstanding bourgeois consolers took the term 'clocking off'
from manual work and wrapped death in it. Hippel" says that a man will
die just as tidily or untidily as he puts his clothes away at night. Or just
as a good day's work brings sound sleep, so a well-spent life brings serene
death. Above all it had to run true to type, not to fall, so to speak, too
far from the tree; death too remained in a worldly context. Not even death
was to fall from the world of light, if only of the smallest light; it is
homogenized without any cracks. Thus Leibniz in particular had on his
side the Enlightenment's distaste for the crack (in which an element of
the other world was sensed) when he included even death in his law of
unbroken continuity. This law softened even the most abrupt hammerblow: dying now became a mere transition from clear ideas to diffuse ones,
from 'evolution' to 'involution'. Leibniz did allow the individual to retain
memory and self-consciousness in involution (involutio), but his image
of death operated above all as a mere modification of the imaginative life;
for all monads of so-called dead things were also in a state of psychical
sleep. Eternal peace now did not need to wait for a judgement in the other
world, it was, in its way, already in the corpse itself. The analogy of sleep
and extinction also removed from sight the gruesome skeleton, the alldevaluing leader of medieval dances of death. Most influential of all here
was Lessing's essay of 1769 on CHow The Ancients Shaped Death'; this
might also be called one of the most ardent classical polemics against the
Middle Ages. It completes consolation with a cryptic exchange of emblems,
with a farewell to the hour-glass and the scythe in favour of a beautiful
image of the friend: of the genius with the lowered torch. Lessing thus
not only renews the death-sleep equation which in poetry dates back as
far as Homer and in philosophy was available to Lessing in Leibniz'
'involution', he drove the last reflexes of the Gothic out of the image
of death. He replaced- it with a reasonable-beautiful, a classicist image,
an eminently aesthetic one, in which the extinguished torch operates as
immanently as the fall of the curtain at the end of a play. Even though
* Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel (1741-96), novelist of the German Enlightenment.
1144
elegy is not lacking, even though Lessing does not even intend to contradict
the Christian religion 'properly understood': 'Scripture itself talks of an
angel of death; and what artist would not prefer to create an angel rather
than a skeleton? Only falsely understood religion can keep us away from
the beautiful, and it is a proof of true, of properly understood religion
if it always brings us back to the beautiful.' In this way the image of
death more or less made itself into an aesthetic wishful image, into one
with an aesthetic glaze. The terrible mass itself remained, but it was concealed; thus it did not generate horror in its appearance and it seemed,
behind the appearance, to be as good as not there any more. The lifegenius, shown on the classical monuments cited and interpreted by Lessing,
puts out the fire of its torch itself, as if this fire were fading music or
a poem passing into silence. Goethe praised Lessing's treatise especially
because it carried out the equation with sleep precisely towards the
aesthetically calming, indeed the entrancing side, and banished the skeleton.
The genius with the reversed torch, compared with the no longer quite
so beautiful, the decaying corpse, here seems visibly utopian. Death is
beautified into the mildest form of life - an undisturbed, not Greek but
Graecizing wish, a wish unafflictedby any grave fumes, let alone hell fumes.
And it did not even stop at this wish, the torch was to be lighted again.
Although this was certainly in order to shine again in a this-world which
is not left by the dead man. The freethinking liberation from the other
world had already done its work in Lessing's case and even more so in
Goethe's. It was no longer a matter of repeating that there was no soul
or that no soul remained after death; to a fullness of life which wanted
to go on and on stirring, this profession of faith appeared not only rather
meagre after liberation from the other world had been gained, it already,
or again, appeared frightening. It was after all the skeleton again, although
without hell; the extinction of the eternal fire had been bought at the
price of the return to dust of which the Bible, in its older parts, had also
already spoken. The genius with the reversed torch had placed itself before
the terrors of corruption and the utter devaluation which the skeleton,
as the remainder or the core of man, represented. This genius was partly
pia fraus, of the fresh, aesthetic-classicistic kind, but partly also self-esteem,
active self-estimation which did not want to capitulate to nothingness.
And a consequence of this active feeling was that Lessing and Goethe despite
everything once again knew how to promote an awakening: not so much
as that of a pure survival but above all as that of a continuing influence.
An immanent continuing influence of course, the this-worldly character
1145
remains, hell and heaven have no place. But precisely the this-worldly wish,
active and insatiable, drove Lessing on to a much more far-reaching hope
than that of the beautifully expiring torch. It drove him to the wishful
hypothesis of its renewed, ever-renewed lighting, in short to the revival
of a belief which one would least of all have expected to encounter in
the Enlightenment. It was the belief in the transmigration of souls: 'Is
this hypothesis', Lessing asks, 'so ridiculous simply because it is the oldest?
because the human intellect hit upon it straight away, before the sophistry
of the schools diffused and weakened it?' The following paragraphs of
the 'Education of the Human Race' connect to the slow course of history
an equally long-lasting, constantly reappearing soul: 'Why should I not
return so long as I am adept at attaining new insights, new skills? Do
I take so much away with me at once that it is not worth the trouble
of returning?' This was said purely for the sake of continuing influence,
of perfection, but of course there was much in the theories of the time
which accommodated Lessing, which revived the oldest hypothesis. The
doctrine of the transmigration of souls appealed to an age as individualistic
as it was fond of progress, because it combined both aspects throughout
all history. Even Hume, so much more sceptical than Lessing, remarked
in his 'Essays on Suicide, and the Immortality of the Soul' that the doctrine
of the transmigration of souls was the only system of this kind which philosophy could take heed of. Lessing was moreover reinforced in his enthusiasm
from the most unexpected source, namely from the sensualistic Enlightenment, in its physiological-psychological form. Bonnet's 'Palingenesies
philosophiques', 1769, which Lessing knew, had ascribed to the'soul,
precisely because it is connected to the brain and appears only in material
form, the tendency to enter a new body after the death of the old. Lessing
had enriched this physiological fantasy with his own historical, activepostulative fantasy. The birth-wheel no longer appears as one of entanglement, as with the Orphics and especially in India, on the contrary it is
productively affirmed. The transmigration of souls is valued as it was in
centuries closer to Lessing, among the Rosicrucians and the Cabbalists:
as an instrument of being able to do better in more than one life. This
is the active element in Lessing's wishful image, it is the hope-will to
participate in human events from beginning to end. Here in this re-lighted
torch we have the strange fact of a development insatiably applied to man.
But above all the doctrine of tKe transmigration of souls afforded individuals
with Lessing's longing for activity and future the gleaming prospect of
an actual being-present in the epochs of history as a', whole. Thus even
the longest, most distant history would be in an active-experienceable way

that of recurring people and not just that of a merely abstract humanity:
'What is there I could miss?' Lessing therefore concludes, 'is not all eternity
mine?' The soul does not go merely passively now through bodies, like
a stone thrown flat skipping several times over water, it travels in an activegrasping way, itself raising the cups, through the distances of occurrence,
so that all eternity may belong to man. And what history was here for
Lessing became for Goethe's so closely related effective will the cosmos,
as apostmortal workshop. 'The moving image of death', says the pastor
in 'Hermann and Dorothea', and he says this with a smile, 'does not
represent a terror to the wise nor an end to the religious': but even to
the wise, in Goethe's world, it did not represent the end. Here too the
torch of life, at least for superior minds, was to go on burning in other
parts of the cosmos, with a transposition of souls in space. Thus the seventyfive-year-old Goethe told Eckermann of his firm conviction 'that our mind
is an essence of utterly indestructible nature, it goes on operating from
eternity to eternity, it is similar to the sun which appears to set only to
our earthly eyes, yet never really sets but goes on shining endlessly'. Thus
Goethe thought nature duty-bound to provide him with another form
of existence as soon as the present form was no longer able to sustain his
mind. At work here, apart from discontent with the torso, is a core
feeling of strength which even in the face of death will only countenance
metamorphosis, a moulded essential form of an unsinkable kind, which
develops as it lives. Immanence survives in all this, even in the case of
astral migration in dreams; even a heaven in which the business of the
mind went on, and for which the sun would be a simile, would not be
excluded from the cosmos in Goethe's spatially conceived transmigration
of souls. Though the merely postulative aspect is retained by Goethe just
as it is by Lessing: beyond the legitimate claim of the moral-active subject,
or at most beyond the obligation of nature itself to meet this claim, there
is no certainty of continuing influence. Lessing and Goethe thus finally
meet in the space which Kant, also with regard to immortality, separated
from the existing space of being, which he dubbed the space of postulation.
For Kant, who was far from the mythological transmigration of souls,
yet morally especially close to the re-lighted torch, allows only one moral
proof of individual survival: it must exist, so that virtue may attain the
bliss which it deserves and which it so rarely enjoys on earth. This sounds
like a renewed version of the prophet Daniel's moral doctrine of immortality, but unlike this it rules out any antic certainty. And the Kantian
HOPEFUL IMAGEs AGAINST DEATH
1147
version of continuing influence is also an immanent one: it is merely the

expression of the fact that a finite being in the moral law makes an infinite
demand on himself, for the fulfilment of which an infinite path is required.
This immanence does not, like Lessing's temporal transmigration of souls,
lie in history, even less does it lie, like Goethe's spatial transmigration
and transposition of souls, in the cosmos; but rather it lies in the
phenomenon of morality itself, in the progress, which has become utterly
non-visual, of moral perfection. This perfection was also classed above
Lessing's and Goethe's utopia; in Kant it is the one and all, according
to which the life-genius, precisely as that of morality, does not let its torch
go out. But immanence, without hell and heaven, 'without fantasies of
otherworldly monsters, negative or positive', is so dense that Kant sees
in postulated survival absolutely nothing but the moral classification,
extended in temporal form, of our existence. Survival itself is in truth
one and the same as moral classification, which to a human intellect is
temporally extended but to an infinite intellect is concentrated in itself.
Hence the ultimate omission of any ascent-panorama, despite all progress:
'For a rational but finite being, only the progressus into the infinite, from
lower to higher levels of moral perfection, is possible. The infinite, to
whom the temporal condition is nothing, sees in this for us infinite series
the totality of conformity to the moral law' (Kritik der praktischen
Vernunft, Werke, Hartenstein, V, p. 129). For the transmigration of souls,
the transposition of souls and the like, which Kant calls theosophical
extravagances, there is of course no place here. Such things Kant numbers
among the simply inadmissible venturings beyond mechanical experience,
the only kind of experience which exists for science. Yet Kant was all
the more animatedly united with Lessing and Goethe in the will-idea of
continuing influence, which was fundamental to both as a practical
postulate. The silence behind the extinguished torch was filled, again or
still filled thoroughly enough with hope. With hope in an unguaranteed
but possible state in which death is not the last word and the moral-rational
propensity retains its meaning.
WISHFUL IMAGES OF THE fULfILLED MOMENT
Dissolution in the universe, lethal return to nature

Thus the drive to make dying beautiful was far surpassed. But death as
sleep nonetheless remained, especially in the sentimental age. More than
most this age experienced the graveyard as a place of peace and sought
it out. What was not mastered in life at least seemed to be forgotten in
the silent grave, which rests so softly. Related wishful images were added
here, taken from the awareness of landscape which emerged in the
eighteenth century, awareness of landscape of a kind distant from man,
solitary-sublime. Into this land the dying man is now supposed to emigrate,
he arrives precisely when he disintegrates into ashes. This is how Young
at that time extolled the night and the grave-mounds 'beneath death's
gloomy, silent, cypress shades, unpierc'd by vanity's fantastic ray'. Thus
Klinger, t although far more full of life than most, thought that the best
might be in the pale corpse, 'in the silver and in the moon which shine
on it, it is not full of vain unrest'. The nothingness which, as the materialists
taught, followed death was overlaid even by men not at all given to extravagance by a natural All and combined with Nothing. As in the following
utterance by Lichtenberg'[ (which anticipates nineteenth-century wishes
for dissolution): 'My God, how I long for the moment when time for me
will cease to be time. When the lap of the maternal All and Nothing will
again receive me, in which I slept when- the Heimberg (near Gottingen)
was formed by the waters, when Epicurus, Caesar, and Lucretius lived
and wrote, when Spinoza thought the greatest thought that has yet entered
the mind of man.' Lethe flows into the Styx, and the Styx is the worldriver itself, the Nothing and All from which all life, by the atonement
of death, is erased. In all this the background of the universej is at work,
which remains and yet so fills nothingness that it can be faced with
composure, indeed with a kind of composed elation. Devotion to the world
thus tries to take away death' s sting; and the most dignified response of
this kind appeared in the nineteenth century, in Gottfried Keller and his
characters; all the more so because the inorganic longing shook off the
Edward Young 'Night Thoughts'.

see Vol. III, p. 977n.
: Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, 1742-99, German writer and anglophile. He wrote 'Briefe
aus England' (1776-8).
S Once again Bloch is contrasting 'Alles' and 'All', the All and the universe, seeVol. I, p. 3IIn.
r Friedrich Maxmilian Klinger,
1149
elegy quality with which it had set out in the age of sentimentality in
a much more manly way than Lichtenberg, but it did not shake off the
resignation which indicates how much this connection of the grave to
a very different kind of dead nature cost. The return to nature, in the
lethal version of this return, is affirmed as Lichtenberg affirmed it, but
with an attempted amor fati too. Watchful for the things that would come
or would not come, there lived in Keller the readiness both for a benign,
broad emptiness of nothingness and for a cosmically populated infinity.
The image of the journey becomes new, when the dead themselves are
seen in a morgue, 'where they lay stretched out, people of all classes and
ages, like market stallholders awaiting the morning or emigrants at the
harbour sleeping on their belongings'. This readiness for nothingness in
the coming morning is nevertheless only a readiness for individual
nothingness, with a continuing, all the more confirmed and more thoroughly
embracing universe. This disaffection with short-lived consciousness, this
inclination towards the realm of the dead around life is most movingly
depicted in the count's daughter in 'Der Griine Heinrich' .(IV, ch. II),
who is a foundling anyway: 'The entire transient existence of our personality, and its encounter with other transitory animate and inanimate
things, our flashing and vanishing dance in the light of the world has
for her a soft, faint tinge now of mild sadness, now of delicate gaiety,
which does not allow the pressure of the weighty demands of the individual
to arise, while overall being subsists.' Precisely this remains the background,
the fact that overall being subsists; a cosmic rule through which individual
divergences are corrected, by death. Unless the individual is taken by the
universe into a common infinity, into a journey through the host of stars,
indeed of the galaxy itself. Of course here - an extension of the gnosticDantean heavenly journey to the world itself - the host of stars is also
conceived as a gigantic procession, as excess of the depth-dimension which,
for the individual, on earth, was so restricted. The readiness to go on
this journey appears most sublimely in a prayer which Gottfried Keller
wrote shortly before his death; the moral law and the starry heavensbecome
one here. Here is farewell as an entry into the world, with the world,
into the distant universe as such: 'Great Wain, * mighty constellation of
* This is the constellation of Ursa Major, the Great Bear, referred to in German as 'Heerwagen',
i.e. 'army wagon'. The Plough in the constellation of the Great Bear is sometimes referred
to as 'King Charles' Wain', or 'The Wain', and we have chosen this as an equivalent for
the extended German image of the wagon with its shafts, used by Keller here.
lIsa
the Teutons, before my eyesyou make your splendid way in constant silent
procession across the heavens, rising from the east each night. 0 go there
and come back each day! Look at my serenity and my faithful eye, that
has followed you for so many years. And if I am tired, then take my soul,
so light in worth but also in evil will, gather it up and let it go with
you, guiltless as a child that does not weigh down your radiant shafts
- over there! - I can see far ahead where we are going.' This wonderful
prayer is unique in that it combines intended dissolution in the infinite
universe with a kind of infinite intention of the Where To - but of a cosmic,
cosmomorphic Where To. What a difference between Keller's worldjourney, however romantic, and the old religious background of the
deathbed, 'where', asJean Paul describes it, 'behind the long black curtain
of the spirit-world one saw busy figures running with lamps; where for
the sinner one glimpsed open claws and ravenous spirit-eyes and restless
wandering, but for the devout man flowery signs, a lily or a rose in his
pew, strange music or his double form'. With Keller it is not the person
who continues to have an influence in the universe but the universe which
continues to have an influence in the person, a person utterly polarized,
who does not weigh the radiant shafts down even with his worth. The
journey utopia thus definitely becomes dissolution in the infinite, in one
no longer concerned with life: the Great Wain is universe without consciousness and without a wagon-rack. This is a seduction which does not
even appear only as an invoked counter-utopia to death but which takes
it as the point of departure for the ever-beckoning worship of the stars.
For participation in this glimmering, a participation which Christianity
did not destroy, which indeed announces itself as seduction in the midst
of the Bible. Job took credit for not worshipping the heavenly bodies;
so powerful was their allure, greater than that of the spiritual, the invisible.
'If I beheld the sun when it shined, or the moon walking in brightness;
and my heart hath been secretly enticed, or my mouth hath kissed my
hand: This also were an iniquity to be punished by the judge' Gob 31, 26f.);
but immanence did kiss its hand, and death seemed to seal the surrender.
Landscape, absorb me, this becomes the password here, far beyond the
sleep-simile, the sleep-equation, far into the rigidly great. The equivocation
in the concept of dead, which describes both the corpse and inorganic nature,
did the rest to connect death with the Panic feeling. To locate it precisely
with temptation, not only with consolation in the inanimated cosmos,
as union with it.
So the place where no man is draws us into itself quite strangely here.
IISI
Two testimonies finally make clear what the nature of the equation between
death and Pan is here. One testimony is in the 'Erl King', as there is more
to it than dread and a vain ride for life. And more to it than the demonic
enticement which whispers through the dread, and promises: bright flowers,
golden garments, dance of the elves. But apart from all this, which the
Erl King has to give, there is the - streak of mist, there is the sombre
place, and its weaving entices far more deeply than the Erl King. The
fact that the wind rustles only in dry leaves, that only old willows shine
so grey, this allusion to wind and willows, which ostensibly dispels the
ghostliness and ostensibly drives away the ghostly images of enticement,
instead increases, indeed establishes the ghostliness and the enticement.
For wind, willows, night drive away from the child of death merely the
meagre life that the Erl King offers, and his gold which is itself already
pale; a quite different desire rises up from the scenery itself, the scenery
which is truly dead. The dreaming about the streak of mist is directed
at the longing to become it, it is the incomprehensibly secret landscape
of death itself which makes Goethe's poem so compelling. Behind the power
of the Erl King is that of the elements, is the Styx, where the old willows
stand, is the silence of stones which is thoroughly experienced by this kind
of death-utopia. Holderlin's 'Death of Ernpedocles' gives the other
testimony to this silence, in the flames of Etna. And the dead 'World, the
supposed underworld appears entirely to this kind of longing as the whole
world, as that in light. The farewell to Being Human thus becomes a
farewell to the littleness connected with life: 'Then sacredly, if it must
happen,/The fearful thing, let it happen splendidly.' Before death comes
the hero takes the metaphor of his best existence from the extra-human
world, the purely formed, prismatic world: '0 Iris' bow! Above rushing/
Waters, when the wave in silver clouds/Flies up, as you are, so is my
joy!' His death in Etna completely celebrates union with nature and atones
for the superhumanity which stepped outside it and wanted to outgrow
it. The old unity between man and earth, between earth and heaven burns
in death, as this unlowered torch: 'If now, when too alone,/The heart
of earth laments and, mindful/Of the old unity, the dark mother/Spreads
out her fiery arms to the ether,/And now the ruler comes in streaming
rays:/Then we shall follow as a sign/We are his kin, down into sacred
flames.' The glowing All-One which was to rise up for Empedocles was
certainly felt and thought of as the Eternal-Living, not as a gigantic mummy
or as mechanics. Yet its life is completely without organic metaphors, or
is just so much crystal: the ether opens and is empty of human beings.
1152
These are the images of longing which seek to go through death into
lost nature, into 'Urania's solemn string music', as Empedocles hopes,
or more precisely into the silence in which the unfinished tragedy ends
in Holderlin, All these images, of such differing rank, have their deathutopia in the unityof the unconscious, which nature, especially in inorganic
natural beauty, seems to promise. What is sought is unsundering through
consciousness, un sundering through subject and object: and the inorganic
world, because it has kept out of life from the beginning, seems close to
this. Death is then not regarded as the brother of sleep but rather as the
brother of granite, with night or azure over it, no matter which. The
No to individual-living Being Human thus appears, in all this curiously
neo-Egyptian and yet again equally quite unstatuesque desire to become
like something dead, as an affirmat.ion of pure emptiness without human
beings. Death, part of nature yet a highly unnatural part, which conflicts
with air, light and sun, is supposed in these cosmomorphic extensions
of death - which philosophically go back to Anaximenes and his doctrine
of the unity of soul and ether - to make us into air, light, sun themselves,
even though there is no eye to see them, indeed precisely because of this.
Glacier, earth-mother and world-spirit

So all did not seem lost when life in the next world was extinguished.
In the nineteenth century people so easily grew tired of being awake in
general, why continue it endlessly? The upturn in business on the one
hand, melancholy which did not delude itself on the other, were closely
related in bourgeois consciousness which was both harassed and divided.
'Life is the sultry day, death is the cool night', sings Heine, the nightingale
sings here too, a still organic happiness, but coolness as true consolation
comes from the inanimate cave, from stillness. Organic nature was certainly
no longer adequate for this radical escape, at least not the pleasant-Arcadian
nature which was almost everything to the eighteenth century's sense of
landscape and peace. The peace of landscape of the calm kind became utterly
inorganic, and in fact: inorganic landscape became the ostensible gateway
to utopianized death, to the 'sublimity' of death. It borders on the glacier
and the fabled mountain of death high in the sky; it is to here that every
great departure from petty life penetrates. It is to here that Byron's Manfred
penetrated, into a landscapewithout people or Christianity, into a supposed
unity, 'How few - how less than few - wherein. the soul/Forbears to
IIS3
pant for death, and yet drawsbacklAs from a stream in winter'. The
nineteenth century approached the lethal return to nature not only poetically
but myth-historically, and in dual form: chthonic as well as Uranian.
Bachofen emphasized both, though the chthonic form most strongly: dying
as homecoming to the earth. The cave again receives, the cave from which
man came, the earth-cradle and the grave. The grave-cult of the matrilineal
order, which is intuitively reconstructed by Bachofen, moves in this cycle:
'The same arising from the womb of matter, the same returning to its
darkness.' Or in the patrilineal order dying becomes an ascent to the stars,
to the Apollonian, though also completely immanent world. The cave
and the earth are now replaced by the Uranian heights, which Hercules
was the first to enter after death, through death. Dying thus becomes
a transition 'to the harmonious law of the Uranian world and to heavenly
light, flame without fire'. Thus there is a return here from Christianity
to archaic emotions, finally even to a kind of solemn battle-frenzy of dying,
with an imagined feeling behind it of being secure below or of being saved
above. A strange sympathy thus entered the old images of the earth and
the sun, as if there had been no Christian other world at all, and it reconciled death with them. But this sympathy came not least from the analogy
between death and the inorganic Unconscious which had been circulating
since Lichtenberg and which culminated in Romanticism (to which Bachofen
belongs). And the so-called All-Life with which Pan was endowed was
still supposed to exclude only the mechanism but not the gigantic encirclement of a primal past, pre-vital as well as postmortal, in which there is
no place for individual life.
It is not surprising that even disenchanted thinking still coloured what
was dead. When nothing but power and matter seemed to be left, the
great corpse was at least presented as naturally beautiful. As the petit
bourgeois began to be uplifted by the Alps, enthused about giant mountains
and majestic mountain ranges, so too his mechanistic world-picture was
poeticized. It had discarded everything but atoms which were lightless
and soundless, and death was dissolution into them, but popular materialist
writers such as Bolsche, even Hackel decked out the essence of the matter
again cosmically, almost pantheistically. And the example which repeatedly
continued to have an effect and was not forgotten by the bourgeoisie
was set by Feuerbach, in a still legitimate manner; he did after all come
from the tradition of monism, and his disenchantments derived their devoted
worldly gleam from here. Individual life, when it fades into the universal,
has in fact gained this universal; clarified, indeed transfigured mechanics
1154
absorbs life. As in Feuerbach's curious 'Rhymes on Death'; here, the

materialist states that he sees 'in every clear spring the death-night's mild
shining', he sees 'his death-certificate shown in every star and stone'. This,
he says, is the last word of immortality and the wish for it, i.e. a word
which cancels it out and at the same time fulfils its wish. Fulfils it concretely, because up to the end nat~ralism 'puts the cunning darkness of
the other world into the brightest light of this world'. In dying man casts
off his limitedness anyway. 'He who has once', writes Feuerbach in his
'Thoughts on Death and Immortality' , and he means this not only ironically, 'he who has once received from death a master's degree in destructive
and subversive philosophy has lost all desire to start learning the ABC
of a new life again' (Werke III, 1847, p. 325). Instead a supra-present
world rises up, in which the individual takes part at least in thoughts:
'Thus the foolish mind, fixed on heaven in the other world, overlooks
heaven on earth, the heaven of the historical future in which all doubts,
darknesses and difficulties which tormented the short-sighted present and
past would dissolve into light' (I.e., p. 346). And no more than Feuerbach,
despite his usual distaste for mere intellectual constructs, considers it
necessary for the person himself corporeally to take part in this posterity
in order to take part in it in reality and not only in thoughts: no
more, indeed even less, does the entering into complete individual
nothingness appear as a breaking-off here; for it is precisely an entering
into cosmic nature. The thought of death, without masquerade or new
staging posts behind it, becomes for Feuerbach an education in selfabandonment, indeed self-sacrifice during life itself; and at the end it is
nothing less than the universe which lasts for ever. If the individual believes
that he is everything, says Feuerbach, then Nothing remains after his death,
but as the individual definitely is not everything, infinite essential being
(essential being of nature) remains infinite and eternal: 'Time is a daughter of
truth, only that which is transitory in essential being passes away in time,
it merely lifts the veil in the temple of Isis' (1. c., p. 82). These were all
poeticizations of mechanical materialism, they were above all attempts to
make from individual annihilation by death a general elevation. Precisely
on the basis of the infinite, and also the unconscious, which encloses finite
consciousness: precisely anthropology, however much Feuerbach puts it
at the centre, has around this centre the ocean of universal, eternal movement
of matter, triumphing in death. Indeed how cosmically and cosmomorphically the nineteenth century framed death and wanted to frame it, was shown
even in those few places where immortality was consigned not only in
1155
unconscious form to the universe. Someone else who stood out strangely
in this respect was Fechner, no materialist but an out-and-out parallelist with
regard to body and soul. With Feuerbach, man is what he eats, yet at
the end the universe eats him; with Fechner, too, he is consumed by the
universe, but he is equally retained and remembered. From the individual
body he is absorbed into the body of the earth, from individual consciousness
he is transposed into a literal earth-, indeed mechanics-consciousness. This
is the idea to which Fechner's 'Little Book of Life After Death' is devoted,
one of the strangest wishful little books within naturalistic .immanence.
For Fechner's basic thesis: psychophysical parallelism, admittedly sounds
cautiously mechanistic, yet it aims to make the cosmos into which the
dead man withdraws more melodious than the harmony of the spheres.
For, as Fechner says, with scarcely compelling logic: just as there can be
no mind without physical nature, so there can also be no nature without
mind. Indeed the more powerfully the material corpus, as earth, sun,
universe, extends, the broader and higher its consciousness. This was a
pure argument from analogy, based on the human brain-soul relationship,
but through it the earth now became 'not merely a ball of dry earth, water,
air; it is a greater and higher uniform creation'. All mankind is its brain,
all human history is the earth's memory, in which the individual continues
to be remembered after his death and combines with all other memories.
But even if individual spiritual and permanent needs are preserved in such
a mixture of cosiness, psychophysics and philosophy-colportage, the cosmic
aspect so to speak, in which both extinguishing and collecting occur, still
triumphs again. In Fechner's late work, 'The Aspect of Day compared
with the Aspect of Night', 1879, the rivulets converged: 'The same earth
which by the same power binds us and all its creatures to it also gave birth
to them all, receives them into itself again, feeds and clothes us all,
controls the communication between all and retains, for all this change,
a stock which preserves itself and develops through this change itself... On
the basis of the above we must grasp the earth as an essential being superordinated to us both on the material and on the spiritual side, uniformly
bound in a higher sense than ourselves, and hence as a knot which ties
us together with our fellow creatures into the divine bond.' Ties us in
life and especially after death, when death itself, 'the great disease of gradual
stages', has been undergone and higher stages: earth consciousness, cosmic
soul, are entered. This is how far Fechner went, and the distance is great
from the psychophysical archive and pillow to Lessing's and Goethe's
emigrations, to Keller's prayer to the Great Wain, but the line of a cosmic
euthanasia continues to the end. A fading into the universe, beginning

with death as the brother of sleep, was thus placed around life. This cosmic
feeling as a whole, even in its mechanistic form, could have led to the
Egyptian sense of crystal if the nineteenth century's inorganic or cosmic
sense of death had still possessed sufficient depth. Such a sense, even if
only as a contrasting ideology to capitalist unrest, did nevertheless exist,
and, directed by the inorganic final movement of death, it forms a striking
contrast to the theory of evolution from the same period', which portrays
earth, star, cosmos merely as the basis from which life and human history
arise. The Death-Pan utopia instead placed the edifice of nature at the end
of the path, as if nature-gods existed again. Even for Bachofen nothing
of the kind existed, and the cosmos as the temple of the corpse remained
only one of the ideals with which pervasive mechanism adorned itself for
its emotional needs, here at the baldest and coldest place. Between the
corpse and the transparent construction of the crystal there is however
the difference of corruption, and corruption is a complicated return to
nature. Nonetheless, death as ultimate calcination and nothing else gave
to an age which was proud ofhaving explained even the organism purely
inorganically a certain homogeneous consolation.
IV. Further Secularized Counter-moves,

Nihilism, House of Humanity
Still the dyeing of nothingness

How does one push away the fear of dying today? That this is apparently
achieved, ostensibly achieved, with superficial means, was made clear above
(Vol. III, P: IIOS). Above all American society must repress the thought
of death in the same way that it represses every prospect of what is to
come. What is to come is its death as a class; unwillingness to accept this
death, despite all the signs, makes people skilled in looking away from
the corporeal-lethal departure. But we also said that death (nobody knows
for how long) could only be repressed so well because new life had once
been hidden behind it, i.e, dreamt out of it and believed into it. Thus
it becomes unlikely that creaturely fear of death in the late bourgeoisie
has been eliminated merely by looking away. Superficiality alone is no
IIS7
liberation, and repression alone does not give the feeling of a victory. It
is becoming probable that mankind today, in living without the fear of
death, is borrowing on past beliefs, even living on completely unguaranteed
cheques. This dubious loan, which precisely among the freethinkers of
today, with their numerous nuances, means that no strong thinkers are
needed at all, as they were in the eighteenth century, is now becoming .
generally prevalent. The meagre profession of nothingness would scarcely
be enough to keep the head held high and to make it seem as if there
is no end. On the contrary, clear signs indicate that, in the subconscious,
earlier, fuller wishful images persist and provide support. Through the
trace which remained of them, the so-called modem person does not feel
the maw which is incessantly around him and which will certainly devour
him in .the end. Through them, quite unexpectedly, he saves his sense
of self, through them the impression arises that man does not perish but
that the world will one day decide on a whim not to appear before him
any more. Probably this utterly flat courage, capable of repressing the fear
of all earlier ages, is dining at the expense of another. It is living on earlier
hopes and the support which they once provided. And it is very often
living - this is crucially important here - on an expired belief which, if
it evaporated completely one day, would leave behind a horror all the more
helpless. It is only in this oblique and half-hearted way that the person
living from day to day fails to feel his last hour, works without despairing.
Four signs of a borrowed faith

This even becomes a flight forwards, which appears as courage. Youth
does this, when it wants to break out of "Vapid life and go to war, when
dying becomes a wild ending. Especially in countries where the ruling
class can offer no other prospect than that of death in battle. 'Tomorrow
we go deathwards' , went a Nazi song; it was sung by soldiers who wished
not only to win victory but also to die. There is certainly death-drive in
these feelings, the drive towards attack, on others and on oneself, it is
almost the same thing. But what lures here is also the abandonment of
an existence which has not been mastered, and frenzy in particular developed
here, that of a merging of battle and life. A single inflamed raging unites
both, so that in dying the blood seems to go on boiling, indeed boils up
especially high. The old idols who inspirited the berserkers no longer exist,
but they had disciples and still have Junger. * This is the first sign of how
people can die in the light of the past. But what if a life still seems to
be in order, if business as usual for the time being still seems to be profitable?
Then it is not battle but bourgeois getting-on which lures, with income
without end and without crisis, the exaggeration lures, an exaggeration
which is utterly extraordinary on the present ground, that all dying is
mere illusion, and to its believers this does not appear madness. Disease,
lack of success, the blows of fate, but also the final lack of success: death,
according to this view are all due solely to powerless thoughts; the failure
called dying is merely the price paid for mental weakness. This is the deathaspect of Coue but especiallyof Christian Science, the most genuine religion
of North America. This seeks to plug the leak which causes the human
ship to sink so early; but this leak is not regarded as one in matter but
primarily as one in the smart will. Through lack of belief in the elbow,
in the Jesus of life which is both healthy and businesslike, evil enters into
man, evil which does not exist at all but which corrupts what is. If these
corrupting abscesses burst, however, then sickness too is supposed to
disappear, all along the line, and ultimately also sickness unto death: what
beckons, if not yet immortality in the flesh, is at least long-lived strength
and mental existence against death. This kind of thing, as will be recalled,
has already appeared as a medical wishful image, but now it returns quite
massively, as faith in faith, and yet no longer massively at all but ultimately
as fascist blasphemy. The repression of death, the curing of death by this
kind ofJesus as doctor is the second sign of certainties loaned from a quite
different age. The God of faith-healing, and of the various spiritualists
of today who are more elegantly associated with this, is the God of business,
the God of late antiquity who has degenerated into what is believed to
be the eternity of business: as such resurrection and as such life. Instead
of the life-giving bull's blood which was poured over the mystes, instead
of the magical Last Supper, all that appears here is belief in success. True
entrepreneurial go-getting has no time for sickness and death, its Jesus
will not tolerate bankruptcy anywhere. Which is why America is neopagan enough to replace the lamb, whose prosperity is notoriously low,
with the life-giving bull, the successfulbullyboy. All these are late-classical
traces or borrowings on an Aesculapius-Jesus; but to continue with the
Bloch is punning here on the word 'Junger' meaning 'disciple' and the name of Ernst Junger,
soldier and writer, erstwhile champion of the German military spirit. His book 'In Stahlgewittem' (The Storm of Steel) is one of the best accounts from the German side of life in
the trenches in the First W orId War.
1159
text, which becomes somewhat nobler, there are, thirdly, still traces from the
lethal cosmic sympathy which the last century already secularized, traces which
were therefore astral-mythic. A panicfeeling ofnature, with the inorganic above
all in.itself, as the worldwide landscape of death, is thus the third late bourgeois
sign of the loan. Death is interpreted not as exitus but on the contrary as
introitus of the other, star-clear side: into man who is no longer cow-warm,
unappetizing, tiny. In the way, for example, in which Alfred Brust, in his
novel 'The Lost Earth' which is typical in this respect, has an old man
announce his end to his friends: 'The serenity of autumn is diffused over my
hours. The circle of the sun becomes smaller and the gentle nights increase
their domain. The approaching sea of stars has ventured beyond my limits
and entered into me completely early this morning.' Here it is not the individual who departs, and he does not go on any journey: on the contrary, the
strangest countermovement is thought to be experienced: it is the autumn
which advances towards the individual; it is the approaching sea of stars (of
the winter sky) which ventures beyond the limits of the person and floods the
person. Pan himself thus diminishes life as the autumn diminishes the days
of sun, and death radiates in over the rest like the night crystals of the winter
sky, indeed as these themselves. Lethal astral myth with a more Christian
tinge appears even in America, in Emerson, even in WilliamJames, although
posited as cosmic-spiritual, pan-psychical. Thusjames, in his 'Human Immortality' , posits cosmic consciousness as primary, hence as the seawhich in death
floods over the little sundering which is individual consciousness again: 'All
abstract hypotheses sound unreal; and the abstract notion that our brains are
coloured lenses in the wall of nature, admitting light from the super-solar
source, but at the same time tingeing and restricting it, has a thoroughly
fantastic sound. ,* Therefore borrowing is visible here too, for there would be
no advance of the dying individual into the universe, of the immortal universe
into the individual, ifbehind this feeling there had not once been astral myth.
Together with its typical mysticism: that of being securely housed in and by the
old physis. Which takes the mouldy thing called life, the injustice called the
individual, back into itself. Gaia here, Uranus there, neither are still believed
in as gods, but death still cloaks itself in their superannuated garments.
However there remains, ultimately, a kind of euthanasia which appears
fresh, it can be called vainglorious despair, and its fourth sign does not from
Bloch is giving a condensed version of James's exposition of 'transmissive function' here. His
'quotation' begins, Universal consciousness is the first, the eternal aspect, but our brain is ... "
then follows more faithfully the text of James's lecture, in the course of which James defends his
'abstract hypothesis' .
1160
the outset seem derived from a tradition. Here man runs on ahead of death,
claims of his own accord to be ready for nothingness. Today for many
the time of prevented or latent suicide has come, precisely the bourgeois
classsees its destruction before it, hopeless. Now here, instead of a shunning
of death, at last even a kind of indulgence in dying seems to be found;
with an imperialist mandate, almost as if there were a will to nothingness,
i.e. to the death from starvation and in battle, which is concealed in
nothingess. This is the only thing which fascist society can offer the people;
thus bourgeois philosophers of today have made people familiar .in an
ostensibly original way with the Nihil. They are philosophers of decline,
they combined the problem of individual death with that of their society,
made the mere nothingness of the capitalist future into an inevitable-absolute
nothingness, so that the view on to a changeable world, on to socialistfuture,
was utterly blocked. They preached an addiction to death which thus
supposedly went far beyond the organic-natural, namely through synthetically produced lethargy and finally through war. They also added counterfeit,
gloomy-uplifting wishful images to their nothingness, images which at
first were defeatist and in the end were Mephistophelian. Spengler spoke
of the fatigue 'which the all too alert person feels in all his bones' and
praised it in cast-iron style because nothing else was supposed to be at
hand. Jaspers, not with a historical but with a so-called existential-eternal
approach, provided the following consolation: 'It is not only the way of
the world in time that nothing can last, but it is as it were a will (!) that
nothing authentic should survive as permanence. Defeat is the name of
the experience, not-to-be-anticipated, necessary to be accomplished, that
the perfect is also the evanescent. To become real in order genuinely to
be defeated is the last possibility (!) in temporal existence: it plunges into
the night which grounded it. If the day is self-sufficient, not-being-defeated
becomes an increasing lack of substance, until at the end defeat comes to
it from without as something alien' (Philosophie, 1932, III, p. 110). Here
therefore nothingness, to which sickness, the time-sickness unto death
entrusts itself, looks almost doubly intricate: from being status it is
transformed into an eternal act, namely into that of defeat, and it is even
supposed to be the guarantor of the best - Something, riamely of substance.
The other wishful image of nothingness was formulated by Heidegger,
a much more presentient angel, no longer a comforter but a reconciler
with, and propagandist of, the late capitalist-fascist world, the world of
death. Fear is fear of death, and this occurs not in individual moments
or even only at the last moment, but is the 'basic state of human existence' ,
1161
'the sole What-Is in the existential analytics of existence' (Sein und Zeit,
1927, p. 13). Fear and the pure nothingness into which it overhangs do
not give life its substance but they do give it its dubiousness and its depth:
'Solely because nothingness is evident in the ground of existence can
the full strangeness of What-Is come over us'; the object of science is
What-Is, that of philosophy is nothingness. 'But existence must, in the
world-projecting over-climb of What-Is, first overclimb itself in order from
this height to be able to comprehend itself above all as abyss.' (Vom Wesen
des Grundes, 1929, p. 110); - thus nothingness, for a pure nothingness,
shows a highly complicated face. But this complicated face is itself unoriginal
and loaned, from jaspers' 'comprehended defeat' to Heidegger's 'unguaranteed steadfastness'; and only the particularly interested imperialist mandate
for this kind of affirmation of the abyss or 'absorption in death' seems
fresh. Otherwise even the Jasperian and Heideggerian nothingness is dyed,
decked out with borrowed plumes, precisely with regard to its death-magic.
For of course there appears in all this, once again in perverted form, much
that is Lutheran-Christian: defeat corresponds to the rejection of
righteousness through works, fear corresponds to the old weight of sin,
pre-emptive resolution to submission to the will of God. And together
with the copied Luther a counter-example is mingled: copied Romanticism,
its wishful concept of the night. A night, however, which is no longer
tinged with Liebestod 'drowning, sinking, oblivious down, highest bliss
is found', but with murder. This is the epigonism of pro-fascist nihilism,
of its vainglorious despair, of its quietism for the followers, and of its
apres nous Ie deluge for the leaders.
Metaphorical immortality: in the work

The history of the city of Rome stands over me at night like a distant star.
If fate should grant that I complete it, then no suffering in the world could
be so great that I would not steadfastly bear it.
Gregorovius
It is now time to come up into purer air again. Here, finally, is the feeling,
certainly the fresh, not only the old feeling, of living on in one's children.
No man, says the peasant proverb, should leave this life without having
planted a tree, left behind a son. Children take the name of their father,
and the father wishes that they should continue to be his work. But works
1162
of the mind are also calledchildren, works that have been painted, composed,
written, built, thought. Both because of the frenzy of their conception
and because of the pangs of their birth, and of course because of their
surviving permanence. Significantly a successful business, a battle won or
a solid political achievement has never been called the child of its author.
In other words, the effect of such deeds finally disappears and becomes
interwoven, they have no framed shape which survives in characteristic
form. However long the name of their author is remembered, it is not
connected with a work which can be performed again and again, renewed
again and again. Vita brevis, ars longa, empires pass away, a good line
lasts for ever: in these artistic convictions only the formed work has a
place. Only this work, like bodily children, experiences posterity and overcomes the obituary, at least for its readers. Of course this is a consolation
which unfortunately cannot be enjoyed by so-calledrun-of-the-mill people,
unless in a comical, and thus not exactly consoling fashion. In such a way
that even a successfulbusiness, by becoming a firm, can be confirmed and
fixed into an eternal value; as is frequently the case in advertising. But
precisely its bizarre forms indicate that the character of intellectual work
has to be copied here, as in the following ridiculous-instructive examples:
'The memory of the deceased will live on immortally in the annals of
the Naxos sandpaper factory.' Or, from a different original: 'We knew
the deceased's dream to found a new, small metal goods industry in
Czechoslovakia, to lead and to mould it and to make it known throughout the world. With superhuman efforts he surpassed himself, and when
a goal was reached he had already set himself a higher one. This principle
will point the way in our future work, so that we may realize and
immortalize Hynek Puc's sublime ideas.' Even if in this kind of thing
survival in the work is claimed only in order to recommend the products
of sandpaper and small metal factories, not even this would be possible
unless they had been endowed with the sun of Homer. But only brothers
in Apollo will bring, or possibly bring, an abundance of intellectualimmortal descendants into the world. Only for them can the grave still
become the pulpit from which their voices may continue to be heard, indeed
often more piercingly than in their lifetime. Only to them applies the
metaphor or hyperbole that a kind of transmigration of the soul of
Beethoven or Shakespeare takes place when their music and verses resound
in the hearts of millions centuries after their death. Or, as has actually
proven to be true with less great printed works, that writing is a ship
which sails over the ocean of time and unites the most distant centuries
116 3
with one another. Only here does the comical quality of that kind of
continued existence cease with which the annals of the various sandpaper
factories both advertise and console. True permanence in a work and a
legitimized dream of this now spread, even though for relatively few
subjects and even for these unreasonably few only in such a way that they
cannot certainly themselves lead or see before them their life which has,
been pressed like wine into work. A half or even a full dozen volumes
on shelves may represent objective immortality but they bear only a
metaphorical relation to the personal immortality of the old faith. However,
at least for those who are thus privileged an ars longa does come about
which is adorned with the name of their vita brevis; and this even before
passing away. Thus Heinrich Mann spoke of the honours which distance
such age in a highly flattering way from youth, by which it is ascended
like a throne. Gottfried Keller saw the seventy-year-old F. Th. Vischer
and indeed greater figures in a similar light and wrote of them that they
stood in the evening sunshine of life under the entablature of their works
with an undoubtedly secure feeling. Schiller had this saving feeling just
as his illness was beginning: 'I will scarcely have time to complete a great
and general intellectual revolution within myself, but I will do what I
can, and when finally the building collapses, then I will perhaps have rescued
what is worth preserving from the flames' (To Goethe, jrst August 1794).
Goethe, who saw his entire life as gradually transformed into a. kind of
supra-personal state, imagined not only the cosmic survival of his essence
but precisely also immortality in his work which had become historical
and which would remain behind as historical. This not quite four months
before his death in a letter to Wilhelm von Humboldt, with himself as
a historically experienced and arranged category: 'If I may express this
in our old confidence, I gladly admit that at my high age everything begins
to seem more and more historical; whether something takes place in past
times, in distant empires or quite close to me in space at this moment
is all the same, and I appear to myself to be more and more historical;
and as my good daughter reads Plutarch to me in the evenings, I often
seem ridiculous to myself if I should recount my biography in this fashion
and sense.' Such objectification has indeed removed the person's own
existence from transience; even life then appears as work, and the work
appears as elapsion, indeed as the printed situationlessness of a life which
has become essential. And all this, with full legend-creation of the personally
objectified and at the same time historically unsinkable, is condensed into
Faust's famous statement that the trace of his days on earth could not
q
disappear in aeons", Immortality in the work was very longingly expressed

by Nietzsche, longingly because the category of work never struck such
an uncanonical person. But Aphorism 208 of 'Human, All Too Human'
says: 'The best lot is drawn by the author, who, as an old man, can say
that everything there was in him of life-producing, invigorating, uplifting
and enlightening thoughts and feelings still lives on in his writings and
that he himself is mere grey ash, whereas the fire is everywhere saved and
carried further.' The same in the very vivid image in Aphorism 209: "The
philosopher and likewise the artist who has brought his better self to safety
in works feels an almost malicious joy when he sees his body and mind
slowly being broken into and destroyed by time, as if from a corner he
were watching a thief trying to crack his safe while knowing that the
safe is empty and all its treasures are saved.' The laurel wreath is here
used as a magic cap, the self in the aggregate state of the work seems
to be more self than ever and yet, or precisely because of this, because
of its discarding of fleshliness, to be as invisible as it is unattainable for
destruction. The perfectors are quoted as if they went down ironically
into the grave, and as if the sarcophagus were really only an eater of flesh,
even less: an end of dross, filth, vanity, bestiality, which even in life the
producers of works found irksome and which now completely sink into
oblivion. This is the utopian consolation of the work, one of course which
is strictly reserved for the intellectual aristocracy, but precisely also one
which does not take the best in the living person: the ability to create,
with it into the wall of eternal letters. All the same this consolation is
powerfully bracing and gives to monks in Apollo or in Minerva, apart
from the worry of not proving worthy of it, a different challenge to the Egyptian, even without geometrical stones.
The feat of not completing his work is the most powerful one for the
artist. Death not only annihilates him generally but also particularly and
as if deliberately, by taking the pencil from his hand. Hence there is here
a particularly ardent wish to have progressed so far with his day's work
that the night of death at least no longer brings annihilation for it. If genius
is hard work, then it is hard work also in .the sense that, as when storms
are threatening, it brings .the sheaves with full shovels into the barn. Or
that it enters into a race with the gathering, the inevitable storm, in order
to cover the distance it has set itself before the stroke of lightning and
to bring the good entrusted to it to a safe place. When Holderlin, tired
'Faust', Part II, 11583-4-
II6S
and sick, was working on 'Empedocles' (which was to remain a fragment),

he expressedhis hopes against death in-these surviving, these bitter-immortal
lines:
Grant me just one summer, you powerful ones!
Just one autumn for my ripe song,
So that my heart will more willingly die
Sated with the sweet playing!
Nor does the soul, which in life was not accorded
Your divine right, rest in Orcus down below;
But once the holy task, so close
To my heart, the poem, has been achieved:
Welcome then, 0 silence of the shadow-world!
I am content even though my playing strings
Do not accompany me down there; once
I lived, like gods, there is no need for more.
Incomparably, the will in this poem penetrates more into the immortality
of creation, a creation which is still granted, longed-for and granted, than
into the immortality of the work. Or rather: it justifies the immortality
in the work (here completely independent of fame, even of recognition
by posterity) in terms of ability to create and of succeeding. True, this
ability to create, in resignation, is confined to something unique, therefore
transient, to one summer and one autumn. But this uniqueness is not
uniqueness at all, for in it gleams a classical, or more correctly: a classicizingChristian participation in the lives of the gods as the immortals par
excellence. What was Christian participation in resurrection and life,
through baptism in-to the death of Christ, here becomes participation in
the life of a creative god (though one which was alien to antiquity). In
Holderlin the frenzy of creation makes the imitatio deorum, hence the
ecstatic comradeship of the round dance with these immortals, hence
immortality in the work while it is happening. But then, however, comes
the world of shadows, even here: for the subject no longer experiences
immortality, claims no personal, no present share in the immortality of
the work. Nonetheless here, in contrast to dispersions into the universe,
a noble part of the individual's own intellectual world is hoped for as rescued
from general decay. And this also in a manner which seems original: from
1166
the new aeon of the work, one which appears only in the history of
civilization. Yet even here a kind of borrowing takes place, from strangely
recent depths of cultural consciousness. There is for example the traditional Roman fame, which transposes itself in highly patrilineal fashion
into the stars. There is an Egyptian element at work in the belief in
permanence, the belief in the work itself, comparable to the survival of
the personal essence (the Ka) in the statue. And, this time a borrowing
which occurs only here: in the pathos of the permanence of the work,
in its height and essence itself, there is undoubtedly the-continuing influence
of the idea of the holy books which orientalizing late antiquity brought
back to Europe or developed for Europe. The Koran and the Bible at that
time or from then on were regarded not merely as life-directing works, but
as works which had elapsed from time, which stood outside transitoriness
which stood in eternity. It was from this model or canon that the modern
idea of classicism first developed in secularized form, hence the unmoving
rainbow of perfection above the waterfall of history. Without this feeling
of classicism or aspiration to classicism, genius would have had no space
within the diminished or vanished hope for survival to expect and to be
granted immortality in the work. This is joined by a secularized continuing
influence, concerning the permanent star of books and the human life which
seeks to cling to it. Permanence appears to arise when events in the book,
as the saying goes, are immortalized, but also when the book makes of
them a departure, an exodus as extract. People die, cities sink into ruins,
empires collapse, but the library has gathered up all the meanings from
transitoriness and therefore - for literary consciousness - preserved them.
The Baroque in particular cultivated this idolatry of the book, as if it were
a new arena, elapsed from death (cf. Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen
Trauerspiels, 1928, P: 83); thus at the end of all things, apart from the
Bible, an orbis scriptus remains. All this continues to be influential in the
immortality image of the work, the Bible and the reified library continue
to be influential in immortality through the work. But of course very
differently than in the Bible and the Koran, the mounds in which the
defuncti, the no longer functioning, lie and have their huge holiday no
longer open up. Survival thought to be literal, and not that thought to
be in literature, looked very different, gave the dying person a different
fixative of his soul than the metaphorical survival, accessible to so few,
of work that outlasts. Yet this very relative, very metaphorical remedy
against death cannot be annihilated now that the old landscape of immortality has disappeared. Immortality-utopia produces itself anew in the act
1167
and the continued existence of intellectual production, and here too - at

the price of no personal survival - it can manage without invisible spaces.
Death as the chisel in tragedy

Nor did writers tire of presenting beautiful dying in this way. If not in
themselves then in fictional people, in the heroes of their plays. Death,
with nothing in it or behind it any longer, may always be depressing,
but given the distance of the stage it is uplifting. And here this distance
does not even necessarily remain: fictional people anyway, if they are powerfully grasped and elaborated, seem curiously real. They are so in the stratum
of artistic pre-appearance, but with a Being in this pre-appearance which
is driven to an end and therefore has an intensified effect. Of course, the
soldiers in a picture are not simultaneously perpetrators of the event they
portray, any more than actors are. All this has life only in the spectator,
but the characters themselves, embodied by the actors, accordingly do not
coincide with the actors, let alone with the spectators. On the contrary,
they are the historical Anthony, Caesar, Wallenstein once again, in collected
form. Or if the character is completely fictitious, a King Lear, then its
life and death is one which could have been and which is now just as much
driven to its end and may be just as real in its way as the fictional Caesar.
If there were nothing but illusion here, it would not be possible that
precisely tragic figures, even non-fictionally occur in history and that, both
as fictional and as driven further, they appear as history made essential.
Napoleon comes across as a tragic hero, even though no commensurate
tragedy about him has been written, and if he were performed in Shake~
spearean style then there would here be no rift between illusion and reality,
but rather St Helena would be a final act with more perfection. Likewise
in well-depicted fictional characters the most important characteristic of
human Being is preserved, namely the moral. Not their spectators and
not their authors but they themselves experience guilt and atonement and,
more important: deliverance from both. So much for the moment about
a life, a death, which tragic characters in particular can enact, without
illusion. This observation is important in order to understand one of the
most disciplined approaches of a consciousness which has lost belief to death.
For tragic immortality in the work, as a utopian consolation, is likewise
granted only to a few, but attainable attitude did emanate from the tragic
death. It seemed and seems, as a proud death, not to annihilate life, but
precisely to affirm it. To affirm it when the upright-essential aspect of a
1168
person faces death as an equal, indeed forces death to seal precisely this
upright-essential quality. To this extent the tragic image of death, as it
has been immanently developed, still has a select significance, but as, unlike
immortality in the work, this image does not presuppose talent, but
attainable will and attitude, its significance is not intellectual-aristocratic.
Nor is it merely work-based and metaphorical, but - although it is enacted
in a fictional work - a personally effective significance. Even up to the
point that death for the tragic person and his cause is used almost
paradoxically-positively.
Here the hero shows how death can be incorporated into him. He is
not cancelled out in death, although not only his life but also his striving
is trampled underfoot. In human terms he comes into form through this
end, the tragic death works as a chisel. Indeed even the tragic play,* in
which no intense characters go under, comes across as an event which
contains not only unhappiness, beautified by emotion. Instead the emotion
raises the trodden flower or the grave of the noble, the once great individual
into a lament; it shrouds the corpse, makes the corpse-like good. Only
the vulgar goes down into Orcus without a sound, whereas even the
smallest spark of light appears colourful and large in the tears of emotion.
Even that form of tragic play which was developed in the Baroque, in
clear contrast to strict tragedy, makes transitoriness into something rescued,
indeed makes it the condition on which there can be any rescue at all,
namely any 'harvesting' into symbol. The dying person here does not
become statuesque but allegorical, in accordance with Benjamin's insight:
'And the characters of the tragic play die because it is only in this way,
as corpses, that they can enter into the allegorical homeland' (Ursprung
des deutschen Trauerspiels, 1928, p. 217). The corpse becomes an emblem,
indeed all history, as a scene of devastation and only as such, becomes
an emblem in the Baroque: 'Deadness of the characters and departedness
of concepts are therefore the pre-requisite for the allegorical transformation of the pantheon into a world of magical conceptual creatures' (l.c.,
p. 225). The Baroque tragic play thus greets death, as 'the significant
division of a living thing into the disjecta membra of allegory'. But the hero
becomes statue and not ruin, the only statue among ruins, according to the
plastic interpretation so to speak, in tragedy. This can also be expressed as
follows: the complaint against death israised in the tragic play, but isthen dropped;
only in the .tragedy is the case carried through, and though it is lost for the life
* For the distinction between 'tragic play' (Trauerspiel) and 'tragedy' (Tragedie), see Vol. I,
p. 429. and 11.
1169
of the hero, it is won for his character. Accordingly, in tragedy no one may
fall except through his own actions; where this does not happen, for example
in the case of Max and Thekla, the human sacrifices for Wallenstein, mere
tragic play immediately occurs in the midst of tragedy. * Therefore only in
tragedy and in the attitude which corresponds to it, but here inevitably, is
death, which is then certainly not lamentable, supposed to be able to be and
above all: to have to be a value-laden definitivum. A definitivum not of
the end but of conclusion, as that of a character who becomes statuesque in
tragic death. Lukacs, from a still neo-classical position, therefore still without
reference to the actual, socialissue which the hero in his character represents
in each case, developed the notion of this hard, brilliant consolation most
consistently. Without the older images of guilt and atonement, without
an origin of tragic poetry in the idea of sacrifice of laying down one's
life to atone for guilt, but of course also without the pathos of the tragic
hero as a fighter against fate, fate which is hostile to man, hostile to
Prometheus. On the contrary: 'The essence of these great moments in life
is the pure experience of selfhood' (Die Seeleund die Formen, 1911, p. 336).
And death falls from it, like the chisel from the finished statue, indeed
here it is supposed to be irrelevant even beforehand when it asserts its
importance with blood, danger, murder. Genuine drama as form itself takes
its characters' lives, i.e, the undecided, the atmospheric life in mere
experienced reality, 'the anarchy of chiaroscuro' in which nothing ever
swings to the uttermost. Tragedy has no biology and no psychology: 'The
readiness to face death ofthe tragic character, his serene calm in the face of
death or his blazing ecstasy of death is only ostensibly heroic, only the
human-psychological view; the dying heroes of tragedy ... are already dead
long before they die' (l.c., p. 342). According to this view, death is merely
the making-visible of a shape which is already present anyway, in its essence;
just as, for example, Michelangelo already saw the statue in the block and
all his chisel had to do was remove the superfluous material around it.
Or as the late Schelling metaphysicized this chiselling, now no longer as
tragic, but towards selfhood: 'The common notion which regards death
as a separation of soul and body sees the body as an ore in which the soul is
encircled like a precious metal; death is the process of separation which frees
the soul from this matter which encirclesand surrounds it and presents it clear
and in its purity. The other notion would tend more to compare the effect of
death with that process in which the spirit or the essence of a plant is
* In Schiller's tragedy 'Wallenstein'.
1170
extracted ... The death ofa person is then not so much a separation as an essentification, in which only the contingent is destroyed but the essence, that which
man actually is, is preserved' (Werke, IV~, p. 206f.). Almost in the same
sense a Church Father, Gregory of Nyssa, had celebrated death and before
that the mortification of asceticism, as the 'last remedy for the body' , in such
a way that the sin-distorted body is 'recast into its transfiguration' . And Plato,
so inclined to the idea of purely represented genus, observes in his 'Cratylus'
that it was wise of Pluto to wish to associate with men only after their death,
after the soul is purified of all the evil and corruption of the body. All this
borders, in secularized form, on the tragic emergence of selfhood, with death
as forming and, basically, form-appearance of a Being-Essential. However,
in Lukacs' still neo-classical theory of tragedy, dying, indeed destruction itself,
is omitted. According to this interpretation, both are the same atmospheric
chiaroscuro as the life of experienced reality, are verbs and not essentialities.
The mere process of destruction is removed from tragic decisions and
decidednesses, and so also, from pure statuesque immanence, is the Promethean
tension of the hero against fate. Thus the statuesque ultimately leaves out,
along with the atmosphere, the aura of tragic death and its possible
background. It not only skips over blood, murders, tragic gloom, it also
leaves, in 'pure selfhood', no other relief than the back conflict-ground', the
content of the represented cause for which the tragic hero goes to his death,
with naive or considered consistency. This cause may of course be 'pure
selfhood', appearing in the formal consistency of an inflexible character; to
this extent, disregarding the content of this character, even Richard III would
be a tragic figure. But more crucial is the positive-universal, the humanrepresentative goal-content of the unshakeable will, which nails the flag to
the mast of the ship, however it may go down. Also the emblem on this flag
is never that of a mere person alone and of their 'pure selfhood', however
essential it may appear; thus precisely the Marxist Lukacs, taking up Marx's
and Engels' line in the Sickingen debate with Lassalle,* subsequently sought
to bring out the more objective relief of the tragic, with a different chisel.
Precisely the socialcause which the hero in his respective character represents
and for which he endures inhis necessaryactions. So that even 'pure selfhood',
Ferdinand Lassalle, 1825-64, the founder of the German Socialist movement, wrote a tragedy
on Franz von Sickingen, a German Protestant knight who leda nobles' revolt during the Reformation. Lassalle sent the play to Marx and correspondence ensued in which Engels joined. Marx
criticized Sickingen as a revolutionary hero. He wrote to Lassalle suggesting that, like his Franz
von Sickingen, he had placed the Lutheran-knightly opposition above the plebeian-Miinzerian
opposition. Seeletter of 19th April 1859(to Lassalle)and 10th]une 1859(to Engels). See also Lukacs
'Die Sickingendebatte' in 'Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels als Literaturhistoriker' (Aufbau 1948).
117 1
however pure, is ultimately only the vehicle of these social conflicts and
contents: certainly not as a mere ideaon two legs, but in such a way that the
tragic individualascharacteris one finally only because, apart from the fatally
clear mould, he characteristically enacts what iscontained in thesesocial forces.
That is to saythat he characterizes colliding legaland moral orders;thesealone
substantiate the tragicconflict. Either in the case of heroes who represented an
existence, a legalorderwhich was not morallyfinished, which had not descended without a sound into Orcus (matriliny in Sophocles' 'Antigone'). Or in
the caseof heroes of a revolt which has come too soon, of a legal and moral
order not yet objectively ripe in its conditions (Spartacus, Miinzer and - to
remain in the literature of the tragic - to some extent Egmont). These rebels
areabove all the human brothers of Prometheus, of the prototype of the tragic
hero asa canonical hero. And from them the last light is alsocast on to allthe
socially more restricteddefiantsubstance of tragic heroes. The light of the unrefuted quos ego, sealed precisely by death, henceof the hero who is not more
powerful but better than fate with its gods and who as such, only as such,
announces a true 'pure selfhood' aslasting,for hisfollowers. This rebellion has
beenactive from the beginningin tragedy,indeed astonishingly longbefore any
actualrebellion; it canbe detectedin the greatness of the long-sufferer, it forms
the first reserve of man againstgods and fate. And to this extent therefore the
tragic death, which makes the hero and his cause so memorable and so
ponderable,was alsoableto appearasa refugefrom the transitoriness of man,
at leastof the heroic man. And aboveall, like immortality in the work, more
shapedly visible than this, thisrefugepositsitselfasutterly immanent, without
any transcendence. Classical tragedy, of course, manages without Hades, and
even the meadsof asphodel of the blessed would be out of placehere; modem
tragedy doesnot in the least implya heaven. This iswhy the natureof the tragicutopiandeath-consolation couldremainnow that religious ideas havedeparted,
with whose 'non omnis confundar' the receptivityto un-death in death even
here is undoubtedly stillfilled. Nonetheless, the tragic downfall, or rather the
fullness of lifewith which it is endured, has addeda pieceof gold to the black
flagof death in far from transcendental times. Theseare usually perceived only
on the stage, in works of fiction, but far less with illusion, far more clearly in
pre-appearance than the bourgeoiscontemplation of art, which for solong was
or hasremained usual, isable to muster.For thisthe consternation wastoo great,
and that which it is capable of communicating, even of revealing, despite
beautiful dying. Tragedyhaskept distinguishable a subject-space, a Promethean
essence-space, in which the enacted annihilation gainsno admittance, although
it first contributed to the specific appearance of this space.
117 2
Disappearance of lethal nothingness in socialist consciousness

AU take earlier flowers into the grave, among them some which are dried
or have become unrecognizable. Only one kind of person can get by on
the way to death almost without traditional consolation: the red hero.
By professing till his murder the cause for which he has lived, goes clearly,
coldly, consciously into the nothingness in which, as a freethinker, he
has been taught to believe. His sacrifice is therefore different from that
of previous martyrs; for they, almost without exception, died with a prayer
on their lips, believing they had gained heaven. Religious ecstasy not only
left the fear of death far behind it, it even in several cases (the song of
the Baptists at the stake) conferred insensitivity to pain. The communist
hero, on the other hand, under the Tsar, under Hitler and ever since,
sacrifices himself without hope of resurrection. His Good Friday is not
mitigated or even cancelled out by an Easter Sunday on which he personally will be re-awakened to life. The heaven towards which the martyrs,
in flame and smoke, stretched out their arms is not there for the red
materialist; nonetheless the latter, as a professor of faith, superior, dies
as only the early Christians or the Baptists were. To this hero Buchner's
utterly this-worldly saying about people applies: 'We are like the meadow
saffron which bears seed only after winter.' This is as paradoxical as it
is magnificent, and how much it is both is shown by the challenges to
it, which here seem most natural but in fact are not frequent, indeed often
occur only among apostates. Thus in Artshibashev's 'Ssanin", a defeatist
novel written after the unsuccessful revolution of 1905 in Russia, Ssanin,
the hero, says that he refuses to be hanged in order that the workers of
the thirty-second century should suffer no lack of food and sexual pleasure.
Such things, at first, at poor sight, appear consistent for a materialist who
even as a revolutionary follows the materialistically inherited pleasureprinciple (and what is pleasure if it is not also one's own pleasure?).
Nonetheless, Ssanin is an exception, even a contemptible one; the revolutionary materialists held their heads high in the face of the class enemy's
gallows, as the most powerful idealists so to speak, although for them
personally nothing remained but the grave, the idea, the certainty of not
being present at the realization of this idea. As enlightened seafarers they would
ostensibly have had every reason to avoid the fateful coast on which man and
mouse are dashed and where no discrimination is made between the two. These
steadfast individuals did not believe they were destined to be welcomed
1173
with alleluias, they thought that they would at best find a niche in the
memory of their contemporaries and of posterity, enshrined in the hearts of
the working class, but they sharply rejected any hope of a celestial
metaphysics and a Last Judgement in which the righteous receive the reward
withheld from them in life. In short, his belief in a mechanical universe
meant that the red hero, when, as a corpse, he was utterly transformed into
dead mechanism, returned without pleasure but also without pantheism to
dust; - yet this materialist dies as if all eternity were his. This means that
he had already ceased to take his ego so seriously, he had class consciousness.
Personal consciousness is so absorbed into class consciousness that to the
person it is not even decisive whether he is remembered or not on the
way to victory, on the day of victory. It is not an idea in the sense of
abstract faith but concrete community of class consciousness, the communist
cause itself, which holds the head up here, without delirium but with
strength. And this certainty of class consciousness, cancelling out individual"
survival, is indeed 'a Novum against death. No traces whatsoever of a
secularized kind, in the caseof FuCik, Fiete Schulz and so many others, replace
the courage which comes from within themselves or improve on it with ideas
from outside. The communist hero, his 'technique' of holding out against
interrogations, of gritting his teeth against hellish pain, of going to his
death without betraying the cause itself or even the name of a comrade
- this extraordinary power appears to be completely without any borrowing.
It does not use any earlier images of death, it neither fortifies itself through
dissolution in the universe nor through immortality in the framed work,
nor even in any appreciable way through tragic greatness, at least as far
as its formative element, indeed its statue is concerned. Thus red-atheistic
courage in death is in fact original compared with the romantic addictions
of the bourgeois sense of individuality. But of course this originality does
not mean that, even though it needs no borrowing, it could not and does
not enter into an inheritance. One with the strength to win from older
wishful images of a mythologically projected kind an element of unmythological, this-worldly meaning. The Feuerbachian re-functioning (not
rescuing) of mythologically given wishful ideas has, precisely in that which,
according to its calmest manifestation, can be called the Sacco and Vanzetti"
phenomenon, a - theoretically far from adequately understood - practical
aspect. The disappearance of nothingness in socialist consciousness is the
* Nicola Sacco, 1891-1927, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, 1888-1927, Italian-American anarchists
who were executed in Massachusetts on charges of murdering a shoe-factory paymaster and guard.
1174
filling of this nothingness with new, humane contents. However by driving

away or at least concealing the mechanism of the background which is
empty of life, empty of man, they are not without connection to older,
humane-teleological series. Though in the freshest manner; so that the
association which takes up and preserves the human beyond death is here
wholly produced and never mythologically given. It is instead objectivelyutopianly given, namely in the struggle against the beast of oppression,
in the service of the unrelenting tendency to freedom which always raises
its fighters above themselves, raises them to the best in themselves and
in all the oppressed. It is into this that the red martyr feels taken up, precisely
because he does not want to be a martyr at all but a staunch fighter for
himself too, for his proven, convincing, fruit-bearing essence. For an essence
which now presents itself neither as individual nor as collective-general,
but which here, too, has individual-collective unity, solidarity, within it.
Not only the solidarity of spatial with and beside one another, but most
especially temporal solidarity as well, extending most presently to the victims
of the past, to the victors of the future. Thus the indestructible element
of revolutionary-solidaristic consciousness, of a security without any
mythology, with all insight and tendency, receives and preserves. This
consciousness - with regard to its bearer - means that the immortal element
in the individual is the immortal element in his best intentions and contents;
and so this best no more feels annihilated by fascist execution than it
previously felt refuted by the fascist scaffold. Here the revolutionary work
of liberation becomes for its steadfast individuals the itself steadfast, lasting
stock of the soul. It is for them the soul. of future humanity appearing
up ahead, which they have already become by faith unto death.
The men of the future for whom the hero sacrifices himself will have
far easier deaths. Their life is no longer Violently cut short, the fear of
life itself, insofar as the ruling classcaused it, not least and most comprehensively through war, is dead and gone. But however it may be postponed,
natural death remains, which cannot be affected by any social liberation.
Mediation with that which is natural in death is now a specifically worldly, world-philosophical problem preciselyfor liberated, solidaristichumanity.
All the more so because, when poverty and the care of life are abolished,
the care of death arises in especially stark form, so to speak without the
undergrowth of other, banal depressions. Mediation with the subject of
society is achieved in classless society, yet the hypothetical subject of nature
itself, from which death comes, is located in another field, one more distant
than that of achieved social harmony. Et in Arcadia ego, reads the old
II7S
allegorical inscription, among the idylls of Theocritus: but this ego is not,
as Schiller interpreted the text, the exul tan t ego that was likewise born
in Arcadia or will be born there and thus dances. On the contrary, the
ego of the prophetic inscription refers to mors, so even in Arcadia death
is visibly inscribed. The dance of death still takes place in the loveliest place
on earth. All the more visibly because a new earth may be entered into
in the social beginning, because - not least - the contempt for death from
the period of heroic revolution has come to an end. The supra-lethal fire
of social revolution no longer finds sustenance in its product, the classless
society, certainly no longer the same sustenance. In order to investigate
it, the final horizon problems of our existence must first become clearer,
or rather more clearly directed, posed and influenced than is possible within
a concept of nature which remains mechanistic. Secularized velleities from
expired ideology and theology no longer mean anything whatever in a
classless existence, one related to reality. But it is certainly always the
strength of communism that it makes free faith without lies in its critique
of appearance. And therefore also that it counteracts nihilism, in which
the bourgeoisie, in the face of death, can no longer even bring forth its
own wishful images, let alone a possible truth in these wishful images.
Whereas dialectical materialism, as opposed to mechanical materialism,
does not recognize any barrier in its this-world; consequently it recognizes
no pre-determined nothingness of a so-called naturally ordained order
either. An order which has taken from the earlier, divinely ordained
order the idea of fate, of uncontrollable fate and transferred it one sphere
lower, to that of a closed natural necessity. Dialectical materialism instead
emphasizes controlled external necessity, one which, because controlled,
is ultimately exploded; humanization of nature is a utopian final goal of
its practice. And realized wishful images of the death-content will in future
be a central part of it, wishful images, of course, that are constitutive in
the sense that they are mediatable with the tendency and the latency of
the real process. Hence here, too, conclusive negations within socialism
are as harmful as their opposite: dogmatic-fixed fantasizing, Being enshrined
in the hearts of the working class is memory, but historical memory itself
must first be enshrined if it is not to have at its end a finally triumphant
nihilism, namely one of total mechanism. In other words, 'history' must
be founded anew in the physics of a still open Totum, and this to us no
longer disparate cosmology lies in the line of extension of all communist
problems - existentially recognizable in death. Communist cosmology here
and everywhere is the problem area of a dialectical mediation of man and of his
work with thepossible subject ofnature. This is no more than a problem and,
with respect to practical reason, a postulate, "but as such the expansion
of the realm of freedom to death as fate is legitimate. Precisely because
for this entire problem, for anything like a meaningful formulation of it,
a non liquet of the material still exists, no No a limine is predicable; if
there is not yet a positive solution to our fate in nature, there is equally
no conclusively negative solution. Socialism does not think and act with
theologically inherited stopgaps of the bourgeois-mechanistic world-picture,
nor equally does it think and act with mechanism itself and into its flXed
nothingness. Nobody knows what lies hidden in the world outside the
human working radius, i.e. in the as yet unmediated being of nature;
what subject here directs the turnover, whether such a subject already
ascertainably exists at all or already in this form; whether when it is
encountered, ascertained, brought out it can be brought into mediation
with man as the subject of history. All this depends on the development
and the prospects of the human seizure of power, i.e. most precisely: on
the development and the appearing horizons of communism. Theorypractice, when it has put the social utopia right and set it on its feet, has
the remedy for death as one of its final problems. So that the possible
real meaning even of the intention of the death- and final-utopia is examined
and, if this meaning exists, it is mediated with the real correlate in the
world, which prevents this intention from being entirely homeless. Here
the saying applies: non omnis confundar, I will not completely fall into
disorder, i.e. in that which is man's best part. And man's best part, his
found essence, is at the same time the last and best historical fruit. A nature
which not only takes its course with the earth as a dead moon at the end
or even in the stereotyped destruction and formation of stars and thus,
for all its mechanistic change, runs on the spot, can - with hope certainly
not dashed - enshrine this fruit within itself, indeed it can become this
fruit itself and does not need to destroy it.
v.
Joy of Life and Fragment in All Things
Journey of discovery into death

Can we get around the final fear by its being no fear at all? In fact when a
healthy person considers the end a quite different feeling sometimes comes
1177
to life. Fear is changed by a strange feeling of curiosity, by the desire to

know what dying is all about. This emotion is aroused by the great change
which death in any case brings with it. Curiosity transforms the falling
curtain into one which also parts and reveals. For it the end of life is at
the same time the beginning of something wholly unprecedented, even
if it is only nothingness. This curiosity can better itself to become a kind
of wish for discovery and for knowledge, it looks forward to the act of
dying as to a revelation. Of course, this drive to discovery presupposes
an ego which survives in and indeed after dying in order to be able to
observe death. Schopenhauer ridicules this superbly, he compares a man
who expects special revelations from death to a scholar on the track of
an important discovery, but just at the moment when he thinks he has
found the solution the light is blown out on him. Nevertheless the subject,
before the light is.blown out on him, circles with undeniable expectation
around the mysteries of the bier; this expectation exists side by side with
the fear of death (provided it is not acute) and posits thirst for knowledge
instead of fear. Brooding puberty, a philosophical bent which has survived,
thus cherish especially the wish to be surprised by knowledge after the
closing of the gate. It should not be forgotten, though, that the cheapest
kind of metaphysics has also set up shop in this very place. Second sight
after the fashion of Cagliostro, spiritualism, feed on the curiosity to know
in advance a state which everyone will experience sooner or later anyway.
At all events the expectation which appears in such a dismal place is certainly
a striking gift, especially when, as usually happens here, it imagines the
end as something unprecedented. Even imagines that it has a key to it
which opens inner doors and doors to the same light, more luminous state
in which the beloved dead are remembered and a return to them is possible.
Expectation then intends death as a kind of journey, both into its own
subject and into the overpowering mystery of existence. At the moment
of 'departure' from life the veil of the incognito seems to it to fall from
the subject, as does the so-called outer shell from the mystery of existence.
From this point of view, any journey can anticipate an element of the
final journey, an element of the northern -but colourful night of death,
of the extremest exoticism. More surely than the night of love towards
the side of sinking is entwined with death, the journey of love towards
the side of seceding is entwined with it, towards the side of the great
expedition. This is a drive which runs very wishfully through the final
fear and, as one which sets forth, takes from this fear one of its most
characteristic features: angustia, narrowness.
The moment as not-being-here; extra-territoriality to death

A second wandering drive seeks far deeper, it is even more difficult for it
to founder. It is located, as might be expected, in themidst of the moment,
at the point where a person may approach his core. That which is nearest to
us in our Being is at the same time the positing ground, the naked That
of our Being. Because of its unsurpassable, utterly immediate nearness, the
just lived moment or the Now which is this That is equally still completely
obscure, dark, nowhere arrested and objectified (cf. Vol. I, p. 287f.,
p. 295ff.). The future, not the past, is its expansion; this is why the future
is as obscure and unobjectified as the just lived moment, though not to
the same degree. For the immediate That can actively grasp itself in acting
for the future, in deciding. The immediate That, on the other hand, has
set out on a road which stretches before us, where it appears not only
as positing but also as driving, as tendency, and furthermore is mediated
with the past. But as the future is also our self-engendering core it is not
in itself subject from the outset to any categories of memory, as is the
Become, the past; it can only be done, and sensed in a utopian way. The
future can be known only (in premonition which has become scientific)
insofar as it is in mediation with continuing tendencies of the past, i.e.
is accessible to and represents the unenclosed, open categories of scientificconcrete utopia in mediated Novum. Does death, this event which both
lies ahead and drags into extreme past and is in this respect decided, which
brings into utterly unexperienced otherness and is in this respect at least
undecided, does death bear any relation to the darkness of the lived moment?
On its one decided side it is transformation into extreme past, but it is subject
to no categories of memory, even if it is declared to be identical with our
state before birth. Death on its other side, which certainly remains problematic
(as a definitivum in a world where there are more fragments than definitiva)
was never unwilling, despite and because of being the harshest anti-utopia
which in realitate it is, to give space to a crowd of effusions and premonitions within it. Becauseof lack of continuity with life to date it is unwilling
to give space to the categories of scientific-concrete utopia; yet it has,
hypothetically, space for the future, space for giving birth to our core in
abundance. In this entire area only questionings are possible for the time
being, at best a supposition is possible - that death has a philosophical
root in .the darkness of the lived moment, indeed that both have the same
root. The unobjectified That, the being-that but not yet being-here
1179
of the ground of existence is undoubtedly the driver of Becoming in the

future series, i.e. of attempted objectification of being-that out into mediated
being-here; but to this extent the ground of existence, entering into the
process, as ground of becoming is also the ground of transitoriness. And
this holds as long as and insofar as the moment is not tenably objectified,
as the That of existence has itself been realized. But because the central
moment of our existing has not yet started out on the process of its objectification and, ultimately, of its realization, it cannot itself be subject to
transitoriness. Quite apart from the larger, for the time being undecidable
question of whether the darkness of the lived moment and death have
the same root, namely still involved being-that without being-here; apart
from this, the processual extension of this darkness, as transitoriness,
undoubtedly has the same content. Chronos devours his children, for the
authentic one is not yet born, the 'Stay awhile, you are so fair' has not
yet appeared. But also, the core of our existence which has not entered
into process does not encounter the process with its transitorinesses, and
consequently it is not encountered by them either. Something immediately
sealed within itself, a Being which is not in being-here, may have death,
as another kind of this involutio, as its neighbour, but it cannot have death,
as the annihilation of a being-here, as its fate. And if the still sealed core
of our existence were to open out of its immediateness, if it were also
to enter into process or evolutio, then it would no longer enter, need
to enter into any-process. For the matter itself would then be out, the
deepest not yet conscious, not yet achieved matter; thus there would no
longer be any occasion for process, therefore no transitoriness, which is
always interwoven with mere Becoming.
A different light, the most inconspicuous and strongest of all familiarlights,
thus unites with this. Although it does not illuminate the darkness of the
lived moment, it applies to it accurately enough. Experiences (not yet more
than these) are found in which something which in all public contexts is
almost irrelevant suddenly impresses, as if a first sight of the That were contained within it. "In the 'Foundation' above (Vol. I, p. 300f.), this point
was described as that of astonishment pure and simple. This may be even
the way a leaf turns in the wind, but what is thus intended may also be
filled with more familiar, higher contents. The smile of a child, a girl's
glance, the beauty of a melody rising up from nothingness, the scornful flash
of a strange word which does not seem rightly to belong anywhere. Yet
this higher element is not necessary to stimulate and to fulfil the symbolic
intention of the tua res agitur which appears in this way. It is deepest
1180
astonishment, without any distraction, or the element of something authentic

in the form of its question echoing within itself. What is intended, what
strikes home here appeared in the exploration of anticipatory consciousness
as the form of the absolute question; it describes the last of all consternations and of its future archetypes. This last consternation is hovering, yet
it has indubitable, though still extremely narrow correlates of landing for
itself. A place of existing striking into itself now manifests itself, a place
of sober, as it were everyday mysticism, i.e. of that which needs no 'highest
object' in order to look to the end, but on the contrary a nearest, an
extremely near object. What is nearest is for itself the core of existing
itself, as the germ of the Not-Yet-Achieved; this fills the human moment,
the unknown moment of man which sometimes only comes near to itself.
The 'Stay awhile, you are so fair' now shows the most serious of the various
light-signs, some faint, some portentous, in which it could conquer: that
of being the index of non omnis confundar. Precisely because of its
capacity for positive astonishment, of that which it reproduces in the objective depth, in the narrowest-central latency light of it, there lives in eve~y
phenomenology of the non omnis confundar an enigmatic, currently often
not at all guaranteed joy; it arises from great health, from the bottom right
up to the top, and it gives space to the consciousness of a utopian aura in
man. And the positive form of the absolute question is thus always a happy
form, not effervescent, certainly not, but inconspicuous, elusive, still unnamable; nevertheless it is connected to this aura, as simplicity of its depth.
Now it is precisely this joy and this form of astonishment which seek to
look forwat;d to death with strange certainty: not only as a journey of the
extremest order but as a settingfree precisely of the - exuberance of life. Pathos
of the moment which is approached in the absolute question already senses
in its darkness a new day and a new shore to which it beckons: no
transcendent shore but the most immanent shore itself. Death, which both
as individual death and as the distant possibility of cosmic entropy confronts
future-oriented thinking as absolute negation of purpose, this same death,
along with its possible future-content, now enters the final conditionality,
the core conditionality which is illuminated by still unguaranteed joy and
the lights of latency of the authentic. Death is thus no longer the negation
of utopia and its ranks of purpose but the opposite, the negation of that
which does.. not belong to utopia in the world; it strikes it away, as it
strikes itself away before the non omnis confundar of the main issue: in
the content of death itself there is then no longer any death but the revelation
of gained life-content, core-content. This is an astonishing turn-about,
IIBI
one which phenomenologically avoids the future's gloomiest position,

although - as it is scarcely necessary to stress - it certainly is not really
occupied. But it is not only a presentiment of our capacities but the wellfounded appearance of a fulfilment which has its place here. This place is
marked by the simply paradoxical major key in the funeral march, and its
light is the lux luceat eis, the wishful subjunctive of a certainty in the midst
of the requiem. Precisely because of this, however, precisely because of this
existential or musical correlate, appearance here is more than pre-appearance,
it blossoms not on the horizon but in an immediateness of a central kind,
however unmediated it may still be. This is why, in numerous reports, consciousness of pre-death (certainly never of the unreportable moment of death
itself) and consciousness of an essentiation strike together. In Tolstoy these
are almost exclusively the great moments of phenomenologically appearing
meaning and of the All, of the All Will Be Well which it claims to contain.
Here, again and again, belongs the experience of the seriously wounded
Andrei Bolkonsky on the battlefield of Austerlitz; even Karenin's and
Vronsky's experience of unity at Anna's deathbed belongs here, although
it is one from outside, a mere wish to be able to die like this. It was argued
above, in the discussion of the relation of death to the darkness of the lived
moment, that darkness and its core may well have death-las involutio) as their
neighbour but they cannot have death (as transitoriness) as their fate.
Therefore the core of existing has not yet set off on the process and consequently is not affected by the transitoriness of the process; against death it
has the protective circle of the N ot-Yet-Living around it. But if the core itself
had entered into the process, then its self-objectification, finally its selfintensification and therefore its self-realization would no longer be one of
process: with this resultant moment the realm of devouring Chronos would
be completely at an end. Nowhere has the wishful longing for the authentic,
which cannot be corrupted by moths and rust, * appeared more passionately
than it does in death, its empirically hardest counter-blow, nowhere else
has it at the same time produced such transcendental counter-movements,
entwinements of utopia with religion. Was utopia able to land in religion,
did that which is called God appear as the highest life, as the object of the
highest wish? Undoubtedly, as far as abstract, even mythical utopia was the
driving force and was pursued; it lives on heaven. The great humanity
religions have often provided improper empty promises for the will to a better
world, but they were for a long time also its most decorated room, its entire
*
CE. Matthew 6, 19.
1182
structure. In no longer abstract, in concretely-mediated utopia, as finally

became clear with the image of death, this transcendence has, however,
Been removed: a devotion to human liberation and to that of its new space
of existence exists; outside this space there is no liberation. Instead of the
gaze upwards a gaze inward, into origin, arises, forwards into the proce~s
and into the identification of men as origin to a good end. Death is then
part of this process, but not of the subjects from which the process first
comes and to whose identification it is directed. Therefore firstly: the core
of existing, as still unbecome, is always extra-territorial to becoming and
passing, neither of which have yet grasped our core at all. Therefore
secondly: the core of existing, if it had become and at the same time, when
brought out, had turned out well, would in this achievedness be all the
more extra-territoriality to death; for this death itself would have become
remote and extinct, along with the processual inadequacy of which it is
part. The utopia of the non omnis confundar supplies and gives to the
negation of death every shell to crack, but it gives it only the power to
crack open the shells around the subject-content, which, if it were
significantly out, indeed if it were extracted and determined, would no
longer be a shell of appearance. Wherever existing comes near to its core,
permanence begins, not petrified but containing Novum without transitoriness, without corruptibility. Only if the process of the self-objectified agent,
the agent materially developing towards its authenticity had reached an
absolute In Vain, would death strike the core of nature which is in men's
hearts. Only then would it have the power over it which it does not have
over the exuberance of life in men, the not yet done. The old saying of
Epicurus that where man is death is not, and where death is man is not,
comes true here. Indeed the proposition of the lasting non-coincidence
of the two comes true in a far deeper sense, precisely with regard to the
basic impetus, as yet unborn and hence also insufficient for the grave, which
is concentrated in man, though to differing degrees. Childhood and future
do not become less in it, nor that supernumerary and unmeasured existence
which has not yet achieved its result. But non omnis confundar, still
invisible, in this glowing-dark core ultimately touches above all the potentially
eagle-like quality of human matter; and this Upwards to the All has been
least affected by nothingness, as long as the world has lasted. Is not the
whole of eternity mine? asked Lessing; at the least this transmigratory
claim applies to the intensive Mine of people in the world, a Mine that
has not yet become visible.
1183
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
GROWING HUMAN COMMITMENT TO

RELIGIOUS MYSTERY, TO ASTRAL MYTH,
EXODUS, KINGDOM; ATHEISM AND
THE UTOPIA OF THE KINGDOM
53
If you look into the dark long enough, there is always something there.
Yeats
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
Hebrews
II, I
What man is not but wishes to be he imagines as existing in his gods, a god
is man's happiness-drive satisfied in the imagination.
Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion

The belief in the other world is the belief in the freedom of subjectivity from
the limits of nature - consequently the belief of man in himself.
Feuerbach, The Essence of Religion
Those who charged the Christians with burning down Rome with firebrands
were slanderers, but they were at least far nearer to the nature of Christianity
than those among the moderns who tell us that the Christians were a sort
of ethical society, being martyred in a languid fashion for telling men they
had a duty to their neighbours, and only mildly disliked because they were
meek and mild.
Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

The critique (of religion) has picked to pieces the imaginary flowers on the
chain, not so that man should wear an unimaginative, dreary chain but so
that he can cast off the chain and pluck the living flower.
Marx, Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right
I. Introduction
In good hands
Fear of nothing, nothing at all, is blind. It does not see where the blow
comes from when it comes. Thus the person who fears ghosts feels exposed
1184
WISHFUL IMAGES OF THE ,FULFILLED
~OMENT
on all sides, front, back, right, left, above and below at the same time.
And even from something that seems utterly harmless terror can suddenly
step forth, inhuman. But the ghost remains equally close to the grave,
equally uncanny, when it seems to appear as friendly. Even the man who
feels in good hands and shakes them may shudder when what this hand
belongs to is, for example, dead. He senses an oppressive atmosphere, and
even friendly light around him, in front of him, above him, remains ghostly.
It clouds and smokes, the gaze at it is no clearer than the different kind
of thing which it thinks it perceives and does not perceive. Hence even
horror, which fills the ghost-ridden, never entirely disappears in the
religious, it becomes timidity. And this lasts even where the religious person
does not prove to be helpless or simply dependent. When he ventures into
the strange river, indeed when by magical acts or as a chosen one he makes
himself important. The religious man then stands as it were armed, he
is no longer a squashed worm, he has become at least a servant of his
onrushing idol. Yet even then, even in this mixture of being-on-the-watch
and watchmen there are still storms and rays. The believer can be sensible,
indeed in lower versions he can represent his cause in a ridiculous-banal
fashion and also talk about it in this way. But it is typical of this river
filled with timidity that for the time being it never becomes completely
surveyable.
Lunatics again, occult path

It is not surprising that special dreamers are to be met here too. They are
perforated enough to allow unstandardized states to enter into them. That
which is deranged has so deranged the limits of the ordinary everyday
that it can easily coat the unusual with the everyday and vice-versa. Into
the ego thus split there enters not only a sense of sin of a strength long
presumed dead. Here, as incorporated super-ego, a pride, a certainty copied
from the saviour takes root, such as the sane, even with the extremest
arrogance, could never bring off. No false Demetrius can hold out for
long, but a false]esus among lunatics certainly can. And, if they are women,
at least in such a way that they go about as his Mary. Thus there were
mothers of God in the Middle Ages, and even in the modern period johanna
Southcott, an English peasant-woman, claimed to be the woman with child
of Revelation 12. Her followers gave her a golden bed, as well as a cradle,
linen and bath, all this was better than in the stable in those days. But
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
1185
the saviour's mother died in the golden bed before it became a childbed,
and when her body was dissected to save its precious fruit it was found
to be empty. To make up for this something as unexpected as a - female
Jesus appeared elsewhere, in a wishful dream come true, which buys the
dearest goods for nothing. For the English laundress Anna Lee brought
herself as Christ into the world, as his female reincarnation, and was
believed. Around 1760 the saviouress migrated to the English colonies on
the upper Hudson but, in keeping with her former profession, nothing
more than a holy laundry and a Jerusalem of the immaculate kitchen grew
up around her. Instead of the much more numerous and certainly more
moving male imitators of Christ - one of the last was the Italian coachman
David Lazaretti, to whom the Sabine country people built a church -,
instead of these manifold renaissances of one already born let there appear
here the relatively original image of two saviours of a special kind', from
whose abnormality a new religion was almost made. One of these, however,
was not indisputably possessed but, at least at the beginning and the end,
a half-swindler: Sabbatai Zewi. He claimed in 1648 and then again in 1666,
the supposed year of the end of the world, to be the Messiah (cf. Vol. I,
p. 328), indeed he even signed his decrees in the grandest blasphemous
style: 'I, the Lord your God Sabbatai Zewi, who led you out of the land
of Egypt.' The Jews of the Baroque who believed inhim were feverishly
preparing to depart, but the god of the last days, when danger threatened,
went over to Islam and ended his days as a doorman in a seraglio. Far
less a Messiah and without bankruptcy, but nevertheless a 'latter-day saint',
one truly possessed appeared on the scene in the last century, within Christianity but tending beyond it: Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormons.
Legend gives the following account of the beginning: in a hill near New
York Joseph Smith found at) ancient chest containing gold' plates, the plates
were inscribed with mysterious signs, Smith deciphered them with God's
aid', and the only genuine, the arch-American Bible, the 'Book of Mormon'
came to light. It was Written in the Book that the Jewish Levites had
emigrated as early as the building of the Tower of Babel, but Jesus had
stayed with the American Levites precisely between his resurrection and
his ascension, i.e. long before Columbus, and had given them the true
revelation. The Jewish patriarch Mormon at the time engraved the revelation
in Egyptian (Smith calls it 'reformed Egyptian') and consigned it to
the hill in the state of New York, a kind of spiritual Klondyke. The
content of the treasure-chest - a geographical-utopian motif recurs here
(cf. Vol. II, p. 754), the motif of the buried letter from God or book of
1186
mysteries awaiting its pre-determined discoverer -, the content of the

treasure is itself a promise again: 'Go West, young man' in chiliastic form.
The Canaan which Christ intended was, according to this, in the Wild
West; and the Mormon trek, one of the greatest migratory movements
in the modern era, thus built a new Zion around the Great Salt Lake.
Or rather a Mohammedan-Puritanical hybrid-and business structure grew
up, seasoned with polygamy, sanctified with gold plates. In keeping with
its grass roots, the New Zion soon scarcely looked more celestial than
Chicago, the sanctity of the last days soon became identical with what
is known in business as a clear monthly settlement. Salt Lake City with
its tabernacle and holy safe in which the gold tablets are kept thus became
business as usual, and the huge fools' religion became only the roundabout
way to it. But this roundabout way was more necessary than in previous
times, in order to rediscover sealed letters from God and to make them
credible to tens of thousands. Eduard Meyer in his book on the Mormons
compared joseph Smith with Mohammed; and there is some truth in this,
but only to the extent that a piece of lunacy today gives a hint at the
believed strength of earlier religious wishful images which themselves, at
that time and-place, had delusion rather only in their train. Differently
from medical, social, technological wishful dreams yet . unspeakably worldimproving here too, delusion finally enters into religious wishful dreams.
Furthermore in flat periods and countries such as the nineteenth century
and America it kept open specific gaps in the wishful dream and the Seven
Sleepers' tale * which waits in these gaps for its day.
And let us not forget what second-rate clairvoyance achieves here. It,
too, seeks by weird means to penetrate mysteries, and does so. They are
purchased cut-price and look like it too, tailor-made for thick-heads yet
sometimes still obscurely strange. Occult tomes from the last century such
as Bulwer Lytton's 'Zanoni' belong here. Then, in the Swedenborgian
manner, Du Prel and his 'Magic as an Experimental Science', and also
Franz Hartmann, petit-bourgeois-Paracelsian. Then, completely disordered
but atavistically interesting, Blavatsky and her 'Isis Unveiled'. At the peak
of 'Knowledge of Higher Worlds' the occult journalist Rudolf Steiner
established himself, a mediocrity in his own right. A mediocre, indeed
unbearable curiosity, yet effective, as if mistletoe were still being broken
off here, as if something shoddily druidical were fermenting, soaking,
murmuring and chattering on newspaper. Whether the chatter and the
* The seven youths of Ephesus, said to have hidden in a cave during the Decian persecution
and slept there for hundreds of years, waiting for Christ's return.
.RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
low level are necessary for this kind of 'initiation' or occult activation it is
difficult to say. There are a few, a very few, serious writings from the Steiner
circle, for example Poppelbaum's biosophical study 'Man and Animal' and
several chemical-astrological boldnesses with imitations of alchemy; but
everywhere else the mere chorus of a hundred thousand fools predominates.
Nevertheless there sometimes also appears a dash of mediumistic disposition,
an atavistic capacity for parapsychic phenomena, above all for atavistic clairvoyance. There can be no doubt that such phenomena and such dispositions
still exist, nor that they rose extremely high in characters like Blavatsky and
the somnambulistic Steiner. Atavistic clairvoyance was linked as it were subterraneously with mythic customs and cults, with world-pictures constructed
on a different state of consciousness from that of today. Thus Steiner was
after all able to touch on elements and secret teachings which from the outside
are almost closed to modern consciousness, however great its philosophical
empathy. Sometimes types such as these, shallow mermaids or minotaurs
of tripod and journalism at the same time such as Blavatsky or Steiner, had
in their consciousness a feedpipe from the unconscious, from the long-past,
not-past. Or" like deep-sea fish, deformed and flattened, but still in a twilight
form scarcelyaccessible to mythological research, old under-, inter- and hinterworlds rose putrefied to the surface. Mingled with strange correspondences
right through the world; with the usual connecting lines cancelled out, with
as it were displaced boundary stones. One example of this is Steiner's pursuit
of the 'sphinx-like element, which still looks with a disturbing interrogation',
through all kinds of popular legends and 'natural manifestations', as far as
that of 'panic terror.' Or even an atavistic-sympathetic analogy between uterus, brain and the firmament. Such (ultimately Paracelsian) flair for
supposed 'correspondences' occurs today only in these theosophical tomes,
in Gnosis for the slightly touched middle class. Less sympathetic, more
cobbled together in the literary sense is the nonsense on world development
out of and about the business of the gods in the world. Here there are not
only religious beings everywhere so that one shudders with awe when one
sees a flower blossoming or especially when a storm breaks; so full is
everything of elemental spirits. Above all the entire planetarium is transformed
into a religious institution, an educational institution in which gods create
and educate, preside over respective ages and the heavenly bodies, as formerly
in astrological nonsense. But then again and again, to supplement the guidance
of the planets with more modern education, in the nonsense-structure of this
not atavistic but cobbled together myth-cosmology - Hackel and evolution
are also to be found, indeed evolution plus gods (at the lectern of the individual
iI88
stages) makes Steiner's world grammar school complete. Let us stick instead
to the atavistic clairvoyance of such types and the curious renewal it can give to
magic which has become hocus pocus but was not so from the beginning.
Let us stick not least to the undeniable fact that such stuff in places forms a
parallel to colportage in literature. Just as this has kept alive, if not paved the
way for, meanings which scarcely occur in good literature, so theosophical
colportage produces tensions, inter-worlds, even archetypes which have been
overlooked; at least it can produce such things if used carefully and as it were
surrealistically. And this precisely because and insofar as theosophical atavisms
are what they are, do not put on airs like the Catholic mythology of the other
world, which in many respects is scarcelyless incredible. Whereas the atavistic
or colportage-like in much theosophy, precisely because of its inferiority,
because as colportage it is not shy, can be put to indirect use as regards insight
into mythical archetypes, wild-mysterious colourfulness. The miracle man is
part of religion, and whoever omits him willieam nothing ultimately adequate
about it. In the wishful and dream space of the unconditional, all-surpassing,
which remains even after the subtraction of religions, he no longer has any place,
but at the edge of this space nothing is less relevant than civilized feelings,
definitions sterilized without astonishment. Even a miracle-man as dubious
as Apollonius of Tyana * is closer to the religious sphere than Melanchthon, t
and even more so Jakob Bohrne is unspeakably closer than Schleiermacher.
Theosophical colportage does not have a single point seriously in common
with the men of the mystery cults, let alone with the Christian mystics of
ancient times. Nonetheless it can show what's what and where many a hubris
broke into what was not built for it. Where Rabbi Low struggled with the
archetype of Astarte and where the guardians of the threshold were feared, in
short where the subject was armed when it penetrated behind the cuttain into
imagined worlds beyond. This has nothing to do with 'Christ-impulse' but
it does have to do with the atavisms and fermenting images, the interim kingdoms and graven images which preceded it. And the young Goethe learnt more
about the Faust magic from the Rosicrucians than from Nicolai! for example.
* Apollonius Tyanaeus (c. 4 B.C. - 97 A.D.), a Pythagorean philosopher and reputed magician
from Asia Minor, whose life and miracle-working have often been compared with those of Christ.
t Philip Melanchthon, 1497-1560, a German humanist who collaborated with Luther and wrote
'Loci Communes', the first great Protestant work on the principles of the Reformation.
t Christoph Friedrich Nicolai. 1733-1811, critic and novelist of the German Enlightenment, also a
bookseller. He published a parody of 'Werther': "The joys of Young Werther'. Tormented by
apparitions of the living and the dead, he submitted to a bizarre cure: leeches were applied to the
end of his spine. Goethe derived the Proktophantasmist (Rump-visionary) from this incident which
appears in the Walpurgis night scene in 'Faust', Part I, thus taking literary revenge on Nicolai.
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
1189
Chiefs and magicians; every religion has founders

Not the individual child paints but something universally child-like in him.
And not the man of the people sings but shared deprivation or a shared
spring sing from him. It is the group of something child-like or popular
which lives here in individuals and speaks through them. A so to speak
gifted ego is not necessary for the production of childhood images, for
the creation of popular ballads. Indeed these expressive creations disappear
or fade when, through sexual maturity in one case, through the individualistic economy in the other, the group light no longer burns so universally
and effectively around the head. The development of an ego through sexual
maturity in one case and through individualistic economy in the other
is certainly very different. Nonetheless, in the physiological as well as the
economic case something separated, self-willed, stands out against the
previous group soul. This group soul is undoubtedly also effective in
religious movements and developments: but in these a kind of personality
sui generis emerges long before so-called advanced social differentiation.
Religious movements have often been, indeed are as a rule, connected with
driving forces under or outside the ego, with convulsions, panic, possession:
nevertheless the group here sets apart a separate figure, a leader. Primitives
who have scarcely developed a division of labour and certainly no aristocracy,
among whom the chief does not tower over the tribe, honour the medicine
man. Among the original gentes * the chief has authority but no nimbus, he
is primus inter pares, whereas the magician, even in a still completely
cooperative community, is considered as being of a different kind. The
mysterious powers attributed to him, the esoteric and often very arduous
training he has had as a discipleof the spirit world, mark him out as individual
and as solitude, even before any social classification. The special position of
the magician, then of the teacher of magic, is consequently independent of
other socialdifferentiation; hence the magical individual appears on the scene
very early. As such, thanks to his own recognized 'charisma' , he did not need
to wait for the place which otherwise, in other activities, was opened to the
personal only by developed class society, and primarily by emerging or still
rising capitalist society. From this follows a further, important characteristic:
no religion has begun completely namelessly, i.e. without a - more weakly or
strongly - stressed originator. Folk songs, even epics, may, even without the
* Clans in Roman antiquity supposed to have a common origin and common rites.
1190
exaggerations which Romanticism gave to this, come into being anonymously, but religions are at least ordered and, if they arise anew, founded by
a named person. Holy men are placed at the beginning of the religion, they
have not only charisma like primitive magicians or even later miracle men
but productivity. Here too belong the older types, predominantly orderers,
they are founders, though to a lesser extent, even without a new god. An
authority as penetrating as frazer finds no exception to the rule that all great
religions have been founded by impressive men (cf. The Golden Bough, 1935,
IV 2, p. 159 et seq.), Now of course there are remarkable gradations in this
impressiveness,gradations of lesseror greater, of more blurred or more distinctive intensity with which legend has handed down a genius religiosus. Thus
for example Cadmus seems faint, Orpheus hazy, Numa Pompilius all too
solemn, little shape emerges with them. They mark a beginning which is
affixed to them, but they stand outside their faces, their not quite human
faces. And the mythical originators of the Egyptian and Babylonian religions
are incomparably more unassailable than Moses or Jesus. They get by almost
without a historical core, are mere signs of a religious beginning, whereas
Moses or Jesus have a face and through all the legend they hand down an
uninventible, real bearing. They themselves entered into the religion which
bears their name, as historical individuals by their appearance they changed
a previous religious content. However, the fact that the more ordering
originators of Egyptian and Babylonian religion, and also of ancient Chinese
and ancient Indian religion, do not stand out anything like as distinctively
as Lao Tzu or Buddha, let alone Moses and jesus, does not disprove the rule
that religions, unlike folk ballads and ancestral epics, have founders.
There are three reasons why some founders are handed down more
indistinctly, are also themselves more indistinct. And the same reasons
at the same time indicate why the founding of religions is only truly freed
with Moses and Jesus. Firstly, the indistinct founders usually lie a long way
back in time, legend names them and at the same time shrouds them. There
is no written record going back to Cadmus, Orpheus or Numa Pompilius
or even one which indisputably comes from their period. And without
this such first teachers can easily become characters in a wandering fable
which goes from place to place and blurs even an originally distinctive
local face. Secondly, founders of religion remain less distinctive if, as primarily orderers and formulators, they stayed essentially within the tradition.
If they do not mark a point at which the wave which had been running
until then breaks, where an opposition to the previous cult is set up, in
short where a new god is taught. An example: the Egyptians honoured
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
1191
two very solemn founders of their religion, Imhotep, a priest of the dead at
the beginning of the third dynasty, and above all the divine scribe Thoth.
Both remain legend, indeed Thoth is almost entirely mythical; neither is
-even a head taller than the religious tradition which they mark. However if
another Egyptian proclaimer, Pharaoh Amenophis IV, prophet of a one and
only god, of the sun-god, had prevailed with his solar monotheism, then
the point of radical change would have been there and Egypt would have
had a distinctive originator of religion, not just a rarefied or mythical one.
Thirdly, of course, even Amenophis IV, the heretic, could scarcely have
attained the distinctiveness of Moses or Jesus; for this final reason, namely
that natural religion, such as that which existed in Egypt, in Babylon and
even in the Vedas, makes the founder figure ipso facto less manifest. For where
gods appear as natural beings, where the human has not significantly registered itself in heaven, no man as a teacher of salvation can clearly enter
heaven. He disappears behind natural-mythic determinations or is even
replaced by them: the Babylonian prophet Oannes thus rises only as a fishman from the sea; Thoth, the legendary Egyptian first teacher, becomes
identical with Thoth the moon-god. Indeed it is the not wholly brokenthrough background of natural religion, or, in Buddha's case, great acosmism in the same place as the cosmos, which causes Lao Tzu and even
Buddha - distinctive though he is and powerfully though he appears in
his glad tidings - to seem slightly more mythical or indeed to become
more mythical than Moses and Jesus. A founder is of course everywhere, but
he becomes very clearly manifest only where he sets his new god against traditional customs, against natural religion empty of men; above all where
he and his followers cling fanatically to him. It was thus that Moses and Jesus
first emerged, were believed in as saviours, not just as mythical teachers,
not just as pointers towards salvation. Although the name of Orpheus,
and also the names of natural-mythic orderer-founders, right up to the
cosmomorphic Confucius, even Zoroaster, the messiah of astral light, are
mentioned together with the gods, they nonetheless remain behind them,
relate externally to them. The Dionysian founder turns tofroth before his
nature god, the astral-mythic founder fades before him, and even Buddha,
the great self-redemption, sinks at the end into the acosmos of nirvana. Moses,
on the other hand, forces his god to go with him, makes him into the exodus.light
of his people; Jesus pervades the transcendent as a human tribune, utopianizes
it into the kingdom. But whether distinctive or not, whether pervading nature
and transcendence or not: words of salvation are always spoken by human
beings. And men in the hypostases of gods spoke nothing hut longedfor
1192
WISHFUL IMAGES OF THE FULFILLED 'MOMENT
future, one which in these illusory hypostases was of course itself only illusorily
graspable. This illusion, in some invocations to the gods, indeed to the
kingdom of god to come at last, could be one which, instead of reconciling
people to given reality and its ideology, regarded it as a delusion and allowed
no peace to be made with it. But for such protest, summoning, utopian..
radical and humane, prophets are needed, not formulators of a ritual, even
though the prophets only replaced the old God..illusion with a new one.
With Moses andjesus this new illusion also contained unreality, but apart
from simply mythical unreality it sometimes also contained a quite different
unreality, one of what could be or at least of what ought to be, which
could thus be understood as a pointer towards utopian reality. There is
therefore a functional' connection between growing se!fcommitment offounders
to religious mystery on the one hand and.the actual proclamation, the miraculous
abyss become human on the other side, that of glad tidings. And the growing
self-commitment is finally grounded in that specific venturing beyond with
which every religious act begins and in which the productive act leaves
all other departures or pre-appearances behind it. This specific venturing
beyond, the more mature religions become, proves to be that of the most
powerful hope of all, namely that of the Totum of a hope which puts the
whole world into rapport with a total perfection. If the nature of this perfection, with less prominent or cosmically fading founders, is outwardly and
essentially astral-mythic in structure, then just as it originated from a
despotic mandate as an ideology of domination, indeed consecration of
domination, it may in its design particularly easily join forces with social
despotism, even with patriarchalism, i.e. with thorough-going dependences
from outside, from above. Ecclesiastical compromise is then not necessary
at all here; on the contrary, the genuine foundation of religion itself, as
in Egypt and Babylon, leads back to and leads on to the ideology of domination. The utopia of perfection, radical and total though it is in its religious
form, through its content here becomes mere supreme ideology. But where
venturing beyond, thanks to plebeian movements, protests, hopes, thanks
to prophetic, not at all conformist but contrastive founders, penetrated
decisively into future and into the Totum of a community, the religion
which resulted could .become a conformist ideology only through later
ecclesiastical compromises (or subtleties of interpretation). Jesus' sermon, an
eschatological one, certainly made no peace with the 'present aeon'; this is
precisely why it also made people most sensitive to mere lip-service and
ecclesiastical compromises. It was considerably more important for it than
for other religions to be a contrast, as it began definitely as a social movement
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
1193
among those that labour and are heavy laden; and it gave those that labour
and are heavy laden an impulse, a sense of their worth and a hope which mere
oppressedness would never have been able to find, or at least did not find
in this way for four thousand years. But this impulse comes from the most
powerful secessio plebis in montem sacrum, * here venturing beyond in toto
at last became - orthodox. And if the maxim that where hope is, religion
is, is true, then Christianity, with its powerful starting point and its rich
history of heresy, operates as if an essential nature of religion had finally come
forth here. Namely that of being not static, apologetic myth, but humaneeschatological, explosively posited messianism. It is only here - stripped of illusion,
god-hypostases, taboo of the masters - that the only inherited substratum capable
ofsignificance in religion lives: thatofbeing hope in totality, explosive hope. Aut
Caesar aut Christus: with this war-cry a different kingdom dawns from that
of domination, also from that of the oppressively awesome on which religion
as myth, especially as astral myth, pinned its apologetic appeasements, its
not yet explosive hopes. The strength precisely of an explosive perfection
was a growing and a rich one, so too, undeniably, was the depth of the
projected wishful creation of gods, which corresponds to the intensity of the
human commitment, Every religion has founders, this means at the same
time that religion in its invocations, even sometimes under the cover and the
dominant ideologies of the masters' and star myth, was a most serious attempt
at the name of all-embracing perfection. An attempt with elements of frenzy
or of calmness, of the anthropomorphic or of the cosmos, of Promethean
rebellion or of hypostatized peace; and the religions of protest represent at
least the most human projections and hypostases into awesome dimensions.
A numinous element, even in the religious Humanum

There is a religious feeling whereby several things are uncanny. This can blind,
but it can also enable to see around the corner, where different, unfamiliar
life may be going on. Even the non-religious person, if he is no flat-head,
will not take his familiar mode of being and seeing as the measure of all things
that are or are not. Religious feeling as such stands absolutely against the
impudent, even the cosy-liberal feeling that is uplifted by itself and thinks
even of its other world as highly sensible and sociable. 'Behold, ye are of
." 'The secessionof the plebs'. Bloch is alluding to the desertion of the popular army to the sacred
hill outside Rome in 494 B.C. as a result of the unfair treatment of the common people by the
Senate. Cf. Livy 'Ab urbe condita', II, 32-3.
1194
nothing'" says the Bible, and is certainly not being misanthropic. 'For my
thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways' , says the
God of the Bible and he is here certainly not being portrayed as a demon.
This remoteness, precisely this dread of the threshold is part of every religious
response if it is a religious response at all. Rudolf Otto is right from this
perspective and, be it noted only in this one respect, when he cites the 'utterly
different' as a sign of the religious object and the 'shuddering-numinous'
as the aura of the saint. The early Karl Barth is right from this perspective
and, again be it noted, only as this antidote, when he puts forward the
outrageously illiberal proposition that 'the divine says a constant No to the
world.' When he teaches that 'The reality of religion is man's horror at
himself', and: 'Infinity, which we men are capable at best of conceiving, is
measured against our finiteness and is therefore itself merely infinite finiteness' (Der Romerbrief, ~940, p. 252, 286). That which is believed to
be God is here, as completely unmediatable despotism, kept remote from
human participation ('federal theology'), but at this grotesque price the Humanum, the Cur deus homo is also protected from the triviality to which
an all-too sociable liberalism has reduced it. The Church, says Barth, has
constantly betrayed god to man, i.e. to the attacks and thought-movements
of the unpenetrated, untranscended creature; against this Barth calls on the
deus absconditus, who is not after all identical with the despotic God. Religion,
and particularly Christianity, amounts instead to turbulent subjectivity and
its interest in the object of worship; Barth's extreme-heteronomous credo
looks as if he is trying to remove the son of man as mediator f and therefore
Christianity itself, from Christianity. But despite this non-human grotesque,
one which ultimately does not even preclude a priest of Moloch but would
have justified his being one, despite this abuse of the Tertullian and originally
far from obscurantist or utterly irrational credo quia absurdum, Barth's
theology does contain a significant admonition. For it fanatically defends a
reverence and a sphere which precisely in the subject-relation of religion are
so easily lost, right down to the vapid psychologism or the priggishness which
the educated philistine substitutes for this reverence. The illiberal element
of taboo theology, after thorough detoxication, in thorough command of
its Humanum, can and must be won over for religious or meta-religious
humanism; not so that the latter should become irrational but precisely the
opposite, so that it does not become stupid. Only in the deus absconditus
is the problem maintained ofwhat the legitimate mystery of the homo absconditus
* Isaiah 41, 24.

t Isaiah ss. 8.
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
119S
is about, of what the community contains of kingdom in its ultimately commensurate sphere, one not. psychologized, not secularized. True though it is
that the so-called mysterium tremendum can be suitable for the ideology of
authoritarian reaction and its despicable irratio, it is equally certain that the
inapplicability of immanent-familiar categories is a first criterion of the
religious layer. How little reactionary irratio needs to be connected with this
criterion is shown by the simple fact that it is by no means confined to
obscurantism and despotic theism, on the contrary. Hence Spinoza, definitely
a rational pantheist, says: 'Furthermore, to speak also of the intellect and
the will usually attributed to God, if intellect and will belong to God's eternal
essence then something utterly different must certainly be meant by these two
characteristics than what is usually meant by them; for the intellect and will
which constituted the essence of God would have to be utterly different from
our intellect and will (a nostro intellectu et voluntate toto coelo differre
deberent) and could be the same in name only, just as the Dog as a heavenly
constellation and the dog as barking animal are the same' (Eth. I, Prop. 17,
note). And this remains decisive: the Utterly Different also holds good for the
ultimate humane projectionsfrom religion. It is only the Utterly Different which
gives to everything that has been longed for in the deification of man the
appropriate dimension of depth. The Utterly Different gives to the hubris
of Prometheus that true heaven-storming quality which distinguishes the
Promethean from the flatness of mere individuality and from the feeble
humanization of the taboo. The Utterly Different with its unfathomed depths
penetrates into the hubris ofThomas Munzer, transforming it into rebellious,
kingdom-inheriting mysticism: 'As must happen to us all with the coming
of faith, that we men of flesh are to become gods through Christ becoming
man and therefore with him God's pupils, taught and deified by him. ' Thus
this numinous element in the regnum humanum itself, instead of unmanning
capitulation to sheer heteronomous sublimity and its Above, which is regarded
as such because man is not found in it, contains on the contrary that Utterly
Different which is itself utterly different, which cannot have too great or
too overwhelming an opinion ofwhat is man's. Such powerful astonishment,
when it penetrates into the contents designated as religious which keep a space
free for it, does not view their approach as oppressive but on the contrary
as - miraculous. The inapplicability of immanent-familiar categories to the
religious sphere, precisely this leap reveals itself as the highest human utopia
when Paul says: 'Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into
the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love
him' (I Cor. 2, 9). The miraculous as the Utterly Different with regard to
the objective religious world is here clearly the most characteristic mysterium
ofjoy, triumphing in the religious hope-content of man, i.e. that which
explodes itself into the Utterly Different. And Christianity stressed the mediation between the subjective religious world and the taboo of the previous
objective religious side - a mediation which is here called kingdom, the
kingdom of God. But now something Utterly different arises more than ever
in the object of the subjective side, namely the mystery of spatiality around' the
highest object: the religious subjective side is also invested with this, with the
mysterium of the kingdom. God becomes the kingdom of God, and the
kingdom of God no longer contains a god: i.e. this religious heteronomy
and its reified hypostasis are completely dissolved in the theology of the community but in one which has itself stepped beyond thethreshold ofthepreviously
known creature, ofitsanthropology and sociology. This is why precisely the religion
which proclaimed the kingdom of God in the midst of men (cf. Luke 17, 21)
has preserved the Utterly Different most resolutely against the old Adam
and the old becomeness: here as rebirth, there as new heaven and new earth,
as transfiguration of nature. It is this border-content of the miraculous,
therefore of the totally removed, which makes even the best human society
the means to a final purpose, the final purpose of the totally removed, which
in religious terms has been conceived as the kingdom. And this quality of
never having been attained reveals itself even in the best of societies, as the
uncancelled frailty of the creature, the uncancelled unmediatedness of
surrounding nature; - consequently it also stands against all the partial
optimism of several social utopias which have fallen out of the Totum of utopia.
Certainly the wishful image in all religions, and even more powerfully in those
of the messianic invocation ofhomeland, is that offeeling at home in existence,
but one which does not see existence as confined to its clearly surveyable and
so to speak local patriotic ranks of purpose. So that religion, in its constant
finalrelation to the last leap and theutopian Totum, amounts to more than ethicizing and blander rationalizations, amounts to more than morality and clear
surveyability even in Confucius, its strongest ethicizer. The wishful content
of religion remains that of feeling at home in the mystery of existence, a
mystery mediated with man and well-disposed to his deepest wish, even to
the repose of wishes. And the further the subject with his founders of religion
penetrates into the object-mysterium ofa Godconceived as the supreme Outside or

the supreme A bove andoverpowers it, themore powerfully manin his earth-heaven
or heaven-earth is charged with reverence for depth and infinity. The growing
humanization of religion is not paralleled by any reduction in its sense of awe,
on the contrary: the Humanum now gains the mysterium of something divine,
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
1197
something deifiable, gains it as the future creation of the kingdom, but of

the right kingdom. Indeed this projection used and uses even the sublimity
of an Outside and Above, as designated above all in Egypt and in Babylon,
despite the literally unholy master-ideology of astral-mythic over-arching and
statics, as education for universe containing man and for its depth. Moreover,
reverence, which includes, and culminates in, the Humanum, still needs the
numinosum, once highly experienced in star-worship, experienced through
the majesty of nature, as a corrective to preserve the religious objectivity of
its self, i.e. precisely so that it cannot think highly and mysteriously enough
of man. Thus this estr,angement is everywhere a part of religion, even of
religion seen from a utopian perspective, seen utterly without obscurantism.
Its obscurum - 'The Lord said that he would dwell in the thick darkness'
(I Kings 8, 12) - is not that of superstition which has applied too little
knowledge to fate, but one of knowledge-conscience that sees itself permanently surrounded by the uncanny in the depths and hopes that this will not
be resolved into or mediated with anything but the - miraculous. The Phoebus
post nubila in which above all messianic religion had its militant light, its
truly burning-red light, is no already present consonance and certainly not
one that would have simply destroyed the clouds: it merely rid them of the
homeless element. Such knowledge-conscience as the inherited substratum
of religion cited above, i.e. as the mindfulness that it is hope in totality, at the
same time grasps the essence of the world in tremendous suspense, towards
something enormous which hope believes is good, which active hope works
to ensure is good. In the sense that religion describes the sphere where man's
fear - of the uncanny in himself and in the essence of the world - can resound
from deep nearness, from deep distance, as reverence.
Presupposing this, religious feeling always penetrated into its Above.
Man wants to be with the powers in which he believes, however much
he feels subject to them. All the more so when, being of related matter,
he feels mediated with them, in Greek religion, and then above all, in
the more secret image, in judaeo-Christian religion. The founders of religion
put themselves increasingly into their versions of the Utterly Different,
increasingly turning it into the mystery of a content which is human or
mediated with men. It is the power of this free penetration, the call of
this reverential penetration which works towards this end, the: 'I will
not let thee go, except thou bless me' (Gen. 32, 26). And in such
penetration how often man has realized that he is better than his gods;
how powerfully there leapt from this - not smug homespunness, not the
emancipated philistine instead of Prometheus, but precisely the founding
of a new mysterium. And the decisive point: even in the most distant astralmythic visions, in estrangements which had degenerated almost completely
into apologetic alienations and ideologies of a despotic-static Above, at the
utopian end, and thus identifiably, an unknown human element also spoke,
spoke out, itself and the unknown in and before it. Numen, numinosum,
mysterium, even No to the existing world are never anything but the secret
Humanum itself. Let it be noted: that which is secret, still hidden from itself,
distinguished by the leap of the Utterly Different from the known Humanum
and its immanent-familiar environment. The contents in the unfathomed
depths of existing which have never appeared are, in the religious ineffabile,
given the sign that they are not forgotten and are not buried. They are given,
firmly in the Bible, the hope, always kept open, that a time and a space of
adequateness has been assigned to them in utopian form, conceived as
kingdom. And just as the religious self is hardly congruent with the existing
human creature and just as religious security hardly coincides with positivism's
smug self-enveloping in the empirical content of life, so the religious idea
of kingdom, in its intended scope and content, does not completely coincide
even with any notion of kingdom in social utopias. Among the chiliasts, the
notion of kingdom posited, recognized and demanded their ways as preparation of the final leap - it appears in the gospels not as heavenly other world
but as new heaven and new earth, but it contains in its anticipations an
absolutum in which contradictions other than social ones are to cease, in which
also the understanding of all previous connections changes. What Engels, in
an early critique of Carlyle, says about the kingdom as a construct of inwardness and of sanctimonious priests certainly remains true: 'Once again it is
the Christians who by setting up a separate' 'history of the kingdom of God"
deny all the inner substantiality of real history and claim this substantiality
solely for their other-worldly, abstract and moreover fabricated history - who
through the perfection of the human species in their Christ view history as
reaching an imaginary goal, interrupt it in the middle of its course' (MEGA, I,
2, 1930, p. 427). Yet this rejection is, even in religious terms, so true that not
least Joachim of Fiore would have agreed with it, indeed most passionately:
however for this reason, precisely for this reason, social history and social
utopia, even an attained classless society, are separated from the summum
bonum of the religious-utopian kingdom by the leap which the explosive
intention of rebirth and transfiguration itself posits. The kingdom remains the
religious key concept, in astral religions as crystal, in the Bible, with a total
outburst of intention, as glory. There is in all these unconditionalities a boundlessness of longing whose hubris extends beyond even that of Prometheus
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
1199
and whose 'I will not let thee go, except thou bless me' does not go under
in the humility of the concept of grace. For even grace, even if it is supposed
to be far from the power of the human will and not to come from the
merit of works, its concept comes after all from the hope of a leap and
of the recognition of being able to be prepared for the most perfect. Hence
precisely that unmistakable non-passivity even in the thickest god-forms
of religion, hence the superadditum of most tremendous insatiability in
every religious shudder, even when it seems to waft down from above. Hence
the ultimate transformation, convertibility of the astral-mythic alien
mysterium into the mysterium of a citoyen of the kingdom and of its paradoxical relationship to becomeness. Hence finally above all the most powerful
paradox in the religious sphere so rich in paradoxes: the elimination ofGod
himselfin order that precisely religious mindfulness, with hope in totality,
should have open space before it and no ghostly throne of hypostasis. All
of which means nothing less than just this paradox: the religious kingdomintention as such involves atheism, at last properly understood atheism. As long
as the latter does not merely drive out superstition to replace it with just
as much of a feeble negativum as the superstition was a dubious positivum.
But insofar as atheism removes that which is conceived as God, i.e. as
an ens perfectissimum, from the beginning and from the process of the world
and instead of a fact designates it as what it can only be: the highest utopian
problem, that of the end. The place that has been occupied in individual
religions by what is conceived as God, that has ostensibly been filled by
that which is hypostatized as God, has not itself ceased after it has ceased
to be ostensibly filled. For it is at all events preserved as a place of projection at the head of utopian-radical intention; and the metaphysical correlate
of this projection remains the hidden, the still undefined-undefinitive, the
real Possible in the sense of mystery. The place allocated to the former
God is thus not in itself a void; it would only be this if atheism were
nihilism, and furthermore not merely a nihilism of theoretical hopelessness
but of the universal-material annihilation of every possible goal- and
perfection-content. Materialism as the explanation of the world in its own
terms has only in its mechanical form failed to touch even marginally on
the place of the earlier god-hypostasis; but it has also failed to include
life, consciousness, process, the switch from quantity to quality, Novum
and dialectics as a whole. And even mechanical materialism, at least in
Feuerbach's version, must leave a special space in anthropology to accommodate the religious projections there, in their 'origin and object.' It was, as we
shall have to show, in Feuerbach's case a flat, a fixed anthropology, one
1200
which was not only ahistorical and asocial, abstract and general, but over
and above this one of scarcely extended human presence; but for all that,
Feuerbach's anthropological critique of religion did touch on religious
contents as if they were by no means mere nothingness as in nihilism. And
genuine materialism, dialectical materialism, cancels out precisely the
transcendence and reality of every god-hypostasis, but without removing that
which is intended by ens perfectissimum from the last quality-contents of
the process, from the real utopia of a realm of &eedom. Something fulfillable,
something expectable by Virtue of the process is certainly not denied in dialectical materialism; on the contrary, its place is held and kept open more than
anywhere else. This means that the kingdom, even in secularized form, and
all the more so in its -utopian-total form, remains asa messianic Front-space even
without any theism, indeed it can only remain at all, as every 'anthropologization of heaven' from Prometheus to the belief in the Messiah has increasingly
shown, without theism. Where the great world-ruler is, freedom has no space,
not even the freedom - of the children of god and not the kingdom figure,
the mystic-democratic figure to be found in chiliastic hope. The utopia of
kingdom destroys the fiction of a creator-god and the hypostasis of a heavenly
god, but not the end-space in which ens perfectissimum contains the unfathomed depth of its still unthwarted latency. The existence of God, indeed
God at all as a special being is superstition; belief is solely that in a messianic
kingdom of God - without God. Atheism is therefore so far from being the
enemy of religious utopia that it constitutes its precondition: without atheism
messianism has no place. Religion is superstition wherever it is not what in
terms of its valid intention-content it has increasingly come to mean in its
historical manifestations: the most unconditional utopia, utopia of the
absolute. Non existence, non-becomeness is the real fundamental definition of the ens perfectissimum, and if it had become it would not be different
from its kingdom, hypostatized as God. The hypostasis of God in religions
which posit it (Taoism and especially Buddhism do not posit it) is, when
it means a creator or a ruler of the world, nothing but unknowingness,
indeed anti-knowledge, and for a sense of religion which considers itself
too good or even too deep -to offer outmoded scientific consciousness or
even bogeyman nonsense, this hypostasis is at very best the mythologized
governorship of a hope such as All Saints' Day for all - without masters.
Thus the history of man's consciousness of God is certainly not the
history of God's consciousness of himself - but of the highest possible
Front-content in each case of an existence open in its Forwards, in its
Above, in its depth. All higher religions are thus themselves fed by the
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
1201
Front-intensity of radical longing and the sought-for anticipations of an

ens perfectissimum which constitutes the goal-content of this longing. The
anticipatory, in art, posits solely pre-appearance, but in religion, where
disinterested enjoyment is utterly absent,' it posits ultimately pre-existence
of our selves in total involvement. And in it existing becomes, in accordance
with the seriousness of the transcendere, a transformed existing, one of
an attempted rebirth towards the new man, through the founder and his
god. Nature itself is transformed in the Christian apocalypse and, unlike
every ideal landscape of aesthetic pre-appearance, it passes first through
destruction to its transfiguration. Transformation, therefore, in the atheism
of religion, above it, constitutes the last criterion of its sphere, a criterion
which equally flows from religious penetration into the Above, into the
aspiration to become like that which is intended as God. Judaism, Christianity, as the highest religions, show the entire intended seriousness of
this transformation; and of course only a concept of knowledge which
has enriched itself with religious conscience can do justice to this. And
the end of religion is thus, in this knowledge, as comprehended hope in
totality, not simply no religion but - in the convolutions of Marxism the inheriting of it, meta-religious knowledge-conscience of the final Where
To, What For problem: ens perfectissimum.
After all the will of the Upwards directed to this lives on precisely in
that of the Forwards. When the people followed a founder, they were ultimately following an aspiration to be as in heaven. This sursum corda applies
all the more when heaven is certainly not an existing Utterly Different
but, as new heaven, new earth, is set as a utopian task; the sursum corda
thus bears precisely the religious, i.e. messianic inherited- substratum.
Founders of religion had behaved messianically long-before the Jews took
the messianic at its word, made it into the fundamental reduction of the
religious, into the creation of kingdom per se. Messianism is the saltof the
earth - andof heaven, too; so that notonly the earth but also the intended heaven
should not become stupid. The promise the numinous made, the messianic
aims to keep: its Humanum and the world adequate to it are not only the
thoroughly unfamiliar, the thoroughly unbanal, but the distant coast in
early morning light. And it was a long way until the founders themselves,
with human latency, entered into the name of their God. Until the history
of ideas of God ran from fetish to star to exodus light to the spirit of
kingdom and ran outvUntil from the projecting of a divine darkness and
heavenly throne belief came close or will come close to the incognito and
the Stay Awhile. All religion was a wishful undertaking mingled more
1202
than elsewhere with superstition and illusions, but it was no splintered or

limited wishful undertaking but a total one, and it was no completely hollow
illusion but an attempting one, with a perfection in mind which is not. Every
religion, even the astral-mythic, found it easier to believe in the invisible than
the visible, and its god-content no more coincided with the manageable kind
of reality than did the religious breakthrough with man as he had been till
then and with his world which - as the prophets in particular complained
- lieth in wickedness. * The content conceived and longed for as God is so
superior to existing reality that, despite all hypostases of reality, it comes increasingly to represent a utopian ideal which is not refuted by its non-being,
A N ot- Yet-Being such as characterizes the mode of reality of concrete ideals
is admittedly never and nowhere a N ot- Yet-Being of God; the world is not
a machine for the production of such a supreme person, of a gasiform
vertebrate, as Hackel rightly put it. Rilke, Bergson, even the early Gorky,
fruitlessly distinguished themselves in various ways in such god-making, and
Lenin rightly described such efforts as necrophilia. Atheism which knows
what this means does not, in miserable imitation of the founders, return to
god-making, but it certainly does go, with the god-hypostasis omitted once and
for all, to the unconditional and total hope-content that has been so variously
experimented with under the name of God. Experiments containing a vast
amount of superstition, illusion, ignorance, as is well-known, with a
hypostasis of unfathomed social and natural powers into otherworldly fate.
But equally it was people in great need who in protest against this fate
attempted to change it magically-mythically or to invoke it for the good;
- thus religious imagination certainly cannot be dismissed in toto by the
achieved demystification of the world-picture, but solely by a specific
philosophical concept which does justice to the ultimate intention-content
of this imagination. For, in the midst of all, this sighing, invoking and
preaching lived and rises into red dawn; and even in the midst of the - very
easily identifiable ~ nonsense about the mythical there lived and rises the
undischarged question, which has been a burning question only in religions,
about the unestablished - meaning of life. It exalts and stimulates precisely
genuine realism, as a question which is so far from coinciding with the
nonsense about the mythic that it gives every sense its seriousness. Thus because of the especially total wishful influence from this sphere - a new anthropology of religion is necessary. And - because of the especially totally
intended character of perfection in this sphere - a new eschatology ofreligion is
*
John s,
19.
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
1203
due. Both without religion, but both with the corrected, undischarged
problem of such tremendous winged creations of humanity. Varying winged
creations, even incompatible with one another, even those with quite obvious
fools' paradises nearby, but preciselyfull of attempts on the uncommon sense
- according to the human-social horizon. Cadmus, Orpheus, the Olympian
gods of Homer, the Egyptian sun of the dead and Babylonian astral myth,
the Chinese Tao, Moses or the exodus, the emphatic god-men Zoroaster,
Buddha and Jesus therefore describe precisely the growing commitment ofthe
founder to theexperimental gladtidings ofan ens peifectissimum; and the social
mandate for this penetration and the human substance of its perfectum always
correspond to each other. In the astral myth the founder disappears, his god
is the complete outwardness of starlight; in Christianity the founder becomes
the glad tidings itself, and his God finally disappears in one single humane
All Saints' Day. Where hope is, there indeed is religion, but as the absolute
content of hope even in its intention is still so unfound, there is also such
a varying fund of imagination in religions as attemptings of the utopian
Totum. However, all are ultimately allocated to this Totum, and, being
religions, to the Totum as that Utterly Different which equally, in view of
the humaniform transformation (kingdom creation), means that which is no
longer different at all, but longed-for authenticity.
II. Founders, Glad Tidings and

Cur Deus Homo
The stranger as teacher: Cadmus

When the first hearth once burned is uncertain. But it is always recounted
that someone first took men away from raw food, in every sense. All
primitive peoples tell of such a man from foreign parts who brings religious
customs and more. He teaches them to cast lots, to carve runes, to write,
often as a miracle-working youth, more often as an old man. The teacher
may even appear as a dwarf, it was as a dwarf, according to the Etruscan
legend, that he was ploughed up out of the earth, revealed the interpretation
of signs and died immediately afterwards. But mostly accounts tell of a
high-ranking traveller who has sat at the tables of the gods. Among the
Celts he was called Ram, prepared a potion against the plague from
mistletoe, taught the art of cooking food and of the favourable hour. Among
1204
the Greeks this figure became clearer, became Cadmus; the foreign parts
from which he came were in this case, and in this case only, Phoenician.
Among the Greeks Cadmus was regarded as the man who taught them
agriculture and writing and to honour the gods. But he is not commemorated
beyond this, the names of such bringers of salvation are simply there, as
if they had ended the shift from animal to man. The news of medicinal
plants and ways of healing left the Ram or Cadmus who first brought
it far behind. The power of the mistletoe is here more important than
the man who draws attention to it.
Singer of ecstatic salvation.' Orpheus

The still indistinct teachers thus always stay behind that which is theirs.
Even Orpheus, a religious haze in human form, although he perhaps did
live. He is regarded as a music-making bringer of salvation, the Greeks
had several such: Linos, Musaios, Eumolpos, Amphion, all enchanters by
their song, zither, lyre. But Orpheus epitomizes them all, both as a calming
and finally as an ecstatic saviour. On one side he appears cooling, not
Dionysian, with peaceful though also melting harmony. Thus he compels
not only trees and rivers but precisely wild animals to listen to him. He
outdid the Sirens, setting his own saving song against their death-bringing
song. In particular he overwhelmed with it the Furies of the underworld,
Orpheus was worshipped as the only man ever to return from the land
of the dead. His sin was that he looked back for Eurydice, a motif that
also belongs to his non-Dionysian side, out of monogamous love. Thus
Orpheus later lamented Eurydice as his only love; thus the maenads, precisely
as Dionysian, marriage-hating, tore him to pieces. Above all Orpheus'
lament for Eurydice does not accord with the hetairan background of
Dionysian belief; the soothed, distinctly faithful is in this point stronger
than the all-mixing, shape-dissolving frenzy. Equally in th-e ethics of the
later Orphics the required discipline, indeed renunciation, appears, if we
disregard the content, almost Apollonian. And yet the other, the burning
side of the god of life is in the end stronger. The melting harmony of
the sounds which not only silences the Sirens but compels them to listen
is not without reason related to the dissolving frenzy. The Sirens understand Orpheus, and: he himself knew how to outdo them, precisely as
the bewitchers who drive men out of their minds. A Greek religion did
develop under his name, one with Apollonian features, but it developed
on the soil of the non-Greek, Thracian worship of Dionysus. Pausanias,
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
1205
in his account of the Orphic places of worship (which did not spread until
the seventh and sixth centuries), says that the statue of Dionysus was always
erected next to that of Orpheus. If the singer was torn to pieces by the
maenads because of his lament for Eurydice, he was for this very reason also
considered the personification of Dionysus, who was also torn to pieces. He
was torn to pieces by Titans, but his heart was rescued by Athene, and from
it the new Dionysus arises, the one who is re-produced from his dismembered
limbs, from the variety of changeful existence. Orpheus, however, kicked
open for believers the gate to this god, one who at least stood in natural life,
as its voluptuous phallic lord. What applied to death in the Orphic rites applies
to the salvation intended here as a whole: it does not fall outside sensualpassion
but completely into it, into one which has become super-sensory. Clear
asceticism is the path, but the goal and the content are enthusiastic fullness;
the Orphically promised eudaemonia is passion towards the above. Man is
supposed to free himself from his evil Titanic inheritance and return pure
to the Dionysus whose heart has remained alivein him; yet precisely the other
inheritance, that of Dionysian frenzy, thus remained alive in this creature
of heart, not of light or of intellect, who had been rescued from laceration.
It tallies with this that the Orphic mystery among the Locrians and on the
island of Lesbos led back to completely hetairan modes of life. Even the
proclaimer of the thus resolving, i.e. dissolving Dionysus did not himself
need to have a distinctface, indeed was not allowed to have one. He was
completely absorbed into the untied life that was to be all that remained when
Hades and the Apollonian day were both overcome. The fabulous Orpheus
was no more seen in it than his god; in frenzy, to the sound of gongs and
cymbals, the eyes roll up. The Dionysian saviour disappears as soon as he
has saved; such frothing away is part of frothing salvation.
Poets of Apollonian gods and their attendance:

Homer andHesiod; Roman state gods
But the attempt to ma~, the all too wild lyre more composed was successful.
Two more or less visible Greek poets even wrote of strangely everyday gods.
Though gods resembling man, * fully developed into statues, not gods of
frenzy. Homer and Hesiod, says Herodotus, named the gods of the Greeks
* Bloch is re-introducing his concept of 'menschenahnlich' here, which we have translated
previously as 'like proper human beings' (Vol. III, 4S). Though it still carries an echo of this
sense, the idea of the gods physically and emotionally resembling man is more dominant in the
present context.
1206
i.e. the unpriestly, the chivalric, then the urbane gods. They certainly did not
name, or even make, the old folk-gods, of whom Herodotus scarcely seems
to know anything. Not the chthonic and the Orphic gods, let alone the animal
gods, which later shrank to become the eagle of Zeus or Hera's cow-like
glance. And indeed, what a way, what a forgetting and brightening, from
the uncanny owl-like creature which haunts the Erechtheion to Homer's
Pallas Athene. And this way is marked by the decline of the Pelasgian priest
and magician caste, by the emergence of profane, chivalric classpoetry, which
takes possession of the gods in Homer. In Hesiod this occurred in a nonchivalric yet equally unschooled fashion: the shepherd of Askra romances and
broods from his folk religion, not from magic circles. Only indistinctly do
Pelasgian-magical figures such as Kalchas, Tiresias, loom into the chivalric
world, Kalchas who ordered Iphigenia's sacrificial death, Tiresias, the seer
who had been a woman, who knows how to handle blood and who summons
the shades from the underworld for Odysseus. Chivalric class poetry has
overlaid all this, the world of patriliny has overlaid the chthonic world, with
the effect of making the taboo an Apollonian one. It became a taboo of the
refined-religious surface, which does not want to know anything too deeply;
even Poseidon, with the rage and the unfathomed depth of the ocean in him,
is now part of the ambrosial midday. Indeed it is significant that Dionysus
is ignored in Homer, asis Demeter, the dark earth-goddess; for they are priestgods, and above all gods of the depths. 'When golden Eos unlocked the
eastern door/Of the benighting pole and the heavens dawned with grey light'
- this day put an Apollonian end to all these impenetrable beings; they now
wear the mask ofbeauty, or at least ofurbanity. Kalchas, Tiresias, Orpheus,
were covered-over; even the Orphic renaissance of the seventh and sixth
centuries, strongly though it was connected with what remained of peasant
and folk religion, did not cancel out the city gods. They were real city gods,
as at home in Athens as the chthonic numina before them had been in a cave,
spring or mountain; the entire underworld was incorporated or conquered
by Apollo's tripod. The Acropolis, ruled by Pallas Athene, the goddess not
born of woman, stands as a mountain temple for polis gods which has become
thoroughly Uranian: Zeus, Apollo and Artemis had their altars, Hephaistos
had his castle rights and civil rights, Aesculapius lived in a chamber in the
rock, even Pan lived in one of its grottoes, which were occupied throughout
with urban demi-gods and heroes. And what Athens on its castle-rock
gathered beneath it, the same Apollonian Homeric system of gods was
repeated on Acrocorinth, in the valley of feasts at Olympia, even in demonic
Delphi; Gaia and Saturn were gone, Zeus ruled. So Homer and Hesiod did, in
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
1207
fact, cum grano salis,create the gods of the Greeks, i.e. as radiantly humanized
gods, walking in urbane light. But yet again, even these announcers, precisely
these, still stand outside their annunciation, in the same way that as epic writers
they stand outside their poems and do not intrude on them. Hesiod appears
as a warner, but never makes the claim to be a sent, let alone a conquered
part of the higher world. Homer stands completely opposite his day-gods
with their frank serenity as an epic poet, not as a guest at the table of the
Olympians themselves. If the latter have become a reflection of the Mycenean
court, a reflection which did not go through any priestly caste, their formulator still does not talk of them with greater personal sympathy than he talks
of Achilles, Agamemnon, Odysseus. And so in fact Herodotus' assertion (II,
53) that Homer and Hesiod gave the gods their names, allocated offices and
arts to them, and even created the Greek theogony, is only correct insofar
as through these poets the Olympic pantheon now definitely took the place
of the dark or twilit local gods. Nonetheless, Homer is a founder, precisely
one of illumination; whatever the Orphics Xenophanes and Plato may have
had to say against his so-called frivolity. To his heaven there is not only an
access depending on the dead man's rank, but the Novum, far from
mysterious, of a familiar-confiding humour now appears. The terrible behind
the mask of the beautiful remained, here Nietzsche in part saw correctly and
discovered the depth in this superficiality, the consciously overlaid element
in this local-humane beauty; behind the gods is Moira, in them is the
numinous. But by virtue ofa mask of beauty resembling man and of Mycenean
culture it was mediated with Moira, as through a mysterium of externality.
The barbaric magician had disguised himself with a lion's face or that of other
natural demons to show the divine as present in his body; the Greek godcreator aims at the opposite: he changes his gods into-Apollonian human form.
But of course the edge of the mask always remains, over which a far from
art-religious ground overflows, overflows with blood. As in its sacrificial
rites, which were as characteristic of Greek as of any barbaric religion: the
temples were full of holy slaughter. The priest poured blood all over the
magnificent marble altar, and the noble simplicity, the silent grandeur of the
gods' images was surrounded by the smoke of burnt sacrificial animals - a
slaughterhouse for Olympus, which lived on more than just nectar and
ambrosia. Something monstrous, something inhuman at least in its proportions is sometimes to be found even in Homer; as with Ares 'who covered
seven hides of land when he fell' (Iliad, XXI, 407). And Moira, fate over man
and gods, remains, it does not at all accord with the Apollonian day. Mortal
fate marks the place where the Apollonian gods abandon man; Athene herself
1208
says that not even a god can help the man he loves 'if the Moira of death has
chosen him as its sad victim' (Od. III, 238). The gods retire when Moira
appears; the moment Hector is destined to die, Apollo leaveshis side to make
way for Moira, which, as a god, he knows but cannot avert from his protege.
Here is the limit of the Apollonian gods, they belong to life, to beauty, to
the day, and where this ends Olympian aid, indeed existence, also ends (cf.
w. Otto, Die Gotter Griechenlands, 1929, p. 339f.). Moira is that power
from the pre-Homeric cult of night and earth which could not be defeated
by the chivalric gods and the gods ofbeauty; thus it reigns behind the victors,
who are victors only by day. Indeed the entire Olympus, though it knows
no death itself, lies only as a narrow realm of beauty before the abyss; with
the blessing that it covers up the prospect of Moira during brieflife and felicity.
But at this price the art-religion of the foreground now flashes all the more
brightly, with gods as knights who have ascended into the heights and light
of externality. Moira, which is not externality, is for this very reason' not
another god hostile to the gods but simply the power of the bottomless, of
the inexorably pre-determined abyss for every figure and its career. Nor does
Moira mythicize for example uncomprehended, uncontrolled natural powers
per se but - in relation to men - primarily the natural power of death and
thus of thwarting-blind destiny as a whole. Thus Homeric religion has no
mediation whatever with Moira, not even the enigmatic-superficialmediation
achieved with the numinous of the day-gods by means of the mask of beauty.
Therefore ultimately, the founding element in Homer was an illumination
in art, it could and had to be this, one of epic shaping, with precisely the
penetration but also precisely the distance appropriate to the epic. To this
uniqueness of a founder-attitude a religion of sheer day-sculpture, of brief
day-of-man-sculpture therefore ultimately corresponds; a religion in which
everything unformed or, here, unformable is passedover in silenceor ascribed
toMoira, The power of these glad tidings, which penetrate so far and no
further, is that of the deified beauty ofHfe and of depths pushed to the edge,
still concealed at the edge. From suffering, from Dionysus, indeed from
Gethsemane much can be cited against this art-religion so rich in omissions,
yet a first Humanum did dawn in it. It escaped from the animal gods, the
Egyptian stone gods, the Babylonian star gods, having failed to overcome
their pressure, even intra-mythically, by a subject. For the possible subject
intended in Prometheus still had despotism above itin Zeus.just as Zeus in
tum was subject to blind Moira. But Homer's undeniable illumination made
the gods of Greece tend towards joy, the taboo became anthropomorphic.
A characteristic, lastingly remarkable tributary joined this in Roman
-RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
1209
religion. The holy was here immediately connected with the most reasonable
actions and virtues, it dwelt in them. Instead of art, Rome thus presents the
Novum of deified concepts, not in the manner of serene brilliance as with the
Greeks but dry-serious and believed. The Greeks also deified abstractions such
as Nike, Dike, Eirene, Hygieia, in Hesiod there is a goddess Eris, a double
goddess, the destructive goddess of quarrel, the good goddess of competition.
But this kind of thing remained subordinate in Greek art-religion, above all
it did not attain the practical seriousness of the peasant and later the state
religion of the Romans. The legendary founder of Roman religion, Numa
Pompilius, was remembered primarily as having as it were cleared the woodgods Picus and Faunus and abolished human sacrifice; just as Romulus
founded the urbs, so Numa founded the law which applied to it and to it
alone. And the gods of this purpose later swallowed up the original spring,
tree and animal cults, just as they added the great natural forces to those of
the urbs, which grew from a rural town into an imperium. One of the most
primeval Roman numina is the genius, i.e.'the seed to which man owes his
existence, which goes on procreating through the son and reproduces the
race. But this god is already, unlike in the phallus cults, one of useful procreation and of its idea; he is the birthday god of every Roman citizen as such.
Ideas of labour andof function such as Saturnus (sowing), Ops (work in the
fields), Terminus (boundary stone) are also among the oldest Roman gods.
These are all gods of peasant Rome and signify the immediately useful in
general. They are peasant activities epitomized in an abstract concept (such
as Consus, the harvest god, from condere, the gathering in of the harvest);
they are functional gods. More mediated abstracta occur in the noble upper
class, in the patriciate, which already from the sixth century onwards stood
above the rural and urban citizenry; the actual state religion was shaped by
this class. In Rome the patricians, the urban incorporated knights and strict
bearers of the state function, played the part that had been played in Homeric
religion by the class of local princes and nobles, with whom the gods, as
Phaeacians of the highest order, had been mediated; but there was.of course
no space for Phaeacian gods and gods of beauty in Rome. Now functional
gods truly began to branch off from Numa's foundations, including some
of quite astonishing functional abstraction. Quietude, tranquillity, had its
altar, as did Occasio, the goddess of opportunity, who was portrayed with
a forelock and with the back ofher head shaved. Concordia had a temple dedicated to her as early as 367, after the end of the class wars, Spes was given its
first temple after the first Punic War, Honos after the capture of Syracuse.
Mens Bona received its temple after the defeat at Lake Trasimene; this in
1210
particular is a numen which does not occur at all among the Greeks, nor is
it identical with the concept of sophrosyne. A cultic realm of theologized
abstracta thus arose, full of holy-dry exaltedness, with no parallel in other
religions. It is very understated to regard these religious images, in Mommsen's
words, as being 'on an incredibly low level of contemplation and comprehension' . On the contrary, there is here a mystery of externality which is related
to the Greek mask of beauty but conceals the unfathomed depths in a far more
remarkable manner, surrounding them with the extremest reasonableness.
Hence Usener in his 'Names of the Gods' quite appropriately recognized the
religious power and the problem in such apparent platitudes; namely that
'the excitable religious feeling of antiquity was quite capable of exalting even
abstract ideas to divine status'. This applies above all to the Roman gods,
and to the most peculiar of them all: the double-headedjanus, He is the functional idea of the door which opens on two sides; he is the beginning, the
morning, and the month ofJanuary, in short he is the divine abstraction for
opening per see Even the three Capitoline gods who seem to coincide with
the three main Greek gods: Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, are least of all the beautiful
divinities of the Greek polis, with their slight quarrels and eternal serenity,
with nectar, ambrosia and blessed privateness. They are, as Mommsen
brilliantly observes, above all abstractions, powerful, powerfully governing:
abstractions of domination, of moral discipline, of understanding. Admittedly
Jupiter is also defined in terms of nature, as the visible firmament (sub love
frigido is the poetic term for cold weather), but essentially he is the firmament
only because this, like Rome's rule, spans all countries. Certainly, other lords
of heaven were at the same time political gods; most impressive of all was
the Babylonian Marduk. He too was a god of empire, not merely an astral
world-ruler and, another Jupiter, he held the title of Bel matati, ruler of the
lands. But Marduk was after all, in the especially high-flying mythological
reflexes of Babylon, primarily the astral ruler of the world and only as such
an imperial god, whereas the Roman Jupiter was from the beginning identical
with the empire as such ..He presided over urbi et orbi, Rome and the globe,
but primarily over Rome, with whose potentia he was identical, and only
as such over the globe. Jupiter is thus the epitome of rule, just as juno is the
epitome of moral discipline and just as - Occasio is the epitome of the
favourable opportunity. This too is Apollonian religion, not in the senseof
the Muse and her heaven, certainly not, hut in the sense of reason of state;
Rome established the Novum of prose in religion, indeed of prose as religion.
Yet precisely the numinous in this conceptuality remains so powerful that it
even constitutes one of the most experienced origins of - Christian allegory.
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
1211
That is, of religious transparency, indeed of a new expressiveness of abstract

categories; faith, hope and charity were such allegories throughout the
Middle Ages, and certainly not frosty ones. They still had the breath of
Spes and Concordia, of Fama and Fides, of Mens Bona and also of Bona
Valetudo from their Roman temples. Finally, indirectly via Stoicism, even
the most inflexible entity in Greek myth, Moira, was invested with Roman
purposes, as if it were thereby mediated. Rome itself becomes fate, a fate
which, for itself, is good; that which, for the Greeks, hovers high over
the gods, is here demoted to fortune of the state. At least it was in Rome's
heyday; in later centuries Fatum certainly again looks like doom, indeed
like a declared enemy. But it is significant that Stoicism, having become
the philosophical sister of Roman religion, could interpret its Zeus, its
'good necessity' essentially as the necessity of Rome. This corresponded
to a political trust in god such as no imperium till then had possessed
in its superstructure, not even (with, moreover, a quite different religious
institution). the English imperium of the seventeenth century. The piety
of Sulla is characteristic of this kind of belief in fate, characteristic because
in this general's highly individual relation to Fortuna that of Roman
patriotism as a whole expresses itself in heightened form. Sulla considered
himself the darling of the gods, especially of Aphrodite, with whom he
claimed to be in the habit of holding secret conversations, he felt he was
almost part of Fortuna and' assumed the cognomen Felix as a formal mystical
title. Moira, the Roman lucky star, the necessity of Rome, thus became
one; the god Fatum now had most temples in Rome, indeed fundamentally it had all temples. And religio itself becomes the Roman word for
tying-back to Fatum as that which is said, which is decreed by the gods;
a tying which coincided with that which is Caesar's. Every official classical
religion is the sense of well-being of the ruling class, is belief in itself having
turned out well in an intercourse of beauty among the Greeks, an intercourse of reason of state among the Romans, both connecting gods with
men. The formulators of this religion are in it but above all outside it
as much as epic writers are, and among the Romans, from Numa Pompilius
onwards, as organizers. Hence the humanization of the gods here occurs
as deification of the human creature: of its beauty among the Greeks, of
its purposeful mind and power-value in Rome. Temples of beauty arise
and a pantheon of the most happily achieved creature-empire: these are
the signs of classical salvation.
1212
The unblossomed belief in Prometheus and the tragic liturgy:

Aeschylus
The Greeks posited only one man who breaks into the above. Wish~.s
to do so were not lacking, Icarus is one example. And Bellerophon, who
tried to rise up to heaven on Pegasus. But Prometheus was the only one
who did not founder before the goal. He was of course no founder of
a religion but originally a chthonic hero of legend around whom a special
cult later developed. The bringer of fire gathers epitomizes in his person
the mythical primal teachers of all peoples, in rebellious fashion. The name
Prometheus itself may be connected with sparking, flaming: pramantha
in Sanskrit means a whirl of fire. Prometheus would then be, in his original
form, both this whirl of fire and its god and therefore not, as in an element
in his legend which appears much later, Prometheus the fore-thinking,
i.e, not the mere level-headed counterpart to his brother Epimetheus, the
after-thinking. Aeschylus interpreted the fire motif broadly: his Prometheus
wants to pass on to men all the goods reserved for the gods. Because this
figure acts as the Greek Lucifer, as the bringer of light, very bright, without
brimstone, the religion of Prometheus pressed forward into a quite different
place from where gods or even anti-gods usually stand. This is why
Prometheanism as a religion has been overlooked up to now, and in fact,
having no temples and accordingly no priests, it has remained undeveloped
as such. Yet under another name it is all the better known: the religion
of Prometheus is the religion of Greek tragedy. Here is its temple and its
liturgy, here the Titan, chained by Zeus to the Caucasus, has his scarcely
theistic cult. The Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus is therefore the central
Greek tragedy; all others modify the Titan. Proudly he tells the Oceanides
how he intervened in the world: 'Men saw, but they saw in vain, they
listened, but they heard nothing' (V, 439.) as a super-Cadmus he brought
light: 'All arts come to mortals from Prometheus' (V, 490). His will is
unconquerable for Zeus, despite the cross in the Caucasus, he rejects any
thought of a conversion, waiting only fot the end of the present era, of the
rule of Zeus. Even now Zeus has nothing to set against him but the companions Kratos and Bia, strength and violence, as well as the eagle, the
old emblem of rule and of tearing to pieces, who feeds on his liver every
third day; Zeus here no longer seems urbane at all, he is a vengeful despot.
Thus the Aeschylean Prometheus has at least one thing in common with
the Goethean: unfathomably deep hatred, indeed contempt for the ruler of
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
121 3
the world. But all this in the religious sphere; which means that rebellion
here has as least as much inscrutability as Zeus claims for his tyranny, indeed
more. Hence Greek tragedy. too, remained a cult; and all its heroes, after
being masks of the torn Dionysus, became masks of Prometheus. Even
Oedipus in Sophocles. the passively suffering man, stands above his fate, and
the serene holiness around the old man at Colonus is almost as if illuminated
by that no-longer-Zeus, that grace a l'homme which the man-shaping,
world-warming will of Prometheus had in mind. And it is not only Dionysus
as torn to pieces, but also Dionysus as fermenting within himself, not
yet articulated, who rebels in the tragic masks of Prometheus: a collisionful
pathos as a whole against heaven as it had become till then. Intended to be
performed as part of the public worship in the sanctuary of Dionysus.
Attic tragedy, most emphatically in Aeschylus, becomes anti-Olympian
prophecy. Nietzsche. in 'The Birth of Tragedy", praises 'the astonishing
boldness with which Aeschylus put the Olympian world into his scales of
justice', and the scales fall in favour of Prometheus, the 'glory of activity'.
This is the truth of this matter and the ground through which Prometheus,
through his poet Aeschylus, became as it were the founder of his own
religion, one which of course did not blossom out. It had to remain
unblossomed in the spirit of its rebellion, firstly because a social mandate
such as that of Moses against the Pharaoh, of Jesus against Caesar, was
lacking. And secondly because the founding of this religion is completely
postponed, i.e. became only the contemplative drama of a rebellion myth.
For the greatest irruption into the other world which occurred beforeJesus the
Greeks had only the allotted roles of a poet who was no prophet and of a
demi-god who was not a man. Thus only tragedy remained for Prometheus
as his religious location, though connected with the rite of Dionysus. Defiance
of Zeus, this is the metaphysics of tragedy, a warlike one, which even in the
destruction of the hero nails to the mast its No to the old order and its deeper
Yes to a different era, to a new heaven. It is a magnificent hubris and more
than that: one purified by suffering, deepened by genius, which annihilates
the old connections between guilt and fate. Even though Prometheus himself
is destroyed, he represents something which is better than the Greek gods.
Among the Olympians, significantly, only Pallas Athene, the goddess of
reason, was believed to be a friend of Prometheus; and she is the only power
who goes together with him here.
Nonetheless it is surprising that the Greeks did not honour this helper in
need more highly. Even in poetry he did not receiveanything like the consecration which his rank would lead us to expect. Aeschylus celebrated the tragic
1214
cult of Prometheus, but for Hesiod and Pindar as well as for Virgil and
Horace he is a scheming rebel and the withdrawing of fire by Zeus is a
measure of wise foresight. Even the Cynics, otherwise no friends of the
Olympian system, attacked Prometheus, though as a bringer of culture.
As Dio recounts, they interpreted Prometheus' punishment as ajust pointer
to human self-destruction as a result of man's longing for external goods
and pleasures. Plato, however, relates in the 'Protagoras' that Prometheus
certainly did not bring men all arts from heaven, certainly not the most
important of all for their civilization: the art of government. Prometheus,
who wanted to bring all heaven down to earth, could not even bring half:
'Thus man received that knowledge which is necessary for everyday life,
but he did not partake of the knowledge of government; for this was with
Zeus, and Prometheus was not permitted to enter Zeus' dwelling, which
was guarded by his terrible sentinels' (Protagoras, 321 D). Law and ethics,
teaches Plato, the utopian of regimented, indeed Uranian order, are
with Zeus, and it was Hermes the messenger, not Prometheus the rebel,
who first brought them to all men. And in slave-owning society only
suffering Dionysus was felt to be the primal image of tragedy, not, as
it rightly ought to have been, the rebellious Prometheus. Towards the
end of the classical era the rebel was even completely forgotten, he disappeared behind the far more sought-after figures of salvation or of
Asclepius; Prometheus is now only the shaper of clay, not the bringer
of light. Indeed in Plotinus' work he becomes a kind of lower world-soul
as a whole, he is said to have played a part in the creation of Pandora
and to have sent her to Epimetheus. Plotinus even reverses the roles of
Zeus and Prometheus; at least in the case of Pandora, who, as Plotinus
claims, had also been made by Prometheus: 'When it says that Epimetheus
rejected the gift of Prometheus, does not this mean that the choice of a
life in the intellectual world is better? The creator of Pandora is bound
because he is as it were tied by his work (the creation of the physical world)
to this work; but this bond is external, he is freed by Heracles, and this
means that despite his chains he still has the power to free himself'
(Enneads IV, 3, 14). Prometheus, originally a rebel against the lord
of the world, thus finally, in a crazy transmutation, becomes the creator
of the world as a whole and the ruler of the world himself; and, in the
gnostic version, this soon afterwards came to mean the - devil. Only the
Church Fathers, from the negation of Zeus, from the new world era,
honoured the light-bringer and deposed him by making him superfluous
in the face of the new Lord. 'The true Prometheus', say both Lactantius
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
121 5
and Tertullian, 'is God.' Thus at least among the Christians Prometheus
became - a full god, instead of the demi-god of tragedy and its cult; he had
in fact first bidden men to burn the false idols. By opposing the supreme god
of the pagans, he seemed to be opposing this idol only, not Yahweh: for the
Church Fathers the man-god Prometheus stood for the good, against Zeus.
Until, that is, he went on practising his arts against the new Lord too, against
the Yahweh ofthe Church, notonly against Zeus. But this happened after a social
mandate against authority had finally emerged, even against its maximum
in the other world. Prometheus, who in the ancient world remained a demigod, became for the modern era an all the fuller religious-atheistic symbol.
So that at the end of the entire history of religion to date the sentence by
Marx could be written and still stands: 'Prometheus is the noblest saint and
martyr in the philosophical calendar.' The revaluation began with Boccaccio,
in accordance with the emerging bourgeois-individual consciousness; Scaliger
and later Shaftesbury adopted the Titan as an 'alter deus', at least as applied to
the poet, who is equally supposed to create beyond what is given (cf. Vol. II,
p. 812). But above all Bacon, though mainly from his technological-utopian
dreams, had again powerfully recalled Prometheus: Prometheus, saysBacon,
with a tone never heard before, is the inventive human spirit who establishes
human control, intensifies human power to a limitless degree and raises it
against the gods (De sapientia veterum, XXVI). * The utterly revolutionary
transformation, unleashed by the revolt of the Sturm und Drang, then
occurred in Goethe's Prometheus fragment, with at the same time a thematic
after-ripening such as no god has ever found. With a mixture of Sturm und
Drang, the complaints ofJob and the tragic knowledge that men are better
than their god. Shelley's 'Prometheus Unbound' then completely followed
the lead of this fragment, the Titan becomes the French Revolution, but Zeus
is given all the features of a Manichaean Satan. Even the later, reactionary
Schelling here, profoundly, brought out the oppressed element without which
'there would be nothing eternal in man'. The oppressed individual is the productive subject who seesthrough his alienations: 'Prometheus is the thought
in which the human race, having created the entire world of the gods from
within itself, returning to itself, became conscious of itself and of its own
* Bloch is quoting directly from an unreliable German translation of 'De sapientia veterum'.
Although it is consistent with Bacon's view of Prometheus, the translation he quotes bears little
resemblance to Bacon's Latin original. It seems to bea loose interpretation of the following passage
describing Prometheus: 'He, desiring to benefit and protect his own work, and to be regarded
not as the founder only but also as the amplifier and enlarger of the human race, stole up to
heaven ... '. See Spedding, Vol. VI, pp. 668-9 (Latin); p. 745 (English translation).
1216
fate, and felt the disastrous element in the belief in gods' (We:rke 12, P: 482).
Prometheus is thus the god who signifies disbeliefin God, or hubris, which
is here so far from being irreligious that it originates from the subject of
religion itself. Thus Prometheus is most emphatically different from the Greek
images ofgods, with the beauty which takes part in undreamt-offeasts, with
the unfathomed depth before which the anthropomorphic, not anthropocentric beauty is placed. Titanic, but titanic for men and through them, in
an unblossomed religion of Greece: in that of rebellious-humane salvation.
Fish-man and moon-scribe ofastral myth:

Oannes, Hermes Trismegistus- Thoth
The proclaimers seen so far have been indistinct or stood apart. For the lastmentioned hero was no founder, but only the dream of one. Yet even though
those who to a greater or lesser extent really appeared' were indistinct or stood
apart, they did act humanly, even in the frenzy which made them Dionysian.
But what now appears, around the Greeks and long before them, the Babylonian,
the Egyptian founders, or rather orderers, not only stand entirely within the
tradition- but they also stand in one which wholly disregards our flesh and
blood. The Babylonian and the Egyptian god is considered super-human
precisely because he is inhuman, animal-headed or star-like. All ancient oriental
form is shaped from without, all content is infused from above, especially
the holy, the astral-mythic. Its proclaimers accordingly show their own,
human face only when it is estranged; their figure is clothed-over. Egypt
recognized as one of its original teachers the historical person of Irnhotep,
who, as is proven, lived as the architect and priest of the dead of the Pharaoh
Zoser around 2900 B.C. But Imhotep, a man with an existing face, a miracleworker and author of books on magic, was not chosen as the founder of
Egyptian religion until much later. Beside him, and certainly above him,
ancient Egyptian legend told of Thoth as the founder of religion, not a man
but a god and from the outset with the head of an ibis. And this remained
so, because later a real prophet, Amenophis IV, failed to impose his new,
monotheistic solar religion. It was not until the Alexandrian period .that
Thoth, who was equated with the Greek god Hermes, stepped back, or
rather, with a new name, stepped forward, as Hermes Trismegistus. The latter
was now declared to be the real founder of Egyptian theosophy, but in vain,
it is the same old moon-god Thoth, only now personified. Thoth, however,
the scribe of the gods, was also regarded as the god of numbers, measurement, geometry and hieroglyphs. Hermes-Thoth, this mere memory which
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
1217
was called founder, this memory which clung to recurrence and to

becomeness, accordingly taught the most collected religion of extra-human
repose. What had again and again appeared in the Egyptian image of death,
in its architectural symbol, now has its final hold in Osiris, the original earthgod, and in Ra, the sun-god; and this hold, in time, is repetition and, in space,
sublime rigidity (cf. Vol. II, p. 72If.). Just as the sun, the same sun, is daily
born again, so short and changeful human life is prolonged by Osiris into
eternity and changelessness: Egypt's nature gods bring happiness as gods of
sameness. What the block-unity of hieratic statues promised was guaranteed,
in the rigid gods Osiris-Ra and finally Ptah: above all living change ruled
healingly ordered death, wishful geometry of becomeness. The latter is the
authentic Egyptian glad tidings, that of a future which has all the repose of
the past in its favour, that of a heaven which is meant to represent the unclouded primal image of the so very clouded, so very changeful earthly order.
The Egyptian pyramid, says Hegel, is a crystal in which a dead man dwells;
the Egyptian religion in itself is certainly not a crystal, on the contrary it is
composed, in four millennia of stratification, of very differently structured
gods with the most diverse functions, which often change in one and the
same god; in popular religion there are also flower gods and the grotesque
god Bes, there is the always preserved fetish stage of animal gods: but these
are externals, and the fundamental content of this religion takes on all the
more unmistakably the crystalline essence of its architecture, in the shape
of the immobile and the definitive whose regularly crystallized order is
dominated by the death-god Osiris. Osiris certainly is in the more ancient
and popular imagination also the vegetation god who dwells in the earth and
from his grave grants fertility of all things, who indeed rises to new generative
power, moving cyclically between life and death; but his essential characteristic, as with the world-ruler Ptah, who was represented as a mummy and
with whom Osiris merged, is life in death; thus he is the god of entrance
to a static cycle of elapsed, statuesque enclosedness. Egypt is not the
religion of the enigma as Hegel defined it on the analogy of the Greek sphinx
myth, but it is the religion of the extremest estrangement, ofsilence andofits
crystal. The holy dwells as thoroughly formed gravity in its house of granite
or of porphyry. Egypt thus becomes an excess of geometrical block-unity
even in religion. Never was the definitive as a state so highly worshipped,
the decided, the closed, as it comes forward in the appearance as death. The
only Greek god whom the Ptolemies were able to naturalize in Egypt was
Pluto; Alexander's Zeus-Ammon equation was notaccepted, But Pluto, in
late, otherwise everywhere disoriented E~t, under the name ofSerapis, the
1218
god of death, became the world-god and the cult of Osiris was transferred to
him, The majesty of death is always Egyptian, and the highest order of
becomeness is and remains the crystal; Egyptian religion is most profoundly
the adoration of the crystal. Only Babylonian religion, so far inferior to Egypt's
silence, still bordered in its specific astral cult on this geometrical quality.
Just as the star borders on the crystal and the cycle ofchange on the stereotypy
of unmoved repetition. So if the pyramid, with a corpse at its centre, stood
by the Nile, by the Euphrates the stepped tower rose up, dedicated to the
seven planets and the houses through which the sun moves.
Accordingly the teachers of such distant circles also look weird. They too
are regarded as immemorially old, have unusual bodies, are surrounded by
strange non-man. Babylon's astral religion even presents especiallymonstrous
founders, unfamiliarly put together. Such as the fish-man Oannes of whom
the Baal priest Berossos recounts, very late, around 280 B.C., but on the
strength of legends which had been preserved. Oannes, .the disguise which
the founder assumes, was originally a god of the depths of the earth; as
such he rises up from the sea, as such he teaches of the origin of the present
world, of the struggle with the dragon of the abyss. Other fish-men and
composite beings are also to be found in the legend of the first Babylonian
kings which Berossos handed down, they add to the knowledge of Oannes,
Grotesque founders certainly, but despite their chthonic origins they are
immediately classified in cosmic-astral terms: Oannes belongs to the zodiac
sign of Pisces, it is from this sea that he now truly comes. And the glad
tidings ultimately refer to the god of Jupiter, the planet of happiness and
of victory, a god who soon came to be identified with the dragon-slayer
Marduk. Only one somewhat anthropoid figure, the sun-giant and hero
Gilgamesh, appears as a not quite astral saviour, he has just defeated the
bull of heaven and attained the water of life and the plant of immortality,
only to lose them when returning to earth, and thus he himself suffers
death, despite all his deeds, without heavenly resurrection. Hence only
a star god puts himself flawlessly into heaven, only Marduk, shining down
in the planet Jupiter, is the redeemer. And after his victory over the dragon
of the abyss Marduk gains power over the new era and world: on New
Year's Day, his feast par excellence, he receives control over fate, the tablets
of destiny, the book with seven seals; from his place" of worship the town
of Babel = Bab-iI, heavenly gate, grows, and under Hammurabi Marduk
becomes the god of the empire. As god of empire Marduk in the period
after Hammurabi absorbed the entire ancient Sumerian trinity of gods:
Ea, the god of the seas and of the hidden wisdom from which Oannes
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
1219
had proclaimed, Anu, the god of heaven, Enlil, the god of the world.
As the god of the New Year Marduk is also the god of spring or of the
deliverance of mankind from sickness and misery. A great deal of salvation
and of glad tidings of victory all at once, yet it all takes place high above
men and outside them, not merely in heaven but in a primeval past in
heaven; New Year's Day is always only the commemoration of this, posited
as completed, or at best the repetition of it. A different hoping is undeniable
in Babylon, also in Egypt, qua glad tidings; a prophecy of blessing after
a great catastrophe goes into the future as a Humanum. Yet because of
the complete extra-humanity and non-temporality of the Babylonian foundation of religion, because of the complete identity of the god of repetition
with the saviour, this hoping moves only within the cycle of becomeness,
indeed in a fixed celestialclock. Marduk-Jupiter is at the same time identical
with the zodiac sign of the bull in which the sun had stood since the
founding of Babylon around 2800 B.C.; thus in the calendar system of
the age of Taurus he becomes the ruler of the morning- and the spring
point of the sun's course; thus he becomes the long-existing point of spring
fixed both in custom and in astral myth, the point from which the constellation again and again rises up. On every New Year's Day, at every
investiture of a new king, the saviour-god appears as the same being, only
in different astrological constellations. The glad tidings of Babylon always
go back to victory of the star-god Marduk over MummuTiamat, the dragon
of the abyss; thus they are and remain trust in a law from above to below,
in a star-law. The earliest cuneiform sign for god was, significantly, a
star, likewise even in ancient Babylon the rudiments of religious astrology
already existed and were then developed by the Chaldeans. In the sky the
primal image of order rules, Marduk, pasturing the star gods, maintains
it as a good order; happiness, bliss, well-being on earth are merely its
cosmornorphic likeness. This perfected astral myth, even as teaching, contains
nothing human, its gospel lands in star gods, in accord with their good
cycle, in wariness of their harmful cycle. It goes without saying that this
is just as much founding and human projection into the world as all
religions, but its will-commitment and self-commitment contains a subject
that seeks entirely to be present only as object. The mysterious path here
goes outwards, into stone and cosmos, and neither in Babylon nor in Egypt
does it tend to turn back towards the subject. The basic teaching of astral
myth is that the world below is as the world above; thus even man is
only the image, only the copy, of the upper and thus external world. So
this astral Above left no substance whatever for religious subjectivity, it did
1220
not even leave it enough to be nailed to the Caucasus. Indeed wherever the
ruling being has been brought to the pure object side, the religious archetype of Egypt and Babylon always continues to exert its influence. Not only
in astrology as developed by the Chaldeans on Babylonian soil, in contact
with the old" star religion - a system of unavoidable dependence on outside
and above. As such, astrology mythologized order versus freedom, always
with stern light in the background, as is still recognizable in Campanella's
social utopia. Even where there is no talk at all of stars of fate, Babylon
remains, a kind of rotating drum of repetition empty of human beings
and alien to history remains, determining from above, even only from
outside, especially in predominantly heteronomous world-views. The astralmythic is thus to be found in every form offatalism, even in christianized,
indeed even in mechanistic fatalism. In return Babylon and Egypt on the
other hand, as not only the most unswerving religions of despotism but
also the most remarkable religions of estrangement, for the first time
brought sublimity into the religious sphere - precisely by the extremely
spatial contraposition of the astral-mythic to all too subject-based anthropomorphization. There is in its absence of human beings the pathos of extreme
outwardness but also the still mythic corrective of an order without wliich
subject and time only flail about and consume themselves. Crystal and
stars certainly were once glad tidings, even though the founders inevitably
became droll or faded in comparison with this pure astral face of their
selves. Astral myth presupposes hierophants, it allows no proclaimers to
turn the sun god's head, turn it towards man; just as the hieratic buildings
of Egypt and quite clearly of Babylon sought to achieve their perfection
purely as reproductions of a cosmic stereoscopy. Even the labyrinths of
Egypt of which Herodotus writes were intended to be far more than stylized
intestinal or cerebral convolutions, they sought in their galleries to imitate
the course of the heavenly bodies, i.e. to be cosmomorphic; and how much
more so did the Egyptian temple path, the Babylonian planet tower. Proclaimers and:worshippers vanish into forms and teachings which have piled
up the divine both colossally and geometrically; this is the sign of strict
astral myth and its long-believed salvation.
Glad tidings of earthly-heavenly balance and of

the inconspicuous world-rhythm (Tao): Confucius, Lao Tzu
The moderate person also holds back, does not impose himself on others,
push himselfforward. Blessed contentment and the gift of being well-balanced
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
1221
in the mean are related in kind. This is bourgeois in an older sense, one
which does not yet have any unmeasured profit drive. Thus the moderate
attitude, alien to adventure, Waspraised particularly among peoples without
a warlike upper class. Anyway, preached decency, along with savage
corporal punishment and more preventive than it, is to be recommended
to keep the masses in check. People love the tried and tested, the balanced,
the straight line in things, they are reverential towards moderation. This
manifested itself most consciously in China, at the end of its feudal era
of course, around 700 B.C., in the midst of anarchic confusion which
dragged on until about 220 B.C. It was then that China first became civilian,
a new class of lords emerged, i.e. a new form of ground rent. The patriarchally structured family remained, but aristocratic birthrights disappeared,
apart from the emperor there is no hereditary aristocracy. Even the emperor
and his mandarins (a new educated nobility) no longer acted like the 'lords'
of the chivalric-feudal era but as the despotic 'parents' of a formally liberated
people. Holding court turns so to speak into holding measure; the form
of life is patriarchally tamed throughout. The sought-for mean was
formulated in religious terms by Confucius, himself a reserved, never a
fanatical man. As a moralist he seems unwarlike like no other: 'Better
to be a dog and peaceful than a man and live in discord.' Li (the law of
manners) becomes a form of devotion, Yen, (humanity) here means custom
or tradition. A wise man does not concern himself with wild or dark things:
'What the master did not speak about were unnatural appearances, deeds
of violence, disturbances and spirits' (Lun-yii VII, 20). Likewise: 'To treat
spirits with awe but to keep one's distance from them, this may be
counted wisdom' (Lun-yii VI, 20). Instead the emperor now moves into
the holy middle, the emperor of the post-feudal; patriarchal-centralized
'state based on the rule of law' and its circumspection. To formulate,
indeed to consecrate this, Confucius personally went back to the past,
as if the theology of the new, patriarchal-absolute state were mere
'reform'. Confucius disguises his own ideas as the codex of the feudal
gentleman, he sticks sentimentally to traditional customs, nothing is to
be restored but the 'way of the old kings', nothing is to be regulative
but the old documents of the Shu-ching and Shi-ching. But in truth
Confucius became the sage of the new patrimonial bureaucracy; he
anticipates its no longer hereditary but academic organization, its pacifism
and rationalism. With post-feudal society a post-feudal world of gods appears
and, despite remaining natural religion, this has in its centre something
as eminently human as the morality of the emperor and his measure-keeping
1222
FULFIL~ED
MOMENT
circumspection. This is in this form something new, especiallyin the field of

natural religions, to which Chinese religion still belonged; and Confucius,
the founder himself, despite all his moderate reserve, appears loud and clear
with his name: as the teacher of the emperor and of his Middle Kingdom.
Certainly, other natural religions also made the chief magical: in ancient
Ireland it was believed that a strong king would bring the blessings of
nature; in ancient Mexico the ruler on acceding to the throne even had to
take an oath that he would make the sun shine, the clouds rain, the rivers
flow and bring the earth to great fruitfulness. In ancient India this rapport
with nature was even connected with morality: 'Where kings act without
sin', says Manu's Book of Law, 'men are born without pain and live long,
corn shoots up as soon as it is sown, children do not die, all offspring turn
out well.' And in Babylon, in Egypt, no founder, but the ruler as such had
god-like status, through him Marduk, Horus, Osiris and Ra blessed the
land. But whether Ireland or Mexico, whether ancient India or even EgyptBabylon with its monarchies made hugely taboo: the ruler of the people
stands beneath the respective nature gods, he merely has in relation to
them a special power of prayer, or else Marduk and Ra embody themselves
in the dignity of king, in the astral myth otherwise almost devoid of human
beings. But it is different in Confucian religion: the emperor ranks higher
than the earthly nature gods, only he holds the balance between earth and
heaven. The mountain and river gods, the town and provincial gods of
the empire are regarded as imperial officials, they are removable, like
mandarins. The emperor of Confucius is the same as the middle of the state
and the middle of the cosmos: poor harvests, floods, avalanches, even evil
star-constellations follow as inevitably from disordered government as does
a favourable course of nature from ordered government. And at this point in
the teaching it becomes clear that the fact that a founder is named and stressed
can crucially change even a natural religion (over and above the mere
ideological glorification of a ruling dynasty). Accordingly afounder, even
when the forces of astral myth are retained, does not fade when' this myth
no longer rises above the realm of man but this realm now advances into
the central middle of earth and .heaven. The ancient Chinese religion still
remained completely nature-mythic, it was demonic-orgiastic in its fertility
and agricultural rites (the Chinese theatre has preserved some features of
this), it was astralin its rites and laws, in its measurements and in its
music (the primal emperor and the primal liturgist, the legendary Huang
Ti, is none other than the year and calendar god). But through Confucius
the orgiastic disappears completely and the astral-mythic is reinterpreted,
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
122 3
is projected by the moderator of concord between emperor and nature on

to the power of human harmony. Hence the basic doctrine: 'Heaven does
not speak, it has its thoughts proclaimed through a man', and: 'For the Middle
Kingdom, not only on earth but also in heaven, there is no abroad.' One
of the most amazing pacifications took place in the antitheses between which
the struggle of the female-chthonic and the male-uranian nature demons may
once have raged. l-ching, the ancient 'Book of Changes', callsthese antitheses
Yin and Yang; they mean valley and mountain or also river banks, one of
which is in the shade, the other in the sun, at the time of the Ming dynasty,
indeed already in very early Shamanic writings they were applied to man and
woman. But the struggle between Yin and Yang, night and day, earth and
heaven, finds, utterly primeval-dialectic, the unity of the antitheses
everywhere, even though this unity is ended; Yin and Yang on the whole
become the earthly and heavenly scales of the great balance, of longed-for
universal harmony. And in spite of this the human world, with the emperor
at its head, is nowhere subjected to nature gods any longer but solely to the
idea of heaven, - and this, a final specific feature of East Asia, is no god.
In all western religions a single superior line, becoming as it were ever
more theistic, ran from the lower gods to the highest. In China, on the
other hand, gods are only to be found in nature, the world which overarches them, is superior to them, and is non-theistic. Shu-ching, the ancient
'Book of Documents' , long before Confucius, named the heavenly order
T''ien-tao, heaven's being-on-the-right-way; in Confucius this became the
care of an equally non-theistic norm which rules throughout the world.
It became the last support of the Middle, through the emperor it prevents
empire and empire-nature from straying beyond their limits; contact with
to T'ien-tao is mediation with the primal balance of all things, i.e, with
happiness. However at this point the founder withdraws again, though
for quite different reasons than with astral myth: person here would be
disturbance. When men's lives are orderly, the world runs pleasantly in
a circle; like the family state, like the harmony of nature, T'ien-tao may
tolerate a teacher but it does not need a tribune, and man himself does
not need one in T''ien-tao either. This is a quality or a limit that remained
with Chinese religion for as long as it existed. Where Near-Eastern, Iranian
and Indian religion were later to bring forth the most powerful prophecy,
China knows nothing of this, and no founder raised his head above the
holy health of humane-cosmomorphic measure. Some centuries after his
death, Confucius was declared a god, yet this does not signify a penetration
into heaven but merely a concession to polytheistic popular religion; this
1224
kind of god-man is insubstantial amid the great and subordinated throng of

Chinese gods. T'ien, heaven itself, has here too no space for a god, T''Ien
remains the apersonal-closedepitome of moral-physical connection. T'ien-tao
thus retains the calm breath of the static family state, in perfect ideology
and the perfection of a religious ideal at the same time: humanity is adhering
to this heavenly way. Astral myth has not disappeared but returnedcornpletely into something cosmomorphic which both reflects the China of
families and of officials and standardizes it in a rationalist myth ofmoderation.
And significantly this religious attitude has appealed everywhere, even
outside China, where a wholesome mean was sought, the regulating
moderation of pacified nature. This happened consciously during the
eighteenth century, in the bourgeoisie's struggle against neo-feudal excesses,
lack of means, 'uri-nature'. It was not without reason that the China of
Confucius moved alongside the Greece of the Seven Sages, of the P/'10JI
li~aJl, of Aristotelian p,EaOTfJS, the religion of moderation moved next
to sophrosyne, optimism about the course of the world next to idylls and
arcadias. On the basis of anti-feudal bon sens at that time something almost
genuine in the China of Confucius and of his moderate world-childhood
was again felt and received, lastingly remarkable, lastingly a partial corrective
in the over-effervescing wishful image of what is right. There is a peculiar
after-image of Confucianism, contrasting strongly with all juste milieu,
even in revolution, not only in the French revolution; and this after-image
appears in Brecht's proposition: 'Communism is not radical, capitalism is
radical; communism is more moderate.' Bon sens, belief in moderation, trust
in the fairway which leads right between Scylla and Charybdis, still contain
an element of those unvociferous glad tidings which originate with Confucius.
These glad tidings are closely related to critical comparison, therefore they
can be revolutionary, they are closely related to balancing, to the continuously
evolving, therefore the message can also be compliant with order and conservative. Hence too the Confucian element in Goethe's belief in world-measure,
in the belief in a natural being who everywhere regulates and puts in the
right weights. Hence the 'life according to reason' in China which so
appealed to Hegel and which led him to treat this country $0 much more
exactly, to understand it so much more closely than the exorbitant India
of the Vedas, the land of Buddha so remote from all world-measure. Even in
the after-ripening there was clearly at work here not chinoiserie but glad
tidings felt to be orderly, almost even to be real: the world, when man knows
how to take it, is well-ordered. However, the cult of harmony disappeared,
the not so clear cult which made Confucianism into a religion and not
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
12 2 5
just a cosmic moral code; the mysterium in the 'I''ien-tao, as fine as it

is untranslatable, disappeared. If the life of men becomes canonical when
it makes the way to heaven its canon, this way to heaven is paradoxical
even in Confucius; if only for the reason that it is itself solitary and silent.
The teacher of moderation became visible as one who stepped back.
But the true, the mystic teacher of Tao appeared by disappearing. Lao Tzu
went westwards, over the mountain pass, was never seen again, left only
his book behind. His person does not live on, except in the most distorted
form; in the memory of the so-called Taoists (a group of Chinese miracle
men of a low kind and their believers) he became a magician. From the
"Tao-te-ching', the 'Book of Tao and- Life', gold-makers and exorcists
learn their formulae. Even where Lao Tzu is remembered as the noble
and wise man, he dissolves into a cosmic form, he then appeared on earth
at the most different times; even in this way, succession does not become
possible. For all this, Lao Tzu undoubtedly did live, an older contemporary of Confucius in the sixth century B.C., a solitary man. His book
contains intensely personal confessions: 'I alone am gloomy, wandering
about as one who never stays' (Ch. 20). But despite this reality of his,
above Lao Tzu as founder there hangs a bright haze, which is so fitting
for this man, which reduces his doing till it arrives at non-doing, and
which covers his tracks. In the Chinese family-state, Lao Tzu is the
wandering hermit, hostile to custom, hostile to civilization, safe and secure
only in the incomprehensible. Lao Tzu vanishes not only to the west,
over the mountain pass, he constantly becomes invisible on the wa! of
Tao. Thus Lao Tzu appears as clearly as Confucius with his name, as the
teacher of the quiet way, but he presents himself even more clearly as disappearing. This founder is certainly profiled, but-his profile is similar to
what it contemplates; it is itself the powerfully inconspicuous. Tao gives
support and guides, but on its way stands no visible mediator, no language
statue; for it is that which is not worth naming, the only thing worthy
of naming, and Lao Tzu does not know its name. It is inconspicuous and
as if nothing: 'So he who is called works and does not retain, when the
work is completed he does not persevere. He does not wish to show his
importance to others' (Ch. 77). Middle and moderation apply here, too,
as in Confucius, but how little this moderation is suited to morality and
ruling government. 'The method of Tao is to reduce substance, to restore
what is missing' (Ch. 77). This equilibrium shows different scales and
weights, a different position of the pointer from Confucianjustice. Lao Tzu's
Tao is harder to define in European terms than any other religious basic
1226
category of East Asia; nonetheless it is, unspoken, the most easily comprehensible. As the religious category of wisdom, as harm-ony with the deep
repose which fulfils wishes by forgetting them. As chiming with the great
Pan, who makes everything earthly small and yet is himself nothing but
smallness and fineness, nothing but intentionlessness and stillness. And
because disturbance by person completely disappears, astral myth advances
even more extensively than in Confucius, but the astral myth of the Lao Tzu
world is the strangest of all: it contains nothing but the light breath of
a cosmic space everywhere; its universe is unextendedly infinite, solemnly
small. Cosmos presents itself as inclinedness in immense shyness, as the
paradoxical dream of being humane without having much that is individually human to show for itself. A certain undistracted access to the dream
background of this intentionlessness is given by that Chinese landscape
painting which, though for the most part it developed much later, under
Buddhism, nonetheless shows the alert, bright stillness of the Tao, not
the deep sleep of nirvana, which cannot be painted at all. Symbols of an
existing, not for example of an objectless, world-extinguished silence rise up
here, deep in a Tao culture which has survived, in the work of Liang Kai,
Ma Yuan, Hsia Kuei, all around 1200 A.D., so long after Lao Tzu, and
everything speaks world symbols of stilledness. This appears now as a bare,
dead branch, now as a boat surrounded by reeds at moonrise, now as a
house roof beneath a tree or as a waterfall or a collection of rocks, with
a person at the edge, himself a solitary and collected, a gathered-in figure,
absorbed in contemplation. This is breath of Tao in its infinite-finite being
at home, expressed through the landscape painting; and Lao Tzu preached"
precisely this repose, this unweighty weightiness. Preached in the inconspicuous, which keeps the universe going, which keeps it in repose. The
differences from Confucius are therefore considerable; they are the differences
between the purest mystic among the founders and the most devout
rationalist among them. Confucius sets the measure, which is easy to keep,
Lao Tzu the simple, which is hardest to do. Confucius is historical, is
fond of quoting the ancients, Lao Tzu is tired of history, does not give
a single historical example, and to him the ancients are excellent only because
of the savour of their Tao. This, however, is in every time, i.e, in nope,
it is the primal beginning in antiquity and in the present, the incessant
as the unending. And, like history, so traditional morality, which for
Confucius is canonical, is for Lao Tzu worthless, even degeneration: 'The
Tao was abandoned and so there were morality and duty .... the states
fell into confusion and disorder and so there were loyal servants' (Ch. 18).
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
1227
Likewise: 'Morality is scarceness of loyalty and good faith and the beginning
of confusion, forethought is the illusion of Tao and the beginning of
confusion' (Ch. 38). Rule, example and codex as a whole, so highly rated
by Confucius that the theory of government and metaphysics were identical,
are superfluous, indeed harmful, in Lao Tzu's Tao. This lives in the instinct
for what is right, the only one which man was left with and which goes
through the health of the whole world; it lives more precisely in the instinct,
if the term can be used, of a mystical democracy: 'If princes and kings
were capable of being its guardians, then all creatures would stand beside
them as its guardians. Heaven and earth would unite to make sweet dew
fall, the people would of themselves become good, without needing anyone
to command them' (Ch, 32). Such glad tidings, of an all-resolving grace,
are far removed from the ideology of the family state; the authoritarian
state; despite the transitions to be found in much of Confucius' advice,
despite the superiority which he accords to grace over dignity. In Lao Tzu
all that is luxuriant and magnificent is left behind, the seductively mild
art of wisdom appears, Tao - long since not only in heaven, long since
close by - is its quiet god, a god full of contrast ideology against anarchy
and the 'state based on the rule of law'. This shows itself most clearly
at last in Lao Tzu's central idea (only verbally does he have it in common
with Confucius): in the principle ofnot-desiring, not-doing (wu yu, wu wei),
in this quiet centre of the Tao itself. Not-doing is praised from time to time
in Confucius, too, as the maxim of government of biding one's time, but
in Lao Tzu it becomes fundamental. In the realm of Tao nothing is done,
the putsch of intervention disturbs its rule, deprives it of its recuperative
powers (convalescence per se, the act itself which does not even always
presuppose sickness) of the receptive stillness in which they take effect.
This is not quietism in the European sense or even in the sense of the
hymn: 'Lord, lift the wagon alone'; the repose of Tao is both more
naive and more radical. More naive because it contains an element of
unpriestly health, a trust in the restitution of the well-built from itself;
more radical because this trust relates to the constant world-rhythm, not
to God's providence and its acceptance. Despite all the characteristic
quietisms to be found precisely in the composure form of oriental wisdom,
it would be wrong to equate not-doing, in Lao Tzu's version, with not
having an effect; on the contrary, it is not-doing and this alone which is here
regarded as producing an effect. Doing here is contrasted with liveliness,
ripening, thriving, which is organic spontaneity and which alone is turning
out well: 'The higher life is without action and without intentions,
/
1228
the lower life acts and has intentions' (Ch. 38); 'One can attain the kingdom
only if one remains free of busyness. The very busy are not destined to
attain the kingdom' (Ch. 48). In this aversion to mechanical-abstractdoing,
chthonic memory speaks unmistakably, belief in the earth-mother, giving
and guarding; long-lost matriliny continues to have its effect in the maxim
of not-doing as spontaneity in repose. And it is not without reason that
Lao Tzu's life-Tao thus reproduces, sublimates images from the earlier,
matrilineal period in China: for Tao is the ancient name for an animalshaped world-mother. Thus not-doing achieves its contact with Demeter
in the Tao: 'The spirit of the deep does not die, this is the eternally female.
Endlessly it pushes forward and is yet as if persisting, in its working it
remains effortless' (Ch. 6); 'It walks within the circle and knows no uncertainty, it can be grasped as the mother of the world' (Ch. 25); 'A great
kingdom must keep below, thus it becomes the point of union of the world.
It is the female in the world, the female defeats the male by its stillness'
(Ch. 61). Thus Lao Tzu's not-doing is definitely connected with a kind
of co-ruling effectiveness: by virtue of its alliance with the pulse of the
world, by virtue of its aversion to abstract mechanics which operates
without contact to nature as mother. But the correctly understood teaching
of not-doing also contains a maxim which in the end can be so far removed
from quietism as to be no stranger at all to concrete action, which indeed
justifies revolution as a breakthrough into that which is due and right.
It is the maxim: the way is begun, complete the journey; and in this sense
Lao Tzu declares not-doing to be a chiming with the concrete efficacy
of the world: 'If Tao is honoured and life valued, then no commandments
are needed and the world goes right of itself' (Ch, 51). He even speaks
on one occasion of the doing of not-doing (wei wu wei), by which he
means precisely the establishing of conformity with the world-rhythm,
with its powerful-still beat. The fragrance of tea runs through this religionuniverse, so far from violence, crudeness and noise; anti-Barbarus has here
become religion in the most worldly way, the mother landscape of ruling
and healing. Indeed the peacein which the doing of not-doing moves causes
Lao Tzu's Tao, without it falling somewhere out of the world, even -to
appear as that complete fullness of inconspicuousness which means that
the strongest may be seen in the weakest, the most important in the
meanest, almost the absent. Therefore Lao Tzu included this among his
many similes for the Tao: 'Thirty spokes meet in a hub; on their nothingness
the usefulness of the wagon depends. Clay is shaped and vessels are "made
from it; on their nothingness the usefulness of the vessels depends. Doors
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
1229
and windows are cut in the wall to build a house; on their nothingness
the usefulness of the house depends. Hence: being gives possession nonbeing usefulness' (Ch. II). Of course this non-being is not acosmic either,
it is no more nirvana than world-secluded absorption in intentionlessness
was; even Tao as emptiness lives, as the simile of the wheel's hub says,
in the middle of the world. And its non-being is not contradictory, not
even disparate, to being, on the contrary it signifies again and again the
inconspicuousness of true being, mild and without taste. The emptiness
of Tao is that of the non-separate, but also again and again that of the
unseparated and of that which is returning from separation: 'Great fullness
must appear as if empty, thus it becomes inexhaustible in its effect ... purity
and stillness are the measure of the world' (Ch. 45). As such fullness and
stillness, Tao emptiness rules throughout the world; emptied of world
yet precisely filled with nothing but world. The glad tidings remain
cosmomorphic: 'Man models himself on the earth, the earth models itself
on heaven, heaven models itself on the Tao, and the Tao models itself
on itself' (Ch. 25); - thus cosmic harmony provides a hold. Although
Tao also stands above heaven, it is not transcendental, rather it swings
through all the after-images of its model, in incessant distributedness, in
a rhythm which for Lao Tzu is both the origin and the norm of what
is right. As such a being of world and of nearness, the Tao, precisely also
politically and theologically, is a god, but so without all magnificence that
it is not a god at all in the common meaning of masters: 'It clothes and
feeds all creatures, and it does not play the master' (Ch. 34). Only a single
passage in the Tao-te-ching (Ch. 4), and this moreover a corrupt one,
talks of a highest ruler (Di), whether he is to be understood as the god
of heaven or simply as the emperor-god of the highest antiquity; yet in
this very passage" the highest is described as caused by the Tao and the
Tao as earlier. An unpathetic world rhythm demands no 19~d, and nature
itself is in Lao Tzu such an old culture that it does not need to play the
master. This Tao, if it were so, would not allow any man to be ruined;
it would be the world without fal~e paths. Richard Wilhelm, who has
probably come closest to the Chinese religious text, wants to render Tao
as 'Being-For-Itself' (Tao te King, I9IS, p. XX), with a Hegelian term
which here, however, must not presuppose a process, as convalescing presupposes illness. Nonetheless the Tao does contain dialectic, not merely that
of the constant self-cancellation of its attained determination but the dialectic
of walking in a circle, of the flux in Being-Far-Itself: 'Always in flux, that
is, far away; far away, that is, returning to itself' (Ch. 25). But above all Tao
12 30
remains sheer spontaneity in sheer repose, in the mother-ground of ruling,

to which the human essence holds as it identifies itself. Because this human
essence becomes so identical with the world-ground that its life, when
it is on the right path, is definitely lived by the world-ground, indeed
as it were walked by the world-ground, the human essence ceases to exist
as a further educating, super-naturing essence. Again and again the paradox
of a pan-humane without human beings breaks through; men disappear
in it like all things, indeed above all the Tao itself. Secret working of
eternally reigning nature, in this divine element without god everything
human is to be embedded without man, all hope embedded without anything needing to be-hoped, all that is in being without Being. 'The highest
life appears as emptiness, the great tone has an inaudible sound' (Ch. 41).
Subjects are lost in the Tao like tones in a harmony so great that like
health it becomes imperceptible, like unceasingness inaudible.
A founder who is himself part of the glad tidings:

Moses, his god of exodus
The especially vehement, fanatical speaker cannot be concealed by legend.
He stands in person in his traditional image, the real voice breaks through
fables. As with Moses, the earliest leader of a people out of slavery. Moses
is chronologically the first distinctive founder and he has remained the most
visible in human terms, a man. Attempts have been made, in vain, to make
him into a legend, like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, who in fact are mere names
of Israelite tribes or perhaps even Canaanite gods, back-dated. For even in
the story ofjoseph, the story which precedes the work of Moses, the dissolution into legend has never quite established itself. Joseph was supposed to be
partof legend ofwandering, thelegend oftheyoungest brother envied by his
older brothers. Joseph was even supposed to be a variant of a Babylonian lightgod, Tammuz, who sets in the West Land. But it turns out that even the
story of Joseph and the person of this imperial chancellor" have a lot of
historical probability on their side. For Joseph knows something about Egypt
which no invented figure, no legendary figure merely applied to West Land
can possibly know. His story, which precedes the exodus by centuries, shows
strikingly strong Egyptian local colour: the rites of investiture (Gen. 41, 42)
are as exact as they are correctly quoted, equally correct are the details on
PharaohmadeJosephgovernorof Egypt. See Genesis 41. Blochis usingthe title 'Reichskanzler'
ironicallyhere, of course.
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
12 31
the dead hand of the Egyptian church (Gen. 47, 22 and 26). So not even the
so far distant story ofJoseph constitutes a precedent for resolving Moses and
the exodus into legend; even though the hitherto known Egyptian counter"
account of these events is incomplete and questionable. There were Egyptian imperial chancellors of Semitic origin, and the clay tablets of Tell al
Amarna, which were pot discovered until 1887, prove that Canaanite kings
asked the Pharaoh for help against invading 'Ibri'. However, Moses has been
surrounded even more liberally than]oseph by that wreath oflegends which
mythological research, especially on Babylon, has woven. Yet no people has
so far ever told of the days of its slavery and humiliation without historical..
real reason, so to speak voluntarily. No people has so far spun completely out
of nothing details of its liberation and being led out of this slavery, or confused
the struggle between the spring sun and the winter with its own. Yet
mythologists, especially those of the Pan-Babylonian persuasion, expect us
to believe this of ancient Israelite history, just as, with even greater fantasy,
they expect us to believe it of the story ofJesus. For them, because of the
basket of reeds in which he was saved from the wrath of the West Land
Pharaoh, Moses was pre-disposed to appear analogous to an entire mythic
group of young sun .. or spring-gods. Like Moses, the Adonis-, the Horus..
and the Jesus-child were pursued by the giant of winter, like him, too, the
various young sun-gods were concealed in a narrow hiding-place, a box or
a cave. Even the work of Moses, the exodus itself, was dismissed as a solar
legend, of Babylonian origin: 'The deliverance from Egypt, in terms of the
world-year myth, is deliverance from the dragon of winter' Oeremias,
Babylonisches im Neuen.Testament, 1905, p. 120). In the ears of the PanBabylonians, even the drowning of the Egyptians in the Red Sea sounded
reminiscent of motifs of the struggle with the dragon, the fight which
Marduk fought with the underworld demon Tiamat. Finally, unlike this PanBabylon, incomparably more serious, indeed with the great achievements
of philology, a radical critique of the Bible sought to erase Moses from history.
Not always as a living person but as the person who proclaimed a new god,
who originally founded a religion. According to a so..called Kenitic hypothesis
(cf. Budde, The Religion of the People of Israel until their Banishment, 1900)
Moses borrowed the idea of Yahweh from the Kenite tribe, into which he
had married after his flight. The Kenites had their pastures on Sinai (perhaps
the now-extinct volcano), and Yahweh (probably meaning: he who wafts,
he who blows) had been worshipped among them as a volcano god since
primeval times. If Yahweh himself is a plagiarism, it is not surprising that the
ten commandments are not supposed to belong to Moses and to the children
1232
FU~F.~LED
MOMENT
of Israel either. According to W ellhausen, the radical exaggerator and an tisemitic epigone of biblical criticism, the decalogue comes from the Canaanites.
Jewish priests. he says, adopted it in Canaan, together with the ritual commandments; only much later, only after Cyrus, were the ten commandments
attributed to Moses, their entire content, not just their formulation, is
interpolated (cf. Wellhausen, Israelitische und judische Geschichte, 1901).
And in the end, in all too radically dissolving biblical criticism, nothing more
remains of Moses and ancient Israel than a wild bundle ofreligions, completely
without a centre, of holy stones and trees, of diverse local gods, ancestor cult,
human sacrifice, Canaanite rites and late Babylonian legends. Thus the
founders of the Jewish religion were the prophets, and Moses, Yahweh,
exodus, the decalogue there and then are no more historical than Abel and
Cain. But now something remarkable happens: precisely where biblical
criticism annuls the later assimilations and back-datings of the priestly codex,
where it has discovered genuinely extraneous elements in Mosaism, precisely
here the originality of Moses becomes more evident than it was before the
triumphs and even the extravagances of biblical criticism. Just as the theory
of evolution does not blur the difference between man and animal but on
the contrary makes it far more recognizable than before, so the Bible appear~
even more original and unique now that its extra-biblical sources and elements
have become fairly well-known. Perhaps, probably Moses adopted the god
of Sinai from the Kenites, but the god did not remain what he had been. Quite
unquestionably the decalogue, not to mention the ritual code, contains late
interpolations from Canaan, but the concise main body has no equal in
Canaan, in the entire world. With Moses, a leap in religious consciousness
occurred, and it was prepared for by an event which is most opposed to
religions till then, religions ofworldliness or of astral-mythic fate: by rebellion,
by the exodus from Egypt. Thus, and not for example as Nimrod or as a
hugely prominent medicine man, Moses became the firstheros eponymos, the
first name-giving originator ofa religion, ofa religion of opposition. Other, later
religions of opposition, such as the warlike religion of Zoroaster, the acosmic
religion of Buddha, are understandable for Europeans only in terms of the
exodus-archetype. Just as -the founder-figure Moses is the prototype of all
who stand not on the margin of their teaching but within it, messianic.
An enslaved people, this is the need here which teaches people to pray.
And a founder appears who begins by slaying a taskmaster. Thus suffering
and rebellion stand at the beginning here, from the outset they make the
religion a path into the open. The god of Sinai, adopted from the Kenites,
through Moses did not remain the local god of a volcano, he became the
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
12 33
spirit of the exodus. The volcano god is set in motion, and his character,
except for certain choleric-eruptive features, is changed. The local god is
raised up from his ground, through his theurgist Moses he becomes a cloud
anda pillar of fire, which moves with a race originally unknown to him
from Sinai into the untrodden, into the splendour of something untrodden.
And just as the god of exodus is Mosaic, not Kenitic, so the main body
of the decalogue preserves a creation of Moses, not a moral code of the
Canaanites or, even more far-fetched, of the ancient Babylonian king
Hammurabi, whose Book of Laws of around 2100 B.C. has about as much in
common with the decalogue as the corpus juris has with Kantian morality.
The decalogue contains interpolations, undoubtedly; the commandment
not to covet one's neighbour's house is meaningless among Bedouins, as
is the commandment to honour the Sabbath. Both presuppose sedentariness
and the ordered workday of the Canaanite farmer, indeed the making holy
of the seventh day did not happen until much later, in Babylonian exile,
it is Chaldean in origin. However, the unbroken community ethic which
Moses formulates did not exist in Canaan. For it stems from primitive
communist conditions, which 'had not yet been completely eradicated among
nomads but certainly had been in the agricultural civilization of the
Canaanites in which a class system had long since been formed. A sentence
such- as: 'Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself' (Lev. 19, 18), such
a concentration of the ten commandments into one, has, even in the
primitive commune, only its still unconscious beginning; the making
conscious and the almost glaring exemplification is the work o~Moses.
As such it was also borne in mind by Israel, not just in the midst of tanaan
but against the Canaanite economy itself, which was now adopted by the
Israelite conquerors. A new entity now penetrated into the existing kulak
morality and Baal religion of Canaan, and, despite. all receptions, it never
completely capitulated (cf. Vol. II, p. 497f.). The Nazarites, from Samuel
to John the Baptist in his nomad's hair tunic, the prophets closely connected
with them, with their view of the period in the desert as the 'bridal period
of Israel', as the time 'when Israel was a child' (Hosea II, I), derive their
memories and their power from the Mosaic foundation, from decalogue
and exodus god. Without Moses the prophets would be without ground,
even the morality of the prophets, sublime and universalistic though it
became, shows the still influential impulse of the exodus-leader and his idea
of the holy people. Through the commitment of Moses the content of salvation' changed, a content which had constituted the completely finishedexternal goal of pagan religions, especially the astral-mythic ones. Instead
12 34
of the finished goal there now appears a promised goal that must first be achieved;
instead of the visible nature godthere appears an invisible godofrighteousness and
ofthe kingdom of righteousness. But if not prophecy then did not the Book of
Job (after so little that was good in Canaan, after so little fulfilled promise)
add to the religion of Moses something completely different, namely the
negation of itself? As rejection of its glad tidings, as rebellion - and now not
only against Pharaoh or Baal and Belial but against the Yahweh of ostensible
righteousness himself. Certainly this is the content ofJob's revolt; neither
the tame correctnesses and traditional harmonies of his friends nor the storm
in which Yahweh announces his disparate sublimity can rescue faith in
the righteousness of the once so magnificently proclaimed-proclaiming god.
A theocracy which has become inhumane no longer makes any impact
on a subservient mentality which does not want to remain limited. And
yet even the Book of Job, although written so late and geographically
on the edges ofJudea, remains genuine Old Testament or Moses in contraMoses. Well before Job not even the priestly version of the Bible text
could suppress or wipe out the memory of the subversive characteristics
in this text, even just the murmuring of the children of Israel, the measuring
of Yahweh's deeds against his promise, against that highest definition which
Isaiah finally gave him; that he is the Holy One of Israel. But the murmuring
was the measuring of God against his ideal: all this is found laid out in Moses
himself, in the man of the water of strife (Num, 20, 13), of doubt that Yahweh
would deliver his people (Exodus S, 23), of the prayer to Yahweh, that he
himself and not merely an imperfect angel should lead them into the Promised
Land (Exodus 33, IS). Moses insists on Yahweh instead of the angel, with
kiddush hashem, the making holy of the name, on him who has become
face: 'If thy presence go not with me, carry us not up hence.?" But the
face is still far above the righteousness which Job so denies in Yahweh, so
that almost nothing remains of him but the old demon of Sinai. 'Prince of
the Face' is significantly a later title of the Messiah, of the intended leader
to the final Yahweh or to the finality which Yahweh was believed to represent.
No religion has passed through so many layers of sublimation, of utopianization
of its god as that of Moses, but all these layers are inherent in the concept of
his God ofExodus himself. The God of Moses is the promise of Canaan or
he is no God. The rebellion ofJob, the Hebrew Prometheus, also stems from
here and this is precisely why it has an utterly different fierceness, an utterly
* Exodus 33, IS. The Authorized Version gives 'presence' where Luther gives 'Angesicht': 'face',
The Hebrew is 'panim'.
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
12 35
different substantiatedness from strife with God in any other religion. Exodus
in Job becomes radical: not merely as the measuring of Yahweh against the
ideal of his righteousness and the kingdom of his righteousness but as the
exodus from Yahweh himself into the unknown Canaan of which he was the
unkept promise. 'I know that my blood-avenger is living and will at the
end rise up above my dust. The witness of my innocence will be by me,
and I will see my deliverer from guilt for myself, with my own eyes I see
it, and DO other' crob 19, 25-27, after Bertholet's translation, using the
conjectures *): the Messiah religion in this text, which, probably for good
reason, has come down to us in corrupt form, abandons Yahweh too - for
the sake of its utopia. But if Moses had not proclaimed God in Canaan,
Canaan in God, then Job would have neither language for his accusation
nor light for his rebellious hope. The impulse of Moses holds the entire Old
Testament together, including Messianism, which appears late or rather is
pronounced late. This too, indeed precisely this, is latent in glad tidings whose
proclaimer brings himself and his people into it, with exodus and promise
of the land, land of the promise.
Moses or consciousness of utopia in religion, of religion in utopia

Much that oppresses and makes people cower has accumulated in the Scriptures. But this is preciselywhat is added, laid on to an unsatisfied, permanently
creative religion. The children of Israel themselves shook off a yoke and
followed him who said to Pharaoh: 'Let my people go.' The law with which
the first rabbis, around 450 B.C., after the return from Persian exile, isolated
and held together a people does not belong to the impulse of Moses. Even less
so does the high-throning lord-god whose cult the Israelites had adopted
in Canaan and who is Baal. It is the same Baal whose religion, according to
the recipe of every ruling class, must be kept up for the people. Together
with the triviality and cliched conventionality with which Job's comforters,
those prototypes of all opium-priests, dispense their kind' of trust in God. The
God of exodus is different in nature, in the prophets he proved his hostility
to lords and opium. But he is above all not static in nature, like all pagan gods
until then. For the Yahweh of Moses, right at the beginning, gives a definition of himself, one which over and over again is breathtaking, which
We have departed from the Authorized Version and translated directly from the German, as
Berthelet's variants are important to Bloch's argument here.
12 36
makes allstatics futile: 'God said unto Moses, I will be who I will be' (Exodus 3,
14). * In contrast to the interpolations of the Law and of Baal, it is hereimmaterial
how late such a highly messianic definitionwas insertedinto the original text.
For, complicated though it looksboth linguistically and conceptually, it springs
in its spirit not from any priestly code but from the original spirit of exodus
itself. Eh'je asher eh'je, I will be who I will be, is a name which despite its
ambiguity and interpolatedness reveals Moses' intention, doesnot cover it up.
Yahweh's self-description is ambiguousbecause the verb hajafrom which eh'je
is derived can mean both to be and to become, and it is interpolated because
only later theologycould haveput suchan enigmatic word in place of the word
Yahweh, which it was forbidden to pronounce. Nevertheless the addition here
is autochthonous, i.e. the interpretation of a realintention, the sameintention
which caused the local god of Sinai to move into the futurum of Canaan, as
hisdistant homeland.To gauge the uniqueness of this passage, compareit with
another interpretation, or rather the late commentary on another name of god,
that of Apollo. Plutarchrecords (De EI apud Delphos, Moralia III) that the sign
EI was carved above the gate of the temple of Apollo at Delphi; he attempts
a numerological-mystical interpretation of the two letters but finally comes to
the conclusion that EI means granunatically and metaphysically the same, namely
Thou art, in the sense of the timelessly unchangeable existence of God. Eh'je
asher eh'je, on the other hand, places even at the threshold of the Yahweh
phenomenon a god of the end of days, with futurum as an attribute of Being,
This end-and omega-godwould havebeena follyin Delphi, asin everyreligion
where the god is not one of exodus. However, God as time is in tension with
God as beginning or origin, with which the Egyptian-Babylonian influenced
teaching of the creation in the Bible begins. The Deus Creator of a world
represented as very good and as complete, and the Deus Spes whom Moses
proclaims to his people, do not become completely identical until rabbinical
theology (and later the Credo of the Christian church). The prophets on the
other hand - which is so important and remains so essentially true to the conception of the God of exodus - seldom mention the god of creation and then
almostonly as the intending scene-setter for man: 'For thus saith the Lord that
created the heavens; God himself that formed the earth and made it; he hath
established it, he created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited' (Isaiah
4St 18). Although this goal-description, as one of the kingdom of God among
men, isalready present in the Mosaic storyof the creation, it is uniquely reinforced
"
* Again, we have translated directly &om the German here. The Authorized Version gives 'I
AM THAT I AM', but clearly the future aspect is crucial for Bloch's interpretation.
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
12 37
by the prophets, and memory here completely becomes anticipation:

'Remember the former things of old: for I am God, and there is none else;
declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things
that are not yet done' (Isaiah 46, 9f.). Even in later extended creation
mysticism, which then in the Cabbala became a gnostic mysticism of emanation,
the god of exodus and promise never lost the final power. This penetrated
into gnostic mysticism about the beginning of the world and about the divine
throne-chariot (Merkaba), it aligned both towards the messianic omega.
According to the Cabbala, God even created several worlds, but smashed
them again because man did not occur in them; it is therefore towards him
alone that the creator works. Indeed the attachment to man as the purposecontent of creation becomes, precisely here, so inevitable that the lord of
heaven and earth, who wants to dwell among his people (Exodus 25, 8),
with his people as Eh'je asher eh'je, takes part in all their destinies, right
to the end and precisely to the end. Exile lent the Deus Spes the most painful
radiance because Yahweh himself, together with his people, seemed to have
gone into exile. God as 'shechina', i.e, as the presence of his light, is now,
according to the Cabbala, himself homeless in a creation in which man does
occur but is imprisoned: the shechina shines not from the beginning of the
world but as a messianic light of consolation and hope. One of the greatest
Cabbalists, Isaac Luria (1534-72), introduced the idea of exile even into the
teaching of the creation itself and thereby changes it completely; bereshith,
the beginning, the word with which the Bible opens, thus became the
beginning not of a creation but an imprisonment. The world came into being
as a contraction (tsimtsum) of God, is therefore a prison from its origin,
is the captivity of Israel as of the spiritual sparks of all men and finally of
Yahweh. Instead of the glory of the alpha or morning of creation, the wishful
space of the end or day of deliverance presses forward; it allied itself to the
beginning only as to a primal Egypt which must be set aside. Little though
such ramifications of Mosaism accord with the solemn hymn of Genesis, they
correspond precisely to the original God of exodus and the Eh'je asher eh'je,
the God of the goal. So Deus Spes is already laid out in Moses, although
the image of a last leader out of Egypt, i.e, of the Messiah, does not appear
until a thousand years later; messianism is older than this religion of the
Messiah.
For a new saviour did not seem necessary as long as things were bearable
for the people. Or as long as they believed that only their sins had caused
the disasters that had befallen them. But despite the God-pleasing change
that quickly gained ground in the Jewish church-state from 450 B.C. onwards
123 8
the situation became more and more hellish. The image of a last leader thus
emerges, becoming sharply defined from the second century B.C. onwards,
after the oppression by Antiochus and the war of the Maccabeans. The
dream culminates in the Roman period; Messiah is the secret king, the
anointed of the Lord, the restorer of the kingdom of David. As such he is a
national revolutionary-leader, with romantic radiance, but at the same time,
in the sense of the prophets' universal Zion, ruler in a new period of time
altogether, in a kingdom of God. Thus, in the messianic religion, as well
as the hoped.. for king from the family of David a hoped.. for higher Moses
rises up. The ten plagues, the destruction of the Egyptians in the Red Sea,
become apocalyptic: the precondition for the coming of God's rule is the
annihilation of the power which now holds sway on earth. And the national
revolution itself, despite its smallness, becomes entwined with worldchange, with the new heaven, the new earth. The Messiah-image was multiplied even more powerfully, far beyond such a cosmic Moses, by that of a
divine first man, in accordance with an idea common to Jews and Persians
at this time. In Ezekiel, a contemporary of Zoroaster (c. 600 B.C.), this
divine human form first appears, full of wisdom, in God's garden of Eden,
powerful as a cherub (Ezek. 28, 12ff.). In the famous vision of Daniel
(c. 160 B.C.) the ancestral messianism even puts on this flesh: 'One like
the son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the ancient
of days, and they brought him near before them. And there was given
him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations and
languages should serve him' (Dan. 7, I3f.). The idea of the Messiah was
given its learned formulation in God by Philo, an Alexandrian contemporary ofJesus: the divine first man - the first-created Adam, who is formed
in God's image (Gen. I, 27) and not of dust (Gen. 2, 7) - is the Logos,
the first-born Son of God, indeed the 'second God'. He is no longer just
the anointed of the Lord but an inner-worldly or a man-god. In fact the
other god, the unrecognizable god of heaven, increasingly relinquishes his
pillar of cloud and fire, his exodus and saving power to the Messiah figure;
the Messiah, despite his subordination to Yahweh, is regarded almost as
equal to him, but as the good God, the helper and the good in God. This
is a theological transformation which goes far beyond the sublimation of
Yahweh that had taken place until then; for in the shape of the Son of Man
as a second god it is directed at trust in Yahweh alone. Even though the
latter, through unrecognizability and transcendence which becomes absolute,
moves ever higher: precisely the disparateness of this distance deprives
deprivation of the being to which it could pray. All too great sublimity
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
1239
is transformed qualitatively: it causes a turning away among believers,

because no relation whatever to this transcendence is possible any longer,
and in the case of the god who is believed absolute transcendence becomes
the same as abdication. Indeed sublimity finally becomes just another way
of saying that God has abandoned his people (heaven is high and the Tsar
is a long way off, says a Russian proverb, in correspondence to that
sublimity for which man is too small to be considered). In late Judaism,
as we have seen, in the case ofJob (c. 300 B.C.) and the preacher Solomon
(c. 200 B.C.), a completely anti-Yahwist feeling now broke through, that
the government of the world was evil; and transcendence, which completely
separates God from the world, could then at best be used as a means of
protection against this feeling. Of course it became only a negative means
of protection, not one that could have prevented the formerly praised
saviour-function of Yahweh from being more and more passionately
expected of the divine first man. Thus the idea of the Messiah finally appears
as a scarcely concealable vote of no-confidence, indeed as secession from
Yahweh; in spite of and because of the sublimity which is proclaimed
precisely in the late Psalms. But what is decisive here is that the Mosaic
foundation, even with this most powerful leap, is not shattered. Messianism
is not shattered by the Messiah, even though he is antithetical to Yahweh;
for he is not antithetical to the old exodus-Yahweh who had proclaimed
that he would be Israel's doctor. Although the entire despair of Judea
was needed to put the Messiah beside Yahweh, indeed against him, and
although the idea of the Messiah did not originate solely on Jewish soil
but also, with manifold interchange, in the Persia of Zoroaster, nonetheless
the exodus god was already such that he could not remain a god if, instead
of destroying Pharaoh and his oppressive empire! he himself appeared as
a - pharaoh. It is quite immaterial how far foreign influences played a
part here, it is even more irrelevant how far philological antisemitism seeks
to take not only the decalogue but also the idea of the Messiah away from
the Jews. No analogies whatever to this now-erupted idea of exodus are
to be found in the panegyrics of the Egyptian-Babylonian courtly style,
which praises every lord who happens to be ruling at the time as a saviourking. Undoubted analogies are to be found, as will be seen more clearly, in
the religion of Zoroaster; it, too, has a divine first man, called Gayomard,
and the last appearance of Zoroaster, the Saoshyant who brings the end of
the world, corresponds to the Jewish Messiah (as well as to the paraclete of
the Gospel of St john). But even though the Jews may have been influenced
by these Persian parallelideasduring the Babylonianexile from 586 to 538 B.C.,
1240
and may have retained them after their return, it is in the first place far from
established that these ideas had not previously radiated from Palestine to Iran.
The ancient Persian religion, a natural religion which largely coincides with
the ancient Indian religion, excludes messianism, this eminently historical
religion, just as much as messianism is intended in Moses and already steps
forth bodily in the first Isaiah over a hundred years before Zoroaster: 'And
there shall come forth a rod out of the stem ofjesse, and a branch shall grow
out of his roots' (Isaiah n, I): this passage t which is not interpolated, and
the verses which follow itt definitely contain the messianic idea, even though
they do not, not yet, refer to a divine first man and his return. But then
the authentically apocalyptic developments of messianicreligion, which begin
simultaneously among the Persians, the Jews and not least the Chaldeans,
appear as a work which may have been common to all but in which only
the Jews had all the power of suffering and therefore all the seriousness of
hope on their side. For the Persians under Cyrus, the Chaldeans under
Nebuchadnezzar ruled a world and their god did not need a future in
order to be victorious; thus a significant document, the magnificentgrateful Behistun hymn of Darius, shows how they managed even without
a Saoshyant. Judea, on the other hand, was in such a bad way after the return
of the Jews that it was here for the first time that the belief in the Messiah
became wholly one of explosion and not only of crowning apotheosis. Thus
philological antisemitism here comes almost more to grief than with the
Kenite Yahweh and the decalogue. Reitzenstein from his knowledge of
Iranian mythology observes, at least neutrally: 'It is not that Jewish ideas
of the Messiah are borrowed per se; hopes of a saviour king and a blissful
age whose duration they do not wish to limit arise independently of one
another among the most different peoples and influence one another in
individual features in literary communication' (Das iranische Erlosungsmysterium, 1921, p. 116f.). And Max Weber gives a summary which even
breaks out of neutrality and, rightly, seesmessianism inherent in Moses and
in the prophets themselves: 'The peculiarity of the Israelite expectation is
the increasing intensity with which, whether it be paradise or the saviourking, the former was projected from the past, the latter from the present,
into the future. This did not only happen in Israel; but nowhere else did
this expectation move into the centre of religiosity with such obvious constantly increasing force. The old Berith (Covenant) of Yahweh with Israel,
his promise in association with the criticism of the miserable present made
this possible; but only the force of the prophecy made Israel to this unique
extent into a people of expectation and of waiting' (Gesammelte Aufsatze zur
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
1241
Religionssoziologie III, 1923, p. 249). Consequently the idea of the Messiah

has survived only in its biblical form; only in this form was it experienced
by peoples with suffering and a sense of mission. And because it expressed
that which constitutes the essence of religious longing, with astral-mythic
statics set aside, with all the after-ripening of the exodus god, it is plagiarism,
though plagiarism not just of Persia but of the central utopia of religions
themselves. Every founder of a religion appeared in an aura which belongs to
the Messiah, and every foundation of a religion has, as glad tidings, the new
heaven, the new earth on the horizon, even when both perfectednesses have been
abused by the masters' churches for the idealization, i.e. apologetics of an
existing order. Of course the astral myth of perfection (with a decidedly old
heaven, old earth) always found this easier than did religions with a prominent
founder, pathos of the new, the human in the middle. But as soon as any
founder at all appears an element of the Messiah is posited, and with all glad
tidings a Canaan experiment is involved. Judaism showed the Messiah and
Canaan particularly clearly, yet all religions contain, in a more or lessbrokenoff or mindful form, these destinations, are grouped around them, are crosses
between transitory mythology and invariantly intended messianism. Messianism in religion is the utopia which enables the Utterly Different of religious
content to be mediated in a form in which it contains no danger of lords'
anointment and theocracy: as Canaan in unexplored splendour, as the
wonderful. Judaism became rigid in the armour of the cult laws but messianic
faith was kept alive through allcodifiedepigonism; it was misery, it was above
all the promise in Moses and in the prophets, irrefutable by any empiricism,
which kept it alive. 'Whoever denies messianism denies the whole Torah' ,
says Maimonides; and it is the greatest Jewish teacher of the laws who says
this, a rationalist and no mystic. The glad tidings of the Old Testament run
against Pharaoh and sharpen on this antithesis their lasting utopia of
deliverance. That which is meant by Pharaoh, Egypt and the kingdom of
Edom is just as much the negative pole of Moses' glad tidings as Canaan is
its positive pole. Without Egypt there would be neither exodus nor such evidence of messianism; but if Egypt is engulfed in the sea, the path to the holy
dwelling becomes clear - therefore the Apocalypse, too, is latent in Moses.
Warlike se!fcommitment, mingled with astral light: Zoroaster, Mani

The visible teacher clearly becomes one who wants to bring his people home.
For this he puts his life into the path, into the goal itself, to save his disciples.
12 4 2
Zoroaster also acted thus, on the path to a brighter sun than that which
already burns. This emphatically human founder nonetheless again takes
part again in nature-mythic movements, comes in part at least from ancient
Persian movements, yet expresses in them his utterly different saving quality.
Zoroaster certainly lived, around 600 B.C., the very wild and dense legend
around him began to form only eight hundred years later, in the earlier
Avesta. The Gathas, the collection of Zoroaster's sayings, show a sharply
vivid man, surrounded by doubters, answering them reflectively. The
incipient legend, too, is produced by the palpably powerful impression of
a historical person; Zoroaster inspired people to spin fables. Even in the
most bizarre legend he himself has a human destiny, not that of a fish-man
or moon-scribe. As power and serenity embodied, 'allied with light', this
founder pierces the fables of the Zendavesta and not least its priestly, often
desolate formulae. The legend says that when Zoroaster was born he immediately let out his happy laughter, the world of the good god cried out
for joy with him, the evil spirits fled. An archangel leads the youth to
the glory of the god of light, there he receives the true teaching and the
mysteries of the great division are revealed. 'I made a creation of beauty' ,
Ahuramazda-Ormuzd, the god of light, tells him, 'and Ahriman made a
second creation, one which is man-destroying, made death, winter, sluggishness, from which poverty follows, inexpiable action.' Again and again
there is the antithesis between the winter giant and the god of spring (among
Germanic tribes this is Thor, who smashes the ice with a hammer). This
is the nature-mythic antithesis per se, it was Babylonian, in the struggle
between the dragon of the abyss and Jupiter Marduk, it was ancient Iranian
as well as ancient Indian; the Indian sun-god Mithra is in any event identical
with the Iranian Mithras and the god of light Varuna with Aburamazda.
But while in Babylon the dragon of the abyss is defeated by Marduk tight
at the beginning of the world, with Zoroaster, the exhorting, forwardrelated founder, this does not happen till the end of the world. History
thus enters into astral-mythic statics, the whole world becomes history,
namely a scuffle in which Ormuzd and Ahriman are entangled. After a
glorious life, the Zoroaster of legend falls in the struggle against Ahriman.
But at the end of each of the three millennia which the world still has to go
through after Zoroaster's death, a new prophet grows from his seed, which
is guarded by spirits. The last millennium brings the end of all things, and
with it of course also, as an element of final tension, the threat of Ahriman's
supremacy. But according to the highly chivalric legend the Zarathustra
laughter with which the first Zoroaster had already entered the world grows
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
12 43
to the same degree. The name of the definitive prophet, from the seed
of Zoroaster, the name of this last Zoroaster is Saoshyant, which means:
coming helper. United with him is Vohu mano, which means: spirit of
truth, one of the genii of Ormuzd, and thus, in purification of men and
of the world, Ahriman is defeated by Ormuzd, the gigantic clinch of two
almost equal forces breaks, the hybrid world, shadow world of day and
night ceases. A new one begins, 'free of age and death, decay and putrefaction, full of eternal life and growth'. Zoroaster thus wins as 'the ally of
Ormuzd', he is the first and the last who, with all who belong to the
light, can return to this light. Thus he shows features analogous to the
Jewish Messiah, not to the suffering Messiah who in Jewish legend is
described as the son of Joseph but to the victorious Messiah, the son of
David. Zoroaster, too, bears a name familiar from the Bible, 'one like
the son of man' (Dan. 7, 13); he is Gayomard, which means the bright
first man, as he was from the beginning with Ormuzd. And the last
Zoroaster, the Saoshyant, stands like the Messiah at the end of the days,
the lord of the separation of the good and the evil, of the Last Judgement.
Even the Christian idea of the paraclete (helper, comforter) has one of
its origins in the Saoshyant: the 'spirit of truth', the name by which the
paraclete is prophesied by Jesus (John 16, 13), is Vohu mano, the spirit
of the last Zoroaster. Despite all this of course the nature-mythic intertwining remains, even with such a powerful, most visible entrance of the
founder-person. Zoroaster rejected the ancient-Iranian, Vedic nature religion,
dispatched many of the old gods to hell, consigned the fiends as well as
the genii to the dependent retinue of Ahriman or Ormuzd. However, astralmythic statics, through having so much person, so much world-history as
Last judgement forced into it, is not completely abolished in the teachings of
Zoroaster. Hence the firmly fixed moment of Ormuzd's victory, which is
due after three thousand years. And just as the future here is not open, is not
truly new, but has been set a closed deadline, that which appears in it at
the end does not seem a Novum but the filled quantum of the alreadypresent
light which has merely been blocked and restricted by Ahriman. Thus
the huge person-commitment of the founder, striking through the world
as threefold lightning, is just as hugely and definitively interwoven with
the external heaven. The Jewish apocalypse also, and even more so the
Christian one, draws the cosmos into it, but as a cosmos which is collapsing,
behind which the kingdom lies. The Persian glad tidings do not contain
this break in nature, they remain despite all their exodus in the old space;
consequently for them light is not so much a symbol of good as good
1244
WISHFUL IMAGES OF
TH~
FULFILLED MOMENT
is a symbol of light. But astral myth did not therefore remain the same
as in ancient Babylon or even among the Chaldeans, whose star-worship
extends so far into the Zendavesta. If the seven main lights of heaven are
worshipped, they are worshipped as allies in the struggle, not only as
directors of fate. And if in Zoroaster history is again engulfed in nature,
nature too is engulfed in the path of salvation of an eminently moralized
history. Precisely in the dualism of night and light, Zoroaster perceived
nature as the place of two armies, as a human battleground. The believer,
instead of standing far below, or in fact outside, as in the astral cult, now
puts on the armour of the light-god, just as the light-god in turn needs
believers. And it is not surprising that the teaching of Zoroaster, by virtue
of its dualism, could cultivate intolerance particularly well. When, from
224 A.D. onwards, the Sassanid dynasty regenerated Persia militarily and
nationally, the Mazdaic church which evolved at that time from the
remnants of the Zoroastrian tradition was as tightly organized, indeed more
tightly organized, than the state. It cultivated a strict hierarchy, a scrupulous
ritual and above all a dogma which enabled detailed distinctions to be made
between orthodoxy and heresy. This church, like all others, completely
denied the utopian nature, i.e. the messianic character of its Zoroaster.
It abolished the cosmic-utopian scuffle and thus determined even before
the appearance of the last Zarathustra that, and how, light (the Mazdaic
church) and darkness parted.
Until a new teacher came into the midst of all this rigidity, came precisely
from the old kind. His name was Mani, he was born in 2IS A.D. and crucified
by Mazdaic priests in 273 A.D. In 242 A.D., the year of the coronation
of Sapor I, the second Sassanid king, he made his first appearance in public,
giving the Shah a document on the reform of the Mazdaic religion. Given
the fortress-like development of the state church, it was already too late
for this, but it is significant that with his first work Mani definitely began
to have an effect on Persian soil, as the renewer of Zoroaster. Not for example
as a Chaldean or as an apostle of the Christian heretic Marcion or even,
as has also beep claimed, as a pupil of the Greeks who knew his Plato well
and his doctrine of the wicked soul of the world. It is more likely that
Mani may have been connected with the curious Mesopotamian sect of the
Mandaeans, which his father had joined, among whom he grew up. The
Mandaeans were fanatical believers in the Son of Man, the saviour of the
last days and the world-conflagration; in all their writings the son sent
by the light-father into the depths is the object of their expectation. Not that
the Mandaeans recognized Jesus as this son, on the contrary they regarded
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
12 45
him as a falseMessiah, although]ohn the Baptist probably himself belonged

to a Mandaean order. In a Mandaean apocalypse contemporary with the oldest
Gospels (cf. Reitzenstein, The Mandaean Book of the Lord of Greatness,
1919), the heavenly ambassadoris still expected; thus, two hundred years after
Jesus, Mani, in the sect to which his father belonged, saw the promise of
John the Baptist still unfulfilled. Now the Mandaeans were anything but a.
Chaldean sect, on the contrary, with many cross-connections to contemporary
popular Jewish religion, theyclung to the legacy of Zoroaster. They certainly
do not uphold the modern tearing-away of Mani from Persian culture or
Harnack's theory that Mani's teachings 'are based on Chaldeism, interspersed
with Christian, Parsi and perhaps Buddhist ideas' . Harnack even claims that
it is the 'semitic natural religion removed from its national limits, modified
by Christian and Persian elements and raised up to Gnosis' (Harnack,
Dogmengeschichte 114 , p. 522). This transposition of Mani does slightly
correct the view that Mani was merely an epigone of Parsiism, but at the
price of making him into a late-Babylonian epigone; both views are wrong.
Mani shows undeniable Chaldean influences, but the Chaldean at his time
was itself Iranized from top to bottom. And if the proportion of astral
myth in his teachings appears far greater than in Zoroaster, dualism still
remains dominant, the scarcely cosmomorphic discord between night and
light, and this is Persian. Indeed the moralization of world history no
more occurs in Semitic natural religion than does history itself and the
son of man who moralizes it. Therefore the older interpretation, that Mani
belongs with Zoroaster, once a number of additions and corrections have
been made, particularly with regard to the Mandaeans, is correct. This
becomes clear enough when we turn from interpretations of Mani to the
core of his teaching itself. This core is dramatic; because of the universal
discord in which man finds himself, and it is as drama that the world
process itself unwinds. This drama, Mani teaches, consists of four acts,
corresponding to the four periods which Zoroaster had assigned to the
battle between Ormuzd and Ahriman. And four times the son of man
intervenes, in diverse forms and knighthood, to prevent hope being
wrecked, to rescue the stolen gold light from the prison of the world.
The drama thus becomes an unparalleled battle- and grace-play, an
alchemically illustrated exodus, with the following stages: evil broke into
the heights, light sent its first ambassador, the first man, to combat it. Against
the helpers of the night the ambassador called up his own, against smoke,
fire, darkness, burning wind, poison, he flung ether, fire, light, pure wind,
water. But the black forces engulfed the bright, the first man himself was
taken prisoner, was numbed, forgot his origins. To free him, primal light,
which in Mani is also called by the highly Mandaean name of father of
greatness, sent a second ambassador, the 'life-spirit'. He manages to rouse
the first man from his benumbed state and lead his spiritual being back into
the world of light - but not his helpers. To free them, the light spirit now
performs his second rescue-act: he kills the helpers of darkness, from their
corpses heaven and earth are formed. The light spirit therefore operates as a
demiurge, but in such a way that heaven and earth are created by him
in their form but not in their matter, which consists of smoke, fire, darkness,
burning wind and poison. Except for the sun, moon and stars: these consist
of parts of the light engulfed by darkness. But to begin to set free the
other, still imprisoned light-elements, the primal light sends its third
ambassador, the 'spirit of the leading wise man', and at his side the 'maiden
of light'. The third act of creation begins as that of movement: only the
stars remain in the firmament and tied to its revolution, sun and moon
however become bodies circling between earth and heaven. The spirit of
the leading wise man takes up residence in the sun, the maiden of light
(Helen, Sophia) takes up her residence in the moon; from here they keep
the work of light-deliverance going. There now occurs one of the loveliest
wishful interpretations of the sun and the moon known in myth, one that
can scarcely have appeared before Mani, Sun and moon, in Mani's now
soteriological astral myth, become two heavenly ships which load up with
the performed good deeds and the departing souls of good people and bring
the light thus removed from the world back to the kingdom of the first
man and of Ormuzd. The moon in its phases is interpreted as a barque
which fills with light (a perspective which indicates the deep south, for
it is only in countries near the equator that the new moon appears horizontally, a boat floating in the air); but the sun passes upwards the light brought
out by the moon in- the 'pillar of praise'. The twelve signs of the zodiac
through which the sun runs and to which it offers its flood of brightness
are here visualized as the spokes of a huge water-wheel or as the buckets
of a lifting mechanism. But if the microcosm is a prison of light, the
macrocosm is one great mechanism for the deliverance of light; the myth
of the soul's heavenly journey (cf. Vol. III, p. III8ff.) is thereby dedemonized. But equally the planets are deprived of their idle rotations, this
harmony of the spheres of mere circling. On the contrary, Mani praises this
music as a divinely-ascending, death-conquering power, hence as one which
is in contact only with the sun-ship and with light-deliverance by the entire
cosmos. In contrast to Babylon and Chaldea, Mani teaches that the moon
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
12 47
and the sun are not gods but ways of reaching god; astral myth thus begins
to move against itself, astrology becomes cosmic alchemy. As such Mani's
entire universe stands, insofar as it is moved, insofar as it leads out the
gold light; Manichaeism remained the religious background to alchemy.
Yet it is still necessary to send a fourth ambassador, for the night, too, is
now preparing to strike. One of its forces has formed on earth the first .
men from the remaining light, on the model of the first man, the lifespirit, the leading wise man. The main part of the remaining light is now
imprisoned in Adam and Eve, their bodies are a work of darkness, but
their forms and their souls are modelled on and follow the light. It is to
break open this last prison of light that the fourth and last ambassador now
appears, at the same time a definitive incarnation of the divine first man.
He appeared, as Mani explained, with a magnificent change of form, in
Mani's own genealogy, he appeared to the Persians as Zoroaster, to the
Indians as Buddha, to the people of the West as Jesus (distinguished from
the historical Jesus, the Jesus of Peter rather than Paul). He appears finally
in Mani and as Mani, who is the paraclete, the Vohu mano of Zoroaster,
the spirit of truth. A gnostic here for the first and last time in history
becomes a prophet, more than that, a crown prince of god; his vocation
is: knowledge which redeems. Thus the work of the deliverance of Adam,
cosmogony, turns into ethics of salvation, into an asceticism and hatred
of the flesh which finally differs from Zarathustra's world-powerful teaching
and displays Buddhist characteristics. For the Zendavesta taught that
Ormuzd had created both body and soul; Mani, on the other hand, sees
in the body only the work of the devil, which must be cast aside. But
there is a difference from Buddha, too, because Mani's asceticism is not
merely individual but at the same time cosmic; it is a partial process of
the cosmic final process. Consequently four acts of initiation correspond
to the four above-mentioned cosmogonic acts, even though Manichaeism,
as far as is known, did not contain an elaborated, sensuous-symbolical
mystery cult. Yet the connection between the higher ranks of the Manichaean
order, the electi, and the universal, as it were itself ascetic nature process
cannot be thought of as close enough. The electi of Mani are truly put into
the world like retorts in order to distil the stolen light-matter from it; they
are the living art of chemical separation, with a cosmic goal. The goal is the last
anti-Ahriman act, the razing of the world fortress; the sun and moon also
cease their work of excavation then. When the last messenger of god 'shows
his image' the dark matter collapses, the world burns, the unmixed original
state of night below but light on high fills the universe. The rigidity of death
below, in the shattered prison, freedom and brightness above: this

constitutes the triumph of the divine plan over the 'king of darkness'.
Thus end the glad tidings of one of the most comprehensive systems of
religion, striving in all its fables towards the residence of light. A natural
light which nonetheless is aimed at throughout history and which does
not shine completely until the end of time. The continuing influence of
this powerful heliotropy was great, although or because it did not establish
a lasting church, and it is not yet extinguished. Mani became the teacher
of Augustine until about his thirtieth year; even as a Christian, Augustine
did not overcome the influence of the doctrine of the war of light. In
his work the devil and God fight out in history what in Mani takes place
on the scene of nature. Augustine even heightens the distinction between
night and light, between civitas terrena and civitas Dei in the course of
history; as in Mani the process ends undialectically, as the rigid separation
of hell and heaven. The more gentle as well as complete solution of Origen,
apocatastasis or the bringing in of all things, even of hell, into paradise,
is rejected by Augustine, undoubtedly influenced by Persian dualism. It
was from Persia that the belief in the devil captured the entire underground
of the world, with all the reactionary ideology to which it was so suited;
but it was from here too that the mysticism of light advanced, militant as
far as the Cathars, symbolic as far as the halo, indeed the colour hierarchy
of church windows. Ormuzd is the god with whom the sun comes, who
opens the world wide for light, who beats the gold brightness from the
crust: thus Mani himself mythologically founded the wishful dream of
alchemy. Good people even on the miniatures of a Persia which had become
Islamic do not cast a shadow, because this is Ahriman; but holy men inevitably stand in fire and brightness. Thus in-Christianity as well as in Islam,
in the continuing influence of Mani on both, light becomes the material
of the divine in and fQ' itself. Light becomes the gate and the content
of purity, a content which constantly expresses itself through its antithesis
to flesh, greed for possession, attachment to the world, power, externals.
Hence the continuing influence of Mani, i.e. of his sharply antithetical
password, right up to the great heretical movement of the Albigensians;
not without reason were they called the neo-Manichaeans. Whether because
Manichaean circles had continued to exist, especially in Provence, since
the end of the classical age; or because, at the beginning of the eleventh
century, trade with the orient brought over from the east hybrid ChristianManichaean doctrines such as those of the Armenian Paulicians or the
Bulgarian Bogumils. At any rate, the sharp dualism between world and
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
1249
light, power and' spirit, gave Albigensianism a revolutionary ideology on

top of its Christian-spiritual ideology. The devil's offer of all the kingdoms
of the world and the rejection of this temptation by Jesus (Luke 4, 5-8):
this genuinely Mandaean legend was now especially sharpened again by
the neo-Manichaeans: the Pope was Satan, power as a whole was Ahriman,
the Christian withdrew from their service. Lux pura was the sign on the
neo-Manichaean flag, as it had been on Mani's; as such it was to be hoisted
on the ruins of the destroyed world-fortress. In Mani's case, of course,
this was an already-present light, one that is merely not complete, not
one coming up within itself, as with Moses, then Jesus. And the ZoroasterMani kingdom is not made from the material of the son of man but finally
from that of natural light, of an externality, though of a radically good
one. Thus right to the end the self-commitment of Mani and Zoroaster,
so highly energetic and substantial, is mingled with nature, indeed lands
in it. Such cosmic landing at the end has the negative quality of not allowing
the self of religious commitment to finish speaking; yet this landing also
of course has the merit that it leads out of a mere aspatial Being-Within.
The corrective which objective astral myth as a whole, in Egypt and
Babylon, forms against pure inwardness is present on a new level in Mani.
And is all the more instructively present because the subject here is not
absent, in the powerful entwinement of ethical-religious with natural
categories. Lux pura in the Manichaean sense is no puritanism, dwelling
in inner light and nowhere else. It is just that nature, as it rightly stands
above history, remains static here, alreadyfixed in its external value-elements
of night and light; on the place which it occupies no human kirigdom
whose content has not come into being is intended. Light as physically
present is blasted out of the compound product world and returned to
the treasury of Ormuzd. This is the doctrine of salvation of dualism it draws the spirit from the night, as if it were merely concealed and buried
beneath it.
Redemptive self-commitment, limited to acosmos,

related to nirvana: Buddha
The visible founder finally wants to become the way which he teaches.
No glance is directed upwards any longer, faith becomes the following
of one who is striding ahead. Buddha wanted to be nothing but this way
and its path, freed from suffering, worldless, traced out for all men in
12 50
one. With none of the founders who have appeared so far does one see the
doctrine so preciselytransformed into way, into a way which of course leads
straight to nirvana. Buddha appeared at the end of the sixth century B.C.,
at a time when the ancient Indian religion of the Vedas was stifled with
formulae, superficialized into ritual. The Indian religion itself was not
originally intent on being lost to the world let alone to the gods as well.
The Vedas, which date back to the pre-Aryan period, are to a large extent
nature-mythic, are not without the juicy wishes of a peasant and warrior
race. Sacrifices, cults, magic rites, even vows and acts of mortification were
intended to achieve nourishment in this world, cattle, horses, long life
and revenge on enemies. Only the dead person is apart from the world,
but in such a way that, united with the fathers, he sees Yama, the king
of the dead, with reward for good works in heaven. The most solemn
part of the Vedas, the collection of hymns, is still for the most part devoted
to nature gods, storm and cloud gods, the fire god Agni, the storm and
heaven god Indra, the frenzied god of libation Soma. The Puranas, which
themselves purport to be part of the Vedas and contain the authentic legends
of Indian mythology, are boundlessly polytheistic; the deeds of the gods
are even more boundlessly entwined in the monstrous, in the inextricably
gigantic. This serves as an astonishing foil to atonement, coolness,
withdrawal into self, glimpses of repose, which do of course already break
through the wilderness of gods in the Rigveda, the oldest part of the Vedas.
And certainly the Upanishads of around 800 B.C., which form the last
part of the Vedas, contain distant light, Himalayan light, whose kind of
nirvana permits no peasant- and war-myth, let alone any approach to the
jungle of gods. Unrest has now made itself into the strongest seeker for rest,
Buddha's 'path of redemption' has its first starting point here. In the
Upanishads an apprentice is shown the world figures so that he may recognize
them, in their terrors and their allurement, as illusion, and at every figure,
whether tiger, cloud, king or nightmare, the exorcistic formula intones: Tat
tvam asi, You are thus. The Upanishads are no longer polytheistic, but
pantheistic: the self (Atman) is not only one with all other beings but also
one with Brahma, the world soul. Brahma sees, hears and knows in every
individual soul, is the all-seeing, all-hearing, all-understanding throughout
all beings; he is the Only One, in whom all striving is extinguished and the
veil of Maya, i.e. the multiplicity of the illusory world, is torn. Yet Buddha's
'path of redemption' has its second starting point in the rationalistic-atheistic
Sankhya philosophy which began around 600 B.C., not in the Himalayas
but in the towns of the lower Ganges, to the east of the old Brahman
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
I2SI
country. The individual self here fell completely, it became a transitory

aggregate, a skandha or heap, just like external things. But above all in
Sankhya philosophy Brahma, the divine substance, fell; it likewise belongs
to Samsara, to the illusion of the fixed figure-world. Sankhya and the
heritage of the Upanishads, especially as contained in mystical Vedanta
philosophy (Vedanta == end, goal, true intention of the Vedas), thusformed
the preconditions for Buddha's decision: as self without selfness and
completely without Brahma to be the founder-figure whose way leads out
of the suffering of the world, which is the incurable impulse of illusion
towards the world. This narrow goal-pointing in his doctrine is unparalleled,
the elimination not only of Brahman ritual and the jungle of the gods
but of all knowledge that does not prove itself to be redemptive. This
was a concision which of course did not and could not survive in the
dissemination of such an esoterically remote message; only an indication
of this is visible in the symbol of the Buddha figure, in the overwhelming
mystery of its gain and of its absorption. The Buddha teaching itself also
mixed" with nature-mythic ideas about it which continued to exist undisturbed; an increasing host of Brahman gods fought their way back again.
Four hundred years after Buddha the form of Buddhism was developed by
Nagarjuna which has survived in Tibet and which, with added ingredients,
went on to Japan and China. It is calledMahayana, i.e, large vehicle, for broad
deliverance from the ocean of Samsara; the older, stricter teaching, which
is called Hinayana, i.e. small vehicle, has survived only partly in Ceylon.
Whereas among the people the Buddha figures have become fetishes, the holy
writings have become magic charms and nirvana has again become the
opulence of the old heaven of gods, augmented even by a hell, the form of
Mahayana has to some extent retained Buddha's atheism, but in return has
disseminated the god Buddha almost polytheistically through times and
spaces. A many-layered universe appears instead of the original uninterestedness in world, time, space, a universe that is filled with Buddhas-to-be
(Boddhistas) and with entire systems of Buddha worlds. But whether the
Mahayana of the crowd, with its often wildly rigid mythology, or the
Hinayana of the scholars: the teaching of Buddha was abandoned precisely in
its major article of faith: that of acosmism. Between 1200 and 1400 A.D.
Buddhism disappears in India proper, perhaps because of its opposition to
the caste system, which developed in post-Buddhist times, although only
one caseofpersecution has been recorded; Hinduism, the developed Brahmanic
form of religion, took its place. With yogis in its train, whose contemplation
had not so much nirvana as magical power over the world as its goal. With the
1252
trinity of Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva over all the much-entangled gods and godkings, over the genii, elephants and demons of ancient Indian legend; not
forgetting the dreadful Kali, wife of Shiva, who demands human sacrifice.
Apart from the Hindu church only the scarcely original sect of jainism
remained, founded by Mahavira, a contemporary of Buddha, a sect which
initially also rejected gods, myth and cult but then vied with the Brahmans
in the building ofbarbaric and even more extensive temples. Buddha remains
by contrast that which has become free, religion without god and gods, with
myth below and behind it. The founder goes on ahead of his believers as
Tathagata, i.e. he who redeems himself; as such, of course, he is finally again
the one who is scattered. The peculiar atheism prevented this kind of subjectiveness - an entire contraction of religion to the darkening Buddha-way least of all. Atheism here became religion because a man, with a content
abstracted from world and from gods, moved into the new layer in which
the gods were no longer to be found, not even as illusions. Outside this layer
they are not completely united in Buddha, for otherwise they could not be
overhauled, on the contrary they have the reality of illusion, to which they
belong like all the hazy realities of this world. Atheism thus becomes a part
of immense acosmlsm, which constitutes the consequence of this thoroughgoing doctrine of illusion, in world as in supra-world. Of course, it was only
at the price of acosmism, this incredibly high price, that atheism was purchased
here, and thus it itself became transcendental-religious. Then precisely the
person of the founder, the utterly human hope-way person Buddha, the
person of the world, remains finally extremely visible, as the first to dissolve
into nirvana. Instead of immersion in Brahma as divine nirvana, as the
Upanishads teach, comes immersion in a nirvana completely without forms.
In a centre of repose where instead of exodus, and as this per se, exitus enters
into itself. 'Just as the great ocean', Buddha explained in the rules of his order,
'has only one taste, that of salt, so, too, my teachings and rules have only
one characteristic: redemption'; but redemption from world as well as from
god. It conquers as total abstraction, its location is the completely abolished
cosmos, is the acosmos and atheos of nirvana.
A man exemplified this who wanted to make suffering in itself dwindle
away. Not specific suffering from onething or another but suffering from
a wretched existence as a whole and above all, so to speak thoroughly, from
its cause. But this cause itself is not supposed to be specific. least of all social,
consisting of lords and serfs. It is supposed to be quite universal, is called
Tanha, desiring, thirst, and as such it is the same everywhere; particular crass
misery merely opens the eyes to the entire incurable condition. The nobleman
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12 53
Buddha became clear-sighted in this way on seeing a beggar, he experienced

Tat tv am asi as compassion. The sermon at Benares on the four holy truths
of suffering by which Buddha won his first disciples adds to compassion
discernment, which sought to bring the individual out of the world. The
lord of mercy proclaims the teaching of the origin of suffering, of the
annihilation of suffering, of the path leading to the annihilation of suffering.
Buddhism knows neither wishes nor wishful prayers, yet the only prayer
which it nonetheless contains says: 'Mayall beings be happy today'; this is
already to be found at the end of ancient Indian plays. Buddha made it
central. If the cause of existence as suffering is thirst, the cause of existence
as illusion is ignorance: 'Not knowing (the source of suffering) is the sole
reason for the appearance of the world.' Thirst tortures just as endlessly
as illusion, which drives thirst from one phantasm to the next, leaving it
eternally unsatisfied: Tanha, desiring, Samsara, the world of illusion, must
therefore both disappear in the same act of reduction. Or as the Dhammapada
strophe says, referring to the chimaera as monster, positing chimaeras as
illusions: 'Once the house-builder is seen, from then on he can no longer
build the house.' The serene, the drive-deadened, the drying up of delusion
come over the world as truth, one great coming-to-rest, coming-to-an
end. The merciless driver disappears, the wheel of rebirths stands still,
the chain of karma breaks, i.e. the existence effect of crime and punishment, with merit and its reward in every new life, disappears as a whole,
in the core as well as in the appearance. As noted, only suffering per se
is dealt with here, such a universal and at the same time such a deep-seated
core of its causation that social reasons or even intensifications of this
suffering do not lie iIi the field of vision at all. Thus every attempt at
social upheaval was trivialized; beggars and kings, starvation and the puking
wish-fulfilment of excess come together in undifferentiated world-weariness
and equally in the last, in the escape-wish of total wish-extinction. Thus
distraction came through ostensible concentration, and all this in the complicated connection between enervating acosmism and bold atheism - as if
both Nos were the same. It was from this side, from the equation of all
change with futility, of all promotion of happiness with illusion, that a
form of neo-Buddhism, through Schopenhauer, also became influential in
Europe. When attempts were made to make the bleakness of capitalist
existence the condition of the world per se and hence one which could
not be cancelled out in the world. And every similar, form of interested
pessimism, every nihilism, lives on such relaxation, even when this relaxation
in the original, in Buddha himself, was nowhere intended and taught as
12 54
cowardly weariness but everywhere as the fruit of the highest concentration.

But the other side of Buddha's teaching of salvation was not considered,
the side on which no trivialization through ostensible radicalization, no
world-toleration through all-abstracting world-negation takes place. For if
Buddha says that not knowing is the only reason for the continuing existence of the appearances of this world, this proposition contains are-evaluation
of the function of knowledge which - in its consequence - differs truly radically
from every merely apologetic affirmation of the world. Here there is not
only an overtaxing of the tension between appearance and essence according
to which when the essence of an appearance has been recognized a reconciliation (to a greater or lesser extent Hegelian) with the appearance takes
place. But even the essence, indeed precisely this, is regarded by Buddha
not as that which is to be confirmed by knowledge, but as that which is to be
changed by knowledge. Here too the bad appearing is undoubtedly assigned
to appearing per se, an inadequate world to Being-World per se, and a
thirst essence which sates itself only in misery, which is not to be sated
with anything that has yet happened, is assigned to the essence of intention, essence of tendency per see And knowledge becomes the same as
the practice of world annihilation pure and simple, as if the truth of the
world were its destruction, precisely through knowledge of its essence
itself, in which according to Buddha salvation is least to be found. But
equally undoubtedly something world-changing is posited - and this for
the first time in religion - in Buddha, is posited in men themselves as
tathagata, i.e. as the central point of a changing of ways. And by virtue
of atheism this happens not through prayer but through the will which
has become knowing - though of course only, unfortunately for this kind
of salvation, through the acosmic, overflowing, all-escapingwill to non-will.
And in this flinging back of the bad into nothingness there is least place of
all for a reckoning; this total contempt is meant even in its effect to be a
happening as if nothing was happening. The entrance to nirvana must
accordingly itselfbe the most peaceful- but again as a prodigious heightening,
over-heightening of the knowledge-faith which believes that purely from
itself it can change the world into non-world and, if it worships no gods,
also believes that it has no adversary to fear or to combat. W4jch is why the
destruction of the world in and through illumination passes off quite noiselessly, without cosmic catastrophe: illusions have no apocalypse. This too,
with its high temperature and crashing dreadfulness, would according to
Buddha's philosophy also belong to illusions, the feverish dream of existence;
at the entrance to nirvana no fire-elements operate, becauseequally there are no
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
1255
longer any gods to receive the souls. About this, nirvana as obliteration,
Buddha's practice of knowledge teaches nothing, there is no answer to
this question, the question itself was treated almost as heresy by Buddha.
Only this much becomes negatively clear in this obliteration, that it must
still in all in its category-less non-plenitude be determined by that in it
which - as acosmos, atheos - extinguishes and obliterates. Hence a specific
Indian kind of cosmos does after all, against the intention, impart itself
with a negative imprint to nirvana, namely as abstractly abandoned, as
the emptiness or abstract negation of that which was previously filled by
the cosmos. The cosmos which is abstracted from here is certainly not
that of an astral myth, as in Egypt and Babylon: on the contrary, Buddha's
abandoned cosmos can be none other than the wild-gigantic cosmos of
Indian mythology. But both by contrast to this world and by the hollow
space geometry of the emptied cosmos something strangely inorganic is
nonetheless present in nirvana, a gravity in all its infinite lightness,
something sealed by sleep despite all landing beyond sleep and waking.
Along with this inorganic aspect there even comes an element of that
magnificently closed quality which the statue of the god Buddha manifests
in such contrast to the wild sculptures of gods in Hindu temples; a closedness
not only out of concentration but also out of geometry, out of a smile
in the sleep-crystal. The figures of Buddha from the classical Gupta epoch
in particular show a quite clear mathematical structure based on the triangle
and circle: as reflection of the unreflectible but symmetrically described
nirvana. This is repose not of this world, yet a repose which touches highly
paradoxically on the Egyptian aspiration to become like stone. For the abstract
devotion to nirvana does not contain that emphatically New towards the
cosmos such as the Christian utopia of kingdom presents, the worldovercoming, not world-abstracting leap by virtue ofapocalypse and heavenly
Jerusalem. But why the smile in the sleep-crystal? - the bliss of nirvana which
after all is ultimately something utterly different from the hollow space
geometry of acosmos? - the symbolism of the Buddha statue, the lines of
initiation in it, which yet seem to impart a quite different cipher than the negative counterpart to external geometry? This kind of thing proves again and
again that a particular kind of self-commitment, extinguishing itself, has
entered into the hoped-for salvation here; but that it is present precisely in
extinction, as extinction. This presence, which is therefore ultimately marked
in Buddha's smile, is inconceivable in astral myth a limine, even in Chinese
Tao it is weak, contemplative, directed to the edge of a landscape. Despite all
this the blissof nirvana remains freelysuspended, hypostatized to itself, without
12 56
supports or anything supported. The rest is silence or sleep-crystal out

of Nothing of all, out of All as Nothing, out of Nothing as All.
Unconscious-objectless extinguishedness, which of consciousness and object
leaves only the smile of bliss, in which both have disappeared ~ these are
the glad tidings of acosmic salvation - as if non-world were already like
heaven.
Founder from the spirit of Moses and the exodus, completely

identical with his glad tidings: Jesus, apocalypse, kingdom
Yea countless people think it a powerful great fantasy. They cannot judge
otherwise than that it is impossible that such a game could be set up and carried
out, to throw the godless from the throne of judgement and to raise up the
lowly rough people... As it must happen and be held to us all with the coming
of faith, that we men of flesh and earth are to become gods through Christ's
becoming man and with him are God's pupils, indeed by him are taught and
made gods, indeed far more, we are completely changed into him, in order
that earthly life may swing into heaven, Philipp. 3.
Thomas Munzer, Expressed Exposure of False Faith
Prayers are said to a child born in a stable. No glance into the heights can
be broken downwards in a closer, more humble, more homely way. At
the same time the stable is true, such a low origin for the founder is no
invention. Legend does not paint misery, certainly not that which lasts
a whole lifetime. The stable, the carpenter's son, the visionary among simple
people, the gallows at the end, this is taken from historical stuff, not the
golden stuff beloved of legend. Yet, as with Moses, attempts have been
made to dissolveJesus into pure legend, with no one behind it. According
to this view, Jesus no more really lived than William Tell, Herod did
not need to massacre the innocents, and Pilate washes his hands not in
innocence but in thin air. Undoubtedly Jesus is surrounded with myth, yet
this is only the framework into which a man entered, which was filled by a
man. The framework was one of expectations: precisely as such it is also
important for the existence of Christ, for his appearancein unrest, prophecy,
year-god myth. The unrest was the political one in the Jewish land which
longed for a leader. A strong king of the House of David, capable of driving
out, of banishing the Roman occupiers. From here came Jesus' first
followers, his ride into Jerusalem and the readiness to start singing the
hosanna, the acclamation for ancient Israelite kings. Prophecy provides the
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
12 57
second, far broader expectation motif, one that was widespread throughout
the entire Roman empire. Hellenic kings had long since taken upon themselves the title of Soter (saviour), which came from ancient oriental court
ceremonial. Precisely at the time of Christ's birth this title fell to Augustus,
the hoped-for emperor ofpeace; at the same time the Egyptian Horus myth of
the divine child converged with the image of the saviour. Genuinely Roman,
yet already interwoven with messianic strands from the Roman jewish community, perhaps dating back to Horace, was the further association of the
imperator with memories of the Golden Age, with the Age of Saturn. Thus
the famous prophecy in Virgil's Fourth Eclogue refers to Augustus: 'Now
the virgil) returns, and with her the reign of Saturn, now a new generation
descends from heaven. The child whose rule will end the iron age and bring
back the golden age of the world, protect him, chaste Lucina, thy Apollo
already rules ... Behold the world is swaying on its shaken axis, the earth,
the seas in their infinite expanse, heaven and its deep vault, how all nature
trembles with hope of the coming ages (Aspice ventura laetantur ut omnia
saecula). ,. Even the word evangelium, in the new meaning of glad tidings
which change everything, also exists outside Judea, but refers to the emperor,
not to the king of the Jews. As in an altar inscription from Priene in Asia
Minor, celebrating the birth of Augustus, not of Christ jesus: 'This day has
given the world a new aspect, it would have been engulfed if a common joy
for all men had not revealed itself in the new-born child. He judges right
who sees in this birthday feast the beginning of life and of all life-forces for
himself; at last the time when one had to regret being born is over. Providence
has endowed this man with such gifts that it has sent him to us and to coming
generations as the sorer: he will end feuding, will shape everything
magnificently. The birthday of the god has ushered into the world the
evangelia associated with him, from his birth a new era begins. ' The strange
ecstasy of such celebrations of the emperor's birthday indicates what faith in
miracles and redemption, what need for it was going around even in Christ's
time in the Roman empire. The peace and legal security which Caesarism,
born out of anarchy, had brought are not enough to explain these exuberant
tributes, especially as they by no means overlap with the later cult of the
emperor. On the contrary, a strange sense of a new era, an imminent transition, of the end of the Iron Age, was prevalent throughout the Roman empire.
It is from here, too, and not only from the Mandaean prophecy Oohn the
Baptist) that the liturgical form in Luke 2, 14 rings out: 'Glory to God in the
* 'Look to the future so that all generations may rejoice.'
12 58
highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.' And thirdly the year-god
myth, an astral-mythically tinged expectation motif, completes this still external,
merely general framework around Jesus. By no means the life but the
death ofJesus now enters the framework of the year- or vegetation-god who
descends and rises up again. The cult of this god was widespread in Asia Minor
in Christ's time, strongly mixed with Orphic-Dionysian images of Die and
become. * There was lamentation and rejoicing over the Phrygian Attis, about
the Babylonian-Phoenician Tammuz (the same who was to serve to make Joseph
in the pit completely mythical); both are nature gods who flourish and disappear. At the beginning of spring a felled spruce-tree was set up in honour of
Attis, wreathed with violets, decked out with the image of the god and swathed
in bandages like a corpse; the fir-tree was carried at the head of a procession
in the Roman Attis cult on 22 March (cf. Ed. Meyer, Geschichte
des Altertums, 12 , 1913, P: 724f.). The start of spring and the summer
solstice were here, in the Attis cult and that of Tammuz (hellenized to
Adonis), combined or telescoped; the death rites were held on the first day
of spring and two days later the resurrection feast was observed. Indeed the
god who had fallen into distress was not only lamented but also mocked here:
at least it is recorded that at the PersianSacaean festival, which is connected
with the calendar cult in Asia Minor, the dying year-god was played by a
slave in royal robes who was given the title of Zoganes or by a criminal condemned to death who was mockingly honoured as king. Hence, for example,
the mocking of Christ by Roman soldiers (Matt. 27, 28f.): he is hailed as
king of fools, with purple cloak, wooden sceptre, crown of thorns. Thus from
the year-god mysterium came a mythical schema into which Christ's death,
his Good Friday, largely fitted. In this case in forms in which even the death
on the cross, a real occurrence, even less impressive than the birth in a stable,
enveloped itself with or combined with the ceremonies of a calendar-god.
Yet as noted, with all these images ofexpectation, with Jewish unrest, Roman
prophecy, near-Eastern year-god myth, the attempt to dissolve the historical
Jesus into legend still does not succeed. On the contrary, the life and gospel
ofChrist contrast especially sharply and concretely with the generality of the
framework of expectation, and even with the later cult-image gospel about
Christ. Christianity was thus prevented from becoming such a pneumatic
and theosophical religion as the neo-Docetism of the so-called Christ myth
makes it into a mythologists' religion. And finally, even more than the birth
in a stable and the death on the cross, Christ's influence as a person on his
* See Vol. I. pp.
309-10
and n.
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
1259
disciples proves his reality. IfJesus were invented, if his person had only been
interpolated later into the myth, then the earliergospels would be imaginativespeculative and only the later ones historicist; yet the precise opposite is the
case.Jesus undoubtedly appeared in a whole storm-light of myth, and this
light was in himself, indeed even Mandaean apocalyptics, to which no Christmyth alludes, was more powerful than the three above-mentioned expectations put together. But the founder of the religion, who animates and fills
that which came together eschatologicallyaround him from myths, towards
the 'fullness of time', cannot himself be confused with nature gods. Least
of all when his gospel is as alien as Moses to nature myth. Whether because
vegetation merely provides parables for an utterly different seed or because
the vault of heaven has space only for the clouds on which the Son of Man
returns. But above all the account of thefounder's life, derivedfrom the recollection of so many witnesses, has no parallelsin the legends and holy adventures
of Attis, Mithras or evenOsiris. The realfigure ofJesus shows an aspectwhich
is least inventible of all, because least expectable: shyness. This is seen in his
early belief that he was only a preacher (Mark I, 38), in the warded-off event
of Caesarea Philippi of which he charges his apostles not to speak (Mark 8,
27ff.) and which makes the preacher into the Messiah. The stable at the
beginning and the gallows at the end scarcely fitted into the legendary image
of the saviour, but shynessis completely alien to it. Likewise the temptations
and despondencies of Jesus are uninventible, they say Ecce homo, not AttisAdonis. His last,feaifulsupper, his despair in Gethsemane, his abandonment on
the cross and his exclamations: they do not accordwith any legend of the Messiahking, nor even with that of the suffering Messiah. The latter would not have
gone through the agony of doubt, he would, like so many later martyrs, have
derived a senseof fulfilment from the suffering. Indeed preciselythe gnosticDocetic dissolution of Christ into pure logos, light, life and other hypostasis
which is only beginning in the Gospel of St John would undoubtedly have
succeeded completely if it had not been for the historical-realresistance which
the person of Christ put up; a vegetation god would not have put up this
resistance. Thus Christian faith more than any other lives from the historical
reality ofitsfounder, it is essentially the imitation of a life on earth, not of a
cult-image and its gnosis. This real memory acted over the centuries: the
imitation of Christ, however great the internalization and spiritualization,
was primarily a historical and only as such a metaphysical experience. This
concrete nature of Christ was important for his believers, it gave them, in
stunning simplicity, what no cult-image or heavenly image could have
given them. It made even heaven, in the sense of a merely baptized astral
1260
myth, empty and flat. No Attis mystes, however many exercises in the
visualization of his god he had performed, could have spoken as Thomas a
Kempis did: 'I would rather wander as a beggar on earth with you than
possess heaven without you. Where you are is heaven and where you are not
is hell and death' (The Imitation of Christ, III). And finally, an absolutely
decisive point, leading completely out of the general-mythic framework into
the religious-philosophical Novum: if Christianity is not a baptized natural
or astral heaven, it is equally notheaven asthethrone-room ofYahweh. Jesus put
himself as the Son of Man into this Above, is more precisely present in this
superhumanization of his God than Zoroaster or Buddha. He did not put
in existing man but the utopia of something humanly possible whose core
and eschatological fraternity he exemplified in his life. God, who was a
mythical periphery, became the humanly commensurate, humanly ideal
central point, thecentral point at every place in thecongregation which gathers
in his name. This required a founder who was convincing, a founder in whom
the word became flesh, tangible flesh, crucifixus sub Pontio Pilato. This
required the uncounterfeitable delicacy of a hubris which presents itself with
such calm assurance that it was not and is not even perceived as such.
A man appeared here as simply good, this had never happened before. With
a characteristic downward attraction, towards the poor and the despised, yet
not at all condescending. With upward rebellion against above, unmistakable
are the lashes of the whip against the money-changers and all 'who afflict
my people'. It is not long before the tables are turned and the last become
first. Poverty is closest to salvation, wealth prevents it, inwardly and outwardly . But poverty for Jesus certainly is not already a component of salvation,
so that it does not need to be eliminated. Nowhere is poverty, ordinary,
inflicted, wretched poverty, defended; only voluntary poverty is recommended, and this advice is given only to the wealthy, to the rich young man
(Matt. 19, 21). The Son of Man certainly did not praise the fact that he had
nowhere to lay his head. And even voluntary poverty is not seen as an end
in itself, at least insofar as the recommendation to poverty is given and love
does not choose the poor; more about this later. Remaining poor is seen as
a means of preventing the stony heart, of promoting the brotherly
community. This community, built on principles of love-communism, wants
to have no rich members, but also no poor members in the forced, deprived
sense. 'Neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed
was his own; but they had all things common' (Acts, 4, 32), and the
goods are collected from donations, sufficient for the brief period of time
which Jesus had assigned the old earth. The words about the lilies of the
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
1261
field * and the birds of the air] is certainly not economically naive, on the
contrary is prudent in a visionary way. For if the feet of those who are to
bury the world and its care are standing at the door, economic provision for
the day after tomorrow becomes foolish. Equally the advice to render to
Caesar the things that are Caesar's (Mark 12, 17) teaches not acquiescence
in the world, as St Paul later argues, but contempt; soon there will be nothing
left of Caesar's. The talent which must be turned to good account is only
goodness or the inner treasure. This treasure is recovered by the imitation of
a love which no longer wanted anything for itself, which is prepared to give
its life for its brothers. Classical love was eros towards the beautiful, the
brilliant, Christian love turns instead not merely to the oppressed and the
lost but to the inconspicuous among them. Only this reverse movement of
classicallove makes the partiality for the poor an end in itself after all, precisely
that which follows from their election, from the sojourn in the small. Jesus
is himself present among the helpless, as an element of this humbleness,
standing in the dark, not in brightness: 'Inasmuch as ye have done it unto
one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me' (Matt. 25, 40 ) .
Christian love contains this inclination towards that which is inconspicuous
in the eyes of the world, as an encounter with it, as the consternation of this
encounter, it contains the pathos and the mystery of smallness. This is why
the child in the manger becomes so important, along with the humbleness of
all the circumstances in the out-of-the-way, cramped stable. The unexpectedness of finding the redeemer as a helpless child constantly imparted itself to
Christian love, most surely in the Franciscan order, which regards the helpless
as important, that which is discarded by the world as called. This always bears
in mind the adoration of the child and the search for the cornerstone which
the builders have thrown away; devotion to the inconspicuous ultimately
guides the reverse movement of this love and of its hearkening, its striking,
its expectation of change in the side points, stillpoints, anti-greatnesses of the
world. Hence it is unparalleled in any previous moral religion, including the
Jewish, despite 'Love thy neighbour as thyself' (Lev. 19,18) and the reception
of Matt. 22, 39. Even the love of Buddha, who, as a rabbit, jumps into the
fire to provide a beggar with a meal, does not lead towards the beggar, does
not seek the divine in the helpless. If instead of the Three Kings Confucius,
Lao Tzu and Buddha had set off from the East to the crib, only one of them,
* Matthew 6,28. 'Consider the liliesof the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they
spin.' Cf. also Luke 12, 27.
t Matthew 8, 20. 'The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have their nests; but the Son
of man hath not where to lay his head.' Cf. also Luke 9, 58.
12.62
Lao Tzu, would have noticed this inconspicuousness of the Almighty, though
he would not have worshipped it. But even he would not have noticed the
stumbling block which Christian love represents in the world, in its old connections and its hierarchies graded according to the power of rulers. Against the
power of rulers Jesus is precisely the sign that contradicts, and precisely this
sign was contradicted by the world with the gallows: the cross is the world's
answer to Christian love. To the love of the last who shall be first, of the
rejected in whom the true light is gathered, of the joy which in Chesterton's
penetrating words was once the great publicity of a few pagans and became
or will be the little secret of all Christians. To justify itself, this same world,
using its pagan myths, later turned the death on the cross into a voluntary
sacrifice, as if this had been Christ's intention and not its own. As if this death
had itself arisen from love and was, as Paul put it, the price which Jesus paid'
God to redeem men from sin. Jesus is not the Messiah although he died on
the cross but because he died on the cross: thus Paul, who had not known
Jesus, dialecticized the white terror. According to this view Yahweh also
wanted Golgotha, he is not like Satan but like a creditor, only more dreadfully loving than any before him: he gives his own son to wipe out a debt
which otherwise - given the commercial code of heaven - could not have
been remitted. But the real jesus died as a rebel and martyr, not as a paymaster;
his loyalty to his followers unto death was never the will to this death. He
hoped that the chalice would pass him by, and before the horrified eve of
his death in Gethsemane only interpolated passages in his speeches indicate
the cross and death, let alone baptism in the death of Christ. He prophesied
to the apostles: 'There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death,
till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom' (Matt. 16, 28); how much
more surely the Son of Man ascends to heaven alive, like Enoch and Elijah.
Subjectively and objectively the death on the cross came from without, not
from within, from Christian love; it is the reward for the rebel of love and
his catastrophe. It is the catastrophe for a Jesus who preached not an other
world for the dead but a new heaven, a new earth for the living. A rebel
against custom and the power of rulers died on the cross, a trouble-maker
and loosener of all family bonds (Matt. 10, 34-37; 12, 48), a tribune of the
last, apocalyptically protected exodus from Egypt. This is Christian love,
a love which is almost micrological, one which gathers up its own in their
out-of-the-wayness, their incognito to the world, their discordance with the
world: into the kingdom where theyaccord. The particles and seeds of the new
aeon contradict the old aeon of Herod and Rome, the power of all existing
creation. Thus the rebellion was finally even more monstrous than the
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
day had thought, the Jewish as well as the Roman day. Jesus ultimately
did not have in mind the restoration of the glory of David, nor even a
national revolution on the narrow given scene, The destruction of the
entire world was at hand according to the Mandaean preaching of John
the Baptist (Matt. 3, 2-12) who had called Jesus. He took up this call,
the best-attested words ofJesus are eschatological, he really spoke, as in Mark
13, about the destruction of Jerusalem, of the temple, of the world of the
old aeon. If Jesus had declared himself to be only the Messiah or son of
God in the traditional, i.e, restorative sense, he would have been protected
by the priestly caste and not denounced to the Romans; least of all would
the High Priest Caiphas, against the will of the Procurator, have insisted
on his death. For the claim to be the Messiah was not regarded before
or after Jesus as a capital offence; only in his case was the passage in Lev.
24, 16 interpreted to mean that the Son of God was the blasphemer of
God and therefore had to die (John 19, 7). Before this even Cyrus had
been praised as a messiah king, then Serubabel, a leader of the Jews returning
from Persia (Haggai 2, Sff.); the messianic pretention as such was not
unprecedented. After Jesus - of course in an utterly desperate period the great national hero Bar Kochba was proclaimed messiah by Rabbi Akiba,
the highest priestly authority; so the messianic title itself was not always
blasphemy. OI1.ly when the messiah did not remain entirely national, or,
as a universal messiah, came into discord with the official church was he
handed over to the Romans. Only when the messiah appeared as the Son
of Man, in the pre-cosmic as well as the apocalyptic meaning of this title,
when a natural catastrophe which also destroys Jerusalem and the temple
was proclaimed as the instrument and evidence of his triumph, was he
regarded as a blasphemer and worthy of death. In fact Caiphas understood
Jesus correctly when he understood him eschatologically, more correctly
than the unversed Pilate and all soft livers since, who saw in the love of
Christ only peace, not the sword. Jesus is in fact eschatology through and
through: and like his love his morality can only be grasped in relation to
his kingdom. His advice not to worry about the next day, to render to
Caesar what is Caesar's, is merely the beginning of what emerges quite
positively in Christ's moral precepts: demolition, release, morality of an
advent world. It is morality as kingdom-preparing, as a function of preparation for the kingdom which is close at hand; with the ethics of Christ,
in the strict sense of the Sermon on the Mount, there is no arrangement
in time, in continuing history, in secular society. The Sermon on the Mount
is itself one of a period which has become purely adventist, and all these
ostensible quietisms make sense only on the morning threshold, a threshold

believed to be reached, of something which has come close. Precisely for this
reason the dawning kingdom of heaven in every case stands at the end of all
the non-violent, violent beatitudes (Matt. S, 3-12) as their immediatejustification. However, it is not the case, as extreme dualistic Lutheranism has argued,
that Christ's morality does not exist in time at all, is therefore not even a morality
ofadvent, but exists wholly outside history. As if, with an absolute leap, the
kingdom of Christ were never born into time, but occurred abruptly, without
any connection with history, after the expiry of time, after the expiry of the
entire ocean of reality. On the contrary, Jesus preached of Kairos, of time
which is fulfilled and which is consequently mediated by and through history;
otherwise there would be no place for any kind of morality with a worldly
connection whatever, not even a morality of immediate _eschatology.
However, the morality of the Sermon on the Mount, in its utter paradoxicality, bears no relation to any other morality, however steeped in religion;
for it is the morality of the end of the world. As an advent morality it has
not only disappeared in the compromise-moralities of churches designed for
permanence but is even diluted in the socialdoctrines of hereticaland sectarian
Christianity; unless the latter, although exhausted, moved within waiting
or else again believed in immediately imminent apocalypse. Fo~ all other forms
of imitation ofChrist, for a time, advent morality, as that of the world-limit,
itselfbecame a limit-ideal; this was the case even with Paul: 'And they that
use this world, as not abusing it: for the fashion of this world passeth away'
(I Cor. 7, 31). Jesus, however, as absolute release, teaches morality exclusively
as that of final wakefulness: 'Watch ye therefore: for ye know not when the
master of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cock-crowing,
or in the morning' (Mark 13, 3S). Every sowing here relates to the dreadful
harvest-feast of the Book of Revelation; it is for this that the grain of faith,
the fruit of works is brought in. The downward pull, the imitation of a love
which is centrally assigned to those who labour and are heavy laden, the
suppressed as a whole: all jesus' teachings and parables thus serve towards
the formation of a community shortly before this day. And precisely that
which is inconspicuous in the eyes of the world comes home here: 'The
kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and
sowed in his field. Which indeed is the least of all seeds:but when it is grown,
it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the
air come and lodge in the branches thereof' (Matt. 13, 3If.). Jesus with his
humanity enters, as everything that remains saved, into the kingdom, nobody
and nothing elsebesides: only this vine and thesebranchesform, in a total equation
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
1265
of thefounding with the content founded, the kingdom of God. The cosmos,
not as worshipped, not as negatively-omitted, but as collapsing, becomes the
instrument, indeed the location of the kingdom; only as the space of the
servants is nature still existent. Or as the Apocalyptist, not far from Jesus'
meaning, says: 'And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon,
to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the
light thereof' (Rev. 21, 23). Christ's glad tidings thus operated socially
as Noah's Ark, soteriologically as the arrival of the Son ofMan, who was
with God before creation and finally establishes a new creation. The glad
tidings operated theologically as the abolition of absolute God-transcendence
through Christ's homousia, i.e. equality to God. It operated democratically
and mystically as the perfection of the exodus god into the god of kingdom,
the dissolution of Yahweh in this glory. The creator, indeed the Pharaoh in
Yahweh fall away completely; he remains only as a goal, and the last Christ
called only the community to be its building material and city.
Jesus and the father; the serpent of paradise as saviour;

the three wishful mysteries: resurrection, ascension, return
/'When a child overhauls in this way, the father finds it hard to hold his own
beside' him. His bodily father is treated as irrelevant, soon Joseph was denied,
light impregnates from above. But even the heavenly father appears strange
beside this son, he no longer thrones in solitary majesty. Jesus, because
he is believed in as Yahweh's mediator, becomes closer than he, indeed
supplants him. The ambassador sent by God becomes the sender himself:
'I and my Father are one'; 'he that hath seen me hath seen the Father";"
'All things are delivered to me of my Father' (Luke 10, 22). Dissociations such as: 'Why do you call me good', - 'No one is good but God
alone', are rare, it is only when death is near, in the Garden of Gethsemane
and on the cross, that the father comes to the fore again as someone different;
resignation and abandonment again establish duality. Yet the death on
the cross, precisely because it was died so bitterly, added something to
Jesus which makes Yahweh, the only good one, unauthoritative. Unauthoritative in the consciousness of the apostles, not by virtue of the doctrine
of Christ's sacrifice but by virtue of his proven loyalty and devotion unto
death. For the Yahweh of Moses and the prophets could never suffer death;
among the infinite qualities of his infinite goodness one, after all, was
missing: devotion to the end. Logically only a mortal man could possess
John 10, 30 / John 14, 9.
1266
WISHFUL IMAGES OF T~E FULFILLED MOMENT
and prove this, not a god immeasurably remote from and unassailableby fear
of death and torment. The doctrine of Christ's sacrificeitself turned against
Yahweh at this point, utterly against the intention in it of explaining the
cross away as a catastrophe. As a catastrophe not only of Christ but of the
father himself, who, as the lord of this world which brought this death, could
scarcely be distinguished from Satan. Essentially the doctrine of sacrifice
belongs to theodicy, not Christianity, indeed since, as noted, it interprets
Christ's death as a real payment in terms of the Roman commercial code,
it belongs to demonic jurisprudence, not religion. But if God the father
sacrificed his son and caused the debt to be paid by him, it was the son alone
who offered up himself, as high priest and sacrificial animal in one. He did,
with the extremest value of love, that of which Yahweh, despite all his
almightiness, not only all his goodness, is not capable; although the later
doctrine taught the complete trinity, only the second person of the godhead
offered himself up on the cross. A new god comes into being, one hitherto
unheard-of, who gives his blood for his children, who, as word become flesh,
is capableof suffering the fate of death in a completely earthly way, not merely
in the ritual of the Attis legend. Here a man, through the hubris ofcomplete
devotion, overhauled every idea of God to date; Jesus becomes a love of God
such as has never been conceived in any god. Hence the wonderful chorale
in the 'St Matthew Passion': 'When lone day must part, then do not part
from me,/When death strikes in my heart, step forward then for me.' From
here too comes one of the finest passages in Paul, a transition with flying
colours: 'For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor
principalities,nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height,
nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love
of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord' (Romans 8, 38f.). Who is not
a lord like God: 'Wherefore in all things it behoved him to be made like unto
his brethren, that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in things
pertaining to God, to make reconciliation for the sins of the people' (Heb.
2, 17), and more a son of man than ever any before God: 'For we have not
an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities;
but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin' (Heb. 4, IS).
So from the high priest's position there was something in the accusation that
Jesus was a blasphemer; and not only because Jesus predicted the destruction of the entire old world aeon, predicted it with approval. This approval,
and the sedition behind it, were enough for his condemnation, but the selfcommitment of Christ in Yahweh came on top of this as an ultimate infamy.
The Church has contrasted Jesus with the Old Testament only in terms
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
of the Law, according to the sentence: 'For the Son of Man is Lord even
of the sabbath day' (Matt. 12, 8). Accordingly Christ's believersare no longer
subject to strict Mosaic law, the god of revenge no longer applies, the curtain
of this temple was torn right through the middle; yet the contrast is far
deeper, and it is softened only by the fact that it is not a contrast at all with
the Old Testament as such, indeed in the most crucial place it turns back
to it. But it turns back to a scene which in the Old Testament itself is full
of meanings and concordancesagainst Yahweh. Which always means: against
Yahweh as Optimus Maximus, like other jupiters, not against Yahweh as
exodus god, as Eh'je asher eh'je. The decisive rebelliouspassageis to be found
in the gospel of St John, which is almost wholly unhistorical, but the words
ofJesus quoted in it, spoken to Nicodemus, stand in an age-old]ewish tradition which was not attributed to Jesus only after the event. The passage,
with its wealth of concordances, reads: 'And as Moses lifted up the serpent
in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever
believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life' (John 3, 14f.).
Moses, however, had made a serpent of brass against the fiery serpents in
the desert who killed the people, 'and put it upon a pole, and it came to
pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of
brass, he lived (Numbers 21, 9). Although this passage could also be interpreted according to the rule of a mythical homeopathy, its contrast with
the words of damnation spoken by the creator Yahweh of Genesis over the
serpent and what it may stand for is plain. Likewise: Jesus is referring to
the serpent, this subterranean-subversive-healing creature. To the dialectical
animal of the depths of the earth, from which simultaneously destructive
gases and healing springs rise up, volcanoes and treasures. Jesus and an
almost apocryphal passage in Moses refer to the serpent-cult of all peoples,
with the double meaning which is inherent in it: the serpent is both an animal
which creeps on the ground, monstrously devastating, hydra, python,
typhon, the Babylonian dragon of the abyss, and it is the serpent of lightning,
the high fire in the heavens. The serpent is both the arch-enemy, fought
and defeated by Apollo, Siegfried, Michael, and the saviour-serpent around
the staff of Aesculapius, the Egyptian serpent ofUraeus on diadems and on
the sun, a magic sign to ward off hostile powers. The serpent-cult survived
for a long time in Israel in particular, as its abolition by Hezekiah underlines, who: 'brake in pieces the brasen serpent that Moses had made: for unto
those days the children of Israeldid burn incense to it' (2 Kings 18, 4). Christ's
astonishing simile, which is an equation, referred only to the saviourserpent in the desert; yet at the same time and on top of this, beyond
1268
the mere nature-mythic determinations of the pagan serpent-cult, it touched

on a well-understood, utterly different, soon completely transvalued being
contra the Yahweh of creation, the serpent ofparadise itself. It was the N aassenes
or Ophites (naas, ophis = serpent), undoubtedly aJewish heretical sect long
before they appeared as a Christian-gnostic sect around 100 A.D. who
definitively carried through the transvaluation ofthe serpent ofparadise in relation toJesus, as the usurper of Yahweh. They interpreted the serpent of Genesis
as the life-creating principle in the lower world, but not only in the worldpreserving, therefore evil sense. The serpent of paradise is at the same time
the symbol of world-exploding reason; for it teaches man to eat of the tree
of knowledge , it announces to the first men a kingdom which is higher than
that of their creator and the creator of the world. It teaches them to break
the law of the demiurge in order by knowledge of salvation to become like
that highest god who is not Yahweh and who was not proclaimed again until
Jesus came - Eritis sicut Deus, scientes bonum et malum. * Because of this
knowledge they believed that the wrath of the demiurge had fallen upon man,
yet the Ophites and related sects such as the Cainites set down a line of fire
throughout the Bible from the family of the slandered serpent of paradise,
the rebel against Yahweh. It began, they said, with Cain, whose sacrifice
the demiurge did not accept, but he accepted the bloody sacrifice of Abel,
for the lord of this world delights in blood. It was in Esau, who did not receive
the blind blessing of the blind Isaac, but whenJacob saw Esau again, it seemed
to him 'as though I had seen the face of God' (Gen. 33, 10), the face of the
true God. They thought that the serpent was in Moses, as the power in the
rod which struck water from the rock, wholly in harmony with the murmuring of the children of Israel, and was the rod which changed into a serpent
and" destroyed the hostile serpents of the sorcerers, i.e. the gods of destruction.
The same ones who later destroyed the children of Israel in the desert and
against whom Moses erected the then white serpent, on the advice of the
true God. The serpent ofparadise was above all inJesus, indeed he is its last,
highest reincarnation; and again its head is crushed by Yahweh. The bishop
Hippolytos gives a completely unequivocal account of this didactic play of
the Ophites: 'No one can be saved and rise up again without the son, who
is the serpent. For as he brought the fatherly primal images from above, so
he also carries up with him from here those aroused from sleep and those who
have again taken on the character of the father (the true god) ... Just as the
magnet attracts iron and nothing else, so the perfect generation, of the same
* 'You will become like God, knowing good and evil.' Cf. Genesis 3,
s.
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
nature, now become the image of god, and nothing else, is led back out
of the cosmos by the serpent' (cf. Leisegang, Die Gnosis, 1924, p. 146).
What taught man to eat of the tree of knowledge thus remains the first
manifestation of redeeming knowledge, which leads out of the garden of
animals, indeed out of the dreadful paternal home of this world: the serpent
of paradise is the caterpillar of the goddess of reason, Jesus therefore frees
men from the dominion of the demiurge, the same demiurge of whom
he says: 'He was a murderer from the beginning' (John 8, 44), and brings
the revelation of the true god, of whom he says: 'Your father which is
in heaven' (Matt. 7, II). A titanism, a Promethean rebellion, was thus
emphasized in the Bible again, but precisely in the Old Testament itself,
of which the priestly version shows only traces. Yet these traces are present,
they must have been unforgotten in Jewish folklore in Jesus' time, and
they were read as path-marks towards the messianism which was moving
away from Yahweh anyway. Even the priestly version of the Bible has
retained these titanisms, apart from the serpent of paradise Jacob's struggle
with the river-god, whom he defeats, belongs here (Gen. 32, 24f.). Nephilim
(giants) clearly appear before the Flood (Gen. 6, 4); the tower of Babel
motif is rebellious against Yahweh, and so too not least are the sea-motifs
(cf. Gunkel, Schopfung und Chaos, 1895, p. 9 Iff.), the legends of the
rebellious ocean (Psalms 33, 7; 65, 7f.; 10 4, 5-9; Job /38, 8-11; Prove 8,
22-31; Jer. 5, 22; 31, 35;Jesus Sirach 43, 23). And later Jewish secret doctrine,
fed from Gnosis but also from unextinguished folklore, certainly did not
forget the strange connection between serpent and messiah, however much
rebellion against the demiurge is diluted into rebellion against the common
Satan. Nathan of Gaza, a pupil of the false messiah Sabbatai Zewi, published
a treatise in around 1650: Derush hatamimim, A Treatise on Dragons (cf.
Scholem, The Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 1942, p. 292); it purports
to he a commentary on a passage in the Sohar about the mystery of the
"great dragon that lieth in the midst of his (Pharaoh's) rivers' (Ez. 29, 3).
Nahash, the Hebrew word for snake, has the same numerical value as
mashiach, messiah. The treatise explains this as follows: the soul of the messiah
shone into the abyss, where the demonic forces dwell, since the beginning
of creation it has been the 'holy serpent' among serpents. The soul of the
messiah is tied to this prison, hence to Egypt, which is the world prison per
se, with Pharaoh-Satan at its head; only with the advent of the kingdom of
righteousness will the 'holy serpent' be freed and appear in a supraterranean
form. This is how far a tradition went which associated the messiah with the
saviour-serpent inthe desert, among the Ophites with the tree ofknowledge itself. And
12 7 0
the antithesis between Christ and Yahweh did not even reach its greatest
sharpness among the Ophites; for the true God, according to them, also
appeared in the Old Testament. The gnostic Marcion, in around 150 A.D.,
was the only one who attempted to wrench Ophis-jesus from the Old
Testament, in a radical-antithetical fashion. Jesus statement: 'Behold, I
make all things new' * was now interpreted against Yahweh in every form,
even that of the exodus; Yahweh became Zoroaster's Ahriman. But the
new element was the new God, who was absolutely strange, about whom
before Christ no tidings had ever come to man; thus the great Logion
was interpreted, as a governmental decree by Christ: 'No man knoweth
the Son, but the Father; neither the Father knoweth any man, save the
Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him' (Matt. II, 27).
Marcion, who saw himself as the completer of the antithetical Paul,
connected this pronouncement of Christ's most closely with Paul's sermon
in Athens on the theos agnostos, the unknown God; t but in such a way
that the ambassador of this God tore people away precisely from the creator
of the world, whom Paul and even more the later Church identified with
the father of Christ. Marcion thus represents the most powerful idea of
anti-Yahweh, in favour of Christ as the total Novum or paradox in
Yahweh's world. But while Marcion burns all his bridges with the Old
Testament, he himself is standing on this bridge, together with the Ophites.
In other words, Marcion comes not only from Paul, he also comes from
Moses, the true or strange God dawns in the exodus God, between Egypt
and Canaan. However he certainly does not dawn in the creator of the
world, in this opulent mythology of the past. From the Egyptian Ptah,
from the Babylonian Marduk, this mythology had made the eh'je asher
eh'je the beginning, even the well-pleased beginning; against this not only
Jesus but the utopia of messianism as a whole was in opposition. It will
be recalled that even the prophets seldom mentioned Yahweh as the creator
of the world, but all the more emphatically they referred to a new heaven,
a new earth. Job's complaints were directed entirely against Yahweh as
the ruler of the world, together with the hope that a 'blood-avenger' would
live, that an exodus would come. The apocalyptist Jesus is steeped from
top to bottom in this exodus-idea; thus he was seen as being together
with the serpent of paradise, not with the God of those who, like their
God himself, found that everything in the world was good.
The appearance of the founder therefore certainly did not seem anything
* Revelation 21, S.
Cf. Acts 17, 23.
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
12 71
like as meek as it was later presented. The humble were to be raised up,
the cross was to be smashed, not to be carried or to become the thing
itself. Jesus' shyness, indisputable and self-obstructing, disappeared after
the experience of the transfiguration, which was also hallucinated by his
apostles, and only they were sore afraid (Matt. 17, 2-6). From this point
on, external obscurity, his instructions to the apostles in Caesarea Philippi
that they were to tell no one he was Christ, no longer applied (Matt.
16, 20). The deepest Humanum..c ommitment into heaven was proclaimed,
the subjective factor of Christ-likeness inherited the transcendental factor,
the glory of God became the apocalyptical glory of Christ and his followers.
And thus utterly new religious matter was created - not for the sacrifice
on the cross, which is and remains a theodicy of the world-creator, worldruler, but for the triumphant image ofthe tribune behind the death on the cross.
'Abide with us, for it is toward evening' (Luke 24, 29): thus for the apostles
the presence of Christ had not ended even on the way to Emmaus, thus
the Wishful mysteries of resurrection, ascension and return came into being.
Consequently this second eschatology, the Christianity of this after..gleam
as fore-gleam, started out only from the empty tomb, only with the
ascension did the Son of Man fulfil eternity, only with the return was
the advent-consciousness of the first followers stretched to that of all later
followers. The real memory ofJesus after his death necessarily established
dimensions of hope unlike those of any previous founder. If anyone, then
he for his believers had to be the first of those who sleep and are awoken.
If anyone, then he had to go up towards heaven, not ennobled like Hercules,
like Elijah, who are distant and removed, but as an anchor of hope which
takes men with it. If anyone, then Jesus had to return, to fulfil the kingdom
of man: 'Let us hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering;
for he is faithful that promised' (Heb. 10, 23). Until that return itself the
evangelist appointed yet another representative: the mysterious paraclete.
He is the only sign that although Jesus guaranteed to the apostles his return,
the Last judgement and the kingdom, he did not guarantee the entire future
till that return. This, however, is a continuing influence of Christ which
contrasts with him, but in such a way that here too the religion of Jesus
gave it colour and direction. The word paraclete, as we have already seen
in the case of its counterpart the Saoshyant in Zoroaster, means helper,
comforter, adviser; true, he appears as such only in the frequently interpolating Gospel of St John, but here as the promise of Christ himself:
'And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter,
that he may abide with you for ever' (John 14, 16). With these astonishing
127 2
words, Jesus posits himself only as a first comforter and not as eternal;
the evangelist has backdated the catastrophe of the cross into Jesus'
knowledge. And an interpretation different from that of the sacrificial death
on the cross now arises, one which as it were raises messianism above
the dying Messiah and embodies him anew for the period of advent: 'Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for
if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart,
I will send him unto you ... Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come,
he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but
whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things
to come' (John 16, 7 and 13). These dark, brief intimations of the evangelist
imply that the Novum of the paraclete is primarily that he does not talk
of himself, is simply a proclaimer of what he hears. Such passivity could
indicate an angel, insofar as the angels of the Christian era are exclusively
messengers, with no actual will or content of their own; but the paraclete
is also called a 'spirit of truth', who leads into all truth. And 'spirit of
truth' is not the category of an angel but rather the category and translation
of the Persian Vohu mano, who -appears with the last Zoroaster, with
the Saoshyant of the end of the world. Thus the idea of the paraclete does
after all contain something different from the mere presence of a comforter
until the return of Christ; the return itself is designated as the 'spirit of
truth'. Indeed in the paraclete Jewish messianisms which are still powerfully alive are more effective than Persian ones: the beliefin the Messiah
who had appeared in turn contained that in the one who had not yet appeared.
Yet always determined and clothed by the appearance of Christ and by
the governing category of his return: the 'spirit of truth' thus became the Holy
Ghost, together with the Son. Thus this advent of the Holy Ghost only now
becomes the true advent of the Son; the essence of Christ from here on
consequently appeared to the believers in the paraclete in a different,
definitive form, and it is only this form, not the Jesus of the New
Testament, who speaksthe authentic - password, and with it the irresistible
turning of the world towards kingdom. Or in the language of the Ophites:
the serpent of paradise reveals its sophia for the third time in the paraclete,
and its head is no longer crushed. Thus even the Church Father Tertullian
regarded Jesus and the New Testament just as much as an early stage and
perfectible as the Old Testament was perfectible. In Tertullian's writings the
fulfiller is the paraclete, towards him Adam, Moses and Jesus are related, it
is only in him that the 'ultima legislatio' into 'libertatem perfectam' occurs.
It is easy to find the connection between this conception of the paraclete
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
12 73
and medieval chiliasms, and especially its connection with]oachim of Fiore

and his teaching of the Third Kingdom (see Vol. II, p. 509ff.). Here, too,
the return of Christ is not the return of the same Christ who appears in the
New Testament; for the age of the Holy Ghost is no longer that of conviction
and promise. The paraclete no longer speaks of himself, he posits the reality
in which inwardness has become spiritual outwardness. The paraclete thus
becomes the utopia of the Son of Man, who is no longer utopia, because the
kingdom is present. Now all this does not break out of homesickness for
Christ, on the contrary, precisely the essence of Christ is repeated in heightened
form in the comforter who has become the Holy Ghost. The pneuma that
came over the apostles at Pentecost was, the apostles believed, poured forth
by Christ, by the Christ of the Ascension: 'Therefore being by the right hand
of God exalted, and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy
Ghost, he hath shed forth this, which ye now see and hear' (Acts 2, 33).
According to the ecstasy interpretation, the ascended Christ, even here, did
not receive the Holy Ghost himself, but only the promise of him; just as the
speaking in tongues of the pneumatic apostles merely projects like a halffinished hieroglyph into the truth of the kingdom. Yet this promise of the
spirit certainly was fulfilled for the upper Christ, which is why the fulfilment
or parusia of the spirit, however explosively it may have been conceived,
always appeared to Christianity according to the measure of the stature of
the fullness of Christ (Eph. 4, 13). Even among the Chiliasts, the wishful
mystery of the return always held to the figure who for them had ascended
into heaven. Christ, the founder, even in view of the paraclete, thus became
the triumphant content of salvation; as such he therefore incorporated the
paraclete of the future within himself, as he incorporated the God of the past
within himself. And as, not only in the teachings of the historical Jesus but
even more emphatically in the three wishful mysteries of the believed Christ,
the eschaton ofthe kingdom forms the unity ofthe goal, so in relation to this Jesus,
for his apostles, himself became this future element, like everything that is
affectedby the kingdom. Jesus as return, according to the images of the Daniel
apocalypse (Dan. 7, 13f.) represented by himself, the Son of Man riding on
the clouds of heaven, accordingly takes part in the leap into the Novum. The
power function and magnification function of homesickness, with the leap
of the Novum, totally transformed itself into the Utterly Different: the Christ
of the wishful mysteries thus lives completely behind an exploding, on the
eschatological plan. And the kingdom, finis ad quem omnia, precisely for
this very reason does not leave one stone of the old on top of the other, not a
stone of the temple, but not one of Zion either. Hence everywhere the
12 74
changing of names (which in the Orient signify the essence): 'The Lord
God shall slay thee, and-call his servants by another name' (Isaiah 6S, IS);
'To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and
will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which
no man knoweth' (Rev. 2, 17). And again in the Old Testament, that
of the exodus-Yahweh, not of the creator-Yahweh, it even says of Zion:
'And thou shalt be called by a new name, which the mouth of .the Lord
shall name' (Isaiah 62, 2). Christ's resurrection from the dead has no analogy
in the history of religion, but the apocalyptic transformation of the world
into something as yet completely inexistent is not even hinted at outside
the Bible. And by virtue of the exclusive relation of this absolute Novum
or omega to human content, the mysticism of heaven becomes the mysticism
of the Son, the glory of God becomes that of the redeemed community
and of its place. In Christian mysticism, above all in Eckhart, precisely
this was therefore thought of as nothing other than the fulfilled moment
of us all, as its - Nunc stans to the kingdom. This is religious protestation, no longer relating to the self as to something unrevealed and no
longer relating to sursum corda as to a hypostatized Above in which man
is not found: Eritis sicut Deus is the glad tidings of Christian salvation.
Fanaticism and submission to Allah's will: Mohammed

Where only one flag is the right one, choosing ceases. The fanatical founder
establishes his religion sternly, without wavering, he can do no other.
Knows only believers and infidels, the lukewarm is spat out of his mouth.
The excluding, the intolerant in the best sense: all this comes from Moses,
there is only EI, the goal. The other gods are nothings in terms of their
power and their Who, even if the fact that they exist is not yet denied.
But they ought not to exist, and certainly ought p.ot to be worshipped
beside the God who leads out of Egypt. They are golden calves or devils,
with them there can be no peace. The possibility did not yet exist that
a believer, when he gave up his idols, then became an out and out
unbeliever. A~ may happen with today's missions, when with the belief in
the old gods all belief is destroyed. On the contrary, the magic of the
henotheistic God, the only one who is God, was downright enhanced by the
shattering of the magic of the idols. This was how Moses operated when
he outdid the Egyptian magicians, this was the case with Elijah, with
Boniface when he knocked down the Irminsul and Odin did not have the
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
12 75
strength to unleash a thunderbolt. * Elijah speaking of Baal sounds almost

like an enlightenment philosopher, he mocks the priests of Baal much as
Voltaire mocked the sanctimonious priests of the church: 'Cry aloud: for
he is a god; either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey,
or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked' (I Kings 18, 27). But
mockery of Baal is a profession of faith in Yahweh, hatred of nature gods
is a profession of faith in a god who refutes them as demons or - at a later
stage - includes them as confused prefigurations within himself. Tolerance
in the style of the eighteenth century arose only from religious indifference
as a whole; living faith knows tempations, seductions, even - inheritances,
but no choice. 'You who worship the infinite creator of the universe, you
call him Jehovah or God, you call him Fu or Brahma': thus the liberal opening
of Mozart's sublimely mild cantata on the infinite creator of the universe.
But the kyrie in the Mass in B minor includes the whole world in the call
for the redeemer, for a Christ without a replaceablename: seriousnessof faith
is orthodoxy. Is healthy monomania, even when the form of existence of
the One who is believed has passed from being an untenable possession to
an unrelenting direction. Ever since Moses gave the signal for the One, it
has been easy to understand why henotheistic and then monotheistic religions
have become the missionary religions per see More than all others they have
allied themselves with the ideology of winning markets and of conquest, but
they have also brought into the world the fanaticism of dying for one's faith,
as a soldier or as a martyr. Fanaticism as an element of faith is found only
in the two religions which started out from Moses, in Christianity and Islam.
Warlike intolerance (certainly not rejected by Jesus, who had come to start
a fire in the world and wished that it was already burning) has as its paragon
Moses, who smashed the golden calf. The subject here does not yet overtake
his god, but he feels so strongly that he is his champion that the wrath of
God burns from his eyes; Moses was acting in Mohammedan fashion when he
destroyed the golden calf. The subject here accomplishes the will of God in
such a way that in inactivity, in passive times and beneath the blows of
fate submission to God's will remains, but even this peculiar, passionate,
typically Islamic submission primarily presupposed the union of God's will
with the monomania of God's champion. The religion of Mohammed was
called Islam, submission, yet the profession of this submission here more
than anywhere else meant fierce jihad, holy war. Thus fanaticism begins
St Boniface, 680-755, the 'Apostle of the Germans' who converted the pagans in Hessen,
according to legend, by felling the great oak tree of Geismar near Fitzlar, sacred to the pagan
god of thunder. Boniface was born in Devon.
with Moses, it thrives in the conquest of Canaan, together with its own kind
of submission it becomes the one and all of early Islam. Religious war well
and truly entered the world with Islam; Adonai echod, Allah il Allah, God
is One, with this cry the subject attains the greatest one-sidedness, the fiercest
for the intended purpose. The Mohammedan glad tidings themselves are not
original, they trail far behind Christ's powerful storming ofheaven, but they
took the passion out of the Bible, passion absolutely in the sense of fervour,
not of suffering.
The path upwards is rugged here, only the man can endure it. Mohammed
started out as a warner about the coming judgement, he certainly did not
immediately appear as a saviour. Visions and voices came upon this man, who
was both powerful and epileptic, the dreams of the night changed into
appearances in the flesh by day. Ancient Arabian religion had worshipped
stone fetishes, sand-storm spirits and rain-gods from the desert and the period
in the desert. For the trading towns in which Mohammed appeared this time
was a long way back in the past, but on the other handJewish influence was
strong. And Mohammed's first concern, as he said, was to restore the pure
religion of Abraham. But in an Arabia of pleasure-seeking merchants and
expansion by land-owners, the prophet of victory did not preach among desert
tribes. A founder of almost unbroken creatureliness. According to a legend
recorded by Gibbon and possible only in Islam, Mohammed's disciple Ali
cried out before his master's corpse: '0 propheta, 0 propheta, et in morte
penis tuus coelum versus erectus est.?" And the virility of this founder is
confirmed by the fact that his most important relic is the weapon, his sword,
al Fehar, known as the flashing one, which is preserved to this day. Allah,
however, is the war-god Zebaoth, he brings out his knights-templar for the
imminent world-judgment, religion is submission to Allah's will, but
precisely war-like fanaticism of submission. And as if called precisely for this
purpose, these menacing glad tidings served an order of knighthood that had
to create the routes for the expansion of rising mercantile capital. The green
flag was soon flying quite homogeneously over a storm of trade, war and
religion. Islam ruled the mercantile empire which spans the period between
the decline of the West Roman Empire and the rise of Venice, almost of
England, it even became the original for all types of expansionist 'God wills
it' , from the crusades to Cromwell. It was primarily its closeness to creature
which made Islam suitable for this unity of expansion and mission; unlike
Christianity, it did not need ecclesiasticalsophistry in order to serve God and
* 0 prophet I
prophet, in death your penis is erect and pointing at the sky.
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
1277
Mammon at the same time. But above all God and his military service at the
same time: 'The war of religion is the monastic order of Islam' , says a decree
of the prophet. Even Mohammed's farewell speech gave the command for
a crusade against the Byzantines, and during the war of succession Caliph
Ali had the Koran tied to his spears. The same Koran, i.e. reading, which
Mohammed claimed to have deciphered from the one kept in heaven (Sura
96): on the spears this reading became anything but contemplation. Islam
defined its heyday as the 'holding on to the stirrup of the prophet', thus it
was only in the period of decline that this submission to Allah's will became
soft, mere letting things happen. And the conversion of the infidels by fire
and sword was allied, if necessary for political reasons, with a tolerance which
was not exactly written on Islam's birth certificate: payment of tribute made
the conversion of the subjugated unnecessary. And in an Islam which had
stabilized to become a church and then become petrified, intolerance could
only react dogmatically, i.e. itselfbecome a stabilizing force, against innovators and philosophers. However, both within and beyond the church, i.e.
in the rebellious sectarian movements and in the eschatological mysticism of Islam,
the teaching never allowed 'renewal', 'deliverance' (fukan), in accordance
with the earliest Meccan suras, to be forgotten. The prophet thus became,
again and more intensively - more intensively until the last one 'guided
rightly' (mahdi) - messianic, thus the memory of his first appearance lives
on: as the warner, the ambassador of the judgement. Above all the religious
landscape which Islam broke into also exerted its influence, only a few
centuries after Mani: that of Zoroaster, of the Mandaeans, of the south
Johannite church. This landscape showed the Islamic mission an ambassador
who fought not only against infidels on earth but against Ahriman
throughout the entire world, and as a power of light, not only as a prophet.
With him Mohammed moved close to the first Adam, the son of man, whose
pre-existence before the world, whose revelation after the world was believed
by Persians, Mandaeans, Jews, Christians. The Koran had made the angels fall
down before the first or heavenly Adam (Sura 2, 28 and 32) and Mohammed
now merged with him. He now appears to the mystics as 'the first heavenly
light, created from white pearl, surrounded by veils'. And like the Mahdi,
beside him or in him, the paraclete lives in Islam, now as a holy wanderer,
now as the mystery of an association of which Mohammed is not yet the
end. The other person beside Mohammed, or rather his own authentic figure
now appears, the legendary Arab figure of the Chidr or al Chadir: he was
regarded by later Islam as the most mysterious saint. Unrecognized, he ceaselessly prepares men for the Day ofJudgement , is the guardian of the chiliastic
impulse, 'Chidr, the eternally greening, never-tiring wanderer, who

through the centuries and the millennia roams over lands and seas, the
teacher and counsellor of devout people, the one who is wise in the things
of God, the immortal one' (Hymn of the Loyal Brothers of Basra). The
legend of Chidr is documented only from the ninth century onwards, in
commentaries on the 18th sura, which is about the Cave of the Seven
Sleepers, but its origin is far older, its content far more sleepless. Chidr
is the eschatological spirit who after the disappearance of Mohammed both
remains and comes. In the West he was falsified into Ahasuerus, into a
mere miracle of punishment, but his place in the Bible is not with the
shoemaker of Jerusalem (whose inconspicuousness he does, however, share)
but definitely with the paraclete. A gleam of John also shines over this
profoundest figure in Mohammedan mysticism, a gleam of the apostle
whom Jesus wanted to tarry till he came (John 21, 23). But what, finally,
with so much war-religion, of this messianic end? - ought it not to be
an eternal Valhalla rather than a Sabbath? Precisely because of the difference
between fanaticism and berserkery, that which in Islam may correspond to
the kingdom is simply joy, peace, rest. Yet in such a way that passion is
not cancelled out, but perfected; as the green of the plant of life in the
garden of Allah after the end of the world. For this Day of Judgement,
that it may become a day for the just, for this the Koran, received at night,
is to be the glad tidings, the military-moral glad tidings: 'We revealed
the Koran on the night of glory. Do you know what the night of glory
is? The night of glory is better than what can be achieved in a thousand
months. On that night the angels and the Spirit come down at the Lord's
bidding, with his decrees. That night is peace, till dawn breaks' (Sura
97). Allah is the password of this victory; Sufi mysticism even compared
Allah with 'the joy of love after victory in battle' (Tholuck, Suufismus,
1821, p. 304). Victory at this end transfigures all creation and nature; the
union of all those that are good with Allah seals his unity.
III. The Core of the Earth as Real

Extra-territoriality
The road of the non-existent What For

The drive upwards at last becomes a drive forwards. The situation of
most people ought to be enough to make this easy and self-evident. But
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
12 79
even today most people find it less easy to discover what and where the light
is. It seems most difficult of all really to go into what is right, on the
true road. And even this road leads astray if the What For, the good whole,
is not constantly considered along with the Where To. This whole is in
the people who walk this path and in the route which the path itself takes.
But it does not exist as something which has appeared and been reached
but only as humanly willed and historically laid out; thus to be well-founded
this good whole must also be trusted in. It takes schooled hope, i.e. trust
in the day during the night, to believe in this un appeared something more
easily than in what is visible. This attitude is not refuted, only corrected,
by setbacks (they are a thousand times more numerous than victories).
The will in this attitude is just as much theoretically directed to the whole
which circulates in all partial movements as it is practically directed to
the whole; in this definitiveness it is necessarilypresumptuous. If the person
fighting for higher wages does not also have the will that the society forcing
him to fight only for wages should disappear then he will achieve nothing
substantial even in the wage dispute. And if a human being already considers
himself a human being, unalienated and the crown of his creation, just
as soon as the miserable society has at last been changed, then he does
not take what for him has not yet become substantially enough. Especially
as the Babbitt which capitalist society has produced on such a wide scale
is not yet simply overcome by electric refrigerators for all; for even in
communist societies there are bourgeois conformists. Men can want to be
brothers even without believing in the father, but they cannot become
brothers without believing in the utterly unbanal contents and dimensions
which in religious terms were conceived through the kingdom. With a
faith which, in its knowledge, as this knowledge, has now destroyed all the
illusions of mythical religion. But even the most clearly visible goal in the
unresting, moving context of a society which isbeginning to become classless
cannot be attained unless the subject overshoots the goal. The great religious
teachers, in their ground of intention - one not exhausted by all its illusory
elements - felt that men were called to the utterly unheard-of, everything
was related to this. Only mumbling priests have made this Too-much of the
non-existent into the Too-little of the existent and defended it, but they were
mumbling priests, not stumbling-blocks, senders to sleep, not wakers. They
were the first to make the Christian religion into opium for the people, they
were the first to project the infinite worth of man which the Bible taught
into the other world, utterly into the other world, where it no longer bites
and does not harm earthly worthlessness. They quoted the just distribution
1280
of supernatural goods as the compensation for the unjust distribution of

earthly goods; by this the shorn lamb was comforted. They confined the
hugely preached claims of what is commensurate with us in an other-world
in order to keep them away from this world. They made religion into
fixed images of the other-world instead of fermentingly this-worldly images,
inciting to full existence, keeping the will to it awake. The path goes
beyond the mumbling priests but not beyond the religion through which
belief is sustained, for this belongs to the path, as courage and supremest
wakefulness. It is the attitude by which knowledge of future things is
not only grasped but also willed and carried out in the face of faint-hearted
or short-sighted doubtings. And the religion which is itself believed, i.e.
religion as content, is also valid here, though in highly corrected form,
namely as the religion of knowledge of what is germinating, of what is
still unfinished in the world. The latter religion certainly does not conflict
in any conceivable way with knowledge, but nor is it redundant beside
it, because it expresses in accordance with content that the essential itself
certainly is not yet spilled out before our eyes. As the best is still under
way, it must also be trusted in order that it may succeed.
Inavertible and avertible fate, or Cassandra and Isaiah

It is certainly impossible to act when the outside is open on all sides. For then
everything is possible, which is the same as saying that all life becomes unpredictable, therefore sinister, like ghosts. Yet at least in these circumstances
something could still be dared; this is what the knight did, when adventures
drew him precisely to where something strange seemed to be going on.
However, even the daring act, precisely this, becomes impossible where
nothing is possible any more but the inavenible, which is fate in the true
sense of the word. Even the Greeks, so open and fearless in many ways,
attested to this spell, as can now again be discussed here. The feeling of
fate is anyway based first of all on the unfathomed and the uncontrolled in
the forces of nature and then of society. The actual belief in fate may be
attached to subterranean forces (Tyche, the Fates), but in its developed form
it presupposes above all astral myth, one in which man is not found.
Accordingly man cannot summon up any movement of his own against
that of the stars and against their spell. In the ancient orient, fate is entirely
astrally determined, by the position of the planets, sun, zodiac; Chaldean
astrology merely elaborated what started in Babylon but was typical of
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
1281
the entire culture area at the time. The uninfluenceable stars not only show
but form and figure uninfluenceable fate, which can merely be deciphered
or interpreted; the God Enlil, custodian of the 'tablets of history', follows
his course north of the celestial equator. And the Greeks, whose gods wore
human and not astral form, in return allowed Moira, fate, to rule even
over the gods. Admittedly there is the passage in Homer in which Zeus
justifies himself in the face of mankind's complaints, declaring: 'They cry
that all evil comes from us, and yet/The fools create their own misery
for themselves, contrary to fate' (Od. I, 33f.), but doom, as the legend
of Oedipus shows, rolls on even without guilt, it rolls on mechanically,
as it is released, and thus inexorably. And in the face of fate the gods
themselves have only one advantage over man - that they know fate; they
have foreknowledge of what Moira has decreed, but it is powerless. With
this knowledge, Hermes can warn Aegisthus and prophesy his end, no
more; Zeus himselfbecomes a powerless spectator when Sarpedon, his own
son, by a decree of fate is run through by the sword of Patroclus. The
fall of Troy was already known as an accomplished fact by Cassandra,
who shared with the gods the gift of knowing fate. It was already determined before Paris was born, before Helen had been stolen by him, before
the war had even begun; no atonement by the Trojans, who were cornpletely innocent anyway, could avert their fall. This is Moira, a being that
sits blindly on every action, driving it on so closely and with such immense
weight that it shatters. The Greeks believed that it came from a different
order than that of their gods; even with the older, matrilineal order of
earth- and night-gods fate was only loosely connected as the daughter of
the night. For this connection fate lacked all goodness and all mercy, it
lacked the womb in the grave, the homecoming in the pre-ordered. Moira
is the absolutely inavertible in disparateness; before it not only the reason
stands still but the blood freezes.
It is futile to act in these circumstances, even if one is free to take the
first step. Only the Greeks could endure this Moira of theirs, for only they
had enough surface power to push the abyss away from them. The people
before this abyss are not instruments of a divine will, neither Oedipus nor
Cassandra can do anything, let alone change anything. Fate itself is not a
will, not even to this extent is it mediated, and to assert itself or even simply
to bring itself on to the scene Moira needs no instruments. Or at least none
which have to carry out anything independently or even under instructions:
precisely the irony of Greek fate shows how little the nature or direction
of human action matters here. This utterly demonic element - or rather
1282
not even demonic, because it is too uninterestedly mechanical for this distinguishes Moira from apparently similar ideas which are to be found on
biblical ground or near it: from Mohammed's kismet and Calvin's predestination. The latter both have as their subject a god who is defined as good and
both make the spell operate for an ultimately good, an absolutely unquestionably good end. It is a decree, even if an inscrutable one, * and a-direction,
even if a highly superior one. And here the complete opposite of the extra-biblical
belief in fate and of the quietism which it ultimately endorses is not to be found
in doctrines of powerlessness. It emerges definitively only in the Bible itself,
in the relation of the Israelite prophets to Cassandra and to what is connected
with her. The antithesis at the same time shows how much the open space
which messianism represents changes the believed god even with regard to
what he decrees. For now that which is decreed, or fate, is no longer in any
way tyrannical to man, as in the case of Moira and also of astral myth. On
the contrary, fate now definitely can be averted: above all others, Isaiah teaches
that it is dependent on human morality and its resolve. This is the active antithesis to the Greek seer, to the merely passive-despondent vision of Cassandra
above all: fate in the Bible hangs in the balance, and the finally decisive weight
is man himself. Of course, not in all the prophets and not even everywhere
in Isaiah is fate regarded as morally avertible. Sometimes even here coming
disaster is regarded as definitive, already hanging from heaven on iron chains;
atonement then means remorseful willingness to accept punishment. But
inexorable fate, which for the Greeks was the rule, is the exception in the
Bible; precisely the first step, namely the step towards moral changing of
one's ways, reverses the disaster. Let us now look at one of the most instructive
passagesin the Bible in this respect: namely the astonishment ofthe prophetJonah,
because he did not grasp the difference between himself and Cassandra. For
Jonah had been sent to announce the destruction of Nineveh after forty days,
but when the town repented and the disaster did not occur, this exceedingly
and wrongly displeased him (Jonah 4, I), as if what he told the people of
Nineveh was untrue, whereas in fact the people changing their ways was
immediately followed by Yahweh's changing his ways (jer. 18, 7.; 26, 3 and
19): fate itself still wavers here. Thus it is not categorical but constantly
hypothetical, and the condition on which it depends is doubly posited. First
in human freedom, whose power in the]onah passage clearly appears as an
antithesis to fate. Yet immediately this freedom then flings itself into the open
* An allusion to the German: 'Gottes unerforschlichem RatschluB hat es gefallen' - 'It has
pleased the inscrutable will of God'.
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
space which corresponds to belief in a time-god, a god with the direction:

'I will be who I will be'. * Here even fate does not look remotely as static
as Moira; the New is a poor residence for the immutable. Of course, for
the prophets Yahweh, as a being believed to be active, who unleashes wars,
overthrows empires, sends plagues, removes plagues, often himself became
a part of fate. No religion, however much self-commitment it contained
into what till then was the other world, could lead to the threshold where
fate could be seen through as something men bring upon themselves. And
the purely moral causes by which the prophets show it to be directed are
evidently themselves mythical. And as causality of fate they held up only
with difficulty; in the Book of Job this kind of explanation is shattered
completely. And nevertheless with this moral intervention in the working
of fate a counter-move offreedom is revealed, which differs very noticeably
from Cassandra, from mere powerless foreknowledge, from extra-biblical
so-called prophecy. In the case ofJonah, consciously in the case of Isaiah,
a prevenire is played over the mere prevoir, with changing of ways and
not just with lament, with a change of path, not with resignation. This
kind of thing is expressly directed against fate, indeed in a veiled manner
against its lord, who is increasingly brought to justice.
God as utopian hypostatized ideal of the unknown man;

Feuerbach, Cur Deus homo again
Things that have happened become smaller in the distance, hoped-for things
become bigger. They feed on the need for them, and they grow by standing
at an end. It is not their existing being which grows in this way, because
this, if it is thought of as distant in space, is invisible, and if thought of as
distant in time is not yet existent at all. Magnified by this final stress, by
this final position pure and simple, is solelythat which has never and nowhere
come to pass, in short a perfection which corresponds in a utopian way to
the need for hope. At the head of the ideal since time immemorial has been
the divine, either because the gods can do and are allowed to do what man
is not allowed to and cannot do, or because they are the situationless ones,
the epitome of those who walk.in bliss. However, it makes a crucial difference
in terms of the nature of being of the ideal whether a religion defines
its distance as essentially spatial or essentially temporal. If the distance is
essentially spatial, the assumption of an existent being of God massively
See Vol. III, p. I2.J6n. The direction is not implied in the Authorized Version.
outweighs his merely ideal being; although the latter is never completely
absent. However, if the distance of the divine is essentially temporal, in the
sense of a breakthrough occurring only at the end of time, then ideal being,
being which has not yet become manifest, decisively outweighs that which
is assumed to be existent; although the latter in turn is not absent from
any religion, however strong the 'I will be who I will be'. Whereas theGod in space, in high space, has his perfection essentially as highest being,
as it were above the roof of all world-being, the God who has the last
days on his side shows his being essentially as highest perfection, and this is
definitely apocalyptically different from every kind of existent world-being.
From the spatial God of astral myth a path therefore leads to pantheism,
insofar as this is worship of the Totum of that which exists; whereas from
the exodus God the Totum goes out precisely from the existent worldbeing, with chiliasm. Even where God's being is so heavily emphasized
that 'proofs' of it were established (astral myth had been able to consider
them completely unnecessary); even in Christian scholasticism the ens
realissimum of its God is after all a quality of the ens perfectissimum, and
not vice-versa. For scholasticism, God is primarily the highest goal, and
only from this does the divine as a superlative of being, not only of value,
follow - as a result of an equation, adopted of course from Plato, not
from Christ, of being with perfection. But the God of exodus was in his
essence no more thought of as res finita than exodus itself; he was therefore
the epitome of the highest perfection, but not of the highest existence
of being. And now: all mythology of being with regard to the divine,
all theology as real science is finished. Not finished, however, is what is
meant by the divine towards the side of its hope and of a hope-content
which is non-alienated and has not been ceded to heaven. The deep need
which drove forth this hope itself has remained, even though the hope
no longer has its real object in a pater noster, qui es in coelis, its merely
spatially separated object in supposedly existent super-space. And long before
God as an existent object of being had been overthrown by the Enlightenment, Christianity put man and his claim, or more precisely the son of
man and his representative mystery, into the Lord of Heaven of former
days. Feuerbach and in many respects Hegel before him here merely brought
to completion what began to resound in the question: Cur Deus homo?
Feuerbach brought religious content from heaven back to man, so that man
is not made in the image of God but God in the image of man, or more
exactly of the ideal guiding images of man at any given time. As a result
God as the creator of the world disappears completely, but a gigantic creative
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
1285
region in man is gained, into which - with fantasic illusion, with fantastic
richness at the same time - the divine as a hypostatized human wishful
image of the highest order is incorporated. This 'wishful theory of religion'
in Feuerbach becomes the same as the 'anthropologization of religion' or the
elimination of the 'heavenly doubling of man'. Feuerbach however knows
man, the subject doubled in religion, only in the form of existence in which
he has so far appeared, an abstractly stable form of existence, that of the
so-called species of man. The social-historical ensemble of the respective
'types' of man is missing here, above all man's uncompletedness is missing
here. Religious contents definitely cannot be accommodated in the
shallowness of the bourgeois man which Feuerbach made absolute, any more
than the bourgeois was ever the subject which produced the wealth of
images of gods from within itself. There is least place of all in Feuerbach's
statically existent subject for status-shattering images of religion, the
chiliastic images of 'Behold, I make all things new' and of the kingdom.
Clearly therefore only the openness of the subject and of its world is capable
of absorbing anticipations of absolute perfection into itself again just as
it produced them from within itself. Feuerbach's anthropologization of
religion therefore presupposes, if religion is to be anthropologized, a utopian
notion of man, not a statically determined one. It equally presupposes a
homo absconditus, just as much as the belief in heaven always carried a
deus absconditus within it, a hidden, latent god. Hence the res infinita
of religious ideal-content can least of all be printed on to the res finita
of the bourgeois, as in Feuerbach; for religion may have got along famously
even with ignorance, even with stupidity, but never with triviality:
mysteries are the anti-trivial per see And not only the subject, the demand
for the return of all the abundance transferred to the gods, must be
understood as utopian, but also the nature which surrounds it; it certainly
must not appear as completed, like Feuerbach's mechanical-materialist
nature. Its significant substance has not yet appeared precisely in time,
like that of men it still lies in utopian latency. The kingdom is outwardness,
not only inwardness, is order, not only freedom, is essentially the order of
that subjectivity which is no longer afflicted with objectivity as with something
alien: thus objectivity, which as nature is still around men, must itself be
understood and respected in its unmanifested aspect. The hope which worked
in religion and which has now become without illusions, without hypostases
and unmythological, intends, through the idea of kingdom, that, as in subjectbased possibility, so too on the edge of object-based possibility, utopian
light should shine. The light in the stable at Bethlehem and the light of
1286
the star which stood still above it are therefore one and the same for a religious
intention for which what germinates inside is also what circulates outside.
Small wishes can be forgotten, they also become boring in the long run.
Not so big wishes, for example the image of a beloved who never came or
disappeared, he who has it takes it with him to the grave. As we have seen,
few in the nineteenth century felt more strongly and placed more precisely
that which is undischarged in religion than Feuerbach, the so very important
atheist. Despite the narrowness, rigidity and abstraction in which he keeps
his notion of man, Feuerbach is a turning point in the philosophy of religion;
from him onwards the final history of Christianity begins. For he did want
want to be merely a gravedigger of traditional religion - an easy task a hundred
years after Voltaire and Diderot -, on the contrary, he was fascinated by the
problem of the religious heritage. Nor was he the badly demystified or inconsistent individual who did not get as far in his thinking as the L. Biichners*
or Moleschotts t of the time. On the contrary, he knew that a residue remains
in the affinities, however demystified, which essentially gave rise to
Christmas, Strasbourg Cathedral, the St Matthew Passion. And this residue
he wished - however inadequately in the agent and in the horizons - to take
away even from the other-worldly band of clericsby means of enlightenment.
Hence Feuerbach remarks that he 'negates only in order to establish', and
furthermore that he 'demystifies heaven only in order to make man important'. The task he sets is, in this expropriation of the other world, 'finally
to give man what is man's'. Thus Feuerbach declares with a decisiveness
which is especially instructive today: 'Whoever saysand knows no more than
that I am an atheist says and knows as good as nothing of me. The question
of whether a God does or does not exist belongs to the eighteenth and seventeenth century. I negate God; in my case this means that I negate the negation
of man, in place of the illusory, fantastic, heavenly position of man, which
in real life necessarily becomes the negation of man, I put the sensory, real
and consequently necessarily also political and social position of man. The
question of the existence or non-existence of God for me is precisely the question of the existence or non-existence of man' (Werke, 1846-66, I, p. xiv).
In more defined form this reads: 'Man thinks and believes a God only because
he wants to be God himself but, against his will, is not God' (Werke X,
Ludwig Biichner, the nineteenth-century materialist philosopher and popularizer of science.
See Vol. I, p. 379 and n.
t Jacob Moleschott (1822-93), the Dutch physiologist and philosopher, often considered the
founder of nineteenth-century materialism. His book 'Der Kreislauf des Lebens' (The Circuit of
Life) was influential in the materialist movement.
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
p. 290); 'God is the fulfiller, i.e. the reality, the fulfilment of my wishes'; 'God
is nothing but eternal, uninterrupted joy as being' (Werke VII, p. 240,
251). Feuerbach thus brings out first of all two opposing and yet interconnected basic motifs of the former building of the altar: the wish for our
being and at the same time the fantastic relinquishment of our being through
a loan to heaven. But more lasting than these two examples remains the
putting of them to the test, the pouring-out of the other world on to man
and the earth from which it came. The religion-forming sigh of the oppressed,
joy-craving creature, the religion-filled conflict in man between his existing
manifestation and his non-existing being: none of these psychogenic explanations and dissolutions of a transcendental illusion completely dissolve the
origin from which this deification arose. Something similar also applies to
the far more concrete study of the origins ofreligion which interprets deifications as reflections of social power-conditions and of precarious relations to
nature as well. For there is something else in this reflection and in the fact
that it is possible at all which, precisely in terms of content, extended it so
colourfully beyond the merely repetitive hazy gleam in the sky. And even if
the task of abolishing human misery is accomplished, misery of which religion
was just as much the expression as it was protest against it, even if its first
source, its nearest wishful motif source should be eliminated: even then the
independentfund of human content remains, which was added imaginatively hut
also anticipatorily to the heavenly hypostasis. For Feuerbach this fund certainly
does not consist of negation: 'Religion is the first, the indirect selfconsciousness of man' (Werke VII, p. 39), even more: 'The consciousness
of the infinite being is nothing but man's consciousness of the infinity of his
own being, or: in the infinite being, the object of religion, it is only man's
own infinite being that is the object' (Werke VII, P: 372). A clear reference
to Christ's incarnation is also made: 'Man is the God of Christianity, anthropology is the mystery of Christian theology' (Werke VII, p. 434); Cur Deus
homo, this question and possibility which exists in Christianity alone,
therefore remains even for Feuerbach both the problem of religion and the
key to religion. Self-commitment into the transcendental is read backwards
in de-reified form: as the withdrawal of the transcendental into the self, in
the manner Hegel had already defined in his philosophy of religion: 'In this
entire history man has come to realize that man is immediate, present God,
in such a way that in this history, as spirit perceives it, even the representation
of the process is of that which man, which spirit, is' (Hegel, Werke, 1832,
XII, p. 253). Only the elimination of spirit, i.e. radical anthropologization,
was needed to bring heaven to the front of human existence itself and to
1288
surround heaven with its mysteries. So that for anthropological atheism

religious contents are not totally chimeras, but 'they are not what they are
in the illusion of theology - not foreign, but native mysteries, mysteries of
human nature' (Werke VII, p. IS). This sentence indicates the truth about
Feuerbach, a truth which, as the son of a shallow age, he vainly tried to
disguise with circumscription such as this: 'In the field of nature there are
still enough incomprehensibilities, but the mysteries of religion, which spring
from man, he can know to the very depths. ' Such circumscriptions from the
bourgeois subject of Feuerbachian anthropology, must be noted, above all
as warnings against every shallow secularization of religion, but they pass
away before the immanent Christianity, the homo homini Deus in atheism
as Feuerbach understands it. Thus the triviality of superficial rationalism is
always broken through, thanks to the human, which is not weaker or more
lacking in mysteries than nature. Hence despite everything this real conqueror's sentence in the field of religion appears in Feuerbach: 'The belief
in the other world is the belief in the freedom of subjectivity from the barriers
of nature - consequently the belief of man in himself' (Werke VII, p. 252.).
This is the not-to-be-forgotten background of humanist immanence in the
thoroughly advancing, thoroughly inheriting sense. For this sense is not
completed, on the contrary, it is, in the words of Marx, 'the development
of human productive forces, therefore the development of the wealth of
human nature as an end in itself'. But religion as inheritance (meta-religion)
becomes conscience of the final utopian function in toto: this is human
venturing beyond self, is the act of transcending in league with the dialectically
transcending tendency of history made by men, is the act oftranscending without
anyheavenly transcendence butwith anunderstanding ofit: asa hypostatized anticipation ofbeingfor-itself. It is this still unknown future element in men, not
what is already to hand and at hand in them, that was essentially intended
throughout the changing hypostases of heaven. Thus the founders of religions
have increasingly put Humanum into God, which means here that they have
increasingly circled around the human incognito through ever closer figures
from the other world. Thus all appellations and nominations of God have
been huge figurations of and attempts to interpret the human mystery:
intending the hidden human figure through all religious ideologies and despite
these ideologies. The wishful, indeed the utopian, face-hypostases clearly did
not coincide with the existing image of man: they were both more uncanny
and more enigmatically familiar than the image of man existing at a given
time, the dominant human guiding image at a given time. That which is
both familiar and Utterly Different, the sign of the religious layer, from animal
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
gods to the One God of Power, to the Saviour God, becomes comprehensible
only as such an interpretative projection of the homo absconditus andhis world. The
animal god mixed wild, hideous and gloomy elements such as no man
possessesinto the face. The god of power, with the characteristic superlative
of his being (nemo potest contra Deum nisi Deus ipse"}, brought in the
awesomeness of infinity, the thundering heaven without limits, a tyrannical
element such as again no man possesses but which after all belongs to the
perfected exaggeratedness of religious projections, to this superlative, to this
outbidding. Finally the saviour god, in the shape of the son, is sheer
mysteriousness, but in such a way that it now especially carries the outbidding
element with it, namely as the expulsion of fear par excellence for all the
baptized, who have added the projection of Christ to their old Adam. The
outbidding element in this final shape presents itself to hope immediately
as the wonderful, as if the true core of the incognito tasted sweet. Hence:
'Hope maketh not ashamed' (Romans S, S); even: 'For I reckon that the
sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory
which shall be revealed in us' (Romans 8, 18); even: 'Eye hath not seen, nor
ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God
hath prepared for them that love him' (I Cor. 2, 9). All these are anthropologizations of religion which in increasing depth are equally religions of the
unknown anthropos, the anthropos rising up from unknownness: 'Till we
all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God,
unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ'
(Eph. 4, 13). Therefore Christian hope was that everything should be man
redeemed, including transfigured nature; in which sun and moon no longer
shine, but its light is the lamb. And no anthropological critique of religion
robs the hope to which Christianity is applied; it takes away from this hope
only that which would cancelit out as hope and transform it into superstitious
confidence: the pictured, determined mythology of its fulfilment, which is
nonsensically unreal but hypostatized as real. The critique brings the contents
of religion back to the human wish, but to the greatest, most thorough wish,
which in the long run never becomes inessential because it is itself nothing
but the intention towards essence. This essence can be prevented,
mythologically this prevention is conceived as hell, but its non-prevention was
conceived mythologically as apotheosis. God thus appears as the hypostatized
ideal ofthe human essence which has not yetbecome inreality; he appearsas a utopian
entelechy of the soul, just as paradise was imagined as a utopian entelechy of
* 'Noone has power against God except God' himself. '
1290
God's world. It is a scientificunclearness to posit this conception of God as

real;it is a poorly demystified fantasy to posit this mythology of God, because
it is not real, for example as a real product at the end of the world, with the
substitute religion of God-making, in the poetic sense of the earlyGorky, or
even of Rilke, or in the nature-philosophical sense of Bergson: the notion
that the world is a machine for producing gods. Equally the demystification
brings no salvationwhich merely deprives the idea of gods of its reality but
allows it to continue in its entire mythological form: asa fixed ideal, posited
in a postulate. This is Kant's theory: true, it does contain most powerful
utopian conscience, expressed in the moral form of the postulate, but it does
not disturb the God of the catechism,it leaves him as 'the unity of allreality' ,
posited asa regulativeidea. Instead Feuerbach's anthropology of religion set
the Cur Deus homo on its feetagain- and that which isbringablefrom heaven
to earth makes deepthis-worldliness. The ideaof God, the transcendent unreality
ofwhich inpastandinfuture is taken seriously, is fulfilled as an ideal solelyby
its anthropological dissolution, yet by a different, completely different dissolution than into human existence as it has been brought out so far, in human
prehistory. Barth, or theisticheteronomy, calls the great religiousmanifestations 'bomb craters' which show that a revelation has taken place. Feuerbach,
or atheisticautonomy, interprets thesemanifestations, especially the biblical
ones, the other way round, the only right way, asprotuberances which show
that a total wishful extensionof the Humanum.has taken place and an equally
total attempt on the meaning of the world. Indeed instead of many separate
hopes, in the great religions of the world hope itselfwas attempted, which
was meant to embrace and to concentrate the many separate hopes. But
absolutely nothing but ens realissimum, and that with subservient man's
reflectionof proskunesis* and throne. The truth of the idealof God is solely
the utopia of the kingdom, and for this the precondition is preciselythat no
God should remain on high, because none is, or everhasbeen, there anyway.
Recourse to atheism; problem of the space into which

God was imagined and utopianized
But how powerful were the forces which posited a beyond. How natural
it appearedfor a long, long time that the world is haunted with spirits from
below and from above. How tenaciously, for those who have been brought
Cf. John 4, 23: 'when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth'.
The Greek for worshipper here is 'proskunetes',
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
1291
up, and have stayed, conservative, the image of one enthroned in the other
world has survived. Much habit and unseriousness gets in here, too, but
precisely habit here pads out vague feelings so that they look fatter than in
seriousness they are. Of course no one, not even the most religious person,
today still believes in God as even the most lukewarm, indeed the doubters,
believed in him two hundred years ago. Yet the strong wishful forces or
wishes for a solution which have survived, in habit and in its organized
tradition, the church form, even in hypostatized form, do after all still permit
lukewarm theism. Otherwise it would not be possible- in the huge bourgeois
prose world itself - for the church still to exist at all. To exist as the exception
to the atheistic rule - of course, as the exception that generally tends to be
on very good terms with this rule whenever it comes to maintaining the
bourgeois prose world itself in its capitalist foundations. Until the victory
of the bourgeois enlightenment, atheism was not the rule but an astoundingly
rare exception. And on top of this it was so hedged about with restrictions
that it is doubtful whether Greek, Roman or Indian atheism can be understood at all in the modern meaning of the word. Already the various figures
in the rejected world of gods mean that the hollow space which formed was
different: the No to Jupiter looks different from the No to Brahma, indeed
from the No to Yahweh. As for this latter No, which is at least similar to
today's, atheism as a danger does not occur much more than three times in
the Bible. The dangers of 'apostasy' , of turning to other gods, were countless,
atheism on the other hand appears, if not late, then timid. It is denounced
not as struggle, as profession, as liberation, but more as a kind of forgetfulness:
'They have belied the Lord, and said, It is not he' (jer, S, 12), or as the manner
of the proud man who will not seek after God (Psalm 10, I), or of the fool
who is not clever enough for this question (Psalm 14, rf.). But now the
questions about God have become clever enough to make atheism positive
precisely as an appearance of what was devalued or transferred in the belief
in God. And in this positive element even all atheisms agree, regardless of
the nature of the God lifted out of them: they agree that with the negation
of the real throning of God human fear of it and human nullity ceases. The
fact that the age of despotism, therefore of heteronomous fear is over, this
is what unites such profoundly different atheisms as that of Lucretius, that
ofSankhya philosophy (on which Buddha's teaching is based), that in the
mysticism of the Son of Man (insofar as this caused Yahweh to disappear),
and that in Feuerbach. Lucretius' sigh of relief returns in almost the same
form in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, despite the difference
in form of the dethroned Grand Lords; indeed Epicurus, the materialist, for
1292
Lucretius becomes the same in science as Prometheus was in myth. Hence the
positivum which fills all atheisms, as Lucretius expresses it in his didactic
poem: 'When on earth human life lay sorely oppressed by the weight of
religion, which showed its head from heaven and, fearful to behold, threatened
mortals: then for the first time a Greek, a mortal, dared to set his eyes against
it and to oppose it; he whom neither the temple of the gods nor lightning
nor the crashing of heaven subdued; all the more so he now raises the bold
courage of his spirit, because he first demanded that the fixed gates of nature
should be broken open' (De rerum natura I, li. 62-71). Such deliverance from
fear appears, however, to contradict the utterly different kind of deliverance
which is connected with the wishful nature of religion itself, with the hypostasis
of its own wishful perfection into Deus Optimus Maximus. But no atheism
which delivered from fear brought deliverance from the wishful contents and
treasures of hope of religion, except in its most meagre and totally negative
form, in the vulgar materialism of the nineteenth century, which preserved
itself only by its educational embourgeoisement from the complete loss of
these hope contents, i.e. from nihilism. On the contrary, atheism brought
these transcendental treasures into immanence; and in Feuerbach it brought
them quite reflectedly into man. What disappeared, what man was delivered
from in the case of this most important and, on this point, probably least
understood atheist, was again and again the posited reality of the perfectissimum, so that it disappeared as oppressive throning against man, as that
absolute Being-Above which characterizes Caesarism, with which a purely
ideological sum of non-treasures, belonging solely to the church of the masters,
could then ally itself. But as for Feuerbach's actual critique of religion, it is
Jupiter Optimus Maximus which atheism essentially abolished, it is not the
wishful content of an Optimum Maximum itself. And it is essentially the
positing as real, superstitiously carried over into an other-world, of human
mystery and perfectissimum against which atheism then plays its immanence,
against which it posits its open space, at first as emptiness. But its emptiness
is not in immanence; on the contrary, the latter, when the treasures
squandered in heaven were brought back to it, gained increased importance:
it gained the Utterly Different of anthropological depth. The meaning of
nature in the Lucretian sense has not survived as definitive, any more than
the astral myth from which worldliness was brought down was a definitiveness worthy of belief. But the meaning of the regnum humanum in nature is
definitively one, and here atheism has inherited no', less than the entire selfcommitment of the founders into the religious mystery, and therefore the most
powerful religious positivum. Or, with full consciousness of the paradox which
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
12 93
constitutes the matter here: Jesus, when he said that he was the mediator
between himself and the Father, had himself become the Father, and when
he said he was the vine and his followers the shoots he spoke in the god-cleared space of a mystical anthropology; the son of man mysticism
always followed him in this entry into Yahweh, or more: in this exodus
from the God of exodus himself. No flat or even demonic hubris has a
place here, where even the sursum corda proves itself against hypostases.
And precisely because of this proving the son of man mysticism remains,
right up to Feuerbach's anthropologization, even when, precisely when
Deus Optimus Maximus does not dwell above the stars: the atheist who
has understood that which is conceived as God as a pointer to unmanifested
human content is not antichrist. Nor is he who sees the unmanifested human
content connected with the utopian content of nature, which surrounds
men with the so much broader, fermenting openness of its incognito: 'Do
you senseyour mystery, world?' isjust as much a Christian, i.e. apocalyptic
cry as the older: 'Do you sense the creator, world?' is a mythical one,
despite the Hymn to Joy in which it occurs. Hence this utopian element
is and remains irreligious, because it is strikingly meta-religious, i.e. it
belongs precisely to atheism which has arrived and is finally comprehended
in its depth dimensions; but the concept of atheism, according to its last
positivum, is the realm of freedom. For this it keeps the world open at
the front and forwards; for this it has cleared away Jupiter and the throne
and the world-creating, world-encircling ghost of an existent ens
realissimum. What was formerly designated as God designates no fact
whatever, certainly no throning existence, but an utterly different problem,
and the possible solution of this problem is not God but kingdom.
Things here below in the long run have proved not to be as frail as
those above. Man inherits the otherworldly treasures insofar as they are
treasures and not merely grimaces from what was not understood. For
undoubtedly along with cringing and the deceit of the masters pious
ignorance was also reflected in the other world, not just the secret, which
is and remains one; the unknowing mingled with it. Of deceitful religion
and its unmasking Engels aptly says: 'In order for existing social conditions to be tackled, their halo had to be removed.' On pious ignorance
and on the mythological in religion Engels says, not quite so exhaustively:
'In the early stages of history the powers of nature are the first to
experience this reflection... But soon alongside natural powers socialpowers
also come into effect, powers which confront men just as strangely
and in the beginning just as inexplicably, ruling them with the same
12 94
apparent natural necessity as the natural powers themselves. The imaginary

shapes in which at the beginning only the mysterious forces of nature were
reflected thus acquire social attributes, become representatives of historical
forces' (Anti-Duhring, Dietz, p. 393f.). In this way the 'forest primeval'
element is joined by 'higher stupidity', at any rate as a very pre-scientific
religious consciousness. All this is genetically correct but as noted it does
not hit the uplift motif which so painfully, image-fully and hope-fully
fills what is by no means merely the 'higher stupidity' of the higher
religions. For the dawnings of the wishful depths and their treasures are
accordingly different from the giant shadows of ignorance, and he who
has seen through one has not yet seen through the other. To give an
example, they are as different as the myth of the river- or town-gods is
from Lao Tzu's Tao or the story of a God who made Eve from Adam's
rib is from Isaiah's prophecy of the future mountain of Zion. Rescuable,
inheritable after reformatio in capite et membris is solely the wishful content
and the depth of hope which have appeared through ignorance and through
pure fantasy in religious images. They are retrieved for the human subject,
for the possible subject of nature, for the dawning of the incognito in
both. But precisely with atheism, now that there should no longer be
any doubt about its anthropological-utopian positivum, this last question
remains: what of the hollow space which the dispatching of the Godhypostasisleaves behind or does not leavebehind? Is it also part of ignorance,
is it only a chimera like the hypostasis itself which settled in it as seemingly
real? Must the cloak also go when the Duke falls, is the problem of the
place into and over to which gods have been imagined an illusory problem
which will be settled of itself with the end of religious illusion? Is this
place and space merely virtual, like the reflected image in a plane mirror:
the entire length of a room is in it, the entire prospect from a window,
with a church tower miles in the distance, but the surface of the mirror
itself is flat, behind it there is nothing of the whole perspective. Or does
the emptiness into which divine illusions have been projected not exist
at least as emptiness? Indeed does not even mere reflection and re-reflection,
in order to happen, require something which is not itself illusion, though
it doubles into illusion, namely a mirror? Does not the entire crux of onesided sensualism or economism repeat itself on another level in the problem
or the illusory problem of the religious place? So that precisely for these
introjections or illusions a field of its own, however this is valued, must
also be posited, against which sensualism or economism inveigh and
which both then wish to - clear out. The crux became apparent when
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
12 95
Leibniz with most perceptive malice added to the old axiom which Locke
had quoted sensualistically: 'Nihil est in intellectu, quod non fuerit in sensu'
the rider: 'excipe: nisi ipse intellectus' * (Nouveaux Essais II, I, 2). The senses
may therefore have provided the intellect with absolutely everything and
without them it may be a completely empty page, but the senses have not
provided the intellect itself; to which by analogy may be added, in connection
with economism: nothing can be in the superstructure that was not in the
economic substructure - except the superstructure itself. And the same applies
to the superstructure in the superstructure, to the religious deification of the
wishful images, even of the obscure powers of nature and history: a field,
a hollow space, a specific topos must be methodologically presupposed and
objectively pre-ordered if religious wishful images, even images of ignorance,
and especiallythe images of a genuine mystery-relation, around the incognito,
are to be projectible in the way in which they have actually been projected
in the history of religion. With this analogy to the Leibnizian rider it therefore
emerges that the problem of the religious projection space inandfor itselfisnot
an illusory problem, and this space, although certainly no reality in the sense
of factual existence, is nochimera either. It is certainly no reality, let alone
the supreme reality in the sense of the Platonic two-world theory of the frailty
of all appearances and the true existence of the eternal ideas in an eternally
Uranian place. But different from this - precisely in the material unity of
the world - is something kept open for future possible, for not yet decided
reality in this hollow space; as such it is emptiness only according to its first
definition and is certainly not the same as absolute nothingness. And nothing
could be more wrong - insofar as atheism is taken seriously in object-based,
not just in anthropological terms - nothing could be more wrong than the
consequence-making of a belief in hollow space in which no kind of Being
whatever is to be found, not even the correlate of a utopian Being instead
of that of God, of a Not-Yet-Being which is like - the kingdom. Pure belief
in hollow spacecan either despair nihilistically or it may be hectically delighted
because for it meaning and God have both disappeared at the same time; and
then of course humanity, surrounded by nihilistic night, merely
phosphoresces, or, surrounded by a vacuum, fluoresces as in a Geissler tube.
But this is not the case, preciselythe hollow spacecleared by certainty of Being
has emptiness - this must be noted - only as its first determination, but it
has fermentation, open sphere ofinfluence for the human subject - and also for
a by no means disposed of subject of surrounding nature - immediately as its
* 'There is nothing in the intellectwhich hasnot already existedin sense exceptthe intellectitself.t
1296
second determination. Hence Feuerbach, too in his later years, had to

interrupt significantly his all too pure anthropology, which here means
his subjective idealism, with regard to the religious wishful world. He
could not help finding, still finding - if not in the extinguished other
world then in a nature equally deprived of gods - something which makes
the projection no longer so freely suspended. As it is nature which in his
view is also involved in religious projection, the mere wishful images are
joined even by objects, namely those of the external sensory world. Thus
for the later Feuerbach of the 'Theogony' the gods are not only wishful
beings but at the same time natural "beings: 'The wish is probably the
origin of religion, the origin of the gods, and the wish itself as such stems
from man; but the object of the wish stems from external nature, stems
from the senses. . . .The gods as such are not idolized and personified natural
forces or natural bodies; they are personified, emancipated, objectified
feelings, sensations, emotions, but emotions which are attached to natural
bodies, are awakened or caused by them' (Werke IX, p. 221, 331). Thus
a finally object-based Feuerbach, instructively; the object-senseis here related
to natural religion, hence to sensory Objects in it which have remained
even after the departure of their deification. However, if the object-sense
is related to humanistic religions, which worshipped their god in the other
world of nature, then no characteristic Objects whatever, i.e. Objects
belonging to the other world, remain, but what remains is the open topos
of the In.Pront.o}Us, the Novum into which human ranks of purpose continue
to run in mediated form. Into this topos myths of perfection have been projected, but also, provided it is not blocked, realizations of tendencies towards
it, if not in it, can occur. The topos is blocked only when nothingness, in
the true meaning of this concept, anti-concept, really breaks into it, i.e,
the nothingness of the definitive doctrine, without any still possible fermentation and real utopia, without a correlate of hope in emptiness. This
genuine Nothing and its In Vain is undoubtedly just as latent in the hollow
space of atheism as the All or the fulfilment through the regnum humanum
or the kingdom; only: it is still just as little decided as the All. The latency
ofNothing announces itself in the time which men still have as prevention,
annihilation, as the sphere of influence of what is called evil. In the space
which men still have the same latency of Nothing announces itself as disintegration, as disorderly multiplicity, as threatening chaos. But equally the
latency ofAll announces itself in the announced openness of the world, in this
case in such a way that the annihilationcan stillbecome that of inadequacy itself,
and the multiplicity can still become that of self-qualifying and experimenting
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
12 97
fullness. But above all the utopian space formerly filled with gods identifies itself, positively identifies itself in the topos of order which holds
together the hope-contents which have become anthropological and their
freedom. This order, as has already been seen in the socialutopias (cf. Vol.
II, p. 533f.) and as becomes clear here in religious-philosophical terms,
is the authentic kingdom in the realm of freedom: but such kingdomlikeness would notat last be intentionable if the field of religious hypostases were
not more lasting than the religious hypostases in this field itself. Nothing and
All, chaos and kingdom, lie in the balance in the formerly religious area
of projection; and it is human work in history which heavily influences
the scale of Nothing or of All. Indeed not only the order which is appropriate to the hope of kingdom, but also the chaos which indicates imminent nothingness, was anticipated in the formerly religious space, has
come to a standstill in the projection-field if not in the anticipation-field.
Because the hollow space may contain Nothing as well as All, it was called hell or heaven; and hell was thought of as the space of the finally annihilating or of Satan. The Satanic is horror, complete nihilation, complete absence of content, sealedness which flees into the definitive emptiness
in which it is sealed. Reality as it has been working to date contains enough
of such annihilations, such outbreaks of primeval evil, but not yet as the
victory of evil; if the victory of evil was represented and hypostatized as
definitive, the religious space filled as negatively with the prince of hell and
demonic contents as it had filled positively with God and angelic contents. But even if the mythologies of the prince of hell and the king of
heaven have each equally departed, the topos does remain, in this case as
the double projection"! and anticipation-space, with the inscriptions: Lasciate
ogni speranza, * or conversely: The noble member-of the spirit world is
saved from evil. t These are all therefore utopian problems of space from the
religious inheritance, they belong to that world-road of the future which
is broken precisely into the most thorough immanence, into that of the
anthropological incognito. They belong to the In-Front-of-Us in which
the core of men and of the earth, in which the anthropological subject
as well as that of the cipher of nature utopianly blossoms to its end or
does not blossom to its end. If there is no utopia of the kingdom without
atheism, then there is implicitly also none without the utopian-real hollow
space itself which atheism has both left behind and revealed. Precisely the
extra-territoriality of the incognito again and again presupposes for the
* 'Abandon all hope'. The inscription over the gates of hell in Dante's 'Inferno', III, 9.
t Faust, Part II, 11934-5.
clearing of the incognito that the hollow space itself into which the divine
hypostasis has collapsed has not also collapsed; the extraterritoriality of the
incognito would otherwise be based neither on the new heaven nor on the
new earth to which it points. The kingdom of the cleared incognito of the
depth of man and of the world: to here and nowhere else the entire history of
religion hasjourneyed; but the kingdom needs space. So much space that all
expressionsand extensions so far are not enough for it, and again so little space,
such intensively penetrated space, that only the narrow path of Christian
mysticism indicates it. The Christian ideal would not be one if it did not strike
directly into this incognito landscape, but into an enveloped landscape. This
ideal alsojourneyed with the Three Wise Men of the entire orient; they forgot
their own stars for the one above the hut, but they also brought gifts from
all earlier religions, frankincense, myrrh and gold, they handed over the tradition together with the destruction of the alienation myths at the birthplace
of the moment which finally touches itself. The star journeyed to the hut
where God ceases - not in nothingness but in the, from here on, self-revealing
Cur-Deus-homo space of the possible identification of what is sprouting
in man and the world as a whole and what is being born. For this and for
this end the religious hollow space is and remains non-chimera, although all
the gods in it were chimeras. Homo absconditus therefore retains a sphere
which remains pre-ordered, in which, ifhe does not go under, he may intend
his most thorough appearance in his opened world.
Stay awhile in the religious layer: the unity of the instant in mysticism
Precisely the best does after all lie nearby, where one does not expect to find
it. The Here and Now therefore returns at this highest place, has to say its
Being-For-Itself. All intensive-utopian glances, with their moral, musical,
religious guidelines, lead back to the darkness of the lived moment; for there
the fermenting All sprouts, and there it is still hidden from itself, unbecome
in utopian terms. Every single narrow path around the hope-content of a
Being-For-Itself goes up to the moment, with an ever more intensive attempt
to define this fundamentally intensive element. The most intense attempt
is religious, in the sense of man's self-commitment into the mystery: the last
other world is our nearest this-world, our most immanent nearness. But this
is nothing but that which is sprouting in every lived moment, that which
has not yet been urged on to happiness, not yet extracted as gold. 'Stay awhile,
you are so fair': the fulfilment of this hope therefore in religious terms
ultimately becomes the same asmysticism or more precisely as the instant or
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
1299
nunc aeternum in mysticism. And in that mysticism which arose on the

ground of religion which had become rich in subject, humanized; that
mysticism which knows immersion, not only, indeed not at all any more,
orgiasm. Religious orgiasm, it too pushed those possessed by it beyond their
previous stature, gave them powers and abilities which seemed to come from
a dark root. Frenzy even made its frenzy-gods so similar that the shamans
and the Dionysian mystes all felt 'deified'. But self-commitment here is itself
as external as the gods into whom it commits and intrudes itself; these are
still nature gods as yet un endowed with any human material. Hence orgiasm
flourishes above all in primitive and in astral religions, among shamans and
priests of Baal, but not in humanized religions or if so only on their edges.
Christian mysticism above all is immersion without any frothing Being-BesideOneself, precisely the kind of immersion which should correspond to the
deepest emotion of nearness in the shape of a pouring-forth of subject into
God, of a pouring-forth of God into subject. The noise of Becoming-BesideOneselfor ofBeing-Beside-Oneselfgives way to the stillness of a BecomingFor-Oneself, wildness gives way to the 'powerful habitation of the self' , as
Daniel Czepko, a Bohemian mystic, expressed it. The individual ego, a mere
part of transitoriness and multiplicity, hence of self-imparting nothingness,
here sinks; this sinking is both a condition and an essential feature, attested
again and again, of mystical experience. Freeing oneself of one's individual
specific being and of the multiplicity of all things, this abandonment of
everything is seen as the main path to the finding of everything, i.e. the finding
of unity ofbeing with the true self. Mystical immersion is thus contact with
God (with essence instead of appearance) by discarding multiplicity, i.e. by
simplification; this grants everything, as the unity ofeverything. Attempts
were made by the neo-Platonists to distinguish the no longer individual self
of this union in a separate, active-concentrated function of consciousness,
for example by Plotinus in highest UVJleUL~, which, as insight, also contains
highest UVJl8eUL~, just as this synthesis flows out into highest li1rAWUL~ or
simplicity. And it is this self-summarizing ground of force, ground of self,
ground of identity per se in which every form of immersion has since maintained its apotheosis, in the three stages of purification, illumination, union.
Here is the place of a self-apotheosiswhich is no longer frenzied, which appears
to be super-conscious, a place for which medieval mystics later attempted to
find the most intense descriptions. These are nothing but descriptions of an
attained Being-For-Oneself: intimum, summum, apex mentis in Richard of
St Victor, feeling, ground, little spark of the soul, umbel of is-ness, incastleness
in Meister Eckhart. 'If the whole man', says Eckhart, 'were like the little
1300
spark he, would always be uncreated and uncreaturely, uplifted above time
for eternity.' Teresa de Jesus calls the same experience, in which her
apotheosis seemed to occur, the castle of the soul, and she lists the separate
chambers within it; all these place names are related to one another. And
related, i.e. merging into one another are also the attitudes or entrances
to this castle, whether called ardour or light, love or contemplation, activity
or passivity: in the unio mystica they ceased to be alternatives. The question of the primacy of will or of intellect, which divided all Christian
scholasticism, for the same scholastics becomes irrelevant in mysticism:
Ruysbroek, the doctor ecstaticus, and Thomas, the doctor angelicus, no
longer have a quarrel as mystics; love of the highest, contemplation of
the highest become identical in the mystical maximum. Likewise the
distinction between suffering and doing, passivity and activity, is cancelled
out, they exchange their faces in the summum mentis. The New Testament
certainly contains this united doubledness of tearing and being torn, in
the fusion of meekness and of an aggression such as this: 'And from the
days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence,
and the violent take it by force' (Matt. II, 12). But mysticism sees meekness
and activity as being in a dialectic, it allows these attitudes, once they
have attained their greatest power, to change and to merge into one another.
Christian mysticism is certainly devotion to God, being-dissolved in God,
but in such a way that the aggression of an utterly different kind of beingdissolved is at the same time working in this passivity: namely that of
redemption from God. On the other hand, Christian mysticism is definitely
a breaking into God, an overwhelming consciousness of an apex mentis,
of a point of the mind which pierces God. Yet at the same moment this
activity bends itself back to devotion, in such a way that God makes his
master into a subservient bearer, into one who himself certainly appears
to be borne up by higher powers. Thus dualisms which have their hold
in the common world of ego and of non-ego fuse in the mystical castle.
And precisely this hold disappears in mystical union, because it causes the
sharpest dualism itself to disappear: the castle no longer has any dividing
wall between ego and non-ego, subject and object, subject and substance;
it is itself built without otherness. No more otherness, this ultimately has
been the hugely anticipatory illusion of all mystics, yet a phantasma
utopicissime fundatum. The axe which splits the world into subject and
object is pulled out mentally by the mystic; then all that is held back seems
to cancel itself out. Thus an entering into the immediacy of the moment
takes place, one which is both undivided and completely esoteric; an
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
1301
entering takes place into a moment which for mystical experience is no

longer located in time. Time and moment were never so close, indeedso fused, as eternity and this moment. Its name therefore becomes nunc
stans or nunc aetemum, a name in which the ostensibly most tense antitheses:
moment and eternity, interchange, in perfect dialectical unity. The God
of mysticism was the God of this nunc aetemum, therefore the God of this
highest moment; in it, Now is Always, Here is Everywhere. So that the
antithesis of God and not-God is also cancelled out; it also belongs to
objectivities outside the castle. God dies by being born in the nunc aeternum;
hence for Eckhart God is sheer Nothing, i.e, the All which has become
predicateless.
So many heads, so many opinions, this applies widely and divides. But
it no longer divides when the heads close their eyes, i.e. when a religiously
ecstatic state occurs. Frothing and immersion do not of course meet, except
on the edge, only there can it rush forward orgiastically. But otherwise
for immersion everything separating which the children of the ordinary
world have drawn fused into an alliance. Thus the frontiers between peoples
and above all between forms of religion absolutely disappear here. Hence
precisely the revolutionary among mystics, Thomas Munzer, read in the
unity of non-scriptural illumination the unity of an Internationale across
all separations. Jewish, Turkish, Papist, Lutheran, all this according to
Munzer belongs to the letter of the world, not to the pouring-out of the
spirit: '1 preach a Christian faith which is the same in form in all the hearts
of the elect on earth. If a man in his whole life had neither heard nor
seen the Bible, he could still, through the right teaching of the spirit,
have an unerring Christian faith, just as all those had who wrote the Holy
Scriptures without any books. If we Christians are now to agree peaceably,
Psalm 72, with all the chosen ones among all scatterings or races of every
kind of faith then, we must know how that man feels who has been brought
up among unbelievers from youth, who has learnt the right works and
the teaching of God without any books.' The same applies to the harvest
in Christianity, the separating of the wheat from the chaff: 'The elect
lover of God feels a wondrous overflowing joy when his brother comes
to faith through an advent similar to his own. The present church above
all is an old profeuse in comparison; but the time of harvests is always
there' (Expressed exposure of false faith, 1524). This is the unity in which
mysticism sawall its children, a unity which cancelled out religions by
making the division between unbelievers and the elect right through the
individual religions. This included the great popular movement which began
1302
with the Albigensian Wars in the twelfth century and culminated in the
German Peasants' War: the abundance of the elect - as once with the community of the disciples - went about as unity in the people, not among the
mumbling priests of the masters, let alone princes. From this unity the
loneliness in which the mysticism of Hugh and Richard of St Victor in the
twelfth century had moved was also cancelled out, the loneliness of the soul
with its God ('Soliloquium de arrha animae'" is, significantly, the title of
one of Hugo ofSt Victor's major works). The rungs of the heavenly ladder
broke out of psychology, the travel guide of the soul to God was transformed
by the first prophet of Gothic mysticism, Joachim of Fiore, into a movement
of history itself, into the dynamism of the last gospel. All mankind now
completes the movement into mystical Christ-likeness as into the Third
Kingdom - to the salvation of the pure, to the destruction of the impure;
mankind goes beyond the kingdoms of the laws and of grace, it attains
plenitudo intellectus (cf. Vol. II, p. 510). And the state of this intellectual
plenitude corresponds precisely to the deification with which Christian
mysticism surrounded its inspired ones; it therefore corresponds to the community of a universal feast of Pentecost. Or as the Brothers of the Full Spirit,
a mystical sect around the time of Eckhart, described this future or third age,
absolutely in line with Joachim but also absolutely in line with previously
solitary ecstasy: 'In the third age the Holy Spirit will show himself as a flame,
as a furnace of divine love, as a cellar of spiritual intoxication, as a pharmacy
of divine spices, spiritual oils and ointments, as a continuing prophesying
of spiritual joys by which not only in simple knowledge but in delicious and
palpable experience the truth of God's word become flesh will be seen' (cf.
Hahn, Geschichte der Ketzer im Mittelalter, 1847, II, p. 465). Indeed the
mankindly union of 'knowledge' is followed by an as it were cosmic,
cosmogonic one in Eckhart: the movement of mysticism to God is not only
self-movement, self..knowledge and self-revelation of God in which he unfolds
from his 'unnatured nature' to 'natured nature', but for this very reason it
is the same as the world process. And as the mystical soul, which in its innermost nature is God, returns from the relinquishment of the world to the
primal ground, to the God who is to be regained, so by virtue of this
'unbecoming' the entire world process again returns to the primal ground:
a reflux of Being through knowledge and an entering into its ground.
The mystical function here becomes a function of the world-change itself:
'Soliloquy of the pledge of the mind'. 'Arrha' is medieval Latin for 'earnest money', a
monetary pledge. Hugh of St Victor is using the word metaphorically.
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
133
scintilla, the mystical spark, burns not in mere loneliness but at the divide
between otherness and identity. These finally are very great modes of union,
but they all stem from the revolutionary feeling of togetherness, feeling
of unity in the elect with which immersion allied itself in full heretical
Christianity, with chiliasm. Towards it, in socially and also in cosmically
broad mysticism, the halo now advanced, which anyway came out of man in
the breakthrough to God as if out of captivity. For it was sheer prevented
halo which burns and breaks out in the scintilla, freedom of the children of
God as after the Last Judgement; this freedom thinks that it already exists
today, and in this surpassing it feels itself free even of God as an object. The
halo ofthecore in thecaptivity ofits incommensurate world thus finally founds
the mystical unity 'of all the chosen ones among all scatterings or races of
every kind of faith'. Undoubtedly the unions of mysticism will never return
in the old form, and the lightning in which the indescribable is done will
no longer open up a heaven from which figurative haloes plunge down. But
in the depth of this enthusiasm there always lay the intended breakthrough
of a touching of self, a touching of ground, into a kingdom that was to contain
no mysteries other than human ones and no other order than that of a corpus
Christi, with vine and shoots. The kingdom of Christian mysticism was built
in the dimensions of the Son of Man, with the suddenly opened moment as
his crib. This nunc stans, which itself steps forth on the Here and Now, is
so far from being other-world as to be the closest this-world of all: thus the
nunc stans ofthe mystics in theliteral andin the central sense means the same asthe
'Stay awhile, you are sofair'; - only in the problem of the nunc stans does this
Faust-goal have form and content of the identity staked outin it. The perfect
utopia or utopia of perfection which religion inserted into heaven here swings
back into the core of man as well as into the problem-subject of nature. Nunc
stans is thus the precision formula for the most immanent immanence, i.e.
for the temporally so distant and still absolutely undetermined world without
any possible alienation.
Miracles and the miraculous; moment as the foot ofNike

Often holy men spread a characteristic awe around them. They seemed
to possess strange powers, thus they exerted influence on the people. These
powers were considered magical, miraculous, and as such beyond human
measure. The magical trick was in part intended to impress and win over
those who could not be won over by a sermon because they simply did
1304
not understand it. But in part, over and above this show-effect, a will-toexplode was also at work in miracle-making. It sought to lift not only
the subjectively but also the objectively accustomed, the usual connection
of things, off its hinges. Both, propagandistic and object-based magic, are
to be found even in the Old Testament. The former when Aaron outdoes
the Egyptian magicians with a rod which finally swallows up their rods.
The latter when Elijah, with 'his face between his knees', appears on the
scene just like an African rain-maker (I Kings 18, 42ff.). Of course, the
accounts of miracles in the Old Testament are mentioned more in passing,
as if they were not really or only indirectly relevant. Even such fantastic
Mosaic legends as those of the Ten Plagues or even the parting of the
Red Sea merely frame the greater charismatic act: the exodus from Egypt.
This relative subordination as well as the ultimate fading of miracles in
the Old Testament is based on two reasons which are no longer found
in the .New Testament. One was that the priestly version of the Bible
under Ezra, when the Jewish church-state was founded, pushed back the
old wildly-growing magical popular religion which was hostile to laws,
and also the will to move within this religion. Many accounts of miracles
probably disappeared at this time, especially if acts were connected with
them which were subversive of or even attempted to improve on Yahweh.
Then the type of prophet also changed: whereas Elijah still displays many
miracle-working, orgiastic-magical characteristics like a shaman or priest
of Baal, already with Amos, only a hundred years later, the form of utopiawith a purely visionary, soon even a literary mandate, begins. The language
of thunder took the place of miraculous things, the miracle itself, indispensable for religious propaganda, was reduced to visionary contact; this was
especiallyrefined in the case of Ezekiel, a scholar and a priest. Until however
the dearest child of faith again advanced both wildly and naively in the
New Testament, much to the chagrin of liberal theologians of today. Jesus
certainly does appear as a magus, he heals the lame, changes water into
wine, feeds five thousand people with five loaves and two fishes, drives
out the devils of disease and raises the dead, as Elijah did. This means
that the popular ground again came to the fore, with it the folklore of
the miracle, undisturbed by Sadducees and Pharisees. Even evangelists such
as Luke, who was a doctor, or the hellenistically educated author of the
Gospel of St. John do not suppress the accounts of miracles, they merely
give them over and above this a spiritualistic meaning, with reference to
even greater miracles. The feeding of the five thousand is related to the
Last Supper (John 6, 35), the healing of the blind man to Ghrist as the
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
135
light of the world (John 9, 30); thus the fleeting and singular aspects of these
miracles cease to apply, they are meant to benefit far more than the chance
number of five thousand men at the time or the single blind man. And
thus it becomes clear from this re-interpretability that it was not only the
mere primitive magic sphere which again spread in the New Testament
thanks to peasants and fishermen, But also utterly new definitions, these
above all, stimulated the miraculous: Jesus as the Messiah, Jesus and the
kingdom of heaven which had drawn near. These two are the fundamental
miracles which first founded the smaller ones which were expected ofJesus,
and which he himself regarded as his 'signs'. In place of the older sense
of the miraculous, still connected with sorcery, came a new, an eschatological
sense: - miracles are the signs of the coming end. However in themselves,
without this background, the accumulated stories of miracles about Jesus
are no different story than all others in history, whether it be the history
of superstition and its mass psychosis (the obsession with witches) or of
the parapsychic or paraphysical processes for which an explanation and
categorization has yet to be found. Parapsychic abilities such as clairvoyance,
paraphysical abilities such as telekinesis and suchlike are, rightly or wrongly,
also recorded outside religions, and within them many miraculous stories
of the New Testament flourish just as well among fetish priests. Legends
such as the changing of the water into wine could just as well have been
told about the sorceress Medea as about the teacher of the Our Father
and of the Sermon on the Mount; the Faust of the chapbook made wine
gush even from wood. A Jewish satire of the Middle Ages, on 'Jesus the
Hanged Man', - on the basis of these isolated miracles - can therefore
come up with nothing better than that Jesus learnt sorcery in Egypt and led
Israel astray by it. But the Novum, with quite different values, consists in
the claim to be the Messiah and in the apocalyptic background: 'Behold, I make
all things new'; it is from this and from this alone that Christ's miracles live.
Along with the other miracles, however primitive, for these, too, belonged
to the Messiah and the last days, but as 'signs', not only as Miracles (John
7, 31) . Above all, and crucially: even the magical actions, in the New
Testament which is always eschatologically directed and surrounded, vouch
in their singular place for a far greater transformation, i.e. for the transformation into the miraculous: from water the wine ofthemiraculous is made. Jesus
hirnselfhad declared these extraordinary deeds to be marks of the Messiah and
the approaching kingdom: with reference to Elijah as a forerunner of Christ,
not as an older miracle-man. Hence his answer to John's question whether
he was the one who was to come or whether they should look for another:
1306
'The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed,
and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel
preached to them' (Matt. II, 5). Hence his reply to the Pharisees and
Sadducees: 'When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for the
sky is red. And in the morning, It will be foul weather to-day, for the
sky is red and lowring. 0 ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the
sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?' (Matt. 16, zf.), The
signs of these times joined together such seemingly remote events as the
healing of the lame and the preaching of the gospel to the poor; the latter
was therefore also intended as really transformative, as the end of labour
and being heavy laden in a new aeon. So definitely does Jesus rank concrete
transformation above the merely inward and invisible that the following
astonishing question becomes possible with him: 'Whether it is easier to
say to the sick of the palsy, Thy sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Arise,
and take up thy bed, and walk?' (Mark 2, 9). The question contains the
answer, which is: 'But that ye may know that the Son of Man hath power
on earth to forgive sins, (he saith to the sick of the palsy,) I say unto
thee, Arise, and take up thy bed, and go thy way into thine house' (Mark
2, rof.), Because after this the palsied man arose, the faithful were given
a proof of their faith - a proof which in Christ's own estimation was
even higher than the power of forgiving sins. A single material line which
does not remain inward runs from the commitment to heal the palsied man
to the proverbialfaith which moves mountains: mountains, not psychologies.
All this in the final sign of the believed fundamental miracle which is phenomenologically connected with the appearance of the Messiah: that of the
apocalypse. Miracle as the blasting apart of the accustomed status quo thus
attains its most radical expression in Jesus; for it is enhanced by the Novum
itself, it wants in each case to be already a new heaven, a new earth, on
a small scale. Certainly, the perceived customary connection of things to
the time and in the environment of Jesus is completely incomparable with
the law-governed causal connection with which the notion of miracle has
contrasted since the sixteenth century. The knowledge of connections was
even different from that of scholastic Christianity, much though its world
still seemed to be inhabited throughout by demons, ruled throughout by
God and his angels. The world of Jesus, however, was that of MandaeanPersian dualism, with Satan as the lord of this aeon, with the kingdom
of light as that of an immediately imminent new aeon. The Messiah is
the bringer of the world conflagration, just as in the Mandaean Book of
John the spirit of light speaks to his only begotten son: 'Be my messenger,
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
1307
go into the world of darkness in which there is no ray of light' ; - it was only
against this world and its irredeemable connections that the miracle. as interruption,
occurred. Nonetheless it did occur uniformly as an interruption. moreover
as a visible one, it occurred above all in favour of the particular-representative
visibility of a totally changed order, that of the miraculous. Consequently
the miraculous nature of Christ over and above his temporary world picture
is united with that which is still imaginable today in two main points: inthe
formal point ofinterruption, in thematerial pointofabsolutely good content. This
also remains essential: miracles were not considered inward, they intend
palpable change of an external kind, the salvation which is meant to appear
through them occurs via world. Thus Thomas Aquinas defines precisely the
Christian miracle, in contrast to mere Christian preaching and change of heart,
as follows: 'Miraculum est effictus sensibilis, qui divinitus fit praeter ordinem
totius naturae'" (Contra Gentiles, 3, c. 101). Hence Thomas did not count
the forgiveness of sins or even transubstantiation as miracles, because they
are not sensibly perceptible effects. And even after the kingdom of heaven
was no longer at all believed to be imminent, i.e. in all scholasticism, the
miracle always dwelt at the break-point of the natural world, at a point where
a visible piece of the visible world visibly cracks. It finally becomes clear from
all this that although the miracle has now degenerated into banal occultism
or has unveiled itself as such. although it now survives officially only in the
propaganda and business operations of Catholicism, in hysterical virgins and
in such wretched gates of heaven as those at Lourdes, equally significantly
the concept of miracle, apart from its transcendental superstition, contains
a concept which is not in the least superstitious, that ofthe leap, which stems
ftom explosive religion. Precisely the concept of the leap has been learnt from
the miracle; in a purely mechanical causal world, a world contrasting in every
form with miracles, the concept of the leap thus had no place, but it did in
one no longer conceived as static and no longer conceived as finite. Here of
course the leap, as a strictly dialectically mediated sudden change, itself
demonstrates its own conformity to laws and therefore, although it interrupts the purely mechanical continuation of the same, it is certainly not located
in an intermissio legis per se like the scholastically defined, mythical miracle.
And above all, because of the obvious elimination of all transcendental factors.
every 'state of emergency' is absent here in whose law-less spacea transcendental will could establish what is impossible on earth. However, when Hegel
'A miracle is a sensory effect which happens through divine agency, contrary to the order of
the whole of nature. t
1308
writes of the qualitative leap and its precursors that here something is 'interrupted by the opening UPt a flash which all at once establishes the pattern
of the new world' (Werke II, p. 10), the grasping of this sudden flashing,
however mediated in accordance with laws sui generis it is, is definitely not
unrelated to the formerly miraculous-sudden element, a fundamental archetype of religious and above all of Christian-advental imagination. Natura facit
saltus: this at least is the contribution of the old belief in miracles to a no
longer magically, let alone transcendentally superstructured world. The idea
of the leap first grew in apocalyptic miracle landscape, indeed it still has this
- in overlooked but not discharged consistency - as its background.
And the leap is not the only thing that remains from the strange hocuspocus. If water turns into wine, this is an interruption only for him who
believes in it. But to go on: in the interruption something different lives
on, and this can dispense with all magic. It exists particularly without any
of the rotten content of the miracle, but is connected with its hoped-for
content and its name is the miraculous. Its name is still known even to the
enlightened, and, unlike hair-raising sorceries, they take it seriously. 'I am
looking for the miraculous', says a liberalwoman, quite outside all theological
circles, Ibsen's Nora. Although she does not say it in exactly the same way,
the same content which inhabits the radical leap is meant. Hence Helmer's
exclamation: 'The most miraculous -?' with which, a superlative and a
question mark, this most untheological anti-family play ends. The miraculous
therefore retains its golden resonance, even if the miracle-like, whose space
of interruption it filled, has paled completely. Admittedly, not every recorded
or imagined miraculous content appeared miraculous, not even always good.
There are also punitive miracles in legend, the most exhaustive are the ten
plagues and the drowning of the Egyptians in the Red Sea, the most manysided are those described by Ovid in his Metamorphoses. Even the total
blasting apart of the status quo ante which is imagined in the Book of
Revelation shows in its content as much dread (for the enemies of Christ)
as it shows totaljoy, Nonetheless, joy is an essential part of the content of
miracle, so that even the drowning of the Egyptians, for those who are not
Egyptians, made its own contribution to rejoicing, namely rejoicing at
salvation or the category of just victory. From this perspective there is no
difference between the song of the prophetess Miriam concerning the
miraculous nature of salvation (Exodus IS, 21) and the sky-high proclamation of the angel to the shepherds, which goes on ringing even in the ears
of unbelievers, from Bach's Christmas Oratorio: 'Fear not: for, behold, I
bring you good tidings of great joy' (Luke 2, 10). The miraculous thus finally
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
1309
remains the dominant, indeed the sole content of the interruption intended
in the miracle. It remains such so powerfully that even the good in this
world, not only the evil or what is incommensurate with us, is thought
of as interrupted in the miracle, insofar as this contains an extreme, i.e.
the authentic nature of the miraculous. Interruption by mystical ecstasy and
by the absolutely outdoing element that it may seem to contain in the,
midst of its moment, when it seems to extend to eternity, was regarded
as the highest interruption. The absolutely outdoing of this kind, as that
which belongs to the miraculous in accordance with its essence, is again
most magnificently intimated in the sentence of St Paul: 'Eye hath not
seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things
which God hath prepared for them that love him' (1 Cor. 2, 9). And Paul
speaks here of 'our glory', i.e. preciselyof that which constitutes the content
of the most radical wishful dream, becauseit is equally the most central. Such
extremes or complete excessivenesses, as laid out in the category of the
miraculous, seem in comparison to the existing world which has come into
being up to now almost as magical as miracle-working itself. Even in its
simplest version the miraculous is empirically in a bad way, and to 'our
glory' as the utopia which dispels everything trivial there is still a long
way to go. But in contrast to the superstition of miracle-making the belief
in toe miraculous is from the outset one of hope, indeed of paradox,
not an objective-real affirmation. On the contrary (to rule out the misunderstanding of an 'eternal ideal' here and elsewhere): it does not imply
an affirmation which relates or can relate to anything other than intimations,
pre-appearances, pre-experiences, or ciphers in the already existing, objectivereal world. But if even the miracle has a relative, converted truth at least
in the fact that the world moves in (historically mediated) leaps and makes
breakthroughs possible (without any alliance with transcendence, without
transcendental interventions themselves): then the miraculous in these leaps
and possible breakthroughs contains a partial pre-appearance and possible
complete real appearance of its content as long as the opposite of the
miraculous, namely the In Vain or Nothing, has not yet totally and really
occurred. The faith of hope, with the miraculous ascontent which is still undetermined in terms of content but unmistakable, is therefore superstition only in
mechanical empiricism or, which amounts to the same thing, in abstract
utopia, but certainly not in concrete utopia and in its still open, dialecticalprocessive world. On the contrary, it is precisely that which is not
superstition in religion; that which together with the self-commitment
of man into transcendence, because of this self-commitment, gives to religion
1310
its still remaining, demythologized truth, stemming not only from dread
and deprivation and ignorance but from the drive towards light. This truth
lives essentiallyin the historically mediated Futurum and Novum; it consists
not in the hypostasis, claimed to be real, of a mythological other world
claimed to be real, nor of course does it consist in the very partial preterite
of a becomeness which is interpreted merely causally and mechanically.
'Our glory': its dwelling place is and remains even here in the incognito
of every lived moment. This is the bequest of the most radical wishful dream,
which as such is precisely the most central: that of the intensive centre
of everything. What we have attempted to define and to identify in guiding
images and guiding panels, in the deep content of the Faust wager, hence
of the true Faust problem, and in the equally direct yet equally still only
half-manifest self-contents of music: this many-voiced mode of production
of our self has its last evidence in the unio which is sought in religion, a
unio of moment and eternity. Not time, but the moment as that in time
which does not belong to it, communicates with eternity, in which alone
perfect joy has its measure. St Paul has the communication of the moment,
the miraculous and eternity in mind when he makes the extraordinary
connnection: 'Behold, I shew you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but
we shall all be changed, In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye' (I Cor.
IS, slf.). And the unmythological, although finalvborder meaning in this
is: the transformation into the opposite of falling asleep, into the opposite
of nothingness, happens, if it happens, in a moment, as this moment. And
with none of the accessories of fanaticism: the same moment of movement which runs in and beneath everything, which is not-having, the drive,
the wish, the longing, the question in Being and at the same time the
still constantly unfulfilled beginning towards a being-here at last adequate
to itself: this same moment of movement at the same time contains complete
arrival in itself and only in itself, insofar as truth strikes into its not-knowing
or incognito, Insofar as in the dark That-Root of the world the finally
found and achieved What of its content blossoms out, as the Authentic
and the Absolute - answered, found, realized. The Hie et Nunc is
everywhere the question-being which for its solution puts out the nonadequate or semi-adequate process-figures of World-Being. But only
through the flash of its identification would that arise which in the entire
world is only just beginning to sound and invariably shines on ahead as
- the miraculous: the figure of identity. There is a deep well-being in
an old, familiar place; in their reflection, St Jerome in his Cell, even the
landscape of the Sistine Madonna represent homeland as after a rebirth;
RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
1311
but the real state of this homeland, its matter: the moment, as yet has
no Present in any place, not even in the surfacing of our self at the place
of the image. The miraculous is the Stay Awhile ofthe most central kind; only
here does it have its local sign. The miraculous is the flash of light of
the subject and of the object, beside which nothing alienated exists any
more and in which subject and object have simultaneously ceased to be
separate. The subject has ceased with its truest attribute: the desiderium;
the object has ceased with its untruest attribute: alienation. This arriving
is victory, and the goddess of victory, like the ancient Nike, stand's on
a point: as concentration of Being, brought out and gathered in and to
the Humanum. At this place on earth of arrived-at Being, of world as
homeness, homeness as world, it settles down, here both flight and message
end. Indeed even the miraculous ceases in the miraculous: the foot on which
Nike stands, stands at the moment of arrival, is - after so much illusion,
pre-appearance, even pathos of indescribability - itself inconspicuous.
Outside there are still many footprints and ciphers, they are of the utmost
importance, for men with their moment are not alone, it is also present
in all processes and shapes of nature, indeed it can only be widely read
in the ciphers of nature, only with the expanse of nature can it comprehend
itself as kingdom instead of mere spacelessness of intensity. But the content
of the kingdom itself is small precisely because it is so great; it is just
as concentrated as that which is called 'the highest good' in the mysticism
of morality. Ciphers of nature and the highest good are the final evidences
in which the core of man reveals itself as identical with the core of the
earth. This identical core is at the same time the unmanifested core, there
is so little of it that is settled, so little that is definitely manifested, that
it is least clear of all whether it will be manifested perfectly at all or whether
it will wither. Its essence - indicated by the religions - hangs because
of this continuing unmanifestedness in the balance of threatening Nothing
or of achieving All, of the In Vain or of the miraculous. The Herods pointed
to nothingness, the Orpheuses, Zoroasters, Buddhas, Moseses,Jesusespointed
to the miraculous: it depends on this century whether at least the well
attainable becomes real. Whether the realm of freedom can come near which
allows an entry instead of an exodus. The goal of all higher religions was
a land in which milk and honey flow as really as they do symbolically;
the goal of the content-based atheism which remains over after religions
is exactly the same - without God, but with the uncovered face of our
absconditum and of the salvation-latency in the difficult earth.
1312
THE LAST WISHFUL CONTENT AND

THE HIGHEST GOOD
S4
Wisdom consisteth not in knowing many things, nor even in knowing them
thoroughly; but in choosing and in following what conduces most certainly
to our lasting happiness and true glory.
Walter Savage Landor, Imaginary Conversations

Let secret ciphers' message
The world's attention claim,
Till every changing passage
Translates into the same.
Goethe, West..ostlicher Divan
Drive and food

Nothing is good in itself if it is not desired. But nothing is desired unless
it represents itself as good. The fact that a drive directs itself to something
presupposes the drive, but also something in that to which it is directed
which is capable of satisfying it. Berries are edible, whereas wood, however
great the hunger, is not. And however much hunger may be the best cook,
it cannot do it all alone. Of course it is always presupposed, in order that
the something which is capable of satisfying it becomes effective in the
thing desired. But the thing desired and adjudged good then becomes the
bearer of a good. Therefore of a quality which seems pleasant or agreeable,
of one which is fit for consumption or some other use. That is adjudged
good which satisfies a need, therefore produces a feeling of pleasure.
Everything good is rightly utility value, which is enjoyed, and not exchange
value or commodity, by which money can be earned. But for desiring
no good is already good enough; which is why it is from here, precisely
from here, that the proverb that the better is the enemy of the good comes.
Even a dish the enjoyment of which is immediately followed by repletion
may be adequate, i.e. substantial and nourishing enough, but it can scarcely
not be prepared even more splendidly, or at least more skilfully. A man
can always be even braver, more generous, cleverer, the only thing he
cannot be is even more punctual. Punctuality, this palest of all virtues,
LAST WISHFUL CONTENT
1313
is the only one which can become perfect, no other. The little tree that
wished for different leaves would not have stopped even at golden ones.
And yet there was always an irrefutable feeling that the better cannot be
surpassed infinitely. Some time, somewhere, there had to be a 'thus far
and no further', one which was not renunciatory, as is usually the case,
but fulfilling. In which a major value is conceivable which in and for itself
fluctuates neither upwards nor downwards, and from which, indeed towards
which, goods are measurable. This best was then finally alone wanted,
usually on the wrong track, sometimes in premonition.
Three wishes and the best

What is to be fled, what is to be sought, this question must always
most definitely be slept on. It is not as plain as day, neither in individual
parts nor even in the whole which comes later. Man desires and wishes
throughout his life, but if he has to say what he wants absolutely, what
he wants at all, he is at a loss for an answer. This is what fairy tales which
dealt with the most desirable thing also say and teach. Hebel, in 'The
Little Treasure Chest', tells of a young mountain fairy who grants a
young couple three wishes and promises to make them come true. Hans
and Lisa are given a week in which to consider carefully, but 'the following
evening, while the potatoes were crackling in the pan for supper, the two
of them, husband and wife, were standing happily together by the fireside,
watching the little sparks of fire darting back and forth, now flaring up,
now dying down, round the sooty pan and, without saying a word, they
were absorbed in their future happiness. But when Lisa served the roast
potatoes from- the pan on to the dish and the smell rose pleasantly
to her nose, she said "If only we had a fried sausage with it" in all
innocence and without thinking of anything and, alas, the first wish was
granted. Fast as lightning comes and goes, it came down through the
chimney like the red dawn and the fragrance of roses together, and on
the potatoes lay the finest fried sausage.' No sooner wished than granted,
to the annoyance of the husband: 'If only the sausage had grown on the
end of your nose", he said, and that was the second wrong wish, for now
there was nothing left but the third wish: to see the sausage removed
from Lisa's nose. 'No sooner wished than granted, and the poor couple
looked at each other, were the same Hans and the same Lisa as before,
and the lovely mountain fairy never came again.' This was therefore an
unthorough sequence of wishes, even though it was not always only
1314
a sausage that was at stake. In Hauff's fairytale 'The Cold Heart', the
young charcoal burner Peter Munk strikes it richer, but not better: 'A
charcoal burner has a lot of time to think about himself and others, and
when Peter Munk sat by his kiln the dark trees around him and the deep
stillness of the forest moved his heart to tears and to unconscious longing.'
And later Peter told the friendly wood sprite, the little glassman, his wishes,
two are free, the third can be refused if it is foolish. Peter wishes to be
able to dance best of all and always have as much money in his pocket
as the rich Ezechiel, and then he wishes to own the finest glassworks in
all the Black Forest, with all the equipment and money to run it. 'Is that
all?' asks the wood sprite, and answers, when Peter still thinks horse and
carriage suitable: 'Sense, common sense, is what you should have wished
for, carriage and horses would then have come of themselves.' In Hebel
the moral of the tale had been quite similar, common sense was recommended as the first wish, in order to know what should be wished second
in order to be happy. And as the third wish, to eradicate every spur to
more or to a change, Hebel recommends lasting contentment and no regret.
Such advice to be contented is usually a means of reconciling poor people,
who are seldom visited by a mountain fairy or a wood sprite, to their
lot; but there is also a formal instruction in the best in it. Sense in order
to find the right wish, contentment so as not to regret what is chosen:
these are certainly means which lead to the best, which start out from
it. In such a way that the best, if it were really known and granted, would
contain contentment with this best in itself.
But often the best shimmers up here in a quite out-of-the-way manner.
Then, apart from the treasures which the poor devil wishes for and attains,
a different, a highly secret happy end appears. Fairy tale heroes stuff their
pockets full of gold and jewels which they discover in the magic garden
or in the cave, but the only right thing stands inconspicuously nearby,
unknown to them, therefore unseen. Thus it is only by chance that Aladdin
grasps the importance of the lamp, for the jewels were more striking,
though at first he thought even these were glass. And most legends of
treasure keep the inconspicuous in the background, as something incidental
for which there is at first no wish at all; and if the person is informed,
then it is too late, and the chance does not come again. As in Grimm's
tale, 'The Maiden of Willberg' (No. 315): the mountain bursts open,
inside stood huge, overwhelming treasures, the shepherd started to load
himself up with them. 'Do not forget the best of all', says the mountain
maiden to him, but the man thinks that she means a large chandelier.
I3I 5
'Do not forget the best of all', says the mountain maiden a second time, but
he had nothing but the treasures in mind and did not even think of the flower
bush. When he had filled his pockets he wanted to leave again, but scarcely
was he outside the door than it closed with a terrible crash. Now he wanted
to set down his treasures, but he had nothing but paper in his pockets; then
he thought of the flower bush, and now he saw that this was the best thing
ofall, and he walked sadlydown the mountain to his home. Such stories about
the best very rarely go beyond intimation, unless they are religious from the
outset. The flower bush for the sake of which everything else is spurned then
takes on more familiar features, although also unobtrusive, gentle ones. The
fairytale motif of the Seven Sleepers points in that direction; in Grimm it
appears in the legend of the twelve apostles. The youths who, as a reward
fOJ; their longing for the saviour, are allowed to sleep through the centuries
until he appears have not forgotten what for them was the best. It was the
fulfilment of all their wishes and their last wish; of course, the saviour and
the clear longing for him have merely been added to the much older motif
of sleeping through time. The many other tales of SevenSleepers, for example
the Chinese, do not know the trump card of a clear wish and an awakening
related to it. Thus not even the fairytale finds it easy to say the wish of wishes
in terms of content: the highest good is like a well of lasting contentment,
but where the well springs up is hidden in the inconspicuous, at best in the
emblematic. Even the otherwise so manifest and straightforward fairytale
always spun out the best merely formally, without fixed content. Even the
Blue Flower, Novalis's version of the highest value, * blossoms in his work
in a kind of oriental haze. It is the metaphor of an 'extravagant contentment',
and when it is plucked, 'the happiest feast of the soul is celebrated', but apart
from the fact that it is at the same time a fairytale it is itself still in the blue.
The only definite feature in all fairytales, insofar as they touch the unconditional Enough, is that the material for it is inconspicuous.
Value-images as variations ofthe highest good;

Cicero and the philosophers
What is to be fled, to be sought, even when it is thought, appears in
different'ways. But then it no longer wavers as with the man who is at a loss
when the fairy comes to him, but is lined up in formation. The wisher
in the fairy tale disconnectedly and unthoroughly enumerates what in the
* The ultimate Romantic ideal in Novalis' novel 'Heinrich von Ofterdingen'.
1316
head of the fairy or of the wood sprite is inter-related and centred. Fairy,
wood sprite and mountain maiden expressed what at the time of the respective fairytales sensible people thought could be wished for without regret.
Thinking of this kind occurs in acts of valuative affirmation or negation
which have become more or less discerning. These acts are not acts of
individual preference, nor do they occur in an atmosphere which is itself
ideal, rather they are determined by the socialenvironment and the guiding
images which in each case occur within it. We encountered these guiding
images at the beginning of this part of the book as those of the warrior,
knight, monk, citoyen and so on, they always chisel out one type of man
as the best. They are followed, it will be recalled, by guiding panels, with
alternating, often antithetical headings of the best behaviour, the best path
to human perfection. Here a debate about status and value arises, the alternatives of happy and of dangerous life, of solitude and of friendship, of abstract
and mediated venturing beyond the limits (Don Quixote, Faust) begin.
But there would, of course, be neither guiding images nor guiding panels
unless they had been preceded by a fundamental act, driven by the need
for the best life, directed towards its most perfected form. It is only this
fundamental act which brings guiding images, virtues, values forth at all;
however much the content of these ideals is in each case ideologically determined, historically exchanged. Thus, in the 'Foundation' section above,
the ideal was related to the utopian function, which is overhauling and
goal-oriented in each case. The utopian function, in the idea of craving
that which is not to hand, indeed that which is not at hand, already gives
to all the things it grasps the cachet of the wishful good, or, if what
corresponds to the wishful good is objectively contained in the thing, it
makes us receptive to it. However, the good, thought of as perfected,
perfected in its way, now attains pathetic status: 'If the goal seems to
contain not just something desirable or worth striving for, but something
absolutely perfect, then it is called an ideal' (Vol. I, p. 165). But the essential
feature of the ideal value-imagetoo is that it is striven for, that it is emulated,
that, even as perfection and precisely as this, it does not remain merely
an object of contemplation. The stars, which we do not desire, whose
splendour is enjoyed in pure contemplation, are not ideals. In contrast, moral
value-images are considered ideal and aesthetic insofar and inasmuch as they
havebroken out of so-called disinterested contemplation. They become ideals
in the strict sense only when, especially in sublimity, they appear as preapperance of an upward-pulling quality, one which has been aesthetically
driven to the end in the existing world. Even religious value-images, such
13~7
as saviour, glad tidings, kingdom, are ideals only when Imitation is

connected with them, postulated eritis sicut Deus; as incomparability on
high Olympus, Optimus Maximus is precisely not Optimus. Therefore
the postulated-postulative possibility of becoming completely identical with
the ideal is part of the objective definiteness of the ideal. A ladder is placed
against it by means of which the subject can climb upward, and: as only
the end can satisfy the hoping will, the ladder which it has placed continues
objectively in the ideals. The ideals themselves are arranged in a climax,
ascending to perfections which intend ever higher. The increasing perfections
of the ideal, when related to the will, are purposes, purposes of a distinctly
fulfilling kind, and like all purposes they are ordered in the sequence of
a more distant or closer relation to an all-embracing purpose, in this case
to the final purpose of a satisfaction which is intended as total. The world,
even in its intended ideal structures, those belonging to the Front, is not
at its goal; thus every ideal has an even higher one above it, a scale up
to the highest good. Only the relation to purpose makes this enumerable
sub.. and super-ordination of ideals possible: 'Up to now there has been
no classification and table of archetypes, but there have been several of
the ideal; and they go right down to terms like: ideal housewife, ideal
Bach baritone and the like, they go right up to the ideal of the highest
good' (Y01. I, pp. 167-8). Very low-lyingideals, within a very limited, hopeless
circle, are of course none at all, but are only called ideals in banal usage.
But all genuine guiding images, virtues, aesthetic and religious hopecontents show themselves to be related to what is final, humanly final:
'Such ideals, corrected and aligned by utopian function, are then collectively those of a self- and world-content developed in terms adequate to
man; thus they are ... all variations of the basic-content: highest good'
(Vol. I, p. 173). And precisely insofar as the direction to the highest good
(more about it is not yet expressible or pursuable) is a matter of dispute
or of agreement, to the same extent the human guiding images and the
ideals on which they are based are ambivalent or clear-cut.
Every age needed to cherish and to cultivate wishes fot a nobler Being.
But in the first instance it is instructive that ideal characters were never
depicted as more violent and more tensed towards life than in bourgeois
society. In particular the pathetic writers of the eighteenth- and early
nineteenth centuries vie with one another in depicting upright models,
models of resistance and struggle against weariness or against baseness in
government. A dramatic poetry which could not do enough to mould
neo-Stoic dignity runs from Addison to Alfieri, from Schiller to Shelley.
1318
Addison struck up the theme by choosing as a hero Cato, the inflexible

republican endowed with every citizenly virtue. The Catos were first
brought to life puritanically, in their attitude of opposition to feudal
corruption, but then the citoyen entered into them, most clearly in the
dramatic statues of Alfieri and their language of freedom. Everywhere there
appears here a hyperbolic ideal guiding image of a bourgeois-pure kind;
obstinate virtue With Promethean sparks of light. The reason for this delight
in positive-ideal heroes is a social-real one: it is the split with feudal society
and the split within the citizen in bourgeois society as well. Until around
the time of the French revolution, the ideal of the citoyen was directed
only against the aristocracy, but implicitly there was already operating
within it the antithesis between the citoyen and the bourgeois which later
erupted in the work of Schiller, even more in Holderlin and completely
in Shelley. Marx was the first to stress this antithesis and at the same time
this unity in the once-revolutionary bourgeoisie: the bourgeois is the real
private individual of free competition, the citoyen the abstract, unegotistical
generic individual of an equally abstract polis. The contradictory unity
of citoyen and bourgeois fell apart in the work of the great idealistic writers
of this period. Hence the so intensified portrayal of the ideal image; it
is the citoyen side of the bourgeois or the humanistic guiding image of
the revolutionary bourgeoisie that comprehends itself as being in conflict
with the bourgeois society that has come into being. Hence the idealistic
tension of the ideal to givenness and to Becomeness can nowhere be better
studied than in the pathetic poets of this period: Schiller will always be
the characteristic representative of the ideal in this fiery-abstract form. In
comparison with these imago pictures, all previous writers are uninhibited
realists, even Dante is then a realist. For they lack the split between ideal
and life which the capitalist division of labour and reification first brought;
the cause for pathetic as well as for revolutionary-idealistic sharpening was
still lacking. Only the ideology of the heretical sects, with their absolutely
uncompromising image of Jesus, could, from quite different regions, be
used by way of comparison. Now secondly it is instructive that not ideal
characters but rather the problem of the ideal was most intensively reflected
on precisely in antiquity and the Middle Ages, not, or only by Kant, in the
modern era. There is no classical or medievalSchiller who created antithetical
images of men, but even Horace poses the more general question of the
highest good in his poetry, which is otherwise so light. How much more
intensely classical and medieval thinkers are preoccupied with this oldfashioned term; and Kant, too, where he deals with the highest good,
1319
is living on ancient ground. This pre-bourgeois predominance of the summum

bonum question also has a social-real origin, one which of course is different
from the ideal interest in the hero. It is precisely the relative uniformity of
pre-capitalist, especially of medieval society, which makes it receptive to a
central goal-question and its content. Particularly when a society such as the
medieval is already living in final relation to salvation, with the universal
ideology of terrestrial-celestialgradations. Permanence, unity, final purpose: these
are the three formal definitions elaborated here of the highest good as the
highest ideal; this is precisely why this problem was closer to the heart of
a relatively undivided society than of disunited bourgeois society. Hence
therefore the prevalence of the One, Necessary, over the brilliant-partial ideal
images of more recent sentimental poetry and of its immediate revolutionary
interest. Thus the formulation of the question about the highest good ranges
from the Seven Sages and their constant respice finem via Cicero and the
Roman Stoics to Augustine and scholasticism and as far as Kant, where it
almost expires. Cicero, in 'De finibus bonorum et malorum' (I. 42), gave
the notion of the highest good, in popularized Stoicism, the urbane definition
which has since held good, despite all theology: 'Extremum bonum, quod
ipsum nullam ad aliam rem, ad id autem res referuntur omnes. ,* And the
Stoics in turn derived this definition from Plato, from that Ratio of Eros
upwards which first graduated ideas in terms of value, with the idea of the
good as the highest among them. 'A being' , says Plato in the 'Philehos' (and
here he eliminates once and for all alienatio, alienation or otherness from the
highest good), 'a being in which the good always wholly and in every respect
inheres until the end, never needs any other but is perfectly self-sufficient'
(ixavov TfAfWTCXTOV e'XELV Phileb. 60 C). Reason and the highest good are
still absolutely one; the idea of the good in such communications of itself
makes all actions good and all conceptions true, insofar as they ultimately
partake in the idea of the good. This unity, which is that of the highest morality
and the highest truth as indistinguishable, still survives in Augustine, transferred from Plato's highest idea to the Christian God: God as the highest
good (a definition which through Augustine dominates all the ideals of the
Middle Ages) is Unum, Verum, Bonum in the same essence. The identity
of Bonum and Verum broke apart only in scholasticism; only here did the
problem arise whether will or intellect, goodness or truth had primacy in
God and therefore constituted the primal quality of the highest good. God
for Duns Scotus is primarily the will of the good which freely ordains what
* 'Ultimate goodwhich does not add itself to anyother things, but to which allthings will bedrawn. '
1320
WISHFU~
IMA-GES OF THE FULFILLED MOMENT
the good is; God for Thomas Aquinas is primarily understanding of the
good, to which God's will is bound. Accordingly, for the ideals of human
life, from goodness as the highest good the Franciscan ordo amoris follows,
from truth as the highest good the Dominican ordo cognitionis follows.
But in both God remains the goal of all value-goals, though with the
mystical extension or narrowing that likewise assimilation to God is the
highest good. Every striving for perfection, according to Thomas, therefore
involves God: 'Quod igitur est summum bonum, est maxime omnium
finis ... Ei igitur res omnes in Deum sicut in ultimum finem tendunt, ut
ipsius bonitatem consequantur, sequitur, quod ultimus rerum finis sit Deo
assimilari'" (Contra Gentiles I, 3, ch. 17. 19). This assimilation to God,
for Thomas as well as for mysticism, is the same as the highest bliss
(therefore the optimum of what Plato called 'perfect satisfaction'). Thus the
definition of the most powerful happiness also unites with the definition of
the highest good; indeed it unites with it so permanently that even after the
weakening of real belief in God bliss remained as the essence of the highest
good. Thus finally in Kant; he defines the highest good as the hope-content
of a world in which virtue and bliss are united; in the existing world virtue
can only make a person worthy of bliss. Insofar as the ideal of the highest
good is represented as the ground of definition of the final purpose of
pure reason, it cannot 'be recognized by reason if one posits only nature
as the ground, but may only be hoped if a highest reason, which commands
according to moral laws, is at the same time posited as the ground of the
cause of nature' (Werke, Hartenstein III, p. 535). This sort of thing goes
far beyond the limits of the theoretical experience of nature, yet at the
same time its otherworldy reality has played itself out. It becomes precisely
hope-content (summum bonum = suprema spes), thisworldy hope-content,
though with a chiliastic gleam. The highest good, as the unity of virtue
and happiness, of ethical and new physical kingdom, becomes the cipher for
'the kingdom of God on earth'. Here the extremest intensification of the
idea of the perfected good is achieved - but at the price of the extremest
rift between the mechanics of nature and kingdom. The absolute purpose
of the highest good appears as one against which reality is ranged as an
insurmountable barrier. The highest good in Kant is at the same time as
disconnected and remote as the ideal people (Marquis Posa) and ideal
'Therefore that which is the highest good is completely the end of all things ... Therefore
all things tend towards God as towards the ultimate end. and consequently they pursue his
goodness. on the grounds that the ultimate end of things is to be assimilated to God.'
13 2 1
concepts (Kohlhaas * or the idea of justice) in idealist writers. Abrupt,

undialectical dualism even with regard to the highest good separated the
citoyen side of the bourgeois (in its highest form: 'the kingdom of God
on earth') from his real, empirical side and its 'nature'. Yet Kant, for
the last time in a long time, presented the venerable idea of the highest
good and put it in the place where for the sailor the Pole Star stands.
The philosopher of the Unconditional could not overlook this place, any
more than the characteristic that has been peculiar to the concept of the
highest good since Plato: that of being free of situation, of containing
no alteritas in itself. In this sense Fichte re-formulated the Kantian prospect:
the highest good is 'the complete consonance of man with himself and
- in order that he may be consonant with himself - the consonance of
all things outside him with his necessary practical notions of them' (Werke,
Medicus I, P: 227). At the head of all ideals the highest good remains
the utopian object which at the same time is no longer an object but is
identical with the subject. Because the highest good is classified with the
most thorough element in the will, with the Absolute of human intending,
it is itself, in a utopian way, the 'What For at all'. Or, to use a popular
expression, the (not yet manifest) 'meaning of life'; this, however, would
have to be both a unum and a bonum and, above all, a verum to stand
as meaning.
Stay awhile and highest good; problem of a guiding image

in the world process
Things are still turbulent as long as their core only is and is not there.
For this core, as the That from which and towards which everything
happens, is still fermenting and dark. Is still random and undisplayed, merely
drifting in sealed fashion and not expressed, nowhere having advanced
to the sure manifestation of its essence. Because it is the Now and Here,
the unarrested moment as which and in which the essence of all things
is located, it is existential nearness which so far has never gone out of
itself. Going out means that the That as essence enters into history, into the
dialectically self-experimenting history of its manifestation. As this has never
yet achieved successful manifestation, i.e. manifestation adequate to its
essence, unfulfilment lives on in it. The That has its basis-manifestation
in hunger, in need, in the universally interest-based substructure of history;
* In Heinrich von Kleist's novella 'Michael Kohlhaas'.
13 2 2
it shrouds and informs itself in the superstructure, insofar as this in the

former case is one of false consciousness, in the latter one of relative
brightening and cultural surplus; it emerges more or less undistractedly
in the future ideal formations (as utopia in ideology). Ideal from this perspec..
tive is unrealized but anticipated That-Essence, in this case human essence
in its hoped-for most positive content. The highest good is that which
is unsurpassably saturated with this content; its anticipated enjoyment is
anticipated being-here (appearance)of that which ultimately is alone worthy
to appear. Precisely for this reason the act which can be directed at it is
not Carpe diem here either, this merely ostensible and superficial beingpresent. Instead an utterly different loyalty of being-in-the-present, a Carpe
aeternitatem in momento, stands near what has come good, indeed the
highest good; and it is only this which can endure, which indeed demands,
permanence. Carpe diem aims towards the fleeting, in contrast to complete
and undivided being-present, to the real perception of a good, of a significant
moment; precisely in this there is nothing fleeting, on the contrary:
everything authentic and thus permanent is mixed in with it. Mere Carpe
diem lands at best in resignation, so that one cannot say to the moment: Stay
awhile, but only: Passaway, you are so fair; for the best here is solelymaterial
for memory, not for hope and arrival. The Stay Awhile, however, as a
present truth, as the truth of a present, occurs nowhere but near a final state
which no longer passes away, which is therefore attained: only as this Carpe
aeternitatem in momento is an edge of the highest good grasped. The first
moment when love arises partakes of this, the experience of magnificent
landscape can contain it, with nothing but symbols in it in which great
moments open up, as was noted in poetic terms above all by Robert
Browning and indeed in religious terms by Augustine in his famous letter
to Monica about the starry sky. Closeness to death, in its absolutely concentrating power, can contain the Carpe aeternitatem in momento, with
an all-illuminating suddenness which Tolstoy again has portrayed and
described with such profundity. The experience of unity of Karenin and
Vronsky at Anna's deathbed led to this hearth, and even more centrally
the experience of peace of the mortally wounded Prince Andrei: around
him the groaning and the wounded, above him again the starry sky, and
now, from the unforeseeable up above, the sense of a greatness dawns
which has nothing in common with that which is arrogated. But equally
the sense of that greatness dawns, from the correlate to those symbolic
intentions described as those of the absolute question and of its astonishment in the 'Foundation' of this book. As 'breakthrough experiences in
1323
the inconspicuous', with 'alternating impressions, different for almost every

person, but always with the same direction and meaning' . As, ultimately,
'that which the boy in the fairy tale left behind when he came out of the
mountain again, "don't forget the best thing!" the old man had said to
him', but this inconspicous, deeply hidden, enormous thing has nowhere
been discovered, nowhere been raised, it announces itself only in such
symbolic intentions, 'between subject and object, identifying 'both in intense
consternation towards one moment' (Vol. I, p. 290). All this kind of thing
lives on the religious frontier, even the symbolic intentions of absolute
astonishment live on it, despite their location in the everyday; but at the
same time it surpasses the magnificent hypostases, the powers, glories,
thrones, radiant heavens with which the mythology of religion has decked
out the best or the highest. Tendency and latency of the Stay Awhile,
related to the highest good, live precisely by virtue of this on the frontier
concept of the unum, verum, bonum which mysticism guarded for so long.
Guarded together with the relation to the moment, as has been shown:
the nunc stans of mysticism is co-existence, indeed opened identity of all
moment-worlds in the making present of the highest good. And as nunc
stans provided the state of the Stay Awhile with its most radical formula,
so permanence, unity, final purpose add to this formula precisely the fundamental definitions of the highest good. In unity the unum and in the final
purpose the verum as bonum are necessary, insofar as truth with regard
to the final purpose coincides with a meaning of a final purpose. This
meaning - which in the truth and the actuality of what has become so
far certainly does not yet exist and is unguaranteed but which equally has
not yet been prevented - is the meaning of the final purpose solely because
the What of the That, the content of the all-processingdynamic-material worldcore becomes one of the fulfilling All and not one of the preventing Nothing.
The fulfilling All, however, as the adequation, therefore arrival of the That..
intention, of the fundamental tendency at its most characteristic and most
authentic content is conceived precisely in the highest good, in this pole
star of all utopia and above all of concrete utopia, occurring above the
world and the world process. Thus the highest good from this position
presents itself not only as the guiding image of all human guiding images
but at the same time as the problem ofa guiding image in the world process,
one which is still pursued and pursuable towards meaning. The hypostases
of religious mythology saw this world final purpose as what it is least
of all: as completed being-here in a heaven posited as ens realissirnum.
Even Tolstoy's Prince Andrei looks at the stars in this way: but when he
1324
returns to life, life which has changed so little, the ens perfectissimum of
greatness up above proves to be not illusion but anticipation; ens perfectissimum remains premonition and experience, not attained reality. That
which is meant by the highest good does not always thus remain premonition and experience, therefore confined to subjectivity, but it emerges from
this only when its mysticism is understood as event at theheight oftheworld
process and not as event within an Olympus, i.e. a finished eternity from
the beginning, indeed without beginning and end. The highest good, when
thought of as God, stands even for itself in the really undecided or at the
Front. It is - in its content which is not already namable either in terms
of permanence or of unity or of final purpose - itself a problem, not only
a problem for the inadequate human intellect but an objective-real real
problem. As an in itself still unsolved problem, as a real form of the absolute
question working in the core and on the Front of the world process. The
fundamental definitions, permanence, unity, final purpose, provide the
processive guiding image only with its antithesis to the fleeting, to the
multiplicity of chaos, to the In Vain or to nihilism, but they do not yet
give any decidedness of positive content whatsoever. Though they do give
relentless invariance ofdirection towards a content: towards that of a beinghere which has become adequate to the point of identity to the sealedbeing
of the essence, which could therefore be without otherness and alienation.
But the real problem of this being-here lives only within the process which
pursues this being-here, indeed: there would be no process at all if this real
process did notexist, and this real problem would notexist if there were noprocess.
The That which in man but also in the problematic subject of nature seeks
to attain absolute satisfaction of needs, i.e. the highest good, first posits,
by virtue of this objective guiding real problem, the future into which
the unfulfilled momentary world drifts ever further, with intended final
goal. And likewise it first posits the past into which the momentary world
again and again sinks because as yet nothing manifested, resolved into
manifestation, corresponds to the intended final goal or to the highest
good. The highest good is itself this goal which is not yet formed, which
in the tendency of the process is ultimately signified, which is the latency
of the process is ultimately real-possible. Thus a utopian-cosmic perspective
appears in the midst of the subjective- and intensive-existential perspective
when it can be established that: that which is meant by the highest good,
formerly called God, then the kingdom of God, and which is finally the
realm of freedom, constitutes not only the purpose-ideal of human history
but also the metaphysical latency problem of nature.
13 2 5
Drive andfood once again or subjectivity, objectivity of goods,

of values and of the highest good
But to what extent is that which is felt to be good merely felt, to what
extent is it outside? It seems natural to argue that it is above all outside,
among the colourful, pleasant things. That wine is just as palatable in
itself as it is yellow or liquid in itself. But while it took a long time for the
colour of wine, the warmth of the oven and so forth to be declared mere
sensory impressions, the material quality of the palatable or of the pleasant
was doubted at an early stage. The naive consciousness finds it hard to
accept that colour, warmth, tone are supposed to exist only subjectively.
But it finds it far easier to accept that good, evil and their different variations occur only subjectively, not objectively. So that a thing can only
be called good because it is desired, affirmed by the will and therefore
appears as a good. The multiplicity and with it the diversity of the various
affirmations undoubtedly contributed greatly to this subjectivistview. What
is an owl to one man is a nightingale to another, or, as another proverb
says, one that did not have to wait till the sceptics came along: there is
no arguing about taste. Thus every so-called value judgement, at least as
far as the pleasant, agreeable and this kind of good is concerned, has long
been considered subjective even in popular opinion. Which does not, of
course, mean that it is considered solely as private in the completely
relativistic sense of 'De gustibus non est disputandum'. Scarcely had the
sophists made man the measure of all things than the Socratic problem of the
universally valid arose. Not for the pleasant, agreeable, and suchlike, for
those still value-free affirmationsof desiring about which a binding judgement
can still no more be given than about a favourite dish. But there is a question
of right about what is right itself, about the moral good above all, an
evaluation of valuing; except that this too, in Socrates as in Kant, seeks
the standard of value in man himself, in his conscience or his general reason,
not in objectively valuable Objects themselves. This is one side of the
problem, the subjective side; but inseparably connected with it, in interaction, is the objective side, which cannot be eliminated by any primacy
of will. For even if a thing is called good only because it is desired, it
is only desired because it is Objectively desirable. Because it presents
itself as palatable in wine, because something felt to be good is found
* 'There is no arguing about taste.'
precisely in this matter or in this kind of person and nowhere else. Even
taste, about which subjectivelythere can be no arguing, becomes unanimous
the moment stones instead of bread, caccatum instead of pictum are
presented to it. And what is an owl to one man does not become a
nightingale for another when it is a matter of the evaluation of plague
bacilli or the unanimous non-good of death. Value judgements of the ethical
kind have never been the same throughout different periods and societies,
they have always been dependent on the changing social basis, yet precisely
for this reason they have always been passed according to the common
guiding image in each case, one which was typical and, in and beyond this,
the main point: one which was Objective in terms of content. The universally valid criterion here certainly does not lie only in the conscience or
in normative reason per se, it lies in the objective matter itself. It therefore
requires no Socrates or Kant in order to be found by a canon of motivating
forces. Evaluation is here not only directed to a normative consciousness of
itself, however clarified, but precisely to Objects which give the evaluation
material content. Thus material substance certainly does enter into what
is felt to be good, indeed it first differentiates goods and values so that
they can have a hierarchy. If the various material Objects which participate
efficiently in the satisfaction of needs, the formation of values, did not
exist, then there would be only a single value, remaining purely in isolated
subjectivity, and necessarily contentless, i.e. formal in nature; Socrates calls
it virtue pure and simple, Kant calls it good will. There would be - as
Socrates and Kant logically argue - neither a majority nor a gradation in
terms of purpose content, there would be no economically,erotically, morally,
aesthetically, religiously specific values, up to the final, the highest good.
It is only work plus raw material and material content which produces all
values; there is no production of value, especially in higher climax, by
the isolated subject-side without the intervening influence of value materials.
However - and this gives the objective side its demarcation - objectivity
definitely does not contain the valuative as a quality existing in and for
itself, in the naive-realistic sense. So that, as Scheler claimed in his teachings
on the nature of value, love, un narrowed sympathy are only necessary
simply to receive the ontic fullness of value of the world in itself. Contrary
to this objectivist overload it is clear that the material world is definitely
capable of being the vehicle of a good, indeed the sole practice-location
of all goods and values, but in such a way that the greatest part of the values
is only produced by human labour with raw materials, and is thus aroused
in them; which means that the material world possesses its possible attribute
1327
of value solely as one of allied potential in value material. The object side
provides the material for value, together with all the differentiations which
the material sends into the value world; but it does not already contain the
value as an object-based, finished development resting within itself. The
world, especially in its values not produced by labour, in the beauty of
nature, even in the depth of nature designated as mythical, contains ascertainable value quantities which certainly have not first been put into them
by the subject; but these qualities - chiefly value-meanings - are solely
ciphers of a content which is as yet real-utopian; they are not ontically preordered realities to which subjectivity is assigned merely as receptive
participation instead of a common awakening call. For the world, even with
regard to its objective value-material, is no museum and as yet no cathedral;
it is a process. Precisely the existing gradation of values, referring to the
goal-value of the highest good, is not a climax in the sense of an ultimately
Thomistic hierarchy of being but solely the climax of a temporal-processive
goal.perspective, one which is only developing man andprocess for itselfaccording

to value. So much here for the objective side of value experience, it is as
surely present as the subjective, but equally it contains only differentiating
suitability for value and the founding material for value, just as the subjective
side contains the desiring- and work-factor for the development of this
material. The two sides occur only in interaction, not in autarky of content
in the former and formal-volitional autarky in the latter case. And in the
last instance the primacy of the will or of subjectivity is maintained for
a very long time even in the objective potential of the value. All goods,
right up to the highest good, where good and most universally.valid value
completely coincide, are referred to the will which wills them, to whose
guidance, ultimately satisfaction (happiness) they are suited. The need of
the will first awakens the potential of the goods and values outside the
will, just as it is only work directed to the satisfaction of needs which
hammers out the objective material value of the materials and subjects which
have been worked. The relation to will shows most clearly in the regioncategory which embraces the concept of goods and values in general: that
of purpose. Every purpose presupposes a relation to a conscious, or at the
outside an unconscious intention, and purposive action (in contrast to
mechanical action) has as its cause (causa finalis) solely this intention. Human
history, precisely as the history of the satisfaction of needs, is essentially
pervaded with purposive actions, in such a way that only the category of
purpose has a motivating and possibly also (in the form of the goal) guiding
effect on the human will. Hence precisely mechanical materialism had to
13 2 8
leave out human history, whereas historical materialism can be historical

precisely because nothing but 'interests', i.e. nothing but purposes of will
have a place in it. The category of purpose is so powerfully related to
subject that it became a problem, indeed was denied, precisely where the
historical human world ceases. This is already the case in biology and since Galileo and Newton - in physics, and ~ in Bacon and in Spinoza
- in .philosophy: the judgment of things according to values, to teleology
as a whole, appears in this view as pure humanization (cf. Spinoza's Ethics,
I, App.). In fact the 'application' of the category of purpose to extrahuman and even inorganic nature presupposes not only a tending propensity
but again a kind of subjectivity, though as a definitely object-based determination. If this volitional core is denied, as in Spinoza, then there is
logically no objective conformity with purpose; but if it is imputed
to nature, then its teleology is objectively immanent. Indeed even the
suitability, evident to us every day, of most of the natural things which
surround us to be bearers of human goods, values and purposes: even this
kind of appropriateness forapurpose (as distinguished from objective-immanent
conformity with purpose) presupposes, if not a subject of nature, then
that kind of relationship in the gigantic externality of nature which allows
an economic-technological-cultural mediation with the subjectivity of human
needs. In such a way that the pronouncedly subject-based and final part
of nature which is called the human world is and can be in constant practical
interchange with the subject-based and final unpronounced part. As far
as the well-founded hope that the tendency-latency of inorganic nature,
which - like its subject - is still unpronounced, is so far from being disparate
to that of the human world that it can become identical to it. Thus
everywhere value points back to a desiring, together with its subjectively
intended, objectively concretizable value-purpose-content.
If a thing is given, it is always given to someone. This someone is
necessary for this purpose, as one who receives and perceives that which
is offered, which is there before him, lies there before him. How much
more so when the given is a good, a nourishing, a pleasant, finally a universally valuable good. And how much more so when, as in this case, what
is thus given must not only be taken but previously produced or at least
worked. Then it is invariably preceded by human need and by human work.
There is no arguing about taste, this principle had subjectivized the attribute
good in receptive fashion. But with the beginning of the bourgeois modern
era active subjectivization also came in: through bourgeois man as homo
faber. Value in its always original meaning is the extent to which an
13 2 9
economic good is capable, or considered capable, of satisfying human needs.

From this utility value and from this alone stems its social exchange value,
both its immediate exchange value in simple barter and its mediated
exchange value in buying and selling, expressed by the abstract medium of
money in the price. But now the rise of the bourgeois economy intensified
the already subjective features of this economic value quite decisively. The
de-objectivization of other values accordingly followed; in stark contrast to
the value theory of medieval society. This went so far that value was even
completely psychologized, therefore objectively dispatched. Namely where
the consumer is the sole point of departure; here the utility value and even
more the exchange value of a good are derived solely from his estimation
(most sharply in the theory of marginal utility). However, if the producer
is taken as the point of departure, the subjective origin of economic value
admittedly remains, but it is certainly no longer psychological: value is
no estimation, but work. This definition can be called an objective, subjectbased one, and at the same time it contains an accent of challenge to the
formerly feudal, later bourgeois classof drones. Adam Smith had fundamentally defined the amount oflabour contained in goods as their 'natural' value.
Also objective and subject-based in this manner is the completion of Smith's
theory of the value of labour by Ricardo and above all, with the crucial
discovery of squeezed-out surplus value, by Marx: value is 'concentrated
labour' , the measure of value is the 'working time which is necessary socially
(i.e. in the socially normal conditions of production)'. For Marx, only
'the human labour objectified in commodities' is the power which 'gives
the natural products which are available a value in the economic sense'.
Accordingly this definition-refers only to commodity value, i.e. economic
exchange value, not to utility value, and Marx applied it above all to the
capitalist economy (whose wealth consists of commodities). The theory
of value of medieval society, without homo faber and with a relatively
undeveloped exchange of goods, was therefore, significantly, almost purely
objectivist. Even-today we talk of the calorific value of coal, of the nutritive
value of cereals, but not as if nutritive value was part of botany or the
calorific value (as opposed to the temperature of combustion) was part
of mineralogy. For Thomas Aquinas, on the other hand, this 'utilitas' is
really an objective quality: God communicated it to the things in his creation
with a view to its use by men. A subjective element in value consists here
solely in the fixing of a price, ~ subjective element of mere standardization
in buying and selling. And this standard, too, was inscribed by God, as
'pretium justum' , with an obligation: the just price is equal to the manual
1330
work and its costs, those incurred in the manufacture of the product. But
the true value itself, the utility value, lay objectively founded in the fruits
of the earth; on the subject side of value there then lay little more than
its acceptance, its 'fruitio' made possiblewith some skilled manual assistance.
And all this in uninterrupted gradation as far as participation, no longer
merely economic participation, in ever-higher values, up to the divine primal
source of all values, the highest value and good. This is almost purely
objective world of purpose, at the same time one posited and hypostatized
as so objective-real that men essentially need'only to receive it, not first
to work for it or even merely to bring it out by their work. The latter
was taken for granted by the bourgeois man of the modern period, the
homo faber with productive forces unleashed ever further. Indeed the
reduction to the productive element (in labour) helped and contributed
towards bringing 'more than the exchange value, i.e. all qualities on to
the subjective side. Quality as a whole was regarded as subjective, the
external world independent of man was quantified as value-free. In the
world of Galileo and Newton, above all of Kepler, there certainly still
remains a kind of value-faith in objective beauty and harmony, but there
was no longer finality in this harmony, therefore no objective values ordered
towards a final purpose of man and the world. Rebellions against total
mechanism were not lacking, especially in Germany, which economically,
socially and ideologicallyremained attached to' the Middle Ages much longer
and more deeply than Italy, France and England: Leibniz as well as Hegel
certainly structured their world-picture valuatively and objectively
teleologically. But characteristically in both cases only as work-worldprocess, no longer as in the case of Thomas as a graduated display of goods
or cathedral of value into which men enter like participants or receivers
of presents. The change to homo faber for him himself subsequently showed
two kinds of aspect on to his position in the world: a negative-impoverishing
and a positive-enthusiastic one. And both with regard to labour which
had now become conscious and to its production of value, far beyond the
notion of mere exchange-values. The negative aspect shows that men are
given nothing free, they must first work for all goods, not even half-way
finished table is laid for them. They are not alone in the world, on the
contrary, precisely the production of economic goods occurs in necessary
metabolism and exchange with nature, but the existence of raw materials and
their suitability for processing no longer seems planned but merely a happy
chance. This feeling of loneliness can- intensify quite powerfully in the
philosophical ramifications of a subjectivist doctrine of values, namely into
1331
a rift between human ranks of purpose and nature conceived as utterly

purpose-free. Human strivings, outside their own small circle, then fall
into nothingness; the effect, as Voltaire once said, is like someone shouting
to a swimmer in the ocean that there is no mainland. Or as Nietzsche
expressed this complete lack of connection of the world of value: 'In some
remote comer of a universe poured forth flickering in countless solar systems
there was once a planet on which clever animals invented knowledge. It
was the most arrogant and fraudulent minute of "world history": but
it was only a minute. After a few breaths of nature the brain froze and
the clever animals had to die' (On Truth and Lies in the Extra-moral Sense,
1873). The works and values of homo faber thus become ultimately
ephemeral, no objective counterpart rescues them from the brevity and
minute thinness of the day of man. However, the effect of the positive
aspect of the subject-related theory of value, that which is switched to
production, is quite different: then nothing is finished and pre-ordered in
ready-made packages, man himself builds his house according to his own
measurements in an inhospitable world. Prometheus comes into his own,
especially when, after the disappearance of God and his objective worldvalue structure, mechanism does not remain the sole alternative. When
a connection to nature does remain as a happy chance, if not even as an
alliance of human with natural production- and goal-movement, united
in the same dialectical materialism. The loss of objectivity of ready-made
pre-ordered values is then more than compensated for by the end of the
theological hypostases which had clogged and blocked up the whole open
production- and projection-space before us. Value-atheism thus becomes
the same as value-utopia, productive value-utopia, especially in alliance
with objective useabilities, possibilities of transformation to value. The
reactions to the non-Thomism of values which has emerged can therefore
be liberated and liberating instead of resigned, and they have been both.
Not even agnosticism together with mythological remnants prevented
the courage which is relevant here when faith in production prevailed.
And the homo faber Kant expressed this as follows: 'As, despite all the
exertions of reason, we have only a very dark and ambiguous view of the
future, as the ruler of the world and his existence and his glory can only
be conjectured, not perceived or clearly proven, but on the other hand
the moral law within us, without promising or threatening us with anything as certainty, demands unselfish respect from us, but moreover, when
this respect has become active and dominant, then first of all and only
then allows views into the kingdom of the supernatural but only with weak
133 2
glances; so truly moral conviction which is immediately devoted to the law

can come into being and the rational creature can become worthy of his share
in the highest good, which is commensurate with the moral worth of his
person and not merely of his actions. Therefore it is probably correct here,
too, as the study of men and nature otherwise sufficiently teaches, that the
inscrutable wisdom by which we exist is no less worthy of respect in that
which it has denied us than in that which it has granted us' (Kritik der
praktischen Vernunft, Werke, Hartenstein, V, p. 153). Indeed even in the
work of a philosopher as anti-Jacobinical as Franz von Baader the following
consequeQce of value-production (contra finished, pre-ordered successful
achievement), merely mingled with though not exhausted by otherworldliness, is to be found: 'It is a fundamental prejudice of men to believe
that that which they call a fut~re world is a thing created and completed for
man, which exists without him like a built house which he only needs to
enter, whereas in fact that world is a building of which he himself is the
builder, a building which grows only with him' (Werke, 1851-60, VII, p. 18).
These and others are the possible truths of a subjective (objective-subjective)
theory of value and its ramifications; the gain is greater than the loss which
results from the destruction of the objective-real theory of value, one already
complete, pre-ordered. Above all, because this is the hardest aspect of this
loss: the unconnected ephemeralness of human sets of values belongs only
to mechanical materialism and not - despite all the powers of tendency and
the dialectics of nature - to dialectical materialism. Equally nothing is lost
with the objectivist theory ofvalue but the falseness of its objective-real scales
of value themselves; for these, right up to the supposed ens realissimum of
the ens perfectissimum, are mythical hypostases, not realities. The world of
objectivity, that of accustomed objectification and becomeness, contains no
angelic host ofelaborated-real values, Thomas himselfin this connection has
to admit: 'Res nobiliores in mente quam in se ipsis. ,* And the hierarchy of
values which by virtue of its relation to the highest good is unquestionable
certainly does not coincide with the completed graduated structure in which
man, if only he climbs willingly, thought he found all his ideals as realities.
This isjust as much irretrievably dead and gone as it never existed in objective
reality: the graduated structure is found only in objective utopia, in processive
propensity. What the world contains is and remains for the time being allied
potential invalue material; QO more, but no less either. It contains the material,
the time and the space to work on this material, to express and to naturalize
"Things are nobler in the mind than in themselves.'
1333
man through it, to mediate nature with human history and to humanize
nature through it. The world contains so much more than the completedreal value statics which medieval society reflectedfrom within itselfinto nature
and into a mythological super-nature. Instead of this standstill the valuematerial of the world contains its tendency, one which is alliable with human
labour and not yet thwarted, to express itself, to bring out the latency of
its core-content. Just as according to Marx not only must the thought push
through to reality but reality to the thought if a plan is to succeed; so every
formation of value is dependent on the tendency-latency in its material, and
equally this tendency-latency - instead of dead mechanism but also instead
of hypostatized value-gods - is present in world material. The end of latency
in the most positive-possible sense is the highest good, and it would not be
the highest good if, in its highest subjectivity, it did not also contain highest
object-basedness in spe within it, both as kingdomliness and as complete
materiality. Only in this is it concrete; only in-this can the desiderium find
the Absolute of its intending and ceasewith it; only in this does subjectivity,
which always has the unfulfilled That as ground and content, gain the
tangibility of its content. The Being-There of the highest good is such an
essential part of it that it can never be the highest good in mere inwardness
but always also in uttered, objectively achieved externality. And as such of
course then to disappear with its liberated subject, just as subjectivity disappears with the unalienated object: the subjective as well as the objective
theory of value, like the entire still-separated subject-object relation, ceases
in the highest moment ofthe highestgood. Therefore in consequence: the worldmaterial of the best, this only true feature of objective value theory, is the
utopian-latent matter of the discovered world subject. The location of the
highest good itself, however, even during its intention (unless this is distracted
or falls for the inadequate) always remains close at hand: in the moment as
the core in which subjectivity and objectivity, in an interpenetration sealed
on both sides, are united in an undeveloped way just as , in the real-possible
highest good, they could become identical when developed through each
other. Therefore: all values already have their climax in the fact that as they
become more central the distance in them between subjectivity and objectivity disappears. The hope of the highest value or of the highest good, this
last conceivableborder-ideal, contains both Selfand World, in a manner which
points the utopian way for all other goods, trained and balanced against one
another. The day of the nunc, the presence of the present, is therefore essentially just as much the world as question and the (imminent) human content
as answer as it is man as question and the (imminent) world content as answer.
1334
Which all concerns the revealed face or Humanum, indeed makes this conceivable as the last .potential to value among all external suitabilities.
Hovering and severity with reference to the highest good

(evening wind, statue of Buddha, figure of the kingdom)
There is a pull inwards which remains open for a very long time. If
everything outside becomes bad, the person who believes he perceives this
does not after all consider himself bad. On the contrary, he will think
he is the only right one, perhaps, if he is not all too self-righteous, with
a few friends as well. Thus the inside seems to be a place in which valuable
existence survives more easily or longer than in the outside which is as
obdurate as it is susceptible. If it is storming outside the window, literally
or figuratively, then not only the room but also the so-called heart is a
good container for warmth. It is also particularly true that the beautiful
soul is beautiful only in itself, its adornment gleams in and consists of
this self-cultivation. But however much the heart and other feelings offer
themselves for retreat and refuge, the value cannot and will not remain
in it. For even when its simple, will-less feeling is not inclined to or capable
of changing things, it still thinks it is surpassing, shining over them, and
this kind of thing does not remain inward. However much a soul may
be despondent or hopeful in itself, even poetically it is not alone, for outside
it definitely finds March or November. Even iI.1 harder forms of its dream
it does not find itself alone with itself and its kind, outside man, beside
atmospheric hovering, there is enough strict feature, indeed form, which
draws attention to the valuable. And even in the so-called dead', in what
is distant from men, often even more, i.e. more sublimely than in living
forms. Only because outside, too, something important in terms of value
is circulating, something suitable for and itself capable of this, could the
value-addicted person, instead of merely sighing or existing within himself,
also speak in veiled manner or through severe gestures of a crystalline kind.
He can express himself, and the last thing in which he does this takes
place not only from his own formed material but also from that which
is itself already outside, which he grips, which grips him. What is valuable
wants to be consumed, and only the best stills hunger completely. But
the Outside helps and cooperates towards this best, gives it the image,
the flowing as well as the material image.
Now precisely the ultimately intended thing presents itself both as
i335
hovering and as severe. It can and must be hovering because it is as yet

present nowhere but in the material of the question. But it can and must
also be the hardest, because the question and its premonition is relentlessly
directed to the one thing needful. If that which is hovering is neglected,
then hardness is betrayed; for this is not yet decided, it still needs the
searching though severely aiming question. But if the absolutely asserted,
the steel-hard in the Yes of the good essence is neglected, then it is doubly
betrayed: for permanence, unity, final purpose are not wind, but number,
measure, weight. But they are, rebus sic fluentibus, present only in
undecided form or in the wafting state of the enigma. Here the state of
metaphysical hovering dwells; it is based on effusion, but responsible and
therefore concerned-concerning effusion. The forms of this effusion are
poetic, not only as self-centred statements, with formed feeling or with
'feeling is all', but equally as objectively exact, with exactly stated enigmatic
utterance deep in the object. The route between man and world, especially
evening world is one on which both sides, man and world, walk -towards
each other, and it shudders with remote whispering. Most precisely in
the work of Kierkegaard, the philosopher of existence, but not only of
man's existence. He gave the following unforgettable example of the
hovering of a last thing in the inside as well as the outside: 'And the farewell
of the evening to the day and to him who has lived the day is an enigmatic
utterance, its reminder is like a solicitous mother's warning to her child
to come home on time, but its invitation, even if the farewell is not to
blame for such a misunderstanding, is an inexplicable hint, as if peace could
be found only by remaining outside in the nocturnal meeting, not with
a woman but femininely with the infinite, won over by the night wind
when it repeats itself monotonously, when it searches through woods and
meadows and sighs as if seeking something, won over by the distant
resonance of stillness in itself, as if the stillness sensed' something, won
over by the sublime peace of the sky, as if this were found, won over
by the audible soundlessness of the dew, as if this were the explanation
and the refreshment of the infinite, which resembles the fruitfulness
of a still night and is only half understood like the half-transparency of
night mist.' With these strange words a field of final frontier is entered,
dawning most precisely like its object. The enigmatic utterance of the
evening is the enigmatic utterance of the Something which the wind is
seeking, the Something which stillness senses, which fills the sublime peace
of the sky, as if it were found. It is the Something of the infinite
which, in this Something, as a thing in and for itself, equally ceases to
be infinite, i.e. becomes homeland. Hence the reminder, which is here

a mindfulness; hence the comparison of this mindfulness with 'a solicitous
mother's warning to her child to come home on time'. In Kierkegaard's
words there is the complete understanding of something only halfunderstood, as well as the 'half-transparency of the night mist' in which
the superfluous fades, a thing in and for itself whispers and smokes. This
therefore is the nature, the best nature, of the hovering which is relevant
here and metaphysically assigned to the highest good, an as it were feminine
meeting with the infinite, with that which is coming home. And it is
clear from the example itself which Kierkegaard has chosen: that which
is called an enigmatic utterance, precisely because it remains in the thick
of existing, goes out of the mere inwardness of this self-Iocatedness. It
therefore discovers the object-based: night wind, night mist, peace of the
sky, as existential and man as not alone in his environment, however inhuman. If with his anxiety, his sickness unto death, his longing for value
and salvation, he had merely become trapped in a universe utterly disparate
to these things, if there did not exist in it the same root of immediate
existence to which he is himself attached, which he himself is: then the
absolutely representative evening experience noted by Kierkegaard would
be impossible, both with its hovering which encounters itself outside and
with the content of hovering, which does not remain inwardness. Anima
mea, this birth and refuge of existence conscious of itself, also lives at
the hearth of the object; there, too, its infinite is together with the finite.
Whenever it moves towards this kind of self-encounter, knowing oneself
to be in existence ceases to remain inwardness and the outside world ceases
to appear unfriendly, inhospitable and unmediatable towards our dawning
matter of value. If in the inward there is also a universe, indeed the only
one in which a man could be at home, there is also an inward in the universe,
and these correlative terms (inside ..outside, subject-object) already begin
to lose their distanced meaning in grasped metaphysical hovering, not only
in the mythical experience of the flash of light or the moment. The language
of knowing oneself to be in existence, with regard to the lost or precisely
newly-sensed fundamental value, is always poetic, in moral and aesthetic
as well as religious attainment of self, exploration of self; but it is poetry
going beyond the edges of subjectivity, is the maintaining of existence, the
forming of existence with a landscape. It is this external landscape itself
in which existing finds evidences of itself, in which it may find aptness for
ciphers of the sought-for final meaning and value. Man came into the world
no differently from the things around him, the same dark That processes in
.-
1337
each case. Hence the hovering towards the last thing is answered outside,
atmospherically, as is fitting here, but with the solicitous warning to come
home on time.
It is the same warning, referring to the same thing, which appears in
severe instead of hovering form. Before it the breath of air passes, and
hovering, although conscientiously effective, withdraws here. In other'
words, that longing withdraws which still characterizes 'feeling is all' and
its way home. The drive-like, the wafting, and the lively quality also depart,
as they depart from an artificial-hard final image in Stefan George: 'My
garden needs neither warmth nor air,/The garden that I have myself
contrived, / And the flocks of lifeless birds resting there/Have never seen
a spring arrive.' Longing and its life have to withdraw here, for together
with it the idea of the highest value, i.e, of total fulfilment, cannot exist.
What Schopenhauer, the metaphysician of fundamental disappointment,
so fundamentally wrongly asserts of the will per se, indeed of the Absolute,
in fact applies only to lower and middle-range value goals: 'The same appears
in human strivings and wishes, which always beguile us with their fulfilment as the final goal of wanting; but once they are attained they no longer
resemble themselves and are therefore soon forgotten, antiquated and
actually always, though this may not be admitted, laid aside as vanished
illusions; happy enough if something still remains to be wished and striven
for, so that the game of constant transition from wish to satisfaction and
from satisfaction to a new wish, the rapid movement of which means
happiness, the slow movement suffering, is kept up and does not fall into
that slackening which manifests itself as terrible, life-numbing boredom,
dull longing without a definite object, deadening languor' (Werke,
Grisebach, I, p. 229). But nothing can be more alien to severe goalformation
or to the means-purposes precisely related to it than this longing without
end; in the landscape of the highest good there is no disappointment through
attainment, there is no problem of the Egyptian Helen here. It is precisely
the criterion of the highest good and of the means-purposes on its precise
path that the magic of the Trojan Helen and of the utopia directed to her
is destroyed only if it is outdone on attainment, indeed on approaching. No
atmosphere competes any longer, no fiery streak of air, no idol bearing
the banner: It was better in the dream. But of course - corresponding to
the mere presentiment of the .highest moment, indeed to the fragmentary
even in the 'chorus mysticus' - even here the hovering only withdraws, does
not disappear completely; for summum bonum even in its severest form is
first present only as a question, as a cipher dawning towards its solution,
not as this solution itself. With regard to the thing which nothing else can
beat there is a plastic mode as well as a poetic one, a figure of metaphysical
hardness as well as a state of metaphysical hovering; but the former, being of
the same unarrived content, is a cloakednesswhich is no less utopian, though
it is formed. Just as the warning to come home in Kierkegaard describes and
does not lose the fixed point in what is wafting, so conversely the truly
attempted figures of perfection never lack the half-transparency of night
mist in which Kierkegaard's concluding countenance so objectively veils
itself. The utopian archetype of the positively definitive acts in all its forms
which have appeared historically as a mystery; in it, hovering becomes
manifest sealedness. All signs of this kind share in George's situationless
garden, and even more so, less preciously and more truly, in this image
of winter arranged by the later Holderlin: 'The rivers are like plains, the
wildness/Of shapes seems more diffused, the mildness/Of life continues,
the cities' expanse/Appears especially fine against the unmeasured distance.'
But the depth of cities appears especially fine against closely measured
infinity: for reasons connected with the civilization of repose, it was not
Europe but the Orient which first developed the 'seals' of an optimum
intended here; Europe, with its varied 'signatum art', culminating in the
attempted signature of highest quality, merely imitated the Orient. Fundamental signs of this kind are found in Babylon, as the star, in Egypt, as
the triangle; but the most powerful geometrical human form of this intended
optimum is unmistakably that of the Buddhafigure. It should be noted
that this is mentioned here as itself merely intending, as a mere attempt,
but as an especially clear one. For the case of this figure shows, in exemplary
and instructive fashion, how precisely the image of repose of something
which has turned out well sought to geometricize itself in human form
in a seal. All the more vividly as the image of Buddha, more than any
other, was also conceived as that by which man was to approach and to form
himself towards the Indian version of the highest good. This highest good
is of course here solely nirvana, i.e. that bliss hypostatized into itself in which
neither subject nor object, neither bearer nor borne exist, but despite this
subject-object-lessness and because of it nirvana borders on the kingdom,
where subject and object are cancelled out only because they interpenetrate
without intervals between them. In the smile of Buddha as well as in the
lines of initiation of his statue there is therefore, even from this side, something much more than the hollow space geometry of an eliminated cosmos
(cf. Vol. III, p. 1255): there is the negative expression of the most highly
intended positivum in it. The Buddha symbol thus itself appears negatively
1339
but within this assertively and absolutely consolingly t a figure of the most
extreme repose-entrance to the highest good. With the yoga position as
model: to the yogi the image of gods is an instrument (yantra) by which
unity between god and man is created; thus there are not only humanlike yantras but above all richly geometric and linear ones, in the form
of diagrams which are intended to symbolize conditions in heaven
(devachan). Buddha was not a yogi, he rejected the yoga technique, the
hetaira can follow his path as well as the penitent: but the Buddha statue,
the earliest of which appeared only in the first century B.C., took up the
yantra unity. Hence therefore the severity in highest mildness, a severity
which contrasts so significantly with the statues of gods of the Brahmanic
religion which appear at the same time. And with the three-headed and
four-armed Shivas which gained ground again in the second century A.D.,
even more so with the overflowing-organic Vishnu and Shiva temples of
the late Indian era, when all the convoluted confusions of Hinduistically
renewed legends of gods proliferated in plastic form too (Temple of
Madura). The statue of Buddha in contrast stands as another world, so
penetrating, so much concentration on the one thing necessary that its
repose initially communicated itself to Hindu art as well (for example in
its greatest monument, the three-headed Shiva in the rock temple of
Elephanta). Not until the second century A.D. (the Buddha temple of
Mathura) was the symbol of repose of the perfected one executed in its
classical primal form, and it was only in the art of the Gupta empire, from
the fourth to the sixth century A.D., that the primal form was drawn as
completely closed in triangle and circle. This figure of a summum bonum
interpreted in Indian terms occurs in a double form, depending on whether
the Indian perfectedness still faces men or dwells in itself. When facing
men, Buddha is the teacher, standing, in a frontal position, his right hand
raised in the 'seal of protection'; this gesture means: Fear not. But when
dwelling within himself Buddha is transported, in the form of the most
difficult ecstasy t of apathetic ecstasy: the seated figure is set in a triangle,
its arms form another two triangles around the body, and levelwith the solar
plexus its two hands rest flat in one another, in the 'seal of teaching'; this
gesture means that in the illuminated one the wheel of teaching revolves
around itself. This is the Buddha figure or the Indian seal of fulfilment
of the final wish: to wish no more. It is not surprising that this most
manifest cipher of salvation, though still abstract salvation, is located at the
dialecticalbreaking point of exodus and entrance, of decay and significance:
the truly metaphysical severity codifies ascent, not Becomeness. Therefore
1340
every cipher contains tile ultimatum of dawning, not only towards the
side of coming up but also towards the side of the passing of what is habitual
and fixed. Hence what was said in reference to music: 'The requiem is
the mystery landscape of the highest good', also applies to the powerful
welcome and farewell which the Buddha figure, like every attempted final
figure, represents. But Buddha, despite subjectless-objectless nirvana, has
an advantage over other attempted final figures because - in the Nothing
of his All - he does not posit a perfectissimum as already existent, as present in essence, though behind the appearance. Like the essence in the
star of Babylon, in the triangle of Egypt, but partly even in the ornaments
of truly final significance which the religions of the exodus and the kingdom
Oudaism and Christianity) have undertaken to posit in hypostatized-real
form. The hypostatized-real here was the damage inflicted on hope by
a faith fixated on a supernatural world; however, that which was figured
metaphysically in this way, which may now at last be recalled, affected
in its contents, as biblically intended, the highest human life form, in
utopianized habitation, and not formless bliss of drifting. Two of these
biblical final figures gave to the highest good at the same time its most
mysterious expression: the divine chariot (Merkaba) and the heavenly
Jerusalem. The vision of the chariot occurs in Ezekiel, in an archaic composite
of animals, cherubim, wheels and the Son of Man (Ezekiel I, 5-28; 10,
9-22). But this wild vision, reminiscent of the hybrid figures of Babylon
and also of ancient Indian fantasy, became the basis of the highest figuremagic to which Judaism could bring itself. For Judaism, Merkaba signified
not only the chariot by which men can ascend to the divine habitations
but also the symbolic figure of these habitations themselves. A group of
Cabbalistic texts (hekaloth), written in the first centuries after Christ, deals
exclusively with the chariot: it was said to represent the form of the final
space, inhabited throughout only by the essence. Merkaba mysticism as
that of the omega thus challenged the position of Bereshith mysticism
or the mysticism of the beginning, of the mere alpha of creation. Merkaba,
of course, did not get beyond esoteric circles, beyond superstitious sophistry
and inaccessible concern at the same time. The figure of the heavenlyJerusalem
certainly did get beyond this, actually symbolizing for millions the holiest
space. As will be recalled, it provided, together with the Temple of
Solomon, an architectural model of imitation, as it were a model for the
Christian yoga position of the stones. The squares of this figure were,
in a reversed squaring of the circle, transformed into a circle again; hence
the definition which extends to Eckhart and Cusanus: 'Deus est sphaera
1341
intelligibilis, cuius centrum ubique, circumferentia nusquam.'* In the figure

of the heavenly Jerusalem the hypostatized-real also decreased, even more
than in the case of the chariot: the index of being of this figure became
increasingly utopian. And at the same time its formation was to go beyond
the destruction of the existing world to the daybreak of a new one in
its place; with baptized astral traces surrounding sheer community. A crystal.
made of soul is conceived in this last attempted figure of the highest good,
but in such a way that anima mea is likewise completely expressed and
coincides with the content of a transfigured nature. Here the nonatmospheric severity culminates, in view of the highest figure: and it must
be esssentially figure, not atmosphere; for the positive ultimum is intended
as situationlessness, without storms and clouds.
As it is not yet there, a'lot stirs around the ultimately intended thing. Not
only the end ferments or shines ahead, even on the way witnesses move
about. Feeling and severity discern a wealth of outer states and forms,
which are, because they signify. Because they signify the valuative, or at
least harmonize curiously with what lives on this in man. Here of all places
not everything can be put down to empathy or interpretation of a subjective,
therefore arbitrary kind. On the contrary, poetic and plastic utility values
of this kind prove in each case and particularly inevitably to be materially
co-determined. Never yet has a May morning, however gloomy the mood
of the person experiencing it, given rise to sad feelings, it appears quite
objectively as cheerful. So that even with the most unbridled imagination the
poetry of the night wind cannot be confused with that of the morning gleam,
nor the cipher of the mountain top with that of the moor. The more
irrefutable and objectively unmistakable such empathy and interpretation
is, the more surely it is objectively well-founded. This kind of feeling of
nature has in vain been completely subjectivized or defused into mere beauty,
especially in the meaning of illusion which the last century gave to this
term. The question cannot be dismissed: what is objectively-qualitatively
in an autumn evening, what qualities are at work in the seasons, in their
landscapes, in the 'fair, enlivening look of spring'F] What communicates
itself in the aura which the heath, the high forest, the high mountains
and the sea, in such an unmistakable yet materially different way, have
around them or which, different right down to the smallest detail, surrounds
an abandoned house, a rainy night in an industrial area, the emeralds and
turquoises of the surge of a southern sea, tropical light ? The mechanical
* 'God is an intelligible spherewhose centre is everywhere, but whose circumference is nowhere.'
t Faust, Part I, 904.
1342
theory of nature has discarded colours and even more so aura from their world,
but they survive in the huge sector of the world which does not consist only
of quantitative relations or beginnings. Even in the highly mechanistic
business of the natural sciences, at least geography and to some extent geology
have retained colour, warmth, qualitative natural forms; correspondingly
these sciences were therefore indebted to landscape painting (most clearly
in the case of Alexander von Humboldt). And correspondingly, consciously
qualitative-valuative natural philosophy such as that of Goethe, Schelling,
Hegel entered most closely into their kind of nature through colours, mines,
crystalline forms. Into a nature which seemed to be partly overspread by
objective melancholy, as if from a misfortune because of which it was there;
and it seemed to be partly overspread by objective expectation, towards a
solution and transfiguration.just as in this nature the gold tree was to grow
in the inside of the mountain and light was to rise up from gravity. It was
this romantic value-nature of which Schelling said that it was 'the first or
Old Testament in which things are still outside the centre and therefore under
the law', but also that it was an older revelation than any written one, containing 'models which no man has yet deciphered, whereas those of the
written ones have long since been given their fulfilment and interpretation'
(Werke VIII, p. 411, 415). And only this cloaked gallery of values, richly
referring tothe ultimate made possible - apart from the beauty of nature - the
astonishing element in nature mythology, before which the religious self for
so long stood rapt. Certainly, the religious animation of nature in particular
was filled over and over again with sheer anthropomorphisms, far more than
perceptions of the beauty of nature were: but just as the beauty of nature is not
mere illusion, so that which is termed nature mythology is not every-where
mere superstition, when nature mythology believed that in storm-night,
thunderstorm, spring, and constellations (seen from the earth) it perceived eruptions or orders which were irrefutably supposed to operate outside the
mechanical sector. As we have seen, precisely this interweaving of natural and
of qualitative-valuative categories turned out to be purely mythical, all too
mythical in the case of Mani, in the nature mythology of good-evil, lightnight; but even the organic universe in Leonardo, the musical universe in
Kepler, the light-intoxicated one in Goethe, is inconceivable without the survival of nature mythology. 'Musical for spirits' ears,/Newly-born the day
appears./Rocky portals boom and shatter,/ Phoebus' wheels roll and clatter;/
What a din the light then bringsl/No one hears unheard of things': * for
* Faust, Part II, 4667-71.
1343
Goethe, Aurora here opens the gateway of the east, a symbol of the birth
of light per se and not merely a retinal phenomenon resulting from the fact
that the lower layer of air allows only red rays to pass through. For these
verses by Goethe and the glance in them, the mere subjective retinal
phenomenon, with nothing but quantum outside itself, is not sufficient; and
likewise it is not enough for Shakespeare's inevitably compelling harmony
between actions and landscapes. How else would the so strikingly attuned
essence of nature around his characters be possible, the summer night around
Romeo, the stormy heath around Lear, the north wind and winter around
Hamlet, all the atmospheric nimbus and the specific locality, corresponding
precisely here to the Quale of characters and actions? To rule out any
misunderstanding: the quantitative basis in physical processes is unaffected
by all this, but it does not of course constitute the whole of nature, as
qualitatively experienced, precisely also as aesthetically and qualitatively
graspable. Least of all is the materialist interpretation abandoned when the
mechanical-quantitative is recognized in its limitations or even in its merely
partial sector; for to no dialectical-materialist depiction is the shift to qualities
alien. Not even when these qualities do not break off physically but even in
their aesthetic reflection call for an explanation - with their own potential
for value-quality even here. Which is why Goethe - in the context of nature
as always and without any dualism whatever - makes and indicates the
following connection: 'Although for my part I am quite strongly attached
to the theory of Lucretius and include all my pretensions in the circle of life,
it always greatly delights and refreshes me to see that all-motherly nature,
for tender souls, causes softer sounds and echoes to resound gently in the undulations of its harmonies and thus in so many ways grants infinite man a
feeling offellowship with the eternal and the infinite' (Letter to F. Stolberg,
2. Feb. 1789). From which it becomes clear in the most innocent way that
those artists who can be called landscape-humanists do not therefore have
to be subjective-idealistic or non-committally anthropomorphizing but can
be and often are more objective-concrete than all Mere Quantum in matters
of nature, with pars pro toto. The hugely bubbling world retort demands
to be known by its fruits too; and in the quantitative age the art of nature
kept its conscience. And furthermore: the background, one which is not only
to be unmasked but also in important points to be unveiled and corrected,
remains that which was once so over-imbued with soul but at the same time
kept meaningful in nature mythologies. It is therefore not surprising that
Christianity adopted, namely baptized or at least re-baptized, determinations
of nature mythology; they form the basis of allits religious feasts. This despite
1344
the Christian war against the idolization of nature: this war, one against
the old aeon and for the new, saw in nature tendencies and elements of
a transfigured comrade, therefore a confederate. Thus Augustine taught
almost a formed premonition of salvation in the shapes of nature, especially
in the beautiful ones: Cut, pro eo quod nosse non possunt, quasi innotescere
velIe videantur' (De civ. Dei XI, 27). * Schopenhauer took up this theory
in his philosophy of art, Wagner's Good Friday theatre magic is based
on it, but Church feasts as a whole even before Augustine were so placed
and held as if nature were unconsciously joining in the celebration. As
for example the feast of St John on the shortest night, or the full paradox
of Christmas on the longest night: at its midnight the new sun rises.
Although with Christ an unnatural beginning of light was supposed to
be intended, one which stands in the way of the course of the world,
which in Chesterton's fine phrase gives the suddenly pealing midnight
bells a sound like the thunder of cannon after a battle just won, nonetheless
Christmas was always experienced in connection with external nature, with
its spark of light in outer darkness, as homeliness in the landscape itself.
Until the age when large towns brought nature out of the field of vision,
Advent, which precedes Christmas, was always understood as part of the
natural cycle, and the cave of Bethlehem lay just as much under the old
earth, as its explosive space, as it lay in a new world, as its birth-space.
Here belongs the star which stood still over the stable of the cave, indeed
which symbolizes the new sun in whose sign the Christ of Easter rises
up. For even the feast of Easter was celebrated in the midst of nature towards
a different nature; thus it turned out to be a curiously double spring festival,
a transparent one in which again and again nature seemed fitted for
transparency. The winter grave breaks open, and the withered and frozen
world experiences that resurrection which in pagan myth is presided over
by the vegetation god and in Christian myth by the victorious Jesus completely in nature but no longer in the cycle of the old nature. Ancient
Christendom celebrated not only Easter Sunday in this way but also, in
an Advent vigil of a peculiar kind, the preceding Easter night: the coming
of Christ for judgment was expected on this night. So although in the
Christian Easter a different aurora was welcomed than that of the spring
sun, it was equally one which could make use of the external signs of
nature as if they were themselves symbolic. Christianity, with the pathos
and the escape of anima mea, remained inexorable towards all astral myth
* 'so that what they cannot have known, they may seem willing to get to know' .
1345
as towards genuine paganism, yet nonetheless it included such concordances.

By no means only as a compromise (the feast of Christmas in particular
came into being very late, with no connection to Near Eastern cults of
the sun, it was first celebrated in Rome in the fourth century), but a movement and a latency in nature sought to express themselves here, into which
the Christian calendar enters, to which - far outbidding and eschatological
- it attaches itself. All this, however, is only possible because storm, winter
night, aurora, times of day, seasons, forms of landscape, present real-utopian
ciphers, so that mythology and Christianity saw themselves obliged to
decipher nature - humanistically, now with man as empathy but also with
man as the key. But these ciphers, too, all have those of a summum bonum
at their head; in the beauty of nature it ordered what in each case were
its most beautiful images, in nature mythology it was ultimately transcribed
as the new, secret sun of the mysteries, 'at midnight in its brightest gleam'.
Here is the function of a new, a material theory of signs, namely at last
to do critically adequate justice to the available meanings and attempted
readings, in a dialectical-material process the welling of which precisely
brings out the quality-ciphers of that which is itself welling. Though what
is perhaps to be interpreted in this is so little revealed to itself that its
solution, far from being present or complete in a hinter-world or supernatural world, has as its time only the future, as its form only the real
cipher, as its degree of reality only latency. But there are hints in the beauty
of nature, the sublimity of nature, the mythology of nature, in the landscape of feasts: and all these witnesses and signs likewise converge in the
direction towards a final figure.
The searching for witnesses along the way is equally not limited to merely
felt trace. Not to the hovering aspect of the- landscape, not to the
corresponding etat d'ame of the feast and its nature-based time. But here
too severity is answered outside, exactly as if the scene of nature itself were
written on with engraved signs, none of which can help displaying and
pre-forming human features and faces on the soil of the world. These signs
occur as particularly laconic images, and in such a way that every one of
these images of things signifies itself and something else in its own line
of extension. That which is signified in the line of extension lies
metaphorically, allegorically, above all symbolically in man's own line of
extension. Its place is at the dialectical surface of decay of things, i.e. where
they become as it were forms of departure from themselves. At this breaking
point the metaphor already dwells, or rather that which in such a curious
way makes possible the equation of a mental or social fact with a concrete
fact. Here in particular allegory expressly dwells, insofar as it provides

a symbol for a 'meaning', above all a meaning which is comprehensibly discerned and is yet surrounded by edges of significance. And
even symbolism, which in contrast to ambiguous allegory quite unequivocally indicates a real cloakedness of the Object, is located in the dialectical
openness of things; for on these edges of significance lives the founding
element of all real symbolism: latency. And unity, for allegories as well
as for symbols, consists in the fact that objective-utopian archetypes are at
work in both, as the true real ciphers in both. This was formulated as
follows in the 'Foundation' (cf. Vol. I, p. 164f.): 'Archetypes of this type
are not at all formed merely out of human material, neither out of the
archaic, nor out of later history; but rather they demonstrate a bit of the
double inscription of nature itself, a kind of real cipher or real symbol.
A real symbol is one where the thing signified is still disguised from itself,
in the real object, and not just for the human apprehension of that thing,
for example. It is therefore an expression for that which has not
yet become manifest in the object itself, but rather is signified in the object
and through the object; the human picture of the symbol is only a representative depiction of this. Lines of movement (fire, lightning, sound-figure
and so on), forms of well-defined objects (palm shape, cat shape, human
face, Egyptian crystal style, Gothic forest style and so on) indicate these
real ciphers. A sharply delineated part of the world thus appears as a symbol
group of an object-based kind whose mathematics and philosophy are still
both equally undeveloped.' A panel of real symbols would therefore be
one of marked severity, with nothing but characters, insofar as they have
developed within the dialectical process (experiment of utterance and
shaping). They are therefore not attainable by a mechanical-levelling world
picture but share their material with that of the concerned-striking feeling
for nature, of qualitative-valuative mediation with nature as a whole. The
objective categories or forms of existence in turn appear in this panel as
what in the Pythagoreanism of the Renaissance - not yet reduced to
quantities and not yet omitting definitions of quality ~ was known as
signatures. In their multiplicity they are mere evidence-forms from on the
way, and as such they are utterly immersed in the dialectical process of
which in each case they figure the Gaining-Of-Self-In-Existence. But as
these real symbols describe, in a far more binding, far more corrected way
than the hints in natural beauty, nature mythology, the nature of Christian
feasts and other such chimings, the gain of the matter itself in each
case, describe it in a way that can be noted, they also refer far more
1347
inexorably to the positive ultimum and to its fermenting-latent form. At

the end of such signatures, therefore, there again stands that which is truly
most concentratedly indicated by the highest real symbols, such as the figure
of kingdom. But also the entire world-multiplicity of real symbols points
to such an Ithaca; in it the incognito of the voyager and also that of the
goal ends.
Number and cipher of qualities; meaning of the highest good in nature

Nature in its beautiful forms speaks to us figuratively, and the gift of interpreting
its cipher-script is accorded to us in our moral feeling.
Kant
What is measurable does not therefore cease to be full of sound. The mere
outline, precisely this, may have it, for example that of the female body.
Every map, with its river-, rnountain-, and especially coast-lines, conveys
a life of its own, carpet-like, abstract, seen from above. The carpet itself
expresses nothing but fiery abbreviations, oriental runes into which its
flowers, animals, places, paths have transformed themselves. And for the
first time in a long time expressionist, cubist, then surrealist experiments
in painting made clear what disillusioned outlines are about, what it means
to see the world as a rebus and to recognize it again in this form, not
naturalistically. Interlacings and pencils of rays, curves and layered applications
of colour brought to light a different, more qualified space than that of real
experience. Bit by bit the everyday context was disturbed, and every thing,
with its cooperation, had a pictorially or physiognomically revealing word
put into its outline or into its mouth. This happened preciselywhere so-called
abstract painting did not degenerate into an absolutely objectlessplay of forms
but reduced or abbreviated things to ground-lines. And it is not as if this
figural essence is confined to Picasso's expressionism or to the geometrical
Cezanne (with his conscientious measurement and weight) from which it
was directly derived. Its closer location is, rightly, the neo-Pythagorean,
neo-Platonic belief in figures in the Renaissance; this was naive in Raphael,
sentimental in Durer. 'The world is full of figure', as Diirer says, or as
Vasari puts it in theoretical terms: 'Depiction draws from many things a
universal judgement (giudizio universale), like a form or idea of all things
in nature, which is absolutely regular in its proportions. This is why
depiction, not only in human and animalbodies but also in plants, paintings
and sculptures, recognizes the proportion of the whole to its parts and the
proportion of the parts to one another and to the whole' (cf. Panofsky, Idea,
1924, p. 33). This proportion, however, was regarded not only as formal
in the modern, all too often purely formalistic sense but as formal in the
older Aristotelian-scholastic sense; it was therefore regarded as substantial
in terms of content. And at the same time as valuative per se; the figure
which is well-balanced in itself and yet significantly humane - called
concinnitas in Alberti, divina proportio in Pacoli- was regarded as an ethical
model throughout the Renaissance, one derived from the revived Pythagoras.
It is scarcely necessary to mention that without the emergent bourgeoisie's
interest in calculation even Pythagoras would not have been revived, but
over and above this the belief in a writing ofnature, in numbers and figures,
continued to have an astonishing, instructive effect. It is the belief which
liberates the same mathematical natural science which later, by rejection of
all qualities, scientistically killed it. Nonetheless, one almost seems to be
hearing a piece of Cezanne and even, in the depths, of the late, Pythagorizing
Plato, when Galileo signs the field of his investigations thus: 'The true book
of philosophy is the book of nature, which always lies open before our eyes.
But it is written in different letters from those of the alphabet; these letters
are triangles, squares, circles, spheres, cones, pyramids and other geometrical
figures.' Nor have these figures quite lost a qualitative character in Galileo,
one which is fully alive in those German philosophers of the Renaissance
who sought to or were able to give not calculation but naturalistic
physiognomy their own contribution. Paracelsus sought nothing but formanalogous ciphers in plants and metals, especiallyin curative ones; on a larger
scale he called this the 'art signata'. This is the art which confers on things
and above all on the specifici of their forms not indifferent names but such
as express their 'nature' and at the same time the corresponding (hostile or
concordant) relation of these 'natures' to one another, above all to that of
man and of his parts. With the idea of correspondence or concordance of
signatures a different, very ancient motif entered this theory: that of the
sympathetic connection of 'natures', mediated by the last child of the astral
myths, astrology. 'What in earth is iron', says Paracelsus in the Book of
Paramirum, 'is in man gall, in the heavens Mars': such astrological correspondence here gave the thing-archetypes their connection, from top to bottom,
from bottom to top throughout the cosmos, or rather the ground for their
'analogy' which was assumed to be object-based. But equally every 'nature'
retains its independence as that of its signature, which in Paracelsus indicates
1349
the morphological aspect now of the species, now of the individual 'character'.
Jakob Bohrne, in many respects his disciple, writes precisely of such marked
features in the book 'De signatura rerum': 'And there is no thing in nature
which is created that does not also reveal its inner form outwardly. As we
know from the power and shaping of this world how the essence reveals itself
in bodying forth in a metaphor, as we know and see such things from stars
and elements as well as creatures, trees and herbs. ' These objective signatures
were supposed to be imprinted most closely in Hebrew characters, as the
oldest, but also in the then undeciphered (or completely fantastically interpreted) Egyptian hieroglyphs. Sometimes Chinese script, made known by
the Jesuits, also lent itself to such speculations, all the more easily because
it was itself celebrated there and then by Chinese mystics as a sign ofessence,
not only as a thing- or thing-complex sign. From Chinese characters (the
understanding of which significantly does not presuppose any knowledge
of the Chinese language) a direct transition occurred to Tao painting, so that
it was not at all remote from the meaning of the theory of signatures when
this painting was praised by Yang Chu, the mystic, as 'the blossom land of
characters in which essences are expressed'. It is known that even Leibniz,
in pursuance of his plan for a 'characteristica universalis' , wanted to study
the Chinese script from this point of view in terms of its 'sign-art' . Returning
to Paracelsus and Bohme, around their theory of signatures stands the most
artificial-voluminous of all, with a direct neo-Pythagorean tradition,

developed in the Jewish Middle Ages, and it came down to the Renaissance
through Reuchlin. It is the theory of signatures of the Cabbala, expressed
in Hebrew characters and the numerical values corresponding to them.
Characters and forms of nature (especially those named in the Bible) are connected with one another here in creation: just as the-forms of the characters
designate the inner forces of the thinking spirit, so the forms of nature are
supposed to proclaim the hidden forces of the creator. Hence the Cabbalistic
teaching: 'Binah (divine intellect), in which are inscribed the ways of the
characters, the form of all particulars and genera, the form of every herb and
so also of the minerals; and the ways of these images are contained in the
three characters of the holy name' (cf. Molitor, Philosophie der Geschichte
oder uber Tradition, II, 1834, p. 249). This of course passed out of its
neo-Pythagorean emanation-essence into both wild and pedantic numerical
and letter mysticism, but always, even here, Pythagoras is behind it. For
it was his school which first understood numbers both in numericalquantitative terms, as units for counting, and above all in qualitativevaluative terms. On the qualitative side, numbers were pronounced to be
135 0
values or non-values depending on whether they were odd or even: to the

odd numbers corresponded the limited, the One, the right, the male, the
light, the good, and to the even numbers the unlimited, the Many, the
left, the female, the darkness, the evil. And it was only in the modern era
that the rift or schism began which, since Kepler at the latest, has opened
between the two sides of Pythagoreanism. Between the quantitative side,
on which mathematics proper, which has since been strictly scientific,
developed, and the figural-qualitative, symbolic side on which so-called 'holy
mathematics' was supposed to dwell. The latter had grown on a different
social foundation than that which ultimately was interested solelyin methods
of calculation and the quality-less world corresponding to it. And 'holy
mathematics' had ultimately attached itself> a use to which it had certainly
not seemed predestined in its Pythagorean beginning - in number-mystical
terms to an ever more superstitious world of spirit, to real-hypostases of
mere charade and not only, as formerly, of form-ideas. Nor had the programme of an individuated and qualitative theory of figures, or even a
morphology of marked forms which develop as they live, come anywhere
near becoming legal in its own mathesis. The number and figure Quale,
this other side of Pythagoreanism, has remained only as a memory or an
uncomprehended field. As a field on which poetically, at best poetically,
the metaphors, allegories and symbols stand, as well as the emblems of
meaning in the use of which Baroque drama so excelled (cf. W. Benjamin,
Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 1928, p. 155ff.). Tieck, in his fairytale
'The Rune Mountain' , describes yet another kind of mathesis of murmuring
inorganic nature, as a tablet which he receives on the mountain: 'The tablet
seemed to form a strange, incomprehensible figure with its different colours
and lines ... He took hold of the tablet and felt the figure, which at once
invisibly passed into his inner being.' Novalis came close to getting on
the track of the theory of signatures again, even in unpoetic form; not
without reason had he written the strange, only ostensibly anti-humane,
only ostensibly astral-mythic sentence: 'Stones and substances are the
highest, man is true chaos.' And he saw this chaos in natural lines affecting
in fantastic manner even the paths of men: 'Whoever follows and compares
them will see strange figures arise; figures which seem to belong to that
great cipher language which one can discern everywhere, on wings, eggshells, in clouds, in snow, in crystals and in rock formations, in freezing
waters, on the inside and outside of mountains, plants, animals, human
beings, in the lights of the sky, on worked and painted discs of pitch and
glass, in the filings around the magnet and in strange conjunctures of chance'
I3SI
(Werke, Minor, IV, p. 3). This is analogy formation and scarcely more,
although one among sheer object-based allegories; it is, like every analogy,
the remnant of a correspondence between the forms of things, although the
methodological background of this concordance-idea has collapsed. For this
background was, as became clear in the case of Paracelsus, astrology, a
sympathetic connection between signatures; this is now finished. But what
is not ultimately finished is powerful physiognomy itself, or that qualitative
and value-meaning ofPythagoreanism so impressively recalled once again in
the Renaissance. This as it were numismatic value-set also maintains its
order not by astrology but by its relation to the form problem ofthe highest
good. And just like the highest good itself the qualitative signatures are
not intentionable and methodologically graspable in any other way than
by a thinking of process; they are not static. And so that there should be
no misunderstanding at the end (caused for example by the reactionary use
of 'marked form' for which neither Goethe nor Aristotle, nor even Paracelsus
are to blame): all these problems together with that of a qualitative theory
of the expression of natural qualities and natural forms do not stand of
course contrary to analysable, causal-dialectical happening but are in the
midst of it, they are solely tension-forms, dialectical-material process-figures
and have around them, before them, the uncompletedness of latency. For
precisely this reason object-based severity or figural severity ultimately
demands a truly figurative mathematics, as the heir to the other world
of Pythagoreanism. It demands, instead of the quality-free mathematics
which alone has developed a mathematics of qualitative arisings and formings,
indeed of latent final formings; for neither dialectics nor process figures
exist without Quale, the New, and latent ultimum. But that form of
mathematics which has since become scientific is - as a system~group of
closed deductions - not interested in the problems of becoming, despite
some dialectical aspects in differential calculus. It has long since ceased to be
interested in the Quale or in its structure, especially its hierarchical structure,
despite some more recent connections of this kind (construction of the
colour continuum .by projective geometry, even the application of group
theory, by Speiser, to the ornament). However, transitions from scientific
mathematics to the problem of becoming (expressedin a non-equation), even
to a world hierarchy of the Quale, have always existed; most impressively
in the huge sound-figure world of Kepler. For the unity of form and valuemeaning, even the hierarchy of value, is already given in Pythagoras, that
unity which again and again connects the idea of allegoricalemblems, of objective real symbols, with a theory of signatures. Indeed even with the problem
of a kind of non-Euclidean theory of signatures, but in such a way that

the spaceof contemplation, with its qualities and forms, is never completely
abandoned, but is transformed with regard to the utopian edges of meaning
around all signatures. With reference therefore to the form-problem of
the highest signature, i.e. of that which signs the intentioned end of all
meanings; this final element striking into itself and thus no longer meaning,
un-meaning, also governs the theory of signatures, as the highest good.
This is theory of form towards the highest good, expressed in lineformations of a dialectically experimenting, utopian-morally evident kind.
Every one of these formations attempted to lead out of a confused space.
Something arranges itself into clarity, often quite simple such as that of
a curve, of a circle, often into a clarity such as that of light shining through
foliage. So-called abstract painting, as noted, has made us aware again of
such forms, existing or pushing forward in that which exists. Playful and
abstract in the negative sense though such experiments may sometimes
look, they draw on the sphere which is filled with living or real-possible
ciphers. In particular all successful art, as form creation, far from offering
or being merely aesthetic pleasure, has contributed to the problem of the
cipher. Organic and remarkably close to the reality of the experience in
Greek art, crystalline in Egyptian art, with a kind of meta-organic, supracrystalline symbol of construction in Gothic art. No statement which is
binding even merely in its orbiting is to be found concerning the possible
final figure. Finally, every such absolutely attempted signature expresses
its content only privately, namely in reference to the evil of which the
figura perfectionis is utopianly free. Just as in life the highest good can
at first only be definitely-intended as anti-pressure, anti-fate, anti-death,
so in the problem of its signature it only definitely appears, completely
analogously, as anti-labyrinth. This and only this is the attained, the
achieved,the absolutely certain in all its orbitings, whether this is, in terms
of the extremest attempt at repose, the figure of Buddha or, in terms of
the highest life, even the figure of kingdom. Every orbiting around
something achieved is such that its meaning-content, although it may at
last satisfy, points still further in itself; as conceived in Christian mysticism
(Bach's St John Passion aria: 'Behold my soul') in the form of the cowslip. *
All these are ciphers of homecoming and of homeland, attempted' signatures
of the fundamental, the main matter. And nature, which with sickness,
* 'Himmelschlusselblume". The German name, more appropriately, literally means 'Key of
heaven flower'. The cowslip is also called 'St Peter's keys' in English.
1353
hostility and disparateness to man thwarts so many things, which for

Christianity stands precisely at the place and blocks the place where the
kingdom (new heaven and new earth) belongs, this same nature, as beauty
and symbolism, does not refuse to provide external objects for the ciphers
of homecoming, to be materially involved with the ciphers. It is capable
of doing this because it is itself in process and not only in statics and because
the subject of the process of nature, insofar as it is not a hypothetical one,
belongs to the mediatable environment of the human subject. Nature is
capable of not only standing disparately sideways-on to human ranks of
purpose above all because it is anything but a bygone or a so-called residuum
to the prehistory of man. It is not only the soil of man but also his lasting
surroundings; it is certainly not a burnt-out ruin but rather the architecture
for a drama that has not yet been performed. In all human history so far
the drama that could completely transform nature into a bygone has at
least not yet been played to its end; if human history has not yet dawned
into brightness, then certainly nature has not yet done so through human
history. Therefore nature, a nature which is not past but surrounds us
on all sides and arches over us, with so much brooding, uncompletedness,
meaning and cipher in it, is nota bygone but rather morning land. If it keeps
the right place blocked and occupied, the space which Christian wishful
hope called kingdom, then this also means that it is located at this topos
of the highest moment. In every beauty, every symbolic cipher of its De
nobis res agitur, nature both rises up out of its place and occupies it again,
with inconspicuousnesses, sublimities of the Authentic which belongs in
this place. The Authentic is the highest good, it is the most qualified form
of existence of What-Is according to possibility, hence of our matter. The
Authentic dawns thus in the entire potential of matter - towards a final
one, adequatedly qualified and figured. This, its kingdom-figure which
does not yet exist, governs, throughout great dangers, hindrances and
orbitings, all the other figures of the good path, and in it the Authentic,
according to the intention, is formed like joy. These are thefrontier definitions
of intention towards the highest good and the frontier concepts of every thought
that moves towards the A bsolute of human wanting. They are in their essence
thorough remotenesses, 'unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the
Greeks foolishness"," but have been part of the optimum since the first
fire started on earth and the first goal ever staked out on it.
Cor.
It
23.
1354
KARL MARX AND HUMANITY;

STUFF OF HOPE
ss
It is not true that the shortest line is always the straightest.
Lessing
It is not enough to portray what exists, it is necessary to think of what is
wished for and what is possible.
Gorky
The great truth of our age (to knowledge of which we have not yet been
helped, but without knowledge of which no other truth of importance can
be found) is that our continent is sinking into barbarism because the conditions
of ownership of the means of production are maintained by force.
Brecht
The true architect

No one has yet been satisfied by mere wishing. It does not -help at all,
in fact it weakens, if it is not joined by keen wanting. And with it a keen,
circumspect glance, which shows this wanting what can be done. But
all this comes out into the open not least through the individual, the merely
specific person, not taking his so-called specific share too seriously. That
is to say, not too seriously in a petit-bourgeois fashion, neither seeing nor
wanting to see further than his nose. The person who is merely narrow
in this way may feel involved in common events so long and insofar as
they affect him personally from time to time. But once this is over, the
all too private person withdraws again until further notice into his normal
condition. He lays the cards of the common good, one which to him appears
merely external, on the table and calls it a day. But then again this type
would scarcely be the way he is without his contrasting brother: the utterly
industrious one. Who may even still be found, against the grain of the matter,
and not only as bourgeois and thus soulless and reified. His being-himself
does not then so much enter, in bourgeois conformist or even snobbish
fashion, a little narrow wig-warn and perish in privacy, but rather dissolves
in sheer external relations. Thus a mere sprint of industriousness results
here, though it may perhaps be of public benefit. And because little that
is personal, human, expressive goes into this any more, but merely more
KARL MARX AND HUMANITY
1355
born or created nonentity, often little real benefit results. For a group
is generally worth no more than those who form it, and bustle in which
nobody moves finally becomes mere repetition and therefore stagnation.
Created and voluntary nonentities do not add up to anything, and curdcheese when trodden on becomes flat, not strong. Worst of all when a
group has become half red, but the other half is just as petit-bourgeois,
and this other half passes on, inculcates and develops all the noble qualities
of the bourgeois conformist. There is not only the love of external kitsch
here, but even more dubious would be the production of human kitsch,
indeed of the degeneration of human relations, in the midst of the ascent
to the freest and boldest goals. The road is not blocked by this, certainly
not, but it is made more difficult and is artificially prevented from remaining
such a fresh one as it is, and a widely appealing one. Therefore trained
men, the true architects of our happiness, will have to bestir themselves
without losing themselves. And likewise they pursue their own life with
such common will and glance that not only their own life remains in this
as something individual, all too private. Struggle and help then begin so
convincingly, and neither mere narrow condition nor what is merely drilled
in an empty fashion is to be found. And it is part of liberating help that
it is also able to smile.
'To overturn all circumstances in which man is a degraded,

a subjugated, a forsaken, a contemptible being'
What was it that led those who did not need it, so to speak, to the red
flag? Perhaps a temperament which, because it exists, is aghast itself at
the misery of so many. Perhaps the conscience which because of this misery
is pricked in some passive members of the ruling class, while the active
partners in the business tuck into the profit quite undisturbed. Perhaps
the thirst for knowledge also helped the knife of scientific analysis to cut
off the bough on which a young man or a young girl with a comfortable
background and future had hitherto been sitting. Of course this kind of
knowledge can scarcely be gained unless there is a previous moral interest
in gaining it. Even less can active, revolutionary conclusions be drawn
from this knowledge if it was gained merely contemplatively and continues
as before. Sombart, for example, once said that he was greatly embarrassed
whenever he was asked if he was a socialist. For the question was, he
said, absolutely ambiguous, depending on whether it referred to the
subjectively desirable or the objectively inevitable aspect of socialism.

In the latter case, Sombart said that on the basis of his scientific insight
he was unfortunately a socialist, whereas in the former case, if he
was asked about his attitude, he was emphatically anti-red because of his
bourgeois values - quod erat demonstrandum and clearly demonstrated
by Sombart 's case. But on the other hand the above-mentioned temperament, even together with conscience and attitude, is not sufficient in
all cases for class treachery against the well-born. Marx himself, in a
circular, attacked a certain Kriege who, purely from the heart, i.e. ultimately
like a benefactor from on high, had declared war on misery. He also
criticized Kriege's causal agent in this point, namely the 'love-lorn
temperamental dew' which Marx found not only among 'German socialists'
but also in many humanely intended passages in Ludwig Feuerbach's work.
And indeed Feuerbach himself was not at all close to the socialist movement,
not even to the revolution in 1848, although he did declare his support
for the workers' party in his old age. Thus at least a combination of
temperament, conscience and above all knowledge is required to set socialist
consciousness off against the individual previous social existence. With
the important and contrasting effect of making consciousness no longer
correspond to what was for so long an individual social existence, so that
in places a state occurs which is described in the 'Communist Manifesto'
and is now revealed olyectively, not just psychologically: 'Finally, at periods
when the class struggle approaches the decisive point, the process of
disintegration within the ruling class, within the old society as a whole,
takes on such a violent, such a glaring character, that a small part of the
ruling class dissociates itself from it and joins the revolutionary class, the
class which bears the future in its hands' (Manifest der Kommunistischen
Partei, Dietz, 1950, p. 19). However, with this threatening defection of
the best young intelligentsia from its class, with this particular effect
caused by the sight of ruin, sight of the future, and humanity, the mandated defensive movement against this also intensifies. The strongest one
was fascism, but more refined obscurations also existed long before it and
then around it, and are now rising up again in its second flowering.
Their common task is to distract in reactionary fashion the impetus towards
the espousal of socialism, and if despite this Marx cannot be secreted
then he must be greatly reduced in stature and in particular, incredibile
dictu, made unrevolutionary. For example as a kind of degenerate relative
of Kierkegaard or even of Pascal; in which case he is not really an
'economic rebel', but more remarkable as one of them that are quiet in
1357
the land. And, quite consistent in this screening-off of the red flag, an
existentialist called Knittermeyer testifies that one cannot 'do justice' to
Marx 'if one simply taints his achievement with what vaunts itself today
as communist ideology' . And Heidegger himself, in the lucus a non lucendo
entitled 'Letter on Humanism', in the de-nazification period at least, was
able to caress downright patronizingly an emasculated or decapitated, but
nonetheless, or precisely for this reason, all the more contemplative Marx.
But it follows from this too that the affinity consisting of temperament,
conscience and objective insight together, by means of which the intelligentsia so often overtook on the left, makes Marx unsurpassable. Because
the unadulterated Marx is an all too certain model of the path of red
intelligentsia: it is humanity actively comprehending itself.
With him it emerges early and visibly, as a particular, never soft
endeavour. Both because this impassioned man feels that he is himself a
human being and because others are human beings too and yet for the
most part are treated like dogs. Those who maltreat them thus are therefore
not included in any mercy, on the contrary: to tolerate them would be
to act inhumanly towards the humiliated and the insulted. The 'feigned
goodness', as Munzer called this in Luther, who condemned so tenderly
for the masters all violence not perpetrated by them, is a far remove from
Marx. Also far removed is the false kind of peaceableness which according
to Marx was part of, and is still part of, the jelly of an indiscriminate
pardon. For its purpose is to ensure that no decisions are taken which
could prove especially troublesome to a ruling class which was partially
defeated in 1918 and even more so in 1945. Instead, Marx cultivates not
a general and abstract but an addressed humanity, one which is directed
towards those alone who need it. And together with Munzer, Marx took
up the scourge with which Jesus chased the money-lenders out of the
temple. Therefore his humanity, precisely as concrete humanity, also
contains a decidedly embittered streak, i.e. it contains in the same act,
depending on the side to which it turns, certainly as much anger as it
does an exhortation, and seeks, finds, communicates objective salvation.
Thus even in misery Marx sees not only misery, in the style of all the
abstract Merciful and even of the abstract utopians, but the revolting element
in misery now becomes truly so, namely active force of revolt against what
is causing misery. Thus misery, once it realizes its causes, becomes the
* Cf. Psalms 35, 20: 'For they speak not peace: but they devise deceitful matters against them
that are quiet in the land.'
1358
revolutionary lever itself. And the humanity of Marx, which is turned

towards the humblest of his brothers, proves itself by comprehending the
humbleness, the resultant nullity of most of his brothers in its foundations.
in order to prise them from the foundations. The zero point of extremest
alienation which the proletariat represents now at last becomes the dialectical
point of change; Marx teaches us to find our All precisely in the Nothing
of this zero point. Alienation, dehumanization, reification, this Becoming..
Commodity of all people and things, which capitalism has to an increasing
extent brought with it: this in Marx is the old enemy which in capitalism,
as capitalism, finally triumphed as never before. Precisely humanity itself
is the born enemy of dehumanization, indeed because Marxism in general
is absolutely nothing but the struggle against the dehumanization which
culminates in capitalism until it is completely cancelled out, it follows e
contrario that genuine Marxism in its impetus, its class struggle and its
goal-content is, can be, will be nothing but the promotion of humanity.
And in particular, all the cloudings and deviations along the way can only
be really criticized, indeed removed, within Marxism; for it alone is the
heir of the humaneness which was intended in the earlier, revolutionary
bourgeoisie. And Marxism alone, with its realization that class society,
particularly capitalist class society, causes every form of self-alienation, has
advanced to the eliminable root of that society. Even to the extent that
as the eliminating power of the proletariat grows stronger, Marxist
humanity can describe ever increasing circles: definitely beyond the radically
exploited, definitely towards allwho suffer common deprivation under capitalism.
The arch-humanistic element in social revolution finally removes the
covering of self-alienation from all mankind. But it does so only with 'War
to the palaces, peace to the huts', as the great democrat Georg Buchner
put it, and with the sharp philanthropy of this statement by Marx: 'The
critique of religion ends with the doctrine that man is the highest being
for man, therefore with the categorical imperative to overturn all circumstances in which man is a degraded, a subjugated, a forsaken. a contemptible
being' (Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right).
And finally it is clear that this material 'categorical imperative' is certainly
not confined, as those who seek to split Marx in half claim, to the writings
of the young Marx. And certainly nothing about this imperative has been
suppressed when Marx transfers what he earlier called 'real humanism'
into the materialist interpretation of history. As early as 1845, in the 'Eleven
Theses on Feuerbach', Thesis 6, as is well known, states: 'But the human
essenceis no Abstractum inherent in the separate individual. In its actuality
1359
it is the ensemble of social conditions.' Even earlier, in 1844, in the preface

to the 'Holy Family", the following highly materialistic assertion about
the same Humanum is made: 'Real humanism has no more dangerous
enemy in Germany than spiritualism or speculative idealism, which puts
"self-consciousness" or even "spirit" in place of the real individual human
being.' It is true that in Marx's later writings the term alienation, i.e.
the negative foil to the Humanum, does recede somewhat, but alienation
recedes only as a term, not as the matter on which the Humanum passes
judgement. The Humanum remains, precisely in the later analyses of the
proletarian working day and of all the rest of the 'ensemble of social
conditions' inflicted on the proletariat, as the standard of measurement,
the standard of judgment. In place of the many examples available, let
us cite just one particularly late and particularly striking one: 'The realm
of freedom in fact begins only where work determined by deprivation and
external expediency ceases; it therefore in the nature of things lies beyond
the sphere of actual material production' (Das Kapital, III, Dietz, p. 873).
And the 'unleashing of the wealth of human nature', blossoming out on
the soil of controlled necessity: 'real humanism' is certainly not suppressed
by this, on the contrary, precisely as real and not formal humanism, it
is first set on its feet. Humanity gains space in a democracy made truly
possible; just as the latter itself represents the first humane dwelling place.
Therefore the Humanum, precisely as a distant goal in social tendency,
is absolutely dominant here. Marxism, correctly practised, if possible
liberating itself from and unburdening itself of its wicked neighbour, has
from the beginning been humanity: in action, the realized human face.
It seeks, takes and follows the only objectively genuine path to this; only
thus is its future both inevitable and home-like.
Secularization and the power of setting things on their feet

The human must be brought out into fresh and strong air. So that it can
walk and at last break out of the merely inner mode, which has been
preached long and vainly enough. But it is sometimes said, though in more
than suspect places, that this kind of thing is not breaking out but sinking
down. What is set on its feet has then so to speak only come down from
the nag to the ass, and then to the plebeian pedestrian. Or it was even
irreverently brought down from a sacred space and 'made worldly'. When
it appears historically, this is also called secularizing, though then in a
136 0
less pejorative sense. The state, for example, transformed ecclesiastical lands,
goods and privileges into worldly ones; in 1648 in Germany, 'more
thoroughly in 1803. in France in 1789 and finally in 1906. But secularization
certainly has become pejorative when a reactionary fashion then applies
it to Marx, because he has set many things on their feet. Even this kind
of thing, despite the walking feet, is supposed to be nothing but second
hand, as the Americans say, who ought to know. Man, for example, or
even his blessed life: did this not exist before Marx, in significantly more
enhanced, more sublime form, and did not Marx defuse this? Did not
the blessed life merely become happy, indeed one with only material goods
in mind? Does not Marx, ask these bank-clerks of the idea, sell formerly
high values at heavily reduced prices, affordable by far too many, and what
is acquired looks that cheap? Such a dumper of goods, when he is selling
them off, then no longer needs to be specially taken into account there
and then, by the relieved commodity expert, peace-commodity expert so
to speak. Instead, the true lover of man and his salvation returns to the
true sources of supply and finds them where the political song never seems
to have sounded, let alone grated, at all. * Thus Marx is elegantly got rid
of, and yet with a sense of morning red, of new beginning. But then this
morning red must have glowed as far back in the past as possible, and
the new beginning lies behind holy smoke and not in the so-called barren
late age of today. Marx himself is then supposed to appear almost decadent,
at the least he becomes civilizatory in the bad sense.Just as with reactionary
intent a distinction was once made between authors and writers, with
the latter being regarded as comparatively trivial, so the secularizing Marx
is then also regarded as part of the asphalt. All this because man and several
great things related to man were here set on their feet.
This disparagement of one's own age is certainly widespread among
the bourgeoisie in other respects too. To this extent it is not only confined
to Marx, the hero whom they are so particularly fond of belittling. The
fatigue of a declining class does not believe itself capable of much more;
the most general watchword was provided here by Spengler.I Now there
is a 'late age' and nothing more, sterile 'wakefulness' instead of the
once-young 'culture-bearing soul'. This continues just as sweepingly in
C' 'Faust", Part I, 2.092.. A political song is a nasty song'.

t The distinction is between 'Dichter' and 'Schriftsteller", i.e, between high literature and
middle-brow writing.
Bloch is referring to Spengler's book "The Decline of the West' .
C
1361
Toynbee, presenting his own 'democracy and science' itself as secularized.

Even this is only 'an almost meaningless repetition of something that the
Greeks and Romans did before us, and did supremely well' (Civilization
on Trial, 1948, p. 237). However, all retractions of the characteristic, though
now historical, bourgeois value would not be fulfilling their social

mandate unless they dismantled both the liberal past and also, above.
all, the calling of our time towards the future. How consoling if
even Marxism, precisely Marxism, purely chronologically, according to
its status in the universal autumn of culture, cannot be anything of
substance, let alone containing future. And how discouraging this is
intended to be for a youth susceptible or inclining to socialism. Here Marx
is not only 'deepest nineteenth century', as the Nazis used to say, but
even if he were and expressed the twentieth century he would have only
the past in him, not the future. And yet the business of antiquarian Marxkilling is still not exhausted; for the disparagement of one's own age would
not be complete without the idolatry of the moonlit magical nights of
yore. The 'revolt. of the masses', the 'rule of the inferior', the 'din of
the mob' at the end of all culture-concerts would not look so pitiful if
even its music - in whatever it may resound - could not be passed off
as a mere derivative of better times, spiritual, idealistic, speculative ones.
Without such a tone from the past the rectification would not be complete,
the total business of secularization would not be destructive in the area
which matters for capitalism. Marx, in well-known lines from the postscript
to the second edition of 'Das Kapital', first identified the setting-on-itsfeet of the past, with regard to the Hegelian dialectic, which was standing
on its head: 'It has to be turned upside down in order to discover the
rational core in the mystical shell.' When this, together with the also
familiar Marxist genealogy in German classical philosophy, was understood
not as 'bringing over' but as it were as bringing back to safety, i.e. into
an allegedly solely classical origin, there then arose the formerly common
'improvements' on Marx by a Marburg Kant or also (significantly weaker)
by a neo..Hegelian HegeL But at least there was no irrationalizing here
yet but rather idealizing, i.e. Marxism was - without regard for its most
characteristic, proletarian-revolutionary source - whittled down to at least
still rational, though definitely non-materialistic theories. But in the late
bourgeoisie, especially the German, irrationalization now increasingly
emerged; therefore the belittling of Marx by the playing off of truly mythical
originals against alleged imitation could now go ahead. Consequently a
radical attempt at extermination of Marx through a kind of accusation
136 2
of plagiarism ousted the former Kantianization or Hegelianization of Marx.

Thus a quite unspeakable kind of source fetishism blossoms here - going
back from Marx to Joachim of Fiore or Augustine or ultimately to the
mythical expectations of salvation of primeval times. The great heretic
and future-dreamer Joachim of Fiore isjust about allowed to pass, although
he too was only a kind of Isaiah of the thirteenth century, but Marx,
because he is the critical case, is stopped and unmasked as a soi disant churchrobber. All this especially in the decrescendo of secularization, one tainted
with the foul odour of revolution. Humanity according to this view is
nothing but the Son of Man trivialized, proletarian solidarity merely the
kitsch edition of early Christian love-communism, the realm of freedom
merely the kingdom of-the children of God - at the level of godless pseudoenlightenment. These are thus the 'Adventures of Ideas', in Whitehead's
telling expression, where the ideas are no longer worth tuppence but are
supposed to earn it when they cease to be spiritual. A typical example
of this kind of thing is Lowith' s genealogical research into the mythological
grandmother; this at least with the secondary aim of portraying the grandson
as one who squanders old temple goods in both senses of the word. Here
exploitation is 'prehistory' or, in biblical terms, the 'original sin of this
aeon'. Here historical materialism as a whole is 'salvation-history in the
language of national economy' and 'communist religion a pseudo-morphosis
of judaeo-Christian messianism' (Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeschehen, 1953,
p. 47ff.). Indeed it is not surprising, in the case of a Marxism so deeply
submerged, utterly exposed as plagiarism and magically dispersed, to find
the scandalous statement here that: 'Compared with Marx, Hegel's
philosophy is realistic' (l.c., p. 54). This is the kind of thing that comes
out when the power to set things on their feet, to save the rational core,
appears exclusively as secularization. A secularization which does not cheer
the supporters and provers of spiritual princedoms in any case. Especially
after it emerges that a society without lords and servants is the thing which
has so long been sought in vain under the name of humanization. And
likewise the very same thing which was thwarted or prevented by class
society for so long, along with the stuff of hope which is still only forming.
For precisely a good substance is not weakened when it has been
corrected. Whereas the real regurgitators only have before them, in dull
and duller form, what was once better or at least newer food. And these
regurgitators include precisely those figures who criticize giants for the
fact that they must also have had parents of stature. Curious then that
they do not also criticize pilots for being epigonic because Elijah has already
travelled through the air, indeed much further. Whereas the secularizers
themselves are in fact epigonic and, so to speak, genuinely so; for they
all originate from semi-reactionary or completely reactionary Romanticism.
At that time mythology as a whole appeared to men such as Creuzer,
and especially Welcker, as the first origin of all science, as a kind of clairvoyance as it were before the mere day of the brain. Indeed it was supposed
to have been the unattained whole of a knowledge which has existed from
time immemorial, and everything later which propounds anything (such
as Plato's theory of Ideas) is a faint echo of this, therefore likewise
secularized. However, as Marx wrote to Ruge in 1843: 'It will ... become
apparent that the world has long possessed the dream of a matter, of which
it must only possess the consciousness in order to possess it in reality.
It will become apparent that it is not a question of a great thought-dash
between past and future, but of the carrying through of the thoughts of
the past.' After the manner of the secularizers, such a statement would
then itself be regarded as secularized from the Romantic original, whereas
of course it is very essence of originality. Namely a completely new position
precisely with regard to the past, or more accurately, as Marx says: with
'analysis of the mythical consciousness which is unclear to itself' in the
past, and of course not with an abstract breaking-off from the past. Therefore
a good substance is infact not weakened when it is corrected, and even more obviously
it is not secularized when, once set on itsfeet, it is realized. It is unnecessary
here to stress the completely New which Marx - with a proletarianrevolutionary mandate behind him - had to find in order to carry through
the good ideas of the past at all. The pioneeringly New in the cognition
of surplus value, in the economic-dialectical interpretation of history, in
the relation between theory and practice: - if the secularizers do not
understand this, if, given their bourgeois interest, they do not want to
understand it, if out of ignorance they cannot understand it, then this
is merely an indictment of their own restorationist mentality, certainly
not of Marxism. And this backwardness least of all says anything about
the new humanity, activity, changing of the world, the corrected forward
dreaming in always open Marxism. Here there is no ci-devant myth which
has cracked and turned cold, but a veil is parted, always intended light
comes. To remain even outside Marxist setting-on-its-feet, let us look at
morality. Has it been diminished when it no longer happens for the sake
of an otherworldly reward, or has it not on the contrary become purer?
Let us look at Christianity itself: was it defused by Thomas Munzer when
it was no longer taken quietistically, nor in the venial-otherworldly sense
of 'dining at Christ's expense'? Did it not on the contrary become more

genuine and a real outpouring of itself by being driven into activity, into
this-worldly contemporary history, revolution and that other 'incarnation
of Christ' which to the Baptists and to the Hussites before them appeared
as mystical democracy? Let us look at the history of science which in any
case originated among the Greeks as a break with myth, however often
myth, with shifting weight, was coupled with the elucidation of the idea.
Did philosophy and science become poorer or were they not rather enriched
by the Never-Seen, Never-Thought, when Socrates sought to bring them
from heaven down to earth, when Democritus' 'Ananke' certainly did
not secularize the mythical 'Moira' or goddess of fate? Or when Aristotle,
with his pair of ontological concepts, 'dynamis-entelechy", 'matter-form',
brought to the mythical woman-man hypostases, apart from the disenchanting application, something thoroughly new, responsible, tenable
'in truth'? Certainly there is a true intending in mythical or in mystical
clothing, one which, in humanity, in dialectics (which is already to
be found in Chinese myth), definitely seeks to be directed towards a
phenomenon of light in future rising; above all in messianic breakthroughflashes of myth. And the friend of genuine enlightenment in particular
will scarcely deny to such premonitions his deep and also gratefully learning
astonishment. But something which corrects, augments, illuminates the
world from within itself, always rises up only at the scientifically achieved
position of consciousness, one of course which is still inhabited. It can
no longer rise up and be understood in a society where, as Eduard Spranger
argued, only two philosophies exist: one of despair, which abandons
everything, and one of the cobweb, which seeks to make medieval-scholastic
pearls of wisdom long since left behind us into the last clerical word. Only
creative Marxism is our age, captured in the form of ideas, an age which
creates, inherits and realizes at the same time. Where humanity no longer
stops at the heart or at ideal encouragements (which do not cost a penny).
Where the earth can truly be on the point of towering through the world,
without this remaining a mythical image to which the 'feigned goodness'
of verbal myth-rumination of today assimilates itself. How different the
realization of that which is recognized as right looks, its implementation
in Marxistically comprehended tendency, according to real possibility and
its perspective. This practice certainly is least of all a secularization of the
heights when it removes every Above in which man does not occur. Unless
secularization is understood in an itselfnew, only now Marxist sense, corresponding

to theory-practice. Then, with positive irony, even a saving of this pejorative
word used so spitefully takes place, in a way which the smatterers among
its despisers expected least of all. Where all great thinkers before Marx
were essentially satisfied merely with a becoming-philosophical of the world,
there now really begins in the horizon of Marxist humanity, suo modo,
a process of making philosophy worldly. So that it is completely set on
its feet and thus proves itself to he as qualified for, as it is skilled in, the
rebuilding of the planet earth. But precisely without any reduction of the
truly great thoughts of the past, on the contrary full of thoughts and
therefore not poor in deeds. 'Or does the deed come, as the sun comes
from the clouds,/From thoughts? Will the books soon live?' -- is the
Marxian question in Holderlin's poem 'To the Germans'. That which
emerges so purely and decisively as task least of all causes comprehended
hope to be wrecked.
Forward dream, sobriety, enthusiasm and their unity

No dreaming may stand still, this does no good. But if it becomes forward
dreaming, then its matter looks consuming in a quite different way. Even
the weary, weakening quality that can be characteristic of mere longing
then disappears; on the contrary, longing now shows what it can really
do. Men have always been expected to cut their coat according to their
cloth, they learnt to do so, but their wishes and dreams did not comply.
Here almost all men are future, rise above the life that has been granted
them. Insofar as they are discontented, they consider themselves worthy
of a better life, even if this life is pictured flatly and egoistically, they perceive
the inappropriate as a barrier and not merely as habit, To this extent even
the most private and unknowing wishful thinking is to be preferred to
unconscious walking in Indian file; because it can be informed. It is capable
of revolutionary consciousness, it can climb into the carriage of history
without having to leave behind what is good in dreaming. Quite the
contrary, the carriage is not as narrow as barren, meagre or ignorant times
choose to imagine or find appropriate for themselves. Social progress
certainly demands, roughly if need be, that prejudices, false consciousness
and superstition are thrown out and remain behind, but for this very reason
it never demands that forward dreams should remain behind. The objectively Possible, to which the dream must hold if it is to be worth anything,
holds the dream too, in pre-ordering fashion. The objectively mediated
and for this very reason non-renouncing waking dream of perfect life thus
1366
overcomes its proneness to being deceived like dreamlessness itself. The

latter, allied with holding-to-self or with a realism which seems to be such
only when it is resigned, is precisely the predominant state of people who
think much but recognize little in a society without perspective (together
with wealth of inaccuracy). They all have an aversion to forwards and
to the penetrating glance forwards, though in varying degrees and with
varying streams of timidity. Half Greek humility and half positivist caution
are taxed in order to make of the fact that we cannot see around the corner
a so to speak anti-Marxist metaphor - all in order to remain in the same
state of interested dreamlessness. Although here even the simple fact of
the truth that we cannot see around the corner becomes shallow as soon
as a mirror is used, and above all: it certainly is possible to - hear around
the corner, it is possible to overhear where the tendency may turn after
the next bend in the road, this dialectical turning can be actively promoted,
and precisely the German word for reason has an acoustic sense of meaning,
that is to say it is derived from the word for hearing. * But dreamlessness
as fate inhibits even further, because the corner, or rather its unpleasantly
pre-effective unbourgeois Beyond, appears almost as eschatological, and
accordingly Greek humility defends itself against Christian presumption.
Or rather not against the latter as the voice of Patmos but only against
eschatology, the eschatology as which - Marxism is again presented here.
Just as if Marxism were a world beyond, full of crazy rapture, and not
very intensely this world itself, in piercing analysis of its impulses, in controlling anticipation of its possible good fruits. Yet it is precisely this intense
element, in view of its disturbing diagnosis and prediction, which may
not only appear penetrating but intrusive; precisely when wealth of
inaccuracy and another wealth, of obviously macabre external brilliance,
conceals the emptiness of its own evening, the fullness - however harshly
rising - of the next morning. Then forward dreamlessness is a protection
which seems philosophical as it were but is in reality scarcely philosophical
at all; it is not on the watch for the things that are to come. Thus there
is in this voluntary-involuntary scepticism fear instead of hope, instead
of the grasping of the future as the greater dimension of the present, as
Leibniz says, there is an anti-finale: even as far as parting, if not failure,
with averted gaze. Fear in particular, says Sartre, is a state which cancels
out the person; accordingly the animatingly opposite is true, subjectively
and especially objectively, of hope. And even if in the building of mere
* The German words in question here are 'Vernunft' and 'Vernehrnen',
castles in the air the total expenditure one way or the other scarcely
matters, from which misdirected and ultimately fraudulently used wishful
dreams then result, hope with plan and with connection to the due possible
is still the most powerful and best thing there is. And even if hope merely
rises above the horizon, whereas only knowledge of the Real shifts it in
solid fashion by means of practice, it is still hope alone which allows us
to gain the inspiring and consoling understanding of the world to which'
it leads, both as the most solid, the most tendency-based and concrete
understanding. Undoubtedly the consolation of this understanding of the
world must be strenuously formed as well. It would have been easier to
build Rome in a day than Athens, and what a difficult path, often
demanding with every step, stretches ahead until the topping-out ceremony
of the regnum humanum. 'Socialist realism must, however, have a perspective', as even Lukacs says of the promoted path-tendency, 'otherwise it
cannot be socialist.' Reason cannot blossom without hope, hope cannot
speak without reason, both in Marxist unity - no other science has any
future, no other future any science.
Walking upright, this distinguishes men from animals, and it cannot
yet be done. It exists only as a wish, the wish to live without exploitation
and masters. Here in particular, daydream, as lasting as it was necessary,
hovered above the previous Becomeness, unsuccessful Becomeness, went
on ahead of it. And various seekers of how to walk upright also went
on ahead of it, in the admonitory sense which Ludwig Borne, in 'Fragments
and Aphorisms', rightly expressed as follows: 'Before an age sets
out and moves on, it always sends on ahead capable and trustworthy
people to stake out its new camp. If these messengers were allowed
to go their way, were followed and observed, .we would soon find out
where the age is aiming. But we do not do this, we call these precursors
trouble-makers, misleaders and fanatics and hold them back with force.
But the age moves on with its entire train, and because it finds nothing
ordered and arranged it settles down wherever it will and takes and
destroys more than it needs and requires.' This has certainly changed
since Marx, or rather in those countries where Marxism took power
- here quarters are arranged for the future. And even the waking
dream of the regnum humanum is here no longer in the air or in the
sky or merely in works of art such that the paths there are taken
only as escape routes and the resignation walks along them for
which the beautiful blossoms only in song. In place of the Walpurgis
Night, 'where to our astonishment it seems/Mammon in the mountain
1368
gleams'," another kind of gold is certainly now given the opportunity

to be deposited from the previous utopia-ideology mixture. But the
anticipatory of course must blossom, it still has its function, especially
when this takes place in sobriety instead of in effusiveness and clouds.
Likewise enthusiasm assists sobriety, so that it does not abstractly-immediately
foreshorten the perspective instead of keeping it on the globe of concrete
possibility. Enthusiasm is imagination in action, and the acid of sobriety
must here become the most precious rather than the generally cheapest
ingredient. Nothing is further from authentic, Marxistically practised
sobriety than common sense, than that not at all so sound, not at all so
human element in so-called sound human common sense, which on the
contrary may be full of petit-bourgeois prejudices; but in turn nothing
is closer to it than the bon sens, so different from common sense, which
is also found precisely in Marxistically practised enthusiasm. Common sense,
typically undialectical, decrees that people always remain people, it will,
if it spends its life in Central Africa, consider it absurd that water can
also occur in solid form, it has declared it impossible that China can ever
be a republic; bon sens on the other hand, this hallmark, mark of fullness,
of truly sound sobriety, does not rule off or rule out any perspective except
that which could lead to things which bring no blessing. And precisely
this is characteristic of Marxism, as the above-mentioned quartermaster
of the future: it removes the frozen solid antithesis between sobriety and
enthusiasm by bringing both to something New and causing both to work
together within it - for exact anticipation, concrete utopia. Sobriety is
not there simply to clip the wings of imagination, as if the Enlightenment were identical with Gottsched or even with Nicolai, and enthusiasm,
precisely as imagination in action, is not there to light fires with nothing
but the absolute, as if revolutionary Romanticism were identical with
Quixotry. Also, to set the hour hand we have to turn the minute hand,
and likewise, the Totum of a large ship on a long voyage must conversely
be illuminable in all the painstaking details of revolutionary work. Therefore
it is equally unwise and alien to Marxism to reach under reality with nothing
but sobriety, as it is to overreach it with nothing but enthusiasm; the
Real, precisely as that of tendency, is attained only by the constant oscillation
of both aspects, united in trained perspective. Thus Lenin wrote for the fourth
anniversary of the October revolution: 'Not on the basis of enthusiasm
directly, but with the support of the enthusiasm born in the great
* 'Faust', Part I, 3914-IS.
revolution, on the basis of personal interest, of personal interestedness,

of the viability principle, you should strive first to build the solid footbridges
which in a petit-bourgeois country lead via state capitalism to socialism,
in no other way will you arrive at communism, in no other way will
you lead dozens and dozens of people to communism'. But closely intertwined with this cool realism is and remains -the factual yet enraptured
realism which Lenin identifiesin his treatise on ' "Left-wing" Communism'
as commensurate with elan (and not (or example with braking) in the
real itself: 'History in general, and the history of revolutions in particular,
is always richer in content, more diverse, more many-sided, livelier,
"cleverer" than the best parties, the most class-conscious vanguards of
the most progressive classes imagine it to be. This is also understandable,
for the best vanguards give expression to the consciousness, the will, the
passion, the imagination, of tens of thousands, but the revolution, in
moments of the particular impetus and of the particular exertion of all
human capacities, is realized by the consciousness, the will, the passion,
the imagination, of dozens of millions of people'. And the model for the
cold stream for the sake of this warm stream, for the warm stream which
needs the cold stream of analysis precisely to show its separate stages. is
analogously found in Marx himself. As in this empirical prophecy (Antonio
plus Tasso, as it were, corrected all in one): 'The law can never be higher
than the economic configuration and the cultural development of society
which is conditioned by this. In a higher phase of communist society,
when the enslaving subordination of individuals to the division of labour
and thus the antithesis between physical and intellectual work has disappeared, when work has become not only a means of life but itself the
first need of life; when with the all-round development of individuals
productive forces have grown as well, and all the wellsprings of co-operative
wealth flow more fully - only then can the narrow bourgeois horizon
of law be completely surpassed, and society will be able to write on its
flags: Each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs' (Kritik
des Gothaer Programms, Berlin, 1946, p. 21). Only with such analysis (if
need be, corresponding to the hazardous straits, even an analysis ad
pessimum), only combined with such perspective is there the consoling
understanding of the world which is called Marxism and which for this
very reason is not contemplative but an instruction for action. The unsuitability of the forces of production, which have long sincebeen socialized,
to their private-capitalist form of appropriation: this fundamental contradiction in developed capitalist society can be ephemerally concealed by hectic
1370
booms between crises and by quack theories, but it remains, and only
Marxism is both the detective and the liberator, both the theoretical and
the practical solution to this most persistent of contradictions. And only
Marxism has given rise to the theory-practice of a better world, not in
order to forget the existing world, as was common in most abstract social
utopias, but in order to change it economically and dialectically. Never
without inheritance, least of all without that of the primal intention: of
the Golden Age; but Marxism, in all its analyses the coldest detective, takes
the fairy tale seriously, takes the dream of a Golden Age practically; real debit
and credit of real hope begins. The circumstances so far have not been
such that it was possible also to enter in life into the more perfect perspective, the circumstances of the more perfect itself are not such, because
it is not yet there, because in alienation so far it has been kept particularly
remote. The relation of neediness to the warming, even to the enthusiastic
elements of most of the wishful images shaped in previous Becomeness
was therefore, over and above the contemplative, resignation or, which
amounts to something similar here, religion. But if the real essence of
the substances of hope is adequately to strike into existence, gaining ground,
hand and foot, then the point of entry, equipped both with prose and symbolic
value, is classless society > usque ad finem.
Certainty, unfinished world, homeland

There came to him an image of man's whole life upon the earth. It seemed
to him that all man's life was like a tiny spurt of flame that blazed out briefly
in an illimitable and terrifying darkness, and that all man's grandeur, tragic
dignity, his heroic glory, came from the brevity and smallness of this flame.
He knew his life was little and would be extinguished, and that only darkness
was immense and everlasting. And he knew that he would die with defiance
on his lips, and that the shout of his denial would ring with the last pulsing
of his heart into the maw of all-engulfing night.
Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again
Better thus:
The wish builds up and creates the real, we alone are the gardeners of the
most mysterious tree, which must grow. The llrge to become commensurate
with self draws in soul, it is the thought-solution for the complete crystal
of renewed reality, and mind- seeking change by thinking things out of the
1371
world and thinking things into the world creatively, directed powerful as a
magnet over into our future, into the future of the world, which constantly
looks towards us and leaves good and evil equally undecided solely to feeble
choice. It revolves around us and does not know where it is going, only we
ourselves are the lever and the engine, external and revealed life falters: but
the new thought finally breaks out, into the full adventures, into the open,
unfinished, reeling world, in order, in its strength, girded with our suffering,
with our defiant premonition, With the tremendous power of our human voice,
to name God and not to rest until our innermost shadows have submitted
and the fulfilment of that hollow, fermenting night has been achieved around
which all things, men and works are built.
Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, 1918
Correct thus:
Three categories of the dialectical process are therefore central: Front, Novum,
Matter; all three presuppose the most honourable human quality for their
grasping and activation: hope. Front, this is the most advanced section of the
age, where the next age is decided. Novum, this is the real possibility of the
Not-Yet-Conscious, Not-Yet-Become, with the accent of the good Novum
(of the realm of freedom) when tendency is activated towards it. Matter, this
is not the mechanical lump but - in accordance with the implied meaning
of the Aristotelian definition of matter - both What-Is-according-to-possibility,
i.e. that which is defined in terms of conditions by what in each case is capable
of appearing historically, and also What-Is-in-possibility, i.e. the real substratum
of possibility in the dialectical process. Precisely as moved Being, matter is
Being which has not yet been delivered; it is the soil and the substance in
which our future, which is also its own future, is delivered. Problems in
abundance therefore lie before contemporary philosophy; to the West at present
they are, although overdue, not yet ready for the 'overclimb'. Looked at in
this way, ex oriente lux, this old saying both from geography and Christianity,
acquires a fresh re-functioned truth: from the eastern point of present-day
humanity comes light. German philosophy, from Hegel to Marx, first articulated
this, German philosophy must remain worthy of this obligation.
Ernst Bloch, On the present state of philosophy, 1950
Even mediated wishing does not yield, does not renounce. It never loses
sight of itself, however much it is impeded or made expensive. It does
not cling to the given, but finds it appropriate, whenever it sees the visible
which exists, not quite to - believe it. Whereas the subjective hope which
is hoped with is sure of itself and certain, even when that which is designated
by it, i.e. objective hope, which is hoped in terms of content, can be at
1372
best only probable. The subjective hope is spes, qua speratur, the objective
is spes, quae speratur; the former, hoping hope, is therefore also really
believed and has, suo modo, confidence; whereas the second, hoped hope,
if it already had complete confidence to support it, would not be hope
at all. In other words, the matter designated in hoping hope, however
inflexible, however actively inspiring to the end, the objective matter of hope
in the world itself, is definitely not yet guaranteed sure and certain of
itself; otherwise the confidence of hoping hope, instead of being brave
and, as so often, upright-paradoxical, would merely be trivial. True hope
as such, i.e hope which is mediated in terms of history and tendency, stands
least of all in an empty space from which nothing moves towards it, in
which it would therefore somewhere be possible to go adventuring. But
precisely because true hope moves in the world, via the world and works
in mediation with its objective process, it stands together with this process
in a hazardous business, that of the Front. And only if the legitimately
expectable and attainable goal, namely socialist humanization, is not
obscured by the inadequate, is not bitterly led away down false roads,
can the objectively valid laws of dialectical development and its more distant
possibility also effectively guide and be happily fructified. In itself certainly
decided as hoping hope, the outcome itself must yet be decided, in open
history, the field of objective-real decision. This is the category of danger
or of the objective unguaranteedness even of mediated, of docta spes; there
is as yet no unwavering situationlessness of a fixed result. There is none
as yet in the dark sense, such that decidability, NOVUffi, objective possibility
would be extinguished and not every lost battle could be fought out better
once again. But nor is there as yet situationlessness in the bright sense,
the brightest sense of all, which denotes existence without alienation,
unequivocally matured, naturalized value. Optimism is therefore justified
only as militant optimism, never as certain; in the latter form it seems,
in the face of the misery of the world, not merely wicked but feeble-minded.
And real, best decidedness of all stands just as little somehow or somewhere
in a hypostatized other world; as if its ens perfectissimum were an ens
realissimum, existing enthroned above. Such accomplished 'fact' of a higher
order, which not only theistic religions but also metaphysical idealisms
apply, on the contrary represents pure hypostasis. All the worse, all the
more wrongly, when all previous philosophies, insofar as they have
considered such distant regions of heaven, have dealt with their God, their
substance, their Absolutum as if these were a Fixum, a Deflnitum, indeed
a Realissimum without parallel and as if all proce~s were merely pedagogics
1373
towards this Fixum or from it. Certainly everything, and above all human
life, is a kind of transcendere, a venturing beyond the given, but this
transcendere, as concrete-utopian, also certainly does not involve any
transcendence. This itself would again be a complete, a spectral givenness,
and as surely as the conscience of concrete utopia does not cling positivistically to the Factum of immediate visibility, even more surely it does not
vaporize at mere Factum-hypostases of purely mythological invisibility.
Philosophy instead proves itself as expedition with and in broadly ramified,
unenclosed process, as courage for that unguaranteedness which puts hope
precisely on the Front. Not with unenclosedness as fate, not with mere endless
approach to the goal, as with Tantalus in sensory terms and with Kant
in moral terms. On the contrary, the unfinished world can be brought
to its end, the process pending in it can be brought to a result, the incognito
of the main matter which is really-cloaked in itself can be revealed. But
not by hasty hypostases and by fixed definitions of essence, which block
the way. The Authentic or essence is not something existing in finished
form such as water, air, fire, even the invisible cosmic idea or whatever
these real-Fixa were called when they were made absolute or hypostatized.
The Authentic or essence is that which is not yet, which in the core of things
drives towards itself, which awaits its genesis in the tendency-latency ofprocess;
it is itself only now founded, objective-real - hope. And its name ultimately
borders on 'What-Is-in-.possibility' in the Aristotelian sense and in a sense
which goes far beyond Aristotle, on what is ostensibly the most certain
thing there is: matter. For all its bearing, conditioning and becoming would
be a concept empty of meaning if that which wishes to and can come
out already existed. This Not-Yet is of course not such that, for example,
in the atom or in the sub-atomic 'differentials' of matter everything which
comes out later or will come out later already existed according to its
'disposition' in reduced form, as if encapsulated. Such a backward interpretation of the Not-Yet would suppress or fail to understand precisely
the dialectical leap into the New. Just as self-evidently, there is in the
dialectical tendency-latency, open to the Novum, of material process no
pre-ordered, i.e. likewise finally posited purpose in the style of the old
teleology, let alone a teleology mythologically guided from above. But of
course with this old teleology, which is also reminiscent of 'providence', the
genuine teleology problem itself is not discredited, nor can the genuine
category of goal, then of purpose, then of meaning be further excluded, nor
is it dogmatically settled once and for all. All the less so as precisely tendency
constantly implies relatedness to goal; as progress without such relation
1374
to goal could neither be measured nor existent in objective-real terms;

as a world without pursuable planning in and with it, without pursuable
goals, purposes, meaningfulnesses in it would by no means be a Marxist
one. Although the truth of teleology never consists of purposes already
existing in finished form, but rather of those which are only just forming
in active process, always arising anew within it and enriching themselves.
The nerve of the right historical concept is and remains the Novum, and
of the right philosophical concept the better Novum. And the utopian
tenor in so many, if not most doctrines of essential being is concealed only
because the purpose-truth of all things was represented as one that is already
absolutely in being and thus completely demonstrated. This truth as the
appropriateness of things in themselves, this exhaustive essential being of
truth, its basic essence, is then, even from this perspective, regarded as
finished in and for itself, clear, elicited, and still cloaked only for the weak
powers of comprehension of man. The rehearsals on the model which the
individual metaphysical names of essential being may represent thus become
the Exemplum itself, * the experiments around the Authentic thus becomes
sheer fixed ontology, and one of a highly contemplative kind. The contemplative character of most pre-Marxist philosophies thus consumes a highest
available existence, although the latter, with much polyphonic light, can
only be anticipated. In such ontichypostasis the method becomes the mere
consuming path, the result becomes the palace which is already complete
anyway at the end of the path, the metaphysics of the Hen kai Pan becomes
the finished inscription on the palace. Then it is not only matter which
is unknown but, even where matter is known, its most important truth:
that of being matter forwards. However, not only art but especially
philosophy now consciously has the active function of pre-appearance and
precisely of the pre-appearance of an objective-real preappearance as the
process-world, the real world of hope itself. And this remains founded solely
in matter, matter which is certainly moved in many forms and not
stereotyped; as both What-Is-according-to-possibility, conditioning through
laws, and Being-In-Possibility, revealing through substance. The perceiving
of this genesis is the organ of philosophy; the dialectically aimed,
systematically open view into tendency-shaped matter is its new form.
The tomorrow in today is alive, people are always asking about it. The
faces which turned in the utopian direction have of course been different
* Bloch is also making a linguistic connection between 'Exempel' (model) and the Exemplum
here.
1375
in every age, just like that which in each individual case they believed
they saw. Whereas the direction here is always related, indeed in its still
concealed goal it is the same; it appears as the only unchanging thing in
history. Happiness, freedom, non-alienation, Golden Age, Land of Milk
and Honey, the Eternally-Female, the trumpet signal in Fidelio and the
Christ-likeness of the Day of Resurrection which follows it: these are so
many witnesses and images of such differing value, but all are set up around
that which speaks for itself by still remaining silent. The direction towards
this materially and not only logically enlightening entity must be invariant;
this is discernible at every place where hope opens up its Absolute and
attempts to read it. There is no doubt at all, and no doubt was left about
it: an unilluminated, undirected hope can easily merely lead astray, for
the true horizon does not extend beyond the knowledge of realities, but
precisely this knowledge, when instead it is Marxist and not mechanistic,
shows reality itself as one of - the horizon and informed hope as one
commensurate with this reality. The goal as a whole is and remains still
concealed, the Absolute of the will and of hope still unfound, in the agent
of existing the light of its Whatness, of its essence, of its intended fundamental content itself has not yet dawned, and yet the nunc stans of the
driving moment, of the striving filled with its content, stands ahead, utopian
and clear. 'Terminus', says Abelard, the restless scholastic, 'est ilIa civitas,
ubi non praevenit rem desiderium nee desiderio minus est praemium', the
goal is that community where the longing does not anticipate the matter
nor where the fulfilment is less than the longing. This is Being like hope,
is the finally manifested What- and essence-content of our striving Thatfactor, a 'Quid' pro 'Quod', i.e. a What and an essence that are such
that the intention in them can be cancelled out. But precisely also the
human capacity for such an absolute concept of goal is the tremendous
aspect in an existence where the best still remains patchwork, where every
end again and again becomes a means to serve the still utterly opaque,
indeed in and for itself still unavailable fundamental goal, final goal. Marx
describes as his final concern 'the development of the wealth of human
nature'; this human wealth as well as that of nature as a whole lies solely
in the tendency-latency in which the world finds itself - vis-a-vis de tout.
This glance therefore confirms that man everywhere is still living in
prehistory, indeed all and everything still stands before the creation of the
world, of a right world. True genesis is not at the beginning but at the end,
and it starts to begin only when society and existence become radical, i.e.
grasp their roots. But the root of history is the working, creating human
being who reshapes and overhauls the given facts. Once he has grasped
himself and established what is his. without expropriation and alienation,
in real democracy, there arises in the world something which shines into
the childhood of all and in which no one has yet been: homeland.
GLOSSARY OF FOREIGN TERMS
Greek (transliterated)
aporia: doubt, perplexity
aristoi: aristocratic quality (lit: best)
diairesis: division
dynamei on: What-Is-in-possibility
dynaton: capable
elphis: hope
eschaton: the last things
eudaemonia: happiness
hen kai pan: one and all
kairos: occasion, opportunity, the right time
logos spermatikos: engendering word
melos: melody
oecumene: the whole world, the merging of all nations
peripeteia: sudden change
polis: city state
proskunesis: worship
zoon politikon: political animal
Latin
ab origine: from its origin
ab ovo: from the beginning
absconditum: the thing that has vanished
actus purus: the pure act
ad calendas apocalypticas: until the time of the apocalypse
ad libitum: as far as desirable
ad oculos: to the eye
ad pessimum: in a pessimistic direction
ad valorem: according to its strength
alter deus: the other god
1377
alteritas: multiplicity
alterius juris: according to another law
amor Dei: love of God
amor dei intellectualis: intellectual love of God
arnor fati: love of fate
analogiae entis: the correspondences between things
a nihilo contracta: assimilated from nothing
anima candidissima: most candid soul
anima mea: my soul
ante rem: before the event
apex mentis: the apex of the mind
apex terrae: the apex of the earth
a posse ad esse: from potential to being
appetitus socialis: social appetite
arpeggio ante lucem: the arpeggio before the light
ars amandi: the art of love
ars combinatoria: the art of combination
ars demonstrandi: the art of demonstration
ars inveniendi: the art of invention
ars magna: the great art
artes liberales: liberal arts (in the Middle Ages)
a se esse: being to itself
auditio beatifica: blessed hearing
augmentatio: augmentation
aut Caesar aut Christus: either Caesar or Christ
bona valetudo: good health
caccatum: stained, soiled
cantus firmus: sure song
caput mortuum: dead head
caritas: charity, love
carpe aeternitatem in momenta: seize eternity in the moment
carpe diem: seize the day (live for the day)
carpe diem nostrum in mundo nostro: seize our day in our world
causa aequat effectum: cause equals effect
causa finalis: final cause
causa sui: for its own sake
chorus martyrum: chorus of martyrs
1379
circenses: circuses
civitas Christi: the city of Christ
civitas Dei: the city of God
civitas terrena: the earthly, sinful city
cogitatio: thinking
cogito ergo sum: I think therefore I am
collegia fabrorum: college of masons
comes: comrade
communes notiones: common ideas
communis opinio: common opinion
compunctio cordis: the contrition of the heart
conditio sine qua non: an indispensable condition
contemplatio: contemplation,
contradictio in adjecto: opposite to what is next to it
Corpus Christi: the body of Christ
corpus permixtum: adulterated body
corpus verum: true body
corrumpere: to corrupt, corruption
corruptio, defectus: corruption, disintegration
corruptio optimi pessima: the worst things are a corruption of the best
credo quia absurdum: I believe because it is absurd (the leap of faith)
crucifixus sub Pontio Pilato: crucified under Pontius Pilate
cum grano salis: with a grain of salt
cum ira et studio: with passion and partiality
cur deus homo: why does god become man
dator formarum: the giver of forms
definitio: definition
de jure: according to the law
de nobis res agitur: the matter in question is ourselves
de profundis: of the depths
descendendo ad opera: by getting down to business
destillatio, solutio, purefactio, nigredo, albedo, fermentatio, projectio
medicinae: the distillation, solution, purefaction, blackening, whitening,
fermentation and projection of medicine
destinatio: destination
deus absconditus: vanished god
deus optimus maximus: greatest and best god
deus spes: god is our hope
13 80
dies irae: day of wrath

disjecta membra: scattered limbs
divinae bonitatis similitudo: the likeness to divine goodness
divina proportio: divine proportion
docta spes: educated hope
doctor angelicus: the angelic doctor
doctor ecstaticus: the ecstatic doctor
doctor subtilis: the subtle doctor
donum inventionis: the gift of invention
dux: commander, leader
ecce homo: behold the man
ecclesia perennis: eternal church
ecclesia philadelphia: church of brotherhood
ecclesia triumphans: the church triumphant
eductio formarum ex materia: extraction of form from matter
egrediens de loco voluptatis: emerging from the place of pleasure
ens perfectissimum: perfect being
epitheton ornans: decorative epithet
en tis sicut deus: you will be like God
et in Arcadia ego: and I too am/have been/will be in Arcadia
ex cathedra: edict from the authority (bishop)
ex contrario: from the opposite
exempla docent: examples teach
ex encyclica: edict from an encyclical (pope)
exercitia spiritualia: spiritual exercises
ex ingenio: from character, personality
existere: to exist, existence
exitus letalis: departure through death
ex machina: by divine intervention
ex oriente lux: light from the East
expressivo: expressively
exprimatio: expression
ex una voce plures faciens: making many things from one voice
ex uno judicio plures faciens: making many things from one judgement
facies hippocratica: shrunken and deathly appearance
factum brutum: bare fact
facultas agendi: individual justification (lit. the ability to do something)
1381
fiat lux: let there be light

fides: faith
fieri: to be done
figura animae: form of the soul
figura Dei: form of God
figura virtutum: form of the virtues
finis ad quem omnia: end to which all things move
florealia: flower festivals
fortuna vertit: fortune changes
fruitio: fruition
generatio aequivoca: of dubious generation
hie et nunc: here and now
hie Rhodus, hie salta: here is Rhodes, here rise
homo absconditus: vanished man
homo contemplativus: contemplative man
homo faber: man as maker
homo homini homo: man being man to man
homo homini lupus: man being a wolf to man
homo religiosus: religious man
horror pulchri: fear of the beautiful
horror vacui: fear of the void
idola theatri: idols of the theatre
imitatio deorum: the imitation of the gods
imitatio mundi: the imitation of the world
impietas: impiety, disrespect
impossibilium nulla obligatio: under no obligation because impossible
in aeternum damnatus: damned for eternity
incipit vita nova: the new life begins
in concreto: in concrete terms
in corpore: in substance, as a whole
incredibile dictu: incredible to relate
in fluxu nascendi: in the process of birth
in gloria et jubilo: in glory and jubilation
in litteris: literally
in nuce: in a nutshell
in realitate: in reality
in spe: to be hoped for

in statu nascendi: in the state of birth
in tellectus : in tellect
in termissio legis: legal loophole
intimum, summum, apex mentis: inmost, uppermost, peak of the mind
in toto: as a whole
in tyrannos: against tyranny
ipso facto: in the fact itself
justificatio: justification
justitia: justice
laboratorium Dei: laboratory of God
laudabiliter se subjecit: he subjects himself in a laudable manner
lex continui: law of continuity
lex divina: divine law
libertas amicorum: the freedom of friendship
libertatem perfectam: perfect freedom
liquidas sorores: liquid sisters
locus minoris resistentiae: place of least resistance
lucus a non lucendo: light that does not light
lux aeterna: eternal light
lux nova: new light
lux pura: pure light
lyra Apollinis vel Solis: the lyre of Apollo or the Sun (god)
magia naturalis: natural magic
magisterium magnum: the great teaching
magnum opus et strenuum: the great and strenuous work
mappa mundi: map of the world
materia prima: prime matter
mathesis: (from Greek) science, mathematics, astrology
mediator Dei et hominum: the mediator between God and man
medicina mentis: medicine for the mind
meditatio: meditation
memento mori: a remembrance of death
mens bona: good mind
mens sana in corpore sana: a healthy mind in a healthy -body
misera contribuens plebs: the people pooling their miseries
moralitas musicae: morality of music

more geometrico: in geometric fashion
mars aeterna: eternal death
mundus situalis: world fixed as it is now
musica coelestis: heavenly music
musicae personae: musical characters
musica humana: human music
musica instrumentalis: instrumental music
musica mathematica: mathematical music
musica mundana: wordly music
mutatio specierum: the mutation of the species
mutatis mutandis: with suitable or necessary alteration
mysterium tremendum: tremendous mystery
natura facit saltus: nature makes leaps
natura naturans: nature naturing
natura naturata: nature natured
natura sive deus: whether nature or god
nervus rerum: the nerve, pulse of things
neque in plano via sita est: nor is the path on the flat
nobilissimi loci totius terrae: the most noble place on the whole earth
nolens volens: willing or unwilling
non liquet: it will not dissolve
non omnis confundar: let me not be utterly confounded/destroyed
non plus ultra: that which cannot be bettered
non possumus non peccare: it is impossible for us not to sin
norma agendi: legal prescription
nova instauratio scientiarum: new instauration of the sciences
numen: heavenly power t divinity
numerus clausus: limitation of numbers
numinosum: numinous
nunc aeternum: the eternal now
nunc stans: the stationary moment, the captured now
omnia sint communia: let everything be in common
omnia sub luna caduca: everything under the moon is mortal, fallible
orbis: globe
ordines angelorum: the orders of the angels
ordo cognitionis: order of cognition
ordo sempiternus rerum: the eternal order of things

origo: root, origin
paradisi voluptatis: paradises of pleasure
pars mentis aeterna est intellectus: the eternal part of the mind is the
intellect
pars pro toto: part for the whole
pater familias: father of the family
pater noster: our father
pavor nocturnus: night-fear
pax Americana: American peace
pax Britannica: British peace
pax capitalistica: capitalist peace
pax Romana: Roman peace
per aspera ad astra: through difficulties to the stars
per definitionem: by definition
per definitionem calculi: by the definition of calculations
per se exitus: exit through oneself, suicide
perfectio motus: perfect motion, the completion of motion
perturbatio animi: disturbance of the mind
phantasma bene fundatum: well-established fantasy
phantasma utopicissime fundatum: a fantasy established in a most utopian
manner
pharos: lighthouse (at Alexandria)
pictum: painted
plus ultra: that which is capable of being bettered
poesis a se: creation through itself
poetica tempestas: poetic storm
post festum: after the celebration
potentia-possibilitas: potentiality-possibili ty
praeludium vitae aeternae: prelude to the eternal life
pretium justum: just price
primae noctis: feudal right of the first night (droit de seigneur)
primae possibilitates: first possibilities
primum agens materiale: first agent of matter
primus inter pares: first among equals
profectus: progression
qua: as
quale: essence
quendam vultum et gestum: a certain mien and gesture
quidditas: whatness, What-Essence (Bloch)
qui es in coelis: that art in heaven
quietas in fuga: quietness in the fugue (lit: quietness in flight)
quodditas: thatness, That-ground (Bloch)
quos ego: those whom I affect
ratio: reason
rebus sic stantibus: as things now stand
rebus sic imperfectibus: things thus being imperfected
rebus sic imperfectis et fluentibus: in the imperfect and fluid state of things
receptacula salutis: refuges of salvation
recta ratio: the right reasoning
regnum Christi: the reign of Christ
regnum homini: the reign for man
regressio: regressive material
res finita: finite thing
restituto in integrum: putting back together again, making whole again
Roma quadrato: the Roman square
sacerdos: priest
sacramentum plenum: full sacrament
sal philosophicum: philosophers' salt
saltare fabulam: to perform a play
sancta: the sacred
satis est: that is enough
seculis: ages
sed: but
sensus: physical sense
signatura rerum: the signature of things
signifer sanctus Michael: Michael the holy standard..bearer
si vis bellum para pacem: if you want war prepare for peace
socialis vita sanctorum: the social existence of the saints
societas amicorum: society of friends
sol invinctus: sun unchained
solus ipse: the individual himself
spes: hope
spes quae speratur: hope which is hoped
1386
status quo ante: the status quo before

status recipientis pro meritis: state of receiving on merit
status termini: end state
status viae: transitional state
status viatoris: transitional state
studio: study
sub love frigido: under an icy Jove
sub specie: under the eye of
sub specieaeternitatis: in the long eye of history (lit. in the sight of eternity)
sub specie aeternitatis vel substantiae humanae: in the long eye of history
or human substance
sub specie toti: under the eye of all
sui generis: of its own or peculiar kind
sui juris: according to its own law
summum bonum: the highest good
suo modo: after its fashion
suprema spes: supreme hope
sursum corda: lift up your hearts
suum cuique: to each his own
suum esse conservare: to preserve one's being
terminus a quo: starting-point
terminus ad quem: finishing-point
terra australis: southern country, Australia
terra inhabilitabilis: uninhabitable country
terra utopica: utopian country
tertium non datur: there is no third possibility
theatrum mechanicum: mechanical theatre
totaliter: in a total way
toto coelo: everywhere, across the whole sky
tranquillitas animi: tranquillity of the soul
transcendere: to transcend, transcendence
tua res agitur: it is your concern
tuba mirum spargens somnum: the trumpet scattering its amazing sound
ubi bene, ibi patria: where good, there the fatherland
ubi lux, ibi patria: where light, there the fatherland
ultima legislatio: ultimate legislation
unio mystica: mystical union
unitas: oneness
universitas litterarium: university of studies
unum necessarium: the one thing necessary
unum verum bonus: the one true good
unus Christianus nullus Christianus: the solitary Christian is no Christian
urbs: city
usque ad finem: right to the end
ut aliquid fieri videatur: so that something may be seen to be done
vade-mecum: a book that can be carried for reference along the way
ver sacrum: sacred spring (season)
verum bonum: true good
via regia: royal road
virgo optime perfecta: the virgin of sheer perfection
virgo virginum: virgin of virgins
virtus: virtue
virtus-ingenium: virtuous talent
vis dormitiva: dormant strength
visio: perception, vision
visio beatifica Dei: beatific vision of God
vita activa: the active life
vita brevis, ars longa: life is short, art is long
vita contemplativa: the contemplative life
French
acte accessoire: act of accessory
apres nous le deluge: after us the flood
au dessus de la melee: above the rabble
au fond: basically
cloches du monastere: monastery bells
concert a la vapeur: steam concert
corriger la fortune: to correct fortune
donneurs d'avis: givers of advice
duree: duration
echappe de vue: vanished from sight
egalisation des classes: the equalization of classes
epater le bourgeois: to shock the bourgeoisie
etat d'ame: state of mind

etre humain: human being
femme introuvable: the woman who cannot be found
ferocite et verve: ferocity and spirit
forces propres: one's own powers
grace a l'homme: thanks to man
inconscient superieur: superior unconscious
inquietude poussante: pressing anxiety
jardin de plaisance: garden of pleasure
juste milieu: proper medium
laissez faire, laissez alIer: let things be done, let things go
la nuit et Ie moment: the night and the moment
I' art pour l' art: art for art's sake
I' art pour I' espoir: art for hope's sake
la ville radieuse: the radiant city
le neant: nothingness
l'homme machine: machine man
liberte: freedom
malgre lui: in spite of this
mysteres de l'infini: mysteries of the infinite
naturel dictionnaire de la nature: the natural dictionary of nature
papillons: butterflies
paradis artificiel: artificial paradise
pensees fugitives: fleeting thoughts
petites perceptions insensibles: perceptions too small to be discernible
petit proprietaire rural ou industriel: the little rural or industrial proprietor
portiere: door-curtain
possibilites etemelles: eternal possibilities
prevoir: to foresee, a foreseeing
propriete: property
resistance a l' oppression: resistance to oppression
sans la barbe limoneuse: without the muddy beard
souvenirs de Varsovie: souvenirs of Warsaw
surete: security
verites de fait: factual truths
verites etemelles: eternal truths
violence creatrice: creative violence
Italian
adagio: quietly, softly
amoretti: little Cupids
atto puro: pure act
dolce far niente: sweet idleness
dopo lavoro: after work
espressivo: expressively
grave: with gravity, solemn
lento: slowly
nnaestoso: stately
nnartellato: hamnnered
misterioso: mysteriously
mondo senza gente: uninhabited world
oprare: to work
pastoso: soft, sticky (from 'pasta' dough)
piano: softly
presto: fast
prevenire: anticipate, an anticipation of what is coming
sostenuto: sustained
sostenuto assai: sustained effort
trepassar del segno: venture beyond the linnits
vedere: to see
veduta: a view (with a full perspective)
virtu ordinata: regulated virtue
vivace allegro: at a lively pace
Spanish
buen retiro: happy retreat
hidalgo: Spanish knight, junker
passacaglia: an early dance tune (of Spanish origin)
NAME AND TITLE INDEX
Amenophis IV (Pharaoh) 1191, 1216

Anaxagoras 874-5
Anaximander 876-9
On the Nature of Things 876-9
Anaximenes 848, 878, US2
Andersen, Hans Christian 802
The Flying Suitcase 356
The Lucky Galoshes 356, 382
The Tinderbox 1000
Andreae, Johann Valentin 528, 634-9,
644
Chymische Hochzeit (Chemical
Wedding) 634-8
Confessio Fratemitatis 634, 635
Fama Fraternitatis 634, 635
Rei publicae Christianopolis
descriptio 638
Angelus Silesius
Cherubinischer Wandersmann (The
Cherubinical Wanderer) 643, 918
Annikeris 483
Anselm of Canterbury 234, 847
Antigonos Gonatas 493
Antisthenes 482
Antonius Diogenes 437
Antonius Marcus (Mark Anthony) 328
Apollonius of Tyana 679, uSB
Aquinas, Thomas 2.18, 402, 761, 818,
820, 825, 832., 1300, 1320, 1329,
1330, 1332
Quaestiones disputatae
quodlibetales 954
Summa contra gentiles 1307, 132.0
Arabian Nights 356, 362, 385, 628,
706-7, 708, 753, 758, 1106
Aladdin 356-7, 628, 707, 1314
Kalaf and Turandot 318, 319, 320
Sinbad the Sailor 437, 438, 753, 764
The Tale of Janshah 706
Abelard 771, 1075, 1375

Abeles, Frida xxii
Abert
Die Musikanschauung des Mittelalters
(The Middle Ages' view of
Music) 1076, 1077
Abulfeda 775
Addison 389, 932, 1317, 1318
Adler, Alfred 57-8, 60, 64, 66, 166-7
Der nervose Charakter (The Nervous
Character) 57
Adorno, Theodor xxii, xxiv
Aeschylus 430, 1212-14
Prometheus Trilogy 429; Prometheus
Bound 428, 882, 1212-14
Agricola
De re metallica 648
Ailly, Pierre d'
Imago mundi 760
Akiba, Rabbi 1263
Alain de Lille 848
Alberti 1348
Albertus Magnus 761, 778
Alexander III (Pope) 766
Alexander of Aphrodisias 207, 850
Alexander the Great 90, 474, 488, 489,
492, 647, 738, 760, 761, 762, 7 66,
767, 77 8, 1217
Alfarabi 1077
Alfieri 107, 544, 932, 1317, 1319
Ali (Caliph) 1276, 1277
Altdorfer
Bath of Susanna 709
Althus
Politica 535
Amadis of Gaul (Romance of) 318, 367,
1036, 1037, 1039
Amalrich of Bena 207, 236
Ambrosius 1076
1390
Aratus 496
Ariosto 882.
Aristides 933
Aristippus 483
Aristophanes 435-6, 591, 882
The Ecclesiazusae 435, 591
The Birds 436, 484
Aristotle xxvii, 7, 168-9, 191, 194,
206-7, 208, 216, 223, 228, 229,
236, 237, 242, 243, 279, 283, 429,
491, 493, 64 2 , 687, 689, 757, 767,
778, 843, 847, 850, 857, 860, 865,
878, 879, 90S, 962-3, 964, 985,
9 86, 1351, 1364, 1373
Logic 1075; Prior Analytics 228
Metaphysics 235, 879
Nicomachean Ethics 962-3
Physics 878; Meteorology 761
Poetics 207
Politics 738, 962
Amim, Achim von
Die Kronenwachter (The Guardians of
the Crown) 708
Arnim, Bettina von 28
Arnold, Gottfried
U nparteiische Kirchen- und
Ketzerhistorie (Impartial History of
the Church and its Heretics) 637
Arnold of Brescia 771
Arts, Hendrik 709
Artshibashev
Ssanin 1172
Asafyev
The Flame of Paris 406
Asaro, Cosmas Damian 70S
Aspasia 328
Augustine 160, 161, 203, 20 4, 269, 479,
493, 499, 501, j02, 503-9, 510, jIl,
512., 7 25, 732, 787, 832-3, 854-7,
860, 862, 1019, 1064, 1076, 1087,
1319, 1362
De civitate Dei (The City of God)
478, 503-9, 854-7, 1120-1, 1248,
1344
De musica 8]]
Confessions 71
In Joh. ev. tractatus 857
Letter to Monica 1322
Augustus, Caesar 383, 739, 9S9, 1257
1391
Aurelian of Reome 1076

Aurelius, Marcus 243, 493, 495
Meditations 1106
Averroes 207, 2]6, 674, 771, 850, 852 ,
I13S
Avesta (see Zendavesta)
A vicebron 207, 8so
Avicenna 207, 236, 850, 852, I13S
Baader, Franz von 787-9, 1332
Uber die Begriindung der Ethik durch
die Physik (On the Foundation of
Ethics through Physics) 625, 787-9
Babcock
Legendary Islands of the Atlantic 763
Babeuf 575-6
Bach, J. S. 2.56, 533, 1063- 7, 1069, 1079,
r080, 108r, 1084, 1088, r095, 1096
Brandenburg Concertos 1067
Cantata No. 39 1082
Cantata No. 48 1066
Cantata No. 63 1063, 1098
Christmas Oratorio 1065, 1308
Mass in B minor IS8, 1066, 1068, 1275
St John Passion 1352
St Matthew Passion 12.66, 12.86
Bachofen 81, 135, 161, 327, 594-5,
III4~15, IIS3, IIS6
Das Mutterrecht (Matriliny) S9S
Die Unsterblichkeitslehre der
orphischen Theologie (The doctrine
of immortality in Orphic
theology) IllS
Bacon, Francis xxxi, 139, 2.11, 269, SI8,
524, 649-52., 653, 654-7, 666, 667,
671, 812., 8S9, 102.8, 132.8
De sapientia veterum 12.15
New Atlantis xxvii, 14, 144, 4S7,
477, 654-7
Novum Organum II8-19, 649, 6so,
6SI, 653, 655, 656, 657, 752
Sylva Sylvarum 649, 6S4n
The Advancement of Learning 650-1,
6S6-7
Bacon, Roger 647
Epistola de secretis operibus artis
Baedeker 376
Baumer, Gertrud 590, 59I
Bakunin, Michael 571, S72-4, 94S
647
1392
Balfour S99n, 60S-6

Ball, John 471
Ballantyne 3S3
Balzac 384
Contes drOlatiques (Amusing tales) 81
Peau de chagrin (The wild ass's skin) 383
Bar Kochba 1263
Barth, Karl 1194, 1290
Der Romerbrief (The Epistle to the
Romans) 1194
Batteux 404
Baudelaire 434
Bauer, Bruno 2SI, 2S2, 270, 271, 272
Baumgarten 212
Bayle 8S9
Bazard S64
Beaconsfield, Lord (Disraeli) 60S
Beaumarchais 540
Beauvais, Vincent de 7S3
Speculum naturale, doctrinale,
historiale 760
Bebel
Die Frau und der Sozialismus (Woman
and Socialism) S90-1
Becher, Joachim 647, 649
Narrische Weisheit und weise Narrheit
(Foolish Wisdom and Wise
Folly) 647
Becquerel 663
Beer-Hofmann
Jakobs Traum Oacob's Dream) 609
Beethoven 158, 220, 459, 833, 834, 910,
984, 999, 1057, 1063, 1069, 1079,
1080, 108S, 1086, 1087, 1094,
IIOI-3, 1162
A minor quartet 1096
Fidelio 163, 183, 368, 425, 831, 833,
910, 992, 1067, 1068, 1082, 1088,
1099-1100, 1101-1103, 1375
Hammerklaviersonata 1096
Rage over a Lost Penny 1082
The Third Symphony (Eroica) 992,
1088, 1092, 1093, 109S, 1098
The Sixth Symphony (Pastoral) 917,
1068, 1073, 1082.
The Seventh Symphony 163
The Ninth Symphony 833, 911, 1096;
Hymn to Joy (Schiller text CAn die

Freude') IS8, 1293
Behaim, Martin 764

Bekker, Balthasar
Die verzauberte Welt (The Enchanted
World) 630
Bellamy 475, 619
Looking Backward 612.-13
Benjamin, Walter xxi, xxii, xxiv, 880
Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels
(Origin of the German Tragic
Play) 384, 1166, 1168, 13So
Benn, Gottfried 61
Berg
W ozzeck 109S
Bergbohm
Jurisprudenz und Rechtsphilosophie
(Jurisprudence and the Philosophy
of Right) 547
Bergson, Henri 59, 140, 201-2., 2.91, 292.,
682., 683, 945, 1202., 1290
Introduction a la Metaphysique
(Introduction to Metaphysics) 140
L'Evolution Creatrice (Creative
Evolution) 201
La Pensee et le Mouvant (Thought and
the Moving) 202.
Berkeley 697
Berlioz, Hector 180, 181, IOS7, 1068,
1099
Requiem 1100
Symphonic fantastique 1060-2.
Bernard of Clairvaux 2.13, 769, 770
On Contemplation 771
Bernoulli 311ft
Bernstein 581
Berossos 12.18
Bertholet 1235
Bertram 957
Berzelius 686
Bessler (see Orfyreus)
Bethmann-Hollweg 33"
Bettelheim, Bruno 62n
Bhagavad..Gita 667, II36, 1138
Bias 481, 839
Bible 7, 201, 2.21, 330n, 502., 509, SIO,
SIS, 518, S78, 609, 610, 642., 718,
730-1, 759- 6 0 , 78S, 787, 917, 9 6 3,
1150, 1166, 1194-S, II98, 12.31, 1232 ,
1237, 12S6-74, 12.76, 1278, 1279 ,
12.82.-3, 1291, 1301, 1304-10, 1349
Characters
Aaron 1304
Abel s06, 1268
Abraham 50S, 732, 1131, 1230, 1276
Adam 478, 50S, S07, 636, 637, 95 2,
1002, II27, 112.8, 1238, 1247, 1272,
1277, 1289 , 1294
Daniel 1126, 1128, 1132, 1146, 1238
David 401, 50S, 1076, 1238, 1243,
1256, 1263
Deutero-Isaiah 498, 917
Elijah 497, 605, 645, 74, 112.5, 1262,
12.71, 1274, 1275, 1304, 1305,
1362-3
Enoch 637, 112S, 112.7, 1130, 1262
Esau 1268
Ezekiel 1304
Eve 478, 1247, 12.94
Herod 163, 113, 12.56, 1262, 1311
Hezekiah 12.67
Hosea 496
Isaac 1230, 12.68
Isaiah 602, 776, 1240, 1282, 1283,
1294, 1362
Jacob 230, 480, 712., 1230, 1268, 1269
Jeremiah 496, 602
Jesus Christ 14, 327-31, 465, 499-501,
52, 503, 504, 505, 57, 508, 511 ,
512, 514, 515, 519, 54 2, 577, 578,
609, 950, 952, 953, 104 8, 112.0,
1129, 1130, 1131, 1132, 1158, 1190,
1191, 1192-3, 1203, 1213, 1231, 1238,
1243, 1244 , 12.45, 1247 , 12.49,
1256-74, 12.75, 1285, 1287, 12.89,
1293, 1303, 1304, 1305, 1306, 1307,
1311, 1344, 1357
Job lI50, 12.15, 12.34, 1235, 1239
John 1 79 , 1305
John the Baptist 497, 499, 510 , I129,
12.33, 1245, 1257, 1263, 1300
Jonah 12.82-3
Joseph (son of Jacob) 80, i60, 1230-1,
12.S8
Joseph (father of Jesus) 1243, 12.65
Judas 609
Leah 954
Lazarus 1131
Luke 1304
1393
Mary and Martha 953-7

Micah 401
Moses 496, 607, 69, 717, 1190, 1191,
1192., 123, 1213, 12.30-41, 1249,
1256, 1259, 126S, 1267, 1268, 1272.,
1274, 1275, 1311
Nicodemus 1267
Noah 478, SOS, 126S
Paul 330, 496, 499, 501, 508, 513,
952, I108, IU7, I120, I13I, 1247 ,
1261, 1262, 1264, 1266, 1270, 1309
Peter 496, 1247
Pilate 500, 1048, 1256, 126o, 1263
Rachel 954
Samson 497
Samuel 497, 11235, 12.33
Saul 401, 1072, 1125
Solomon 497, 6347, 1239
Books: Old Testament

Genesis 711, 730, 731, 760, 769, 1125,
1197, 1198-9, 1230- 1, 1237, 1238,
1267, 1268, 1269
Exodus 212, 719, 896, 1127, 1234,
12.35, 1236 , 1237, 1267, 1270,
1282-3, 1284, 1308
Leviticus 38, 1233, 1261, 1263
Numbers 12.34, 1267
Deuteronomy 746
Samuel 41, 497, 1125
Kings 401, 497, 718, I197, 1267,
127), 1304
Chronicles 718
Job 213, 731, II26, 112.8, 1150, 1234,
12.35, 1269, 1270, 12.83
Psalms 103, 189, 2.13, 731, 781, 1126,
1239, 1269, 1291, 1357
Proverbs 1269
Ecclesiastes 288
Song of Solomon (Song of Songs) 330
Isaiah 498, 499, 500, 515, 610, 731,
776, 896, 1098, I100, II26, 1127,
1193-4, 1236, 1237, 1240, 1274
Jeremiah 1269, 1282, 1291
Ezekiel 134, 679, 776, 1238, 1269,
1340
Daniel I126, 1238, 1243, 12.73
Hosea 1233
1394
Amos
497-8, 515, 731
Jonah 12.82.
Micah 498
Zephaniah 1132."
Hagai 12.63
Books: New Testament

Matthew 17, 451, 499, 500, 501, 516,
112.8, 1133, 1135, 12.60, 12.61, 12.62,
12.63. 12.64, 12.67, 12.69, 12.70, 1271,
1300, 1306
Mark 501, 726, 12.59, 12.61. 12.63.
12.64, 1306
Luke II, 2.74, 497. 499, 542., 953,
954, IIZ7, 112.8, 1129, 1130, 1131,
1132.", 1196, 12.49, 12.57-8, 1261",
1265, 12.71, 1308
John 500, 501, 52.4, 970 n, 112.9, 1130,
1239, 12.43, 1259, 12.63, 1265, 12.67,
1269, 1271, 12.72 12.78, 1290n, 1304,
1305
Acts 496, 514, 1260, 1270, 1273
Romans 1131, 1194, 12.66, 12.89
Corinthians 330, 952., 1100, 1117, 1131,
1195, 1264, 12.89, 1309, 1310, 1353
Ephesians 330, 729, II2.0, 1273, 1289
Philippians 1256
Timothy 1130
Hebrews 1100, 112.8, 1183, 12.66, 1271
First Epistle of John 553n, 1100, 1202.
Jude II27
Revelation 215, 221, 502, 733, 759,
776, 1133, 1184, 12.64, 12.65. 12.70,
1274, 1285, 1308
Apocrypha
Book of Enoch 112.6, 1127
Book of Ezra (Esdras) 112.7
Jesus Sirach 12.69
Bier 5461
Bindel
Die agyptischen Pyramiden (The
Egyptian Pyramids) 723
Bismarck 2.32.n, S66, 890n, 942, 943
Bizet
Carmen 934, 949
L' Arlesienne 398
Blake, William 114
Blanc, Louis S64, 574, 903
BlaB
Das Wesen der neuen Tanzkunst (The
Nature of the New Art of
Dance) 405
Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna U87
Isis unveiled 1186
Bleuler 1002
Bloch, Elsa xxi-XXII, 331n
Bloch, Ernst xix-xXxiii
Avicenna und die Aristotelische Linke
(Avicenna and the Aristotelian
Left) 2.07
Das Materialismusproblem (The
Problem of Materialism) xxiii
Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle
of Hope) xx-xxxiii
Das Weltall im Lichte des Atheismus
(The Universe in the Light of
Atheism) xix
Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Legacy of this
Time) xxiii, 6
Geist der Utopia (The Spirit of
Utopia) xxi, xxii, xxiii, 6, 157.
21S, 2.89-90, 297-8, 304, 386-7,
72.4, 733, 880, 924, 1058, 1070,
1084, 1371
Renaissance der Sinnlichkei t
(Renaissance of Sensuality) xix
Spuren (Traces) xix, xxiii, xxxii, 6, 289
Subjekt-Objekt, Erlauterungen zu
Hegel (Subject-Object,
Commentaries on Hegel) 6, 8S9,
1058
Thomas Munzer als Theologe der
Revolution (Thomas Munzer as
Theologian of the
Revolution) xxiii, xxx, 6, 582
Ober den gegenwartigen Stand der
Philosophie (On the present state of
philosophy) 1371
Bloch, Jan Robert xxiv
Bloch, Jean-Richard 909
Bloch, Karola xxii, xxiv
Aus meinem Leben (From My
Life) xxii
Blok, Alexander SI4
March of the Twelve SI4
Blossius 495
Bluher S88
Boccaccio
Decameron 818
Bodin, Jean 517
Bocklin 380
Bohme, Jakob 365, 637, 640, 643, 671.
712, 8so. 859. 860, 861, u88
De signatura rerum 1349
Morgenrot in Aufgang (Aurora) 712,
8S8
Theosophische Sendbriefe (Theosophical
Missives) 928
Bolsche, Wilhelm 380, U53
Borne, Ludwig 912
Fragmente und Aphorismen (Fragments
and Aphorisms) 1367
Boethius 107S
Ars musica 1075. 1077
Boetie, Etienne de La
Le Contr'un ou de la servitude
volontaire (The contrary man or
the will to bondage) 516
B6ttger 629
Bollnov 104
Bonnet
Palingenesies philosophiques II45
Book of John (Mandaean) 1306
Borchardt. Ludwig 723
Bosch, Hieronymus 43S
Boyle, Robert 647"
Brahms 1063
A German Requiem IIOO~I
Fourth Symphony 107
Brand 629-30
Breasted
The History of Egypt 730
Brecht, Bertolt xxi, xxiii, 413-6, 417,
418 419. 4 24. 42.7. 666. 746, 886,
1224, 1354
Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny
(Rise and Fall of the City of
Mahagonny) 914
Der jasager (The Man Who Says
Yes) 416
Der Neinsager (The Man Who Says
No) 416
Die Ausnahme und die Regel (The
Exception and the Rule) 415
Die MaBnahme (The Measure
Taken) 415
1395
Dreigroschenoper (Threepenny
Opera) 34, 414
Dreigroschenroman (Threepenny
Novel) 47S
Kleines Organon far das Theater
(Little Organon for the
Theatre) 414, 415. 417
Leben des Galilei (Life of Galileo) 416
Theaterarbeit (Theatre-work) 414
Brentano, Clemens 96
Brentano, Franz 71
Brion, Friederike 974, 977n
Brissot 933
Brockhaus, Heinrich
Die U topia-Schrift des Thomas Morus
(Thomas More's
Utopia-work) 517-18, 519
Brotoffer
Elucidarius major
Browning, Robert 1322
Pippa Passes 172
Brown-Sequard 461
Bruckner 267. 1079
Sixth Symphony 1073
Brueghel, Pieter (The elder)
The Land of Cockaigne 357n,
813
The Tower of Babel 711-12
Bruning 553
Brunelleschi 648
Bruno, Giordano 207. 2.08, 236. 237,
242. 652. 672, 793. 848-50. 852,
864. 993. 102.8
De la causa, principio e uno
(Cause, Principle and Unity) 236.
667
Brunswick, Duke of 294n
Brust. Alfred
Die verlorene Erde (The Lost
Earth) II59
Brutus, Marcus jonius 152, 368, 425, 933
Budde
Die Religion des Volkes Israel his zur
Verbannung (The Religion of the
People of Israel until their
Banishment) 1231
Buddha 678-9. II36, II37, II40-1, II90,
1191.1203,1224,12.32,1247,1249-56,
12.60,1261, 1291, I3II. 1338-40
Speeches of Gautama Buddha, set

Neumann, K.
Biichlein der Fialen Gerechtigkeit (Booklet
of the Justice of Pinnacles) 714
Buchner, Georg II72
Hessische Landbote (The Hessen
Messenger) 1358
Lenz 30i , 977

Woyzeck 301
Buchner, Ludwig 379, 1286
Kraft und Stoff (Force and
Matter) 379n
Burger, Gottfried 437 see also
Miinchhausen
Bunsen 696, 697
Burckhardt, Jakob 70S, 710
Butzbach
Des Johannes Butzbach
Wanderbuchlein Oohann Butzbach's
Little Book of Wandering) 369
Byron 107, 136, 916, 991, 999, 1003-4,
1010
Childe Harold 1003

Don Juan 1010
Manfred 1003-4, 1152-3
Cabet S61-3, 607

Voyage in Icarie (Voyage to
lcaria) 562.-3
Caesar, Julius 90, 91, 294, 49 2, 493,
650, 6S1n, 947, 1028, 1148
Cagliostro 630, 631, 633, 1177
Caiphas 12.63
Calderon 421, 422, 983, 1017
Caligula 68
Calvin 1282
Camoes
Lusiads 217, I13S

Campanella 139, 479, SIO, 512., S23-8,
529, 533, 544, 545, SS2, 562, S66,
568, 6S6, 744
Civitas solis (City of the Sun) 4S8,
475- 6, 477, 490, 52 3- 8, S32, 534,
638, 639, 654, 656, 740, 742., 1220
De monarchia 52.6
De sensu rerum et magia
Philosophia realis 524
Caracalla I118
524
Carlyle 615-17, 1198

Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic
in History 12.6
Past and Present 616
The French Revolution 616
The History of Frederick II of
Prussia 616
Casanova 702
Catechismus Romanus 1131
Cato 933, 947, 1318
Cellini, Benvenuto 433
Cervantes 882
Don Quixote 16, 170, 320, 352, 358,
772, 1025, 1027, 1029, 103S-57,
1316
Cezanne 1347, 1348
Grandes Baigneuses (Large

Bathers) 81S
Les Ondines (The Water-sprites) 8IS
L' Estaque 816
Chagall, Marc 398
Charlemagne S6S, S67, 708, 730
Charles II S36
Chassin 573
Chekhov, Anton 794
Cherubini 1099
Requiem IIOO
Chesterton SS, 930, 1262, 1344
George Bernard Shaw 326
the Return of Don Quixote 1043
The Everlasting Man 1183
Chiso16
Ruins of Carthage 38S
Chopin 180
Christian of Mainz (Bishop) 770
Chrysippos 4~!, 493, S03, 838
Churchill, Winston 606
Cicero 403, 492, S3 6 , 933, 959, 960,
971, 1319
De fato 2.43
De finibus bonorum et malorum
De oratore 403
Laelius de amicitia 963
Somnium Scipionis 761
Cieszkovski 270-1
Prolegomena zur Historiosophie
(Prolegomena to
Historiosophy) 2.70
Cimabue 819
1319
Clair, Rene
Chapeau de paille (Straw-hat)
408
Gaslight 408
Claudel, Paul 405
L' annonce faite ~ Marie (The Tidings
brought to Mary) 736
L'homme et son desir (Man and his
Longing) 405
Clemens of Alexandria
Stromata 758
Cleopatra 328, 704, 754
Cocteau
Orpheus and Eurydice 416
Collini 390
Columbus 732., 749, 750-1., 758, 760,
762., 772, 773, 774-7, 782, 7 85,
788, 793, 1026
Comenius 528, 636, 717

The Labyrinth of the W orId and the
Paradise of the Heart 639
Comte, Auguste 474, 567-8
Confucius 1191, 1196, 11.2.1-8, .1261
Lun-yu 122.1
Conrad, Joseph
Typhoon 661
Constantine 739
Cook 778
Cooper, James Fenimore 353
Copernicus 785-6, 848
Correggio 744
Cortez 777
Coue, Emile 453, ns8
Creuzer, Friedrich 160, 1363
Symbolik und M ythologie der alten
Volker (The Symbolism and
Mythology of the Ancient
Peoples) 160-1
Cromwell, Oliver 1276
Cusanus (see Nicholas of Cusa)
Cyrus 754, 12 31., 1240, 11.63
Czepo, Daniel 12.99
Daubler, Theodor 101
Dahn, Felix
Ein Kampf urn Rom (A Struggle for

Rome) 379
Dalcroze 394
d' Alembert 6S5
Dali, Salvador 365, 366

D'Annunzio
11 Fuoco (The Fire) 1002.
Dante Alighieri 89, 1.18, 761-2, 774,
820-7, 832, 864, 1317
The Divine Comedy 98, 158, 333,

821-27, 992, 1119, 111.1, 1130-1;
Inferno 761, 1023-7, 1130, 12.97;';
Purgatorio 761, 954, 1121;
Paradiso 94, 12.2, 126, 2.14, 776,
813, 821- 27, 835
Danton 1010
Danziger S88
Da Ponte 1008
Darius 1240
Darwin 469, 646, 894n
Daumier 473, 476, 1023
David of Dinant 207, 236
Davy 686
de Bonald 566
Debussy 105, 107
Decian 506
Declaration des droits de 1'homme
(Declaration of the rights of
man) 541
Defoe, Daniel
Robinson Crusoe 816
Dehio 3 1 , 957
Delacroix 377
de la Ronciere
La decouverte de l' Afrique au moyen
~ge (The discovery of Africa in the
Middle Ages) 770
de Maistre 566
Etude sur la Souverainete (A Study of
Sovereignty) 566
della Porta
Magia naturalis 651
Democritus 256-7, 2. 85, 841- 2, 843, 847.
864, 1364
Descartes 71., 123- 4, 147, 2.12, 2.57, 667,

739, 740
Meditations 71Desmoulins 933
Deutsche Zeitschrift fur Philosophie xxv
Dickens, Charles
The Old Curiosity Shop 692.
Dickinson, H. D.
Economics of Socialism 903
Diderot 12.86
Essay on Painting 2.16
Rameau's Nephew 42.8, 983
Diels (with W. Kranz)
Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (The
Fragments of the Pre-Socratic
Philosophers) 840-1, 875, 876
Dilthey 72.
Dinokrates 738
Dio Cassius 72.9
Dio Chrysostomos 12.14
Diodoros Kronos 2.02., 2.43, 2.44, 2.45
Diodorus 112.2.
Diogenes 482, 543, 915
Dionysios Areopagita 833
Disraeli, see Beaconsfield, Lord
Doctor Faustus (chapbook and
puppet-play) 948-9, 1305
Domseiff
Odysseus' letzte Fahrt (Odysseus' Last
Voyage) 1025
Dostoevsky 817, 1047, 1048
Crime and Punishment 1004
The Brothers Karamazov 289
The Idiot 320
The Raw Youth
Dreyfus 602
Durer 232., 274, 1074, 1347
Apocalypsis Cum Figuris 2.2.1
David 3Ig
St Jerome in his Cell
301, 932., 957,
1310
Melencolia 123, 301-2, 312., 957

Duncan, Isadora 394
Duns Scotus 954, 1319
Du Prel, Carl
Magie als experimenteller
N aturwissenschaft (Magic as an
Experimental Science) 1186
Dutschke, Rudi xxvi
Ebers, Georg
Semiramis 379
Uarda 379
Eckermann 991
Eddington 697
Edison 439, 661, 748
Edrisi 757, 758, 761, 77 8
Egrnont, Lamora! II7I
Egyptian Book of The Dead 1119, 112.3

Ehrenberg, IIya 410
Einstein, Albert 604, 664. 697, 785
Eisenstein
Battleship Potemkin 407
Ten Days that Shook the World 408
Eisler, Hans xxiii
Ekkehard I
Waltharilied 367
Eleagabal 32.8
El Greco 744
Emerson 1159
Empedocles 840, 841, 853, 854, 857, 874
Engels, Friedrich xxvii, xxviii, 95, 216.
2.49, 2.50, 2SI. 2.72 2.79, 2.81, 2.94,
481, 515, 530-1, 556, 557, 573, 574.
578. 600, 601, 617, 62.1, 666. 697-8.
887, 891, 892 94S. 1170, 1198, 1293-4'
Anti-Duhring 530, 669, 697-8,
968-9. 1293-4
Dialektik der Natur (Dialectic of

Nature) 286
Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus (The
Development of Socialism) 945
Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang
der klassischen deutschen
Philo sophie (Ludwig Feuerbach and
the Outcome of Classical German
Philosophy) 250. 2.67
The Condition ofthe Working Class
in England 888-9
Eosander 739
Epictetus 2.43. 49 1
Epicurus 168, 42.5, 484, 489, 535, 545,

813, 8IS. 842, 908, 1010, II48. 12.91
Erasmus 517, 518, 519, 957
Colloquia SI8
Erdmann, J. E.
Grundriss der Geschichte der
Philosophie (Outline of the History
of Philosophy) 6S2
Ericson, Leif 772., 102.6
Erman
Agypten und agyptisches Leben im
Altertum (Egypt and Egyptian 'Life
in Antiquity) 112.5
Ernst Blochs Revision des Marxismus
(Ernst Bloch's Revision of
Marxism) xxv
Ernst, Max 36S

Euclid 6S8, 743
Euemeros 489-90, 494
Holy Inscription 489, SI6
Euripides 42.9
Helen 184-S
Hippolytus 112.9
Euryphon 738
Eyck, Jan van 848
Gent Altar 713
(Paris) Madonna 799-800
Ezra (Esdras) 1304
F., P. (Gent)
The Historie of the damnable life, and
deserved death of Doctor John
Faustus 1012.n
Fabius Cunctator 2.2.6, 940-1, 947
Fallada, Hans
Kleiner Mann was nun? (Little Man
What Now?) 92.8
Faraday 663, 685
Fechner
Das Biichlein vom Leben nach dem
Tode (The Little Book of Life after
Death) 115S
Die Tagesansicht gegeniiber der
Nachtansicht (The Aspect of Day
compared with the Aspect of
Night) IISS
Fenelon
Aventures de Telemaque 544
Ferdinand of Castille 776
Ferenczi 81
Feuchtersleben
Diatetik der Seele (Dietetics of the
Soul) 463
Peuerbach, Anselm S41
Peuerbach, Ludwig 2.49-286, 872., 1153-5,
1199-1200, 1284-90, 1291, 1296,
13S6
Das Wesen der Religion (The Essence
of Religion) 1183
Das Wesen des Christentums (The
Essence of Christianity) 2.S0, 2.53,
2.61
Gedanken iiber T od und
U nsterblichkeit (Thoughts on
Death and Immortality) 1154
1399
Grundsatze der Philosophie der

Zukunft (Principles of the Philosophy
of the Future) 2.S0, 2S3, 272
Kritik der Hegelschen Staatsphilosophie
(Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of
State) 2.51
Vorlaufige Thesen zur Reform der
Philosophie (Provisional Theses for .
a Reform of Philosophy) 2.50, 2.53
Reimverse auf den Tod (Rhymes on
Death) II54
Theogonie (Theogony) 1296
Fichte xxviii, 139, 147, 244, 169, 270,
476, 548-SS, 601, 689, 132.1
Der geschlossene Handelstaat (The
Closed Commercial State) 271,
524, S48-SS
Die Bestimmung des Menschen (The
Destiny of Man) 471
Reden an die deutsche Nation
(Speeches to the German
Nation) 2.71, SS4
Rechtslehre aurisprudence) S48
Staatslehre (Political Science) S54-S
Wissenschaftslehre (Theory of
Science) SS3
Picino, Marsilio 644, 645
De arte chimica 643
Theologia Platonica 643
Flaischlein, Casar
Sonne im Herzen (Sun in the Heart)
Fludd, Robert 643
Foigny
La terre- australe connue (The
Australian land experienced) 779
Pentane, Theodor 170
Frau Jenny Treibel 170, 941
Forster, Georg 816
Fourier 473-4, 476, 477, S4S, 5S2, SSS,
SS8-561, 56 S, S66, S70, S78, S79,
S80, 1044
Le Nouveau Monde Industriel (The
New Industrial World),
476, SS8
Theone des quatre mouvements
(Theory of the four
movements) SS8
Traite de l'association domestique
agricole (Treatise on the domestic
agricultural association) SS8
1400
NAMJ; AND TITLE INDEX
Fra Angelico 59, 401

Fra Giocondo 741
Francis of Assisi 218, 714
Franck, Sebastian 972
Franckenberg, Abraham von 637
Oculus siderius 638
Franco 895
Frazer
The Golden Bough II90
Frederick I (Frederick Barbarossa) 766,
770
Frederick II of Prussia (Frederick the
Great) 552, 616, 991
Freising, Otto von 770
Freud, Sigmund xxix, 51-7, 58, 60, 61,
63-64, 66, 67, 68, 77, 78-87, 94,
96, 97, 109, II5-16, 128, 137,
166-7, 915
Civilization and its Discontents (Das
Unbehagen in der Kultur) 54
Das Ich und das Es (The Ego and the
Id) 83, II6, 137
Neue Folge der Vorlesungen (New
Introductory Lectures on
Psychoanalysis) 84
Vorlesungen (Introductory Lectures on
Psychoanalysis) 87, 94, 97
Freytag, G.
Die Journalisten (The Journalists) 431
Friedrich, Caspar David 835-6
Friedrich Wilhelm IV 271
Pueik, Julius (Composer)
March of the Gladiators 364
Pueik, Julius (Writer) 1173
Fux, Josef
Gradus ad Parnassum 829
Galen 463-4
Galileo 647, 667, 918, 1328, 1330, 1348
Galli-Bibiena, Alessandro 706
Galli-Bibiena, Giuseppe 703-4, 706,
739
Galsworthy 892
Beyond 891
Garaudy, Roger 625
Garve, Christian
Ober Gesellschaft und Einsamkeit (On
Sociability and Solitude) 962
Gauguin 816-17
Gellert, Christian Fiirchtegott
Geistliche Oden und Lieder (Religious
Odes and Songs) 1076
Gentile, Giovanni 547, 943, 945
George, Henry 618-19
Progress and Poverty 618
George, Stefan xx, 175, 405, 468, 957,
959, 999, 1337, 1338
Gershwin
Summertime 345n
Gervinus 1069
Gesell, Silvio 617
Ghiberti 818
Gibbon 1276
Giorgione
Concert in the open air 813
Sleeping Venus 798
Giotto 218, 267, 533, 7II, 712-13, S16,
817-20, 825, 864
Annunciation to Zachariah 8IS
Apparition of St Francis to the Chapter
at Aries 818, 820
Dream of the Palace 818
Flight into Egypt 818, 819, 820
Jesus' Return to His Parents
713
Joachim's Dream 818
Raising of Lazarus 214
The Assumption of St John 818
The Last Judgement 821
Glaucon (Plato's brother) 485
Gluck
Orpheus and Eurydice 832
Gorres
Mythengeschichte (History of
Myths) 135
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang xxvii, xxx,
39, 122, 134n, 147, 174, 175, 176-7,
193, 213, 215, 216, 217, 223, 294,
314, 377. 387, 4 0 0 , 4 24-5, 597,
642, 670, 789, 807, 812, 821, 839,
840, 846, 880, 911, 919, 973-1000,
1033, 1084, II44, 1146, II47, II55,
II88, 1342-3, 1351
Am Rhein, Main und Neckar 1814 and
ISI5 (On the Rhine, Main and
Neckar) 909
Anmerkungen zu Diderots 'Rameau's
Neffe' (Observations on Diderot's

'Rameau's Nephew') 983
Anmerkungen zu Diderots 'Versuch
fiber die Malerei' (Observations on
Dideror's 'Essay on Painting') 216
Benvenuto Cellini (Goethe's translation
of the life of Cellini) 1000
Der Zauberflote zweiter Teil (The
Magic Flute Part Two) 32.9
Deutsches Theater (German
Theatre) 424
Dichtung and Wahrheit (Poetry and
Truth) 64 2, 975, 979, 982, 997
Die Geheimnisse (The Mysteries) 637
Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The
sorrows of young Werther) SO,
322, 780, 960, 962, 974-S, 981,
999, 1000, 1013, 1188n
Egmont 104JI, 42S, 978, 980, 1171
Erlkonig (Brlking) 375, IIS1
Es schlug mein Herz ... (My heart
beat ... ) 176n
Faust xxviii, xxx, xxxii, 16, 70n, 94,
98, 119, 120, 122, 157, 158-60, 189,
191, 197, 214, 221, 240, 248, 293,
312, 313, 317, 32S, 328, 329, 373,
39S, 412, 4 28, 430, 597, 626, 670,
693, 811, 812-17, 837, 846, 852,
892-1, 949, 980-81, 892, 983-4,
985, 986, 987, 9 88, 992, 994, 996,
997, 999, 1013-22, 1031, 1032,
IOSI-2, 1055-57, 1069n, 1078, 1092,
1107, 1121, 1163-4, 1188, 1303, 1361,
1367- 8
Farbenlehre (Theory of
Colours) 645-6
Ganymed 974
Gedichte sind gemalte Fensterscheiben
(Poems are Painted Window-panes)
174, 99 2
Gesprache mit Eckermann
(Conversations with
Eckermann) 991, 1146
Gotz von Berlichingen 978, 980, 1017
Hefte zur Morphologie (Notebooks on
Morphology) 984
Hermann and Dorothea 739, 999,
1146
Hochzeitslied (Wedding Song) 290
1401
Iphigenie auf Tauris (Iphigenia on

Tauris) 979
Italienische Reise (Italian Journey)
374, 376
Kampagne in Frankreich (The
Campaign in France) 294
Letter to F. Stolberg 1343
Letter to Wilhelm von
Humboldt 1163
Marienbader Elegie (Marienbad
Elegy) 975, 999
Metamorphose der Tiere (Metamorphosis
of the Animals) 984
Mignonlieder (Mignon songs in
'Wilhelm Meister') 994-7
Pandora 333, 334, 987, 997, 999
Prometheus (poem) 998n
Prometheus (dramatic fragment) 122,
1212., 1215
Relief von Phigalia (Essay on the relief
of Phigalia) 811
Selige Seuhsucht (Blissful
Longing) 310, 998
Stella 417
Torquato Tasso 417, 979, 980, 987,
988, 994, 996, lOS2-3 , 1369
U rfaust (The original draft of
'Faust') 122
Ur-Meister (see Wilhelm Meisters
theatralische Sendung)
U r-Tasso (The original draft of
Tasso) 979
Urworte. Orphisch (Primal Words.
Orphic) 984, 992.
Von deutscher Baukunst (On German
Architecture) 983
Wanderers Nachtlied (Wanderer's
Night-song) 177, 852
Wanderers Sturmlied (Wanderer's
Storm-song) 982, 990
West-ostlicher Divan 220, 3Ion, 329,
1136, 1312
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm
Meister's Apprenticeship) 122,
642n, 979-80, 982, 987, 988,
993-997, 1017
Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung
(Wilhelm Meister's theatrical
mission) 979, 980
1402
Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre

(Wilhelm Meister's Wandering
Years) 999
Willkommen und Abschied (Welcome
and Farewell) 176
Winckelmann 1055
Xenien 231, 948
Zahme Xenien 459, 852
Goethe, Katharina Elisabeth (Goethe's
mother) 96, 973
Gotz von Berlichingen 463, 978
Goldoni
Don Giovanni 1007
Goldsmith
Vicar of Wakefield 803
Goncourt (Brothers) ~II
Gorgias of Leontini 243
Gorky, Maxim 1202, 1290, 1354
The Mother 596
Gottfried von Strassburg
Tristan and Isolde 187
Gottsched, Johann Christoph 424-5, 976,
1086, 1368
Goya 476
Naked Maya 798
Grabbe, Christian Dietrich 1003, 1010
Don Juan und Faust 1003, lOll
Hannibal 1003
Herzog Theodor von Gothland
1003
Marius und Sulla 1003
Scherz, Satire, Ironie und tiefere
Bedeutung croke, Satire, Irony and
Deeper Meaning) 1003
Gracchus, Gaius 152n
Gracchus, Tiberius 152n, 495
Graham, Dr 455, 46 0
Grandville
Concert la vapeur (Concert for
steam) 434
Mysteres de l'infini (Mysteries of
infini ty) 434
Un autre monde (Another
world) 434, 435
Gregor, Josef
Denkmaler des Theaters (Monuments
of the Theatre) 704
Gregorovius n61
Gregory of N yassa 1170
Griffith, D. W. 406
Birth of a Nation 406n
Grimm (Brothers) 353-7, 362
Brother Lustig 356
Cinderella 353
Faithful John 317-8
Frau Holle 86n, 455
Godfather Death 354
Hansel and Gretel 352
The Boy Who Went Out to Learn
What Fear Was 354-5, 357
The Frog King 355
The Land of Cockaigne 357, 472, 627
The Magic Table, the Golden Ass and
the Cudgel in the Sack 355, 356,
47 2, 473, 477, 627
The Maiden of Willberg 1314-15
The Star-thalers 361
The Twelve Apostles 1315
The Valiant Little Tailor 353, 357
The Water-sprite 356
Grimm, Jacob 39-40
Gropius, Walter 386- 1, 735
Grotius 537, 538, 541, 895
De Jure belli et pacis 535-6
Grunewald 218, 267, 774, 819
Isenheim Altar 694, 819
Guericke, Otto von 647
Guillaume de Lorris
Roman de la Rose 804
Gundolf 175
Gunkel
Schopfung und Chaos (Creation and
Chaos) 776, 1269
Haam, Achad 603

Haba, Alois 1091
Hadrian 729, 1116
Hackel, Ernst 1153, 1187, 1202
Weltratsel (World-riddle) 380
Hahn
Geschichte der Ketzer im Mittelalter
(The History of the Heretics in the
Middle Ages) 1302
Hall
The Effects of Civilization 556
Haller, Albrecht von
Die Alpen (The Alps) 390
Hallmann
Marianne 630
Hamann 134, 977
Aesthetica in nuce 838
Hammurabi 1218, 1233
Hamsun 289
Handel 1063
Julius Caesar 828
Hannibal 226n, 940, 1003
Hanno 772
Hardenberg 541
Harich, Wolfgang xxv
HarleB
Jakob Bohme und die Alchymisten
Oakob Bohme and the
Alchemists) 643
Harnack 1245
Dogmengeschichte (History of
Dogmas) 1245
Harrington
The Commonwealth of Oceana 544
Hartlib, Samuel
A Description of the Famous
Kingdome of Macaria 474
Hartmann, Eduard von 204
Philo sophie des Schonen (Philosophy of
the Beautiful) 423
Hartmann, Franz n86
Hartmann, Nicolai 241
Hastings, Warren 891
Hauff 357
Das kalte Herz (The Cold Heart)
1314
Der kleine Muck (Little Muck)
357-8
Saids Schicksale (The Fates of
Said) 355-6, 628
Hauptmann
Einsame Menschen (Lonely
People) 569, 593
Haydn t063
Creation 1082
Hebbel, Friedrich 184, 430
Auf die Unbekannte (To the Unknown
Woman) 322
Hebel, Johann Peter
Schatzkastlein (The Little Treasure
Chest) 1313-14
Die Juden (The Jews) 885-6
xix, xxvii, xxviii, 6, 8, 18, 71,

7 2-3, 124, 131, 139, 143, 169-70,
172, 190-1, 203-4, 2II. 215, 233.
239, 242, 244, 245-6, 250, 251,
253, 263, 269-70, 271, 274, 279,
280, 282, 283, 285, 291, 324, 559,
600, 620, 669-70, 688, 689, 690,
710, 722, 745, 808, 812, 824, 843,
847, 8S7, 861-2, 863, 871, 874, 875,
882-4, 912, 955, 1016-22, 1084,
1123, 1217, 1224, 1284, 1287, 1307-8,
1330, 1342, 136 1, 1362, 1371
Asthetik (Aesthetics) 239, 808
Briefe von und an Hegel (Letters to
and from Hegel) 124, 88S
Die Phanomenologie des Geistes (The
Phenomenology of Mind) 73,
139-40, ISS, 246, 2S7, lOIS,
1016-22
Enzyklopadie (Encyclopaedia) 191,
203, 233, 244, 245, 246
Geschichte der Philosophie (History of
Philosophy) 208
Jenenser Realphilosophie 670
Logik (Logic) 208, 244, 24S
Rechtsphilosophie (philosophy of
Right) 245, 270
Hehn, Viktor 376
Heidegger 72, 105-6, 109
Brief liber den Humanismus (Letter on
Humanism) 1357
Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) 106,
no, 14S, 1160-1
Vom Wesen- des Grundes (On the
Essence of Reasons) n61
Was ist Metaphysik? (What is
Metaphysics?) 106
Heimann, Eduard 468
Heine 147n, 321, S62, 898
Heinse 803-4, 807
Ardinghello und die glucklichen Inseln
(Ardinghello and the Fortunate
Isles) 803
Heisenberg 697
Helen of Tyre 328
He1mholt 697
Helmont 643
Helvetius 154
Henry VIII 516
Hegel
Heraclitus 114, 840, 841, 846, 850, 853,

854, 858, 863, 864, 877, 1098
Herbart 728
Herder 120n, 134n, 780, 78~, 812
Genius der Zukunft (Genius of the
Future) 286
Reisejournal 1769 (Travelogue 1769)
1034
Vom Geist der Hebraischen Poesie (On

the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry) 134
Herodotus 877, 120S-6, 1207, 1220
Hertzka
Eine Reise nach Freiland (A Journey to
Freeland) 612
Herwegh 578
Herzl, Theodor 602-7, 609
Altneuland (Old New Land) 603
Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) 603
Hesiod 62, 334, 1111, 1205-7, 1209, 1214
Hess, Moses 271, 600-2, 603, 604, 605,
607, 608, 609, 611
Rom und Jerusalem 600, 601

Hildebrandt 739
Hipparchia 482
Hippel, Theodor Gottlieb von II43
Hippocrates 463
Hippodamos 738
Hippolitos 1268
Elenchos 1120
Historia von D. Johann Fausten
(Chapbook) 1012
Hitler, Adolf xxiii, 29, 30, 68, 310, 386n,
428, 443, S87, 606, 733, 89 2, 894,
1172
Hobbes, Thomas 257, 536-7, 543, 859, 867
De cive 536,537
Leviathan 536, 537
Holderlin 933, 1164-5, 1318,1338

Am Quell der Donau (At the Source of
the Danube) 121
An die Deutschen (1798) (To the
Germans) 1365
An die Deutschen (1799) (To the
Germans) 178
Der Tod des Empedokles (The Death of
Empedocles) 841, 1151-2, n65
Patmos 112, 939
Hoffmann, E. T. A. 357, 378, 391, 392-3,
398,803
Das Majorat (The Estate) 393

Der goldene Topf (The Golden
Pot) 358-60, 393, 708, 755
Don juan 1101
Fermate 179
Lebensansichten des Katers Murr (Murr
the Tom-eat's Views on
Life) 179-80, 323, 1003, 1060
Ritter Gluck 189
Hofmannstal
Die agyptische Helena 184-S
Hogarth
Analysis of Beauty 727
Holbein (the younger) 957
Hollingworth
Jews in Palestine 60S
Homer 213, 792, 1111, 1113, 1143, 1162, 1203,
12.05-8
The Iliad 12.7, 313, 1207

The Odyssey 185, 304, 313, 418, 437,
7S8,102.0n,I023-7,1207-8,1281
Honegger
Pacific ~31 1081
Hooch, Pieter de 796, 797
A mug of beer 796
Hooke, Robert 647n
Horace 2.93, 373, 937, 959, 1214, 1257, 1318
Epistles I54n
Odes 290n, 393
Horkheimer, Max xxiv
Horseman of Bamberg (sculpture) 932
Howard, Ebenezer
Garden Cities of Tomorrow 612.
Tomorrow 612
Hsia Kuei 122.6
Huch, Friedrich
Traume (Dreams) 99
Hudson, W. H.
A Crystal Age 474
Hufeland
Makrobiotik (Macrobiotics) 461, 463
Hugh ofSt Victor 1019, 1302
Hugo
Lehrbuch des Naturrechts (Textbook of
Natural Right) 547
Humboldt, Alexander von 39, 774, 1342.
Ansichten der Natur (Views of
Nature) 816
Kosmos 2.13
Kritische Untersuchungen (Critical

Investigations) 764-5, 775
Humboldt, Wilhelm von 1163
Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Grenzen der
Wirksamkeit des Staateszu
bestimmen (Ideasfor an attempt to
define the limits of the effectiveness of
the state) 540
Hume 291
Essays on Suicide,and the Immortality of
the Soul 1145
Husserl 71, 108-9, 230, 291-2
Zur Phanomenologie des inneren
ZeitbewuBtseins (On the
phenomenology of the inner
consciousness of time) 109, 292
Huxley, Aldous
BraveNew World 440
Huxley, Thomas H. 567
Huygens 647
Iamblichus
916
De mysteriis 93
Iamboulos 510
Islandof the SUD 490-1, S16, 523
Ibn Khordadbeh 757
Ibn Tofail 401, 771
Ibsen 170-An Enemy of the People 421
Ghosts 170
Love's Comedy 323
~ora
373,593,138
Rosmersholm 144,569
The Doll's House 170
The Wild Duck 170, 569, 1044
The Woman from the Sea 323
I-ching (Book of Changes) 1223
Imhotep 1191, 1216
Impekoven 397
Irenaeus 1117
Isabella of Castille 776
Isidore of Seville 7S3
James, William 275-6, 291, 292, 682

Pragmatism 275-6
Human Immortality IIS9
Jane, C.
Selected Documents, Illustrating the
Four Voyagesof Columbus 775
Jannequin
Cris de Paris (Cries of Paris) I08r
Jantzen
Das Niederlandische Architekturbild
(The Dutch Architectural
Picture) 709
Jaspers, Karl n61
Philosophie 1160
Jean de Meung
Roman de la Rose 804-5
Jean de Muris
Speculummusicae 1075
Jean Paul (Richter) 80, 136, 313-14, 805-7,
869,IIS0
Dammerungen fUr Deutschland
(Dawnings for Germany) 314
Die unsichtbareLoge (The Invisible

Lodge) 474
Flegeljahre (The Awkward Age) 1003
Titan 314, 391, 699, 806-7, 1000, 1003
Vorschuleder Asthetik (Preschool of
Aesthetics) 136
Jeans 697
Jefferson, Thomas 152
Jensen
The Wheel 1036
Jeremias
Babylonisches tm Neuen Testament
(Babylonian Traces in the New
Testament) 1231
Jesus the Hanged Man (Satire) 1305
Joachim of Fiore xxx, 206, 480,
498, 509-15, 513, S14, SIS, 610,
64S, 769,855,1198, 1273, 1302,
1362
De concordiautriusque testamenti
510
Jacobsen IOS,107
Niels Lyhne 934
jahn, Friedrich Ludwig (called Turnvater
Jahn) 4S2
Jacob of Liege
Speculummusicae 1075, 1077
Jochanaanben Sakkai 679

John Lackland, King 881
Joseph of Arimathea 755
Josephson, Mirjam xxii
Josephus, Flavius
AntiquitatesJudaicae 718
1406
Josquin 1064. 1081

Joyce. James
Ulysses 101
Junger, Ernst 584. IIS8
In Stahlgewittern (The Storm of
Steel) II58n
jung, C. G. xxix, 56. 57. 59-64. 66, 68.
77.81,93,102,137-8,160
Psychologische Typen (Psychological
Types) 60
Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido
(The Psychology of the
Unconscious) 62, 138
Ober die Archetypen des kollektiven
BewuBtseins (Archetypes of the
Collective Unconscious) 62
Justinian 542
Juvenal 216
Kabasilas 679
Kafka. Franz xxi
Kamasutra 372
Kant, Immanuel xxvii, 6, 8, 147. 168, 169,
190. 244. 257, 42.3. 543, 549. 667,
67 2, 69 2-3, 784. 808, 810. 825.
844-S, 847. 864, 868-74, 895-6, 951,
971. 972, 1016, 1047. IIOI, II08. II08,
1146-7. 1290, 1318-19, 1320. 1321,
1324. 1347, 1361, 1373
Allgemeine N aturgeschichte und
Theone des Himmels (Natural
History and Theory of the
Heavens) 783. 843
Kritik der Praktischen Vernunft
(Critique of Practical Reason)
869- 74, II47. 1331- 2
Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of
Pure Reason) 244. 843
Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of
Judgement) 672. 693, 810
Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der
blossen Vemunft (Religion inside
the Limits of Mere Reason) 844
Streit der Pakultaten (Dispute of the
Facuities) 844. 872
Traume eines Geistersehers (Dreams of
a Spirit-Seer) 245. 784, 844
Zum ewigen Frieden (On perpetual
peace) 896
Karl Eugen von W iirttemberg 702

Katharine of Siena 465
Kauffmann
Von Ledoux bis Corbusier (From
Ledoux to Le Corbusier) 741
Kauffmann. Arthur
Triptych of the German
Emigration xxiv
Kawerau 588
Keller. Gottfried 99, 102, 213. 314, 357.
59S, 654, II48-50, IIS5, II63
Der griine Heinrich (Green
Henry) 99-100, 361,
1149
Die Jungfrau als Ritter (The Virgin as
a Knight) 358
Poetentod (Death of the Poet) 94
Traumbuch (Dreambook) 366
Kellermann 294n
Kepler, Johann 9S. 647, 7 83, 785, 1072,
1078. 1330, 1342, 1350, 1351
Harmonices mundi 1078
Kepler in seinen Brieferi (Kepler in his
letters) 1072
Kerner, justinus 143
Khrushchev, Nikita xxvi
Kierkegaard, Soren 71, 72, 73, 181, 182,
183. 293, 960-1, 989, IOII, 1021,
1335-6, 1338, 1356
Either/Or 961
For Self-Examination 1104
Sickness unto Death 1336
The Moment IOS7
Kingston 3S3
Kipling, Rudyard
The Brushwood Boy 361-2
KjelIen 584
Klages, Ludwig 59, 60, 61, 77, 102
Kleanthes 494, 496
Kleist, Heinrich von 835-8, 984
Das Kathchen von Heilbronn 317
Ernpfindungen vor Friedrichs
Seelandschaft (Impressions before
Friedrich's sea-landscape) 83S-6
Michael Kohlhaas 1321
Ober das Marionettentheater (On the
Puppet-theatre) 396
Klemperer, Otto xxiii
Kleomenes 495
Klettenberg, Susanne von 642, 983

Klinger, Friedrich Maximilian 1000,
II48
Sturm und Drang (Storm and
Stress) 977
HJinger.~ax 380
Klopstock 812.998
An Freund und Feind (To Friend and
Foe) 120-1
Messias (The Messiah) 120, 187-8
Knebel, Major 88S
Knittermeier 1357
Kopp
Die Alchymie (Alchemy) 643
Koran 832, 1134, II36, 1166. 1277-8
Krates 482
Kraus, Karl 427
Kleneck
Uber neue Musik (On New
Music) 1090
Kriege, H. 273, 1356
Kries, John. von 241
Kritschevski 10
Kropotkin S71
Kubin. Alfred
Die andere Seite (The Other Side) 99
Kurten 346-7, 349
Kuhlmann 279
Kunckel 629
La Bruyere IS4
Lactantius 1214-15
Lagerlof, Selma 629
Little Nils' Journey with the Wild
Geese 360
La Mettrie
L'Homme machine (Machine
man) 630
La Motte-Fouque, Friedrich Baron
de 99Sn
Landor, Walter Savage
Imaginary Conversations 1312
Lange, Helene 590, 591
Lao Tzu 304, 88o, II90. 1191, 122S-30,
1261-2, 1295
Tao-te-ching 880, 1225-30
Laroche. J. J. 1008n
La Rochefoucauld IS4, 964
Larsson, Carl
House in the Sun 380
Lasker-Schuler, Else xxii
Lassalle S5S, 566, 600, 620, 1170
Franz von Sickingen II70n
Lasso, Orlando di 1064
Lasswitz, Kurt 474, 629, 753
Auf zwei Planeten (On two
planets) 753
Sternentau (Stardew) 753
Lavater 981
Lavoisier 642
Lawrence, D. H. 59, 61
Lazaretti, David 1185
Le Corbusier 735. 742
Ledoux 827, 741- 2 744, 812
Lee, Anna 118S
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 6, 8, 132-3,
138-9, 212, 243, 257, 480, 546, 6S3,
673, 687, 843, 847, 856, 8S8, 8S9,
860. 861-2, 863, 864, 87S, 1143,
1295, 1330, 1349, 1366
De arte combinatoria 652
Monadologie 860
Nouveaux Essais (New Essays) 133,
1295
Leisegang
Die Gnosis (Gnosis) 1268-9
Lenau, Nikolaus 119, 181, 183, 293, 1010
Don Juan 1010-11
Faust 1010-II, 1016, 1023
Schilflieder (Reed Songs) 119
Wandel der Sehnsucht (Change of
Longing) 181-2, 323
Lenin 6, 9-10, 157, 174, 271, 281, 294,
3S4, 410, 554. 580 , 607, 610, 622,
903, 943, 945, 1202, 1368-9
'Left-wing' Communism 1369
Philosophical Notebooks 208, 673
State and Revolution S74
What is to be Done? 9-10
Three Sources and Three Components
of Marxism 277
Lenz, Jakob Michael Reinhold 301. 977n
Der Hofmeister (The Private
Tutor) 427
Leonardo da Vinci 121, 648-9, 670, 672,
800, 1074, 1342
Mona Lisa 800, 819, 836
1408
St Anne, The Virgin and the Infant

Christ with a Lamb 800
Virgin of the Rocks 800
Lermontov
A Hero of Our Time 1004
Lersch
Der Aufbau des Charakters (The
Structure of Character) 104
Lessing 727, 825, 955, 976, 1143-7, 1182,
1354
Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts
(The Education of the Human
Race) 1145
Emilia GaIotti 544, 809, 933
Faust fragment 1012-13
Hamburgische Dramaturgie (Hamburg
Dramaturgy) 430
Laokoon (Laocoon) '411
Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet (How
the Ancients Shaped Death)
1143-7
Levy-Bruhl 62
Lewin, Louis
Phantastica 89
Lewis, Sinclair xxiv
Babbitt 32
Liang Kai 1226
Liber secretus 754
Lichtenberg 353, 1148-9
Briefe aus England (Letters from
England) 1148n
Light of Hatha Yoga 676
Lille, Duke of 702
Lincoln, Abraham 618
Lipps, Th.
Leitfaden der Psychologie (Guide to
Psychology) 104
Liszt 180
Livy 946, 1193n
Locke
Civil Government 537, 1295
Low, Rabbi 1188
Lowith
Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeschehen
(World History and Events of
Salvation) 1362
Loheland 394, 396, 397
Lohenstein
Agrippina 631
Loos, Adolf 735

Lorrain, Claude 389
Acis and Galatea 817
Lotze
Geschichte der Asthetik (History of
Aesthetics ) 1071
Louis XIV 524
Louis XVI 406
Louis Philippe 377
Lowe, A.
The Trend in World Economics 899
Loyola
Exercitia spiritualia 675, 683
Lucian
.
Dialogues 882
Vera Historia 436-8, 1025
Lucretius 842, 1010, 1148, 1291-2, 1343
De rerum natura 489, 1292
Lucullus 373n
Lukacs, Georg xx, xxii, xxiii, xxv, 808,
1170, 1367
Der russische Realismus in der
Weltliteratur (Russian Realism in
World Literature) 817
Die Seele und die Formen (The Soul
and the Forms) 1169
Die Theorie des Romans (The Theory
of the Novel) 218
Geschichte und KlassenbewuBtsein
(History and Class
Consciousness) xxiii
Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels als
Literaturhistoriker (Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels as Literary
Historians) 1170n
Die Sickingen debatte (The Sickingen
Debate) 1170n
Lull, Ramon 641, 643, 651-3
Luria, Isaac 1237
Luther xxx, 171, 1064, 1161, n88n, I234n,
1357
Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott (A
Secure Fortress is our God) 7lin
Freiheit des Christenmenschen
(Freedom of the Christian
Man) 635
Lycurgus 486
Lytton, Bulwer
Zanoni 1186
1409
MaaB
Versuch 'liber die Leidenschaft (An
Essay on Passion) 80
Mably S39
Macaulay 891
Mach 697, 774, 78S
Machiavelli 94 2, 943, 946-7
Discorsi (Discourses) 946
II Principe (The Prince) 946, 947
Macpherson, James (Ossian) 134, 391,
779-81, 783
Macrobius 1II4-IS
Maeterlinck 681-2
The olive-branch 68~
Magellan 77 2-3, 777
Magus, Simon 328
Mahavira 12S2
Mahler, Gustav 1083, 1092, II02
Lied von der Erde (Song of the
Earth) 1092
Sixth Symphony 1083
Seventh Symphony 1092
Maimonides, Moses 732, 1128, 1241
Fuhrer der Unschlussigen (Guide of the
Perplexed) 732
Makart, Hans 378-9, 380, 703
Malthus, Rev. Thomas 467-9
Essay on the Principle of Population 468
Mandeville, Bernard de
Fable of the Bees ISO
Mandeville, Sir John Gean
d'Outremeuse) 7S3
Manet
Dejeuner sur l'herbe (The Picnic) 813,
814, 81S
Mani 8S4, 1II9, 1121, 1244-9, 1277, 1342
Mann, Heinrich 1163
Mann, Thomas xxiv, 1068
Der Tad in Venedig (Death in
Venice) III
Doktor Faustus 1004
Mantegna 70S
Manu
Book of Law 1222
Manuel 766, 768
Marc, Franz 794, 837
Marcellus (Pope) 213, 1079, 1086
Marchettus of Padua 1077
Mardon 1244, 1270
Marcuse, Herbert
xxvi
Marees 81S
Marlitt (Eugenie John) 351
Marlowe
Doctor Faustus 654, 1012, 1016, 1017,
1029
Martinov 10
Marx, Karl xxvii, xxviii, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,
10, 17, 125, 130, 131, 141, 146, 148,
150, 152 , 155-6, 163, 173-4, 199,
204, 2,08, 211, 232n, 240, 247,
249-86, 294, 44 2 , 468, 481, 483,
S14, 534, 546, 559, 560, 571, 573,
576, 578, 681, 582, 583, 584, 585,
600, 601, 604, 607, 612, 615, 618,
619, 619- 2 4 , 695, 813, 866, 874,
882, 884, 889, 892, 921, 932, 947,
969, 97 2-3, 1044, 1047, 1170, 1215,
1288, 1318, 1329, 1333, 13S4-76
Aus dem philosophischen NachlaB
(Posthumous Philosophical
Writings) 270, S12-3
Circular against H. Kriege 273, 1356
Das Kapital (Capital) 76, 261, 265-6,
278,' 620, 886, 970-1, 1359, 1361
Der 18. Brumaire des Louis Napoleon
(The Eighteenth Brumaire) 294
Differnz der demokritischen und
epikureischen Philosophie
(Distinction between Democritean
and Epicurean Philosophy) 2.63
Einleitung zur Kritik der Hegelschen
Rechtsphilosophie (Introduction to
the Critique- of Hegel's Philosophy
of Right) 265, 279, 281, 882, 1183,
13S8
Einleitung zur Kritik der politischen
Okonomie (Introduction to the
Critique of Political Economy) IS4
Elf Thesen liber Feuerbach (Eleven
Theses on Feuerbach) 199, 249-86,
1358
Kritik der Gothaer Programms
(Critique of the Gotha
Programme) 1369
Kritik der Hege1schen Staatsphilosophie
(Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of
State) 251
La misere de la philosophie (The
1410
Poverty of Philosophy) I47n, 570,

579
Letter to Engels (1859) II70n
Letter to Lassalle (1857) II70n
Letter to Ruge (1843) 155, 195, 251,
1363
Okonomisch-philosophische
Manuskripte (Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts) 251, 257,
281, 625-6
Zur Judenfrage (On the Jewish
Question) 53I
Marx/Engels
Die deutsche Ideologie (The German
Ideology) 250, 252, 258, 260, 264,
266, 278, 279, 280, 283-4, 920
Die Heilige Familie (The Holy
Family) 154, 250, 251, 252, 264,
271, 280, 569, 671, 691, 850, 1359
Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei
(The Communist Manifesto) 271,
282-3, 47 1, SIS, 566, 600, 1356
May, Karl xix
Mein Leben und Streben (My Life and
Strife) 352
Ma Y dan 1226
Medea and Jason (pantomime) 404
Mehring, Franz S5I, 575
Meinong 230
Meister Eckhart 61, 273, 292, 689, 857,
862, 954, 1141, 1274, 1299- 1300,
1301, 1302, 1340
Melanchthon, Philip n88
Loci Communes n88n
Memling 709
Mendel 458
Mendelssohn, Moses 604
Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Felix 1064
Menno Simons 512
Mercator 764
Mesmer 455, 632
Metshnikov 462
Metsu 796
Meyer, Eduard 723, n86
Geschichte des Altertums (History of
Antiquity) 1258
Meyerbeer 829, 830
Meyrink, Gustav 364-6
Der Golem (The Golem) 365
.,
Das grune Gesicht (The Green

Face) 365
Michelangelo Buonarroti 220, 744, 1169
Mill, John Stuart 618
Milton 314, 781
Mirabeau 991
Moeller van den Bruck
Drittes Reich (Third Reich)
Morike, Eduard 96, 686
Maler Nolten 96, 172, 321n, 996
Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag
(Mozart on the Way to
Prage) 321-2
Peregrina Lieder (Peregrina
Songs) 321, 331
Mohammed 708, 1134, 1186, 1275-8, 1282
Moisseyev 397
Moleschott, Jacob 1286
Der Kreislauf des Lebens (The Circuit
of Life) 1286n
Moliere
Dom Juan ou Ie Festin de Pierre (Don
Juan or the Feast of Stone) 1008,
1011
Molina, Tirso de
El Burlador de Sevilla (The Mocker of
Seville) 1008, 1029
Molitor
Philosophie der Geschichte oder uber
Tradition (Philosophy of History or
on Tradition) 1349
Mommsen 294, 1210
Montaigne 516, 657, 939
Montesquieu
Lettres persanes (Persian letters) 770
Monteverdi 1064
Apollo 829
Orfeo 828
Montezuma 523
More, Thomas 14, IS, 139, 437, 438, 475,
479, 480, 510 , 512, 515- 23, 525,
527, 528, 529, 530, 534, 537, 544,
545, 568, 585, 592, 617, 618, 744
Utopia 9 8, 457, 475, 476, 477, 479,
490, 515- 2.3, 638, 740
Morelly
Code de la Nature (Code of
Nature) 539
Moritz, Karl Philipp 160
Morris, William 551, 613-15, 617

News from Nowhere 613, 614
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 164. 316,
321, 390, 911, 1033, 1063, 1069,
1079, 1080, 1088, 1275
COS! fan tutti 829
La Clemenza di Tito 829
Don Giovanni 1004-11
Idomeneo 829
The Magic Flute 98, 127, 164, 181,
319, 322., 325, 327, 328, 329, 417,
628, 829, 1086, 1095
The Marriage of Figaro 240, 390,
417, 829, 1067, 1082
Muller, Friedrich (called Maler
Muller) 981
Life of Faust 977-8
Muller, Friedrich von (Chancellor) 998
Miinchhausen 437, 438, 631, 667, 748,
1025
Munzer, Thomas xxiii, xxx, 488, SII,
515, 608, 774, 1108, II71, II95, 1301,
1303, 1357, 1363
Ausgedriickte Entblossung des falschen
Glaubens (Expressed Exposure of
False Faith) 1256, 1301
Von dem gedichteten Glauben (On
fictional faith) 512
Mulford, Prentice
Your forces and how to use them 681
Mumford, Lewis
The Story of Utopias 523
Musaus
Der Schatzengraber (The Treasurehunter) 754
Musil, Robert 608
Mussolini 943", 945
N agarjuna 1251
Nagy, Imre xxv
Nansen
Farthest North 376
Napoleon 136n, 383, s65n, 991, 999,
1004, II67
Nathan of Gaza
A Treatise on Dragons 1269
N avigatio St Brendani 763
Nearch 488
Nebuchadnezzar t240
1411
Neefs, Peter 709

Nernirovitch-Dantshenko 42.1-2
Nero 68, 310, 500, 704, 72.9, 1118
Nestroy
Einen Jux Will Er Sich Machen (On
the Razzle) 441
Neumann, Balthasar 739
Neumann, K.
Die Reden Gotamo Buddhos (The
Speeches of Gautama Buddha) 678,
II40, 1141
Newcombe 660
Newton 460, 67 2, 784, 785, 843, 919,
1328, 1330
Opticks 687
Nicholas of Cusa 242, 526, 848, 849,
1019, 1340
Nicolai, Christoph Friedrich 1188, 1368
Nielsen, Asta 405, 407, 408
Niethammer 195
Nietzsche, Friedrich 58, 59, 68, 123, 204,
2II, 274, 615, 936, 937-8, 943,
949-51, 959, 1004, 1207
Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spake
Zarathustra) 398n, 936, 949, 950,
IIOI
Die Geburt der Tragodie (The Birth of
Tragedy) 1213
Menschliches- Allzumenschliches
(Human-All-Too-Human) 1164
Uber Wahrheit und Luge im
auBermoralischen Sinne (On Truth
and Lies in the Extra-moral
Sense) 133
Norling
Die kosmischen Zahlen der
Cheopspyramide (The Cosmic
N umbers of the Cheops
Pyramid) 72.3
Nollius
Theoria philosophiae hermeticae 645
Norden
Die Geburt des Kindes
(Childbirth) 112.4
Nostradamus 144
Novalis 160, 970, 1315, 1350
Die Christenheit oder Europa
(Christendom or Europe) 551
Heinrich von Ofterdingen 790n, 1315
1412
NJ\ME AND TITLE INDEX
Klingsor's Marchen (Klingsor's

fairytale) 995n
Numa Pompilius 717, II90, 1209, I2II
Offenbach 427, 439
Hoffmanns Erzahlungen (Tales of
Hoffmann) 426, 439, 631
La Perichole 797
Orpheus in der Unterwelt (Orpheus in
the Underworld) 830
Pariser Leben (Paris Life) 441
Olschki
Der Brief des Presbyters Johannes (The
Letter of Prester John) 770
Sacra doctrina e Theologia
mystica 882
Olsen, Regine 182
Oncken, Hermann 519
Oppert
Der Presiterkonig Johannes in
Geschichte und Sage (Prester John
in History and Legend) 768
Orcagna
Altar-piece in S. Maria Novella
Orfyreus (Professor Mystos) (Bessler) 632,
633, 647
Die acht verborgenen Kammern des
Naturgebaudes (The eight hidden
chambers of the edifice of
nature) 632
Origen 510, 1248
Ossian (see Macpherson)
Otto, Luise 591
Otto, Rudolf II94
Otto, W.
Die Gotter Griechenlandes (The Gods
of Greece) 1208
Ovid
Metamorphoses 1059-60, 1308
Tristia 9S9
Owen, Robert 476, 477, 480 , 528, S45,
S55-8, SS9, 560, 561, 563, 607, 618,
620,6S6
The Book of the New Moral
World SS6
The Social System SS6
Pacioli 728, 1348
Padma Sambhava 1139
Palestrina 832, 833, 834, 1064, 1096

Missa papae Marcelli 1079
Palmerston , Lord 60S
Panaitios 263, 491, 492Panofsky
Idea- 1348
Vortrage der Bibliothek Warburg
(Lectures of the Warburg
Institute) 743
Papin 6S9
Paracelsus 635-6, 640, 645, 648, 683- 6,
688, 7II, 784, 850, 857, 8S8, 8S9,
1348, 1351
Paragranum 64S, 684
Paramirum 684, 1348-9
Signatura rerum naturalium 643
Pareto 547
Parmenides 311, 840, 864
Pascal 6S3, 1356
Pataiijali 678
Pausanias 1204
Pavlov 48, 57, 469
Pavlova 396
Pepper 433
Perdigon, Luis 764
Peri 1064
Eurydice 828
Pericles 328, 1112
Perret 735
Peter I of Russia (Peter the Great) 991
Petrarch 89, 774
Petrus Hispanus 1075
Petrus Martyr SI6
Pfister
Kleine Texte zum Alexanderroman
(Minor Texts on the Alexander
Story) 767
Pfitzner
Palestrina 1079
Pherekydes 853
Philalethes 1025
Philipp of Vitry 1077
Ars nova 1075
Ars contrapuncti 107S
Philo 203. 609, 644, 1238
Odes of Solomon 644-5
Picasso 1347
Pico della Mirandola 652
Piero della Francesca 800
Pietro da Mora
Da rosa 822
Pindar 1214
Nemean Odes 757, 983
Piotrkowska, Karola (Karola Bloch) xxii
Piranesi 74 1, 74 2, 744
Vedute di Roma (Views of
Rome) 385
Pisano, Andrea 218, 334
Pissarev 10
Pistis Sophia II20
Pius IV (Pope) 833, 1079
Pius IX (Pope) 330
Pizarro 777
Plato 7, 8, 18, 62, 140, 160, 161-2, 168,
212, 256, 257, 269, 292, 305,
477-8, 480, 484- 8, 490, 491, 492,
493, 506, 512, 527, 553, 609, 757,
843, 845-7, 999, 1086, 1207, 1244,
1320, 1321, 1348, 1363
Critias 489, 654
Cratylus II70
Gorgias 243
Laws 486
Meno 283
Parmenides 292, 846
Phaedrus 845
Philebos 847, 1319
Protagoras 671, 1214
Republic 457, 484-8, 516, 523, 549,
1086
Symposium 155, 845
Timaeus 728
Plautus 939
Plekhanov 10
Pliny 753, 767
Plotinus 62, 211, 491, 840, II41
Enneads 1214
Plutarch 464, 773, 1163
De defectu oraculorum 764
De EI apud Delphos 1236
De facie in orbe lunae 764
De fortuna Alexandri 492
De lsi et Osiri 723
Poe, Edgar Allan 392
The Fall of the House of Usher 392
The Gold Bug 357
Poppelmann, M. D.
Poincare 667
706n
1413
Polo, Marco 752, 762, 767, 771, 772,

778
Polybius 492
Pomponius Mela 753, 761
Ponce de Le6n 777
Pontoppidan
Hans im Gluck (Lucky Jack) 1001
Pope, Alexander 389
Mensch und Tier (Man and
Animal) 1187
Poseidonios 491, 494
Poussin 389
Powel 433
Presbyter Leo
Nativitas et victoria Alexandri
Magni 767
Proclos Ill8
Prodikos 948
Proudhon 569-72, 575, 576, 579, 580,
581, 617, 620
De la Justice dans la Revolution et dans

L'Eglise (On Justice in Revolution
and in the Church) 571
Idee generale de la revolution (General
Idea of the Revolution) 571-2
La Philosophie de la Misere (The
Philosophy of Poverty) 147n,
571-2
Qu'est-ce que propriete? (What is

property?) 570
Pseudo-Justinus 1087
Pseudo-Kallisthenes
Biography of Alexander 760, 767
Ptolemy 772,1077
Pudovkin
Storm over Asia 411
Pufendorf 546, 873
Purcell
Dido and Aeneas 828
Pushkin 136
Pythagoras 165, 1348, 1350-1
Pytheas 772
Quesnay
Tableau economique (Economic
Tableau) 620
Rabelais 81, 1104
Gargantua and Pantagruel 437
Racine 546
I phigenie 211
Rameses II II24
Raphael 1347
School of Athens 709
Sistine Madonna 836-7, 1310
Rasputin 630
Rawley, William 654n
Reich, Wilhelm 633
Reichenbach
Physikalisch-physiologische
Untersuchungen
(physical-physiological
investigations) 633
Reinach, Salomon II28
Reinhardt, Max 621
Reitzenstein
Das iranische Erlosungsmysterium (The
Iranian Mystery of the
Redemption) 1240
Das mandaische Buch des Herrn der
GroBe (The Mandaean Book of the
Lord of Greatness) 1245
Rembrandt 800-2, 999
Entombment of Christ 801
Man with the Golden Helmet 800
Night Watch 801
Resurrection 802
River Landscape with Ruins 801
Saskia 800
Renard, Maurice
Docteur Lerne 439
Retif de la Bretonne
La decouverte australe par un homme
volant (Australia discovered by a
lying man) 779
Reubeni, David 600
Reuchlin 1349
Reuleaux 662
Reventlov, Franziska 66, 467
Ricardo 545, 557, S80, 621, 1329
Richard of St Victor 1299, 1302
Richardson, Samuel 151
Richelieu 52.4
Richter
Literary Works of Leonardo da
Vinci 649
Rienzo 774
Rilke, Rainer Maria 959, 1202, 1290
Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies) 990n

Robespierre 933, 1010
Rodbertus 555, 620
Roland, Madame 933
Rolin, Chancellor 799
Rosenberg
Mythos des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts
(Myth of the Twentieth
Century) 584
Rosenkranz
Psychologie 125
Rousseau 68, 389, 535, 537-40 , 541 , 546,
549, 597, 816, 873, 915, 951, 976
Confessions 92
Contrat social (Social contract) 527,
537-40
Emile 538, 539
Ruben
Geschichte der indischen Philosophie
(History of Indian Philosophy) 676
Rubens 1099
Garden of Love 798
Ruckert 928
Ruge xxviii, ISS, 195, 251, 1363
Ruskin 551, 613-14, 615, 617, 915
Russell, Bertrand 668, 697
Rutherford 663
Fluysbroek 1300
Sabbatai Zewi 328, 600, n85, 1269
Sacco, Nicola II73
Sachs, Hans 1083, 1085
St Boniface 1274-5
St Brendan 763-4, 76S, 766, 77 2 , 788
St Germain, Count 4SS, 460
St Jerome 767
Saint-Pierre, Bernadin de
Chaumiere indienne (The Indian
Hut) 816
Paul et Virginie 816
Saint-Saens 398
Saint-Simon 474, 476-7, 479, 480 , 528,
545, 55!, 56 0 , 563-8, 576, 577, 578,
616,970
Nouveau Christianisme (New
Christianity) 567
Reorganisation de la societe europeenne
(Reorganization of European
society) 564
Systeme industriel (Industrial

System) 477, 567
Salin, Edgar 468
Salisbury, Lord 60S
Sallust 373n
Salzmann 998
Sand, George,
592
Le meunier d' Angibault (The Miller of
Angibault) 591
Sandschar 769
Sapor I 1244
Sartre 433, 674, 1366
L'etre et Ie Neant (Being and
Nothingness) 433
Satie, Eric
People Dining on the Terrace of the
Hall at the Spa 1081
Sauer, Josef
Symbolik des Kirchengebaudes (The
Symbolism of the ChurchBuilding) 725
Scaliger, Julius Caesar 794, 812, 1215
Poetics 812
Scamozzi 741
Scarlatti 829
Cat Fugue 1073
Theodora 828
Scheeben
Die Mysterien des Christentums (The
Mysteries of Christianity) 1131
Scheerbart 474, 736, 737
Scheffel, Joseph Victor von
Ekkehard 37;, 379
Scheler 74, 748, 1327
Schelling xxviii, 190, 192, 194, 672, 688,
689-90, 860-1, 1021, 1169-70,
1215-6, 1342
Philosophie der Kunst (Philosophy of
Ar~ 699, 1049, 107 8
Philo sophie der Offenbarung
(Philosophy of Revelation) 1104
Philo sophie und Religion 192
Vorlesungen uber die Methode des akademischen Studiums (Lectures on the
Method of Academic Study) 1019-20
Scher, Peter 369
Schiller, Friedrich 67, 211, 215, 417,
420-1, 423-4, 4 29, 430, 431, 540,
625, 670, 918-19 , 932, 94 8, 951, 974,
988, 1000, 1067, 1086, 1175, 1317

An die Freude (Ode to Joy) 92n, 158,
1293
Das Lied von der Glocke (The Song of
the Bell) 625, 670
Demetrius 427
Die Jungfrau von Orleans (The Maid
of Orleans) 407
Die Piccolomini 562n
Die Rauber (The Robbers) 91n, 144,
200n, 368, 4 26, 454, 978, 1017
Die Schaubiihne als eine moralische
Anstalt betrachtet (The Theatre
regarded as a Moral
Institution) 423
Das verschleierte Bild zu Sais (The
Veiled Image at Sais) 838
Don Carlos 144, 1044, 1051, 1320
Fiesco 416, 544, 933
Kabale und Liebe (Cabal and
Love) 425, 501
Kallias letters (to Komer) 810
Letter to Goethe (August 1794) U63
Maria Stuart 318, 427
Spaziergang (The Walk) 1019, 1020
Turandot 318
Ober den Grund des Vergnugens an
tragischen Gegenstanden (On the
Reason for Pleasure in Tragic
Objects) 429
Dber die asthetische Erziehung des
Menschen (On the Aesthetic
Education of M~n) 97
Ober die tragische Kunst (On the Art
of Tragedy) 429
Uber naive und sentimentalische
Dichtung (On naive and sentimental poetry) 918, 1034, 1051, 1053
Wallenstein 420, u69
Wilhelm Tell (William Tell) 425,
427, 544
Xenien 231, 94 8n
Schlegel, A. W. 1030
Schlegel, Friedrich 390, 907
Schleiermacher 420, 1188
Schmidt von Lubeck G. P.
Des Fremdlings Abendlied
(The Stranger's Evening
Song) 180n
1416
Schmieder
Geschichte der Alchymie (History of
Alchemy) 643
Schnaase 715
Schnabel, Johann Gottfried
Insel Felsenburg (The Isle of
Felsenburg) 474
Schonberg 1089-91
Erwartung (Expectation) 1090
Harmonielehre (Theory of
Harmony) 1090
First string quartet 191
First chamber symphony 1091
Second chamber symphony 1091
Three piano pieces 1091
Wind quintet 1091
Scholem
The Major Trends in Jewish
Mysticism 1269
Schopenhauer, Arthur 58, 59, 126, 169,
274, 793, 808, 998, 1084-5, 1177,
12S3, 1337, 1344
Schubert, Franz 180n
Schubert, G. H.
Die Geschichte der Seele (The Story of
the Soul) 1000
Schultz, Fiete 1173
Schultz-Hencke 587
Schumann 1093
Schweizer, Albert
J. S. Bach 1065-6
Scipio the Younger 263, 49 2, 971
Scott, Howard 898
Seer of Prevost 143
Seghers, Anna
Das siebte Kreuz (The Seventh
Cross) 1103
Selmer, C.
764
Semon 60
Semper 715
Seneca 491
Medea 438, 773, 774, 1026
Sens, Bishop of 702
Sent M'ahesa 397
Serubabel 1263
Sesostris III 1124
Seurat
Un dimanche la Grande-jatte (A Sunday
on the Grande-Jatte) 814, 909, 920
Shaftesbury 812, 919, 9SI, 1215

Shakespeare 184, 213, 418, 419, 421, 422,
4 28, 430, 440, 518, 983, 98S-9,
1000, 1027-33, 1069, 1073, 1162,
1343
Anthony and Cleopatra 160
A Midsummer Night's Dream 393,
986, 1031
Cymbeline 1030
Hamlet 332, 416, 420, 422, 427-8,
1027- 32
King Lear 419, 459, II67
Macbeth 134, 4 19
Othello 416
Richard the Third 428, 868, 103P,
1170
Romeo and Juliet 422
The Merchant of Venice 427, 1077
The Merry Wives of Windsor 1032
The Tempest 986-9, 1029-33
The Winter's Tale 332, 1030
Troilus and Cressida 986
Shaw, George Bernard 1107 )
Shelley, Percy Bysshe 136, 933, 1317, 1318
Prometheus Unbound 372, 12IS
Shi-ching 1221
Shu-ching (Book of Documents) 1221,
1223
Sickingen, Franz von 1170
Sidorov 741
Sigwart
Logik 242
Simmel, Georg xx, xxi, 668, 682-3
Fragmente und Aufsatze (Fragments
and Essays) 683
Simonides 839
Simplikios 877
Sinclair, Upton 3S0
Sismondi S4S, S80
Smith, Adam lSI, 5S2, 948, 964, 1329
Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of
the Wealth of Nations S44
Smith, Joseph 7S4, 1186
The Book of Mormon II8S
Smyth, Piazzi 722.-3
Our Inheritance in the Great
Pyramid 723
On the Reputed Metrological
System of the Great
Pyramid 723
Socrates 168, 190, 269, 48S, S29, S30,
S32., 842, 844, 867- 9, 9S0, 132.S,
1326, 1364
Sohar (Book o~ 1135, 1269

Solon 460, 481, 839
Sombart 1335-6
Die Technik im Zeitalter des
Friihkapitalismus (Technology in
the Early Capitalist Age) 647
Song of Roland 1027, 1036
Sophocles 160
Antigone 416, 1171
Elektra 160
Oedipus at Colonus 12.13
Oedipus the King 1213
Sorel, Georges 683, 942-6
Reflexions sur la violence (Reflections
on violence) 943, 944
Southcott, Johanna n84
Spartacus 1171
Spedding, James 6Sln, 6S4n, 6ssn, 6S7n,
121sn
Speiser 13SI,
Spencer, Herbert 894
Spengler 584, 730, 942, 1160
Der Untergang des Abendlandes
(The Decline of the W est) 376,
1360
Sperber
Traktat von den drei seculis (Treatise
on the three seculis) 645, 1079
Sphairos 495
Spinoza, Benedict 67, 72, 212, 234, 243,
2.44, 2S7, 311, 740, 793, 846,
8so-3, 8S9, 861, 864, 9S5, 993,
1148, 1328
7 2, ISS, 243, 8S1-3, 884, 1195,
132.8
Ethics
On the Improvement of the

Intellect 8so
Theological-political Treatise
Spitta
J. S. Bach 1065
Spitteler
Imago 323-4
Spontini 829
Spranger, Eduard 1364
Stalin 547
BS3
Economic Problems of Socialism in the

USSR 669
Stamitz 1092, 1093
Stangen, Louis 375
Stanislavsky 420, 421
Stein, Charlotte von 387
Stein, Karl Freiherr von 541
Stein, Lorenz von 564
Steinach 461
Steinbach, Erwin von 717
Steiner, Rudolf IIB6-8
Stendhal
De l'amour (On love) 179
Sternberger
Panorama 410
Stevenson, R. L.
Treasure Island 353, 357
Stieglitz 71S
Stimer, Max (Johann Kaspar
Schmidt) 252, 279, 568-9, 572,
1004
Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (The

Lone Individual and his
Property) 271, 569
Stockl
Geschichte der Philosophie des
Mittelalters (History of the
Philosophy of the Middle
Ages) 652
Stolberg, F. 1343
Storm Theodor
Viola Tricolor 332
Strachey, James xxix,
S4n, 62.n
Strato 207, 8so Strauss, David Friedrich 9II
Strauss, Richard 1068
Die agyptische Helena (The Egyptian
Helen) IB4-5
Don Juan 1093
Don Quixote 1083
Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life) s96,
1093
Frau ohne Schatten (Woman without a

Shadow) 1067
Sinfonia domestica 109S
Stravinsky 1090
Stritt, Marie 590, S91
Stritzky, Elsa von (see Elsa Bloch)
Suarez, Andre 1047
Suetonius 729
Sulla 947, 1003, 1211
Surajah Dowlah 891
Susman, Margarete xxi
Suttner, Berta von
Die Waffen nieder (Lay Down your
Arms) 895
Swedenborg 630
Swesen
Limanora, The Island of Progress 457
Swift, Jonathan
A Modest Proposal 888
Tacitus
Annals 72n
Germania 779, 783
Talmud 604, 1128, 1134
Tarde
Underground Man 612
Tasso
Aminta 804
Liberated Jerusalem 1135
Tausend, Franz 633-4
Taut, Bruno 737, 742
Die Stadtkrone (The City
Crown) 736
Tchaikovsky 1068
Telesphorus 511
Teniers 813
Teresa de Jesus 1300
Tertullian 504, 1194, 1214-15, 1272
Thales 18, 67 2, 840, 849
Theocritus 803, 1174-5
Theodoros 489
Theophrastus 757
Theopompos 488
The Suit of Leaves (Chinese
Fairytale( 628
Thirion
Neustria 612
Tholuck, Friedrich August Gotttreu
Suufismus (Sufism) 1278
Thomas a Kempis
The Imitation of Christ 1260
Thomasius 976
Fundamentum juris naturae et
gentium 543
Thomas of Celano
Dies irae I067n, 1I00n, 1127, 1132
Thorndike
A History of Magic and Experimental
Science 754, 767
Tibetan Book of the Dead II39-40
Tieck, Ludwig 1041
Der Runenberg (The Rune
Mountain) 1350
Tiepolo 704, 710
Tillich, Paul xxxii
Timotheus 1081
Tintoretto 744
Titian 379, 778
Tito xxv
Tobin 433
Tocqueville 967, 968
De la democratie en Amerique (On
democracy in America) 967
Toland, John
Pantheisticon 568
Tolstoy 213, U81, 1322
Anna Karenina 302, U81, 1322
Death of Ivan Illyich 240, 302
Kreutzer Sonata 322
War and Peace 240, 302, 917, 1181,
1322, 1323-4
Torah xxv, 1128, 1241

Torre, Dona Juana de la 776
Toynbee
Civilization on Trial 1361
Trepte
Leben und Werk Stanislawskijs (Life
and Work of Stanislavsky) 420
Trois Cousines (Three Cousins) 797
Trotsky 426
Turgenev
Hamlet and Don Quixote 1048
Tyndall, John 237
Uhland
Friihlingsglauben (Spring Faith)
Ulbricht, Walter xxv
Upanishads 1137, 1250, 1251, 1252
Urfaust (see Historia)
Usener
Gotternamen (Names of the
Gods) 1210
Valturio 648
Van Gogh 125
224
Vanzetti, Bartolomeo 1173

Varro, M. Terentius 6
Liberated Prometheus 439
Odysseus and a half 1025
Vasari, Giorgio 220, 728, 1347
Vasari i1 Giovane 741
Vasco da Gama 772
Vauhan 524
Vayrasse
L'Histoire des Severambes 544
Vedas 1250-1
Rigveda 1250
Velde, Henri van der
Ruskin 613-14
Velde, Theodoor H. van de
Ideal Marriage 350
Venus de Milo 386
Verdi 998, 1099-1100
Aida 830
Othello 419, 830
Requiem 1067, 1100
Vermeer 796
Verne, Jules 474, 659, 753
Around the World in Eighty
Days 629
Veronese, Paolo 710
Feast in the House of Levi 710
Verweyen 241
Vespucci, Amerigo 516
Viera 76S
Vignola 728
Villiers de L'Ile Adam
L'Eve future (The future Eve) 439
Virgil 1214
Fourth Eclogue 1257
Georgics 759
Vischer, F. Th. II63
Vitruvius 699, 701, 728-9, 736
De architectura 728-9
Vivaldi of Genoa 1026
VoBler
Einfiihrung in die spanische Dichtung
(Introduction to Spanish
Poetry) 1034
Voltaire 17, 39, 390, SI7, 1275, 1286, 1331
Voronoff 461
Voss
Luise 803
Vries, Vredeman de 709
Wagner, Adolf 468

Wagner, Richard 319, 420, 829-31,
1057, 1063, 1067-9, 1083-5,
1344
Die Meistersinger von Niirnberg
319, 322, 831, 1067, 1083, 1085,
1095
Flying Dutchman 319, 831, 1083
Lohengrin 319, 1083
Parsifal 995", 1084, 1I35
Rienzi 830
Ring des Nibelungen 86, 420, 830,
1067, 1083, 1093; Das Rheingold
830, 1083; Die Walkiire 830, 1068,
1083, 108S; Siegfried 830, 1083,
1084; Gotterdammerung 831, 1084,
1085, 1098
Tannhauser 830, 1087
Tristan and Isolde 51n, 830, 1069
Wallenstein 1167
Walpole, Horace
Castle of Otranto 391
Warren, Josia 572
Washington, George 565
Watt, James 660
Watteau
Embarkation for Cythera 797-8
Webb, Sidney 941
Weber, Carl Maria von 829
Der Freischiitz 1083
Weber, Marianne xxi
Weber, Max xxi
Gesammelte Aufsatze zur
Religionssoziologie (Collected
Essays on the Sociology of
Religion) 1240
Wedekind, Frank
Franziska 593
Friihlings Erwachen (Spring
Awakening) 1106
Weill, Kurt xxiii
Weininger 594
Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and
Character) S93-4
WeiBe, Christian 1071
Weitling 499, 575-8
Die Menschheit wie sie ist, und wie sie
sein sollte (Mankind as it is, and
how it ought to be) 576
1420
Evangelium des armen Sunders (Gospel

of the poor sinner) 577
Garantien der Harmonie und Freiheit
(Guarantees of Harmony and
Freedom) 576, 577
Welcker 1363
Wellhausen
Israelitische und judische Geschichte
(Israelite and Jewish History) 1232
Welling
Opus mago-cabalisticum 642
Wells, H. G. 584, 617
Men like Gods 617
Mr Britling Sees It Through 611
The Time Machine 439-40, 617
Welsch 739
Werner, Anton von 409
Welsch 739
Weyl, Herm.
Philosophie der Mathematik und
Naturwissenschaft (Philosophy of
Mathematics and Natural
Science) 664
Whitehead 1362
Whitman, Walt 561
Leaves of Grass 1104
Wieland, Christoph 803, 948
Wiener, Norbert
Cybemetics 653
Wigman, Mary 398, 399
Wilamowitz 493
Wilde, Oscar 479
Wilhelm I 942n
Wilhelm II 606. 890
Wilhelm, Richard
Tao te King 1229
William of Occam 269
Williams, Roger 517
Wilson, Thomas Woodrow 584
Winckelmann 377, 385, 803, lOSS
Winstanley 5S7
Wolfe. Thomas
You Can't Go Home Again
Wolff, Christian 212, 873
Wolfram von Eschenbach 218
Parzival 218n
Titurel 707
Wollstonecraft, Mary S91
Wright, Frank Lloyd 735
Wyneken S88
1370
Xenophanes 1207
Xenophon 483, 948
Xerxes 34, 49
Yang Chu 1349
Yeats 1183
Yeliutaschi 769-70
Young
Night Thoughts 835, II48
Zeising
Asthetische Forschungen (Aesthetic
Investigations) 728
Zeller
Sitzungsbericht der Berliner Akademie
1882 (Report of the Berlin
Academy) 243
Zendavesta 1242, 1244 , 1247
Zeno (Eleatic) 130, 243
Zeno (Stoic) 491, 49 2, 493, 494
Politeia 492, 493, 495
Zimmer
Indische Spharen (Indian Spheres) 677
Zimmermann, Johann
Ober die Einsamkeit (On
Solitude) 960
Zoroaster 1191, 1203, 12.32., 12.38, 1240,
1242.-9, 12.60, 1270, 127 1, 12.72,
1277, 13II
The Gathas 1242
Zoser (Pharaoh) 1216

Bloch - The Principle of Hope 3

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Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought

Thomas McCarthy, General Editor

The MIT Press

Written in the USA 1938-1947

Library of Congress Caealcging-In-Publicarion Data

WISHFUL IMAGES OF THE FULFILLED MOMENT

43- NOT STRAIGHT WITH ONESELF

44. HOME AND SCHOOL GUIDE THE WAY

45- GUIDING IMAGES THEMSELVES, TO BECOME LIKE PROPER

46. GUIDING PANELS OF DANGEROUS AND HAPPY LIFE

47. GUIDING PANELS OF WILL TEMPI AND OF

48. YOUNG GOETHE, NON-RENUNCIATION, ARIEL

of sublimity, Faust Gothic and metamorphosis 980 Ariel and poetic

VENTURING BEYOND THE LIMITS, ILLUSTRATED BY THE

52. SELF AND GRAVE-LAMP OR IMAGES OF HOPE AGAINST THE

heaven, the wishful image of nirvana 1136

Cassandra and Isaiah 1280 God as utopian hypostatized ideal of the

54. THE LAST WISHFUL CONTENT AND THE HIGHEST GOOD

Glossary of Foreign Terms

Name and Title Index

WISHFUL IMAGES OF THE FULFILLED MOMENT

NOT STRAIGHT WITH ONESELF

Go where you will.

From early on we want to get to ourselves. But we do not know who

WISHFUL IMAGES OF THE FULFILLED MOMENT

HOME AND SCHOOL GUIDE THE WAY

The boy is -going to be someone, to be made into something. The young

by Hans Fallada (1893-1947).

HOME AND SCHOOL GUIDE THE WAY

WISHFUL IMAGES OF THE FULFILLED MOMENT

GUIDING IMAGES THEMSELVES, TO BECOME

WISHFUL IMAGES OF THE FULFILLED MOMENT

Thus guiding images as images of attitude do not stand in the merely

of the bourgeois has occurred - pessimistic in Holderlin and finally in

WISHFUL IMAGES OF THE FULFILLED MOMENT

GUIDING PANELS OF DANGEROUS AND

On the saddle the bride before you.

Much still open

Too warmly dressed

GUIDING PANELS OF DANGEROUS AND HAPPY LIFE

WISHFUL IMAGES OF THE FULFILLED MOMENT

GUIDING PANELS OF DANGEROUS AND HAPPY LIFE

French happiness and joy

WISHFUL IMAGES OF THE FULFILLED MOMENT

WILL TEMPI, CONTEMPLATION. SOLITUDE

GUIDING PANELS OF WILL TEMPI AND

WISHFUL IMAGES OF THE FULFILLED MOMENT

Fabius or the hesitant man of action

WILL TEMPI, CONTEMPLATION, SOLITUDE

creeping revolutionary movement or the upheaval which leaves everything

WISHFUL IMAGES OF THE FULFILLED MOMENT

Sorel, Machiavelli or energy and the wheel offortune

WILL TEMPI. CONTEMfLATION. SOLITUDE

WISHFUL IMAGES OF THE FULFILLED MOMENT

WILL TEMPI. CONTEMPLATION, SOLITUDE

WISHFUL IMAGES OF THE FULFILLED MOMENT

WILL TEMPI, CONTEMPLATION, SOLITUDE

WISHFUL IMAGES OF THE FULFILLED MOMENT

Problem of breaking, Hercules at the crossroads, Dionysus-Apollo

WILL TEMPI. CONTEMPLATION. SOLITUDE

"There are two souls, alas! within my breast.'

WISHFUL IMAGES OF THE FULFILLED MOMENT

WISHFUL IMAGES OF THE FULFILLED MOMENT

'For now we see through a glass darkly;' 1 Corinthians 13, 12.