The Crucial Epoch in Schopehauer's Life by R. J. Hollingdale

 

Schopenhauer’s schooling was sporadic but in 1797, aged nine, he was taken off to Paris and then Le Havre, where he stayed for two years with a French family. In 1799 he came back, not to Danzig but to Hamburg, and for three years attended a private school for ‘the sons of the wealthier classes.’ During these years the maternal component of his make-up began to become active and he developed a strong inclination towards literature which at length dominated him and led him to declare his intention of following a literary career when he grew up. It is clear that neither he nor his father had any precise notion of what this meant, but his father did know that at any rate it did not sound compatible with the running of the house of Schopenhauer as it ought to be run. He therefore offered the boy an alternative: he could either persist in wanting a ‘literary career’, in which case he would have to begin regular studies in Hamburg of literature, Latin and other dull subjects; or he could agree to settle down to a mercantile career, in which case he could leave immediately on a long tour of France and England so as to see something of the world first.

 

 Arthur was 15 and he chose the latter alternative. Presumably his father knew he would. They all left for a trip that was to last two years (1803-5), and when they returned to Hamburg in January 18054, Arthur was put into the office of a merchant named Jenisch, as a clerk.

This is now the crucial epoch of his life. In April his father dies; the death leaves him feeling more rather than less bound to fulfill his promise to become merchant. But the house of Schopenhauer is sold up, his mother and sister leave for Weimar, and he is left in the office of Jensch. And now despair begins to enter his soul. He hates the work of clerk, and has now come to hate the whole mercantile world; at the same time his very modest education has fitted him for little else. When he is 21 he will get his share of the paternal fortune, assuming his mother has not spent it by then – but as yet he is only 17, and at 17 four years are an unimaginable eternity. In short, Jenisch’s office becomes Schopenhauer’s blacking factory – with this difference, that Dicken’s experience was that of a little boy unable to analyze his situation and was now fortunately rare, while Schopenhauer’s is so ordinary as to be called as perhaps the common lot of middle-class youth. The capitalist world, and in particular the heart of it, the world of buying and selling, offers almost nothing a young man wants: the instincts of youth are at variance with the demands of business. And especially with those of clerking. What young man is by nature diligent, sober and regular in his habits?  Respectful to ‘superiors’ and humble before wealth? Sincerely able to devote himself to what he finds boring? One in ten thousand, perhaps. But for the great majority a ‘job’ is, depending on temperament, a torment or a tedious irrelevance which has to be endured day after day in order that, during one’s so-called ‘free time, one will be allowed to get on with living. This situation is the most commonplace in the world. I believe it is the cause of that settled cynicism with which nine out of ten regard as the ‘social order’: they know that short of a total revolution in the conduct of human affairs, any conceivable social order will for the great majority mean the boredom of routine, the damming up of their natural energies and the frustration of their natural desires. This familiar feeling was what now overcame Schopenhauer: the feeling which appears when life, hitherto apparently capable of granting anything is suddenly revealed as a deception, when the color is drained from it and the whole future seems a single grey. The essence is in the question: Is this all? Is this life? The intensity with which the question is asked must of course vary; but when we consider that Schopenhauer was in fact a man of genius, we shall not be surprised to discover that in him its intensity was very great. He himself tells us that, when in the spring of 1807 his mother wrote to him from Weimar that now two years had elapsed he could if he wished regard his promise to his late father as fulfilled and change his mode of life, he ‘burst into tars of joy and left Jenisch’s office at once. And my contention is that the attitude towards life produced by these two years and more of office misery became, as did everything he felt, a permanent and irremovable part of his make-up; became, in fact, his permanent attitude towards life. What he as yet is a mode of expressing it, but as soon as he is introduced to a suitable mode he seizes it instantly and employs it to the limit of its capacity.

 

 

Menuet by Jonathan Littell

 

But in any case, despite the interdiction, the promises of secrecy and Globocnik’s* threats, the men of the Einsatz remained talkative. You just had to wear an SS uniform and frequent the bar in the Deutsches Haus, occasionally buying someone a drink, to be quickly informed of everything. The obvious discouragement caused by the military news, clearly decipherable through the optimism radiating from the communiques, contributed to loosening people’s tongues. When they proclaimed that in Sicily our courageous Italian allies, backed by our forces are holding firm, everyone understood that the enemy had not been driven back into the sea, and had finally opened a second front in Europe; as for Kursk , anxiety increased as the days passed, for the Wehrmacht, after its initial success, remained obstinately, unusually silent: and when finally they began to mention the planned implementation of elastic tactics around Orel, even the most obtuse must have understood something was wrong. There were many who ruminated over these developments; and among the loudmouths who ranted every night, it was never hard to find a man drinking alone and in silence, and to engage him in conversation. That’s how one day I began talking with a man in an Untersturmfuhrer’s uniform, leaning on the bar in front of a tankard of beer.

Döll- that was his name- seemed flattered that a superior officer would treat him so familiarly, yet he must have been ten years older than me. He pointed to my ‘Order of the Frozen Meat’ and asked me where I had spent the winter; when I answered Kharkov, he relaxed even further.
‘Me too, I was there, between Kharkov and Kursk. Special Operations.’ ‘You weren’t with the Einsatzgruppe, though? ‘No, it was something else. Actually, I’m not in the SS.’ He was one of those famous functionaries from the Führer’s Chancellery. ‘Between us, we say T-four. That’s how it’s called.’ ‘And what were you doing around Kharkov?  ‘You know, I was in Sonnenstein, one of the centers for the sick there.’ - I motioned with my head to show I knew what he meant, and he went on. ‘In the summer of forty-one, they closed it. And some of us, were considered specialists, they wanted to keep us, so they sent us to Russia. There was a whole delegation of us, it was Oberdienstleiter Brack* himself who led us, there were doctors from the hospital, everything, and we carried out special actions. With gas trucks. We each had a special notice in our pay books, a red piece of paper signed by the OKW, that forbade us being sent too close to the front: they were afraid we’d fall into the hands of the Russians’ –

 

 ‘I don’t really understand. The special measures, in that region, all the SP measures, those were the responsibility of my Kommando. You say that you had gas trucks, but how could you be carrying out the same tasks us without our knowing it?’

 

His face took on a belligerent, almost cynical look: ‘We weren’t carrying out the same tasks. The Jews or the Bolsheviks, over there, we didn’t touch them.’ –

 

 ‘So?’ He hesitated and drank some more in long draughts, then wiped the foam from his lips with the back of his fingers. ‘We took care of the wounded.’ –

‘Russian wounded?’-

‘You don’t understand. Our own wounded. The ones who were too messed up to have a useful life were sent to us.’

 I understood and he smiled when he saw: he had produced his effect. I turned to the bar and ordered another round.

 ‘You’re talking about the German wounded, ‘I finally said, softly.

 

‘As I told you. A real shit pile. Guys like me and you, who had given everything for the Heimat*, and bang! That’s how they were thanked. I can tell you; I was happy when they sent me here. It’s not very cheerful here, either, but at least it’s not that.’ Our drinks arrived. He told me about his youth: he had gone to a technical school; he wanted to be a farmer, but with the crisis he joined the police: ‘My children were hungry, it was the only way to be sure I could put food on the table every day.’ At the end of 1939, he had been assigned to Sonnenstein for the Euthanasia Einsatz. He didn’t know how he had been chosen. ‘On the one hand, it wasn’t very pleasant. But on the other, it wasn’t the front, and the pay was good, my wife was happy. So, I didn’t say anything.’ – ‘And Sobibor?’ He had already told me that’s where he worked now. He shrugged his shoulders: ‘Sobibor? It’s like everything, you get used to it.’ He made a strange gesture. Which made a strong impression on me: with the tip of his boot, he scraped the floor, as if he were crushing something. ‘Little men and little women, it’s all the same. It’s like stepping on a cockroach.’

 

   There was a lot of talk, after the war, in trying to explain what had happened, about inhumanity. But I am sorry, there is no such thing as inhumanity. There is only humanity and more humanity: and that Döll is a good example. What else was he, Döll, but a good family man who wanted to feed his children, and who obeyed his government, even though in his innermost being he didn’t entirely agree? If he had been born in France or America, he’d have been called a pillar of society and a patriot; but he was born in Germany, and so he is a criminal. Necessity, as the Greeks knew already, is not only a blind goddess, but a cruel one too. Not that there was any lack of criminals at the time. All of Lubin, as I’ve tried to show, was steeped in a sleazy atmosphere of corruption and excess; the Einsatz, but also colonization and exploitation of that isolated region, made more than one person lose his head. Since my friend Voss’s remarks about this, I have thought about the difference between German colonialism, as it was practiced in the East during those years, and the colonialism of the British and the French, in principle more civilized. There are, as Voss stressed, objective facts: after the loss of its colonies in 1919, Germany had to recall its cadres and close its colonial administration; the training institutes remained open in principle, but didn’t attract any one, because of the lack of prospects; twenty years later, a whole specialized field of knowledge had been lost. That being the case, National Socialism had given impetus to an entire generation, full of new ideas and greedy for new experiences, which, as regards colonization, were perhaps just as valid as the old ones. As for the excesses – the aberrant outbursts like those you would see in the Deutsches Haus or, more systematically, the seeming incapability of our administrators to treat colonized peoples, some of whom would have been ready to serve us willingly if we had left the door open, other than with violence and contempt – one shouldn’t forget, either, that our colonialism, even in Africa, was a young phenomenon, and that the others, in the beginning, scarcely did any better; just consider the Belgian exterminations in the Congo, and their policy of systematic mutilation, or else the American policy, precursor of and model for our own, of the creation of living space through murder and forced displacement – America, we tend forget, was anything but a ‘virgin territory,’  but the Americans succeeded where we failed, which makes all the difference. Even the British, so often cited as an example, and whom Voss so admired. Needed the trauma of 1858 to begin to develop more sophisticated tools of control; and if, little by little, they learned to play a virtuoso game of carrot-and-stick, we shouldn’t forget that the stick was far from neglected, as one can see from the Amritsar Massacre*, the bombing of Kabul, and other examples, many and forgotten.

 

But now I’ve strayed from my first reflections. What I wanted to say is that if a man is certainly not, as some poets and philosophers have made him out to be, naturally good, he is not naturally evil, either; good and evil are categories that can serve to qualify the effect of the actions of one man or another; but they are, in my opinion, fundamentally unsuitable, even unusable, to judge what goes on in the heart of that man. Döll killed people or had them killed, so he’s Evil; but within himself, he was a good man to those close to him, indifferent to all others, and what’s more, one who respected the law. What more do we ask of the individual in our civilized, democratic cities? How many philanthropists, throughout the world, made famous by their extravagant generosity are, on the contrary, monsters of egotism and harshness. Greedy for public glory, full of vanity, tyrannical towards those close to them? Every man wants to satisfy his own needs and remains indifferent to the needs of others. And in order for men to be able to live together, avoiding the Hobbesian state of ‘all against all’ and, on the contrary, to be able, thanks to mutual aid and the increased productivity that stems from it, to satisfy a greater portion of their desires, you need a regulatory authority, which prescribes limits to these desires and arbitrates conflicts: this mechanism is the Law. But it is also necessary for men, egotistical and weak, to accept the restraint of the Law. And so, this Law must refer to an authority outside of man, must be founded on a power that man feels is superior to himself. As I had suggest to Eichmann during our dinner, this supreme and imaginary reference point was for a long time the idea of God; from that invisible, omnipotent God, it shifted to the physical presence of the king, sovereign by divine right; and when the king lost his heads, sovereignty passed to the people or to the Nation, and was based on a fictive ‘contract,’ without any historical or biological foundation and thus just as abstract as the idea of God.  German National Socialism sought to anchor it in the Volk, a historical reality: this Volk is sovereign, and the Fuhrer expresses or represents or embodies this sovereignty.  From this sovereignty the Law is derived, and for most men, in all countries, morality is nothing but Law: in this sense, Kantian moral law, with which Eichmann was so preoccupied, stemming from reason and identical for all men, is a fiction like all laws (but perhaps a useful fiction).Biblical Law says, Thou shalt not kill, and doesn’t brook any exception; but every Jew or Christian accepts that in wartime that law is suspended, that it is just to kill the enemy of one’s own people. That there is no sin in that; once the war is over and the weapons stored away, the old law resumes its peaceful course, as if the interruption had never taken place. So, for a German, to be a good German means to obey the laws and thus the Fuhrer: there can be no other morality, since there would be nothing to support it. ( And it’s not by chance that the rare opponents of our power were the most part believers: they preserved another moral reference point, they could judge Good and Evil on another basis than the will of the Fuhrer, and God served them as a fulcrum to betray their leader and their country: without God, that would have been impossible for them, since where could they have found a justification? What man alone, of his own free will, can come to a decision and say, this is good, that is evil? How outrageous that would be, and how chaotic too, if everyone dared to act that way: if every man lived according to his private Law, Kantian as it might be, we’d be back to Hobbes again.) So, if you wish to judge German actions during this war as criminal, it’s all of Germany you have to call to account, not just the Dölls. If Döll and not his neighbor ended up in Sobibor, that’s chance, and Döll is no more responsible for Sobibor than his luckier neighbor: at the same time, his neighbor is just as responsible as he is for Sobibor, since both served the same country with integrity and devotion, the country that created Sobibor. When a soldier is sent to the front, he doesn’t protest; not only is he risking his life, but he is forced to kill, even if he doesn’t want to kill; his free will abdicates: if he remains at his post, he is a virtuous man, if he runs away, he’s a deserter, a traitor. The man is posted to a concentration camp, like a man assigned to an Einsatzkommando or a police battalion, most of the time doesn’t reason any differently: he knows his free will has nothing to do with it, and that chance alone makes him a killer rather than a hero, or a dead man. Otherwise, you would have to consider these things from a moral standpoint not Judeo-Christian (or secular and democratic, which amounts to the same thing) but rather Greek: for the Greeks, chance played a part in the doings of men ( chance it should be said, often disguised as an intervention of the gods), but they did not consider that this chance diminished one’s responsibility in any way. Crime has to do with the deed, not the will. When Oedipus kills his father, he doesn’t know he is committing parricide; killing a stranger who has insulted you on the open road, for Greek conscience and law, is a legitimate action, there is no sin in it; but that man was Laius, and ignorance doesn’t alter the crime in the least and Oedipus himself recognizes this, and when he finally learns the truth, he chooses his own punishment, and inflicts it on himself.  The link between will and crime is a Christian notion, which persists in modern law; the penal code, for example, regards involuntary or negligent homicide as a crime, but a lesser one than premeditated homicide; the same is true for the legal concept of diminished responsibility in the case of insanity; and the nineteenth ended by linking the notion of crime to that of the abnormal. For the Greeks, it doesn’t matter whether Heracles kills his children in a fit of madness, or if Oedipus kills his father by accident: that changes nothing, it’s a crime, they are guilty; you can pity them, but you can’t absolve them – and that is true even if often their punishment is left to the gods, and not to men. From this perspective, the principle of the postwar trials, which tried men for their concrete actions, without taking chance into account, was just, but they went about it clumsily; tried by foreigners whose values they denied (while still acknowledging their rights as victors), the Germans could feel they were relieved of this burden, and were hence innocent: since the person who wasn’t tried regarded the one who was a victim of bad luck, he absolved him, and at the same time absolved himself; and the one rotting in a British jail, or a Russian gulag, did the same. But could have it been otherwise? How, for an ordinary man, can something be righteous one day and a crime the next? Men need to be guided, it’s not their fault. These are complex questions and there are no simple answers. Who knows where the Law is? Everyone must look for it, but it’s difficult, and it’s normal to bow to the common consensus. Everybody can’t be a legislator.

 

 

 

 

 

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odilo_Globocnik

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Brack

* Heitmat: Country, part of the country or place in which one was [born and] grew up or feels at home through permanent residence (often as an emotional expression of close connection to one.)
* Amritsar Massacre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jallianwala_Bagh_massacre

The Costume of the Actor by Soren Kierkegaard

 

What does it mean to love one’s neighbor?

 

   To love one’s neighbor means, while remaining within the earthly distinctions allotted to one, essentially to will to exist equally for every human being without exception-

  

Consider for a moment the world which lies before you in all its variegated multiplicity; it is like looking at a play, only the plot is vastly more complicated. Every individual in this innumerable throng is by his differences a particular something; he exhibits a definiteness but essentially, he is something other than this – but this we do not get to see here in life. Here we see only what role the individual plays and how he does it. It is like a play. But when the curtain falls, the one who played the king, and the one who played the beggar, and all the others – they are all quite alike, all one and the same: actors. And when in death the curtain falls on the stage of actuality (for it is a confused use of language if one speaks about the curtain being rolled up on the stage of the eternal at the time of death, because the eternal is no stage – it is truth), then they are also all one; they are human beings. All are that which they essentially were, something we did not see because of the difference we see; they are human beings. The stage of art is like an enchanted world. But just suppose that some evening a common absent-mindedness confused all the actors so that they thought they really were what they were representing. Would not this be, in contrast to the enchantment of art, what one might call the enchantment of an evil spirit, a bewitchment? And likewise suppose that in the enchantment of actuality (for we are indeed, all enchanted, each one bewitched by his own distinction) our fundamental ideas became confused so that we thought ourselves essentially to be the roles we play. Alas, but is this not the case? It seems to be forgotten that the distinctions of earthly existence are only like an actor’s costume or like a traveling cloak and that every individual should watchfully and carefully keep the fastening cords of this outer garment loosely tied, never in obstinate knots, so that in the moment of transformation the garment can be easily cast off, and yet we all have enough knowledge of art to be offended if an actor, when he is supposed to cast off his disguise in the moment of transformation, runs out on the stage before getting the cords loose. But, alas, in actual life one laces the outer garments of distinction so tightly that it completely conceals the external character of the garment of distinction, and the inner glory of equality never, or very rarely, shines through, something it should do and ought to do constantly.

 

 

Works of Love, pp. 92-96 (SV XLL 86-91)