People demand humility but are deeply offended if their demands are indulged.

*

The offense at what strikes one as superior to oneself is very different from the offense at that which presumes to be superior but is sealed against learning otherwise. The former always attributes its offense to the latter. The latter always attributes the offense it arouses to the former.

*

We all believe in better or worse, even when we pretend to know better.

*

Arrogant – ORIGIN late Middle English : via Old French from Latin arrogant– ‘claiming for oneself,’ from the verb arrogare.

*

Possession is consummated socially. Until possession is publicly acknowledged there’s only a claim.

*

Good practical advice from Nietzsche:

Artist’s ambition. — The Greek artists, the tragedians for example, poetized in order to conquer; their whole art cannot be thought of apart from contest: Hesiod’s good Eris, ambition, gave their genius its wings. Now this ambition demands above all that their work should preserve the highest excellence in their own eyes, as they understand excellence, that is to say, without reference to a dominating taste or the general opinion as to what constitutes excellence in a work of art; and thus Aeschylus and Euripides were for a long time unsuccessful until they had finally educated judges of art who assessed their work according to the standards they themselves laid down. It is thus they aspire to victory over their competitors as they understand victory, a victory before their own seat of judgment, they want actually to be more excellent; then they exact agreement from others as to their own assessment of themselves and confirmation of their own judgment. To aspire to honor here means: “to make oneself superior and to wish this superiority to be publicly acknowledged.” If the former is lacking and the latter nonetheless still demanded, one speaks of vanity. If the latter is lacking and its absence not regretted, one speaks of pride.

*

You can acknowledge the importance of social opinion by submitting to it.

You can also betray its importance by denying its significance with suspiciously excessive vehemence.
Finally, you can acknowledge the importance of social opinion by working to influence it, superficially at the factual level, or deeply at the level of vision.

*

We have the capacity to see everything differently, and that’s very weird.

From time to time. — He sat himself at the city gate and said to one who passed through it that this was the city gate. The latter responded that this was true, but that one should not want to be too much in the right if one wanted to be thanked for it. “Oh,” the former replied, “I desire no thanks; but from time to time it is nonetheless very pleasant not only to be in the right but to be acknowledged to be right as well.”

– Nietzsche, Assorted Opinions and Maxims 297

*

A (the?) essential tension: What is most provable matters least. What matters most is the least provable.

Grammatical x-ray (exposed on Chinese film): Thesis [passive] : antithesis [active]. Thesis [active] : antithesis [passive].

*

“No, what is most provable is the most important.” Prove it.

Philosophy has a “last mile” problem. Popular culture, and its disparate “worlds”, including business and, sadly, education) is missing some fundamental insights which have been well-understood for nearly a hundred years, but which have never made it beyond humanities classrooms, with disastrous consequences.

There is a huge difference between someone who seeks ways to measure things and someone who rejects the existence of anything he cannot measure.

Measuring is a mysterious activity.

*

A Romantic correctly notes that some things are beyond the grasp of cognition, and positively values these things. The commonest form of Romantic, however, proceeds to make a mind-boggling mistake: preserving the cognition-resistant truths as rare, fragile, precious mysteries. The greatest mystery is that anything like an ordered, cognizable world could arise at all. The Romantic is the crowning achievement of this order: they spontaneously see the most mysterious thing of all as the opposite of mystery.

*

Humility demands that we recognize the surpassing reality behind and beyond whatever a man can think. Knowledge does not and cannot possess or master anything. It only relates.

*

The fullest form of relationship a human being can have is the human-to-human relation, whether this relationship is to another person or to the entire world as a whole.

I might actually disagree with Buber on an important point: The I-Thou relationship does not exclude the I-It relationship, and I-Thou is not a complete human-to-human without I-It.

“Listen with the faith that that you have something to learn, and you will feed your intellect. Listen with the conviction that you already know, and you will feed your arrogance.”

Everybody knows nine women cannot have a baby in one month.

Fewer people understand that one woman cannot be pregnant for three weeks per month and produce a baby in a year.

It is also worth noting that two women cannot be half-pregnant and produce a baby in nine months.

Everything falls apart if you bring in the concept of twins.

Gadamer, from the foreword to the second edition of Truth and Method:

This fundamental methodical approach avoids implying any metaphysical conclusions. In subsequent publications, especially in my research reports “Hermeneutics and Historicism” and “The Phenomenological Movement” (in Philosophical Hermeneutics), I have recorded my acceptance of Kant’s conclusions in the Critique of Pure Reason: I regard statements that proceed by wholly dialectical means from the finite to the infinite, from human experience to what exists in itself, from the temporal to the eternal as doing no more than setting limits, and am convinced that philosophy can derive no actual knowledge from them. Nevertheless, the tradition of metaphysics and especially of its last great creation, Hegel’s speculative dialectic, remains close to us. The task, the “infinite relation,” remains. But my way of demonstrating it seeks to free itself from the embrace of the synthetic power of the Hegelian dialectic, even from the “logic” which developed from the dialectic of Plato, and to take its stand in the movement of dialogue, in which word and idea first become what they are.

Hence the present investigations do not fulfill the demand for a reflexive self-grounding made from the viewpoint of the speculative transcendental philosophy of Fichte, Hegel. and Husserl. But is the dialogue with the whole of our philosophical tradition — a dialogue in which we stand and which, as philosophers, we are — groundless? Does what has always supported us need to be grounded?

*

“Slippery ice
Is paradise,
As long as dancing will suffice. “

*

Nietzsche, “The Dance Song” from Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

Into your eyes I looked recently, O life! And into the unfathomable I then seemed to be sinking. But you pulled me out with a golden fishing rod; and you laughed mockingly when I called you unfathomable.

“Thus runs the speech of all fish,” you said; “what they do not fathom is unfathomable. But I am merely changeable and wild and a woman in every way, and not virtuous — even if you men call me profound, faithful, eternal, and mysterious. But you men always present us with your own virtues, O you virtuous men!”

Thus she laughed, the incredible one; but I never believe her and her laughter when she speaks ill of herself.

And when I talked in confidence with my wild wisdom she said to me in anger, “You will, you want, you love — that is the only reason why you praise life.” Then I almost answered wickedly and told the angry woman the truth; and there is no more wicked answer than telling one’s wisdom the truth.

For thus matters stand among the three of us: Deeply I love only life — and verily, most of all when I hate life. But that I am well disposed toward wisdom, and often too well, that is because she reminds me so much of life. She has her eyes, her laugh, and even her little golden fishing rod: is it my fault that the two look so similar?

And when life once asked me, “Who is this wisdom?” I answered fervently, “Oh yes, wisdom! One thirsts after her and is never satisfied; one looks through veils, one grabs through nets. Is she beautiful? How should I know? But even the oldest carps are baited with her. She is changeable and stubborn; often I have seen her bite her lip and comb her hair against the grain. Perhaps she is evil and false and a female in every way; but just when she speaks ill of herself she is most seductive.”

When I said this to life she laughed sarcastically and closed her eyes. “Of whom are you speaking?” she asked; “no doubt, of me. And even if you are right — should that be said to my face? But now speak of your wisdom too.”

Ah, and then you opened your eyes again, O beloved life. And again I seemed to myself to be sinking into the unfathomable.

*

Matthew 14:

Immediately he made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, but by this time the boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land, for the wind was against them. And early in the morning he came walking toward them on the sea. But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, “It is a ghost!” And they cried out in fear. But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.” Peter answered him, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” He said, “Come.” So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus. But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord, save me!” Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” When they got into the boat, the wind ceased.

A dance becomes art when steps and counts give way to pure movement in response to music. Philosophy becomes practice when memorized syllogisms and concepts give way to freedom of vision. Morality is fulfilled when freedom moves though it were governed by law.

*

Two quotes from Nietzsche:

“One must remove the scaffolding once the house has been built. “

“Jesus said to his Jews: “The law was made for servants–love God as I love him, as his son! What have we sons of God to do with morality!” –“

A quote from Gadamer:

…The fact that ideas are formed through tradition, especially through the hermeneutic circle of whole and part, which is the starting point of my attempt to lay the foundations of hermeneutics, does not necessarily imply this conclusion. The concept of the whole is itself to be understood only relatively. The whole of meaning that has to be understood in history or tradition is never the meaning of the whole of history. The danger of Docetism seems banished when historical tradition is conceived not as an object of historical knowledge or of philosophical conception, but as an effective moment of one’s own being. The finite nature of one’s own understanding is the manner in which reality, resistance, the absurd, and the unintelligible assert themselves. If one takes this finitude seriously, one must take the reality of history seriously as well.

The same problem makes the experience of the Thou so decisive for all self-understanding. …The experience of the Thou throws light on the concept of historically effected experience. The experience of the Thou also manifests the paradox that something standing over against me asserts its own rights and requires absolute recognition; and in that very process is “understood.” But I believe that I have shown correctly that what is so understood is not the Thou but the truth of what the Thou says to us. I mean specifically the truth that becomes visible to me only through the Thou, and only by my letting myself be told something by it. It is the same with historical tradition. It would not deserve the interest we take in it if it did not have something to teach us that we could not know by ourselves. It is in this sense that the statement “being that can be understood is language” is to be read. It do not mean that the one who understands has an absolute mastery over being but, on the contrary, that being is not experienced where something can be constructed by us and is to that extent conceived; it is experienced where what is happening can merely be understood.

Trained lifeguards know the properties of panic, they’ve mastered techniques for breaking every kind of grip and hold, and they are strong swimmers. They always try to throw a rope or buoy first, but if that doesn’t work they are prepared to jump in. They are not faced with the dilemma of the untrained: stay outside the situation and watch helplessly or jump into it and face the near-certainty of being drowned yourself.

Some people need things they know how to ask for.

Some people are meant to give the things for which they are asked.

Those are the lucky people.

Others need things and they do not know how to ask for. It is not that they do not know how to ask for things in general; it is that they cannot locate, objectify and speak about their need. A common response is to ask for things that can be asked for and to hope satisfaction happens.

Others need to give things nobody would ask for, that nobody recognizes they need, and sometimes even reject. These people are not generally considered useless; it is that they have a purpose no other person could ever assign them. The function they are asked to provide, as valued as it might be, is felt by the one providing it to be incidental. The common response to this condition is either a refusal to associate with those in the habit of assigning purposes, or to submit to the demands of the world and to coat meaning with insulating doubts. In other words a person withdraws from meaninglessness, or he internalizes meaninglessness and becomes a cynic or nihilist.

*

Responsibility is only responsible when it acts with judgment and judges in order to act.

Responsibility must respond. It cannot refuse to respond.

However, responsibility cannot simply obey.

*

When a need speaks, it often speaks the truth of its general existence with false specifics.

(Why? A determined need is uncomfortable. An indeterminate need is horrifying. Need finds relief even in false determinations.)

The need does its best to express its substance, but often it can only manage to indicate the fact of its existence.

*

A patient who feels ill misdiagnose his ailment, but that doesn’t mean he is wrong that he feels ill. A doctor who treats his patients according to their self-diagnoses is a bad doctor. So is the doctor who refuses to treat his patients on the basis that they have misdiagnosed themselves.

A parent who dismisses a child’s distress because the child is wrong about its source is as bad as a parent who indulges the child’s demands. Spoiling a child comes not from giving the child what she needs, but from failure to exercise parental judgment before acting on the child’s need.

The same is true, but more ambiguously, between employer and employee, between husband and wife, between citizen and nation, between parishioner and parish.

The dialectic form — thesis, antithesis and the resolution of the opposition — is a fundamental form of philosophical truth, but it is functionally useless. The dialectic form is severely constrained and as powerless as Cassandra. The dialectic is entirely retrospective: it is both radically non-predictive and radically postdictive.

Those who have lived out dialectical truth know the strange transfiguration of anxious, opaque nonsense into crystalline vision.

The dialectic as such is not an answer: it promises an answer if you grapple faithfully with the anxiety of the present question. It reassures: the anxiety in the face of opaque chaos is not the symptoms of a disease but the necessary birth-pangs of insight. It teases: if you already knew the answer, it wouldn’t be a question.

The dialectic is a kind of faith. It is the form and the assurance that spurs the pursuit of the presently unseen.

Sometimes a human being finds himself able to dominate an other — to bind another to himself in dependency, and coerce him to participate in a purpose that he would not freely choose.

Sometimes a group of human beings find in one another sufficient like-mindedness to form a covenant. Each accepts shared principles, acknowledges reciprocal duties and enters into voluntary interdependence. The principles, the duties and the interdependence apply only to one’s neighbor within the covenant. The other — the one standing outside the covenant — is neither bound by its duties nor protected by its principles. The morality of the covenant is reciprocal.

Those bound in covenant can behave like a single human being, and can decide to dominate or annihilate an other if that other is called “enemy”.

A time can come when the morality of the covenant — its duties and principles — become so internalized, so deeply inscribed in each neighbor’s heart, that he is no longer himself apart from them. The covenant loses its reciprocal functionalism and becomes useless, absolute and universal.

The man of the universal covenant can be counted on to behave according to his morality regardless of advantage or disadvantage. There is no legitimate ground for distrust. The “preemptive” violence at the root of all violence — “do unto the other before he has a chance to do unto you” — the eternal justification of a nation’s defense taking offensive action — becomes a ludicrous and shameful ruse.

The man of the universal covenant treats the enemy who persecutes him as his own neighbor and exposes the coercive violence as chosen by preference, not by necessity.

Mediocre – ORIGIN late 16th cent.: from French médiocre, from Latin mediocris ‘of middle height or degree,’ literally ‘somewhat rugged or mountainous,’ from medius ‘middle’ + ocris ‘rugged mountain.’

Excellent – ORIGIN late Middle English : from Latin excellentia, from the verb excellere ‘surpass’, from ex– ‘out, beyond’ + celsus ‘lofty.’

*

Are the excellent necessarily rugged?

What if excellence, being the venturing into the beyond is intrinsically vulnerable?

Is it possible that in conditions where only the rugged survive, excellence is precluded?

*

Mediocrity finds its advantage in emergencies and tough times. Look closely at the declarers of emergency, the united-standers, the principle-suspending, expedient-employing realists: their fear is cut with a strange exultation. They are in their element.

*

Nietzsche asks: What, after all, is ignobleness?

…Words are vocal symbols for ideas; ideas, however, are more or less definite mental symbols for frequently returning and concurring sensations, for groups of sensations. It is not sufficient to use the same words in order to understand one another: we must also employ the same words for the same kind of internal experiences, we must in the end have experiences in common. On this account the people of one nation understand one another better than those belonging to different nations, even when they use the same language; or rather, when people have lived long together under similar conditions (of climate, soil, danger, requirement, toil) there originates therefrom an entity that “understands itself–namely, a people. In all souls a like number of frequently recurring experiences have gained the upper hand over those occurring more rarely: about these matters people understand one another rapidly and always more rapidly–the history of language is the history of a process of abbreviation; on the basis of this quick comprehension people always unite closer and closer. The greater the danger, the greater is the need of agreeing quickly and readily about what is necessary; not to misunderstand one another in danger–that is what cannot at all be dispensed with in intercourse. Also in all loves and friendships one has the experience that nothing of the kind continues when the discovery has been made that in using the same words, one of the two parties has feelings, thoughts, intuitions, wishes, or fears different from those of the other. (The fear of the “eternal misunderstanding”: that is the good genius which so often keeps persons of different sexes from too hasty attachments, to which sense and heart prompt them–and not some Schopenhauerian “genius of the species”!) Whichever groups of sensations within a soul awaken most readily, begin to speak, and give the word of command–these decide as to the general order of rank of its values, and determine ultimately its list of desirable things. A man’s estimates of value betray something of the structure of his soul, and wherein it sees its conditions of life, its intrinsic needs. Supposing now that necessity has from all time drawn together only such men as could express similar requirements and similar experiences by similar symbols, it results on the whole that the easy communicability of need, which implies ultimately the undergoing only of average and common experiences, must have been the most potent of all the forces which have hitherto operated upon mankind. The more similar, the more ordinary people, have always had and are still having the advantage; the more select, more refined, more unique, and difficult to comprehend, are liable to stand alone; they succumb to accidents in their isolation, and seldom propagate themselves. One must appeal to immense opposing forces, in order to thwart this natural, all-too-natural progressus in simile (continuation of the same thing), the evolution of man to the similar, the ordinary, the average, the gregarious–to the common!

*

Buber answers:

The great character can be conceived neither as a system of maxims nor as a system of habits. It is peculiar to him to act from the whole of his substance. That is, it is peculiar to him to react in accordance with the uniqueness of every situation which challenges him as an active person. Of course there are all sorts of similarities in different situations; one can construct types of situations, one can always find to what section the particular situation belongs, and draw what is appropriate from the hoard of established maxims and habits, apply the appropriate maxim, bring into operation the appropriate habit. But what is untypical in the particular situation remains unnoticed and unanswered. To me that seems the same as if, having ascertained the sex of a new-born child, one were immediately to establish its type as well, and put all the children of one type into a common cradle on which not the individual name but the name of the type was inscribed. In spite of all similarities every living situation has, like a newborn child, a new face, that has never been before and will never come again. It demands of you a reaction which cannot be prepared beforehand. It demands nothing of what is past. It demands presence, responsibility; it demands you. I call a great character one who by his actions and attitudes satisfies the claim of situations out of deep readiness to respond with his whole life, and in such a way that the sum of his actions and attitudes expresses at the same time the unity of his being in its willingness to accept responsibility. As his being is unity, the unity of accepted responsibility, his active life, too, coheres into unity. And one might perhaps say that for him there rises a unity out of the situations he has responded to in responsibility, the indefinable unity of a moral destiny.

All this does not mean that the great character is beyond the acceptance of norms. No responsible person remains a stranger to norms. But the command inherent in a genuine norm never becomes a maxim and the fulfilment of it never a habit. Any command that a great character takes to himself in the course of his development does not act in him as part of his consciousness or as material for building up his exercises, but remains latent in a basic layer of his substance until it reveals itself to him in a concrete way. What it has to tell him is revealed whenever a situation arises which demands of him a solution of which till then he had perhaps no idea. Even the most universal norm will at times be recognized only in a very special situation. I know of a man whose heart was struck by the lightning flash of “Thou shalt not steal” in the very moment when he was moved by a very different desire from that of stealing, and whose heart was so struck by it that he not only abandoned doing what he wanted to do, but with the whole force of his passion did the very opposite. Good and evil are not each other’s opposites like right and left. The evil approaches us as a whirlwind, the good as a direction. There is a direction, a “yes”, a command, hidden even in a prohibition, which is revealed to us in moments like these. In moments like these the command addresses us really in the second person, and the Thou in it is no one else but one’s own self. Maxims command only the third person, the each and the none.

One can say that it is the unconditioned nature of the address which distinguishes the command from the maxim. In an age which has become deaf to unconditioned address we cannot overcome the dilemma of the education of character from that angle. But insight into the structure of great character can help us to overcome it.

Of course, it may be asked whether the educator should really start “from above”, whether, in fixing his goal, the hope of finding a great character, who is bound to be the exception, should be his starting-point; for in his methods of educating character he will always have to take into consideration the others, the many. To this I reply that the educator would not have the right to do so if a method inapplicable to these others were to result. In fact, however, his very insight into the structure of a great character helps him to find the way by which alone (as I have indicated) he can begin to influence also the victims of the collective Moloch, pointing out to them the sphere in which they themselves suffer–namely, their relation to their own selves. From this sphere he must elicit the values which he can make credible and desirable to his pupils. That is what insight into the structure of a great character helps him to do.

A section of the young is beginning to feel today that, because of their absorption by the collective, something important and irreplaceable is lost to them–personal responsibility for life and the world. These young people, it is true, do not yet realize that their blind devotion to the collective, e.g. to a party, was not a genuine act of their personal life; they do not realize that it sprang, rather, from the fear of being left, in this age of confusion, to rely on themselves, on a self which no longer receives its direction from eternal values. Thus they do not yet realize that their devotion was fed on the unconscious desire to have responsibility removed from them by an authority in which they believe or want to believe. They do not yet realize that this devotion was an escape. I repeat, the young people I am speaking of do not yet realize this. But they are beginning to notice that he who no longer, with his whole being, decides what he does or does not, and assumes responsibility for it, becomes sterile in soul. And a sterile soul soon ceases to be a soul.

*

Sometimes people are fated to fall in line and do their duty with the collective.

Sometimes an individual is destined to step out of line and to take sole responsibility.

From “Dialogue”, the first essay in the collection Between Man and Man:

Be clear what it means when a worker can experience even his relation to the machine as one of dialogue, when, for instance, a compositor tells that he has understood the machine’s humming as “a merry and grateful smile at me for helping it to set aside the difficulties and obstructions which disturbed and bruised and pained it, so that now it could run free”. Must even you not think then of the story of Androclus and the Lion?

But when a man draws a lifeless thing into his passionate longing for dialogue, lending it independence and as it were a soul, then there may dawn in him the presentiment of a worldwide dialogue, a dialogue with the world-happening that steps up to him even in his environment, which consists partly of things. Or do you seriously think that the giving and taking of signs halts on the threshold of that business where an honest and open spirit is found?

You ask with a laugh, can the leader of a great technical undertaking practise the responsibility of dialogue? He can. For he practises it when he makes present to himself in its concreteness, so far as he can, quantum satis, the business which he leads. He practises it when he experiences it, instead of as a structure of mechanical centres of force and their organic servants (among which latter there is for him no differentiation but the functional one), as an association of persons with faces and names and biographies, bound together by a work that is represented by, but does not consist of, the achievements of a complicated mechanism. He practises it when he is inwardly aware, with a latent and disciplined fantasy, of the multitude of these persons, whom naturally he cannot separately know and remember as such; so that now, when one of them for some reason or other steps really as an individual into the circle of his vision and the realm of his decision, he is aware of him without strain not as a number with a human mask but as a person. He practises it when he comprehends and handles these persons as persons — for the greatest part necessarily indirectly, by means of a system of mediation which varies according to the extent, nature and structure of the undertaking, but also directly, in the parts which concern him by way of organization. Naturally at first both camps, that of capital and that of the proletariat, will decry his masterly attitude of fantasy as fantastic nonsense and his practical attitude to persons as dilettantist. But just as naturally only until his increased figures of production accredit him in their eyes. (By this of course is not to be implied that those increases necessarily come to pass: between truth and success there is no pre-stabilized harmony.) Then, to be sure, something worse will follow. He will be pragmatically imitated, that is, people will try to use his “procedure” without his way of thinking and imagining. But this demoniac element inherent in spiritual history (think only of all the magicizing of religion) will, I think, shipwreck here on the power of discrimination in men’s souls. And meanwhile it is to be hoped that a new generation will arise, learning from what is alive, and will take all this in real seriousness as he does.

Unmistakably men are more and more determined by “circumstances”. Not only the absolute mass but also the relative might of social objectives is growing. As one determined partially by them the individual stands in each moment before concrete reality which wishes to reach out to him and receive an answer from him; laden with the situation he meets new situations. And yet in all the multiplicity and complexity he has remained Adam. Even now a real decision is made in him, whether he faces the speech of God articulated to him in things and events — or escapes. And a creative glance towards his fellow-creature can at times suffice for response.

Man is in a growing measure sociologically determined. But this growing is the maturing of a task not in the “ought” but in the “may” and in “need”, in longing and in grace. It is a matter of renouncing the pantechnical mania or habit with its easy “mastery” of every situation; of taking everything up into the might of dialogue of the genuine life, from the trivial mysteries of everyday to the majesty of destructive destiny.

The task becomes more and more difficult, and more and more essential, the fulfilment more and more impeded and more and more rich in decision. All the regulated chaos of the age waits for the break-through, and wherever a man perceives and responds, he is working to that end.

From “The Question to the Single One”, the second essay in the collection Between Man and Man:

Kierkegaard does not marry “in defiance of the whole nineteenth century”. What he describes as the nineteenth century is the “age of dissolution”, the age of which he says that a single man “cannot help it or save it”, he can “only express that it is going under” — going under, if it cannot reach God through the “narrow pass”. And Kierkegaard does not marry, in a symbolic action of negation, in defiance of this age, because it is the age of the “crowd” and the age of “politics”. Luther married in symbolic action, because he wanted to lead the believing man of his age out of a rigid religious separation, which finally separated him from grace itself, to a life with God in the world. Kierkegaard does not marry (this of course is not part of the manifold subjective motivation but is the objective meaning of the symbol) because he wants to lead the unbelieving man of his age, who is entangled in the crowd, to becoming single, to the solitary life of faith, to being alone before God. Certainly, “to marry or not to marry” is the representative question when the monastery is in view. If the Single One really must be, as Kierkegaard thinks, a man who does not have to do essentially with others, then marriage hinders him if he takes it seriously — and if he does not take it seriously then, in spite of Kierkegaard’s remark about Luther, it cannot be understood how he as an existing person can be “the truth”. For man, with whom alone Kierkegaard is fundamentally concerned, there is the additional factor that in his view woman stands “quite differently from man in a dangerous rapport to finitude”.

. . . .

Marriage, essentially understood, brings one into an essential relation to the “world”; more precisely, to the body politic, to its malformation and its genuine form, to its sickness and its health. Marriage, as the decisive union of one with another, confronts one with the body politic and its destiny — man can no longer shirk that confrontation in marriage, he can only prove himself in it or fail. The isolated person, who is unmarried or whose marriage is only a fiction, can maintain himself in isolation; the “community” of marriage is part of the great community, joining with its own problems the general problems, bound up with its hope of salvation to the hope of the great life that in its most miserable state is called the crowd. He who “has entered on marriage”, who has entered into marriage, has been in earnest, in the intention of the sacrament, with the fact that the other is; with the fact that I cannot legitimately share in the Present Being without sharing in the being of the other; with the fact that I cannot answer the lifelong address of God to me without answering at the same time for the other; with the fact that I cannot be answerable without being at the same time answerable for the other as one who is entrusted to me. But thereby a man has decisively entered into relation with otherness; and the basic structure of otherness, in many ways uncanny but never quite unholy or incapable of being hallowed, in which I and the others who meet me in my life are inwoven, is the body politic. It is to this, into this, that marriage intends to lead us.

. . . .

A man in the crowd is a stick stuck in a bundle moving through the water, abandoned to the current or being pushed by a pole from the bank in this or that direction. Even if it seems to the stick at times that it is moving by its own motion it has in fact none of its own; and the bundle, too, in which it drifts has only an illusion of self-propulsion. I do not know if Kierkegaard is right when he says that the crowd is untruth — I should rather describe it as non-truth since (in distinction from some of its masters) it is not on the same plane as the truth, it is not in the least opposed to it. But it is certainly “un-freedom”. In what unfreedom consists cannot be adequately learned under the pressure of fate, whether it is the compulsion of need or of men; for there still remains the rebellion of the inmost heart, the tacit appeal to the secrecy of eternity. It can be adequately learned only when you are tied up in the bundle of the crowd, sharing its opinions and desires, and only dully perceiving that you are in this condition.

The man who is living with the body politic is quite different. He is not bundled, but bound. He is bound up in relation to it, betrothed to it, married to it, therefore suffering his destiny along with it; rather, simply suffering it, always willing and ready to suffer it, but not abandoning himself blindly to any of its movements, rather confronting each movement watchfully and carefully that it does not miss truth and loyalty. He sees powers press on and sees God’s hands in their supreme power held up on high, that the mortal immortals there below may be able to decide for themselves. He knows that in all his weakness he is put into the service of decision. If it is the crowd, remote from, opposed to, decision which swarms round him, he does not put up with it. At the place where he stands, whether lifted up or unnoticed, he does what he can, with the powers he possesses, whether compressed predominance or the word which fades, to make the crowd no longer a crowd. Otherness enshrouds him, the otherness to which he is betrothed. But he takes it up into his life only in the form of the other, time and again the other, the other who meets him, who is sought, lifted out of the crowd, the “companion”. Even if he has to speak to the crowd he seeks the person, for a people can find and find again its truth only through persons, through persons standing their test. That is the Single One who “changes the crowd into Single Ones” — how could it be one who remains far from the crowd? It cannot be one who is reserved, only one who is given; given, not given over. It is a paradoxical work to which he sets his soul, to make the crowd no longer a crowd. It is to bring out from the crowd and set on the way of creation which leads to the Kingdom. And if he does not achieve much he has time, he has God’s own time. For the man who loves God and his companion in one — though he remains in all the frailty of humanity — receives God for his companion.

Higher sense and nonsense are, in regard to understanding, the same. That is, they are unassimilated and unassimilable to knowledge. To intention, however, they can be different, but not necessarily. Regarding an unknown as potentially having a higher sense opens the possibility of actualizing that possibility in active understanding. Regarding an unknown as mere nonsense closes the possibility.

There is, however, a second and third way of regarding an unknown as as having a higher sense while leaving the possibility of understanding closed: Agnosticism categorizes the non-understood assertion to be unfalsifiable with no intention to attempt to affirm, refute or otherwise grapple with it. Fundamentalism categorizes the non-understood assertion as true with no intention of ever actualizing the truth in understanding. They evade grappling with truth by exteriorizing and worshiping. Its overheated emotionalism regarding its professed facts conceals a lukewarm indifference to lived participation in truth.