to be at home, so the impoverished in spirit march joyously into the inferno that is their paradise deflect outward responsibility for their respective ill-doing to the other while in. reality existing together in a murky swamp The only decent marriage would be one allowing each partner to lead an independent life, in which, instead of a fusion derived from an enforced community of economic interests, both freely accepted mutual responsibility. Marriage as a community of interests un- Promise me this, my child.- The immorality of lying does not consist in the offence against sacrosanct truth. An appeal to truth is the perfidy of the world's arrangements that no-one, even if aware scarcely a prerogative of a society which dragoons its members to of it, can escape such degradation. The idea might therefore be own up the better to hunt them down. It ill befits universal untruth entertained that marriage without ignominy is a possibility reserved to insist on particular truth, while immediately converting it into for those spared the pursuit of interests, for the rich. But the possi its opposite. Nevertheless, there is something repellent about a lie bility is purely formal, for the privileged are precisely those in and awareness of this, though inculcated by the traditional whip, whom the pursuit of interests has become second nature-they yet throws light on the gaolers. Error lies in excessive honesty. A would not otherwise uphold privilege. man who lies is ashamed, for each lie teaches him the degradation of a world which, forcing him to lie in order to live, promptly sings the praises of loyalty and truthfulness. This shame undermines the lying of more subtly organized natures. They do it badly, which alone really makes the lie a moral offence against the other.It with all my worldly goods. -Divorce, even between good-natured plies his stupidity, and so serves to express contempt. Among amiable, educated people, is apt to stir up a dust-cloud that covers todays adept practitioners, the lie has long since lost its honest and discolours all it touches. It is as if the sphere of intimacy, the everyone is in the know. Lies are told only to convey to sonoody, function of misrepresenting reality. Nobody believes unwatchful trust of shared life, is transformed into a malignant poison as soon as the relationship in which it Flourished is broken that one has no need either of him or his good opinion. The lie, off. Intimacy between people is forbearance, tolerance, refuge for once a liberal means of communication, has today become one of idiosyncrasies. If dragged into the open, it reveals the moment the techniques of insolence enabling each individual to spread of weakness in i, and in a divorce such outward exposure is inevit around him the glacial atmosphere in whose shelter he can thrive. able It seizes the inventory of trust. Things which were once signs of loving care, images of reconciliation, breaking loose as indepen dent values, show their evil, cold, pernicious side. Professors,after separation, break into their wives'flats to pilfer objects from writing desks, and well-endowed ladies denounce their husbands for tax evasion. If marriage offers one of the last possibilities of forming human cells within universal inhumanity, the universal takes time that has removed the basis of its human justification, usually revenge in the breakdown of marriage, laying hands on what had erves today as a trick of self-preservation: the two conspirators seemed excepted from the rule, subjugating it to the alienated orders of rights and property and deriding those who had lived in I. Vor allem ein, mein Kind: allusion to the lines of the late romantic pe Robert Reinick(18of-s2), For aller elusive security. Just what was most protected is cruelly re- nie die Lige deinen Mund enrweihen(Above all else, my child, be loyal and quisitioned and exposed. The more ' the couple had true/ and never let a lie profane your mouth). ginally been, the less they thought of possessions and obligations, 2. DB immer Treu und Redlichkeit: phrase from a Lied set by Mozart
in the realm of the legally undefined that strife, defamation and endless confict of interests flourish. The whole sombre base on ladies achieve the honour of their dishonour, at the moment when which the institution of marriage rises, the husbands barbarous there are no longer either society or ladies. power over the property and work of his wife, the no less barbarous sexual oppression that can compel a man to take life- long responsi- bility for a woman with whom it once gave him pleasure to sleep all this crawls into the light from cellars and foundations when the house is demolished. Those who once experienced the good universal in restrictively belonging to each other, are now forced without exception, mutilated, and does well to acknowledge it to by society to consider themselves scoundrels, no different from himself,if he wishes to avoid being cruelly the universal order of unrestricted meanness outside. The universal the tightly-closed doors of his self-esteem. He lives in an environ- is revealed in divorce as the particulars mark of shame, because the ment that must remain incomprehensible to him, however flaw particular, marriage, is in this society unable to realize the true less his knowledge of trade-union organizations or the automobile industry may be; he is always astray. Between the reproduction of partial, responsible work, yawns an irreconcilable breach. His language has been expropriated, and the historical dimension that Inter pares.-In the realm of erotic qualities a reversal of values trustful of their members, hostile to those branded different. The seems near completion. Under liberalism, up to our own times, share of the social product that falls to aliens is insufficient, and married men from good society, unsatisfied by their correct spouses forces them into a hopeless second struggle within the general of sheltered upbringing, were wont to indemnify themselves with competition. All this leaves no individual unmarked. Even the man and cocottes. With the rationalization of society this possibility of spared the ignominy of direct co-ordination bears, as his special mark, this very exemption, an illusory, unreal existence in the life- irregular bliss has disappeared. The cocottes have died out, the process of society. Relations between outcasts are even more equivalent of"suisse Madel probably never existed in Anglo-Saxon poisoned than between long-standing residents. All emphases are and other countries with a technical civilization: but the chorus wrong, perspectives disrupted. Private life asserts itself unduly, girls and the bohemians now parasitically grafted to mass culture, hectically, vampire-like, trying convulsively, because it really no are so thoroughly imbued with its reasoning that he who volup- longer exists, to prove it is alive. Public life is reduced to an un- ruously flees to their anarchy, the free control of their own exchange spoken oath of allegiance to the platform. The eyes take on a value, risks waking up under the obligation, if not of engaging manic yet cold look of grasping, devouring, commandeering them as assistants, at least of recommending them to a film magnate There is no remedy but steadfast diagnosis of oneself and others, the attempt, through awareness, if not to escape doom, at least to to indulge in anything resembling uncalculating love are now these very ladies whose husbands once forsook them for the tiles. While Is called for, particularly in the choice of private acquaintances,as they remain as tedious to their husbands, through the latters'fault, far as choice still remains. Above all, one should beware of seeking as their mothers were, they can at least bestow on others what they out the mighty, and'expecting something of them. The are otherwise denied by all. The long-since frigid libertine repre- Possible advantages is the mortal enemy of all human relationships; sents business, while the correct, well-brought-up wife stands from these solidarity and loyalty can ensue, but never from thoughts gly and unromantically for sexuality. So at last society 33
the mighty, lackeys, flatterers and cadgers, who ingratiate selves with those better off than they in an archaistic manner tha can flourish only in the economically extraterritorial circumstances of emigration. While they may bring their protector trivial adva Le nouvel aware. -There are two kinds of avarice. One, the archaic tages, they drag him down the moment he type, is the passion that spares oneself and others nothing; its easelessly seduced to do by his own helplessness in a strange physiognomic traits have been immortalized by Moliere, and ex country. If in Europe the esoteric gesture was often only a pretext plained as the anal character by Freud. It is consummated in the for the blindest self-interest, the concept of austerity, though miser, the beggar with secret millions, who is like the puritanical hardly ship-shape or watertight, still seems, in emigration, the mask of the unrecognized caliph in the fairy-tale. He is related to the collector, the manic, finally to the great lover, as Gobseck is to Esther. I He is still occasionally to be found as a curiosity in local example at their disposal. To most boarders, it threatens starvatio columns of newspapers. The miser of our time is the man who considers nothing too expensive for himself, and everything for thers. He thinks in equivalents, subjecting his whole private life to the law that one gives less than one receives in return, yet enough to ensure that one receives something. Every good deed is accom- panied by an evident"is it necessary? , do I have to? This type Le bourgeois revenant. -Absurdly, the Fascist regimes of the first are most surely revealed by the haste with which they avenge half of the twentieth century have stabilized an obsolete economic kindness received, unwilling to tolerate, in the chain of exchange form, multiplying the terror needed to maintain it now that its acts whereby expenses are recovered, a single 'missing link.Because senselessness is blatant. Thereby has private life also been marked. with them everything is done in a rational above-board manner. With the strengthening of external authority the stuffy private they are, unlike Harpagon and Scrooge, neither to be convicted order particularism of interests, the long-outdated form of the nor converted. They are as affable as they are implacable. If need family, the right of property and its reflection in character, have be,they will place themselves irrefutably in the right and transform right into wrong, whereas the sordid mania of. stinginess had the scarcely concealed awareness of untruth. Whatever was once good redeeming feature that the gold in the cash-box necessarily attracted and decent in bourgeois values, independence, perseverance, fore- thieves, indeed, that its passion was stilled only in sacrifice and loss, thought, circumspection, has been corrupted utterly. For while as is the erotic desire for possession in self-abandonment. The new bourgeois forms of existence are truculently conserved, their misers, however, indulge their asceticism no longer as a vice but economic pre-condition has fallen away. Privacy has given way with prudence entirely to the privation it always secretly was, and with the stub born adherence to particular interests is now mingled fury at being no longer able to perceive that things might be different and better In losing their innocence, the bourgeois have become impenitently malign. The caring hand that even now tends the little garden as if On the dialectic of tact. -Goethe, actuely aware of the threatening it had not long since become a lot, but fearfully wards off the possibility of all human relationships in emergent industrial unknown intruder, is already that which denies the political refugee society, tried in the Novellen of wilhelm Meister's Years of Travel sylum. Now objectively threatened, the subjectivity of the rulers to present tact as the saving accommodation between alienated and their hangers-on becomes totally inhuman. So the class realizes an beings. This accommodation seemed to him inseparable itself, taking upon itself the destructive will of the course of the 1. The miser and the courtesan in Balzac's Splendeurs at Miseres des world. The bourgeois live on like spectres threatening doom ourtisanes: Gobseck was Esthers great-uncle. 35
from renunciation, the relinquishment of total contact, passi and unalloyed happiness. The human consisted for him in a self a form, the universal which made up the very substance of the limitation which affirmatively espoused as its own cause the inel ndividual claim. Tact is the discrimination of differences. It con- table course of history, the inhumanity of progress, the with sists in conscious deviations. Yet when, emancipated, it confronts of the subject. But what has happened since makes Goethean the individual as an absolute, without anything universal from renunciation look like fulfilment. Tact and humanity-for him the which to be differentiated, it fails to engage the individual and ame thing-have in the meantime gone exactly the way from finally wrongs him. The question as to someone, s health, no longer which, as he believed, they were to save us For tact, we now know required and expected by upbringing, becomes inquisitive or has its precise historical hour. It was the hour when the bourgeois injurious, silence on sensitive subjects empty indifference, as soon as there is no rule to indicate what is and what is not to be dis- he answers for himself. hile the forms of hierarchical respect and cussed. Thus individuals begin, not without reason, to react anta- consideration developed by absolutism, divested of their economic gonistically to tact: a certain kind of politeness, for example, gives basis and their menacing power, are still just sufficiently present to them less the feeling of being addressed as human beings, than an make living together within privileged groups bearable. This inkling of their inhuman conditions, and the polite run the risk of seemingly paradoxical interchange between absolutism and liber eeming impolite by continuing to exercise politeness, as a super- ality is perceptible, not only in Wilhelm Meister, but in Beethoven's seded privilege. In the end emancipated, purely individual tact attitude towards traditional patterns of composition, and even in becomes mere lying. Its true principle in the individual today is logic, in Kant's subjective reconstruction of objectively binding what it earnestly keeps silent, the actual and still more the potential ideas. There is a sense in which Beethoven s regular reca wer embodied by each person. Beneath the demand that the following dynamic expositions, Kan ndividual be confronted as such, without preamble, absolutely as t's deduction of sc befits him, lies a covetous eagerness toplace him and his chances, categories from the unity of consciousness, are eminentlytactful'. through the tacit admissions contained in each of his words, in the The precondition of tact is convention no longer intact yet still present. Now fallen into irreparable ruin, it lives on only in the ever more rigid hierarchy that encompasses everyone. The nomin parody of forms, an arbitrarily devised or recollected etiquette for alism of tact helps what is most universal, naked external power, to triumph even in the most intimate constellations. To write off papers, while the basis of agreement that carried those conventions convention as an outdated, useless and extraneous ornament is in their human hour has given way to the blind conformity of domination. That the abolition of even this caricature of tact in the car-owners and radio-listeners. The demise of the ceremonial ib-digging camaraderie of our time, a mockery of freedom,never moment seems at first sight to benefit tact. Emancipated from all theless makes existence still more unbearable, is merely a further that was heteronomous and harmfully external, tactful behaviour would seem one guided solely by the specific nature of each human indication of how impossible it has become for people to co-exist under present conditions situation. Such emancipated tact, however, meets with the diff- culties that confront nominalism in all contexts. Tact meant not simply subordination to ceremonial convention: it was precisely the latter all later humanists unceasingly ionized. Rather,the exercise of tact was as paradoxical as its historical location. It ry rights. -It is the signature of our age that no-one, w demanded the reconciliation- actually impossible-between the out exception, can now determine his own life within even a unauthorized claims of convention and the unruly ones of the could be measured. Convention represented, in h g by which tact individual. Other than convention there was nothi the arately comprehensible framework, as was possible earlier in nships. In however powerful, is an object. Even the profession of general
the enforced conditions of emigration a wisely-chosen norm. The attacks, and commandants observing traditional caution are hanged hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice. They live by Hitler and beheaded by Chiang Kai-shek. It follows if not in slums, in bungalows that by tomorrow may be leaf-huts, trailers, cars, camps, or the open air. The house is past. The bomb- vival itself has something nonsensical about it, like dreams in which, ings of European cities, as well as the labour and concentration having experienced the end of the world, one afterwards crawls camps, merely proceed as executors, with what the immanent from a basement-ought also to be prepared at each moment to development of technology had long decided was to be the fate of end his life. This is the mournful truth that has emerged from houses. These are now good only to be thrown away like old food zarathustra's exuberant doctrine of freely-chosen death. Freedom cans. The possibility of residence is annihilated by that of socialist has contracted to pure negativity, and what in the days of art Nc individual can resist this process. He need only take an interest nouveau was known as a beautiful death has shrunk to the wish to curtail the infinite abasement furniture design or interior decoration to find himself developing of living and the infinite torment of the arty-crafty sensibilities of the bibliophile, however firmly he dying, in a world where there are far worse things to fear than may oppose arts-and-crafts in the narrower sense. From a distance death. -The objective end of humanism is only another expressio for the same thing. It signifies that the individual as individual no longer so considerable Purely functional curves, having broken in representing the species of man, has lost the autonomy through free of their purpose, are now becoming just as ornamental as the hich he might realize the species. basic structures of Cubism. The best mode of conduct, in face of all this, still seems an uncommitted, suspended one: to lead a rivate life. as far as the social order and one s own needs will tolerate nothing else, but not to attach weight to it as to something still socially substantial and individually appropriate. 'It is even shown by its arena. Dwelling, in the proper sense, is now day is od fortune not to be a house-owner, Nietzsche already wrote in the Gay Science I Today we should have to add: sible. The traditional residences we grew up in have grown in- it is part of morality not to be at home in one's home. This gives tolerable: each trait of comfort in them is paid for with a betrayal of some indication of the difficult relationship in which the individual knowledge, each vestige of shelter with the musty pact of family interests. The functional modern habitations designed from tabula rasa, are living-cases manufactured by experts for philis- perty no longer belongs to one, in the sense that consumer tines, or factory sites that have strayed into the consumption goods have become potentially so abundant that no individual has sphere, devoid of all relation to the occupant: in them even the the right to cling to the principle of their limitation; but that one must nevertheless have possessions, if one is not to sink into that packing, Modern man wishes to sleep close to the ground like an pendence and need which serves the blind perpetuation of animal, a German magazine decreed with prophetic masochism property relations. But the thesis of this paradox leads to destruc tion, a loveless dis disregard for things which nece sarily turns waking and dreaming. The sleepless are on call at any hour,un- people too; and the antithesis, no sooner uttered, is an ideolog resistingly ready for anything, alert and unconscious at once. Any- life e wishing with a bad conscience to keep what they have. o wr for one seeking refuge in a genuine, but purchased, period-style house, cannot be lived rightly embalms himself alive. The attempt to evade responsibility for Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke(ed. Schlechta), Munich 1955, Voll,p. 154 ones residence by moving into a hotel or furnished rooms, makes (The Joyful Wisdom, Edinburgh-London 1910, p 2o3)