Stages on Life’s Way Read online

  They took their places at the table. That same moment, as if with one single bound, the little dinner party was out in the middle of a boundless sea of enjoyment. Everyone had all his thoughts, all his desires, on the banquet, had set his soul afloat for the pleasure offered in overabundance and in which the soul overflowed. An expert driver is known by the way he lets the snorting team start with a single bound and keeps them evenly abreast; a well-trained steed is known by the way it absolutely decisively gets up in a single spring—if one or another of the guests was perhaps not like this, then Constantin was a good host.

  So then they dined. Before long the conversation had so woven its beautiful wreath around the guests that they sat festooned in it; at times the conversation was enamored of the food, at times of the wine, at times of itself; at times it seemed as if it would mean something, then in turn at times it meant nothing at all. At times a flash of wit burst forth, that wonderful kind that blossoms but once, that delicate flower that closes immediately. Then came an exclamation from one of the diners: These truffles are superb; then a shout from the host: This Château Margaux! At times the dinner music was drowned in noise, and then it was audible again. At times, at the crucial moment when a new course was about to be served or a new wine offered and designated by name, the waiters stood quietly as if in pausa; then they were busy again. Silence intervened for a second, and then the exhilarating spirit of the music passed over the guests again. Now the one with an audacious thought took the lead in the conversation, and the others followed him, almost forgetting the food, and the music came trailing behind as it echoed the jubilation of the tumult; then at times only the clinking of the glasses and the sound of dinner plates were heard, and the task of eating proceeded in silence, supported only by the music, which [VI 33] festively took the lead and again called forth the conversation. —And so they dined.

  How impoverished is language in comparison with that certainly meaningless but nevertheless so suggestive consonance of sounds all at once, as at a banquet, something that not even the theater can reproduce and for which language has but a few words! Yet how rich is language in the service of desire in comparison with language when it describes actuality.

  Only once did Constantin step out of his omnipresence, in which one actually did not notice his presence. 82At the very beginning he got them to sing one of the old drinking songs “in order to be reminded of the jolly times when men and women banqueted together,” a suggestion that produced an effect of sheer parody, which very likely was the intention and which nearly gained the upper hand when the Fashion Designer wanted them to sing: When I climb into the bridal bed, falderi, faldera.83 After a few courses had been eaten, Constantin proposed that the banquet should end with each one of them giving a speech, provided that the speakers were not permitted to meander about too erratically. He then laid down two conditions: first, that the speeches must not be given until after the meal, 84and that no one was to speak before he had drunk enough so that he could detect the influence of the wine or was in the condition in which one says a great deal that one is otherwise not inclined to say—without needing for that reason continually to interrupt the continuity of the speech and of the thought by hiccups. Each one, therefore, was to declare solemnly before speaking that he was in this condition. Since the saturation capacity could vary, it was impossible to prescribe the quantity of wine.

  To this, Johannes objected. He could never become intoxicated, and when he had reached a certain point, he became more and more sober the more he drank. Victor Eremita was of the opinion that deliberately and experimentally to set out to become intoxicated would prevent one from doing so. If someone wished to become intoxicated, he must do it spontaneously. [VI 34] Now several points were discussed with regard to the various effects of wine upon consciousness, plus the point that in very reflective individuals the drinking of much wine can manifest itself not in any marked impetus [enthusiasm] but, on the contrary, in a markedly cold sober-mindedness.

  85As for the content of the speeches, Constantin proposed that the subject should be erotic love [Elskov] or the relation between man and woman;86 love affairs, however, should not be related, but indeed they might very well be the basis of the point of view.

  The conditions were accepted. —All of a host’s just and reasonable demands upon guests were fulfilled: they ate, drank and drank, and became drunk,87 as it says in Hebrew—that is, they drank mightily.

  The dessert was served. If Victor had not yet had his request fulfilled to hear the splashing of a fountain, something that fortunately for him he had forgotten about since that conversation, now the champagne effervesced to overflowing. The clock struck twelve; then Constantin asked for silence and toasted the Young Man with a glass and these words: Quod felix sit faustumque [May it be to good fortune and success]88 and asked him to speak first.

  The Young Man arose and declared that he did feel the influence of the wine, which was rather visible, for the blood pulsed violently in his temples, and his appearance was not as handsome as before the meal. He spoke as follows.

  If there is any truth in the poets’ words, dear drinking companions, then unhappy erotic love is indeed the saddest of pains. If this needs any proof, then listen to what lovers say. They say that it is death, certain death, and the first time they believe it for two weeks. The second time they say it is death; the third time they say it is death, and finally one day they die—of unhappy love—for there is no doubt that they die of love, and that it takes love three times to succeed in taking their lives is like the dentist’s having to try three times before extracting the impacted molar. But if unhappy love is certain death in this way, then how lucky am I, I who have never loved and hope that I shall manage to die only once and mercifully not from unhappy love! But perhaps precisely this is the very worst misfortune; how unhappy, then, must I not [VI 35] be! The significance of love presumably must be (for I am speaking as the blind person speaks about colors) its bliss, and this again expresses that the cessation of love is the lover’s death. This I understand as an imaginary construction in thought that relates life and death. But if love is just an imaginary construction in thought, the lovers who actually go and fall in love are indeed ludicrous. But if it is supposed to be something actual, then the actuality must in fact confirm what the lovers say about it. But even if we hear this said, do we hear or perceive that it actually happens? Already in this I see one of the contradictions in which love entangles a person; whether it is otherwise for the initiates, I do not know, but to me love seems to entangle a person in the strangest contradictions. No other relationship between human beings lays claim to the ideality that love does, and yet it is never judged to have it. Just on this basis I am afraid of love, because I fear it might have the power also to make me gush about a bliss I did not perceive and a pain I did not feel. I am saying this here since I am bound to speak about love, although unversed in it; I am saying this here in surroundings that are as gratifying to me as a Greek symposium, for otherwise I have no desire to talk about it, have no desire to disturb anyone’s happiness, but am satisfied with my own thoughts. Perhaps in the eyes of the initiates these thoughts are merely stupidities and cobwebs; perhaps my ignorance is explained by my never having learned or cared to learn from anyone how one comes to love, by my never, because it was bold, having challenged a woman with a glance but having always looked down, unwilling to surrender to an impression before I have fully comprehended the significance of the power to whose control I am surrendering.

  At this point the Young Man was interrupted by Constantin, who pointed out that by confessing that he had never had a love affair he had disqualified himself from being able to speak. The Young Man declared that at any other time he would gladly comply with an order that called for silence, because he had often enough felt bored in speaking, but here he wanted to defend his rights. Precisely this, that he had had no love affair, was also a love affair, and the person who could say this was especially qualified to t
alk about Eros,89 because in his thought he could be said to have a relationship to the whole sex and not to individuals.90 He was given permission to speak, and he continued.

  Inasmuch as doubt has been cast on my right to talk, this [VI 36] doubt presumably has served to spare me your laughter, for I am well aware that just as anyone who does not have a pipe is not considered by farmhands to be a real man, so also anyone without any experience in erotic love is not considered by males to be a real man. If someone wants to laugh, then let him laugh—to me the thought is and remains the primary point. Or does erotic love perhaps have the privilege of being the only thing one must not think about beforehand but only afterward? If this were the case, what would happen if I, the lover, came to think afterward that it was afterward? This, you see, is why I choose to think about erotic love beforehand! To be sure, lovers also declare that they have thought about it beforehand, but this is not so. 91They presuppose that to love belongs essentially to a human being,92 but that, after all, is not thinking about erotic love but is presupposing it in order to be intent on acquiring a beloved for oneself.

  Everywhere, therefore, where my reflection wants to comprehend erotic love, I see only contradiction. To be sure, at times it seems to me as if something has escaped me, but what it is I cannot say; on the other hand, my reflection is again able to show me immediately the contradiction here. Therefore, you see, in my view Eros is the greatest contradiction imaginable—and comic as well. The two go hand in hand. The basis of the comic is always in the category of contradiction,93 a subject I cannot elaborate upon here, but what I do wish to point out here is that erotic love is comic.94 By love, I understand here the relation between man and woman and am not thinking of Eros in the Greek sense, for example, as so beautifully eulogized by Plato,95 but with him it was so far from being a matter of loving women that this is mentioned only in passing and is even considered to be imperfect in comparison with loving young men. I am saying that erotic love is comic to a third party—more I do not say. Whether this is why lovers always hate a third party, I do not know, but this I do know, that reflection is always a third party, and therefore I cannot love without also being a third party to myself in my reflection. 96This cannot seem strange to anyone, inasmuch as everyone, after all, has doubted everything,97 and I am making an attempt to doubt everything only with respect to erotic love; but on the other hand it seems strange to me that one has doubted everything and has found certainty again and yet [VI 37] never drops a word about the difficulties that have fettered my thought so that I have at times longingly wished deliverance with the help of the one, please note, who first thought of the difficulties and did not in his sleep receive the suggestion to doubt and then doubted everything, and again I say, did not in his sleep receive the suggestion to explain and then explained everything. So give me your attention, dear drinking companions, and if you yourselves are lovers, nevertheless please do not interrupt me, do not shush me up because you do not want to hear the explanation; rather turn away and listen with averted faces to what I have to say, what I have a mind to say now that I have begun.

  In the first place,98 I find it comic that all human beings love, and want to love, and yet one can never learn what the lovable, what the actual object of erotic love, is. I am not taking the words “to love” into consideration, for they say nothing, but as soon as the subject comes up, the first question is: What is it that one loves? To that there is no other answer than that one loves what is lovable. In other words, if the answer along with Plato is that one should love the good,99 then one has overstepped in a single step the whole sphere of the erotic. But then the answer may be that one should love the beautiful. If I then were to ask whether to love is to love a beautiful region of the country, a beautiful painting, we would promptly see that the erotic is not related as a species to the sphere of erotic love but is something utterly distinctive. Thus if a lover, desiring to express how much love there really was in him, were to talk as follows: I love a beautiful countryside, and my Lalage,100 and the beautiful dancer, and a beautiful horse—in short, I love everything that is beautiful—then Lalage, even though otherwise satisfied with him, would not be satisfied with his eulogy, even though she was beautiful. And just suppose that Lalage was not beautiful—would he still love her? If I then were to link the erotic to that separation Aristophanes talks about when he says that the gods divided man into two parts, like flounders, and that these separated parts seek each other,101 then I would again come up against something I cannot fathom, in which case I can appeal to Aristophanes, who, simply because there is no reason for the thought to stop, goes on thinking in his discourse and thinks that it could occur to the gods to have even more amusement by dividing [VI 38] men into three parts. To have even more amusement—am I not right in saying that erotic love makes a person ludicrous, if not in the eyes of others, then in the eyes of the gods? Nevertheless, I shall assume that the erotic has its power in the relation between female and male—what then? If the lover were to say to his Lalage: I love you because you are a woman; I could just as well love any other woman, just as well love ugly Zoe—then the beautiful Lalage would be insulted. So what is the lovable? That is my question, but the trouble is that no one has ever been able to answer it. As far as he is concerned, the individual lover still believes that he knows it but cannot make anyone else comprehend it, 102and the person who listens to the talk of several lovers will learn that no two say the same thing, although they all speak about the same thing. Aside from the utterly foolish explanations that end in a blind alley, that is, end by saying that it is the beloved’s beautiful feet or the lover’s much admired handlebar mustache that really is the object of erotic love, even when we hear a lover talking grandiloquently, he first of all mentions various particulars, but finally he says: her whole lovable nature; and when his speech has reached its high point, he says: that inexplicable quality of which I cannot give an account. And this kind of talk is supposed to be especially pleasing to the beautiful Lalage. It does not please me, for I do not understand a word of it but find that it contains a double contradiction, partly because it ends in the inexplicable and partly because it ends there, for anyone who wants to end with the inexplicable would really do best to begin with it and say nothing else in order not to become suspect. If he begins with the inexplicable and says nothing else, this does not demonstrate his inability, for in a negative sense it is still an explanation, but if he begins with something else and ends in the inexplicable, then this demonstrates his inability.

  So, then, to love—the lovable corresponds to this, and the lovable is the inexplicable. Now, there is something to that, but it is no more comprehensible than the inexplicable manner in which erotic love seizes its prey. Who would not feel alarmed if time and again people suddenly dropped dead around him or had a convulsion without anyone’s being able to explain the reason for it? But this is the way erotic love intervenes in life, except that one does not become alarmed by it, since the lovers themselves regard it as the greatest happiness, [VI 39] but laughs at it instead, for the comic and the tragic are always connected. Today one talks with a man, can understand him fairly well; tomorrow the man speaks in tongues103 and in strange gestures—he has fallen in love. If erotic love expressed itself in loving the first that comes along, then it would be understandable that one cannot explain oneself more precisely, but since erotic love expresses itself in loving a one and only, a one and only in the whole world, such a prodigious act of separation must in itself contain a dialectic of reasons one would have to decline to hear, not so much because it explained nothing as because it would be too long-winded to listen to. But no, the lover cannot explain anything at all. He has seen hundreds and hundreds of women; he may be getting on in years, has felt nothing. Suddenly he sees her, her, the one and only—Catherine. Is this not comic; is it not comic that what is going to transfigure and embellish all life—erotic love—is not like a mustard seed that grows to a great tree104 but, even less, is essen
tially nothing at all, for not a single antecedent criterion can be stated, as if, for example, there were a specific age in which the phenomenon made its appearance. And not a single reason can be stated as to why he chooses her, her alone in the whole world, and not at all in the same sense “as Adam chose Eve because there was no one else.”105

  Or is not the explanation lovers give just as comic, or, rather, does it not accentuate precisely the comic? They say that erotic love makes one blind and thereby explain the phenomenon. If a person going into a dark room to fetch something were to respond to my advice to take a light by saying: The whole thing is a mere trifle, and that is why I am not taking a light—well, I would understand him perfectly. But if the same man took me aside and in a secretive way confided to me that what he was going in to fetch was extremely important and that was why he could do it only in the dark—ah, I wonder if my poor, weak, mortal head would be able to follow such a rhetorical flourish. Even if, in order not to offend him, I refrained from laughing, as soon as he turned his back I would hardly be able to avoid it. But no one laughs at erotic love. For this I am prepared—prepared to be embarrassed in the same way as the Jew who after ending his story said: Is there no one who laughs? But unlike the Jew, I have not left out the point, and insofar as I myself laugh, my laughter is far from wanting to offend anyone. On the contrary, I [VI 40] scorn the fools who imagine that their erotic love has such good reasons that they can laugh at other lovers, for since love cannot be explained at all, one lover is just as ludicrous as the other. Moreover, I find it just as silly and supercilious for a man arrogantly to scan a group of maidens to find the one who is worthy of him, or for a girl arrogantly to toss her head and reject, because such people are occupied only with finite thoughts within an unexplained presupposition.