Ebner

The Word & the Spiritual Realities

(the I and the Thou)
Ferdinand Ebner
Pneumatologic al Fr agments
�
Edited by Joseph R. Chapel
Translated by Harold J. Green
The Catholic University of America Press

Washington, D.C.

English translation Copyright © 2021
The Catholic University of America Press
All rights reserved
Originally published in 1921 in Innsbruck, Austria (Brenner Verlag), as Das Wort und die
geistigen Realitäten: Pneumatologische Fragmente
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standards for Information Science—Permanence of Paper for Printed
Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Design and composition by Kachergis Book Design
Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from the
Library of Congress
ISBN 978-0-8132-3406-9
Contents
C on t e n t s
A Note on the Need for an English Translation

of Ebner by Krzysztof Skorulski vii
Translator’s Note by Harold J. Green xi
Editor’s Introduction and Acknowledgments

by Joseph R. Chapel 1
�
Preface 47
1. Fragment 1. The Spiritual Realities 53
2. Fragment 2. Word and Personality—Origin of the W0rd—
Aloneness—I and Thou 56
3. Fragment 3. Word and Human Becoming—Proofs of God—
Atheism—Word and Self-Consciousness—Dependence of the I 64
4. Fragment 4. I Think and It Thinks—Kierkegaard—The
Concrete I— Verbalization of Thinking—Ideal, Concrete,
Fictitious Thou—Word and Truth 76
5. Fragment 5. Knowledge of the Spiritual Life—The Philosophers
and the Word—The Word and the Spiritual Life—Science and
the Word—Pneumatology 89
6. Fragment 6. Sense and Senses—The Lower Senses—Hearing
and Seeing—Beauty—Musical Intuition—Tone and Word—
Word and Spiritual Neediness 97
7. Fragment 7. Reason and Word 116
Contents
8. Fragment 8. The Primal Word 124

9. Fragment 9. Consciousness and Being-Conscious—
Pneuma and Psyche—Psychology— Insanity 130
10. Fragment 10. The Existence of the I—Idealism—The Word
and Love 147
11. Fragment 11. The Oblique Case and the Meaning of
the M-Sound 157
12. Fragment 12. Mathematical Thought and the I—Harmony—
Descartes—Word and Mathematical Formula—Substance
and Ethos—The Principle of Identity—Reality 171
13. Fragment 13. Verb and Sentence—The Meaning of the T -Sound 198
14. Fragment 14. Existential Declaration and Personality—
The Becoming and Being of the Spiritual Realities—Love 209
15. Fragment 15. The Human and the Divine—God as
Mental Image and as Reality 228
16. Fragment 16. Otto Weininger—Spirit and Sexuality—
The Jews—Christ 237
17. Fragment 17. The Ultimate Meaning of the Cogito—
Self-Knowledge—Ethos and Grace—Sin and the Word 256
18. Fragment 18. Nature and Spirit, Universal Life, and
Individual Existence—Culture and Christianity— Conclusion 270
Index 291
vi
A Note on the Need for a Translation
A No t e on t h e N e e d
for a n E ng l i s h T r a ns l at ion
of E bn e r
Krzysztof Skorulski
Secretary, Internationale F
erdinand Ebner Gesellschaft
The International Ferdinand Ebner Society (IFEG) seeks to dissem-

inate and popularize the work of Ferdinand Ebner and of dialogical
thought in general.1 The appearance of the Fragments in English
is a great joy. This book, finally available to the E nglish-speaking
reader, is of considerable importance. The question is, how is it
possible that such a significant book had not been translated into
English before now? It has always been a desire, first by Ebner’s ed-
itor and friend Ludwig von Ficker, then by the International Ebner
Society, to make this book available in English. One hundred years
have passed from the writing of the book to the publication of this
English version. There is a long story behind it, a story of failed at-
tempts and unrealized plans. The cause of the delay was not really
a lack of interest; rather, it is as if some fate hung over the project.
Perhaps the right moment has arrived now.
Ebner is often brought into connection with Ludwig Wittgen-
stein. Not without reason. Ebner knew about Wittgenstein as a
person and admired his generosity, while Wittgenstein must have
known about Ebner. The first point of connection was Ludwig von
1. Internationale Ferdinand Ebner Gesellschaft, http://www.ebner-gesellschaft.org/.
vii
Ficker, the editor of the review Der Brenner, which was read by both
Ebner and Wittgenstein. As Walter Methlagl, a friend of Ficker,
said, Ficker had both books ready for publication on his table at the
same time: Ebner’s Fragments and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus! For lack
of money, he decided to publish Ebner’s book, which seemed to fit
better in his review. The disappointment of Wittgenstein was appar-
ently considerable, and when the review took on a more Catholic
character in the following years, he distanced himself from it. His
book was published elsewhere a few years later and achieved great
popularity in the English-speaking world, where his connection
with Bertrand Russell and Cambridge played a decisive role.
The second point of connection was Ludwig Hänsel, a good
friend of Wittgenstein, who was fascinated by Brenner and Ebner.
It is unthinkable that he would have not spoken about these themes
in his lengthy conversations with Wittgenstein during his prima-
ry school-teaching period, in the 1920s. In Austria’s postwar years,
both thinkers were compared as representatives of two attitudes
toward language, and each had his followers. But while the way
of thinking of the two philosophers is perhaps closer to each oth-
er than one usually thinks, the status of their popularity in the
English-speaking world stands in stark contrast.
But it did not have to be so. For the first edition of Ebner’s book
(1921), Ludwig Ficker said he had orders “from Russia, Japan and
America.”2 It is probably no longer possible to find out who actually
ordered the book, but in certain circles it was very likely already no-
ticed. After all, Ebner was mentioned in America from time to time,
especially in Protestant writings and in the context of Emil Brun-
ner’s theology. Brunner himself drew inspiration from Ebner’s book
and even thanked him by letter. But while Brunner became known
in the United States, Ebner did not. Brunner was right to call Ebner
the most neglected thinker of the twentieth century.
2. Walter Methlagl, Brenner—Gespräche: Sufgezeichnet in den Jahren von 1961 bis
1967 (Innsbruck: Forschungsinstitut Brenner Archiv, 2014), 72, http://www.uibk
.ac.at/brenner-archiv/publikationen/links/brenner_gespraeche.pdf.
viii
At any rate, before translating the Fragments into English, the

first task was still to publish Ebner’s other works in German, their
original language. After his death in 1931 it was not a favorable time
for that because of the financial crisis and the beginning of Nazi
rule in Germany. Despite that, a German publisher, Anton Pustet,
attempted to do so in 1935 and published two books before the situ-
ation worsened.
On the other hand, the Nazi regime’s persecution forced some
of Ebner’s supporters into exile, including Ebner sympathiz-
ers like John M. Österreicher, later the coauthor of Nostra Aetate
during Vatican Council II. Österreicher belonged to a group of
Judeo-Christians who came from Judaism, often under the influ-
ence of Ficker and his Der Brenner, which promoted conciliation
between Jews and Christians. Another prominent representative of
this group, Karl Thieme, apparently “converted under the impres-
sion of Ebner’s life’s work,” as the great Austrian author Karl Kraus
wrote.3 The presence and work of Österreicher in the United States
must have led to a better knowledge of the positions of Der Brenner
and Ebner himself, even if for German-speaking immigrants. It is
possible—as maintains the “oral tradition” of the IFEG—that even
in this environment an English edition of Ebner was also planned
but was never realized.
After surviving the Second World War, Ficker continued to strive
for the dissemination of Ebner’s thought. In the 1950s and ’60s, as a
wave of interest for Ebner rose, he had other prominent allies, like
the aforementioned Ludwig Hänsel, who was the president of the
IFEG at the time, and the English-American poet W. H. Auden.
Among the “open Christians” of that time in Austria there was
a widespread belief that a renewal of Catholicism and Christianity
was imminent based on Ebner’s ideas. An expression of this convic-
tion can be seen in an essay by Friedrich H ansen-Löve at this time:
3. Karl Kraus, “Brief des Verlags der Fackel an August Zechmeister,” in Der Brenner
und die Fackel: Ein Beitrag zur Wirkungsgeschichte von Karl Kraus, ed. G. Stieg (Salz
burg: Müller: 1976), 206.
ix
“If in the near future, probably inspired by the eminent poet and es-
sayist W. H. Auden, the A nglo-Saxon world gets to know Ferdinand
Ebner as a contemporary of Wittgenstein, then the actual thanks
are due to Ludwig von Ficker.”4 But for some reason, even this proj-
ect remained unfulfilled.
In the meantime, the United States already knew of dialogical
philosophy from the works of Martin Buber, so the term became
nearly attached to his name. Yet as Joseph Chapel writes in his in-
troduction, not only was Buber’s thought very similar, Buber later
admitted reading Ebner’s work while writing his own I and Thou.
Although he did not like to talk about it, he did mention this in his
diary.
It was an interest in Martin Buber that brought Harold (Hal)
Green to Ebner. He describes his relation to Ebner’s thought in his
own translator’s introduction. In the meanwhile, however, the di-
rection of philosophical investigations has changed (postmodern-
ism and so on), and the interest in Ebner has subsided. But since
the IFEG learned about Dr. Green’s translation, it has always been
on its agenda to get it published. Now, as we’re seeing a certain up-
swing in interest in Ebner, after one hundred years it may be the
right moment to fulfill Ebner’s possibly prophetic words about his
book and its main idea:
I do not really understand how exactly I had to come to this idea. It is not
arrogance for me to think that someday it will be effective in the world
and in life. It does not have to be the very book that starts this effect, for
it is possible that a completely different person comes who is more worthy
than I and with a real vocation.5
4. Forum 12, no. 136 (April 1965): 192–93.

5. Ferdinand Ebner, letter to Walter Huber (May 12, 1931).
x
Translator’s Note
T r a ns l at or’s No t e
Harold J. Green
My way to Ferdinand Ebner was through Martin Buber. Specifical-

ly, the impact Buber’s I and Thou had on me. I first happened upon
Buber’s masterwork in the bookstore of Iowa Wesleyan College, in
Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, in the spring of 1970. I was teaching psycholo-
gy there at the time. I chanced to find and open the book and pro-
ceeded to have an intellectual reaction unlike anything I had expe-
rienced before or since. Very quickly during my reading, I had the
uncanny sense that I understood Buber and that I was waking up
what must have been half-asleep in the dawning of my knowledge,
as Kahlil Gibran put it. Along with that was an unexpected, unnerv-
ing sense that somehow I shared—or would share—in Buber’s in-
sight into the nature of persons, human and divine.
My undergraduate major had been philosophy, with an empha-
sis on philosophy of science and philosophy of language, especially
the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, an Austrian Jew, whose ground-
breaking work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was published in the
same year as Buber’s I and Thou. Wittgenstein and Buber were two
of the most influential thinkers of my intellectual development.
Fast forward to 1976. After entering pastoral ministry in the
United Methodist Church and completing an M.Div. at Garrett-
Evangelical Theological Seminary, I began a Ph.D. program in
World Religions at Northwestern University. I did so because I
wanted to study Buber and Judaism, and Dr. Manfred Vogel, a rabbi
xi
Translator’s Note
and Buber scholar, had invited me into the program. My studies had
to be comparative between two world religions, so I chose Judaism
and Christianity.
Since I wanted to study Buber, I had to find a Christian theolo-
gian and/or philosopher with whom to compare him. Then I hap-
pened upon Ferdinand Ebner. I had to pass language requirements,
so, needless to say, for my modern language, I chose German, which
I had studied for a year as an undergraduate. In the course of de-
veloping my capacity to read German, for the sake of reading Bu-
ber’s work in German, as well as t hen-current German scholarship
regarding his work, I kept coming across Ebner’s name—only in
German, since he had not been translated into English. Again and
again, what was referred to was the “I-Thou insight of Ebner and
Buber.” Who is Ebner? I had to find out.
And what a find it was! I will never forget coming across Ebner’s
work in German at Northwestern’s library. I opened its beginning
pages, and even though it was all in German, once again I had the
sense that I shared—or was going to share—in this insight. It was
as if I were somehow involved in developing intellectual history, at
least around this primal insight.
At first I intended to only translate some of Ebner’s work, when
needed, to compare and contrast with Buber, especially their dif-
ferences as a Catholic and a Jew. Then one day, while holding onto
Ebner’s book, it was as if it addressed me, saying, “Translate me!”
Though I could not of course hear words, I nevertheless felt ad-
dressed, as Buber would put it. Ebner’s book now took on the status
of an “I-Thou” rather than merely an “I-It.” I knew what I had to do,
which fortunately was also what I wanted to do.
I asked for an appointment with my major advisor, Dr. Vogel, to re-
quest including a translation of the entire book, alongside my disser-
tation. It was entirely unnecessary to do so, since my dissertation it-
self consisted of three sections: the history of the concept of dialogue
from Plato to Ebner; a critical introduction to Ebner’s book; and a
xii
Translator’s Note
comparison between Ebner and Buber, respecting their religious tra-

ditions. Sitting across from his desk, even before I could make known
my request, Dr. Vogel leaned forward and asked me if I would con-
sider translating the entire book! Acting surprised, but pleasantly so,
I said I would be willing to do so, as long as it was understood that
the translation was not to be included in the dissertation; therefore, it
would not be subject to critique. He agreed, and we shook hands. Dr.
Vogel never asked why I wanted to talk to him, nor did I ever tell him.
The translation became a labor of love as well as learning. The
dissertation, together with Ebner’s translation, took two years to
complete. The dissertation necessitated translating over eighty pag-
es of German scholarship, mostly about Ebner. I served two church-
es around Iowa City, the home of the University of Iowa, which
had an extraordinary theological and philosophical library. It also
had Dr. Fred Fehling, professor emeritus in German. Each week
Dr. Fehl ing and I would get together to discuss my translation. I al-
ways had a translation; I never asked him to translate for me, but
only to determine the accuracy of my work.
The central problem, as anyone who translates discovers, is that
words have a Sitz im Leben or “setting in life” in one language that
simply cannot be fully translated into another language. A central
example is the word Geist in German. Its many meanings include
“spirit,” “ghost,” and “mind.” So when the word Ebner uses is geistig,
which is an adjective, you are forced to choose between “spiritual”
and “intellectual”—which have very different meanings in English.
So in Ebner’s case, especially since the subtitle is Pneumatological
Fragments, referring directly to “spiritual,” it seemed essential to
translate geistig as “spiritual.”
By way of intellectual history: I completed the translation and dis-
sertation in the spring of 1980. In August of 1983, I began work on a
book that came to be titled The Eternal We (Chicago: Loyola Univer-
sity Press, 1986). What both Ebner and Buber seem to see, but that
they did not develop, was the concept and meaning of the third di-
xiii
Translator’s Note
mension of “person,” both human and divine—namely, the “We” be-

tween or shared by the “I” and “You.” For a period of several years,
I was hounded by a concept, by what Buber called a geistige Gestalt,
or “spiritual/intellectual form.” Buber had his spiritual form, and I
had mine. Mine finally got named by me in 1978. In German it was
dazwischen, or the “in-between,” or more simply the “between.” What
happens, according to Buber, and in keeping with my experience of—
or encounter with—the “between,” is that it seeks to become clarified
and brought across via the only instrument available—namely, lan-
guage—into the realm of discourse and discussion.
My book The Eternal We turned out to be a trinitarian metaphys-
ic about the nature of persons, both human and divine. The “We” of
Spirit, which constitutes what is distinctly shared by and between
the I and Thou, as their relationship as such, is as real, substantial,
and eternal as the partners therein and thereof. The eternality of
relationship, once recognized, will change how we see and under-
stand God and ourselves.
In grateful sum, I humbly stand on the intellectual shoulders of
Ferdinand Ebner and Martin Buber. That my translation is at long
last being published means more than I can here convey. I do want,
however, to thank two men. First, Fr. Joe Chapel, STD, who found
and utilized my translation of Ebner back in the 1990s to assist in
the writing of his own dissertation. He has always been most posi-
tive about my translation. And as an editor, he did an excellent job
of making a technically accurate translation an even better one.
Second, I wish to thank Dr. Krzysztof Skorulski for his tireless
efforts to see to the publication of an English translation of Ebner’s
book. His many suggestions contributed to the completion of the
current publication, which has been greatly developed since its
original form.
Finally, it is my fervent hope that Ebner will finally get the rec-
ognition he well deserves as a highly original and significant philos-
opher and theologian—not only that, but that his ideas might gain
currency in the English realm of ideas.
xiv
Introduction and Acknowledgments
E di t or’s I n t roduc t ion a n d

Ac k now l e d g m e n t s
Joseph R. Chapel
The Importance of Ebner

This seminal work of Ferdinand Ebner (1882–1931), Das Wort und
die geistigen Realitäten, was first published in the original German
in 1921.1 It has been translated over the years into a number of oth-
er languages—including Italian,2 Spanish,3 and Polish,4—but until
now there has been no published translation in English.
1. Ferdinand Ebner, Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten: Pnuematologische Frag-
mente (Innsbruck: Brenner, 1921). It was republished in 1963 as part of a t hree-volume
collection of Ebner’s complete works in Schriften, vol. 1, Fragmente, Aufsätze, Apho-
rismen: Zu einer Pneumatologie des Wortes, ed. Franz Seyr (Munich: Kösel Verlag,
1963), 75–342. There have been other editions through the years; the most recent is a
critical edition: Ebner, Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten: Pnuematologische Frag-
mente, ed. Richard Hörmann (Vienna: LIT, 2009). This edition is also incorporated
in the ongoing digital project begun in 1999 to produce critical editions of Ebner’s
complete works: Digitale Edition: Ferdinand Ebner Gesammelte Werke, ed. Richard
Hörmann (collaboration of University of Salzburg, Center for Ethics and Poverty
Research and University of Innsbruck, Institute of Philosophy), http://wfe.sbg
.ac.at/exist/apps/Frontpage/index.html (hereafter FEGW).
2. Ebner, La parola e le realtà spirituali: Frammenti pneumatologici, trans. Paul
Renner, ed. Silvano Zucal (Cinisello Balsamo, Milan: Edizioni San Paolo, 1998).
3. Ebner, La palabra y las realidades spirituales: Fragmentos pneumatológicos,
trans. José Maria Garrido (Madrid: Caparrós Editores, 1995).
4. Ebner, Słowo i realności duchowe: Fragmenty pneumatologiczne, trans. Krzysztof
Skorulski, intro. Bernhard Casper (Chojnice: Oficyna Wydawnicza Fundacji Fuhr-
manna, 2016).
1
This volume will serve to introduce the English-speaking world

to the dialogical personalist thought of this very original thinker—
well known and the subject of significant study in Europe, but vir-
tually unknown in the English language.
Why a translation, and why now?
Ebner’s thought has been applied fruitfully for nearly a century
in a variety of settings and disciplines and continues to have many
points of influence and points of reference that can be fruitfully ap-
plied today.
In the philosophy of language, Ebner’s thought on the “why” of
language and where it comes from can be juxtaposed with thinkers
who explore the “how” of language and how it operates.
In theology, Ebner has had a notable influence, both direct and
indirect. Indeed, he has been called “the secret philosophical inspi-
ration of modern theology.”5 Especially in the study of sacraments,
Ebner’s thought provides useful insights for symbolic approaches to
sacramental theology.
In the world of religion in general, most notably for dialogue
among religions, Ebner offers a typology that is useful for compar-
ative religious study and dialogue. Ebner’s authentic dialogue was a
fruitful tool in the early days of interreligious dialogue after Vatican
Council II.
In the world of political science and international diplomacy, Eb-
ner offers excellent contributions for the theoretical underpinnings
of dialogue in general.
In psychology, Ebner offers insights into the transpersonal na-
ture of the human person that have been taken up in the world of
psychology.
In the world of hard sciences there has been a notable interest in
Ebner over the last decade or more. Interestingly, in cellular biol-
ogy, c ell-level communications theorists note that cells do not be-
5. Jurgen Moltmann, Anfänge der dialektischen Theologie (Munich: Christian Kai-

ser, 1966), 1:xvii.
2
have as they should, and at the level of basic science, they seek new
philosophical paradigms for inter- and intracellular communica-
tions to understand how it is that cells appear to converse and make
decisions independently of the larger system.
The sheer diversity of disciplines in which Ferdinand Ebner’s
thought has found a home and the variety of ways in which his
thought has found application provide reason enough to bring this
work finally to the attention of the E
nglish-speaking world. While
his thought and his form of expression are challenging, readers will
find great reward for the effort.
The Philosophical Environment

Much of the philosophy of recent centuries stands in stark contrast
to the biblical sense of the human person as founded in relationship
with God and the community. Specifically, there has been such a
radical shift in philosophy toward the autonomous subject that the
way to understanding the things above, the transcendent, seems at
times to be closed. The focus here will not be a formal presentation
of one or another philosophical system, but merely some observa-
tions on the influence that Cartesian thought and German idealism
have had on modern man and woman, an influence with a great in-
ward focus on thought, reason, and idea, but little sense of relation-
ship with God and neighbor as foundational for the human person.
Consequently, there is no foundation for understanding that bring-
ing guilt and sin to speech in a concrete confession can be a recon-
ciling encounter with God and community.
Beginning with the philosophy of René Descartes (1596–1650),
something might be said about the Cartesian problem.6 Starting
with universal doubt, Descartes found a foundation for certainty: If
I doubt, then I am thinking. Thought then exists, even in the event I
6. See René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy,

trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980); Fergus Kerr, Theology after
Wittgenstein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 3–27, 77–100.
3
am dreaming or led into error by some evil demon. Regardless, the

fact that I do think is beyond a doubt.
Here is found Descartes’s turn to the subject: I think, therefore
I am, cogito ergo sum. The foundation of knowledge is no longer to
be found in the object, but rather, in the subject and the conscious
spirit. Since ancient times, being had been divided into living or
nonliving, but with Descartes, the distinction became conscious or
unconscious. What was living possessed a soul as the first principle
of life, but now consciousness is something apart from matter, thus
life is a material process; the soul (or mind) is not part of that ma-
terial process and so loses its union with the body. The soul is now
a thinking thing (res cogitans) and the body an extended substance
(res extensa), completely subjected to mechanical law.
In trying to know who is this “I” that exists, Descartes concludes,
“I am . . . only a thing that thinks; that is, I am a mind, or intelli-
gence, or intellect, or reason . . . a thinking thing.”7 B
odies that lack
consciousness have no souls—true of inorganic bodies, but now
also true of animals. There is only one exception where the soul and
body are in contact: man.8
From the ancients to the Middle Ages, man had been a spiritu-
al being with a predetermined place in the hierarchy: God, angels,
man, animals, etc. Now with Descartes, the key given is no longer
the world, but human thought, the subjective idea. As Descartes
himself said, he no longer thought of himself as a man or even as a
rational animal; “He has redefined what it is to be human in terms
of consciousness, and his perspective is completely egocentric. Thus
7. René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings, trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff,

and D. Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 2:18.
8. The term “man,” used throughout, should be taken to mean “man and woman.”
It has not been possible to substitute some more inclusive term, such as “humanity”
or “humankind,” “person” or “people,” because the various authors under study, es-
pecially in the source languages, assign particular, precise meanings to each of these
terms that do not lend themselves to inclusive translations without causing confu-
sion about actual meaning.
4
the Cartesian ‘I,’ as a thing that thinks, comes into the philosoph-
ical tradition.”9 The Cartesian “I” is in relation with itself, or stated
differently, it engages only in monologue, for dialogue would re-
quire the personal address and response of an “other,” who in this
case cannot be reached. The Cartesian turn to the subject was to
have significant consequences for philosophy: The analysis of man
and the disclosure of his cognitive structures become the principal
efforts of philosophers like Kant. On the other hand, the objective
world is gradually given over to doubt, to such a degree that it ap-
pears as a function of the subject. Even Hegel is dealing with a kind
of human thinking about a world, which becomes obedient to the
dialectic that it has discovered.
Turning to Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and the German Ide-
alist philosophers and their treatment of the subjective idea, it is
difficult to give a precise definition to the term “idealism,” as it is
understood in a variety of ways. In a general sense, however, it is un-
derstood to mean that reality is mediated by ideas in the mind rath-
er than by knowing the thing in itself.
In trying to understand how reality and idea were related in the
centuries after Descartes, Kant looked for a way to integrate expe-
rience and reason. Therefore, the nature of human knowledge is of
great interest in his philosophy.
It is not entirely certain that Kant is truly an idealist, but he as-
signs the designation to himself. Kant maintained that we don’t
know the world through rational thought alone, but at the same
time, mere sense experience doesn’t give knowledge of the world,
either, for it is blind without interpretation. Therefore, our percep-
tions must be organized in a priori intuitions of space and time, in
terms of rational principles.
His critique of knowledge approached reason through science
and tried to resolve the gap between rationalism and empiricism be-
9. Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein, 4–5.
5
cause, in his view, neither offered a coherent theory of knowledge.

Empiricism, by holding experience over understanding, lacked the
concepts with which experience could be described, and rational-
ism, by emphasizing understanding over experience, dismissed the
very subject matter of knowledge.
Kant’s solution is his transcendental idealism: knowledge is
achieved through the synthesis of concept and experience. This
synthesis is transcendental because it can’t be observed as a process,
but only presupposed as a result. Experience must conform to the
categories of understanding, which are basic forms of thought, a pri-
ori concepts, which subsume all empirical concepts (for instance,
the concept “table” is subsumed under “artifact,” which in turn is
subsumed under “object,” then “substance,” as opposed to the con-
cept “killing,” which is subsumed under “action,” which is con-
sumed under “cause”).
These categories are endpoints of the chains of subsumption, the
most basic operations of human thought, and by them we can know
a priori that our world must obey certain principles implicit in con-
cepts such as substance, object, and cause and be ordered by space
and time. Thus, with Kant’s “Copernican revolution,” objects con-
form to our knowledge, instead of the more common view that our
knowledge conforms with the objects we encounter—that is to say,
the mind is indeed important.
And so by Kant’s doctrine of synthetic a priori judgments, man can
only know appearances (phenomena) and not things-in-themselves
(noumena); that is, man can know the idea, or the representation, but
not the reality. Thus, there were real limits to knowledge, and there is
very little that can be known about the a priori ideas of world, soul, or
God.
While Kant recognized that the world is not known by reason
alone, he does not propose a dialogical model: it is precisely Kant’s
notion that knowledge is limited to the ideal world of representa-
tion that Ebner’s dialogical philosophy rejects.
6
Kant had a great influence on the classical German Idealists—

including three key figures, Johann Fichte (1762–1814), Friedrich
Schelling (1775–1854), and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–
1831)—who embraced much of his method, but not his limitations
on human knowledge, for they recognized an ultimate unity in re-
ality that was spiritual and intelligible through reason. While Fichte
made some steps toward a dialectic theory, it was for Hegel to work
out the dialectical development of spirit.
As an absolute idealist, Hegel tried to achieve a synthesis through
the Absolute Spirit, manifest in man. For Hegel, absolute, dialecti-
cal unity was in the act of mind or spirit. The dialectical law worked
like this: every level of consciousness moves by self-contradiction
to a higher level that resolves the contradiction, so that the highest
contradiction of consciousness, which is the duality of subject and
object, finally gets resolved in Absolute Mind. The triad can be de-
scribed as Art (thesis), Religion (antithesis), and Philosophy (syn-
thesis).
All of this is perfected in the collective history of man, because
Absolute Spirit unfolds in history. (This suggests the interesting
possibility that Hegel’s dialectic is inherently dialogical: the con-
frontation of thesis with antithesis is, in a sense, a dialogue that
strives toward synthesis. If Spirit is complete in itself, why is a di-
alectical process necessary? Does spirit dialogue with itself within
human history toward the fullness of Absolute Spirit?) This has a
political application, as well, for the state is also a manifestation of
the Absolute and so is seen as absolute and authoritarian.
Hegel’s synthesis earned critics who didn’t find enough room for
individual human existence and action in the absolute spirit. For
example, Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) looked to the free individual,
who searched for happiness, was morally responsible, and believed
in a transcendent personal God, while Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72)
looked to man as he becomes more fully real through social rela-
tions with other men and the natural world. The undervaluation of
7
the free individual and of human social relations suggests a dialogi-

cal element missing in Hegel that these critics will try to overcome
in their own thought (to be examined later).
Among the effects of these philosophies, even to this day, is a
residual m ind-body Cartesian dualism: to the extent that we are
trapped inside our own heads by this dualism, we continue to find
it difficult to open ourselves to the presence of God and one anoth-
er in concrete personal relationship: despite my yearning for God,
I am at the center of the universe, at the center of what is real and
knowable as existing, and I am unwittingly isolated.
Since I am the arbiter of truth, the reality of God and of others
depends on me. Yet, I know myself to be finite, thus my finitude
then impoverishes this me-dependent God so that any real open-
ness to God becomes problematical. Indeed, it has been said that in
Kant’s variations on the Cartesian paradigm, we have come to rec-
ognize in ourselves
the man . . . , who confronted even with Christ turns away to consider the
judgment of his own conscience and to hear the voice of his own reason. . . .
This man is with us still, free, independent, lonely, powerful, rational, re-
sponsible, brave, the hero of so many novels and books of moral philoso-
phy.10
Thus, Descartes and Kant have given us as a legacy, “a ‘philosophy

of the autonomous subject,’ who is closed against the transcendental
experience in which dependence on God becomes evident. The mod-
ern self is ill at ease in Christianity because of this failure to evince a
sense of creatureliness.”11 As a consequence, there is the false sense
that verification is within ourselves rather than in community: I don’t
perceive the community as constitutive of self, nor personal relations
as part of my relationship with a God who is greater than I (rather
10. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of the Good (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1970), 80.
11. Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein, 7.
8
than dependent on me). This isolation of the autonomous subject in

the world of ideas has motivated substantial philosophical reflection
within the varied philosophical currents of the twentieth century.
Pragmatists, such as Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), William
James (1842–1910), and John Dewey (1850–1952), each examined the
close link between thinking and doing.
Analytical philosophy—a term that broadly encompasses Ber-
trand Russell’s (1872–1970) logical atomism, the Vienna Circle’s
logical positivism, and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (1889–1951) philo-
sophical analysis—reacted to philosophical idealism by concerning
itself with the complex of problems surrounding the imprecise use
of language. (Although Wittgenstein was in Vienna in these years,
he was not a participant in the Vienna Circle, but his work was influ-
ential in their thought). This would provide the underpinnings for
the development of various philosophies of language that would ul-
timately have a significant effect on related disciplines, such as criti-
cal theory, structuralism, and semiotics.
Phenomenology, in attempting to take a step back from experi-
ence in order to understand it, tries to intuit essences (not merely
what is contingent or empirical) and grasp essential connections
between those essences. Through its most famous proponent, Ed-
mund Husserl (1859–1938), phenomenology is both a bridge to, and
a major influence upon, existentialist thinkers later in the century.
Meanwhile, the discipline of hermeneutics was significantly
shaped by Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) and would be further influ-
enced by a diversity of thinkers from Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)
to Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) and from Gabriel Marcel
(1889–1973) to Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005). It concerns itself with the
principles of interpretation: because history deals with human life,
it can only be understood through our own lived experience (Er-
lebnis). The problem then of how to understand the experience and
texts of periods and cultures not our own becomes the necessary
subject of sustained reflection.
9
It is worthy of note that Austria in this period was a place of great

intellectual ferment, not only in philosophy but also in other disci-
plines. Psychology saw the development of psychoanalysis by Sig-
mund Freud (1856–1939) and individual psychology by Alfred Adler
(1870–1937).
Although Ebner did not go to Freud’s lectures, he was aware of
his thought through some of his other followers, as well as through
his writing, especially The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeu-
tung).12 In fact, he transformed the concepts of Freud in a dialogical
way into the “Dream of the Spirit” (Traum vom Geist).
The composer, music theorist, and painter Arnold Schönberg
(1874–1951) had a great influence in music as leader of the Second
Viennese School, which included composers, many of whom had
been his students in early t wentieth-century Vienna, whose work
was characterized by an expressionism that gradually evolved into
an atonal style.
The dynamic intellectual environment of this period offers a
backdrop against which to situate the work of the dialogical philos-
ophers, who viewed dialogue in authentic relationship as pivotal to
the human person.
The Dialogical Philosophers:

Das Neue Denken
Das neue Denken, “the new thinking,” was the name given to the
work of the dialogical philosophers who came to prominence in
the wake of World War I. At issue was a loss of confidence in the
sufficiency of reason and the possibilities of human and social prog-
ress that had begun with the Enlightenment and endured as ideal-
ism into the twentieth century. The drastic experience of the First
World War put an end to the optimism of Idealism and brought
12. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2008), originally published as Die Traumdeutung (Vienna: Franz Deuticke,
1900).
10
acceptance for voices who, for many years, had opposed Hegelian
philosophy.
The most prominent dialogical philosophers—Franz Rosenz-
weig (1886–1929), Martin Buber (1878–1965), and Ferdinand Eb-
ner—share a remarkable similarity of thought due not to the lim-
ited contact they had with one another’s work, but rather deriving
from das neue Denken, “the new thinking,” Rosenzweig’s term for
this reaction against the Cartesian and German Idealism of the
time. Therefore, the dialogical thinkers must be understood in light
of this philosophical climate to which they were reacting, and so a
brief examination of their philosophical precursors will be helpful.
The History of the Dialogical Principle

Although dialogical philosophy is a twentieth-century phenom-
enon, its precursors struggled with the turn to the subject and its
implications for the reality of the “I” and the “other” and their place
in the universe.13
Blaise Pascal (1623–62) was unable to find the meaning of his
own personal existence in a rational, Cartesian I. What he found
was not man in dynamic relation as a s elf-affirming subject, “I am,”
but the contrary, insignificant man, an infinitely small and limited
moi over against the vastness of the universe. “It is the sobriety of
the man who has become more deeply solitary than ever before, and
with a sober pathos he frames the anthropological question afresh:
qu’est ce qu’un homme dans l’infini?”14 For Pascal, the I’s aloneness is
not due to its self-sufficiency and autonomy, but rather, in its small-
13. See Harold Johnson Green, “Introduction,” in “The Word and the Spiritu-
al Realities: A Translation of and Critical Introduction to Ferdinand Ebner’s Das
Wort und die geistigen Realitäten and a Comparison with Martin Buber’s Ich und Du”
(Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1980), (hereafter Green, “Introduction”).
14. Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New
York: Collier, 1965), 131, citing Blaise Pascal, Pensées (Paris: G
arnier-Flammarion,
1976), Fragment, 230. See Pascal, Pensées, bilingual ed., trans. H. F. Stewart (Lon-
don: Routledge, and Kegan Paul, 1950), Fragment 230: “What is a man, within the
infinite?”
11
ness it is the I of despair. The moi only moves beyond this meaning-
less aloneness through the spiritual activity of the heart: “The heart
has its reasons, which reason does not know. . . . It is the heart which
experiences God, not the reason.”15
For Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88), it is not with the heart,
but in language that man relates to God, for language is not created
by man, but given to him by God. In Creation God’s plan unfolds
in speech: “Speak that I may see thee!16 This wish was fulfilled in
the creation, which is a speaking to the creature through the crea-
ture.”17 It is language that binds man to God and his Word, but at
the same time, language in its humanness binds man to the human
community. “The fact that God speaks, constitutes the foundation
of philosophy in Hamann’s view, which makes it philosophy of lan-
guage. Hence the basic philosophical problem is the problem of
language.”18 The problem of language unfolds dramatically in his
oft-quoted reflection on its relation to reason:
Even if I were as eloquent as Demosthenes, I would still have to repeat no
more than a single word three times: reason is language, logos. I gnaw at
this m
arrow-bone and I will gnaw over it until death. This profundity still
remains obscure for me; I still wait for an apocalyptic angel with a key to
this abyss.19
Hamann’s asystematic line of thinking greatly affected dialogi-

cal thought, and Ebner was to be especially influenced by its Johan-
nine character.
The terms “I” and “Thou” appear, perhaps for the first time, in a
15. Pascal, Pensées, bilingual ed., trans. Stewart, Fragments 277–78.

16. Harold Stahmer, Speak That I May See Thee!: The Religious Significance of Lan-
guage (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 74–76.
17. Ronald Gregor Smith, J. G. Hamann: A Study in Christian Existence (London:
Collins, 1960), 197, cited in Stahmer, Speak, 84.
18. Green, “Introduction,” xxv.
19. Johann Georg Hamann, “Letter to Herder, August 7, 1784,” in Hamanns
Schriften, ed. Fr. Roth (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1821), 7:151ff, cited without reference by
Ebner; see Green, “Introduction,” xxiv, and chapter 7 in this volume.
12
1775 letter by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819): “I open eye or

ear, or I stretch forth my hand, and feel in the same moment insep-
arably: Thou and I, I and Thou.” By 1785, this had matured into a
more precise formulation: “The I is impossible without the Thou,”
which “ruptures the monism of the Ichphilosophie (I-philosophy),”20
while anticipating later dialogical thought.
To this, Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) adds the recogni-
tion that in language the otherness of each partner is expressed in
duality, by which the thought of the one finds resonance in the oth-
er, when the subject “really sees the thought outside himself; and
this is possible only in another being, representing and thinking
like himself. And between one power of thought and another there
is no other mediator but speech.”21
Likewise in opposition to the Cartesian, rationalist cogito, Franz
von Baader (1765–1841) views man from the religious perspective of
his relationship with God, because no consciousness is possible that
does not imply a relationship with a superior being.22
Most authors would maintain that Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72)
discovered the “I-thou” with his 1843 affirmation that the ultimate
and highest principle of philosophy is communion of man with man
as the criterion of truth: “The essence of man is contained only in
the community, in the unity of man and man—a unity which rests
upon the reality of the difference between I and Thou.”23
Yet, Feuerbach, in making this key anthropological affirmation,
does not take the further step to see that the unity of the I and Thou
is God; rather, he responds “with the substitution of an anthropo-
20. Martin Buber, “The History of the Dialogical Principle” (“Nachwort zu den
Schriften uber das dialogische Prinzip”), translated by Maurice Friedman, in Be-
tween Man and Man, 209; see Green, “Introduction,” xxvi–xxvii.
21. Buber, Between Man and Man, 27.
22. Julio Puente, Ética Personalística: Una interpretación de la obra de F. Ebner
(Madrid: Imprenta Saez, 1982), 24.
23. James Mundackal, “The Dialogical Structure of Personal Existence accord-
ing to Martin Buber” (S.T.D. diss., Pontifical Gregorian University, 1977), 34; see
Puente, Ética Personalística, 24–25.
13
logical ersatz God.”24 He does not recognize that there is a religious

foundation in the word that gives unity to the I and the thou, that it
is this religious foundation in the word that gives them their person-
al dignity. Nonetheless, Feuerbach’s discovery of the thou is a real
leap in dialogical thought.
Where Feuerbach rejected all religious relationship, Søren Kier
kegaard’s (1813–55) specifically religious interest was to discover
what it means to become a Christian. His analysis of human exis-
tence, which would have a great influence on later existential phi-
losophy, argued that each individual had to acquire and appropriate
ethics and religion on his own, contrary to the Hegelian view that by
objective information or demonstration reason could show the way
in all things. Such determinism loses sight of freedom, thus for Kier-
kegaard, the individual is irreducible and must become an ethical or
religious person—that is, the individual must choose: first to recog-
nize that good and evil exist, and second, whether or not to become
religious. Kierkegaard’s thinking focused on extreme situations
where everyday life breaks down, reminding us of the contingent
nature of life and social relationships. In the individual’s fundamen-
tal choice for God, he considered all interhuman relationships as a
possible danger to that one true relationship with God; to enter into
relationship with God, the individual must become a “Single One”
(Der Einzelne), hence the much noted renunciation of his fiancée,
Regina Olsen. The choice is for eternal life, in Jesus Christ; to resist
this belief is “sickness,” which is “unto death,” for the individual is
in despair, believing that death is in fact the end. Kierkegaard is not
properly a precursor of dialogical thought, as his own project is rath-
er monological in focus, with its retreat from the other in favor of the
“Single One.” However, his thought was a key influence on Ferdi-
nand Ebner, who directly appropriated some of his categories.
The problem of the reality of the I and the reality of the other re-
24. Buber, “History of the Dialogical Principle,” 210.
14
surfaced again in 1890 with Wilhelm Dilthey’s (1833–1911) principle

of phenomenality (Phänomenalität), by which whatever exists for
me exists as a fact of my consciousness. But with this starting point,
how can external reality be verified?
Three decades later, the problem of the Thou and its philosophi-
cal implications was as yet unresolved. By Max Scheler’s (1874–1928)
assessment, “The question of our grounds for assuming the reality
of other selves, and the possibility and limits of our understanding
of them is virtually the problem for any theory of knowledge in the
social sciences.”25 Ebner would later be influenced by a notion he at-
tributed to Scheler: that the spirit is present in man because he “has
the word” (Wort haben). Man “has the word,” and John’s Gospel
speaks of the mysterious logos—thus it is the word that will gradu-
ally reveal to Ebner all the power for interaction, disclosed through
nature and through the dynamic of the spirit. This approach, which
ran contrary to the Cartesian-Hegelian system, helped Ebner form
his thinking.
In the twentieth century, Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), although
not strictly a dialogical thinker, contributed the notion of man as
Mitmensch, or fellowman, and the link between interhuman and re-
ligious relationship: man, having been created by God, has a duty
to continue the process of creation by creating his fellowman. This
second creation occurs through the real religion of reason, behind
which is the power of God’s love, which itself is the prolongation of
the first creation in the interhuman world. Although God creates
the second time by teaching man to create himself as a fellowman
through other men, God is not encountered here as the eternal
Thou.
This overview of the precursors to dialogical thought will serve
to better understand the founders of dialogical thinking.
25. Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy (Wesen und Formen der Sympathie),
translated by Peter Heath (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1970), lxix; see Green, “Intro-
duction,” xx.
15
Martin Buber
Best known among the dialogical philosophers is Martin Buber,
whose seminal work, by its title alone, I and Thou,26 sums up the
core of dialogical philosophy: one comes to self-identity only in re-
lation to the other. Because his thinking is well known, only a few
points relevant to the topic of this study will be noted.
In his early philosophy Buber was attracted to Kant and Dilthey,
but with I and Thou, he makes a great shift in perspective and makes
his starting point the given reality of the “I” and the “Thou.”27 Buber
was drawn to dialogical thinking not so much by the influence of a
given author as by his contacts with Hasidism and by the problems
of the day during World War I.
Key to I and Thou is Buber’s contrast between two fundamental
ways of being in the world. There is the mode of meeting (Begeg-
nung), which is personal, immediate, and underivable, and there is
the mode of experience (Erfahrung), which is objective, impersonal,
and derivative.28 This world of experience is the world of the “It,”
which is a world of function and manipulation:
Man goes over the surfaces of things and experiences them. He brings
back from them some knowledge of their condition—an experience. . . .
But it is not experiences alone that bring the world to man. For what they
bring to him is only a world that consists of It and It and It, of He and He
and She and She and It. I experience something. . . . Those who experience
do not participate in the world. For the experience is “in them” and not be-
tween them and the world. The world does not participate in experience.
It allows itself to be experienced, but it is not concerned, for it contributes
nothing, and nothing happens to it. The world as experience belongs to the
basic word I-It. The basic word I-You establishes the world of relation.29
26. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1970).
27. On Buber’s thought, see I and Thou; Buber, Between Man and Man, 1–33, 209–26.
28. John O’Donnell, “The Trinity as Divine Community,” Gregorianum 69, no. 1
(1988): 14.
29. Buber, I and Thou, 55–56.
16
Buber is not so much interested in the world of experience, the

world of I-It, as with the world of meeting or encounter, the world of
I-Thou. He makes the following distinction between them:
Basic words are spoken with one’s being. When one says You, the I of the
word pair I-You is said, too. When one says It, the I of the word pair I-It is
said, too. The basic word I-You can only be spoken with one’s whole being.
The basic word I-It can never be spoken with one’s whole being.30
In fact, as a consequence of so much development in Western

culture, authentic relation has become more difficult, for “the im-
provement of the capacity for experience and use generally involves
a decrease in man’s power to relate.”31 Buber would not refer to the
relation of love as an experience of the beloved nor relating to God
as experience of God. It is not that they are beyond experience, but
that to the extent we make God or people into objects of experience,
we do not truly relate to them.
Buber’s concern is authentic relation, for the I can get stuck in
the It-world whose I is the ego, or reach the I-Thou world, which
means to become a person: “Egos appear by setting themselves
apart from other egos. Persons appear by entering into relation to
other persons.”32 So the distinction is between establishing bound-
aries and eliminating boundaries. If one is stuck in the world of I -It,
then the way to relationship is by letting go, by risking trust, rela-
tion, and love.
There is risk because the I is not the same in the two cases, be-
cause the I doesn’t stand alone, but always in reference to relation.
In the I-It relation, the I is not completely engaged; there is a part
remaining outside observing, and so it is less risky, for there is a part
of the self that remains outside the relation and can’t be hurt by the
other.
But in the I-Thou relation, this security is not there because there
30. Buber, I and Thou, 54.

17
can be no withholding of self for the whole being is involved. If not,

it becomes an I -It relation because part of the self is holding back as
a spectator. Everything is risked, because the I addresses the Thou
with the whole self, with no defensive position to run to.
Another risk is that in the I-Thou relation, the Thou must be met in
the freedom of otherness, which means to respond with total unpre-
dictability. If responses are calculated, if the I asks itself what kind of
impression it is making on the Thou, then the relation is to an It, not
a Thou. So, the I-Thou relation requires a total listening, always in the
present, without calculating with prejudgments from the past.
However, in reality life is not at any time purely I-Thou or purely
I-It, for these two attitudes are completely interwoven. What deter-
mines which attitude is present in a given moment is not a function
of the object known, but the zwischen (the Between)—that is, the
way in which man relates himself to the object.
What makes such an I-Thou encounter possible is the zwischen,
a grace that is between the I and the Thou and that overcomes their
isolation. Genuine encounter is an act of sheer grace, for neither the
I nor the Thou can originate it. Therefore, for Buber the zwischen is
interpreted in a religious sense. God is the origin of this grace, and
he makes every encounter of the I and the Thou possible. Or as Bu-
ber says it,
The extended lines of relations meet in the eternal Thou. Every particular
Thou is a glimpse through to the eternal Thou; by means of every partic-
ular Thou the primary word addresses the eternal Thou. . . . It is consum-
mated only in the direct relation with the Thou that by its nature cannot
become It.33
In God, it is not possible to have an I -It relationship, for even if a

person tries to ignore God, God can’t be reduced to a thing or to an
object like some other object, for God ultimately remains the eter-
nal Thou:
18
Men have addressed their eternal Thou with many names. In singing of
Him who was thus named they always had the Thou in mind. . . . Then the
names took refuge in the language of It; men were . . . moved to think of
and to address their eternal Thou as an It. But all God’s names are hal-
lowed, for in them He is not merely spoken about, but also spoken to.34
Like the other dialogical philosophers, Buber maintains that

there is a divine Thou that grounds human subjectivity and that
makes the human I-Thou encounter possible. But one thing lack-
ing in Buber is a more thorough consideration of language. As will
be seen, both Rosenzweig and Ebner see language as a phenome-
non where Being is manifest in time. But for Buber, the goal of en-
counter is not language, but a silence before the Thou that leaves the
Thou free.35
Before moving forward, a brief excursus is in order to demon-
strate that Ferdinand Ebner’s influence on the development of Bu-
ber’s thought, especially in I and Thou, is far greater than previously
recognized.
In the autumn of 1919, Martin Buber finished his first draft of I
and Thou and, by his own account, read no philosophy at all during
the next two years:
therefore, the works connected with the subject of dialogue by Co-
hen, Rosenzweig, and Ebner I read only later, too late to affect my own
thought. . . . Then I was able to begin the final writing of I and Thou, which
was completed in the spring of 1922. As I wrote the third and last part, I
broke the reading ascesis and began with Ebner’s fragments.36
The fragments are the pneumatological fragments, the collection

of aphorisms that make up Ebner’s The Word and the Spiritual Real-
ities. “First I happened to see some of them that were published in
an issue of Brenner and then sent for the book.”37 In 1919 and 1920,
35. O’Donnell, “Trinity as Divine Community,” 14–15; cf. Buber, I and Thou, 39.
37. Buber, “History of the Dialogical Principle,” 215n.
19
some of the fragments were published in Der Brenner, before the re-
lease of the complete book in 1921.38
Although Buber himself says that he saw these “too late to affect
my own thought,” commentators have rarely noted that in the next
breath he explicitly concedes his exposure to Ebner’s writings just
as he was revising the third part of I and Thou, the very section that
treats the question of the “Thou.” Buber, in fact, “read Ebner in sev-
eral stages at the time he was writing his work.”39
According to John Österreicher, by this time the I and Thou
theme was already the concern of other philosophers, in particular
Ferdinand Ebner and Franz Rosenzweig, who had published their
insights into the dialogical existence of the human person before
Buber. Furthermore, “Rivka Horwitz has pointed to Ferdinand Eb-
ner as the source of Buber’s own dialogic thought, particularly the
postulate that God must be addressed not as the remote ‘He,’ but as
the ever present ‘Thou.’ In my opinion, Ebner and Rosenzweig even
outrank Buber.”40
The concept of God as the eternal Thou or the absolute Thou ap-
pears in Buber for the first time in early 1922, in a series of lectures
entitled Religion as Presence.41 According to Horwitz, Ebner’s influ-
ence is very clear in these lectures (delivered just as Buber was read-
38. Stahmer, Speak, 219–20, 228. At the outset, Ebner had difficulty finding a pub-
lisher. However, the manuscript was well received by Theodore Haecker (Kierke-
gaard’s translator), who sent it to Ludwig von Ficker, publisher of the Brenner Press
and the periodical Der Brenner, well known both to Buber and Ebner. The publish-
er’s own financial limitations prevented immediate publication, and so, at Haecker’s
suggestion, fragments 1, 2, 3, 16, and 18 were serialized in Der Brenner, where Buber
read them, before the complete book became available to him in 1921. The first three
fragments alone treat the entire I -Thou-God question in sufficient detail to make Eb-
ner’s main argument clear to Buber.
39. Rivka Horwitz, “Ferdinand Ebner as a Source of Martin Buber’s Dialogic
Thought in I and Thou,” in Martin Buber: A Centenary Volume, ed. Haim Gordon and
Jochanan Bloch (New York: KTAV, 1984), 122.
40. John Österreicher, The Unfinished Dialogue: Martin Buber and the Christian
Way (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel, 1987), 31.
41. See Horwitz, Buber’s Way to I and Thou: An Historical Analysis and the First Pub-
lication of Martin Buber’s Lectures Religion as Presence (Heidelberg: Schneider, 1978).
20
ing Ebner), but less obvious “a few months later, when composing
the lectures into a book, he took out the concepts closest to Ebner’s,
so that they are less evident in I and Thou.”42 In Horwitz’s judgment,
Buber received the concept of divinity as developed in I and Thou from Eb-
ner. On every page of the book, Ebner recognizes God as the “true Thou”
who cannot be God in the third person; but this is one of the decisive in-
novations of I and Thou, that God can never be grasped in the third per-
son, but only in presence. The similarity exists not only in the substance
of the concept, but also in the whole structure and development of the
idea. . . . “Thou” as the basic and fixed name of God is found in Buber’s writ-
ings only after his encounter with the writings of Ebner.43
God is the eternal Thou, addressed in the second person rather

than spoken about in the third person: this recognition was virtually
absent in Buber’s earlier writings, but later became emblematic of his
work, beginning with the prepublication revision of I and Thou, fol-
lowing his initial exposure to Ebner’s fragments. What would merely
be a historic footnote is significant in the present case because Eb-
ner was not well known, and thus his direct influence on dialogical
philosophy is somewhat limited. However, because Buber’s name is
practically synonymous with I -Thou thought, his debt to Ebner for
this key insight establishes Ebner’s indirect influence as foundational
and decisive to any understanding of dialogical philosophy.
Franz Rosenzweig
It was Rosenzweig who coined the term “the new thinking” (das neue
Denken),44 which was to be grammatical and dialogical, using the
method of speech, which is to take the other person and to take time
seriously. In contrast, the “old thinking” is portrayed as logical (not
grammatical), monological (not dialogical), timeless, and meant
42. Horwitz, “Ferdinand Ebner,” 123.
43. Horwitz, “Ferdinand Ebner,” 123.
44. Franz Rosenzweig, “The New Thinking” (Das neue Denken), in Franz Rosen-
zweig: His Life and Thought, ed. Nahum Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1953).
21
only for the isolated individual. Thus speech and deed, language and
active involvement, are essential features of the “new thinking.”
His system requires one to start from experience, to recognize
speech as the entrance to the essence of being and the rejection of a
monism that would deny reality. Thus it hinges on concrete dialogue
in relationship rather than solitary, abstract thought. For Rosenz-
weig, this is a thinking that must return to common sense that
is content to know that a chair is a chair. . . . Philosophy refuses to accept
the world as world, God as God, man as man! . . . This very point, where
traditional philosophy comes to the end of its way of thinking, is the be-
ginning of philosophy based on experience.45
Another basic component is that truth is no longer only what is

true (in the sense that ideas match the thing known), but rather,
truth must be confirmed in the living of life, in relationship to oth-
ers. Thus to distinguish between true and false is not just a question
of logic and intellect, but involves trust in the whole person, because
the whole person is involved in relation, and as a whole person one
must respond to God’s call.
For Rosenzweig this kind of thinking was a personal shift. A gift-
ed scholar, he did major research on Hegel’s politics and the concept
of state, producing his doctoral dissertation and a t wo-volume work
entitled Hegel und der Staat (Hegel and the State), but in 1913, as he
was offered a very prestigious university post in Berlin, he abruptly
reached a critical turning point, realizing with clarity “the ambigu-
ity of the scientific method and the hubris of philosophical Ideal-
ism to understand absolute truth. Hegel’s a ll-encompassing theory
of world, history, spirit, and man broke down before the individual
asking the existential question: Who or what am I?”46
This was accompanied by a religious reawakening that led him
45. Rosenzweig, “New Thinking,” 193.

46. Nahum N. Glatzer, foreword to Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption
(Stern der Erlösung) (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), x.
22
almost to convert to Christianity, but instead gave him a new and

deep appreciation of his Judaism. The result was a break with aca-
deme and a desire to place knowledge at the service of men. While
in the trenches of Macedonia during World War I, witnessing the
daily death of his companions, Rosenzweig wrote his major work,
The Star of Redemption (Der Stern der Erlösung), in which he tried to
explain all these changes as his thinking moved toward a vision of
existence in the Old Testament sense.
At the heart of his shift, Idealism could not provide Rosenzweig
with an explanation for the carnage of war with its death, loneliness,
and hate. He came to see Idealist optimism as merely utopian and
instead found authentic reality in the nearness of concrete beings
and, in particular, in the profound mystery of living relationships
between persons.
In The Star of Redemption, Rosenzweig describes the threefold
reality of M an-World-God, which is not known by rational deduc-
tion and which is beyond our rational understanding. He describes
it as prior to reason, as a threefold working of God: of creation, rev-
elation, and redemption. While God is beyond human knowledge,
the believer experiences God’s working by being receptive to it; he
encounters God by being God’s trusted child.
For Rosenzweig, creation is a dialogical process, which begins
with God’s address to man, which is the source of the dialogue
between God and humans. God’s question to Adam, “Where art
Thou?” is taken to mean, “Where is such an independent Thou,
standing freely over against the hidden God, in whom he could dis-
cover himself as an I?”47 Buber comments on this:
From this point an inner biblical way to that “I have called you by name;
you are mine” becomes visible by which God shows himself “as the origi-
nator and opener of this whole dialogue between him and the soul.” This
is Rosenzweig’s most significant theological contribution to our subject.48

23
Thus, God is at the heart of man’s consciousness of self and his

dialogue with God. God is not a disinterested partner but will be
encountered in his essence in this dialogue. A key element of God’s
creation as a dialogical process is his gift of speech: “Speech is truly
the creator’s morning gift to mankind, and yet at the same time it is
the common property of all the children of men, in which each has
his particular share and, finally, it is the seal of humanity in man.”49
Finally, Rosenzweig elaborates on this gift of speech in terms
that resemble Ferdinand Ebner’s (as will be seen), who was writ-
ing at the same time, although they did not yet know one another’s
work:
The miraculous gift of speech was created for man and upon man at cre-
ation. Man did not make speech for himself, nor did it come to be for him
gradually: at the instant of becoming man, man opened his mouth; at the
instant of opening his mouth, he became a human being.50
Thus, like Ebner, Rosenzweig finds that man and woman are
constituted in the miracle of speech, a gift of creation, which is the
very possibility of being human.
Ferdinand Ebner: “Bedenker des Wortes”

Ferdinand Ebner was born in Wiener Neustadt on January 31, 1882.
From childhood on, he suffered from poor health, anxiety, and de-
pression. Oppressed by an overbearing father, Ebner considered his
homelife a mere illusion of a nonexistent freedom, akin to that of
his caged pet squirrel. In his youth, he regarded Christ crucified in
this same light, not as a redeemer, but as a man persecuted by those
around him. Friction with his father surrounded young Ebner’s dif-
ficulty in accepting the dogmatic and institutional aspects of reli-
gion, a difficulty that persisted throughout most of his life. Afflicted
at eighteen years of age with severe tuberculosis, he began teacher
49. Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 110.

50. Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 199.
24
training. At this time, because he was preoccupied with various

sexual concerns and a series of traumatic romances, the obligatory
religious instruction and frequent Confession associated with his
school program were particularly unpleasant; he felt his religious
life was fraudulent.
During this period Ebner began to seriously study the classics
and poetry on his own, but by 1910, this interest gave way to life-
long, private study of existential philosophy, psychology, and reli-
gious thought, about which he made extensive aphoristic notes.51
Despite his studious temperament, he felt lonely and isolated be-
hind his Chinese wall (Chinesische Mauer), always longing for an
authentic I-Thou encounter.
World War I brought a dramatic life conversion that turned Eb-
ner definitively toward Christ. There was not a distinct moment of
conversion, but by Ebner’s own later account, he had realized by
1916 that his study of philosophy had “led him up a blind alley.”52
The tragedy of war brought Ebner to despair because it was fought
by Christian against Christian, each claiming a patriotism favored
by God: in Christian churches prayers for victory were offered and
processions with miraculous pictures of Mary were conducted. But
a prayer for the victory of the just cause—even if this meant the vic-
tory of the enemy—would have been condemned as unpatriotic. . . .
Christian peoples were the ones who fought this war. Therefore, it
51. These aphorisms were published posthumously as Ebner, Wort und Liebe (Re-
gensburg: Friedrich Pustet, 1935), a title given by the editor, Hildegard Jone. The
book contains Ebner’s 1916–17 diaries, Aus dem Tagebuch 1916/17, and his final work,
Aphorismen, written in 1931 at the request of his friends Hildegard Jone and Josef
Humplik. Both works were republished in Ebner, Schriften, 1:19–74 and 1:909–1014,
respectively (see also FEGW). In 1949, Hildegard Jone edited another selection
from Ebner’s sixteen diary notebooks, entitled Das Wort ist der Weg (n.p.: Herder,
1949). This was not included in Franz Seyr’s edition of Ebner’s Schriften, and it is out
of print; thus the Italian edition La parola è la via, ed. and trans. Edda Ducci and
Piero Rossano (Rome: Anicia, 1991), will be used here. Translations to English are
mine.
52. Stahmer, Speak, 227; see Ebner, “Nachwort 1931,” a postscript to his Fragment
aus dem Jahr 1916 mit einem Nachwort (1931), in Schriften, 1:1048ff.
25
was impossible during this period to avoid a confrontation with the

Sermon on the Mount.53
Ebner was deeply offended that “amid the noise of war the Word
was forgotten”:54 Jesus’ radical demands were dismissed at the time
as mere rhetorical flourishes, to be discounted by r ight-thinking
people. Ebner became a daily reader of the Gospel Word but re-
mained aloof from the institutional church.
With belief in Jesus the Word as his interpretive key, the years
1916–23 were his most productive and saw the publication of this
work, his magnum opus, Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten, in
1921. However, after 1923, with more frequent and severe depres-
sions, Ebner retired from teaching and published a few more articles
in Der Brenner, but with occasional periods of good health, he was
able to marry and become a father—a source of joy to him.
Ultimately, Ebner’s very personal and existential writing style,
coupled with his focus on relation with God over against the limit-
ed fulfillment he found in human relationships, demonstrates both
Ebner’s affinity with Kierkegaard and, notwithstanding their simi-
lar I -Thou presentations, Ebner’s distance from Buber’s recognition
of the way to God in and through concrete, human I-Thou relation-
ships.55
Bedridden with his illnesses by the spring of 1931, he died on Oc-
tober 17, 1931. The epitaph carved on Ferdinand Ebner’s grave by his
friends reads, “Bedenker des Wortes,” which means one who is en-
amored of words, who reflects deeply, ponders, and considers the
word—“a ‘philologist’ in the most literal sense of the term.”56
Before moving to the outline of Ebner’s thought, a brief word
about the early thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein may be helpful. Eb-
53. Cited in Stahmer, Speak, 225; see Ebner, Versuch eines Ausblicks in die Zukunft,
in Schriften, 1:725; see also FEGW.
54. Cited in Stahmer, Speak, 226; see Ebner, Versuch eines Ausblicks in die Zukunft,
in Schriften, 1:725; see also FEGW.
55. Stahmer, Speak, 217.
56. See Green, “Introduction,” 56, and chapter 5 in this volume.
26
ner and Wittgenstein surely were aware of one another (as Krzysz-
tof Skorulski details earlier in this volume in the “Note on the Need
for an English Translation”), and, on the face of it, some common-
alities in their thought suggest themselves. In responding to the
shortcomings of German idealist philosophy, the limitations of sci-
ence, and the futility of war, Ebner said the purpose of his project
was “to show the man (Mensch) of his day the only way out of the
endemic human condition,”57 which resulted in the first publication
of this book in 1921.
It is striking that in the very same year, Ludwig Wittgenstein,
also Austrian and also at times a schoolteacher, whose aim in phi-
losophy was “to shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle,”58 re-
sponded to the same set of circumstances with the publication of
his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,59 in which he, too, “in his own
‘secular’ way sought to undo philosophy via linguistic analysis . . .
therein giving rise to the ‘philosophy of language’ movement.” 60
In fact, apart from their biographical coincidences—born in
Austria in the 1880s, schoolteachers who lived and worked largely
outside of official university circles, similar aphoristic style of writ-
ing—their projects are indeed quite different.
While Wittgenstein would not be identified with Ebner or
with dialogical thought in general, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus might be seen as an alternative way to respond
to the cultural crisis of the interwar years.61 Still, it can be said that
in the first half of the twentieth century both shared this common
concern:
57. Ebner, paraphrased from Tagebuch 1916: Fragment aus dem Jahre 1916, ed.
Markus Flatscher and Richard Hörmann (Vienna: LIT, 2007), 248ff.
58. Green, “Introduction,” xxxxviii, citing Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical In-
vestigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953), §309.
59. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. Mc-
Guinness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972).
60. Green, “Introduction,” xxxxviii.
61. Stahmer, Speak, 220.
27
Ebner, as well as Wittgenstein, asked the decisive question whether or

not there is a bridge between existing and speaking, between the “mysti-
cal” which only “indicates” itself and that which can be formulated. Over
against Wittgenstein’s apodictic saying: “Whereof one cannot speak,
thereof one must be silent,” Ebner recognized the principal ability of man
to find verbal expression even for the unspeakable of his spiritual life. In
these opposing views lies the basic dissimilarity between both attempts;
which, nevertheless, because of their preoccupation with thoughts about
language, move close to one another.62
In fact, this comparison takes into account only Wittgenstein’s

early thought (Ebner would not live to see most of Wittgenstein’s
later thought), and while the similarities are never very great be-
tween them, in Wittgenstein’s later thought, there is much more of
which one can speak, so that there is some affinity between Ebner’s
dialogical philosophy of the word and Wittgenstein’s analytical lan-
guage criticism.63 Both take a phenomenological approach to lan-
guage: it is not such a great distance from Ebner’s “everything came
to be through the Word” and Wittgenstein’s “in language every-
thing becomes expressed.” 64 They come together insofar as “both
want ultimately to adduce not about language, but out of language
to think, to contemplate their meaning within the total horizon of
human experience of the world and human self-understanding.”65
In short, Ebner and Wittgenstein both look for a solution to the
same realities, but ultimately in distinct ways—Wittgenstein in the
62. “‘Der Brenner’—Leben und Fortleben einer Zeitschrift,” in Nachrichten aus
dem K ösel-Verlag (Munich: Kösel-Verlag, 1965), 4–5, cited in Stahmer, Speak, 221.
63. See Peter Kampits, “Sprachspiel und Dialog: Zur Sprachdeutung Ludwig
Wittgensteins und Ferdinand Ebners,” in Sprache, Logik und Philosophie: Akten des
vierten internationalen Wittgenstein Symposiums, ed. Rudolf Haller and Wolfgang
Grassl (Vienna: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1980), 205–7; unpublished translation to
English by Terrance W. Klein and Joseph R. Chapel.
64. Peter Kampits, “Gioco Linguistico e Dialogo: Sull’interprtazione del lin-
guaggio in Ludwig Wittgenstein e Ferdinand Ebner,” in La Filosofia Della Parola de
Ferdinand Ebner, ed. Silvano Zucal and Anita Bertoldi (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1999),
467; unpublished translation to English by Joseph R. Chapel.
65. Kampits, “Gioco Lingistico,” 468.
28
analysis of “how” language functions and Ebner in the “why” of the

“miracle of language.”
Having the Word: The Miracle of Language

Ebner’s key insight is this: humans are given the word. It is only in
the word, in language, that an “I” meets a “Thou,” that relationship
and s elf-identity can occur, and this word is given in Jesus Christ,
the Word made flesh. Where the point of departure of dialogical
thought for Rosenzweig and Buber, as Jews, is God’s address to man
in the Old Testament, for Ebner, as a Catholic, the Word between I
and Thou, through which everything has been created, is interpret-
ed in the sense of the Logos of St. John’s Gospel. Jesus as the Word
and mediator between God and man stands between I and Thou. . . .
Through him it is possible to address God in the human Thou.
For Ebner, the key fact that reveals the presence of the spirit
in man is that man has the word. Something distinctive in Ebner’s
thought is the word as the objective vehicle that constitutes a per-
son and mediates the I -thou relationship. If having the word is key
to our human speaking nature, what caused the passage from noth-
ingness to being? How is it that we have the word? “Man has the
word because Someone has called to him, Someone who is word.
Man is one called, one addressed: a proof is the ‘t hou-orientation’
(Duhaftigkeit) of his consciousness, synonymous with having the
word.”66
The heart of Ebner’s thought is found in the first words of the
Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word.” 67 This is the orig-
inating, creative, divine Word, which is before all things—before
history, before man—through which everything was made. This
divine Word was made flesh and became man: “Everything that is,
66. Edda Ducci and Piero Rossano, in the introduction to their Italian transla-
tion of Ebner’s Wort und Liebe, entitled Parola e Amore (Milan: Rusconi, 1983), 28,
citing Ebner without further reference.
67. John 1:1.
29
is by means of the word,” 68 and Jesus Christ is the Word that founds
that word.
This creative, inspired word from John’s Gospel is the body of
interhuman dialogue, which constitutes or places man’s being. The
Word, the divine Thou of the Father, gives origin to being. The word
that places being acquires its meaning in the midst of a phrase. This
is the foundation of Ebner’s spiritual thought: “The word is the pri-
mary fact, the ‘place’ of spiritual being—the relation between the I
and the thou—and of being in general. The logos is not only a pre-
supposition for thought but also for being.” 69
God created man by speaking to him: “I am and through me
Thou art.”70 Thus, God placed the I in man: the I, created in the rela-
tionship to his true Thou, to God, becomes conscious that he exists
and that God does not cease to address the word to him. And man
responds: “You are, and through You I am.”71
The Prologue to John’s Gospel also announces the Word made flesh
as a second creation for man, a rebirth, which reveals the ultimate
spiritual meaning of being for man as interpersonal life in dialogue:
“The light of man is in the word. Through it, consciousness, as a fact
of natural life is transformed into s elf-consciousness, as a fact of spir-
itual being.”72 Consciousness of God’s existence, placed within the
essence of man is, “nothing other than language, understood in the
depth of its essence . . . , the spiritual fact of ‘having the word.’”73
In the word man has knowledge of God, but with man’s sinful
Fall, consciousness of God’s existence darkened again. The human
word created by man begins here, and with it, his history: “This
68. Ebner, Notizen (16. Juni 1922), in Schriften, 2:301.

69. Ebner, Zum Problem der Sprache und Des Wortes, in Schriften, 1:654; see also
FEGW.
71. Ducci and Rossano, Introduction to Parola e Amore, 28.
72. Ebner, Zum Problem der Sprache und Des Wortes, in Schriften, 1:654; see also
FEGW.
30
‘human’ word is not the same, though presupposing it, as the word
through which the spiritual life in man, the I in its relation to the
Thou, is created. The human word testifies to that word which . . . ,
since it constitutes all history, has no kind of history itself.”74 The di-
vine, originating Word entered history; the divine Word meets the
human word in human history, in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ:
“And the Word was made Flesh and dwelt among us.”75
The I exists in relation to the Thou, and the word is the spiritual
essence of language that takes place between the I and the Thou. In
Ebner’s view, the fact that language happens at all is always a mira-
cle, for in order to be myself I have need of the other, and the other
likewise has need of me, yet neither of us can ever create the condi-
tions of communication on our own: “We remain locked in mutual
need. Nevertheless, language and communication happens. I do not
create this language, but receive it as a gift. In this sense language
has a transcendent origin.”76
Language is a miracle whose origin is beyond the I or the thou,
yet language is the vehicle between the I and the thou; we should be
astonished at the fact that language exists. In its deepest ontologi-
cal sense, Ebner considers language to be the gift of being, for it is
through language that being reveals itself, in conversation and in
temporal events. Thus, in Ebner’s very particular use of the terms,
the origin of language is word.
Ebner distinguishes between the Word, which is divine, and
words, which are the condition needed for human language and di-
alogue to be possible. Because the human person has the Word, he
can speak. It is God, always the true Thou of the true I in man, who
ultimately addresses man in and through the word, which, “in the
ultimate ground of its being-given-to-man, is from God.”77
74. See Green, “Introduction,” 20–21, and chapter 2 in this volume.

75. John 1:14.
76. John O’Donnell, “Trinity as Divine Community,” 12.
31
The I -Thou relation, which arises in man from the divinely orig-
inated word expressed as language, does not occur at some point
after the I has existed for itself in aloneness. Rather, the I-Thou re-
lation is the precondition: for the existence of the I “is objectively
identical with the fact that man ‘has the word.’”78
While some evolutionary theories claim that language is a pro-
cess of imitating animal sounds, Ebner insists that language itself is
what separates man from the animals. It is not the simple process of
the brain getting larger that causes consciousness. There must be a
“leap” that animals will never make. “The animal screeches, howls,
roars, etc., but nonetheless remains mute. . . . Man, on the other
hand, ‘has the word.’ And only because he has the word can he also
be silent.”79 Conversely, animals have no I because they lack word
and language: “It is characteristic for man that he can express some-
thing, and also has something to express. The animal can express
nothing precisely because it ‘does not have the word.’ But it also has
nothing to express—and for the same reason.”80
The word makes man free. Animals must obey instincts, but man,
because he can name or concretize his experience in word, can gain a
distance of perspective from his experience and then make decisions
in freedom. In this sense, Jesus the Word frees man in the word.
Word and Love: The Spiritual Realities

Having the word is that leap from animal to man, and it is a miracle.
Yet it is invisible to science, for God becomes visible only in the eyes
of faith, in the interiority of prayer. God is grasped in the intimate
bond between word and love, which Ebner describes as two great
miracles in which the spirit is at work and that encompass all of re-
ality:

79. Ebner, Wort und Liebe: Aphorismen 1931, ed. Markus Flatscher and Krzysztof
Skorulski (Vienna: LIT, 2015), 15.
80. See Green, “Introduction,” 18n, and chapter 2 in this volume.
32
The Word embraces and carries language—not only language, but the
whole man, and not only man, but the being of the whole world—and
therefore it is more than language, more than our spoken words. It em-
braces everything which we cannot express, for which our language does
not have the right word. It embraces God, because God embraces the
Word. And it embraces Love.81
In his will to save man communally, God sent his word and his
love. Ebner argues that authentic community is based on trust
in the word, which makes it possible to relate with others as per-
sons—a personal dialogue that always leads to God. In true com-
munity, the word is accompanied by love, which is the Spirit al-
lowing men to live in communion with God and in true reciprocal
relation with one another.
For Ebner this combination of word and love is the linchpin of
man’s I-Thou relation: man knows the reality of God not by logical
proof, but rather in recognizing his absolute dependence on God
and in the fact that the I in man is dependent upon a relation to the
Thou, outside of which it does not exist at all. God becomes more
palpable for man when his I-Thou relation with God comes to liv-
ing expression in word and love: We are “hearers of the word” be-
cause God gave us the word; we are “doers of the word,” insofar as
the word we have heard endures as love, which the word demands
we fulfill in our lives. In this way, word and love are the two key
realities of the spiritual life; they form the link between the I and
the thou and bring man to salvation, for they save him from being
closed within himself.
Bringing to Speech: Thought Becomes Word

This spiritual significance of language begins with the fact that the
word occurs between the first and second persons. In being spoken,
language presupposes that the relation of the I to the Thou is a per-
81. Ebner, Wort und Liebe, 86, cited (from earlier edition), translated in Stahmer,
Speak, 236.
33
sonal one. Precisely because man has the word, the very potential
for speaking brings with it the possibility of being addressed as a
person, as the Thou, “the ‘addressability’ in the other, and this be-
longs just as much to the essence of personality as the potentiality
to express ‘self,’ in which the ‘I’ emerges.”82
Bringing thought to speech, in words, liberates the I, for the
strong desire and longing to be known and to express oneself to the
other demonstrate that one’s spiritual life is always oriented to the
spiritual in the other person. The vehicle of this spiritual relation is
the word. Even one’s own solitary thinking is in the word: “Even if
I were closed within myself before others and I were to occupy my-
self only with the clarification of my thoughts, I would desire that
relationship—whose vehicle is the word—because I need it for this
clarification.”83
In the relationship between thought and word, Ebner believes
that there are no thoughts that cannot be expressed. Bringing one’s
interior life into word regulates thought, especially the content, for
in coming into word, thoughts are discovered and understood, in an
immediate sense, as an expression of one’s interior life, as an imme-
diate sense of being, consciousness, and existence.
Allowing thoughts to come into speech brings them out of
the private realm and into the public realm—consciously before
God. Word adds a communicative tension to the concept of mere
thought, a tension that is the urge or desire to communicate, so
the word brings thought up to the brink of dialogue and allows the
thought to take root in the person’s being.
Word mediates reason, but it also founds our origin and com-
munal existence in relation. Yet, thought that is not grounded in
authentic relation may remain at the level of monologue. Not to ex-
perience a communicative tension to move beyond monologue of
thought and into speech means to ignore the thou, to stay closed in

83. Ebner, La parola è la via, 123.
34
my thoughts, closed to the world and closed to others, to let thought

remain mere abstract thinking, unconnected in relation with oth-
ers. In this sense, the word can be abused when it is used idly for
chatter, instead of speaking only those words born of interior si-
lence, animated by the mystery of the spirit.
Sin: Failure to Open to the Thou

For Ebner, the dialogical word gives life to relationship, so that even
in silence the word is authentic and directed to a dialogue partner.
We can retreat from this encounter into “I-aloneness,” an inauthen-
tic world of idea or a “dream of the spirit.” This is a kind of slumber
from which modern culture cannot awake on its own—but only by
waiting for and responding to God’s call. Ebner sees this “closing of
oneself to the Thou” as the very heart of sin.
This has a bearing on how good and evil will be understood.
“The fundamental error of idealist ethics: that good and evil have to
do with the individual founded in himself. But all good and all evil
have to do with the I with respect to the thou. One is good or bad
only in relation to another.”84 Sin is not an idea; rather, it is in the
realm of broken relation:
Every experience convinces that the full realization of the I is in the vital
discovery of the authentic Thou, the dialogue partner that makes all the
richness of his own being resound and that shows the true sickness of clo-
sure, of isolation; the seriousness of a spiritual sickness that can weaken
the I to the point of death without having found the Thou. The Light calls
this darkness by its true name: sin.85
In Jesus darkness is overcome. In the Word made flesh, contempt

for man is definitively eliminated not by the force of ideas, but by
lived reality. Jesus definitively shows how the I reaches the thou and
the thou reaches the I: each moves along two routes—toward God
84. Ebner, La parola è la via, 196.

85. Ducci and Rossano, Introduction to Parola e Amore, 30.
35
and toward man. Because of Christ’s Incarnation, between God and

man there is now man, and in man there is now the privileged mani
festation of God.
Ebner’s thought is profound: any attempt to find the thou in God
alone is destined to fail because one doesn’t know how to find the
thou in man. Any road toward God that does not pass through man
is blocked. Man must search for God not only within himself, but
also in his neighbor, for man’s relationship with God always begins
by relating to concrete man. This means that the I of man must
make the leap from the experience of the “Thou-God” to the expe-
rience of the “t hou-man.” God is not metaphysically remote from us
but rather quite near and accessible:
We are therefore not to dream of Him. Whoever does that does not want
to see Him in the reality of His nearness. One could thus even say that
God is near to us not only spiritually but also physically: near to us in every
one, and above all in the man next to us, the neighbor. . . . God is near to us
in the man whom we, emerging from our I-aloneness, make the true Thou
of our I, which obviously does not mean simply to look at him in his hu-
manity as God. What you have done to the very least of my brethren, you
have done to me.86
The nearness of God is discovered in the I-Thou relation with

the neighbor. The true I is always in relation to a Thou such that the
being-for-itself of the I in its aloneness is not an authentic part of
the spiritual life of man, but is a consequence of “secluding himself
from the Thou,” which is “nothing other than the ‘fall from God,’
the attempt of man to exist in godless ‘inwardness’. . . ; it is the first
abuse and perverted use of the ‘freedom,’ of the ‘personality’ of ex-
isting, implanted into man by God.”87
Where the Fall is acknowledged, man’s predicament in the
world, especially in his spiritual existence in the world, can be prop-
86. See Green, “Introduction,” 210–11, and chapter 14 in this volume.

36
erly understood. Man became the slave to sin, forfeiting that aspect
of his personality that exists only in its relation to God. In trying to
be free, in the sense of absolute independence or I-aloneness, man
turns away from the other and avoids the Thou in violation of the
very definition of being a person, an I, given by God in the word.
This is the Fall. In trying to be more free and more independent,
man ends up less so. Yet, when the I moves out of this I-aloneness,
there is an unfolding and openness to the Thou that
has the meaning of an offering. God is the “being to whom we sacrifice.”
What does man sacrifice? Everything which he has grasped as his own in
his I -aloneness and taciturnity before the Thou. . . . The I must give up all
that belongs to it, everything that it grasped or willed to grasp.88
For Ebner, there is no sin as such; there is sin only in man, and
then only insofar as it is revealed to him in faith. This is not a theo-
logical consideration of objective matter, but rather an assertion
that sin is a relational reality. Therefore, on the part of the subject,
sin is only subjectively possible once the reality of the I -Thou re-
lation is recognized, and in the final analysis, this is always in ref-
erence to the I-Thou relation with God: “Man discerns his ‘mortal
sin’ in that action through which . . . he consciously and deliberately
affirms and approves of his fall from God, the I-aloneness of his ex-
istence, the ‘original sin.’”89 While in reality there are many trans-
gressions,
there is only one sin, the sin: only the single sin of interior closing before
God and before men. . . . Born into evil itself is the fact that man closes
himself off and “does not come to the light.” All evil happens in the “clo-
sure” of the I to the thou, in “aloneness.”90

90. Ebner, Wort und Liebe, 53.
37
Return to the Word

Every aspect of spiritual life, even sin, has a direct and essential rela-
tionship to the word, because that life was created through the word:
“All being, which has fallen from God and has become wordless, is
destined to return again to the word—in man and through him.”91
There is a concrete moral dimension to Ebner’s thought in the
fundamental premise that we are created in the Word: God calls
to us in love, and we are free to respond to that love or not. The
call-response dynamic of I-thou relationship has an ethical con-
tent in the sense that the moral life is our response to God. At the
same time, our behavior is good or bad mainly in the context of our
relationship with others. Humans are the animals that speak, but
there is an ethical or responsible dimension such that speaking ori-
ents our existence toward the thou. We do not speak as isolated in-
dividuals but within relationships, which presumes an orientation
toward communal life.
While Ebner does not develop the theme, if the moral life is a lived
response to God’s address, this suggests a moral dimension to sacra-
ments. Ebner’s understanding of the dialogical power of the word co-
incides with the Roman Catholic Church’s traditional understanding
of the sacraments as efficacious. Aware of the necessity for formal ex-
pressions of man’s I -Thou relation with God, Ebner is sensitive to the
risk that the sacraments might be celebrated as empty, external forms
if they lack a contact with life. On the other hand, in Ebner’s view,
when an institution, as a sacrament, in its spiritual reality is struc-
tured in a way that engages the personal and dialogical dimensions of
life in the faith, then it truly is an authentic Christian sign.
Ebner offers no extensive application of his thought to the sacra
ments, yet he points in a direction that will harmonize with later
thought at the Second Vatican Council about the word: in sin, be-
38
ing falls from God and thus loses the word and is destined to return
again to the word—in man and through him. This return to the
word suggests an opening to sacraments in general and to Eucharist
and Confession more specifically, for in Ebner’s sense of the word,
external signs and gestures have a place in interpersonal communi-
cation, for the word is perceptible and real when persons encounter
and communicate with each other. Although Ebner does not go so
far as to state it explicitly, his thought suggests that all sacrament can
be seen as word, as a medium for the encounter of man with God.
Ebner’s Impact
Because Ferdinand Ebner was a somewhat obscure figure who died
relatively young, unfortunately his work is not as widely known
as its merits deserve. Still, whether directly or indirectly, Ebner’s
thought has been taken up by a wide variety of writers. He has had
a notable direct influence on various thinkers who have had the op-
portunity to read and assimilate his thought, such as the Protes-
tant theologian Emil Brunner (1889–1966), whose assimilation of
Ebner’s thought, in turn, significantly influenced Roman Catholic
theology. Even with his ambiguities, Ebner makes a substantial
achievement in his presentation of I-Thou relation, an advance that
is somewhat taken for granted, having now been assimilated into
theology. (Indeed, he has even been called “the secret philosophical
inspiration of modern theology.”)92
Ebner’s influence is found indirectly in authors such as René La-
tourelle, Edward Schillebeeckx, Walter Kasper, and Pope John Paul
II—and directly in such authors as Romano Guardini, Karl Rahner,
Bernard Häring, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Pope Benedict XVI.
In a book review, Karl Rahner described Romano Guardini’s
92. Jurgen Moltmann, Anfänge der dialektischen Theologie (Munich: Kaiser, 1966),
1:xvii, cited in Hans Waldenfels, “La comprensione della rivelazione nel XX secolo,”
in La rivelazione, trans. Maria Christina Laurenzi (Palermo: Edizioni Augustinus,
1992), 452.
39
World and Person (Welt und Person) as “very Ebnerian.” Regard-

ing his own writings, when asked whether he got his concept and
book title, Hearer of the Word (Hörer des Wortes),93 from Heidegger,
Rahner replied, “No, I got it from Ebner.”94
Similarly, in an interview in 1998 with Bavarian Radio, the t hen-
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger described among his early influences
“Ferdinand Ebner and Martin Buber . . . and naturally all the im-
portant French personalists.”95 This is significant because many on
this short list were quite instrumental as consultants (periti) in the
drafting of major Vatican II documents, especially the “Dogmatic
Constitution on Divine Revelation,” Dei Verbum, in which Ebner’s
indirect influence is notable.
It is Ebner who places the origin of all relation squarely in God,
identifying God as the “eternal Thou,” who reveals himself as such
to man. God spoke creation into existence, for his Word is ac-
tion. Man’s forgetfulness of God in the Fall and his dream of the
spirit that accompanied it are both remedied in the same creative
Word, who was in the beginning and is God. Jesus, the Word made
Flesh, is God’s self-revelation as eternal Thou, the Word spoken to
man to reawaken him from his dream of the spirit, from his state
of I-aloneness that is isolation and monologue. The Word breaks
through such that man discovers the Other, the eternal Thou, and
in this discovery, his isolation ends; monologue becomes dialogue
in man’s discovery of his own “I” necessarily reflected by the dis
93. Karl Rahner, Hearer of the Word, trans. Joseph Donceel (London: Blooms-
bury, 1994), originally published as Hörer des Wortes (Munich: Kösel, 1941).
94. Private conversation between Karl Rahner and Prof. Silvano Zucal, then a
doctoral student in Innsbruck, now a professor of philosophy at the University of
Trent, Italy, reported by Prof. Zucal to Dr. Krzysztof Skorulski in a conversation on
March 17, 2009, cited in Krzysztof Skorulski, “Ferdinand Ebner und der Platz der
Dialogphilosophie in dem katholischen Denken des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts,” Lo-
gos i Ethos 1, no. 32 (2012): 38, n56.
95. See radio interview, “Prof. Dr. Joseph Ratzinger im Gespräch mit Martin
Lohmann,” Bayerischen Rundfunks (September 4, 1998), http://www.br-online.de/
alpha/forum/vor9804/19980409.shtml.
40
covery of the Thou. In the same discovery, man’s relation with hu-
man “thous” is redefined by the very same Word.
Ebner’s understanding of the word as foundational for human
identity responds to the fundamental question of why, and from
where, man has the word. These are questions that language phi-
losophy as such does not address. On the other hand, Ebner leaves
pending the question of how language, as such, operates.
It is difficult to sum up the work of this rather original thinker, as
his work does not fit neatly into any single category. Without ques-
tion, the serious reader will find difficulties in Ebner’s fragments,
discovering that they are
inchoative and polemical in nature, and require that the reader think
through the thoughts only begun in them, and systematize for argumen-
tation’s sake that which is frequently confessional rather than conceptual.
Further, the fragments evidence through[out] a fundamental inconsis
tency, one that Ebner himself was deeply aware of yet could not avoid: the
mode of presentation, namely philosophical discourse, stands in diamet-
rical opposition to the content therof, namely the word and the spiritual
realities of the I and the Thou.96
Methodologically, although Ebner rejects philosophy, he is

in the predicament of making his case using philosophical argu-
ment and speaking in the objective third person, as philosophy
demands. Likewise, in Ebner’s thought, the relationships between
reason and faith and between philosophy and theology ultimately
remain somewhat fluid and are not completely resolvable. Because
the centrality of the word is the basis of reason in man, Ebner fluc-
tuates between the philosophical and the theological: that man is
addressed by the word means that man’s existence has a religious
basis such that “the existence of man . . . has the existence of God as
96. Green, “Introduction,” c, citing and trans. Bernhard Casper, Das Dialogische
Denken: Eine Untersuchung der religionsphilosophischen Bedeutung Franz Rosenzweigs,
Ferdinand Ebners und Martin Bubers (Freiburg: Herder, 1967), 259f.
41
its presupposition. In other words, it means that man was created by

God.”97
Ebner’s understanding of the centrality of word is theological but
at the same time anthropological in the sense that it defines man,
but the precise line between the divine, creative Word and the hu-
man word is unclear. Likewise, the line between G od-human re-
lation and strictly human relations is unclear: it is clear in Ebner
that the God-human relation is somehow different than strictly
human relations, but it is not clear how, other than to say that the
human-to-human relation concretizes the G od-human relation.
Despite his aphoristic style and the difficulties of his thought,
Ebner undertook a most challenging task: in trying to overcome
the limits in idealistic thought and move beyond the possibilities
of the “sciences,” he circles around and around his points, trying to
express something spiritually elusive, beyond the immediate sense
of his words. The reader, having entered into Ebner’s mode of ex-
pression and style, is rewarded by the originality and richness of his
thought.
Even with his ambiguities, Ebner makes a substantial achieve-
ment in his presentation of I-Thou relation, an advance that is
somewhat taken for granted, having now been assimilated by other
thinkers. It is Ebner who places the origin of all relation squarely in
God, identifying God as the “eternal Thou” who reveals himself as
such to man. This revelation awakens man from his “dream of the
spirit”; in recognizing the eternal Thou, man discovers the I in him-
self and so can recognize the other as his thou.
More than this, Ebner moves beyond other dialogical philos-
ophers with his original presentation of the word as the center-
piece of this revelation and discovery within I-Thou relations.
Here, Ebner breaks some new ground. He accepts the view of the
eighteenth-century Sturm und Drang philosopher Johann Georg
42
Hamann that logos is reason, and thus to be human is to speak.98

Language philosophers take up this theme as well, trying to explain
the workings of language in human interaction, but Ebner asks in-
stead: why, and from where, does man have the word?
This is Ebner at his most original and his key contribution to this
study: God spoke creation into existence, for his Word is action.
Man’s forgetfulness of God in the Fall and his concomitant dream
of the spirit are remedied in the same creative Word, who was in
the beginning and is God. Jesus, the Word made Flesh, is God’s
self-revelation as eternal Thou, the Word spoken to man to reawak-
en him from his dream of the spirit, from his state of I -aloneness
(Icheinsamkeit) that is isolation and monologue. The Word breaks
through such that man discovers the Other, the eternal Thou, and
in so discovering, his isolation ends; monologue becomes dialogue
in man’s discovery of his own “I” necessarily reflected by the discov-
ery of the Thou. In the same discovery, man’s relation with human
“thous” is redefined by the very same Word.
Ultimately, the first appraisal is perhaps the best: Ebner is the
“Bedenker des Wortes,” the “‘philologist’ in the literal sense: the ‘lov-
er of the Word,’ the logos, understood in the context of the New Tes-
tament, within which the whole of his thought takes its root.”99
Editor’s Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to the people who have kept interest in Ferdi-
nand Ebner’s scholarship alive over many years.
First and foremost, heartfelt thanks to Dr. Harold J. Green, who
allowed me to freely use his t hen-unpublished English translation
and commentary on this work for my own research almost thirty
98. The Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) movement of 1770s Germany pro-
posed that for life to be meaningful, it had to be lived with one’s full energies applied
to religion, poetry, and discourse, at the same time embracing nature, feelings, and
mystery. The movement has echoes in later n ineteenth-century romanticism and
t wentieth-century existential and language philosophies.
99. Green, “Introduction,” xxxxvii.
43
years ago. Since that time, we have shared the hope that Ebner’s
work might finally be available to English speakers. His desire to of-
fer the best possible translation has been consistent over these many
years as we grew from colleagues to collaborators, from collabora-
tors to friends.
I am also grateful to the Internationale Ferdinand Ebner Ge-
sellschaft (IFEG), dedicated to the promotion and publication of
Ebner’s thought, for its continuous encouragement and assistance
with this project.
A very special word of thanks is owed to IFEG’s secretary, Dr.
Krzysztof Skorulski. As the translator of two Polish editions of this
work, his exhaustive knowledge of Ebner’s thought and his great
generosity in proposing countless and detailed suggestions have
truly done much to improve this work.
Finally, I would like to thank the staff members of the Catho-
lic University of America Press, especially John Martino, Theresa
Walker, Brian Roach, and Aldene Fredenburg, who have done so
much to shepherd this work to publication with such attention and
care.
44
Ferdinand Ebner
�
Preface
Preface
He was not the light, but came to bear witness to the light.
—John 1:8
There is something which we must be firmly on our guard against, Phaedo.—

What?—That we do not become hostile to the word, like someone else be-
comes a misanthropist. No greater misfortune can befall man. And both orig-
inate in the same way of thinking: the hatred of the word and misanthropy. . . .
Wouldn’t it be deplorable, Phaedo . . . if he, I say, henceforth nourishes the
hatred of the word all of his life, and thereby forfeits the truth and knowledge
of real things?—That would certainly be sad in connection with God.—We
must thus above all beware of, we must never allow the thought to arise in the
soul that there is no reliance in words.
—Plato, Phaedo
We stand at the eve of a scientific bankruptcy, the consequences of which are

incalculable.
—Jakob Baron von Uexküll,
You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret
the signs of the times.
—Matthew 16:3
[Ed. Note]: Ebner cites without reference: Plato, Phaedo sections 89c–d; 90c–e.
See Plato in Twelve Volumes, vol. 1, trans. Harold North Fowler (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1966).
[Ed. Note]: Ebner cites without reference: Jakob von Uexküll, Bausteine zu einer
biologischen Weltanschauung: Gesammelte Aufsätze (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1913).
47
Preface
An esteemed Viennese bookseller declined to undertake the publi-

cation of these fragments on the basis of the following expert opin-
ion, given by a professor of philosophy at the University of Vienna:
“The author says that this work was written in the winter of
1918–1919. The impression on the author of the political and cultural
breakdown is palpable. This work expresses the turning away from
science, philosophy, art and culture in general, and the desire for
a personal relationship of the human I to its one true Thou, i.e., to
God. This relationship exists only in faith and in active love to God.
The I wishes to express itself to the Thou through the word, which
is granted to it for that purpose, and this one true Thou wishes to be
addressed by the human I in the word. Everything else is a dream
life of the isolated and godforsaken I, consisting of unimportant
subject matter.
“So far, as a modernized and Christianized Neoplatonism, and
as a reaction to Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky, the book would not
be uninteresting. Even more so if it were cut down to half its size.
It could in part be a book of edification for theosophists and other
mystics, and in part have a vitalizing effect by arousing a lively op-
position.
“Unfortunately, however, the work has a dubious side. This con-
sists in an expressed pathological bent. It is an immediate ordeal for
the reader who does not bring to this highly interesting case the
interest of a professional psychologist or of a psychiatrist by voca-
tion, winding its way through 300 pages in an endless repetition of
a single thought and identical phrases, giving rise thereby to the
feeling of always revolving around the same point. What does this
discourse on science, psychology, philosophy, art and culture, have
to do with the A nglo-American economic and colonial warfare
against the German people? This pathological bent must have de-
veloped and established itself long ago, for it is interwoven on every
page. The author is unable to emerge from his pathological condi-
tion and return; it is likely that he no longer even wants to.
48
Preface
“The preference of our society today, inclined to every kind of

occultism and mysticism, is incalculable. Perhaps the book would
circulate among theosophists; perhaps it would even create a stir
among the devoted admirers of Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky. A
success would depend upon the organization, the impulse to buy,
and the spending power of the theosophists. Since I am not in touch
with this circle, I would have no way of knowing. Scientifically, psy-
chologically and philosophically, the work is bluntly impossible.”
Let one read the Fragments with some effort only to understand
them in their essentials, and one will recognize that this expert
opinion actually belongs in the book and had best be placed at its
head—as a sign of the time. Since it was written by a teacher of phi-
losophy, it cannot be intended as malicious satire on philosophy
professors.
It does not appear entirely superfluous to me to bring the funda-
mental thought of the Fragments to the most concise possible form
here in the Foreword. That thought is: provided that human exis-
tence in its core really has a spiritual meaning—that is, one that is
not exhausted in its natural assertion in the course of world events;
provided that one may speak of the spiritual in man other than in
the sense of a poetically or metaphysically intended fiction, or one
really offered only for “social” reasons; then this spiritual some-
thing is essentially determined by its being fundamentally intended
for a relation to something spiritual outside it, through which and in
which it exists. An expression of this being intended for such a re-
lationship, and indeed the objectively comprehensible expression
and therefore the only one adequate for an objective knowledge, is
to be found in the fact that man is a speaking being, that he “has the
word.” He has the word, however, neither for natural nor for social
reasons. Society in the human sense is not the prerequisite of lan-
guage; rather, society itself presupposes language, the word that lies
in man, for its continued existence. If we now, so as to have a word
for it, call the spiritual in man the “I,” and the spiritual outside him,
49
Preface
to which the “I” exists in this relation, the “Thou,” we must then re-
flect on the fact that this I and this Thou are given to us precisely
through the word and in it in its inwardness. The “I” and “Thou” are
not, however, given as empty isolated words [Wörter] that have no
inherent reference to a reality (which of course they seem to be in
their abstract, substantivized, and substantialized usage); but rather
as the word that, in the concreteness and actuality of its being spo-
ken, reduplicates its content and its own reality [Realitätsgehalt].
That in brief is the fundamental thought.
The apprehension of the essence of language that supports the
fragments and the interpretation attempted herein of the fact that
man has the word stands or falls, quite unscientifically and unphil-
osophically, with a definite inner attitude of man toward a certain
historical fact. The historical facticity of this, moreover, which is
significant in many respects, was called into question scientifically
in the course of the nineteenth century, though, it seems, only tem-
porarily. This important and decisive element, impossible within
both science and philosophy, which neither precludes nor renders
thinking impossible in and of itself, for—or even against—the entire
book, cannot and should not touch the development of philosophy,
nor obviously of linguistics. But it does indeed intend to confound
philosophy in its complacency, which has long since become prob-
lematic. Further, it is definitely the opinion of these fragments that
in the attitude just alluded to, man has the ultimate decision of his
existence as that of a self-deciding being, because according to his
innermost essence he is called and destined to make decisions. The
fragments also maintain that no one who disregards this attitude,
who renounces it in the concrete case as far as he is concerned, or
who imagines that he has to renounce it for philosophical or scientif-
ic reasons, could ever grasp the spiritual meaning of existence (thus
also, because in their ultimate basis they are identical, the meaning
of the fact that man is a speaking being), not through “thinking” or
“existing,” not as poet or artist and not as philosopher or whatever.
50
Preface
That even theologians (most unfortunately!) will take little plea-

sure in this book is not unlikely—with the exception of those who
are less interested in theology (or other elements of Christian cul-
ture) than in the spiritual life. But that is not to be helped, as low as
things in the world of the spirit have already sunk.
The one to whose memory these fragments are dedicated would
not have understood them if he had lived. Although he presumably
had a very good grasp of their fundamental thought in the practice
of his life of quiet desperation, rich in s elf-denial—of course from
a completely different side, which knew nothing of his relationship
to the problem of language, although he did not need to know any-
thing of it. That he would not understand them, I must and cannot
do other than regard as a main defect of the whole work. It was not
given to me to avoid it.
Let it stand thus, with its appearance of remoteness and contra-
diction to the meaning of the fundamental thought. It is certainly
not the only defect, and I believe myself to be no less clearly con-
scious of all the other defects. The second major defect (which
seems even more disquieting to me than the first) will be discovered
only by he who has understood the fundamental thought and its
implementation as regards both its objective and subjective sides.
For now, there appears to be only one person whom I know of in
all of Europe: that would be Theodor Haecker (Kierkegaard is long
dead). I leave it to the reader to discover this defect and to reproach
me with it. That reproach would have to make me happy—and not
only because it would be proof that someone had understood me.
What difference would it make after all? To rectify this defect would
require a thoroughgoing revision of the entire work, the success of
which would in the end still remain in doubt—even if, as is actually
the case, external circumstances did not prevent it.
June 1919
Ferdinand Ebner
51
The Spiritual Realities
Fragment 1
The “I” is a later discovery of the self-reflecting and self-discovering

human spirit than the idea.1 Classical philosophy did not know
of it. For it was first brought to human consciousness by the spir-
it of Christianity—thus by the religious factor. But it has hitherto
been conceived only in its relation to itself, or as one might say, in
its “I-aloneness” [Icheinsamkeit]—that is, the real I has not been in
view, but the moi of Pascal. The inadequacy of the moi to furnish
an ethical or epistemological principle must be recognized. At the
same time, ethics, no less than epistemology, was surrendered to
relativism. That attempt which German philosophy undertook a
hundred years ago to recover the existence of the I in a subjective-
ly turned idealism failed and had to fail precisely because mankind
had not yet learned to deal with the real I, but rather with the moi
of Pascal, which is unreal and abstract in thought and speculation.
What relevance does this have for the real I? The matter is very
simple: its existence does not lie in its being related to itself, but
rather (and this is the fact on which all significance rests) in its rela-
tion [Verhältnis] to the Thou.2 The I -aloneness of Pascal’s moi is thus
1. [Trans. Note]: To point up Ebner’s central emphasis, as well as to avoid confu-

sion, Geist and geistig are translated throughout as “spirit” and “spiritual,” respectively.
2. [Trans. Note]: The terms Verhältnis and Beziehung will be translated throughout
as “relation” and “relationship,” respectively.
53
not to be conceived as an absolute, but as a relative in the relation of

the I to the Thou. And outside this relation there is no I at all. The
I-aloneness is nothing original in the I but is the result of a spiritual
deed within it, of an action—of the I—namely, of its secluding itself
from the Thou.
The I and the Thou are the spiritual realities of life. To develop
the consequences of this, and of the recognition that the I exists
only in its relation to the Thou and not outside of it, could well place
a new task before philosophy, which has always been troubled about
the affirmation of the spirit. The indissolubility of its problems and
the untenability of its framing of them ruined philosophy, which—
if we only admit it to ourselves—now merely prolongs an appear-
ance of life. The resolution of these problems certainly includes
the suicide of philosophy in itself. For the insight into the spiritu-
al realities of life must manifestly signify nothing less than the end
of idealism. But all philosophy lives on it, whether philosophy ac-
knowledges it or opposes it.
This insight also shows the essence of mathematics—and of
natural science that strives toward it—from a new and apparently
up-to-now unobserved side. It allows us to perceive how all math-
ematical thinking takes root in the I -aloneness of the human spir-
it and how in it, mathematics is fully realized. The inadequacy of
our prevailing mathematical ideas and concepts, coming from this
source, to apprehend and reflect upon the experience of the world
in its reality, must have been observed by the physicist Ernst Bar-
thel. He disputes the correctness of the astronomical axioms of the
roundness of the earth and wants the form of the earth to be con-
ceived in the image of the total plane—of a self-enclosed but un-
curved plane. From this he asserts that one consciousness alone is
not sufficient for its conception; a second must be there to help that,
in union with the first, could then imagine without contradiction
the total plane of the earth.
If the concept of I-aloneness drawn from the realization of the
54
spiritual realities teaches us, on the one hand, to understand human

thought in its essence, then the meaning of language in the spiritu-
ality of its origin is revealed to us on the other hand, through the
insight into the fact that the existence of the I is given in its rela-
tion to the Thou. Johann Georg Hamann, this invaluably deep phi-
lologist, had already clearly seen this origin, as had Wilhelm von
Humboldt. From him onward the apprehension of the essence of
language came to be reduced spiritually more and more in spite of
all the accumulation of h istorical-philosophical and psychological
data of knowledge and interpretation. Language finally witnessed
the triumph of its downfall in the invention of artificial world lan-
guages. For that is indeed characteristic of our time: all its triumphs
and victories signify its defeats.
This is what constitutes the essence of language—of the word—
in its spirituality: that it is something that takes place between the I
and the Thou, between the first and second person, as it is expressed
in grammar. It is thus something that the relation of the I to the
Thou presupposes on the one hand and establishes on the other.
But what is by far the most important and significant (and at the
same time casts ultimate light on the essence of the word) is this: in
the form of this relation, the relationship [Beziehung] of man to God
finds its expression. It is the basis and archetype of the relation to
God that, precisely because it is and must be a personal one, it can
be nothing other than the relation of the I to the Thou. At the ulti-
mate ground of our spiritual life, God is the true Thou to the true I
in man. This I that becomes concrete in its relation to God is cer-
tainly not the ideal I of philosophy—which is merely an abstraction
suspended in the air, a soap bubble of speculative reason that the
very next breath of wind from the world of the reality of human life
brings to destruction. This is the real I, which comes to expression
in the fact that I am and that I can say that of myself.
55
Word and Personality
Fragment 2
Word and Personality—Origin of the
Word—Aloneness—I and Thou
The spiritual life of man is most intimately and indissolubly bound

up with language and, like language, is based upon the relation of
the I to the Thou. Every attempt to fathom language with reference
to its spiritual significance must proceed from the fact that the word
occurs between the first and second person. In the actuality of its
being spoken, language presupposes the personal nature of the re-
lationship of the I to the Thou. But again, personality is not to be
contemplated without relation to the word. Only in this relation is
personality rendered objective at all, as that potential in man—by
means of his having the word—of stating in general and in partic-
ular of asserting his individual existence in the word “I” of the sen-
tence “I am.” By this means self-consciousness becomes objective.
This potential of speaking also entails another possibility (again, by
means of his having the word and the sense of the word)—namely,
that of being addressed as a person, as the Thou. The Thou is the
addressability in the other, and this belongs just as much to the es-
sence of personality as the potential to express self, in which the “I”
emerges.
A special state of affairs obtains with the pronouns “I” and
“Thou.” In concrete usage, they are not substitutes for substantives
in the sentence, not the representatives for nouns in general or per-
56
sonal names in particular. Rather, they stand directly for the very
person in the spiritual spheres that are created and made objective
precisely through the word. They were not only the “origin and be-
ginning of all nouns,” as Jacob Grimm says of pronouns; rather, as
the manifestation of a spiritually stable reality, they constitute the
origin and beginning of language per se. In the concreteness of their
being spoken, the I and the Thou are the spiritual realities of life.
What is really true of the word in its spiritual primitiveness and live-
liness is manifested most clearly with respect to the I, just as to the
Thou; it is not added to the content of the statement from without,
but is rather born of the content itself, just as the content is born of
the word, of the fact that man has the word. And thus what Johann
Georg Hamann said is true in this sense above all: “The invisible
essence of our soul reveals itself through words.”
Since the I and the Thou always exist only in relation to each oth-
er, there would be just as little validity in contemplating an abso-
lutely Thou-less I as an I-less Thou. The word is that through which
not only the existence but above all the relation of the two becomes
objectively constituted—established. In the liveliness of its being
spoken, the word is always a sentence, a word [Wort], whose plural
in German is Worte. The word, however, whose plural is Wörter,1
is nothing but a dead member of a dismembered sentence, whose
spent life can again be awakened. Behind every sentence—and ev-
ery word that is a sentence—stands as its intrinsic and inmost sense
the positing [Setzung] of the relation between the I and the Thou,
the real or even purely ideal positing of the spiritual life.
There is in man, objectively, so to speak, an urge for language,
and subjectively, a need to address. Hence, as Jacob Grimm notes,
1. [Ed. Note]: In German, the term Wort (word) has two plural forms: Worte are
words of importance or gravity, for instance, a legal sentence in a courtroom or the
inspired word that Ebner considers significant as hallmarks of authentic language
and dialogue between the I and the Thou; on the other hand, Wörter are mere vo-
cabulary, insignificant words, uttered lightly, and for Ebner conventional or lifeless
words with no great meaning, incapable of nourishing authentic dialogue.
57
someone who grew up in an environment that did not teach him

to speak would, with his awakening capacity to reason, invent a
language for himself (and would certainly search for a being to ad-
dress). This urge is nothing other than an expression of the orien-
tation [Angelegtsein] of the spiritual in him, of the I—the speaking
person—for the relationship and relation to the Thou, to the spir-
itual outside him, which he can address. “It is my complete con-
viction,” says Wilhelm von Humboldt, “that language must be re-
garded as situated directly in man . . . it does not help to allow for
its invention over the millennia. If a man truly understands a single
word, not as a merely sensuous impact, but as an articulated sound
which signifies an idea, language must already lie in him with com-
pleteness and cohesion.” That language and the urge for it lie direct-
ly in man does not mean they are innate. For everything innate and
thus hereditary belongs to the natural life, whereas the word, lan-
guage, and the urge for it belong to the spiritual life. Precisely be-
cause it is not innate to man, everyone must first learn it. But no one
would learn to speak if the word did not lie within him—and this
must be understood spiritually.
In the actualized relation of the I to the Thou, man has his true
spiritual life. It is not to be found where one prefers to see it: in poet
ry and art, in philosophy and mythical religions, one dreams of the
spirit—as brilliant as it may be. All culture up to now has been and
will never be anything other than a dream of the spirit, which man
dreamt in the I-aloneness of his existence, apart from the spiritual
realities of life, the inner law of which he discerned above all in the
conception of the idea.2
Since the orientation of the spiritual in man for a relation to
something spiritual outside him finds its objective expression in
language, from language alone can an objective knowledge of the
2. In no spiritual production does man come to consciousness of himself and his

true spiritual life. Even if this consciousness should stand as the starting point of
production, it nevertheless finally loses itself in it.
58
spiritual realities be obtained. One naturally, on the other hand, has

to know where these realities can be sought in order to understand
their essence. Yet how will man grasp what spirit is, if the word is
not alive in him?
According to Max Scheler, the word, possession of which first
makes language possible, the word understood ultimately as b eing-
given-to-man, is from God. Thus, as was the conception of Hamann
(to whom every profound perception of language will always re-
turn), language is of divine origin, something by definition simply
transcendent, supernatural, a fact of the spiritual, not the natural
life. The word had to receive its life from God, for life would not
have been able of itself to find the way to the word, which creates
and awakens in man the life of the spirit. To understand this, man
must of course believe in God. But that means first of all that he, in
faith, be conscious of the spiritual ground of his existence and of the
orientation of that existence for a personal relation to this ground.
God is this ground, and he is also the true Thou of the true I in man.
Through the divinely originated word created in man, the rela-
tion of the I to the Thou, from which language emerges as its senso-
ry expression, does not come about subsequent to the I existing for
itself in aloneness, but is rather itself the precondition for the exis-
tence of the I. The existence of the I, thus understood, is objectively
identical with the fact that man has the word. It can accordingly be
said of the animal that it has no I because language is denied it, be-
cause it does not have the word.3 Without the relation [Verhältnis]
of the I to the Thou, not only would there be no I, but no language
as well. The relation, which can never be conceived psychologically
but only pneumatologically, makes possible the self-assertion, al-
though not the self-positing, of the I in the utterance of the sentence
“I am.”
3. It is characteristic for man that he can say something and also has something
to say. The animal can say nothing precisely because it “does not have the word.” But
it also has nothing to say—and for the same reason.
59
The being-by-itself of the I in its aloneness is not a primordial fact

of the spiritual life of man, but is a consequence of secluding himself
from the Thou (to assume that the I exists outside its relationship to
the Thou and independent from it means that man would be just as
dumb and speechless as the animal, as the whole of nature). This se-
clusion is nothing other than the fall from God, the attempt of man
to exist in godless inwardness [Innerlichkeit] (what a contradictio in
adiecto!); it is the first abuse and perverted use of the freedom, of the
personality of existing, implanted into man by God. This fall must
be assumed if the spiritual existence of man in the world, and above
all the spiritual neediness of that existence, is to be properly under-
stood. Man became a slave to sin and forfeited thereby that aspect
of his personality that can only exist in its relation to God.
�
Aloneness is something spiritual and in its ultimate basis is always
the aloneness of death. The inner aloneness of man’s life would not
be perceptible at all were it not for something spiritual underlying
it. This aloneness is really nothing but this spiritual something.
What man has not suffered from it? That one would not indeed be at
all attentive to the spiritual ground of his existence. Only at times,
when denying one’s suffering, is a virtue made of this aloneness—
and one is wrong in so doing. The true basis and spiritual core of
aloneness have not yet been encountered so long as one becomes
conscious of it only in the painfulness of not being understood. For
man first grasps its basis and core, and really understands himself
in the aloneness of his life, when this aloneness is apprehended as
the active seclusion, not the passive isolation, of his I from the Thou.
He who has the need to be understood by others—and the ge-
nius has this most strongly and suffers the most under it—who in
the dissatisfaction of this need and not another discerns the alone-
ness of his life, still wants this aloneness to be respected by others.
He desires to be understood by others precisely in this aloneness,
60
behind the Chinese wall of his I, which, above all with the genius,
his life of mental constructs and thinking has helped to construct.
He who really comprehends the ultimate basis of the aloneness of
his life, who grasps it thus in the seclusion of his I from the Thou
(and ultimately this Thou is God, who understands everything and
therefore him, as well) and who thereby really understands himself,
can no longer demand that people understand him in this aloneness
as he understands it and still respect it at all. The deeper a man un-
derstands himself in the aloneness of his life, the more his need to
be understood is suspended.
�
Science recognizes to be sure neither a fall from God nor the divine
origin of the word and language. Jacob Grimm expresses himself
in this context in his lecture about the origin of language: “I have
demonstrated that human language could be just as little directly
revealed as innate. An inborn language would have made people
into animals; a revealed one would have presupposed the gods in
them. Nothing else remains: language must be human, acquired by
us with full freedom for its origin and advancement. It can be noth-
ing else; it is our history, our inheritance.” According to this inter-
pretation, the existence of man is the precondition for language. It
came into being through him. But what of man, whose entire hu-
manity is so deeply rooted in the fact of the word that it can be as-
serted with just as much right, and must be, that he became what he
is, a man, through the word, through language? So said Wilhelm von
Humboldt, a nd he may have had in mind the way out of the circle,
which pneumatology certainly sees, but which science does not and
cannot discover: man is only man through language, but to invent
language, he must already have been a man. Max Scheler demand-
ed that we not ask anything of linguistics regarding the “genesis of
language”; in a more profound sense, that genesis is a preh istoric
fact not of nature but of the spirit. Its object is the word, which man
61
himself created after his fall from God—and with it first began his
history. This human word is not the same (while presupposing it)
as the word through which the spiritual life in man, the I in its rela-
tion to the Thou, is created. This human word, as Scheler points out,
testifies to that creative word that, since it constitutes all of history,
has no history itself. Yet this word in the divinity of its origin indeed
became historical i n the life and words of Jesus.
�
The more intensely man understands himself in the spirituality of
his life, in the “I-ness” [Ichhaftigkeit] of his existence, the more reso-
lutely he strives in earnest for a life in the spirit, and the more clearly
and distinctly he comprehends that God is the true Thou of his I,
and that he cannot exist at all except in relation to God—even if the
previous godlessness and G od-forgetfulness of his existence may
appear to speak strongly against the latter. It also becomes clearer
to him that there is only a single I, and that the I is the unique one
before God. This I is in me myself, and in you who reads these lines
(in order to express this, one cannot be other than personal, bring-
ing into focus his own person). Rather, the I is not even in me, for
the I “is” not at all, but “I am it.” Further, there is only a single Thou,
and that is God. In my genuine spiritual relation to other persons,
which the spirit demands, the Thou in “Tom” is not entirely differ-
ent than that in “Dick” or “Harry,” but always one and the same,
the sole Thou that exists. Now are the other persons besides me
I-less? That is simply impossible. In order to examine how the mat-
ter stands, one must assume the correct point of view regarding the
spiritual sphere and see it in the proper perspective. The I in its re-
ality yields this vantage point, not some abstract I. I have this point
of view in my own spiritual existence. No one can have an objective
relation to the spiritual in other persons that lacks a point of view
and perspective. I cannot have such a relationship outside the fact
or while neglecting the fact that I am. If I have the right relation to
62
this spiritual being—and that means a nonobjective and personal

one—then that being is for me not the I, for I am that myself, but
the Thou. If, however, I do not have the right relation of the spirit
with another person, so that I consequently do not have in him the
Thou of my I, but only experience his I and its Chinese wall, behind
which it shuts itself off from me, and over which I can reach an un-
derstanding with him only laboriously or not at all, then even I shut
myself off from him. In the final analysis, I then experience in this I
of the other nothing but my own I, its seclusion and aloneness and
Chinese wall. I experience myself in my I-aloneness; I experience
the I pure and simple, the only I that there is.
�
Since the God-relation is and must be a personal one, it can only
be understood as the relation of the I to the Thou, of the first to the
second person, as it is expressed in grammar, clearly with no hier-
archy intended. Now since this relation consists of speaking to the
addressed person together, and is thus the spiritual atmosphere in
which the word lives and breathes, the word that comes from God
and in accordance with its first and last meaning desires to return
to God by way of man, so also the spiritual situation of language in
the actuality of its being spoken is ultimately nothing other than the
relation of man to God.
63
Word and Human Becoming
Fragment 3
Word and Human Becoming—
Proofs of God—Atheism—
Word and S elf-Consciousness—
Dependence of the I
Every personal relation is based upon the relation of the I to the

Thou. That man has and must have such a relation to God con-
stitutes the spirituality of his existence. In the relation to God, in
which his I emerges from the aloneness that brings spiritual death,
man realizes his spiritual life. The I has no absolute existence, for
it exists only in relation to the Thou. Its subjective permanency
in love corresponds to its being given objectively in the word, so
that the word and love belong together in their common spiritual
ground. The word in the actuality of its being spoken presupposes
the Thou, and since this is ultimately God, it means nothing else but
that the existence of man in his spirituality has the existence of God
as its presupposition. In other words, it means that man was created
by God. By God, who as Spirit has a real existence, not only one that
is imagined and dreamt in the idea of the divine.
God created man by speaking to him. He created him through
the word, in which was life, and the life was the light of men, as
the prologue of John’s Gospel states. That God created man means
nothing other than: he spoke to him. In creating him God said to
him, “I am and through me Thou art.” By God thus speaking to him,
64
and through the word in the divinity of its origin placing the I in
him, the I that is created in the relationship to the Thou, man be-
came conscious of his existence and its relation to God. And thus
the consciousness of God’s existence is placed in the foundational
essence of man, not, however, as a concern of the intellect but as an
imperative for faith—situated in our entire existence, as Hamann
says, the basis of religion—although this consciousness darkened
again after the fall from God. This consciousness is nothing other
than language, understood in the depth of its essence. It is nothing
other than the spiritual fact of having the word, wherein man has
his secret knowledge of God, which he certainly does not recognize,
considering the abuse he promotes with the gift of the word and lan-
guage. The divine word that created man and spiritually gave him
language raised up his body, so that he is now anatomically fit for it;
it freed his hand and turned his glance upward to heaven. Doubtless
some contemporary will say that not all of this is scientifically con-
ceived and expressed. No doubt it is not. But when could the truths
of the spiritual life ever be scientifically conceived and expressed? A
concession might, however, be made even to the dark spirit of our
time: whether God created man by the word from a lump of clay, in
accordance with the biblical account, or from a supremely evolved
ape, is in the end unimportant.
In the spirituality of his origin in God, man was not the first but
the second person—the first was and is God. And here this first
and second actually express the spiritual hierarchy, in contrast to
their grammatical usage. Man was the person addressed by God,
the Thou of the divine Word that created him. Yet since it was God
himself who spoke, the Thou was not the one it otherwise always
ultimately is, God, but precisely man. Here thus, as a unique case,
the law of perspective for the apprehension of the spiritual is valid
in the opposite sense.
To prove objectively the existence of God has no importance
at all. No proof, which by the way man only finds time for in the
65
idleness of his inner life, and assuming also that he could logically
succeed without contradiction and without fearing an equally log-
ical irrefutable antithesis; no proof would touch the real existence
of God, for one would be led into the I -aloneness of human life and
thought and thus away from the reality of the spiritual life. But once
man has stepped out of this I-aloneness and into a relation to the
Thou, to God, he no longer asks about proofs. It is not, however,
these proofs in their objectivity that drive him out of his aloneness;
rather, it is the reflection upon himself in the personal decision of
faith that does it. If the fools are, as Hamann wrote to Jacobi, those
who deny the existence of God in their hearts, then those who only
want to prove his existence seem to me to be all the more foolish.
Every proof of the existence of God is epistemologically inadequate,
and for the true spiritual life of man, it is not only dubious but su-
perfluous—a situation worthy of some attention.
The personal existence of the I, and in this personality the
concrete and not merely abstractly conceived existence of the I,
cannot be asserted other than personally by the I itself in the dec-
laration of the sentence “I am.” The situation is different with the
existence of the Thou in the sentence “Thou art.” For in its ac-
tual declaration this is not asserted at all, but (as in the utterance
of the sentence “I am”) is already spiritually presupposed as the
possibility of declaration per se. One must keep in mind here that
the true Thou of the I is God; that man, when he asserts his own
existence in the self-consciousness of the sentence “I am,” secret-
ly presupposes God. If he is not conscious of this, it only proves
that in the sentence “I am,” he simply does not understand him-
self in the s elf-consciousness of his existence, which is to say, his
self-consciousness is only apparent.
In the first chapter of the Gospel of John, the phrase occurs “be-
lieve in the name of God.” In the name of God does not simply mean
believe in God. The German word “Gott” (from the Sanskrit root hû,
meaning “invoking gods”) corresponds exactly to the deeper mean-
66
ing of this phrase. Believing in the name of God means believing in

God as the Being who is appealed to, as the addressed Person, as the
Thou precisely of the I in man. In other words, it means believing
in his personal existence. The phrase “believe in the name of God”
also emphasizes the relationship of faith to the word. And in its final
and deepest basis, all faith is faith in the word.
The reality of God for us is not in some concealed corner of hu-
man reason, accessible only to the logical penetration and sophistry
of a metaphysician or theologian. It is authenticated in nothing else
than in the fact—and in this unshakably so—that the I in man is
intended for a relation to the Thou, outside of which it does not exist
at all. Further, God is authenticated wherein this relation comes to
living expression—in the word and in love: in the former, in that it
is given to us by God; in the latter, in its demand given through the
word that we have to fulfill in life; in the word, which makes us into
hearers, in love, which makes us into doers of the word.
A remarkable state of affairs obtains with atheism. Strictly
speaking, one can never really believe in it. For is there an absolute-
ly godless man? Could one exist? Man is nevertheless created by
God, and his existence, even in its invariably only relative godless
ness, presupposes God, and basically includes the G od-relationship,
although it may still conduct itself in a godless manner. Faith, says
Hamann, belongs to the natural conditions of our power of cogni-
tion and to the natural impulses of our souls. Yet not only our cog-
nition is based on faith, but above all our life, our entire existence.
We all live by the grace of God, and there is not a man who, in the
innermost part of his heart, does not know of God, does not believe
in God. Yet there are others who cannot put their trust in divine
grace, who secretly do not know how to live, and therefore in their
hidden inner helplessness and concealed from the eyes of all oth-
ers, suffer continually. And they then go to the point of denying not
God, but their belief in God, which becomes their most profound
affliction and torment. In the end they deny him to themselves. The
67
one who says and recites to himself that he does not believe in God
denies that which dwells in the depth of his consciousness and con-
stitutes its essence and core. And the man who thinks that science
and philosophy have proven the nonexistence of God with full satis-
faction—on him a guilty conscience weighs heavily. Perhaps there
is not a single man who does not trust in the grace of God in the
most hidden corner of his heart, hidden most of all to himself. For
we live not only by grace, but also by having faith in it. At the mo-
ment when a man would absolutely cease to believe in God and to
trust in the divine grace, at that same moment, as if his heart were
torn asunder and rent to pieces, that man would cease to exist as
man. The godlessness of many a human existence is thus nothing
but a misunderstanding upon which the guilt of man presses heav-
ily. It is true: one forgets with extraordinary ease that he believes in
God in the innermost part of his soul, and there are probably many
who forget it not only involuntarily, as it were, in the state of spiri-
tual absent-mindedness, but who want to forget it—which of course
does not succeed. And these then declare their atheism at every
fitting and inappropriate opportunity, an atheism that is simply a
completely false declaration and is never without a trace of the de-
monstrative. Yet when does man become demonstrative? When he
wants to fool himself and another about something. Obviously be-
hind the atheistic demeanor stands despair. But all despair is ingrat-
itude of man toward God and his grace. The despairing one does
not notice at all, being so blind in his desperation that he could not
despair at all without the grace of God. For that he is despairing is
still a spiritual sign of life.
It cannot be denied that unbelief is planted deeply in the human
spirit. But it is not as original in man as faith in God, nor is it as deep;
rather, it emerges as a consequence of the fall from God. The objec-
tion of Schopenhauer—namely, that among the Mongols there are
essentially atheistic religions—is not at all valid. Once there were
not different religions but only one. Just as all types of irrationality,
68
says Hamann, presuppose the existence of reason and its abuse, so

must all religions have a relationship of belief toward a unique, inde-
pendent, and living truth. That unique religion is Christianity, and
in it alone is the living truth, do we possess the truth of our lives.
Only its spirit has made true belief possible, which in its ultimate
basis is the faith of man in the word, and which also makes possi-
ble the real essence of unbelief, provoking atheism. Second, let one
bear in mind that the Mongolian race has in fact not yet come to
consciousness of himself and, consequently, not to the conscious-
ness of the existence of God. This circumstance characterizes the
entire Mongolian life of the spirit; the Mongolian man (who does
not know what to make of the spirituality of his existence, either in
a good sense or in a bad sense) becomes deeply rooted in the life of
the generation in a manner incomprehensible to us Europeans.
The unbelief planted in the human spirit must be overcome in
whatever form it may assume: as absolute religious and moral indif-
ference, which is always just an act for public display, or behaving
demonstratively as cynicism in the conception of the ethical, or hid-
ing behind a philosophical mode of viewing or a purportedly scien-
tifically acknowledged and supported opinion. This unbelief must
be overcome by another spiritual deed, just as it came about in man
through one—namely, the personal decision. Thus does man come
to belief in God, to his true spiritual life.
One could really consent only to that atheism that would not
change its entire ethical attitude and conception of life in the least
if its erroneousness were to be demonstrated rigorously and scien-
tifically by an incontestable and absolutely clear proof of God. Such
an atheism might be logically imagined, but even that isn’t possible,
and after all, there are no such atheists. On that point, do not be de-
ceived by those who pretend to be atheists. If there were such athe-
ists, it would of course be a proof for the superfluity of the belief in
God with regard to the inner life of man. But that’s not all. No man
would be able to grasp even the existence of God—in spite of any ir-
69
refutable, absolutely clear proof. In conclusion, the situation is real-

ly this: a philosophical system that, in the blindness of philosophiz-
ing, indisputably abolished the existence of God, is conceivable. But
a human existence that has abrogated the existence of God while
existing is simply impossible.
It has of course happened that some have died as steadfast athe-
ists—and not just with the cynicism of many a criminal, which
despairs to the point of blasphemy. Can one comprehend how this
self-deception of atheism can be maintained right up to the very last
moment of life? Does not everyone unmask in death, when the com-
edy that has been played before the world comes to an end? But bear
in mind that between the end of the next-to-last second of life and
the instant of death, there is still time enough for the “breakthrough
of eternity.” And what takes place in that moment, even if it lasts
only the smallest fraction of a second, no one knows—outside of
the one who participates in it and God.
�
God either has a personal existence or he does not exist at all. Since
he exists personally, his relation to man is therefore a personal one,
and we mean nothing else but that when we speak of divine grace,
of that which in man conforms with the humble trust in it, the trust
of the I in the approach of the Thou. But grace corresponds to the
moral sense [Ethos] of human existence. How can one risk behaving
impersonally toward the divine authority that sits in judgment over
everything ethical? Which human cause would not then be lost be-
fore God and for all eternity?
The personal reality of existence is never grasped by thinking, and
therefore philosophy and metaphysics are not capable of pointing
man’s way to God as a spiritual reality. None of these has been able
to produce any more than a sketch of the idea of the divine (of this
projection of the I in its I-aloneness), and none is able to render abso-
lutely impossible the withdrawal [Zurücknahme] of the idea in man.
70
What if the I had an absolute existence—that is, one independent

from the Thou? What if the aloneness of the I was thus its original
and intrinsic state, with the relation to the Thou only being added
to it, perhaps having developed in the progress of the socialization
of human life as a social necessity? (Although the opposite is quite
certainly the case, and the relation to the Thou is the precondition
of socialization in general, and above all of true socialization, from
which man of course is still a long way off.) If this were so, then God
would indeed have nothing but a merely ideal existence. The divine
would be nothing but an idea, which to be sure renders good service
at the beginning of the process of development, but then becomes
more and more worn out, finally becoming useless and superfluous.
But then, the existence of this absolute I would itself be situated no
less badly. Then those philosophers would be right who claim to see
in the I only a fiction that is in the end not even logically necessary
but merely grammatical, an object and accident of linguist usage,
and in whose eyes the task of philosophy is to penetrate this fiction
and to free scientific and philosophic thinking from it.
The only question still to be answered concerns the origins of the
randomness of linguistic usage. One may thereby finally do away
with the misfortune of thinking with which the problem of philoso-
phy has up to now unavoidably been focused upon, directly or indi-
rectly: how does the world come to the I, how does the I come to the
world? Or more precisely expressed, how does consciousness attain
the I, and the I consciousness? How does it come about that man re-
alizes his existence by asserting himself in the word “I”? Why does
it happen that I (and in order to express oneself here as clearly and
concretely as possible, there is no choice but to become personal)
can say “I am” of myself and by so doing submit to the view, which
is quite wrong according to those philosophers for whom the I is
merely provoked by parlance, that in this sentence and thought, the
most certain and undoubted existence of the I in and for itself has
been asserted? On the one hand, we stand here before the problem
71
of s elf-consciousness—and the problem of the will, since the sub-

jective reality of the I must be seen in the statement “I want,” which
underlies the declaration “I am.” On the other hand, we stand be-
fore the problem of language, for in the word, and above all the word
“I” of the sentence “I am,” lies the objective reality of the I. How
does language come to the I, and the I to language?
Self-consciousness, whose core is truly the I, is not the self-posit-
ing of the I, as the philosophers said a hundred years ago (for then it
would have to have its basis in the I -aloneness), but is the possibility
in man, which is placed into consciousness by the word and which
is to be comprehended neither psychologically nor metaphysical-
ly, of asserting his personal general existence in the stating of the
sentence “I am”—in the stating, which means presupposing the re-
lationship to the Thou, to the addressed person. The intervention
of consciousness into the organic course of events, which is a fact
of natural life, since the animal also has consciousness, implies in
itself no I. But in it, one can say, nature encounters spirit. Spirit cre-
ated the I in nature—through the word; and since it created the I
by placing the word into man, spirit created it for a relation to the
Thou, outside of which it does not exist at all, and in which alone it
can come to consciousness of itself. Nature has, so to speak, only
brought it to the level of the dumb, wordless, and thouless I, and
therefore not to s elf-consciousness (as science will never be able to
tell us). This mute I of nature, however, does not exist at all. In na-
ture there is no factual individual existence t hat is made real only
by the I—but only the outline for it, which is withdrawn again and
again and exposed to annihilation.
Those philosophers who denied the real existence of the I were
no doubt already aware that self-consciousness is identical with
nothing else but the fact that man is a speaking being. But they nev-
ertheless did not grasp the significance of this identity, because they
did not see the foundation and anchoring of language in the spiritu-
al realities of life.
72
The word is the light through which consciousness [Bewußt-

sein] (this is also a fact given in animal life) was enlightened in man
into self-consciousness [Selbstbewußtsein], into being conscious
[Bewußt-Sein], which is denied to the animal. The word created the
self-consciousness and the spiritual life of man in its reality. Truly,
the light shone in the darkness, and the darkness has not compre-
hended it. And thus it states in the Gospel of Matthew (6:23), “If the
light in you is darkness, how great will the darkness be!” As Luke
puts it (11:36), “If now your body (your life in this world) is entirely
illuminated, without having any part in the darkness, then will it be
entirely in the light, as when the light of lightning illuminates you.”1
“Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that pro-
ceeds from the mouth of God,” Jesus said to the devil in the wil-
derness. We live spiritually by the word of God, which created us;
by the life of Jesus, who was the Word and the Bread of life, which
came down from heaven, so that if anyone eats of it he will not die,
as the Gospel of John states.
�
Man must delete nothing from the word of God. But he must also
add nothing; he must seek to invent no word of God, if for no other
reason than that it is simply impossible. The critical inclination of
a humanity, which had become spiritless and godless and had lost
belief in the word, doubted the historical existence of Jesus, made
him into a mythical figure, a figure of religious poetry. But the life
of Jesus in its historical facticity is authenticated for us in his word.
That this word could not be invented constitutes the most conclu-
sive proof for the existence of Jesus, who certainly makes an appeal
to the spirituality of man, and humanity, which had become spirit-
less, did not know what to make of him.
The word of God is simple and clear and cannot be misunder-
1. Perhaps the etymological relationship of the word “logos” with “light,” which is
filled with meaning pneumatologically, will someday be demonstrated linguistically.
73
stood, if man absorbs it in the seriousness of his spiritual life. But it

immediately loses this simplicity and clarity, it becomes doubtful,
ambiguous, indeed even unintelligible, when one attempts to grasp
it with the frivolity of theorizing and speculating. The poor in spirit,
praised as blessed by the gospel, certainly never thought of theory
and speculation, wherein there is no earnestness—and therefore to
them belongs the kingdom of heaven. What is a genius before God?
It is not through his genius, but through his taking seriously the
spirituality of his life, that man opens his soul to the word of God.
To have this earnestness, no one needs to be a genius. And whoever
has it hears the Word, and the light of his life dawns upon him.
�
Man would never have been able by himself to discern the spiritu-
al realities of life and the I-aloneness of his existence in the world
in its true significance as the state of his spiritual lostness. Without
the spirit of Christianity, which means without the life and word of
Jesus, in whom the reality of the spirit and the word were absolute-
ly one, in whom God became man in order to redeem us from the
curse of original sin, no one would know, with however the Jews be-
ing excepted, anything of himself—of the I, which means of his I,
or of God. Both the self-consciousness of the I that is emphasized
practically in the relation of man to man, being then maintained
in the same sense in the aloneness that is nevertheless only appar-
ent, and the p hilosophical-theoretical self-consciousness of the I
that secludes itself from the Thou, forget their own precondition or
want to forget it: the consciousness of the existence of the Thou. The
self-awareness of the thought “I am I,” which consciously renounces
the Thou and God, does not notice that the thought and declaration
“I am” would not be possible at all apart from the thought “Thou
art”—that is, apart from the consciousness of the existence of God
that is placed in man by the word. The s elf-consciousness of a man
concretizes and realizes itself in the God-relation, and only in it
74
does human personality come completely to its breakthrough, and

the I to its full life, which is a life of the Spirit.
Personal being, from the standpoint of man and having absolute
validity for him, is always the existing of the I in the relation to the
Thou. Only the personality of God could be relationship-less; but it
is not, since it truly stands in a relation to the personal existence of
man, whose existence would not be possible at all without this rela-
tion. But that God created man for a personal existence—that is, for
a personal relation to him, lay not in the necessity of his existence as
God and personality, but was of his free will.
Just as the relation of God to man resides in the creative word of
grace and love, “I am and through me Thou art,” so conversely, the
relation of man to God, through which man becomes conscious of
his existence and its spiritual ground, is expressed in the word and
in the thought that underlies and gives meaning to every prayer:
“Thou art and through Thou I am.” The Thou in its divinity is the
first, the I in its humanity is the second person; and thus the hierar-
chy of spiritual being is established. God is not a projection of the I,
as many psychologists believe, who cannot grasp the real relation-
ship of God to man (since they do not even believe in God), but
only the human idea of the divine. The existence of the Thou does
not have that of the I for its presupposition, but the opposite: the I is
presupposed by the Thou.
Arising from the word in the divinity of its origin, the life of the
spirit includes and demands a personal relation to God. This life
is the possibility in man, created and intended by God himself,
that man when he prays speaks directly to God as to the Father.
In prayer, in dialogue with God, the word returns from whence it
came. If man prays only the first word of the Lord’s Prayer in the
right way, then the inexpressible mystery of God becomes word in
being uttered by man; just as in the life of Jesus, who taught us to
pray the Lord’s Prayer, it became word in being uttered, but in this
instance by God himself.
75
I Think and It Thinks
Fragment 4
I Think and It Thinks—Kierkegaard—
The Concrete I—Verbalization of Thinking—Ideal, Concrete,
Fictitious Thou—Word and Truth
Lichtenberg, as is well known, wants to posit an “It thinks in me”

in the place of “I think.” That is correct with regard to all those
thoughts that we have to call “genius.” Their conception is never ar-
bitrarily forced, it comes of itself as a suggestion from above, as an
inspiration, and perhaps they are only interrupted in their growth,
internal clarification, and unfolding by an entirely too arbitrary “I
think” (only the genius can say for sure). Man must yield himself to
these thoughts that think themselves out in his consciousness. Out-
side these thoughts, which always have objective value, there are no
edifying thoughts about their subjective meaning by which the “It
thinks in man” may be justly maintained. There are thoughts that
come about in a dreamlike state of consciousness, in a state that in
any case signifies a symptom of illness, in which mental constructs
live a life of their own, but without—and this is crucial—having ob-
jective meaning. It may even happen at times that brilliant thoughts
that have, as it were, bogged down on their way to objectification
may bear a certain resemblance to them.
Thoughts of genius are always inwardly oriented toward the idea.
But with the idea a remarkable state of affairs obtains—namely, that
it is something subjective and objective, personal and impersonal in
76
one. It originates in the personality, yet personality always assumes

a subordinate position to the idea. It has objective meaning—that
is, there exists for everyone in principle the possibility of reflect-
ing upon a thought that is oriented in its conception and develop-
ment toward the idea, and thus making it “his”—but is nevertheless
grounded in the subjective aspect of the will. In its aesthetic mean-
ing, which psychologically presupposes the rupture [Brechung] of
the will in desiring, it is not immediately clear. For here the will,
which through its brokenness [Gebrochenheit] in desire meets the
idea, is brought by objectification to its disappearance, as it were,
so that it is no longer noticed that the idea is firmly rooted in it. And
there we are dealing with that indifference in the aesthetic mode
of viewing, in the contemplation of the idea, that has been under-
scored especially by Schopenhauer. The situation is different, how-
ever, with the ethical idea that addresses the will (so that the will
comes forward) and gives it direction. However validly it may be
said of the thoughts of genius (and let it not be forgotten that the
spirituality of the genius is always aesthetically oriented and di-
rected) that the “It thinks in man,” or more clearly stated, “The idea
thinks itself in man,” in the final analysis a mode of thinking still
underlies it, and the I underlies the latter. A thought in its actuality
is always an “I think,” even if the I is so hidden that it no longer rec-
ognizes itself—and behind the cogito stands the volo. The I of the
brilliant thought is not the concrete but the ideal I of the genius; it is
a potential but never a real I, as the possibility of thinking in gener-
al. It is an I abstracted from its reality—which lies in the will.
�
The pseudonymity of Kierkegaard’s writing may perhaps be ex-
plained from this standpoint. Kierkegaard was certainly one of
the most profound thinkers of all time, which has not yet been
clearly recognized, who had in himself the manifold possibilities
of thought. In the spirituality of his life, considered religiously, he
77
did not do what other thinkers do: he resolved not to convert one
of these possibilities of thought into the reality of his spiritual ex-
istence, into the reality of his thinking of what the “truth” is for
him. For he saw in his religious perceptiveness [Besonnenheit] where
alone the reality of the spiritual life and truth lies. But he was too
much of a thinker (and poet besides) to discard all these thoughts
and spiritual possibilities of existence; and for that reason, poetiz-
ing his philosophers, he placed these before himself as ideal, poetic
possibilities, without identifying with them in the reality of his spir-
itual life. An achievement of genius, which in elasticity and range
has no equal in all of history, requires extraordinary extensiveness
of spiritual life no less than intensity. Kierkegaard obviously knew
very well (and how could he not have known it, since it was indeed
the presupposition of his entire work and gave his work deeper
meaning) that his real spiritual life was not in his unprecedented
production of genius. The truly religious man, who knows where
the truth lies and therefore never seeks it with unbridled imagina-
tion, cannot abide with the viewpoint of any philosophy or philo-
sophical problem-raising to come to the truth. He alone, not the
critic of knowledge, really understands the complete inadequacy of
every philosophical point of view. Kierkegaard was perhaps the only
genius who understood himself in his genius, the single great think-
er who made proper use of his genius. And he could only do that
because the religious perceptiveness was in him. Kant, whose orien-
tation was less religious than ethical and critical of science, wanted
nothing of genius in philosophy, as everyone knows. Genius, as the
d ifficult-to-tame Pegasus with wings of imagination, always threat-
ens to run away with the philosopher and to not only seduce him to
dream of the spirit, but finally to hold this dream for pure truth and
reality. Since Kierkegaard was himself conscious of the ideality of
all objective thinking, and as a result was also conscious of the re-
ality of the spiritual life, of the concrete I, he therefore can do what
no philosopher in the world from Plato to Kant and Fichte has been
78
able to do: he can transform the reader directly into the concrete
Thou—that is, bring the concrete I in him to consciousness of itself.
He can compel the reader to an understanding of himself—while
the philosophers, if all goes well, can help him only to the objective
comprehension of their thoughts and works. The one who has un-
derstood the Critique of Pure Reason well enough to criticize it has
simply understood it and has nothing further to say. But the one
who has really understood one of Kierkegaard’s writings, for exam-
ple Sickness unto Death or The Concept of Dread, understands him-
self better than before—or he has quite certainly not understood it.
And then there would be much more to say.
�
If this concrete I did not exist at all and in reality, then there would
really be no spiritual reality—which is not to say that everything
spiritual has its reality from the I. Then spirit would exist only in
the sphere of ideas—that is, only in the imagination of man that has
become estranged from reality, only in his desire, in his dreaming of
the spirit. But this dreaming has as its presupposition that spiritual
reality in man that is, to be sure, estranged from him. The animal
does not dream of the spirit. But there is no man who does not or
has not so dreamt. Those who view the I as a mere fiction (thus as
less than something ideal, since objective meaning always adheres
in the latter) naturally also see a fiction in the will, precisely in its
quality of I-ness [Ichhaftigkeit]. But there is just as little an I-less
will—which in the end they want to conceive as a completely ob-
jective striving, as a tendency in nature a s there is an absolutely
w ill-less I.
If there is a concrete I—which only those “without spirit” doubt,
and with whom it is of course very difficult to reach an understand-
ing regarding the spirit—then there are also thoughts of which not
the “It thinks,” but rather the “I think” immediately holds true.
These thoughts could not be conceived at all apart from this imme-
79
diacy of I -consciousness, and only therein do they have their mean-

ing, that the concrete I in man thinks them, that “I think them.” Yet
just as this concrete I must be conceived as either the psychologi-
cally determined moi of Pascal or as the spiritually determined and
self-determining I—that is, as either psyche or pneuma, so also are
the I -based [ichhaft] thoughts of a twofold nature: they are either of
the psychological I that secludes itself from the Thou, that relates
to itself in the reality of its will; or they are of the pneumatologi-
cal I that seeks and finds the reality and determination of its exis-
tence in relation to the Thou. It can be valid for the former type, but
not necessarily in all cases, but it must be conceived for the latter,
without exception, that the “I think” is valid. If a man thinks only of
himself while rejecting the Thou, having nothing else in view than
his relationship to the world and his existence in it, then his volition
thinks; then it is not the “It” in him that thinks, but “he” thinks. It
can also be that this self-relating volition flees into unconsciousness
and, masking itself in images and thoughts, comes to conscious-
ness in man without genuine intelligibility. And then of course the
“It thinks in him” holds true once again. But if one reflects on that
unconscious volition, or if he sees through it, he recognizes himself
and understands these images and thoughts. If in the affliction or
the joy of love he thinks of the one whom he loves and in whom he
accordingly has found the Thou of his I; if while praying he lifts his
thoughts to God, then again it is not the “It” in him that thinks, but
“he” thinks. In the I-based thoughts of the psychically determined
I, the Thou is always forgotten—or thought of as the I once more,
seemingly as the I of the other. But in the thoughts of the pneumat-
ically determined I, which ultimately constitute a single thought, in
spite of all their manifoldness, the Thou is called to mind, brought
to remembrance. And here this beautiful word “remembrance”
comes to its final and real meaning: man remembers the depen-
dence of his existence upon the Thou. In this remembrance he has
the inwardness of his life. And therefore the deepest recollection of
80
himself lies in these thoughts, and in them the word comes to life in
its most immediate sense.
�
Just as the I underlies all thoughts, at least ideally, so the relation-
ship of the I to the Thou serves as the basis of their verbalization,
again at least ideally. What happens if one wants help in bringing
a thought that he has just had to full clarity, to himself and to no
one but himself, and in so doing makes use of the word in the still-
ness and aloneness of his thinking? How strange does the word
seem in aloneness. The word contradicts it, it testifies against such
aloneness. If we see in the word an instrument of communica-
tion, then we can ask what the deepest and ultimate meaning of all
communication may be. Does it lie only in the application of one
thing or another to the addressed person, be this a definite action
in the external world or only the inner empathy about our life and
experience, thinking, feeling, and willing? Does this really entirely
exhaust the meaning of communication, or must we not go deep-
er still? For the ultimate meaning of the word in human terms (for
the divine meaning is the creation and awakening of the spiritual
life in man) is and remains the opening of the I to the Thou over
against him. This is not the exercise of influence [Einflussnahme]
on the outer or inner attitude of the Thou, but the establishment of
the relation to him, which must in no way be broken off again in the
next instant. If one thus wants to make a thought that he is thinking
entirely clear to himself, and that therefore he thinks in words, does
he communicate with himself, does he open up to himself? In a cer-
tain sense it is true that he opens up something in himself—namely,
his thought. But it is the word that helps him to illuminate some-
thing within that is still dark to him, that makes something hidden
accessible to him. And the meaning of the word is the relation of the
spiritual in man to the spiritual outside him. Man, however, thinks
of nothing else but making his thought clear to himself. Does he in
81
the verbalization of his thought speak to a purely fictitious Thou?

But he is not at all a poet and would not like to be, least of all in his
attempt to think out his thought clearly. Or does he converse as a
madman? Perhaps every person who is going mad has a tendency
to carry on a conversation with himself. Or when he talks to him-
self, when he, only in thought, renders himself the addressed per-
son, does he convert his I into the Thou? But it would be nothing
else but the I, the I once more—it would thus be a doubling of the
I that interests the psychiatrist. Hence he would be a little insane.
But how is this possible, since some kind of self-clarification takes
place in him, whereas in the insane person the opposite happens;
an ever-spreading self-darkening takes place, the “darkening of the
spirit,” as it is well put, into which finally an illuminating ray of light
can no longer penetrate. If a man cannot do other than appeal to the
word for help in the clarification of a thought, then one again sees
how all spiritual life in us is conditioned by the word, and through
it is dependent on a relation to the spiritual outside us. Everything
spiritual in me, even if I possessed it only for myself (as in the case
where I am concerned with nothing else but making clear to myself
my own thoughts with the help of the word), is only a reflection and
afterglow of the relation to the spiritual outside me. If in my spirit I
isolate myself from all men and am occupied with nothing but the
clarification of my thoughts, I still long for this relation to the Thou,
since I need it for this clarification in the word, which interests me
above all. If it is a question of objective thoughts, I probably do not
have another man at all in mind in thinking them; yet I nonetheless
think them for him, without my becoming aware of it. The verbal-
ization of these thoughts above all has the meaning that in being
thought they bring another into connection, and thus I may and
even must secretly have the hope (for who knows whether I would
come to the word at all without it) that my thought, which clarifies
the word and therein myself, might somewhere and sometime yet
be spoken to the spiritual in another man. But with this secret hope
82
I can already go astray in the realm of dreams, and one has to be-
ware of that under all circumstances.
How about the subjective thoughts of a man, which con-
cern only himself, his own existence, and his more or less deep-
ly understood neediness in it, and whose verbalization in abstract
self-conversation is not really directed to the Thou in another man,
not even ideally? What of those thoughts that one—without raising
the slightest claim to their objective validity, to their having some-
thing to say to another—really only thinks to himself and for him-
self, and that he may not want another to know about at any cost?
But let one keep this in mind: whatever man says and to whomever
he speaks, God listens. And according to the words of the gospel,
he requires an accounting someday for every uselessly spoken word.
If man speaks with other men, in reality or only in thought—God
listens. If he talks to himself about himself and the neediness of his
existence, regarding things that he would not like to speak about
with anybody, God listens all the more; or rather, man can, so to
speak, become more easily aware that God is listening in this kind
of conversation than when he speaks to another man, be it only ide-
ally. He should be mindful that in this absolute conversation with
himself, this speech on a path toward insanity, he ignores God com-
pletely. Yet God is listening and right there wants more than ever to
be addressed. Can one who talks to himself in the aloneness of his I
and the spiritual neediness of his life, and then suddenly remembers
that God is listening, still continue his self-conversation, as if God
were not there and not listening? He becomes silent—or he turns
the word to God, there, where it strives after its origin. But God is
never merely an observer and a listener. Man only makes him that.
In the moment when the word of man turns earnestly to God, God
speaks also to man. And not only is the thought silenced in which
the e ver-falsely understood neediness of existing is considered and
lamented, but even the suffering from it comes to nothing. For when
God speaks he makes man aware of where his real suffering dwells.
83
The monologue of one suffering in thought is gibberish and a true

symptom of the illness of the spirit, so long as it has not been a di-
alogue with God. But if it is the latter, then it is no longer a mono-
logue and is not gibberish. In monologue the word loses its meaning
and finally becomes gibberish. In dialogue with God, it comes to
its ultimate and deepest meaning. Man needs the word to become
clear about himself and his thinking—for it is the light of our life.
And he only becomes clear about himself, he only understands the
neediness of his existing and himself in this neediness, in dialogue
with God.
�
There are no doubt thoughts that are absolutely wordless yet still
clear and distinct. They are conceived in the greatest possible alone-
ness of the I. But in the verbalization of this thinking the relation-
ship of the I to the Thou is clearly asserted. The word—as document
of the spiritual life—has the power in itself to beget the spiritual
life in the addressed person who does not close himself off from it
by awakening in man the ideal Thou via the word of the poet and
the concrete Thou via the religious word. The one who speaks in the
poetic word, addressing himself to the ideal Thou, is an ideal I. But
the one who speaks in the religious word, an apostle, for example, is
not the I of man, but rather is God himself, who uses man in order
to speak through him. It can also be the case that in one who is not
even an apostle, the I has become absolutely concrete in its relation
to God. Addressed and moved by the word, the I itself becomes the
Thou, and therein it has the one side of its spiritual life, either in its
reality or only in the idea. There is also, however, a verbalization of
thoughts that avoids the Thou, a word that thus speaks neither to
the ideal nor to the concrete Thou in man, but rather adheres to the
objectivity of thinking. Yet that means it denies the spirituality of
its origin and meaning. Since this word is not a document of spir-
itual life, it cannot beget spiritual life in man—for the latter does
84
not move in the sphere of objective thinking. To become complete-

ly objective would eventuate in an absolute renunciation of living,
and above all of spiritual living directly. With the exception of pure
mathematical thinking, there is no mode of conceiving that can ex-
tricate itself completely from the native soil of spiritual life in man,
whose real sphere is subjectivity. Such a way of thinking would have
to renounce verbalization eo ipso and would find its most perfect
expression precisely in a mathematical formula. Even the most ob-
jective thinker (and secretly the mathematician, as well, in whose
case, however, it appears as pure human fortuitousness) may not
be completely devoid of the need to communicate his thoughts and
to be understood by others (a need that is quite foreign to the truly
religious man). This demonstrates that the search for the Thou, the
spiritual life of man in his subjectivity, this search that can go astray
and that cannot overcome “I-aloneness,” still underlies his thinking
in spite of all objectivity.
There is also a verbalization of thoughts for which a relationship
to a merely fictitious Thou forms the basis, which is not to be con-
fused with the ideal Thou. That is the case with the insane person or
with a man on the verge of insanity. His I lacks the Thou—and that
is already a symptom—even if the conversation seems to be entirely
reasonable in itself. For the insane person talks incoherently above
all in a pneumatological sense and only subsequently in an intellec-
tual sense, as well. It is not only the intellect that suffers loss, for the
evil is situated much deeper.
It often happens to the genius, and no doubt always to the in-
sane, to talk at cross-purposes with real man. They do not address
the concrete Thou directly; they overlook it, so to speak, and per-
haps even disregard it. The kinship of genius and madness was rec-
ognized long ago, but wherein this kinship is to be seen, has never
really been sought: in the circumstance that the genius not less than
the insane labors in the I -aloneness of human existence and builds
his own world in it. Both suffer from it (and from the problemati-
85
zation of life), but the former has his genius to help him over the
suffering. If a brilliant man becomes insane, he does not become so
through his genius but rather because he is abandoned by it, so that
he no longer finds in himself the means to bring the sickness of the
spirit under control—and man spiritually suffers from nothing else
but the Thoulessness [Dulosigkeit] of the I. Yet that is the distinction
between the genius and the insane, that the former has a relation-
ship to an ideal Thou at least spiritually (it is bad enough, moreover,
if his entire spiritual life becomes completely merged in it), while
the latter speaks only to a merely fictitious Thou. Idea and fiction
are of course not the same; for the former always has objective, the
latter only subjective meaning. While not always the case, the one
who bears in himself the possibility of an ideal Thou as the premise
for being addressed by the word and by the work of the genius in
his brilliance—that one knows what to do with the Thou, howev-
er little it may address his concrete Thou. But one usually does not
know what to make of the talk of an insane person (that would be
for the psychologist), for no one has a fictitious Thou in himself, as
many have the possibility of an ideal one, and no one wants his I to
be abused as a merely fictitious Thou, as an external pretext but not
an internal motive for speaking.
Everything that becomes word in man, and the more it arises
from the depth of life, has its genuine sense and its real truth in its
not lacking the Thou. Truth is that through which a thought has
permanence and materiality, and there is no truth of a thought that
has been verbalized that exists absolutely independently of the re-
lationship of the word to the Thou, the Thou that is addressed in
the ideal or concretely. There is objective truth only on the abstract
surface of being—and of thinking—and it is in the end not a truth
in itself. It is the relationship to the genuine Thou that makes the
verbalization of a thought the objective truth. The truth does not
create or compel the relationship; rather, the opposite is everywhere
the case, when it is not a question of the abstract surface of being,
86
thus of mathematics and science. The I that is unable to find its Thou
moves in nothing but misplaced thoughts and h alf-truths. Only half
of the conditions for the existence of truth are given: the I—and it is
already in danger of becoming an untruth.
�
What of the truth in the religious life? No man can understand an-
other in his relation to God—each can understand only himself,
and must understand himself in this relation, or else it is not a real
relation to God. No one can know the truth of another’s relation
with God, even if communication about it is offered to him, which
really is not possible. For the word of this communication only pos-
its the relation of the I to the Thou in man; the relation to God, how-
ever, is that of the I to the Thou in God, and cannot be expressed
immediately to the intellect in the form of direct communication
v is-á-vis man and as something like a mathematical axiom, for ex-
ample. In other words, I can only believe in the truth of the relation
to God in another man that was communicated to me indirectly,
because it could not proceed otherwise. We can really understand
only what is given to us in mathematical certainty or as something
evolving. Mathematics is our understanding in space, where man
feels entirely at home; but the idea of evolution is our understand-
ing in time, and in that he is already no longer at home as in space.
Yet the kingdom of God, as the gospel says, is not here and there but
is within man—and it does not develop but rather breaks through.
The God-relation is the mystery of its breakthrough and existence
in man, about which no direct communication can be made. There-
fore, we cannot assert of anyone with absolute certainty that the re-
lation does not exist in him, even if it concerns a criminal or a mad-
man; but neither that it abides even in a saint. We must assume it
unconditionally in every man. For we must believe in God in man,
just as, conversely, we have to believe in man in God.
87
�
If a man in speaking to God in his heart would have to turn his word
exclusively to an ideal Thou, then only the genius would have a rela-
tion to God, for only he has a relation to the ideal Thou. But this is
not God for that very reason, because it only refers to man in his hu-
manity, as it were, and in the final analysis to mankind, to the idea
of man, but never to God, who is truly a reality of the spiritual life;
neither does it have reference to God in his humanity—that is, to
his incarnation in Jesus. If one would have only a fictitious Thou in
God, however, then one would be insane in his relation to God. But
nothing is more certain than that man in his real relation to God
is beyond all insanity and all possibility of insanity that lies in the
human spirit.
88
Knowledge of the Spiritual Life
Fragment 5
Knowledge of the Spiritual Life—The Philosophers
and the Word—The Word and the Spiritual Life—
Science and the Word—Pneumatology
There would be no knowledge of the spiritual life if that life subsist-

ed only in love and not also in word. The latter forms the basis of
all knowledge in general. If man possessed the spiritual life only in
word and not also in love, he would be without security and certi-
tude of its reality. He would no doubt know of the I and even of the
Thou, but nothing of this knowledge would be secure from the crit-
ical attack of philosophy, which claims to see in this I, just as in the
Thou, nothing but a linguistic habit. The word as the objective and
love as the subjective vehicle of the relation between the I and the
Thou belong together. The divinity of both is vouchsafed to man in
his faith in the incarnation of God in Jesus. Yet it is not granted to
man to understand why they necessarily and essentially belong to-
gether. For that would mean understanding why God created man
precisely as he is and not otherwise.
�
“Philosophia nata videtur,” Leibniz asserted of the German language.
The point would thus be to develop that philosophy innate to lan-
guage, to make “use of the instrument . . . which it had already pre-
pared when it was not yet real philosophy,” and not only to extract
89
from language those poetic treasures that lie hidden in it, according
to an observation of Schelling, and that “the poet does not put into
language; but which he, as it were, lifts out of it, as out of a treasure
trove which he merely persuades language to reveal to him.”
Every deep thinker suspected that there must be an entirely
unique state of affairs with language, and they engaged in etymol-
ogy. Such was the case with Plato and Scotus Eriugena, to name
only two examples. They privately surmised that there might be a
stability in the word and that philosophy might have something to
gain by it. As Schelling said, the basis of language cannot be situat-
ed with consciousness (because without it human consciousness is
not at all conceivable, the latter thus presupposing language), and
yet, the deeper we penetrate into it, the more certainly language
discloses that its depth still excels by far that which is the product
of full consciousness. What dwells in this depth is something more
than philosophy or an instrument for it. Of what importance, then,
is philosophy? The problem of language is neither a philosophical
nor a psychological nor perhaps a scientific one, but rather a pneu-
matological one; and as long as it is not conceived in this way, the
essence of the word will never be fathomed. Conversely, the prob-
lems of pneumatology—that is, the questions of the spiritual life—
undergo a special illumination from the clarification of the deeply
grasped problem of language. For the key to the spiritual life lies in
the word. Why shouldn’t one even dare to attempt a pneumatologi-
cal grammar? Through a statement of Jacob Grimm, the view might
be encouraged that not only is philosophy apparently innate to it to
be extracted from the German language (and from related languag-
es), according to that word of Leibniz, but it is also the knowledge
of the spiritual essence of language and of the meaning of the word.
This I ndo-Germanic language, Grimm said, must offer through its
inner construction, which can clearly be pursued in infinite grada-
tions, the richest insights into the universal course and develop-
ment of human language and perhaps about its origin. And the Ger-
90
man language in particular truly has an etymological physiognomy

and countenance in which its interpretation divulges to us the deep-
est and innermost life of language and the meaning of this life. The
physiognomy of language is, to be sure, like every other spiritual
venture upon which one haphazardly embarks.
�
Since the mystery of the spiritual life conceals and reveals itself in
the mystery of the word, pneumatology is therefore, as far as it is
possible at all, word-knowledge, a knowledge of the word and about
the word and an interpretation of the prologue of the Gospel of
John, which certainly does not speculate metaphysically with the
logos. John the Evangelist was the first (the second was probably
Hamann) who saw the inner connectedness of the spiritual life in
man with the word and with the life of Jesus with the word, whose
divine origin he recognized. How could man know about the life
of the spirit if it had not been revealed to him in the word of God,
in the word of the gospel? The word that Jesus spoke was no doubt
a human word in its sensuous aspect, spoken in a language condi-
tioned by a nation; but it was precisely the word of God according to
Jesus’ own testimony, in which we have to believe if we want to live
in the spirit. It was the word itself, purely and simply in the divini-
ty of its origin, that entered into human language and dwelt there-
in, just as God himself became man in the human life of Jesus and
dwelt among us.
Hamann said that without language we would have no reason,
and without reason no religion, and without these three essential
elements of our nature we would have neither spirit nor the bond
of society. How far removed from this core of a ll-pneumatological
knowledge of language is science, which became more and more
godless in the course of the nineteenth century; how far removed
from the insight into the inner connectedness of having the word,
reason, and religion, and from the true spirit and bond of society,
91
love. Science no longer saw the “vast difference between the dumb-
ness of the animal and human speech,” which cannot be accounted
for physically, as Wilhelm von Humboldt was aware, and thus lan-
guage could not be “an absolute point of division between animal
and man” for it. To reject the formal and verbal modes of thinking
with abhorrence and to think beyond the word—t hat would be sci-
ence’s ideal. Beyond the word, that means “apart from the spirit.”
All reverence for language, all confidence in the word has been lost
to it, and science must be severely reproached for that.
Whoever wants to fathom the essence of language must have
reverence for the word, he must be a philologist in the most liter-
al sense of the term, whom Hamann had in mind when he called
himself one by preference—the merely talented linguist, in calling
himself a philologist, abuses the term, as Schelling stated. He must
also believe in God. For in the deepest knowledge that is possible of
the essence of the word, he will discern that it is from God. In that
way man trusts in the word with his utmost confidence, because it
is from God—which alone can make him creative in language, and
above all from which his word draws power to stand against the
whole world and its powers and principalities. Swer niht mêr gelou-
ben wil denne er weiz, der uniwîse (“He who does not want to believe
more than he knows, is not wise”), as one mystic states it. All sci-
ence of the nineteenth century became uniwîse and godless—and
thereby also inhuman.
This was and is no doubt due to its nature; for science—just as
mathematics, toward which science strives as its ideal end—has
its spiritual root in the moi of Pascal, in the I-aloneness of human
existence. And it also belongs to the essence of science, the more
scientific it becomes, to urge man to awaken from his dream of the
spirit—but truly not to awaken to the spiritual realities of life. By
its nature science does not know what to make of the divine origin
of the word and of language. But if science seeks to refute it directly
and to prove the untenability of the assertion of this origin (just as it
92
did in the nineteenth century, while expecting all too optimistically

through evolution to attain the solution to all riddles of the universe
and the explanation for all miracles of life and even of the facts of
the spiritual life in man), science demonstrates thereby not only
that it simply does not understand the essence of the word and of
language, but also that it does not grasp at all the meaning of human
existence in its spirituality. Science has only the earth-boundedness
of life in view, and it takes away the deeper meaning of every glance
up to heaven. But what kind of knowledge about language is it that
claims to know nothing of the origin of the word in the spirit, noth-
ing of the redeeming quality in the word, and of the redemption of
man by the word, and that does not grasp that it is not the human
spirit that invented language, the word, but God who created the
spiritual in man through the word and called it to life?
The word mediates spiritually between man and man—in its ul-
timate basis, however, between man and God, between man and the
spiritual ground of his existence, which the intellect does not fath-
om. The intellect does not understand the mystery of life, no matter
how much it may understand, the mystery that reveals itself in the
word, in which life is; and it allows the man who entrusts himself
exclusively to its guidance to live oblivious to this mystery. It be-
lieves that there may be no mystery at all, thereby showing that it
does not understand itself. For if it understood, it would see its own
limits, its own insufficiency and narrowness. Then it would discover
the mystery—which would be its proper task. But it is no longer his
task to have reverence before it. Let it therefore step aside and not
bar the way to the deeper forces of the spiritual life.
Pneumatology must not claim to be a science. Though there are
no doubt certain pneumatological findings (the object of which is
the word and its essence), there is no pneumatology as a science.
Would not a completely successful solution to the problem of lan-
guage have to bring man to wholly understand himself objectively
in the spirituality of his life, since the mystery of the spiritual life
93
dwells in the mystery of the word? But that would mean that this
solution would in its final analysis have a religious significance and
would lead knowledge in its objective orientation to veer into the
subjective. Man is able to really understand himself only religious-
ly—that is, only in his relation to God; and in the simplest, seem-
ingly most obvious and in itself clearest declaration of the sentence
“I am,” he understands himself only in this relation and through it.
But how is a man to be objectively compelled to religiousness, to
a relation to God, when he subjectively bears in himself the possi-
bility of being not religious? Everything religious depends upon
faith—that is, upon the commitment of the individual person and
the personal decision. Such is not the case in the domain of the sci-
entific and mathematical, where this decision plays no role at all.
And there is no external objective factor that can predetermine
man in this decision or make it easy for him, let alone save him en-
tirely from it. But precisely this commitment of the individual per-
son is the insertion [Einsetzen] of the spiritual life in man and his
salvation: the I places itself in a relation to the Thou, only through
which it really exists. Only in the religious sphere, not in the ethi-
cal in and for itself (although the religious must always go through
the ethical, which, as Kierkegaard notes in his Journal, is “the sole
medium through which God communicates with man, the only one
from which he wants to converse with man”) does the personality of
human existence, which includes self-understanding, come to full
and complete breakthrough. Regarding the solution of the problem
of language, assuming it is possible: it is certain that he who would
succeed in solving it would have participated in and endured some-
thing in a religious sense; and, while solving his problem of think-
ing, what he took part in and passed through neither science nor
philosophy and metaphysics truly has a presentiment. No solution
will ever succeed, however. But the problem ought to be thought
out to its ultimate basis, so that man may discern the problem of his
spiritual life in it.
94
If Hamann maintains that without language we would have no

reason, and without reason no religion; if he thus links together
language and religion (as the relation to God and the demand for
this relation that is inherent in the human spirit, which rouses him
to the life of the spirit), then one may flatly state: that man has the
word and that he has religion are spiritually one and the same. Just
as language is something put directly into man, so also is religion—
not, however, as a demand raised by him, but rather as one placed
on him. And just as little as the former could have evolved from a
state prior to language, so also could the latter have developed from
a state of consciousness prior to religion.
No man has thus far really understood himself in the fact that he
has the word, that he has language and the possibility of the decla-
ration “I am,” which includes s elf-consciousness (this may not be
entirely true only of John the Evangelist). For then indeed the prob-
lem of language would have been solved. But up to now has there not
really been anyone who understood himself by the fact that he has
religion—and that it is identical with the word being given to him?
One cannot accept this because one would thereby deny that there
has ever been a truly religious man. But the life and word of Jesus
have made it possible for man to understand himself in a religious re-
spect—and thus to really know himself. Hence those thinkers have
not been entirely wrong who inhibit w ord-fetishism in thinking. For
thinking actually promotes w ord-fetishism if it clings to language, to
the point that man does not understand himself in the fact that he is
the speaking being. But this is possible only religiously.
Only the man who is aware of being struck by the demand to
have religion and to confront his existence with the fact of the life
and word of Jesus awakens to the reality of the spiritual life. In be-
lieving in the incarnation of God in Jesus he begins to understand
himself. The genius never really understands himself, for he only
dreams of the spirit (for if his spiritual life had not turned toward
the religious, could he still be a genius, since certainly no man is a
95
genius before God?). What are dreams really? That man dreams and
how he dreams perhaps only demonstrate that he does not under-
stand himself. For dreams are the proceedings of consciousness in
us that we for the most part do not understand, and therefore gladly
call meaningless. But can one think of them, wanting to interpret
and t hus to understand them, if one does not presuppose a mean-
ing in them? And they most certainly always have a meaning. How
could we understand ourselves subjectively in the proceedings of
consciousness whose meaning is hidden to us, which we do not un-
derstand, objectively? Every attempt at dream interpretation is jus-
tified only so far as it leads to this subjective understanding. Yet the
one who interprets dreams must reckon with the remarkable fact
that most men do not want to understand their dreams at all and
thus themselves as well. With the inspired dream of the poet or the
metaphysician—which is dreamt objectively and has the principle
and precept of its objectification in the idea—this is not entirely the
case. For without doubt each objectively understands his poetry or
his system. The genius, however, is not aware that he is only dream-
ing of the spirit. That means he does not understand himself subjec-
tively in this dream.
Behind every dream, even behind the dream of the spirit, a mis-
ery lies hidden, and idealism truly only plays the role of a sickness
in the spiritual life of man. For of itself, idealism does not get rid of
the discrepancy between idea and reality on which it is founded and
that it postulates. It can in the end only surrender itself in the with-
drawal [Zurücknahme] of the idea.
Must man be a genius to come to pneumatological knowledge?
96
Sense and Senses
Fragment 6
Sense and Senses—The Lower Senses—
Hearing and Seeing—Beauty—Musical Intuition—
Tone and Word—Word and Spiritual Neediness
What do we mean when we say that a man has a sense [Sinn] for this
or that, for music for example, or for poetry? What is sense, really,
inasmuch as under this word the senses with which we grasp the
world are included? Sense is always, whether it is meant with one or
the other meaning, the way in which something enters into us. That
also finds expression in the etymology of the German word Sinn.
The Old High German verb sinnan means “to go somewhere,” and
the German root sintha means “way,” “journey” (Gothic sinths =
motion [Gang], Old Irish sét = way). But the world that is our expe-
rience and not merely our mental image enters into our conscious-
ness not only through the senses; the senses also encounter [entge-
genkommen] the world. (Only the abstraction of the thinker turns
the world into a mental image, into that which is abstracted from
its being concretely experienced and from the participation root-
ed in life, from the interest of the subject who experienced it.) To
have a sense for something means to encounter it. To have a sense
for a poem means to encounter it spiritually. If one has no sense for
mathematics, his spiritual constitution does not encounter math-
ematics. Sense is disposition to a spiritual receptivity. To have the
sense for light and color in the eyes and for sound and tones in the
97
Sense and Senses
ears means once again nothing other than to encounter light and
sound through the eyes and ears. The human spirit is above all the
sense for the word—reason, taking this word in its basic and origi-
nal meaning; it is a spirit that encounters-the-word. And the word
again, in the actuality of its being spoken, is something, objectively
a sound, that has a meaning, something that encounters the spir-
itual in man—and with his need for meaning. The one who has a
sense for poetry (and therefore understands it), not only spiritually
encounters the poem, but by understanding it, also creatively par-
ticipates in it. Is this not also the case for the senses that mediate
the world to us? They are not only tools of receiving; they partici-
pate creatively in the world as it is experienced by us, precisely by
encountering it. Only this is not as clearly the case with the three
lower senses as with the two higher. Only the spiritual can be cre-
ative. Everything creative is rooted in it. It has been asserted that
the senses are spirit; if that is right, then they must in some way
co-creatively participate in the experience of the world that they
mediate.
It is necessary, however, to emphasize a situation the attention to
which can save us from many a misunderstanding. One cannot fath-
om the aesthetic without speaking of the spirit. But if one speaks
of the spirit in the realm of the aesthetic, one really does not know
what one is talking about. For what the spirit is in its reality cannot
be grasped aesthetically. Neither can it be grasped metaphysically.
For metaphysics is never spiritually able to elevate itself beyond the
aesthetic—out of its dream sphere into the realm of the reality of
the spiritual life—because metaphysics is nothing but the aesthetic
transposed into the sphere of thinking.
In the three lower senses, one could say, the materiality of the
world is experienced. The three aggregate states of matter corre-
spond to them exactly: solid substances correspond to the sense of
touch (as do the others, insofar as they exhibit solidity in a certain
sense—namely, in offering resistance); liquids and that which dis-
98
Sense and Senses
solves in them correspond to taste; gases and that which evaporates

in gas from solid and liquid substances correspond to the sense of
smell. The sense of touch responds to physical properties of sub-
stances (with which warmth can also be classed); smell and taste
to chemical properties. In touch the materiality of matter is directly
experienced—that is, its filling of space and its impenetrability. The
sense of touch mediates the experience of the resistance of matter,
the primal experience, so to speak, in the experience of the world. In
this resistance as it is experienced through the sense of touch, man
has the ultimate sensuous evidence of the reality of a thing. Only
through it, as well as through the sense of sight, do we really experi-
ence things. The latter, however, already makes things unreal: man
sometimes does not rely on his eyes but on the grasp of his hand. He
has to be able to grasp something in order to be sure of its existence.
In the direction of this will to grasp lies the tendency for substan-
tialization of thinking, in consequence of which we are compelled
to think that everything that exists and is said to have real existence
for us (and our objective thinking) exists as a substance. Yet sub-
stance is not a necessity of being but of thinking.
Not quite in the same way as the sense of touch experiences the
resistance of matter, the impenetrability, the physical, and through
smell and taste, the chemical materiality of matter, the ear responds
through hearing to that movement of air which is produced by the
oscillation of a body, which objectively produces the sound. The
specific factor in the hearing experience lies precisely in that this
movement of air is experienced by hearing not as resistance of mat-
ter, but rather as sound, which is something completely different.
That the ear, while hearing, perceives the air agitated in the sound
wave as sound (and not as agitated air, which would be a mere ex-
perience of touch, that in and for itself lies at the basis of the process
of hearing as a collision of agitated air with the individual compo-
nents of the hearing apparatus, if considered from the standpoint of
its external cause) is already a creative response to the perception of
99
Sense and Senses
agitated air. The term “creative” obviously must not be understood

here other than relatively; that is, as legitimate within the concept
(and brought about by the concept in its usage) that every event in
the world, conceived independently of its being experienced and
perceived through the tools of the senses, would be based on the
movement of matter, and that the latter would receive in the expe-
rience of touch its most primitive and so-to-speak original percep-
tion by a living being.1 If the specific response of the ear in hearing
should cease and a perception of agitated air should nevertheless
take place in the ear, only the resistance of matter would be experi-
enced, as in the sense of touch. But since the ear, which when hear-
ing makes in and by means of its response to the movement of air
something entirely different of the latter than what is given objec-
tively in it (as far as it is perceptible by the sense of touch), does not
experience the materiality of matter as such, but rather permits it
to disappear, as it were, one can therefore say that the experience of
sound signifies a spiritualization, a dematerialization of matter. The
situation is no different with the eye, with seeing and light. The eye
when seeing responds to the undulation of the ether through the ex-
perience of light. What is this experience other than organic modifi-
cation of the contact of the retina by the latter? The eye creates light
from these waves just as the ear creates sound from agitated air.
Let one take note of a special state of affairs. Namely, it makes
sense to demand a physical explanation of the origin of sound and
light. For while one in some way experiences something immateri-
al in the experience of both, the scientific understanding will rest
content with no explanation except one that traces every process
in the world back to a definite moment of matter as its substratum.
But would it make sense to seek a physical explanation for the ori-
1. All perceiving, even through eye and ear, one could say, is based on contact,
and hearing and seeing are nothing else but an organic modification of the original
experience of contact, thus of touch. The creative factor would lie precisely in this
organic modification.
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Sense and Senses
gin of touch as well? Is the impenetrability experienced in the latter

something different than matter itself, insofar as it is concretely ex-
perienced and not merely abstractly conceived? Is the experienced
physical materiality of matter as directly experienced as chemical
materiality in the experiences of smell and taste? Impenetrability
cannot be further explained physically, because it is itself the pre-
condition of every physical explanation.
The origin of sound can be physically explained from the air that
is agitated in the sound wave. Here one is still dealing with a real
matter, so to speak, whose impenetrability and resistance (thus ma-
teriality) can still be perceived somehow differently. The physical
explanation of light, however, demands the formation of the ether
hypothesis, the assumption of an imponderable matter, of a matter
without materiality. Would anyone have ever hit upon that without
the experience of light and the need for its physical explanation? It
naturally proved itself to be exceedingly useful and fruitful in other
areas of physics. But this may only prove that one does not get along
well with matter in its materiality when one wants to explain and to
make scientifically comprehensible the events in the world.
�
In this connection a recent attempt to solve the problem of eccen-
tric sensation can be considered. According to this, the experienced
world, the image of the world created by the brain “as sensation, is
a modification of the matter of the central organ.” But there is “an
organic connection of the image with the central organ,” for the
brain is not only “solid anatomical matter,” but also “etheric matter,”
which begins oscillating when it receives the impulse of the optic
nerve, and these undulations, breaking through the cranium wall in
the manner of s o-called invisible rays, pass into the world. Seeing
is thus only a “physical kinetic response of the brain to the message
of the optic nerve, which is modified kinetically and possibly also
chemically by the impulse: the brain responds with an invisible
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etheric emission.” The whole external world is thus an “incessant

inner explosion from us ourselves”; our experience of the world is
“nothing but our own reaction.”2 Materialism is still marginally in-
volved in this attempted explanation, which utilizes matter, even
though demateria lized, so that it cannot be perceived at all, an ex-
planation that, even if it were right, would leave the question un-
resolved precisely within the concept that underlies it—how the
fact of consciousness is to be accounted for or at least interpreted.
The fact, namely, that I am conscious of this inner reaction, even
if not in its actuality nevertheless in its effect, of the invisible ethe-
ric emission with which the brain replies to the impulses coming
from the external world, through which I experience the world as
a b eing-outside-of-me; the fact that I am the one from whom this
reaction emanates as my own and for whom the world out there ex-
ists through this reaction. One sees here again the need to explain
the world materialistically, as well as life and the experience of the
world, which finally compels man to a spiritualization of matter, to
the acceptance of matter that has lost its materiality, as it were—or
has not yet acquired it. For what is this imponderable world-ether
that one assumes for the physical explanation of light and other
phenomena of nature except dematerialized matter? But that must
not in any way encourage a spiritualistic explanation of the world
and life. For this in turn would be constrained to move in the op-
posite direction from materialism: it cannot avoid a materializa-
tion—namely, a substantialization of its principle of explanation,
of the spiritual. Who knows, moreover, how the final problems of
natural science would find their ultimately unexpected solution,
if the scientifically discerning consciousness of man could emerge
from its I-aloneness? But all thinking takes place in it, scientific as
well as philosophical and epistemological, metaphysical speculation
and theological thought. As long as consciousness abides in this
2. Quoted from a review of Hermann Bahr about the essay by Ernst Marcus,
“The Problem of Eccentric Sensation and Its Solution.”
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I -aloneness, all scientific objectivity and absence of presuppositions

are of no avail. We will nevertheless investigate many connections
to still know nothing at the conclusion. That it would also be nec-
essary for science to overcome this I-aloneness the mathematician
and physicist Barthel certainly anticipated when he conceived the
notion of the total plane for the real shape of the earth.
�
In the experience of the higher senses, a spiritualization of the world
is undergone of the primitive initial experience of the world in feel-
ing and touch. In the creative act of experiencing, sound and light
are spiritualized matter, spiritualized experience of touch. Sound is
not without the ear through which it is heard; light is not without
the eye through which it is seen. Sound is just as much a creation of
the ear, of the sense of hearing and the sound receptivity in the ear,
as light is one of the eye, of the sense of sight and the light receptiv-
ity in the eye. Remember the expression of Goethe: if the eye were
not sunlike, how could we see light? Not only do we see light be-
cause the eye itself is sunlike and l ight-creative; we also hear sound
and tone only because the ear itself is sound- and tone-creative. The
“direct affinity of light and the eye,” which Goethe says no one will
deny, corresponds to such an affinity of sound and the ear. And just
as “in the eye a dormant light” dwells, “which is stimulated at the
least provocation from within or from without,” so also in the ear
there dwells a dormant sound and tone, waiting for its stimulation
from within (in the psychic and spiritual life of the musical genius)
or from without. The eye must thank light for its existence, as stat-
ed in Goethe’s Farbenlehre. The ear thanks sound for its existence.
Yet in our physical approach, light without the eye that sees it is not
light, but ether oscillation. Sound without the ear that hears it is not
sound, but merely agitated air, wind. Not only are the words sound
and light related by root, according to a remark by Jacob Grimm,
related in the original phonetic and linguistic reaction of man to the
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experience of sound and light; this experience itself springs from

the same root, from the spirit. There is something spiritual in the
ear just as there is something spiritual of light in the sunlike eye: the
senses are spirit.
A special significance is to be assigned to the fact that there is re-
ally beauty only in the domain of that which is experienced through
the eye and ear (and also through the word), but not through the
senses of touch, taste, and smell. The spheres of the experience of
light and sound are therefore the domain of artistic creation. Only
in them does the aestheticization of sensuousness take place, taking
this word in its narrower sense in reference to art. Aestheticization
has spiritual significance (and there are even many who, when they
talk about a spiritual life, think of it only in an aesthetic way); it is,
so to speak, the spiritualization of sensuousness. It is the continua-
tion and intensification of that act of spiritualization through which
the experiencing of light and sound emerged from the experience
of touch, from this primitive initial experience of the world and the
resistance of matter.
Every experience is, so to speak, preformed [vorgebildet] in the
experiencing subject, the experience of the world already formed in
the sense organs—but life itself imperceptibly yet constantly con-
tinues to create and add on to this pattern inherent in the subject
and his organs, unless it, exhausting its strength, should get bogged
down in matter. A need in the subject underlies every experience,
with which the experience either does or does not conform in its
objectivity and its externality. This preforming of experience in the
subject and his organs of experience become evident above all in the
cases of light and sound. The two experiences are measured in man
according to an aesthetic need. Aesthetic needs are undoubtedly
spiritual needs in which, however, man does not understand him-
self in the authentic spirituality of his essence, and behind which
is concealed the real spiritual neediness of his existence. That man
could make his experience of light and the sun in nature the sym-
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bol for the spiritual must have its basis in that something spiritual
was already situated in this experience in and for itself, something
both more and other than the mere experience of the resistance of
matter. But the experience of sound and especially of musical tone
cannot be made into a symbol, as with the experience of light.
If one penetrates more deeply into the essence of musical intu-
ition (which has, to be sure, come completely under the influence
of the idea—which is contrary to its essence—in European music
since Beethoven, and really beginning with him; and it has finally
even dared to engage in philosophy and metaphysics), one makes
a curious discovery—it puts forward the pretension no less, while
not even being aware of it, that it includes in itself the spiritual life
directly in its reality.3 There is to be sure a misunderstanding here
wherein the musically creative genius does not understand himself,
just as poets do not understand themselves in their poetic dream of
the spirit, and the philosophers in their metaphysically speculative
one. Man obviously also dreams this dream in musical intuition.
Or could the latter perchance have the same origin in the reality
of the spiritual life as the creation of the word? One interpretation,
sustained to be sure more poetically and romantically than by the
seriousness of the knowledge of the realities of the spiritual life,
maintains that language originated from song. That, however, is an
error brought about through the spiritual entanglement in the aes-
thetic, which in the end misleads only too easily to the mixing and
confusing of the aesthetic dimension with the religious (in which
alone man has his true spiritual life). This is always extremely dubi-
ous and must be avoided under all circumstances. Language did not
3. It is to Joseph Hauer’s credit to have drawn attention, in practice with his com-
positions, in theory in his work On the Essence of Musicality (which appeared in the
autumn of 1920, published by W aldheim-Eberle, in Leipzig and Vienna), to the es-
sence of primitive musicality in its characteristic spirituality, which has played virtu-
ally no role in music since Beethoven, and to the significance of the tempered tuning
that is connected to it. By so doing he has actually brought us nearer spiritually to
East Asian man.
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originate in song; the word did not spiritually emerge from musical
intuition. But in song dwells the longing for the word of that which
is t one-creative in man.
Actually, all musical tones seek the human voice in order to be
brought forth by it. Just as one has fully grasped a picture inward-
ly only if one is able to draw it outwardly, it matters not how the
drawing turns out, just so one understands a melody (and that re-
ally is what music is all about), in accordance with its spiritual and
sensuous content only if one is able to sing it. The human voice is
not only an external means of tone presentation, like other sound
bodies [Klangkörper] and musical instruments;4 it also internally
interprets the musical intuition. The instrument is a dead body in
which the soul, the inner life of the musical intuition (and that life is
perhaps the sound color in its pure spirituality), must always be in-
vested into it. It is a process in which the resistance of matter, which
musically is noise, can probably never be completely overcome. It
can, however, be overcome in the singing of the human voice, which
is a sound body that is in and for itself animated and inspired. Yet to
the extent that the musical tone seeks the human voice to become
audible, it very much yearns in secret for the word—but not in or-
der to be enlivened by it, to receive a meaning from it. As regards
music, it is ultimately quite irrelevant what the voice sings (even if
it be “tra-la-la”); what is crucial is that it sings. And an unending de-
votion and s elf-emerging of man certainly lies in singing, just as in
love. But it is a devotion in the sphere of the aesthetic, with its poetic
unreality, in contrast to the self-surrendering and self-emerging of
love in the realm of the reality of the spiritual life, a love that ad-
dresses itself to the concrete Thou in man. One may call music the
“art of inwardness.” And it is this all the more, the deeper it is root-
ed in musical intuition. Music therefore speaks directly to the inner
4. [Ed. Note]: Klangkörper, literally “sound body,” refers to the sound box of a
musical instrument. Here there is a play on words comparing the “dead body” of the
musical instrument with the “sound body” of the human voice.
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man—but to an I -less and Thouless inwardness, which lies beyond

the word. Yet that means “apart from the realities of the spiritual
life.” This directness is completely different from that with which
the word addresses the spiritual in man, the word that turns to the
concrete Thou. Musical inwardness is I-less, just like the mystical
inwardness of the God-experience. In musical intuition man does
not become conscious of the I-aloneness of his existence; nor does
he know anything of the Thou in it. The true inwardness of human
life is not musical inwardness but is rather the inwardness of the
word. Musical inwardness is still at bottom, as with everything aes-
thetic in general, a being outside himself [Aussersichsein] of man. In
the word, man emerges from the I -aloneness of his existence into
a relation to the Thou, and only in this relation does he possess his
real spiritual life.
Music occupies a unique position among the arts. It is on the
one hand the most spiritual art, but on the other hand the most
sensuous—in its original intuition touched and moved not in the
slightest by spirituality in the conception of the idea. It appears
that in music as in hardly any other art, the spiritual and the sen-
suous are aesthetically identical. This musical sensuousness is a
thoroughly inner sensuousness in its earth-disengagement and
world-removedness. Much too little note is taken that, as Joseph
Hauer emphatically points out, the true musical imagination is
never fertilized from the outside through some element of the ex-
perience of the world and nature, nor by the natural tonal charac-
teristics (conditioned by the harmonic series) of the various musical
instruments, but rather everything, even the sound-color, is found
creatively all within itself. Musical sensuousness is, so to speak,
pure sensuousness in and for itself in its spirituality—but every av-
enue to the outside is closed off to it. One must nevertheless assume
that it seeks this avenue; for otherwise musical intuition would
remain an experience of the musical genius that could not be im-
parted to any other person. The outward avenue is the avenue to the
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world and to man. In fact, primitive musicality wants to put itself

entirely in the place of the experience of the world—but not to lend
itself as a means of expression for a worldview. Yet it cannot do that
without at the same time entering into the experience of the world
and emerging from its removedness from the world. That is to say,
it has to seek a tone body through which to become physically au-
dible. But is there a tone body that would permit primal musical in-
tuition to become fully audible in its spirituality? That would be the
human voice (Hauer included the piano and harmonium, of course,
only faute de mieux). But that pushes toward the word.
Musical intuition, however much in its being removed from the
world and the earth, in its unsensuousness and supersensuousness,
may create the impression of having direct heavenly origin and of
issuing directly from the reality of the spiritual life, is and remains
an affair of musical genius—thus of an exceptional man, for every-
one is not a genius. And its effect on other men presupposes in them
a definite aesthetic development and readiness for reception, which
is not everyone’s cup of tea, but which, precisely because it is an aes-
thetic concern, is to be sought not in the realm of spiritual reality,
but rather in the sphere of the life of mental constructs that is pro-
duced through the ear and hearing. The genius is a man in whom
mankind creatively dreams its dream of the spirit. And it is dreamt
also in musical, tone-producing intuition, although in accordance
with an essentially different law than that given in the conception
of the idea. It appears, moreover, that the conception of the idea,5
both in its aesthetic meaning (as artistic beholding and prophetic
presentiment) and in its ethical, is rooted more in the spiritual life
of visual man, as the Greeks primarily were. Musical intuition, how-
ever, is called to play as the dominant role in the spiritual life of au-
ditory man, as are the Mongolians above all (one need only consid-
5. Ideîn = to see; just as with Plato (according to Vorländer’s History of Philoso-

phy) the word idea is “used in numerous passages in connection with the characteri-
zation of perceiving.”
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er what kind of sensitive ear the Chinese language requires with its
manifold vocal shades). Hence it is not incomprehensible that Plato
assigned to music the last place in the hierarchy of the arts and sci-
ences in the Philebus.6
Neither in musical intuition does man emerge from the I-alone-
ness of his existence into a relation to the Thou. But the I can never
become as sharply and distinctly conscious of its aloneness in musi-
cal intuition as in the conception of the idea, when the latter presses
ever more firmly to make itself known in its deep foundation in the
I and in the will, and to be understood in its real meaning, which
lies not in the aesthetic but in the ethical sphere. Nothing is further
from and stranger to the musical than the ethical. The musical is
that sphere of the aesthetic in which a consciousness of the ethical
is eo ipso impossible—precisely because it originally had nothing to
do with the ethical.
6. In Western man, what is spiritual in his existence has become involved in a

relation with the experience of the world. He dreams his dream of the spirit in his
experience of the world; he experiences beauty always in beholding—the German
schauen [to see, behold] and schön [beautiful] are even etymologically related. And
in beholding (theoreîn) he comes to cognitive knowledge (theory), to abstract knowl-
edge (video = I see, behold, and the Gothic witan = to look at something). With the
Mongolian, things appear to be different. His spiritual existence cannot attain a
right relation to the experience of the world; it has not yet become conscious of itself,
and it lives in a state prior to the I, just like musical intuition. He does not experi-
ence beauty in beholding, in this coming-out-of-self of life, but rather in himself and
in the i nterior-listening-to-self. He always dreams his dream of the spirit somehow
apart from the experience of the world—and therefore apparently nearer to the re-
ality of the spiritual life. In his case one cannot at all speak about a worldview in the
real and deep sense of the word. He experiences the world in the secrecy of his mind
always as dream, as something in itself but not like the idealistic philosopher of the
West, who does not experience it as dream, but rather thinks it. This dreamlike expe-
rience of the world is palpable, for example, in Chinese poetry. The surface-like way
of seeing and the absence of perspective in East Asian paintings are also connected
with this. The seven-tone scale of his music permits him to be much more removed
from nature, from the experience of the world, than the t welve-tone scale, which
approaches the natural tonal series, permits us—a situation that Joseph Hauer was
aware of and to which he assigned a special significance. Since there is no original
conception of the idea in the spiritual experience of the Mongolian, he has not ethics
in the strict sense of the word. The Chinese man is courteous and polite, and perhaps
that is the heart of his ethos.
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If the spiritual in the experience of sound and above all in the ex-
perience of tone, which is drawn from the primal musical intuition,
gives the pretension of being the reality of the spiritual life in man
(the pure subjectivity of the spiritual, on account of which it cannot
be utilized as a symbol and sign, which always appear objective, for
something else that is spiritual), then there probably is a very spe-
cial reason for that. The experience of light in nature, above all of
sunlight, is the fulfillment of that experience as it is already formed
in the sunlike eye—the ultimate and so to speak most perfect ful-
fillment. Of course the eye does not tolerate sunlight directly; but in
the light that spreads over the things of the world, over villages and
fields, mountains and forests, perhaps in a beautiful spring evening,
in this light the eye, the spirit in man, comes to rest. The fulfillment
of the experience of light is brought about by nature (as the ultimate
secret meaning of every experience of the world and nature in gen-
eral, so to speak) although not that of the experience of color in its
totality; one may find information about that in Goethe’s Farben-
lehre. The fulfillment of the experience of tone, however, man has to
produce himself, through his own musical imagination. In this he is
quite abandoned by nature, by his experience of the world.
Yet is musical tone, as the creative imagination that is freed from
the earth and removed from the world produces it in the spiritual
ear of the brilliant composer, really the final and perfect fulfillment
of the experience of sound, the fulfillment of that which is already
preformed spiritually in the ear that hears (as need and as the inner
cooperation with the sound experience, without which we would
hear nothing at all), the fulfillment of that for which the ear was
really created, in reference to the spirituality in human existence?
Must not this fulfillment be seen rather in the word and in the fi-
nal and deepest meaning of the word, although the latter can come
via other means, through the eye and touch, which make use of the
mediation of scripture in order to speak to man and the spiritual in
him? This question, however, is not a pneumatological but a meta-
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physical one, and therefore its being raised is already dubious, and
the attempt to answer it even more so. This much is certain and may
be stated without reservation: not through the eye and the experi-
ence of light (howevermuch the spiritual may be in this, or if one
prefers, has been attributed to it by man all along); nor through
the ear and the experience of sound and tone pure and simple, but
rather through the word and the fact that the word reaches his spirit
(through the ear in a sensuous way), that he can be addressed by the
word and has a sense for the word, and that the sense of the word
is revealed to him: man is man only by this means. The word made
him man. He was created through the word.
Hamann once wrote to J. G. Lindner, “Between an idea of our
soul and a sound which is produced by the mouth, is precisely the
distance as between spirit and body, heaven and earth. What kind
of inconceivable bond connects these things which are so removed
from each other?” Perhaps he should have paid less attention to
sound insofar as it is elicited by the mouth than to sound as the ear
perceives it and to the factor of the spiritual that lies in listening.
It is indeed a long way from sound to word, but perhaps no further
than from agitated air to sound. Life follows the path from agitat-
ed air to sound; the spirit, that from sound to the word. Our intel-
lect, of course, is not able to follow either life or the spirit on their
paths—perhaps only because we have assumed a false viewpoint
with our intellect, from which we perceive things and events with a
misleading perspective; yet we cannot do otherwise. And that bond
between sound in its naturalness and the word in its spirituality re-
mains incomprehensible. Yet we realize that it is the spirit that cre-
atively puts the meaning of the word into sound (as the spirit is itself
the sense of the word objectively in us); the spirit perceives and as-
similates the meaning of the word in sound, by which process sound
becomes word. Just as the experience of sound brings the movement
of air in its materiality, in which it has its external stimulation, to
disappearance as experience, so in similar fashion in the experience
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of the word, the external sound, the body of the word disappears,
being completely absorbed in the grasping of the sense of the word.
The experience of sound, insofar as something spiritual actually
dwells in it, encounters the word. In it already, so to speak, is the
constitutional readiness to serve as the embodiment of the word,
to prepare the way in man and his inmost heart for the word in the
spirituality of its origin—which passes through the experience of
the world. In the listening ear, if it is true that the senses are spir-
it, this spiritual something lies hidden—mediating between sound
and word—just as the spiritual something of light abides in the sun-
like eye. Doubtless this is a bit fantastic and is not at all conceived
clearly and distinctly. There must nevertheless be a reason, although
never understood by us, why just the ear became the physiologi-
cal sense for the word (physiological reason, as it were, like reason
is the spiritual ear for the word), why the word found above all in
sound its embodiment and means of manifestation, and only sub-
sequently in written characters grasped by the eye or even through
touch. The soul of man is moved through the word, and the spiritual
dwelling in him is addressed and called forth. But it is above all to
the spoken word, thus to the word that enters man through the ear,
that this power of mental excitation and spiritual arousal belongs. It
is in speech, not in writing, in its being spoken, that the word has its
true spiritual actuality in this world. That word through which men
shall awaken from their dream of the spirit, that word thus through
which the word itself, because it belongs to the reality of the spiritu-
al life, arrived at its own authentic meaning, and through which, in
the divinity of its origin, man, if he absorbs it and lets it bear fruit, is
re-created and reborn to the true life of the spirit—that word was a
spoken word. And Jesus’ divine power gave speech to the mute and
opened the ears of the deaf to the word. Jesus wrote not a line that
he could have left behind as a spiritual legacy for his disciples.
The spiritual moment in the living act of hearing has two direc-
tions that it can go in man. It can move toward the tone-creative
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Sense and Senses
imagination of the musical genius. But then it still remains caught

up in the realm of the aesthetic and thus outside and apart from
the realities of the spiritual life. The other direction is to the word.
That leads from the aesthetic—the dream sphere of the spiritual
life—into the realm of the reality of the spirit. That the experience
of sound in man can take this direction to the word and to the liv-
ing manifestation and embodiment of the word actually elevates it
above the experience of light, which is never able to emerge from
the realm of the aesthetic—no matter how much of the spiritual
may dwell in it and be experienced by man.
�
Is it not perhaps longing that is aroused in the heart of man through
the experience of profound musical beauty even more strongly than
through the experience of light? Longing in general underlies every
experience of beauty, and in longing it fades away. In the obviousness
of its givenness, what is beauty but the manifestation of the spiritual
(interpreted aesthetically, of course), the spirituality in the experience
of the sensuously given world? In the Phaedrus [259E] Plato states, “As
soon as a man beholds the beauty of this world, he is reminded of true
beauty, and his wings begin to grow; then is he fain to lift his wings
and fly upward; yet he has not the power, but inasmuch as he gazes
upward like a bird, and cares nothing for the world beneath, men
charge it upon him that he is possessed.” The Greeks knew well what
beauty is, and perhaps they were the only ones who knew it.
Beauty is the spiritual experienced in the viewing of the world.
Schauen [to behold] and schön [beautiful] are etymologically related
in German, and the latter was formerly used primarily in connec-
tion with the experience of light, according to its original meaning.7
7. Old High German scôni = bright, shining; Old Saxon skôni = shining, light;
English sheen = bright, shining; Old Teutonic skjome = ray. Although not etymolog-
ically related, compare scheinen = to shine, Old High German scînan = to glitter, to
shine, and then schimmern [to glimmer], to which belongs also Gothic skeima = light.
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Sense and Senses
Only the genius, to whom the experience of beauty is not unfamil-

iar, can have a worldview (taking the term in its deepest meaning).
The need for a worldview is in its ultimate basis not merely an in-
tellectual but an aesthetic need. The experience of beauty under-
lies even the driest and most abstract construct of the w orld-image
[Weltbildes] in conceptual terms in the case of the brilliant meta-
physician. All brilliant philosophers have had a primal relation to
art and therefore knew what beauty is. Consider perhaps the con-
ceptually bold and profound Schelling. Strictly speaking, there is
really only a Platonic worldview, and every other one that is not in
principle Platonism is wrongly termed a worldview, being instead a
mere construct of the world [Weltkonstruktion] consisting of dead
concepts.
In the longing underlying the experience of beauty, the spiritu-
ality and the spiritual neediness of human existence are concealed,
and in that yearning they are not brought to consciousness of itself.
No doubt the sense for beauty, the aesthetic need, is nothing oth-
er than an expression and a form of the need for a renewal of life,
which is deeply rooted in man and is rightly called metaphysical.
It is possible to grasp psychologically (but not sufficiently as to ex-
plain) the feeling underlying this need, familiar to every man and
usually misunderstood, that the life one is living is not the right one.
Not only the metaphysician, but also the poet, subsist spiritually on
this feeling in secret, yet whose meaning, insofar as it creates itself
as an aesthetic need, is already misunderstood. The aesthetic ful-
fillment of life and experience is only an apparent fulfillment; it is
dream and not reality. And therefore it just fades away, born of long-
ing, into longing again. Since in the experience of light (and in the
experience of beauty in nature in general, and also in art) the I com-
pletely disappears, so to speak, the spirit in it consequently comes
to rest. The restlessness of the spirit takes its root in the aloneness of
the I. Since the I is directed toward a relation to the Thou by its very
essence, the I struggles against itself and its existence in its seclu-
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sion from the Thou. Yet therein exists the real spiritual neediness of
man—that turns him into a G od-seeker, which he can become con-
scious of only in his religious attitude. Through his aesthetic needs
and their satisfaction, although in them he is also a God-seeking
being, he is nevertheless led down the wrong path, into the dream-
land of the ideal world. Therein lies the neediness: that the spiritual
in man, to exist spiritually, needs a relation to God. The I and the
Thou—which ultimately mean man and God—these realities of the
spiritual life have their objective existence in the word, just as they
have their subjective existence in love. The word is the vehicle of the
relation of the I to the Thou. Man was created through the word.
But the word is from God and is in man the real and ultimate fulfill-
ment of the experience of sound: man hears above all for the sake of
the word.
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Reason and Word
Fragment 7
Reason and Word
Hamann once wrote to Herder, “Even if I were as eloquent as Dem-

osthenes, I would still have to repeat no more than a single word
three times: reason is language, logos. I gnaw at this m arrow-bone
and I will gnaw over it until death. This profundity still remains ob-
scure for me; I still wait for an apocalyptic angel with a key to this
abyss.” May we not seek this key in the fact that the spiritual in man
is oriented toward a relation to the spiritual outside him, the only
possible form of which is the relation of the I to the Thou, of the
speaking to the addressed person, from which language, the logos,
arises as its expression and objectification? What is reason? Let us
for once take the word at its word. For one never goes wrong when
one calls on the profundity of linguistic usage, of the etymology of
the word, for help in his thinking, after the example of many think-
ers. Reason [Vernunft] comes from perceiving [vernehmen] what is
heard and absorbed. Reason is originally and essentially the sense
of the word, which the word in the divinity of its origin placed in
man. Reason is the possibility of being addressed by the word and
the meaning of the word and only subsequently the ability to form
concepts and ideas. It is the special human consciousness that is
constituted by the word, and that is therefore not to be separated
from language; in this consciousness, it is the precondition of the
human application of the intellect. The animal certainly has con-
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Reason and Word
sciousness, and even intellect, but not reason. Reason is the possi-
bility in man of being an addressed person, which takes its root in
the personal character of the spiritual life, which became objective
through the word in it (the subjective possibility is, in a way, the I it-
self). By means of this possibility, man became at the same time the
speaking person. Without word, no reason, and reason is language,
logos.
The logos of the Gospel of John is, in a pneumatological sense,
which is the only possible one here, correctly translated with “word,”
verbum. And this Word is in no way meant merely as a metaphor and
a symbol for the o nly-begotten Son of God, but rather should and
must be understood literally. If one wanted to use “world-creative
reason,” “world-spirit,” “reason in itself ” or other similar expres-
sions for logos, that would be wrong and would moreover include
a summons to lose oneself thoughtlessly in the imaginary king-
dom of philosophical speculation. That would contradict the spirit
of Christianity, which knows nothing of the dreams of metaphys-
ics, since it (and it alone) is concerned with the spiritual realities of
life.
Originally an expression and form of the orientation of the
spiritual in man, of the I, for an eo ipso personal relationship to the
Thou—thus an expression of the relation to God—only when the
I in this relationship isolated itself from the Thou did reason be-
come factual and impersonal, speculative and full of ideas. And
only in the relation with the world of the I isolated from the Thou
did reason develop within itself the ability of forming concepts—
and only subsequently the coercive tendency of substantialization
of thought. In all its philosophical and metaphysical speculation
(and the enthusiastic excesses of its reason), the human spirit per-
sists in the I -aloneness of its existence, which has fallen from God.
But speculative reason seeks God in vain and finally is destroyed in
the conflict with itself in which it gets ever more deeply involved. In
that practical reason, moreover, which according to Kant’s doctrine
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Reason and Word
necessarily postulates the existence of God for ethical reasons, man

has not yet emerged from his I -aloneness, and the God postulated
by it is nothing but the idea of the divine—not God himself, who is
a reality of the spiritual life.
�
There is truly some darkness in every human life; but the darkness
of suffering in the fracturing of life is not the only darkness, nor
is it the blackest. It is there that the will to know shines with the
question “why?” But in vain does the I in the aloneness of knowl-
edge assail the Chinese wall of its existence, against which life frac-
tures—the torch is extinguished, and the darkness is greater than
ever. And right behind it is—God. To be sure, not as answer to the
question. Faith is thought standing still, the resting of thought in
God. But it is man’s nature not to arrive at faith until his life has ac-
tually reached the point of intellect standing still. In God the why of
man falls silent. The real question is the significance of this silenc-
ing. When objectified reason, through speculating about God, re-
sponds to the question “why?” with silence, that is something quite
different than when the same question, born from the suffering of
life, is silenced in God—in order that the true reason of man, his
spiritual ear through which he hears the word of God, may open to
him. When God speaks to man, the “why” falls silent. And he wants
to be heard. But his word is truly not the answer to the speculative
questions of metaphysics about the ultimate basis of things.
�
When speculating metaphysically, man must not turn reason into
an impersonal element in the happenings of the world. That would
be anthropomorphism. But man must also not ascribe reason to
God and seek to establish the rule of that divine reason in the hap-
penings of the world, and especially in human history—for that
would once again be nothing else but anthropomorphism. We know
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Reason and Word
exactly nothing, literally nothing regarding what pertains to God’s

relation to the world. At least we would not know any more, even
if we were the most profound and penetrating metaphysicians and
theologians, than a simple shepherd has to say, for example, while
his intellect labors with difficulty, for whom, as he once learned in
his catechism, the world was created by God. Yet we need know
nothing over and above that, and to desire to know more is specula-
tive arrogance, excess, and a going astray in the idleness of the spir-
itual life, which consumes the soul as rust does iron. It is truly more
a caring about the world than about God, and in this man forgets
what he really ought to be concerned about. Hence we must refrain
from expressing any opinion about the will of God in reference to
the machinery of this world. It would be presumption to say straight
away of one or another event of nature or of history, that is the will
of God—with the exception of the life of Jesus. The strict assertion
of the opposite would also be presumption, however. We know ex-
actly nothing. As Pascal once expressed it in the Pensées:
Si le monde subsistoit pour instruire l’homme de l’existence de Dieu, sa divinité
reluiroit de toutes parts d’une manière incontestable; mais, comme il ne sub-
siste que par Jésus-Christ et pour J ésus-Christ, et pour instruire les hommes et
de leur corruption et de leur rédemption, tout y éclate des preuves de ces deux
véritées.
It can and must be enough for us to know the relation of God to

us, to man, to the individual man who is real in his individual exis-
tence, and in this to really know his will, which is that none be spir-
itually lost. We know that, however, because it has been revealed to
us in the life and word of Jesus.
As the organ of the assimilation of the word, reason is the spir-
itual ear of man, just as the ear is, so to speak, sensuous reason (in
respect to the word). And just as the deafness of the ear is the phys-
iological, so the irrationality of insanity is the spiritual expression
of reticence before the word. But this is the reticence of the I before
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Reason and Word
the Thou. The lunatic actually won’t listen to reason. Insanity is, as
it were, the completion of the I-aloneness, of the Thoulessness of the
I—a practical attempt to absolutize the I, in which the I manifestly
goes under. It is a state of the spirit in which the word that begets
the spiritual life, and love, no longer reaches man—that would be
the divine word itself and the incarnated love of God in Jesus. Thus,
if taub [deaf] and toben [raving]—the raging of man in insanity,
in the inner unfulfilledness of life, against the Chinese wall of in-
dividual existence—if these two words are etymologically related
to each other in German, it has a deep meaning and testifies to the
profoundness of language.
Reason, which lives in the word as the eye lives in light and the
ear in noise and sound, has to do with the living word [lebendiges
Wort]. That intellect, however, which the animal has and of which
even the irrational insane person still often evidences, concerns
only dead words [tote Wörter]. The living word is a word that is a
sentence and is the positing of the spiritual life. The dead word has
stiffened into a conventional concept sign, and as such—as an ob-
ject of agreement—the intellect comprehends and makes use of it.
The intellect sees in words-in-discourse [Worte] only isolated words
[Wörter]; it invents such unconnected words and, finally, an entire
language. It is always inclined to operate with the word as with a
mathematical formula—which is the diametrical opposite of the
word. It is characteristic for the spirit (or rather, the demon of mod-
ern science) that it is so extraordinarily sympathetic to the notion of
the invention of an artificial universal language. It leaves science so
completely cold that no poet could possibly emerge from this still-
born product of the intellect and, carrying even more weight, that
no man could pray. For one who would grow up in and speak such a
language, or at least would have learned it from childhood, would eo
ipso not have learned to pray. Do not expect from it what the apos-
tles of godlessly inspired science and humanitarianism anticipate—
namely, that it will lead to a unification of men encompassing all the
120
Reason and Word
nations of the earth. On the contrary: the universal acceptance of it

would end just like the tower of Babel, with a linguistic and spiritual
confusion in which no one would understand anyone else. There is
indeed a word that is certain to spiritually unite mankind. That is
the word of God, the word that pronounces the commandment to
love. And surely that which is essential in the gospel can be translat-
ed into and understood in all languages. Conversely, the word of the
poet can never be translated perfectly from his language into anoth-
er, because it never returns to its origin in God, as does the religious
word; because in the word of the poet, behind the Chinese wall of
I-aloneness—which separates individual persons just as the Chi-
nese wall of cultures separates peoples—the spirit is only dreamt of.
�
One could contrast the attempt to invent a world language, which is
intended so grimly and seriously but which always strikes one who
sees more deeply into the essence of the word as somewhat comi-
cal, with the dilettantism of the creation of words and language in
onomatopoeia. Has it never really occurred to linguistic research-
ers that a dilettantish and capricious tendency is inherent in the
latter? It was not exactly a propitious idea to seek in onomatopoeia
the beginning of the word and the origin of language. The primitive
relationship between the sound and the mental image expressed in
it can be detected only in the most isolated of cases, and then the
root of the sound that becomes word proves to be something al-
most physiologically conditioned and prescribed in its function of
bestowing meaning. It is still recognizable in isolated words that
the m, t, r, l sounds, and possibly also the w and n, and even the p
and f played an original role in their formation.1 This primitive
1. In this respect the etymology of the German word faul [rotten, foul] is excep-
tionally interesting and instructive: the Germanic root fu in Old Teutonic fuenn =
rotted, I ndo-Germanic pu = to rot, stink, in Greek pijon, Latin pus = matter, pus, Lat-
in puteo = to stink, puter = putrefied; foul, Lithuanian puti = to rot, pulei = matter,
pus. The formation of the p-f sound appears to have originated as a defensive gesture,
121
Reason and Word
relationship was certainly not onomatopoeic, but rather of an in-

terjectional nature. If, however, the onomatopoeic element of our
language turns out to be present throughout newer words, one
must not therefore assume like Hellpach that these kinds of word
formations could have been created only at the very highest level
of linguistic development and only in p oetic-aesthetic intention-
ality. Onomatopoeic words probably have been formed since the
beginning, and new ones will always come into being. But if they
can maintain themselves in the body of language only for a short
time (as those that originated in older language periods have been
lost long ago), then one has to seek the reason for that in the fact
that whatever urged their creation, even in the poetic-aesthetic in-
tention of the poet, does not possess the original w
ord-creating and
therefore word-preserving power. Imitation, except for the practi-
cal and expedient imitation in regard to learning, is always based
on a psychic subjection to an impression. This is the case even if
the imitation pretends to be mockery and ridicule, when it only
masks this succumbing and poses as its opposite. The creative as-
signment of names, however, psychically includes standing above
the impression, a control of one’s experiences, the triumph of spirit
over nature. From that point, what is brought forth is never entire-
ly lost in the life of language. Onomatopoeia presupposes nature,
but the word presupposes the spirit. In the former, man does not
break away from nature; the latter leads him back to his origin in
spirit.
which though not entirely unintelligible physiologically was not very successful in
reaction to the experiences of the sense of smell (see also pfui and the French fidonc).
Yet this also played a role in sexual life, which makes it understandable that, accord-
ing to Kluge, several German dialects formed a noun from the root fu with the mean-
ing cunnus (compare the Old High German invective f udh-hundr and the Modern
High German Hundsfott [scoundrel, skunk] = actually cunnus canis).
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Reason and Word
�
The ultimate meaning of human language in general, and of reason,
its spiritual organ, is that it absorbs the word of God. But apart from
God’s cooperation with reason, that would not be possible. Never-
theless, let man not only be a hearer but also a doer of the word, of
the word of divine love.
123
The Primal Word
Fragment 8
The Primal Word
When man in the beginning of his epoch heard the first word as
word and not only as sound, when he himself spoke his first word,
the light of his inner world dawned in him and the mystery of his
life was revealed to him. But there must have been a moment when
that light darkened again, and that mystery shut itself from him;
and that was the moment of the fall from God. Then man began,
while living at c ross-purposes with the mystery of his life, to dream
his dream of the spirit, from which he shall be awakened to the re-
ality of his spiritual life only by Jesus—qui est venu ôter les figures
pour mettre la vérité, as Pascal expresses it. Yet what comes to light
in this? That humanity does not want to abandon its dream at all;
that humanity continued to dream its dream for two millennia,
even incorporating the incarnation of God into it, with a bad con-
science that again and again pressed toward waking up, until at last,
having become completely godless, no longer even believing in its
dream and concocting empty words and deliberate lies, it actually
awakened from it in a dreadful way—but not to the reality of the
spiritual life.
From the moment of the fall from God onward, man has had to
learn language anew by creating the word for himself—in the dark
recollection of that first word, which was from God and through
which God had created him. Not the conception and contemplation
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The Primal Word
of the idea, as Plato believed, but rather the word—creation was

truly anámnesis by man of his origin in the spirit, in God.
The primal word of language must be a verb and a personal pro-
noun in one. “The levers of all unconnected words,” Jacob Grimm
said in his lecture about the origin of language, “appear to be pro-
nouns and verbs. The pronoun is not merely the representative of
the noun, as its name could make us believe; it is rather the direct
beginning and origin of all nouns.” In the beginning of language
was the “sentence”—the “word” [Wort], the plural of which reads
“Worte.” This is the case just as linguistics affirms the “preexistence
of the sentence before the word” (word [Wort], the plural of which
is Wörter), understanding this preexistence not in a phonetic but a
psychological sense. This primal word thus must have been a sen-
tence, a sentence in the first person that emerged from a cry of pain.
Man is always born with a cry of pain, and a cry of pain was also his
first word after his fall from God.
Taken physically, the word is the air current formed and made
audible by the organs of speech through which it passes, a breath
and a breathing, a blast of wind from the lungs, from the bellows of
the body. No different is the cry of pain; it is still not a word but sim-
ply an interjection, often already articulated in man’s case. The be-
ing that cries out in pain, feeling its life directly or indirectly threat-
ened, emits a sign of life precisely in its crying out, in this intense
thrust of air become audible, through which it attains a certain re-
lief from the menace to its life that it experiences as pain.
The primal word of language was a sentence in the first person.
At the beginning of language—not, however, in the divinity of the
word, which, in being placed in man and creating him and the spir-
ituality of his life, makes language possible at all; rather, in the hu-
manity of its origin and becoming, after the fall of man from God—
at the beginning of language stands the I that emerged from a cry
of pain. In the Yajurveda it is stated (according to Jacob Grimm’s
citation) that the original Being said, “I am I,” and man, when he
125
The Primal Word
was addressed, answered, “I am it.” This I, by becoming word in the

cry of pain and by asserting its own existence in this and bringing it
to utterance, spoke, though not of course in calm recognition, but
in passionate excitement: I am and suffer. This was the meaning of
the primal word.1 In the suffering of his existence that had fallen
from God, man became conscious of himself and hit upon the fact
that he has the word; thus he became a speaking being. The spiritual
in him, the I that becomes conscious of itself, sought the Thou and
came to be in the word.
It is perhaps even yet perceptible in its acoustic material that the
word “I” (ego) is rooted in the cry of pain. Doesn’t something of an
interjection of pain resound in its Sanskrit form aham—in this full
chest-tone with a guttural breath, as Jacob Grimm describes it? This
has in itself a vocalic or h alf-vocalic character (ah, au, aí, oí, vae). The
formation of consonants from the vocalic primal sound (it being un-
important what kind of anatomical basis and physiological process
it is due to) is nothing else but the formation and articulation of the
air current forced from the lungs that moved the vocal chords and
therefore made audible, only through which the phonetic forma-
tion of a word becomes possible. Jacob Grimm doubted that there
could have been word roots produced from a simple vowel. This for-
mation of consonants, however, would not have taken place at all
if man had not come upon the spiritual fact, in his becoming con-
scious of himself, that he has the word. Just like little children, be-
fore they are able to talk, hit upon sounds and syllable formations,
language, as it were, in their preliminary practice (that is, the articu-
lation of an individual sound for its own sake, or even the formation
of consonants from some vocalic sound). They do this certainly on
their own, because the word and the urge for language are placed
in them. Without this spiritual precondition of language in them,
1. Compare also Faulmann’s Etymological Dictionary of the German Language re-

garding the word “I”: for Old High German jehan = to say, this possibly being related
to quec; accordingly, “I” could mean “I am.”
126
The Primal Word
they would learn to speak as little as the animal learns to speak. One
will never observe in the latter that kind of sound-forming exercise,
that playing with the elements of language preparatory to speech.
For there is nothing in the animal kingdom that presses for speech,
as there is in the child; nor may speech be regarded in any way as
an expression of a mere instinct that the individual unconsciously
directs as something expedient for self-preservation and the pres-
ervation of the species, precisely because it is of a spiritual origin,
arising from having the word.
The articulation and formation of consonants presuppose a
conscious clarity that is simply impossible within animal con-
sciousness. In the original state of language, just as now, it is in
fact through nothing else but a conscious act that man becomes a
speaking being, which presupposes the word in him and is found-
ed upon that spiritual act which transforms the interjection into
the word. That is also the view of Humboldt, who doubtless stood
nearer to the essence of language than our modern psycholin-
guists, who steadfastly advocate the theory of evolution. They do
not want to understand that the spirit does not develop in nature
and from nature, but rather breaks through in man—precisely be-
cause it is placed in him. “The articulation of tones,” says Hum-
boldt, “the vast difference between the dumbness of the animal and
human speech, cannot be explained physically. Only the strength
of self-consciousness imposes the sharp division and limitation
of sounds upon corporeal nature, which we call articulation.” But
the self-consciousness of man is identical with his having the word
and thus with the possibility given in the spirituality of his being to
make the statement “I am.” It is therefore also the spiritual basis of
the urge for language, which is inherent in man.
That formation of consonants of the intrinsically vocalic cry of
pain, which was fashioned by the occurrence of the guttural sound
in the burst of air made audible, through which the word “I” was
formed from the interjection of pain, gives the appearance of the
127
The Primal Word
preparation of the air current in the throat for an amplified burst,

for a springing forth, as it were. The guttural sound also appears
called upon to play a similar role in calling and crying out—for in-
stance, “hurrah,” “hello,” “oh,” and the like.
The cry of pain and the word—and thus also the primal word
that emerged from it—have a joint physiology in that they are one
breath: atmós, in Sanskrit átman (breath). This word plays the role
of the I -principle in Indian philosophy. It has long been noted that
the expressions for breath (pneuma, pnein = breathe, respire) in
different languages found their special use as a concept for spirit
life. But spirit and life are above all in the word: breath itself, Old
High German âtum = breath, spirit, wihô âtum = the Holy Spirit; in
Middle High German, it was still termed der heilege âtem [the holy
breath].2
That the cry of pain (an interjection that man truly has in com-
mon with the speechless animal) became word was a deed of the
spiritual in man. The word is something that takes place between
the I and the Thou, between the self-expressing and the addressing
one, and the one addressed. It is that which establishes a relation
between the I and Thou, between the first and second persons of
grammar. The sentence of the primal word in which the I expressed
2. Here also belongs the etymology of the German word Ahnden = punitive re-
venge: Old High German antôn, andôn = to be angry, Middle High German Ande =
insult. For the dialectal Ant Tuen, Tetzner’s Kleines Deutsches Wörterbuch gives as its
meaning “that which I unconsciously possessed and now have lost stirs up my pain
(let one remember the situation and the meaning of the ‘primal word’).” In Old Teu-
tonic, Ande, which etymologically belongs in this series, means breath, spirit, and
the feminine Ond means breath, soul. The I ndo-Germanic root of all these words
is an = to breathe (in Gothic usanan = to exhale, die). The Latin animus and anima
also belong here, meaning breath, soul, life, and the Greek ánemos = wind. The word,
as physical phenomenon, is sound. In physical and physiological respects, hearing
depends on the oscillation of air in the form of sound waves. We always hear “wind”;
sound is wind made audible, and the tone bodies of music are either wind generators
or wind molders. It is certainly remarkable that the words anima and animus, just as
ánemos, lead us to the etymology of the German word Mensch (man), to which they
are remotely related.
128
The Primal Word
itself, and thus itself, asserted the existence of the I through the
spiritual deed of the word and made the I objective and brought it
to consciousness. At the same time, the sentence included the pos-
iting of the relation to the Thou. The primal word was a sentence,
and this sentence was the positing of the spiritual life. But the word
is from God, and only he is able to posit the spiritual life in man.
That consequently means that the “I am” of the primal word did
not signify the self-positing of the I, for it had the Thou, God, for
its presupposition. The fact of personality in the existence of man,
the self-consciousness (which is identical with his having the word,
with his being a speaking and addressable being), is a fact of the
spirit but not of nature and therefore can be explained via natural
science just as little as the essence of the word and language.
One day God will retract the creation of the world, of heaven and
earth, but not the creation of man in the spirituality of his existence,
and not the word. The primal word of language has an eternal sig-
nificance; it expresses an eternal being and life. And the decision
of man in the temporality of his life determines whether or not the
sentence “I am” has, for all eternity, the sense of a cry of pain.
129
Consciousness and Being-Conscious
Fragment 9
Consciousness and Being-
Conscious —Pneuma and Psyche—
Psychology—Insanity
The I is by no means a mere grammatical fiction, as those believe

who imagine that with this interpretation the I and the assertion
of self-consciousness are finally dismissed, and along with that,
the will and its freedom. Yet one thing is right: only through lan-
guage, through the word, which is a fact of the spirit, is the I objec-
tively given. The I is not founded on consciousness [Bewußtsein]
in itself (for then the animal would also have an I, since it also has
consciousness), but rather on the being-conscious [Bewußt-Sein].
This difference and contrast—perceptible in the German language
only through a difference in accentuation—between consciousness
[Bewußtsein], which is always objective—that is, objectively deter-
mined—and the being-conscious [Bewußt-sein], which determines
itself subjectively, comes to expression in the fact that, for a living
being, it can be said that consciousness consists in the having con-
sciousness of something, of any object, but not in having conscious
being (a monstrous word construction, against which the linguistic
predisposition struggles). Consciousness no more developed simply
from being (if the latter now be conceived as material, substance,
energy, or whatever), from the vegetative impetus in the process of
life (who can conceive how this could have happened, accidental-
130
ly or of necessity?) than being-conscious, which implies the I and in

having the word the possibility of language, developed simply from
consciousness. This case is the same with the child; for when the
child is one day able to say “I,” it is not a question of a result of devel-
opment but of the breakthrough of the spirit, for which one waits in
vain (for millions of years!) in connection with the animal.1
Consciousness as such, common to men and animals, is really
life, which includes an experience of the world. One may with jus-
tification raise the question of whether an individual who has con-
sciousness may be thereby nothing but a spectator of the course of
his life and of the events in the world in which his existence appears
to be embedded and entwined; rather, whether the fact of con-
sciousness would not imply (even with the animal, and how much
more so with man?) the summons to take part in it and thus repre-
sent a manifestation of freedom. In any case, moreover, the animal
has like man a special experience in respect to its own kind, which
is clearly contrasted within its experience of the world and does not
become completely merged in that experience. That which is char-
acteristic of the latter is that the animal experiences its own kind
only so long as they live, but no longer when they are dead; for the
animal knows nothing at all of death. But man, who has that knowl-
edge of death that appertains to spirit, still experiences in the dead
his own kind, and sees in them the formerly alive, and honors them.
With man the experience of the world is the sphere of the extension
of consciousness; but his experience with other men, evoked by the
spirit that is not in the animal, is the sphere of the intension of con-
sciousness. In the latter experience man’s spirituality is ethically di-
rected. For in it the I always secretly seeks its Thou, encountering
1. The child, however, though it has the word and therefore can speak and can say
“I,” does not yet live a real spiritual life. That is still hidden in God, so to speak. The
point at which the spirit intervenes in the natural life can be given exactly. It is situat-
ed where the intervention of consciousness in the course of life raises the demand for
a meaning of life and poses the question about it. Nevertheless, even that does not
yet testify to the real and true spiritual life.
131
for the most part, however, and certainly through its own profound
culpability, nothing but an I that secludes itself. And just there the
problems of ethics arise—by the I thereby becoming conscious of
its own “I-aloneness.”
A tendency toward the dissipation and loss of self is operative in
the I as long as it has not found its Thou. The sphere in which the I
dissipates and loses itself is the world. Man’s experience of the world
is actually just as “I-less” as that of the animal; even in the experi-
ence of beauty, in which the experience of the world rises into the
spiritual, and through it, in the case of the genius, into the world-
view. For the I rests there and dreams in spiritual concealment, and
does not come to light, since it does not enter into a relation to the
Thou, which it seeks not at all. But in the I that has found its true
Thou and therein itself, a concentration has taken place that coun-
teracts all self-dissipation and loss, and in which the whole world is
no longer able to harm it.
Man never becomes aware of his sickness of the spirit through
his experience of the world. He is already born with it; for there
is no direct health of the spirit, as Kierkegaard states in one of his
works. Only in his experience of man can he perceive it; because
only then does consciousness enter into himself—in the experience
of the world, the spiritual in him is, so to speak, always outside him.
Only then does his consciousness become being-conscious. He be-
comes conscious of the spiritual in him and therewith begins his
struggle for a spiritual life.
Being-conscious, while actually not consciousness directly, in-
cludes suffering. It is, on the one hand, suffering from the earth-
boundedness of existence (a suffering that the animal certainly
never goes through), and on the other hand, from the experience of
man. But in both cases, it is a question of the suffering of the I in
its I -aloneness, against which the protective measure of an aesthetic
distancing from the cause of suffering is undertaken. This distanc-
ing always works at relieving the soul but is not able to overcome
132
e arth-boundedness and thus to form the relation of man to man in

which the I would no longer suffer. The positing of that aesthetic
distance from suffering that makes the burden of the problemati-
zation of life bearable takes place not only in the spirit of the poet,
but also in that of the philosopher and metaphysician. It actually
makes possible the dream of the spirit, which always signifies the
objectification of the intrinsically subjective problem of life. In aes-
thetic distance, the problematization of life is objectified as tragedy.
But the tragic (just like fate) rests on a flawed perspective, which
ethical circumspection certainly corrects, with its emphasis on the
subjective. Fate and tragedy naturally are not simply the same. Man
can maintain that he has a fate, although he obviously errs in this.
The tragic can only be confirmed objectively. If one would main-
tain it subjectively—namely, from his own life and fate—he would
then not only err, but would be the direct opposite of tragic-comic.
Yet is being-conscious really possible in dreaming—even if it is
the objective dream of the spirit in a genius? Doesn’t complete
being-conscious mean being awake from all dreaming, even from
the dreaming about the spirit? But then there is no longer any aes-
thetic distance from the earth-boundedness of existence, from the
suffering of man, no poetic and no philosophic relief of the soul: the
spirit has become conscious of its being sick in this suffering. Now
man accepts the problem of life in its full gravity and dreadfulness
while renouncing its objectification; he takes up his cross, as the
gospel demands of him. He knows nothing of an aesthetic relief of
his soul and wants nothing of it.
The objectification of the problem of life does not succeed com-
pletely even in the consciousness of the genius, because the prob-
lematization of life lies in its subjectivity. If subjectivity were to ab-
solutely disappear, then not only would the problematization of life
disappear but also life itself. Absolute objectification would be very
much like spirit without life—thus, the death of the spirit. Since the
objectification of the problematization of life never fully succeeds
133
for the genius, truly for his well-being, the possibility therefore con-
tinues to exist for this deep dreamer of the spirit to wake up—not to
total spiritual lostness, but to salvation in the spirit of Christianity.
It is only the Christianity of a genius that has nothing to do with
his brilliance. It neither enhances nor furthers his brilliance. If the
genius does what he must do as a Christian, he suspends objectifica-
tion; then he ceases to be a genius. Then he stands before God, and
there no man is a genius.
It goes entirely without saying that man can attain to a posi-
tive relation to God only through his conception of life [Lebens
auffassung], thus ethically—as he attains this conception in the
inner confrontation of his own existence with the fact of the life
and word of Jesus, a conception that is tested in his experience of
man. But this relation can never be attained aesthetically through
his experience of the world, nor through its spiritualization in the
experience of beauty, and never through his worldview. We must
one day give back to the earth what belongs to the earth, not only
our bodies, but also our life of mental constructs that truly feeds
on nothing but our experience of the world, even though we often
like to believe that primarily through it we can raise ourselves be-
yond the e arth-boundedness of our existence. It is true that in this
man dares to venture into the infinite; but how does he intend to
grasp the infinite with finite means? We do not have the spiritual-
ity of our life in the life of mental constructs; in its sphere we only
dream of the spirit. Death forever extinguishes consciousness of the
world (even if it be that of great genius), but that consciousness of
God which is placed into every man is allowed to come to complete
breakthrough. Man takes nothing else with him from this life over
into eternity than what he has made in this life of the relation of his
I to the Thou, in which his spiritual life consists. Through death it is
fixed for all eternity. The I in man exists in the relation to the Thou
through the word. Heaven and earth will pass away, it is said in the
gospel, but the word will not pass away—the word and love. In the
134
word is love, but also judgment. The Word is the light of our life and
the true light of this world, and in him is the summons to believe.
He who believes in the Word is not judged; but he who does not be-
lieve is already condemned, because he does not believe in the name
of the only begotten Son of God. But this is the judgment, that the
light has come into the world, but man loved the darkness more
than the light (Jn 3:18–19). In love there is mercy and forgiveness for
our sin. But he who passes from this life into eternity without love
and without faith, for him the word becomes eternal condemnation.
The animal (and perhaps the plant), though living semi-con-
sciously in a quasi-state of slumber, has consciousness. But one can-
not assert of it a being-conscious. It is; that means it lives—but not
as conscious. It truly has consciousness and in this an experience
of the world, but not in the strict sense of a consciousness of being.
It can never become conscious of itself and its existence, nor of the
suffering of its life, as is the case with man. It has consciousness but
no language; rather, only “I-less” interjections. Language presup-
poses on the one hand, the I—as the spiritual possibility of being a
speaking person and of grasping the word, of expressing itself, and
of asserting its existence in the sentence “I am.” On the other hand,
language at the same time presupposes the consciousness of the
spiritual in another with regard to his addressability. The animal has
consciousness that includes nothing but an experience of the world;
therefore, it cannot be immortal, as man. This actually implies no I,
and for that reason a relation cannot be established to a conscious-
ness in the other, to the Thou. The awareness of consciousness in
another, which would not be possible at all without being-conscious,
is the precondition for objective thinking—that is, thinking that
has validity for another. It is the basis of all objective cognition, of
scientific and mathematical thinking, which, though it may pass it-
self off as Thouless and I-less, and as objective, still presupposes the
I in man, and of course the Thouless moi of Pascal. One has to say
that science in its I -aloneness sets the objective validity of thinking
135
in the place of love, which creates and expresses the relation of the I
to the Thou, as the bond between man and man.
When one speaks of the I, one can differentiate between the
I that is still psychologically determined and the one that is al-
ready spiritually determined and s elf-determining. The former is
the relatively Thouless I that remains caught up in itself; it is the
I of the individual in his relation to the world, whose being given
to the individual presupposes its being experienced by this I. It is
thus the subject of the experience of the world and the worldview
in man, the I in relation to his existing in the world. But the spir-
itually determined and spiritually self-determining I is the one
that exists in a relationship to something spiritual outside it, to the
Thou; and it is conscious of this relationship wherein its spiritual
self-determination comes to expression. For the right comprehen-
sion of the I, one must always keep in mind the decisive fact that
the Thoulessness of the I, which must always be taken relatively, its
being caught up in itself, its I-aloneness (thus its psychological de-
terminability) is not that which is primary to its essence, only out of
which perhaps the relationship to the Thou could have developed.
Rather, the Thoulessness comes about only in the isolation of the
I from the Thou. One will never understand the essence of man if
one disregards this extremely important fact. To be a man means to
exist, from the very beginning and from the very foundation of his
existence, in relationship to the spirit, to the spirit outside him, and
that is God.
Through that act of closure of the spiritual in man, the I from
the Thou, which can never be comprehended psychologically but
only pneumatologically, the sphere of the psyche first came into
being. In the I -aloneness brought about by it, the spiritual in man
becomes psychologically comprehensible; man becomes the object
of psychology.
Psyche is the relatedness of nature, of the natural to itself (already
presupposing spirituality); Pneuma is the spiritual in man in its re-
136
latedness to God. The former is always on the way to losing itself

in the infinity of the many—which is the world. But the latter finds
itself in the infinity of the One, in God. Pneuma is the eternal in
man and, in the temporality of existence, is to a certain extent the
principle of the anticipation of eternity. What man in the temporal-
ity of life makes out of the spirituality of his existence, deciding for
or against it, becomes fixed for eternity. The pneuma also gives rise
to the consciousness of that which is past, wherein what has gone
before is transformed into the past; it is thus the pneuma that consti-
tutes history. The need of man to become historical, however, which
not only the great statesman but also the geniuses have, can once
again go astray. All remembrance—re-miniscence [Er-innerung]—
is in it. In the psyche, that which is past works unconsciously; for
it there is no real past. That which is past is always present in it and
determines it. Yet the psyche is also the principle of the anticipation
of the future and thus is actually the inner principle of life itself (al-
beit operating unconsciously, as instinct, in the natural life). Every-
thing living is animated. That is truly the mystery of the organic,
a mystery that the mechanistic apprehension of events, in which
alone the intellect feels at home and that comprehends everything
that happens only as an effect of a past event, cannot grasp: that the
future influences the present. Hunger, for example, is something
physiological, the emptiness of the stomach; and to the intellect, the
logic of nature [Physis] always appears as mechanistic consequence
in the course of events. But the anxiety of starving, which is indeed
strange to the animal, is something psychological and presuppos-
es the conscious (not unconscious, as in the instinct) anticipation
of the future. The pure physiological impulse is always psychically
underlined beneath the yet unconscious influence of the past, and
precisely therein lies the logic of the psyche. Psychology, however,
could be called the doctrine of logic that is most subtle, most erro-
neous, and that most fails to recognize reality, the logic of the I in
its aloneness and Th ou-seclusion [Duverschlossenheit]. Nothing is
137
more self-evident than that pneuma stands above psyche, although

few grasp it.
The I that isolates itself from the Thou is not the real and true I,
but is rather, grammatically stated, the casus obliquus of the I, the
Mein—Mir—Mich [mine—to m e—me], the moi of Pascal. It is the
attempt of man to exist godlessly, or in a misunderstanding about the
relation of man to God. It is thus the godless man who becomes the
object of psychology. But the one who has again attained the right
relation to God and has realized and recovered therein the existence
of the I, thus his personality, is psychologically incomprehensible.
The essence of language is also psychologically incomprehensi-
ble. For language is the objective expression for the I in man that
has a relation to the Thou; it is the expression for the I opening-
itself-to-the-Thou, the I that just for that reason is no longer to be
understood psychologically. According to its real essence, language
belongs not to the natural or to the psychical, but to the spiritual
life. Therefore, strictly speaking, psycholinguistics is not possible at
all, and what it claims to be psycholinguistics—with the pretension
of finally accounting for the origin and development of language,
beginning with animal sounds [Lautgebärden] and interjections—
misunderstands the essence of language, because it never quite pen-
etrates it.
�
It was the spirit of Christianity that called attention emphatically to
the I and thus brought about the turning of the objective idealism
of pagan antiquity to the subjective (in so doing, it was not the fault
of Christianity when this subjectively turned idealism once again
thoroughly misunderstood it, or even wanted to push it aside). It
was the spirit of Christianity that extraordinarily deepened roman-
ticism, this self-consciousness of a culture at its end, from which
arises cultural philosophy and finally cultural criticism. It was the
spirit of Christianity from which psychology also takes root, al-
138
though, on the other hand, the spiritual demeanor of psychology

consists in attacking all things Christian and religious in general.
One looks in vain for a real and authentic psychologist among the
Greek thinkers and poets. The psychological critique is more dan-
gerous to idealism than the critique of knowledge, because it lam-
poons the idea in its subjective foundation in the will and the wish.
The psychological critique is thus the antithesis to subjective ideal-
ism, wherein man dreams his dream of the spirit unperturbed and
from which the critique rouses him, but of course not awakening to
the realities of the spiritual life. For psychology never really reaches
the spirit. It also does violence to genius when it wishes to explain
it. For it cannot even explain wherein lies the essence of genius, the
transposing of a psychic and thus subjectively given aspect of life
into the sphere of the objective and aesthetic—a fact of the spiritual
life in man that is misinterpreted by metaphysical speculation and
is projected into the universe. Psychology cannot explain the subli-
mation of the instinctive and emotional drives, as it is called in psy-
choanalytical terms. What gives it the most trouble is not the man
who originally dreams the dream of the spirit, but rather the one
in whom that dream miscarries or the one who takes it over from
the genius to cover and disguise his a ll-too-humanness. Psychology
is always concerned with men who have a bad conscience and who
become sick from the lie of life—not from the pain of life, for that is
really a psychical euphemism for that lie—but sick from the incon-
gruence of life and word. But this is true: since the life and death of
Christ, whose life and word were absolutely one and were the truth,
humanity, and not only Judaism, has had a bad conscience in the
deepest sense of the word, and the untruth of a culture calling itself
Christian provokes a psychological critique as no other culture in
the world.
Psychology investigates the motives of thinking and behavior and
tries to explain the personality of a man from them. But that cannot
be done. For thinking and behavior belong to the sphere of nature;
139
personality is something spiritual. It is that in man that often enough

purports to have motives, in any case hiding or not hiding them ac-
cording to the measure of the inherent power with which person-
ality permeates the essence of a man, his thinking and behavior, an
essence that is given or only purported by him. Motives explain this
thinking and behavior only in particulars but not in man as a whole.
However much one may penetrate and analyze them, there abides
an inscrutable and analytically unsolvable remainder; and precisely
that is the personality. The less the motives are shielded by this per-
sonality, the more man is the object of psychology. Psychology is the
dissolution of an apparent inner life in the void, which that life is. It
sees through appearance. At the true inner life, however, where there
is nothing to see through and to solve, psychology comes to naught.
At the personality it finds its limit. The truly personal motives of love
and reverence that are no longer natural but spiritual and in which
motive and personality are absolutely identical do not exist for psy-
chology, which can express its views about personality neither in rev-
erence nor in love. One can and should do only thus: unpretentiously
and silently step aside from personality.
The strongest cognitive driving force for the psychologist is al-
ways hatred—self-hatred, misanthropy, but also direct hatred of
everything spiritual in general. And the psychologist not only has
the moi of Pascal always in view in connection with another per-
son; he also bears it in himself as the true seducer of psychology.
For that reason, neither love nor reverence is an ultimate motive for
him. When something in man behaves as if it were this or that, the
psychologist always seeks something else behind it. He claims to
see through the psychic arrangement in love and reverence; in the
former, for example, as sexuality, and in the latter as expression of
a defect of self-consciousness and personality. His irreverence has
as a consequence that he is only correct to the extent that his ob-
ject can tolerate psychology. For between the latter and the former
there exists a dynamic relation of the powers of personality, which
140
come into operation in tension and mutual grappling with each oth-
er. Even experimental psychology, which is completely impersonal,
presupposes the willingness of the object to take part in the exper-
iment and in no way comes about entirely independent of personal
assertion. Actually, personality resists every experimental attempt
regardless of how scientific it may be; this is self-evident. No per-
sonal psychology is ever entirely free of a slight tendency toward
médisance [gossip] and therefore is mostly carried on behind the
back of the object. It is not only psychoanalysis that therefore re-
quires a good deal of personal insolence. Moreover, its methods can
only be employed on those who subject themselves slavishly to the
will of the analyst. Yet it can also happen that the analyst becomes
a slave to the will of his object, whose assertion the analyst is nev-
ertheless ultimately dependent on (which has not escaped the alert
eye of an otherwise not very astute psychoanalyst).
The psychologist is irreverent and does not believe in love and
reverence because he does not believe in God. But that does not
have to be, and it is not the case with Kierkegaard, with Dosto-
yevsky, or with Pascal, who was certainly one of the deepest of all
psychologists and was a Christian just like the others. And there-
fore his psychology, the deeper it became absorbed in its object, the
hateful moi, the more it discovered the sphere of the religious life
in man, beyond the merely psychic, the demand intimately placed
in our hearts to have religion, to have a relation to God, and in the
lack or failure of which we end up as the object of psychology in the
deepest sense.
�
The insane person is obviously, but not exclusively, the object of
psychology. Insanity is a phenomenon that is connected with the
spirituality of the human being (inasmuch as only man, not the
spiritless animal, can become insane), and it therefore also admits
of a pneumatological interpretation. No one seriously disputes that
141
in becoming insane, somatic compliance, a brain inferiority and

thus a physical factor, plays a role—which may not be reliably ascer-
tained in all cases, but is surely to be deduced. “Nature,” one could
say, is “being-I-less.” The I does not result from it and its life, for the
I is a fact of the spirit. Yet the power with which the I asserts itself in
its I-aloneness is a natural one. There nature encounters the I. With-
out this encounter, however, the I does not find its salvation in the
spirit, and it is lost in insanity. Insanity, or at least its possibility, is
not a sporadically appearing but a universal human phenomenon, if
not in its physiological then still in its pneumatological condition.
There is perhaps not one human characteristic that does not bear in
itself the seed for it. For character, this countenance in death is not
only the brokenness of life in matter, but above all in the case of
man, the brokenness of his spirit in natural life. Insanity is nothing
other than the latent sickness of the spirit of man that has become
acute and somatically modified, the sickness that takes its root in
the Thoulessness of the I.
If one strips away the superficial layers of man, within which he
appears thoroughly sensible and rational in accordance with the
dictates of the social order, one will discover that beneath these lay-
ers every man thinks and feels a little insane. Ibsen often engaged in
such stripping away, pointing his finger at what poets usually only
intimate with poetic euphemism. Deeper men are conscious of it,
while superficial characters become so utterly absorbed in the social
realities, be it of work or of idleness, that in the end they themselves
believe their demeanor of sensibility and reasonableness, of normal
thinking and acting. For that reason, they fear aloneness—in which
they would have to cease believing in their normality, they would
have to face that even they were not so sensible and rational after all,
but rather a little insane. They do not want to be that, nor shall they
be. But in their flight to the social sphere they miss the real path to
healing. For that path cannot lead outward to where sickness is al-
ways hidden and well camouflaged; it must rather lead inward.
142
Man has to penetrate his latent insanity, as it were—even at the

risk of its outbreak—and work through it, to get it behind him. He
has to reach that point where he really becomes its master. And then
he enters into a relation with God as a spiritual reality. There is no
other deliverance from the entanglement in the unreal, which holds
everyone in thrall, than the inner penetration to this point of mas-
tery. But let this not be forgotten: man remains stuck in the midst of
his secret insanity as long as his relation to God is spiritually based
on the stubbornness of his idea, on the mental construct of the di-
vine. Not only is no man a genius before God; before him no one
can be neurotic or insane, either. One becomes that only when one
does not live spiritually before God, but rather before man, in whom
one is not able to find the Thou of his I, but experiences only the I.
Lurking behind insanity is the failure of the relation between
the I and the Thou. The insane person sinks down into the abyss of
the I; he spiritually perishes at the aloneness of the I. No one be-
comes insane who has not greatly suffered in his experience of man,
precisely because of the failure in the relation of his I to the Thou,
and who over and over again in man has experienced the I of the
other and his own Chinese wall. One must bear in mind that the
inner reality of the I is to be found in the “I want”: the volo underlies
the sum and the cogito. In essence the I wants nothing other than
the relation to the Thou. It wants itself and its existence; yet it ex-
ists only in this relation. It therefore always suffers from the alone-
ness of its isolation from the Thou. Even though the I may find a
certain self-satisfaction in the power of this isolation and may as-
sert itself in time through it, it still secretly suffers in and from this
self-assertion. Absolute isolation, in which the I would no longer
have a relationship to the Thou at all, and by virtue of this would be
standing entirely on its own, would immediately eventuate in the
death of the I. In it man would forfeit language. He could no lon-
ger communicate and come to an understanding with another. He
could no longer say something about himself; in his reticence, he
143
could no longer find the word that would redeem and rescue him.
Precisely here, the profound meaning of the assertion that the I ex-
ists objectively only in the word comes to light. Let one consider
the evil demons of the gospel who rob men of speech. The evil spirit
in man is nothing but the power of the isolation of the I from the
Thou. To ask how it originates leads to idle metaphysical specula-
tion without exorcising it in the concrete case, even if one should
devise the most plausible answer that is possible. In the complete-
ly taciturn man, all love would be paralyzed, and being-conscious
would be nullified. Only consciousness pure and simple would per-
sist, but more in conscious twilight on the way to extinction. When
all love dies in man, perhaps always after having gone down blind
alleys, that is spiritual lostness. The I severs all relationship to the
Thou and attempts to establish its existence entirely on its own. The
moment it succeeds, even though only in time, the I is lost.
What the insane person appeared first of all to be lacking was the
power for the self-assertion of the I in its isolation from the Thou.
And right here we see somatic compliance, the factor of nature,
playing its role. At the same time, we also see insanity being psycho-
logically comprehensible in a specific sense. Nevertheless, suffering
has its spiritual seat much deeper, and at a place that is inaccessible
to psychology. Nothing is more characteristic of the spiritual and
psychic condition of a man going insane than a certain inner help-
lessness. He who, while being supported by the powers of natural
life, is able to assert his I in isolation from the Thou, even though of
course only relatively, is never as inwardly helpless as was the I of
the insane person before he became insane. But in spite of this help-
lessness, it is always the fault of the man himself when the relation
of his I to the Thou miscarries—precisely because he seeks spiritual
help in the wrong place, where it is not to be found. Otto Weininger
is entirely right when he asserts that no one becomes insane without
having desired it. Yet it can also be that a man on the way to mad-
ness suddenly stops in his spiritual lostness and does not move in
144
that direction again. He would have to stop, since the somatic com-
pliance inherent in the process of becoming insane is missing. He
can thus inhibit further progression and can turn away from insan-
ity, but not toward his spiritual deliverance. In his inner helpless-
ness he hits upon a desperate way out. All at once he can take care of
himself—he commits suicide or becomes a criminal.
The lack of spiritual certainty about existence for man finds its
perfect expression in insanity. The spiritual is there, but in a state of
uncertainty that man, so to speak, does not know what to make of
it. Everyone suffers from this lack in some way or other; for there is
no immediate health of the spirit in man. Out of this lack, man at-
tempts to find the spiritual certainty of his existence in the isolation
of the I from the Thou and in the power of this isolation. This pow-
er is certainly not of the spiritual, but of the natural life, and thus
the lack is not really removed but only veiled. Since in this isolation
the I, while always presupposing the Thou, albeit as the I in the oth-
er, has only a relative existential certainty, as this unfolds—as in a
thoughtlessness and inconsiderateness of the I, in which it does not
weigh how far it may go into isolation without entirely losing every
relationship to the Thou—the moment can come when the I actu-
ally no longer has any relation at all to the Thou. In this moment
the I forfeits the final remainder of its relative existential certainty,
and such a man perishes in the aloneness of his I in time, just as the
one who, without a positive relation to the Thou, does not summon
up the power of relative s elf-assertion in isolation. He sinks into the
abyss of the I and becomes insane, assuming the somatic compli-
ance. The former becomes insane because, in the spiritual neediness
of his existence, the ultimate basis of which is always the lack of a
positive relation to the Thou, he relied too much on the powers of
the natural life and finally pushed it too far; the latter because he
had already been abandoned by these powers from the very begin-
ning. The former spiritually perishes because in his spiritual need-
iness he is able to take care of himself only too well; the latter, be-
145
cause he is helpless in it. The one becomes insane because the grace
of God is not able to reach him—which is his own fault; the other,
because he inwardly renounces the grace, refusing the help of God.
The one, being entangled in sin, cannot believe in the compliance
of God—and that is again his own fault. The other does not want to
believe in it, and that is obviously his own fault, as well.
Theodore Haecker (one of the few whose word is worth listening
to in this time of spiritual bankruptcy in Europe) states as one of his
deepest convictions that insanity is not a possible sickness for the
committed Christian, however unfavorable the external physical
and physiological conditions may be—as, for example, in the case
of Pascal. An age that in its scientific character takes offense at this
conviction thereby condemns itself. The religious insanity of the
psychiatrist has nothing to do with religion, least of all with Chris-
tianity. It is the condition of the man whose I has become caught in
the religious life of mental constructs and in its I-aloneness no lon-
ger sees its way. For our life of mental constructs truly helps build
the Chinese wall of the I, which may appear to be, on the other
hand, the very screen onto which we project our conceptions, ideas,
and dreams. Once it has been torn down, there is no longer a place
for dreams and ideas. If there is true faith in God in a man who nev-
er clings anxiously to the mental image of the divine, as does the
pagan—and Christ points the way there—then, let his brain be in-
ferior, let the memory fail, let the orientation to the machinery of
this world, let him lose all contact with society, so that he is of no
use to this life and a useless member of society; all this can befall
that man—yet he will not become insane.
146
The Existence of the I
Fragment 10
The Existence of the I—Idealism—
The Word and Love
One has not asserted anything at all against the existence of the I
when one says that the I is only a word. Yet one must understand it
in this way: it exists—objectively—only in the word. One cannot
do other than assert the objective existence of it by saying, the I is a
word. Its subjective existence also lies in the fact of the word—and
the I, which creates the sphere of the subjective, really exists only in
this sphere; it comes about, namely, by this word “I” being uttered
with the meaning that it has—and every word means something
and has a sense. It lies in that the I expresses itself in this word and
by so doing asserts its existence, directly reduplicating its meaning
and content. Its existence is thus once specifically asserted in the
word “I” in the actuality of its being uttered and then in the word
“per se.” In the beginning of language was the word as sentence;
“I am” was the first sentence, the primal word that underlies all
remaining words [Worten] and sentences as well as unconnected
words [Wörtern] as the precondition of declaration. The crucial el-
ement is the special form of the existential declaration “I am,” and
here the profoundly significant linguistic usage in German helps
us to clarify the facts in question. The I is not—thus far therefore,
the philosophers and critics of knowledge would be right who deny
the existence of the I. But I “am”—that is something entirely dif-
147
ferent. Schopenhauer was already aware of the significance of the

difference between “is” and “am” in the assertion of being. The I is
a word and nothing more. That is not to be disputed. But now, can
a man maintain about himself, “I am a word, my existence is that
of a word”? That would be obvious nonsense. But he can still say,
without needing to fear serious contradiction, I am. The existential
statement that utilizes the verb “is,” being thereby in the third per-
son, asserts an entirely different kind of existence than that of the
sentence “I am.” The s entence-formulation “the I is” signifies noth-
ing at all; the formulation “I am” signifies everything, which can be
meant only in this sentence and word, for it is really the reduplica-
tion of the content. The existence of the I can never be expressed
and asserted without contradiction in the third person, but only
in the first, by the I expressing itself. By the I bringing its existence
to pronunciation, letting it become word, it exists—objectively as
word and in the word. An objection or a doubt cannot possibly be
raised against this existential declaration.
Since the I, a fact of the spiritual life in its being given to man,
is not, neither psychology nor metaphysics can therefore assert
its existence without contradiction. Neither the psychologist, for
whom the I is ultimately only an ancillary word that facilitates and
simplifies the description of psychic conditions and processes, nor
the metaphysician, who now and again finds his joy in speculation
about it, knows what properly to make of the “I am” declaration of
being, which is possible solely from the I. For their purposes, both
need the declaration of being in the third person. Furthermore,
one cannot even say, “Man is an I.” That would be paradoxical. One
ought not to assert, strictly speaking (which is done so often and
so well) that man has an I, according to the way the philosophers
have already objectified the I and used it as a noun. For the I is not
a thing [Sache]—object o f having, but is rather the subject of the
spiritual being in man, which defies all objectification and is itself
this being. Nor is the I a mental image [Vorstellung], and it cannot
148
be grasped in any concept. As word, the I is the most nonsensual

word, so to speak, to which no sensuous mental image could have
corresponded in its original linguistic state, in which one otherwise
imagines all isolated words formerly bound to a s ensuous-concrete
content of consciousness.1 Nor is the I the knowing self, or the
identity of the subject and object, or the return of knowledge into
itself, however beautiful and profound all of that may sound. The I is
none of those things; all that is only the abstract mental image that
a philosopher—namely, Fichte—once made of it. The I is nothing
abstract—in spite of its supersensual meaning as word; it is rather
something radically concrete, obviously not in the realm of the pal-
pably concrete, but of the spiritually concrete. The question regard-
ing what the I is should not by rights be raised at all. It is paradox-
ical, as if the spirit of language, the spirit that created the word “I,”
interjects its veto when one says, the I “is.” The I is not and is thus
also nothing, least of all the fully self-enclosed bipolar ellipse. What
kind of thoughts do German poets and thinkers hit upon in their
philosophical busyness and spiritual idleness!
The I of philosophy does not exist in reality. The I that is involved
in the fact that I am and that I can say that of myself is something
different than the I of the philosophical speculation of yore and
is above all something real—real both in my will to be and in my
declaration—and very concrete. The real man: you are that, I am
that—this most simple of all truths idealism never grasps. The I is
not, but I am—philosophy must someday learn to see that, and then
it may carry on its thoroughly precarious business, if it has not com-
pletely lost the desire. That is no doubt asking a lot of it. Until now
philosophy has brought speculation only to the understanding of
the h alf-truth—namely, that the I is not. About the other half, about
the fact that the individual, definite, concrete man—not some ab-
stract idea of man—can say “I am” of himself, and that radically
1. The same holds true for the Thou.
149
personally, and meant just so, about that philosophy does not both-
er at all. If I nevertheless expect it to one day concern itself with the
fact that I am (in the face of philosophy, this demand sounds almost
like presumption), it will reply to me, with good reason from its own
standpoint, “What philosophy troubles itself about you and your ex-
istence? It has more important things to do; it must finally solve the
problems of the world and of life, of being and of thinking. It would
be interested in you only if you were the ‘absolute’ I.” Philosophy
would say that or something similar. But I might then retort (cer-
tainly not with less reason?), “If that is the case, then what do I care
about philosophy? I have more important things to do; I have to ex-
ist.” That certainly cannot be understood in its ultimate basis other
than religiously, as the imperative to exist in the relation to God.
One really places philosophy into no small predicament when
one asks that it concern itself with the fact that I am. Its refusal of
this request is s elf-defense and nothing else, however little philos-
ophy quite naturally admits it. The sphere of the personal is strange
and unsettling to it. And it would indeed have to become personal
to accept this fact. Not philosophy, but at most it would be the phi-
losopher who could do this; but he must not then speak of philoso-
phy. The ethicist already understands all this very well, and in any
case better than the metaphysician, who audaciously constructs his
worldview.
It would really be making fun of philosophy to demand that it
address the concrete meaning of the sentence “I am,” about which
metaphysics does not have to speculate laboriously in a specific in-
dividual case, upon which it alone depends. However—se moquer de
la philosophie, c’est vraiment philosopher.
The s elf-expressing I, the first person in the s elf-awareness of his
existence, establishes the relation to the addressed person through
the word placed in it, the word that created it. It is a complete-
ly personal relation and is not to be understood otherwise. In this
relationship the I exists, the word comes alive and language lives.
150
The problem of the word, since it is identical with the problem of

self-consciousness, is truly the Archimedean point of philosophy.
That philosophers have up to now touched on the problem of lan-
guage only occasionally, but have never brought it to the center of
philosophizing, meant that they exercised their philosophical in-
stinct for self-preservation. For once it really applies the lever to its
Archimedean point, it eventually unhinges itself, and thus seeming
indifferent to whether philosophy conceives the I as a grammatical
fiction, and thus pronounces the declaration of s elf-consciousness
as being untenable and irrelevant with regard to knowledge or
whether it perceives the I in the reality of its existence in the relation
to the Thou. Here lies therefore the real task of philosophy, in the
solution of which it actually relinquishes itself and its spirit—which
is the best that it can do. To want to save metaphysics (and a philos-
ophy that does not strive for this is not authentic) is an arrogance
of the human spirit and is therefore, according to the word of the
gospel, an abomination before God.
�
All philosophy lives on idealism. In the conception of the idea, how-
ever, there is no humility of the spirit, which can only proceed from
man’s consciousness of the spiritual neediness of his existence, of
that poverty in spirit on account of which man is called blessed in
the gospel. That humility is the expectation of grace and the spiri-
tual readiness in which man entrusts his spiritual life and its salva-
tion to God alone. Idealism renders impossible the consciousness
of spiritual neediness, and it conceals this behind a splendor and
semblance of spiritual riches, which it ultimately borrows from the
natural life. As long as man is still not conscious in the conception
of the idea of its deep subjective foundation in the will, the idea has
an objective existence for him—just as with the Greeks, whose phi-
losophy knew yet nothing of the I, but also nothing of the problem
of the will. He dreams of the spirit and cannot become conscious
151
of his dreaming and of himself in the dreaming. He knows yet

nothing of himself, of the I. Yet to become aware of this is already
an arrogance of the spirit, with which the Greeks were truly not
acquainted.
Man doubtless knows of himself, of the real spirituality of his es-
sence; but he still does not yet see its spiritual neediness, the pres-
ence in the I of an existential need for the relation to the Thou.
And therefore, strictly speaking, he does not even yet know of
himself. He perceives the subjective foundation of the idea, and
suddenly the I becomes the world-creator, the ethical lawgiver. In
the view and thought of the philosopher, the world of our experi-
ence becomes the projection of the I. It is certainly not that. But the
worldview of the metaphysician is nothing other than such a pro-
jection. It is actually nothing other than this: the I sets itself in the
place of God—because it became conscious of itself, but not of its
relation to the Thou, which alone makes its existence possible, be-
cause it perceives its I-aloneness in the moment when it has knowl-
edge of itself, but does not understand it as a deficiency. And thus
in this misunderstood aloneness, the metaphysician turns it into
the absolute I, the ethicist into the intelligible I; and neither the
metaphysician nor the ethicist seems to understand that this ab-
solutizing of the I -aloneness would have to mean nothing less than
the death of the I, the spiritual death of man—if the absolutizing
took place not merely in abstract thought. In a certain sense, a Thou
doubtless corresponds to the I of the ethicist—since the ethical, as
opposed to the aesthetic and metaphysical, is directed toward the
reality of the spiritual life—but only an ideal Thou, inasmuch as the
inner reality of the I in “I will” is ethically determined by a “Thou
shalt.” But the I thinks and speaks this “Thou shalt” to itself in its
aloneness, and it is nothing but the projection of the I. The dream of
the spirit is dreamt again.
The intelligible I (the autonomous legislation in man) is just as
little the real I as is the world-creative I of the metaphysician. It is
152
rather the idea of it, in the one case the ethical idea of the I, in the
other the metaphysical. Obviously, the intelligible I can emerge
from its I-aloneness just as little as the empirical ego that ethicists
set against it. It thus has no relation to the Thou, and just like the
empirical ego, the moi of Pascal, it is not the true I. As mere idea (an
abstract thought, even though it had been made into a principle of
ethical thought) it is even inferior to the moi of Pascal. For the latter
is something thoroughly concrete and real in its seclusion from the
Thou. Moreover, hidden behind this, despite its ethical demeanor,
there is denial of life and devaluation of existence, together with
contempt for mankind and misanthropy, and in many cases even
self-contempt. The ethicist doesn’t know what else to do about this
but to call him to self-respect and respect for man; that means to
enter the ethical claim for the respect of the Chinese wall of the I in
man, the respect of I-aloneness and Th ou-seclusion.
The idea is not the spiritual bond between man and man, be-
tween the I and the Thou, and not that between man and God, but
rather at its best only between the individual and humanity. Yet
humanity itself either exists only in the idea or is, in its reality as
life of the generation, not at all a spiritual but a biological fact, an
aspect of the natural life. The ethical needs a basis of support, not
as a practical demand of a final relative importance that places itself
entirely in the service of the natural life, but as a concrete fact of the
spiritual life of man that looks beyond and surpasses all relativity of
existence. If the ethical does not seek it in the metaphysical sphere
(since it would lose itself thereby in the realm of the unreal, and it
still aims at reality), and not in the religious, in the G od-relation,
it would be forced to rely on the personality of man alone. But that
this still has a spiritual basis—not however in personality itself, but
outside it—philosophy cannot apprehend.
In the aloneness of its existence, the I bears in itself an insoluble
contradiction. It does not know what rightly to make of its eternity
and transcendence of time [Ausserzeitlichkeit]. It seeks its spiritual
153
certainty of existence [Existenzbestimmtheit] and finds it neither in

the aesthetic nor in the ethical as such. It seeks it in the relation to
the idea to emerge from its entanglement in the temporality and the
relativity of existence. But that is possible only if the idea itself be-
comes something eternal, beyond time, absolute. Yet if it becomes
that, it simply abrogates the existence of the I. Idealism is truthfully
the consuming sickness of the spirit, and all the more so in its turn-
ing into the subjective—which no doubt moves toward the reality
of the spiritual life, but does not reach it. And it is of no use at all to
man when he then discovers in himself the possibility of the with-
drawal [Zurücknahme] of the idea. Even that does not preserve him
from his spiritual death. For if the I withdraws the idea into itself
in order to assert its existence, it loses itself again in the relativity
of being [Dasein]. It becomes something temporal, and therein lies
a contradiction to the timelessness of its essence. While dreaming
of the spirit in the conception of the idea, it is passively lost. The
withdrawal of the idea is its active lostness. One thus sees that, in its
I-aloneness and Th
ou-seclusion, it is not to be saved.
�
One can perhaps say that the I exists in that it thinks. Thus cogito,
ergo sum. For that reason, the I comes to be the identity of think-
ing and being: it is, because it thinks; it thinks, because it is; it be-
comes the identity of subject and object: the I is the subject that,
while thinking, is at the same time itself the object. But keep in
mind that the sentence “I am” cannot really be thought wordless-
ly—that is, without any relationship to the Thou, or at least an ideal
relat ionship to the Thou, precisely because the I does not exist out-
side this relationship—even if the I that thinks and expresses its
existence is not clearly conscious, or even conscious at all, of this re-
lationship. If the sentence is really thought without words, one does
not think the sentence itself, but rather the principle of identity in
its pure abstraction and objectlessness. One thinks the thought, as
154
it were, simply without an object to which it may refer; that is, the I
thinks itself in an absolute way, without understanding itself. For it
can truly understand itself only in the relationship to the Thou. Of
course, that is not the real I, but rather the moi of Pascal that has
become abstract, the Mein—Mir—Mich [mine—to me—me], the
I existing in the I-aloneness of a mere thought. It is so because it
thinks only itself; when thinking it refers to itself, and hence turns
into the object.
The real I exists in the relation to the Thou; even the moi of Pas-
cal that is something thoroughly concrete, has, namely in its isola-
tion from the Thou, a negative yet still a relation to the Thou. The
real I exists where and when it moves toward the Thou, not in the
I-aloneness of its self-birthing and s elf-devouring thought, in which
it thinks itself. Rather, it exists subjectively in love, through which
its inner reality of “I will” receives direction and meaning, and of
which the intelligible I of the ethicist knows nothing. But the I does
not exist objectively other than in the word; not in that it thinks, but
in that it expresses itself. The word and love are the true vehicles of
its relation, its movement to the Thou. By thinking (and in think-
ing itself, it dreams of its existence) the I does not emerge from its
I-aloneness. But by expressing itself and coming to be in the word, it
moves out from this aloneness toward the Thou and becomes real in
a profound sense. In the word, the spiritual life of man has become
objective in its subjectivity, objective subjectivity, so to speak, but
without thereby surrendering itself as in mathematical thought. The
I is not only a grammatical fiction and subject of linguistic usage. It
really exists in the word and in love as the reality of the spiritual life
in man.
So the word and love belong together. Man truly draws all power
of knowing from the word and from reason placed in him by it; yet
reason, in the ultimate ground of its being given to man, is of ser-
vice to love, the divine love and the charity demanded by God. The
right word is always one that speaks love, and the power to break
155
through the Chinese wall resides in it. All human misfortune in the
world follows as a consequence of men so rarely knowing how to
speak the right word. If they knew they would be spared the wretch-
edness and misery of war. There is no human suffering that could
not be banished by the right word; and there is no other real com-
fort in every misfortune of this life than that which comes from the
right word. But the loveless word is already a human abuse of the
divine gift of the word. In it the word struggles against its inherent
meaning and spiritually abrogates itself. It gets lost in temporality.
The word that speaks love, however, is eternal. Linguists and psy-
cholinguists always have the loveless and dead word in mind, which
has hardened into a mere c oncept-sign. Is it any wonder that the real
essence of language, which they have never noticed, remains a mys-
tery to them?
In the I-aloneness of his existence—in this sickness unto death
of his spiritual life—and from it, man is redeemed through the word
and love. The love of God, which created man through the word in
which was life, became objective in the word in order to redeem
him—that is, became a palpable historical fact—in the incarnation
of God and in the word of the gospel.
The abstract I of philosophy, which was suspected for a long time
of being only an empty word and a linguistic fiction, was not real-
ly to be rescued. But the concrete I in man, human existence in its
personality, God himself wills to see saved; for that reason he truly
became man in Jesus—and then the I is not supposed to be some-
thing real?
156
The Oblique Case and the Meaning of the M-Sound
Fragment 11
The truth (which philosophy unfortunately knows nothing about,

nor can it, strictly speaking) is that there is no absolute I, but only
one that exists relative to the Thou. Philosophy accordingly once
had very much to say of the I, yet without being clear regarding
by what means man had become aware of it, and characteristical-
ly having nothing at all to say of the Thou. Just as the inner posit-
ing and s elf-assertion of the I in relation to the Thou found a lin-
guistic expression in the word and in language generally, above
all in the creation of the word “I,” so also did the spiritual fact of
its isolation from the Thou. There we see ourselves referred to the
profound meaning of the formation of the oblique case in an ety-
mological and also grammatical respect; and placed before us is the
by-no-means superfluous question regarding what sense the root me
may have in mein—mir—mich [mine—to me—me], the Latin me
mihi, the Greek me, and the Sanskrit ma (in makîna = mein).1
The meaning of the case on the whole becomes accessible from
the case of the personal pronoun, in particular of the first person.
In the nominative a person, and then consequently a thing, receives
1. [Trans. Note]: Ebner’s etymological investigation in this Fragment is at points

so thoroughly tied to German cognates that it will be necessary to carry over a num-
ber of German terms into English. Where appropriate, English equivalents are given
in brackets.
157
the name. The giving of the name in call and address is the voca-
tive, which is the nominalization [Nominalisierung] of the second
person, the substantivization [Substantivierung] of the Thou. In the
genitive, “having” comes above all to expression, as well as the as-
pect of procreating; in the dative, desire is expressed, thus the will
to have and to receive. In the accusative a goal is given to move-
ment, to activity; it denotes, as it were, the real and originating ob-
ject. The ablative and the instrumental and locative of the Sanskrit
do not appear to have a particularly deep meaning, as do the other
cases. All this is of course something thoroughly self-evident in a
purely grammatical respect. But that the grammatical forms here,
as occasionally elsewhere, can still be interpreted in a pneumatolog-
ical sense is certainly noteworthy.
�
The s elf-naming of the I in the primal word that stands at the be-
ginning of language is at the same time the spiritual root of the lin-
guistic function of naming, of the nominalization of experience,
that first emerges after the formation of pronouns and verbs and
gains more and more linguistic meaning. In any case, in the course
of linguistic development the tendency of the substantialization of
thinking, which really only put in a claim for an existential asser-
tion in the third person, has played an e ver-increasing role in the
function of naming, in connection with the genesis of adjectives
and nouns from verbal roots. The s elf-naming of the I included rec-
ognition [Erkennung] as the constitution of self-consciousness. We
therefore even now, while carried and led by the spirit of language
in our whole spiritual life, somehow inwardly still value the naming
of a thing with its own name as the acquisition of knowledge, which
also manifests itself linguistically and etymologically in the primi-
tive affinity of Name, with the Greek gnosis.2 A remarkable spiritual
2. Name, according to Kluge a word of the greatest age and of the widest distribu-
tion, is synonymous with the Sanskrit nâma, the Latin nomen, the Greek ónoma. The
158
power is inherent in the function of naming that allows its creations

to outlive the destinies of nations through the ages. It is nothing
but a hidden reverence for the spirit of language, which deters man,
once a name is created, from arbitrarily setting it aside and putting
another name in its place. So, for example, many mountains, rivers,
and villages in the region of the Alps populated by Germans for a
millennium still carry Slavic names today. Every new event of nam-
ing is a spiritual venture.
�
The personal pronoun of the second person has essentially the sense
of the vocative, particularly in the first case, which is really nothing
but a vocative. But the nominative of the first person, which is orig-
inally self-named, is eo ipso not a vocative. How could the I call to
and address itself? Some men of course carry on conversations with
themselves, in silence or even out loud, and thereby talk to them-
selves; yet they do so always with the fiction of an addressed person,
sometimes consciously, frequently unconsciously, of one at least be-
fore whom one speaks. And doesn’t that already appear to be a slight
symptom of insanity, of the Thou-seclusion of the I? One cannot
moreover give oneself a name without a certain inner violence, one
would almost like to say, in any event without affectation—in many
cases even a directly unconscious or even consciously willed denial
of personality. It lies in the spiritual order of things that everyone
probable I ndo-Germanic root is gnô (English “to know”), with the original mean-
ing being “Erkennung.” Kennen [to know], the Gothic kannjan [uskannjan] = bekannt
machen [to make known], erkennen, meaning to really make somebody know some-
thing [wissen]; kühn [bold] (Old Norse koenn = weise [wise], erfahren [learned]; see
also Konrad, the Greek gegona = tue kund) belongs to konnen = actually able to [ver-
mögen] spiritually, wissen, kennen, verstehen [to understand] (in contrast to mögen,
vermögen, thus similar to the French savoir and pouvoir), Gothic kunnan = erkennen,
A nglo-Saxon cunnian = erforschen [to investigate], versuchen [to attempt], with the
L atin-Greek root gnô in gîgnósko = erkennen, gnôsis, Latin cognoscere = erkennen,
noscere = kennen lernen [get to know], erkennen, notus = bekannt. Obviously kund
[known] also belongs in this series and relationship.
159
receives his name from another. Otherwise, what answer does one
called in the darkness give to the question, “Who are you?” At first
saying “I” or “it is I” as a rule, and not without a certain discomfort
(mitigated to some extent by social convention, in a different situa-
tion—namely, that of introducing oneself), he ends up calling him-
self by his own name. He who, while using his name received from
another, speaks of himself wholly objectively and in the third per-
son without any inner restraint and resistance, either still has no I—
that is, the I has not yet burst forth into his consciousness, as with
small children and savages, or he has already forfeited it, just like
an insane person. The I can become the person who is addressed
and called objectively with a name only in the mutual relation to
the spiritual in the other man, and only from its standpoint, never
from itself. It cannot turn itself into the Thou, either the Thou of the
word or of love. If the I does that, the man is raving: the I has missed
the Thou, as with the insane person, and is at c ross-purposes with it.
But if the man loves himself in the I-aloneness and Th ou-seclusion
of his existence, then he does not turn himself, his I, into the Thou
of love, but only into love’s object. He makes himself an object.
In his lecture on the origin of language, Jacob Grimm alludes to
the striking fact that a half-refusing labial m comes forward in the
oblique case of the pronoun of the first person, whereas the pointing
to t of the addressed person has to remain in the casus rectus and
obliquus. With what justification, one will ask, did Grimm conceive
this m as something that rejects? If we attempt to examine the rea-
son for this perception, the altogether extraordinary and remark-
able depth of the spirit that forms language and the word sudden-
ly opens to us. We see, as it were, how spirit and nature touch one
another in the acoustic material of isolated words [Wörter]. We
must first of all attend to the formation of the ra-sound itself as the
somewhat natural lip and sound-gesture [Lautgebärde] of the “will
to have” [Habenwollen]. The first object of childlike desire is the
mother’s breast, the mother being the child’s object of preference
160
and love, which is of course quite selfish and thoroughly anchored

in the sensuous.3 Do we not have the genesis of the word “mamma”
bodily in view here, literally traced out physiologically when we pic-
ture the lip movement of suckling?4 Mamma, moreover, is a Tatar-
ian word that means “earth.”5 Let us remember, however, that the
mythological imagination of man readily visualizes the earth (gaîa)
as mother and as the maternal principle of nature. Let the word
maya be brought into comparison: in the Greek maîa = real mother
(in addition maieuein = to give birth), and is likewise the daughter
of Atlas and mother of Mercury in conjunction with the Roman
name of an old Italic nature goddess, A ll-Mother, from which the
month of Mai [May] originates, as is well known. The Sanskrit
maya, the elemental female power that proceeded from Brahma in
Indian mythology, signifying deception, deceit, appearance, the
veil of maya in philosophy—the principium individuationis accord-
ing to Schopenhauer—lies over the experience of the world and is
unveiled when man no longer desires, when he renounces his will. It
is here again clearly perceptible that the m is a sound-gesture of de-
sire; so also in the etymology of Mut [courage, heart]: Middle High
German muotc = Neigung [inclination], Wille [volition] beside Sinn
[sense], Gesinnung [disposition], Stimmung [state of mind]; muoten
= verlangen [longing], begehren [to desire], and is a cognate of the
Greek maíomaí = begehren.
3. In the language of children Mama, French maman, Spanish mamá, Latin mám-
ma.
4. Note also the Russian mámka = Amme [nurse] from mamtschitji = nähren
[to nourish], stillen [to breastfeed]; note also Amme itself (Old Norse amma =
Grossmutter [grandmother]), for which according to Kluge, Romance and oth-
er languages alike have expressions independent of German—for example, the
Spanish-Portuguese ama. Further, the Greek mazós = woman’s breast (Amazonen =
having no milk breast), the Latin amare = love, and the Arabian aman = security and
protection(?).
5. “Mammoth” originated from that. The Tungus and Yakuts believe that the
beast burrowed under the earth like a mole (according to Heyse’s dictionary of for-
eign word adoptions).
161
The t is the s ound-gesture of indicating, pointing to something,6

which is once again dictated anatomically and physiologically and
is thus the natural material for the formation of the pronoun of the
second person, of the word in the first case that points to the ad-
dressed person, of the nominative and vocative in one. But in con-
trast to the formation of the case in the first person, this does not
change in the oblique case, not on external linguistic-grammatical
grounds, but rather on internal pneumatological ones, because
with the actual formation and application of the oblique case of the
Thou, the relation of the I, of the speaking to the addressed person,
does not change o r at least does not need to change. The situation
is different in which the I forms the oblique case—not only as the
speaking person, but as the person who speaks of himself and in
this relates to himself.
Not only does the relation of the I to the Thou then undergo a
change, which even though it is not exactly an external change (for
there the situation always remains the same as that of the speaking
to the addressed person), is at least an internal one; but the relation
of the I to itself is also displaced. The I not only expresses itself as in
the nominative (and places itself in a relation to the Thou, as it were
seeking and calling forth the Thou); it rather relates objectively to
itself, while changing this original relation to the Thou, actually re-
jecting the Thou, as Jacob Grimm quite correctly perceived. The I is
now only externally the subject of the word and the statement, but
not primarily the subject of the relationship to the Thou; it is rather
above all the subject of desire. And the etymological and grammat-
ical expression of this is the formation of the oblique case with the
root me. First in the Mich [English me], in the accusative as the goal
of movement and the original and real meaning of the object: the
I simply turns around the inner movement of the sentence, which
6. This is already the case in the children’s word da-da. Take note of zunge
[tongue], cognate with the Latin lingua from dingua; further dáktylos = the
sound-gesture of pointing to, accompanied by a gesture of the hand, of the fingers.
162
really proceeds to the relation to the Thou and refers to itself instead
of to the Thou; it becomes itself the object. Then in the Mir [to or for
me], it is expressed as the will to have (in this relationship to itself);
and finally in the Mein [mine], as the assertion of having and of hav-
ing a right to possess anything at all. It would be wrong to raise the
objection that the original desire in man is grounded in the nature
of his physical organism and hence is not to be explained pneuma-
tologically and criticized ethically as the isolation of the I from the
Thou. This critique is certainly not leveled at the natural desire in it-
self but rather at the fact that the spiritual in man loses itself in this.
In the nominative, the I is inwardly open to the Thou. The Thou
is its true object as the goal of its spiritual agitation, a nd it really ex-
ists only in its movement toward the Thou. The I secludes itself from
the Thou in Mein—Mir—Mich, wherein it becomes itself the object
and goal. And it can relate to itself objectively only in this isolation.
The I no doubt still exists in its movement away from the Thou, yet
less and less the further it moves away, so to speak: it ceases becom-
ing [entwerden]. The formation of the oblique case of the first per-
son is, pneumatologically speaking, the verbalized expression of the
I-aloneness of human existence. The true I does not underlie it, but
rather the hateful moi of Pascal, fallen from God, the I of the will to
power and the object of psychology.
It is certainly not an accident that in the same century to which
Descartes, the theoretical discoverer of the I of philosophy, be-
longed, there also lived the thinker of the Pensées sur la religion.
Like the former, Pascal was a great mathematician who also be-
came aware of the existence of the I but from an entirely different
standpoint than that of objective philosophy and epistemology (the
I had been attended to practically long before, but without calling
it directly by name). Descartes sought to grasp the existence and
reality of the I in the fact of thinking, pure and simple. But it does
not lie in the cogito; rather, in the volo. In this volo, Pascal saw the
I in its reality and thus its concrete existence, though in a state that
163
had to be hateful to him. This moi of Pascal is the human spirit sick
unto death in its aloneness; it is the spiritual in man secretly will-
ing its own sickness and death. It is something concrete and real
in contrast to the abstract I of philosophy, which is made unreal in
the abstraction of thinking, and it must always be attended to, even
though it is not the actual and true I of man.
�
While desiring with awareness, while grasping in the earth-bound-
edness of his existence for the goods of this world and of this earth,
man was compelled to live peacefully and to share with others, as
far as he saw in them his own kind. He was compelled to become
the being that measures and reckons, but that also disputes and cre-
ates law and establishes justice for itself, to become the scientist and
mathematician. Measuring and comparing underlie all mathemati-
cal thinking, and desiring in turn forms the psychological basis of
the latter. The pneumatological root of measuring in its concrete-
ly material meaning and of mathematics with its abstractness and
nonmateriality is the root of desire: the isolation of the I from the
Thou, the rejection of the Thou. The verb to measure [messen] has
manifold meanings: to survey, allot, weigh, assay. The A nglo-Saxon
metan means “to measure, estimate, take for,” and the Gothic mitan
= to measure, whereas mitôn = to consider, reflect on, which corre-
sponds in meaning to the Old High German mezzôn = to moderate
[mässigen]. (Moderation is the restriction of desire and of the out-
burst of anger; if one attaches that to the meaning of the word Mut
[courage]—Middle High German muoten = to desire, just as the
Greek maiomaí, while the Gothic môds = anger—one is then deal-
ing with a contrast reminiscent of the remarkable phenomenon of
the antithetical meaning of primal words.) Etymologically compare
messen [to measure] with the Latin modus = measurement [mass],
mode, manner, and the Greek médomai = to weigh, calculate, médon
= advisor, medímnos = bushel; the Latin modius signifies an old Ro-
164
man standard of measurement, and the Gothic mitaths = measure-

ment standard and peck.
Thus, in addition to the sensuously palpable meaning of measur-
ing with receptacles, there is the nonsensuous meaning of thinking.
A remote kinship between mother, mater (Chinese mu), and mea-
sure is not out of the question; according to Kluge mater may possi-
bly be traced to the I ndo-Germanic root ma, which means to mea-
sure out. Consequently, “mother” may have originally meant “she
who measures and distributes.” Nevertheless, the word appears to
be related to the Greek maia, through which a connection is estab-
lished with mamma and the root me, of course only indirectly, and
the psychological and pneumatological significance of the m-sound
as the gesture of desire is confirmed even more.
The connection of the German stem met = messen, ermessen [to
estimate], bedenken [to consider], with the Latin metiri (Greek
métron) is disputed in Kluge’s dictionary for phonetic reasons. On
the other hand, it is once again established there in the etymology
of the word Mal [mark; time] (Wundmal [stigma] in Middle High
German; the Old High German mal = moment, point, and the
Gothic mel = time) for which is assumed the I ndo-Germanic root
me, which is said to also underlie metiri and métron. But then why
not likewise messen with the stem met? Perhaps linguistics has too
little (or not at all?) seen that the legitimate center of meaning is not
to be sought in the monosyllabic root constructed by it—the philo-
logical opinion about which w ord-component is to be perceived as
the center of meaning—but rather in a definite single sound. It is to
be sought especially in the initial sound, already noticed by Hein-
rich von Stein, who saw in the initial w [v] something enlivening,7
7. Over against esse, the dead being, is Wesen, the living being [Sein]. See more-
over vivus (Greek bios, in addition Quecke [cough-grass], erquicken [to revive], keck
[bold], vir (in wer [who], “Werwolf,” Welt [world]), virtus, Wille [volition], volo, and
various words of “movement.”) This is even the case for via, veho; Woge [wave], Wal-
len [wave], Wind [wind], ventus, winden [to wind], from which wenden = anderswer-
den [to change], werden zu [to turn into], verto = I turn, wende, etc.
165
and also by Otto Weininger in a note in the posthumous work (On

the Last Things) about the frictionless lambda in words [Wörtern],
which according to their meaning are connected with life.8
From this first, thus in a certain sense fundamental and orig-
inal meaning of the m-sound, different meanings may have subse-
quently arisen. For example, the m appears as the s ound-gesture of
a half-suppressed indignation, of a pain more closed in itself; but
also, as the etymology of the word messen [to measure] shows, of
dubiousness and reflectiveness (hm!). It possibly also plays a role,
not coincidentally, in the formation of those words that can be
traced to the root mor = sterben [to die], widespread throughout all
I ndo-Germanic dialects. Mord [murder] originally meant simply
death; the Sanskrit root mr = to die, in mrtám = dead, the Latin mo-
rior = to die, mortuus = dead, mors = death. In death man verstimmt
[grows silent] (Latin mutus = stumm [dumb]; see also the Greek
myein = to close eyes and mouth). The r in the stem mor is likewise
certainly not without meaning. In Sterben [to die] the resistance of
matter gains superiority over life; life is overcome by it. (Old Norse
starf = Arbeit [work], Mühe [toil], Anstrengung [exertion], stjarfe =
Starrkrampf [catalepsy], according to Kluge meaning originally =
sich plagen [to toil]; then see also the Latin torpidus = gefühlos [un-
feeling], torpere = starren [stare]). The r, the phonetic opposite of the
frictionless l, actually appears to be the phonetic symbol for the ex-
perience of this resistance, or even its overcoming. To give only a
few of many possible examples: reiben [to rub], rauh [rough], Runzel
8. Leben [Life] is the overcoming of the resistance of matter; the more Leben
there is, the less is matter felt or experienced (weariness is experienced gravity),
and the more frictionlessly and smoothly is its resistance overcome. See also Schall
[sound], Licht [light] (lux, leukós, lumen), Lust [pleasure] (not impossibly related to
the Sanskrit lôd lud = to move), Liebe [love] (libido, Sanskrit lubh = heftig verlangen
[vehement desire]), lachen [to laugh]. Leib [body] (cognate with Leben, bleiben [to re-
main], the Greek liparéo = I persevere: perseverance in the course of material events,
to be sure only relative perseverance of the organic form in the metabolic process of
life), gleiten [to slide], glatt [smooth] (English glad = froh, Latin glaber = glatt), glacies
= Eis [ice], among other things.
166
[wrinkle], rollen [to roll]; the Greek rhómbos = Kreis [circle], Kreisel
[gyroscope], greifen [to grasp], graben [to dig], and also rinnen [to
run], rennen [to race], rheîn. In Mord, morior, we thus directly see
two sounds side by side in their granting of meaning, cooperating
directly in the meaning of the word, reduplicating the meaning.
Perhaps the significance of the m-sound as such a granter of uni-
form meaning can be recognized in the series of words mollis, mor-
bus, morbidus, Moder [mould], Moos [moss], Moor [bog], mahlen [to
grind] (Latin molo, Greek mýllo), Mumie [mummy] (from the Per-
sian mûm or môm = Wachs [wax], a soft and balmy resin). One could
also add the children’s word mamm, formed once quite accidently
and arbitrarily for the thick dust lying around under the furniture of
the poorly cleaned living room.
�
When we say the word Mensch [man], it is as if we strike a poly-
phonic chord whose individual tones we make clearly audible to
ourselves when we enter into its etymology, which is more interest-
ing and more deeply significant than nearly any other word. While
the I, in its seclusion from the Thou, related to itself, man gave him-
self a name, which he then mythologized in his dream of the spirit
and attributed to the progenitor of the human race (Mannus; see
in the Germania of Tacitus, son of Tuisto = hermaphrodite). The
meaning of the m in the oblique case of the pronoun resonates and
echoes in the formation of the word Mensch and in its meaning as a
thinking being (Sanskrit manus = Mensch, with the root man = to
think). For thinking originates psychologically from desire: in man
the will to take possession of something changed into the will to un-
derstand abstractly. It is in accordance with this that the beginning
of speaking and thinking in the individual development of the child
may well go hand in hand with the reaching for things and that the
right hand corresponds to the left lobe of the brain, as the neural
organ of speech. Thinking, on the one hand, is an expression of the
167
will to have; on the other hand, however, it is an expression of the

will to be. “I think” can mean “I think how I can appropriate this
or that, and if it concerns a menacing danger, how I can avoid it”;
in so doing, this appropriating and keeping something at bay can
assume a very spiritualized form. Yet it can also mean something
essentially different, precisely insofar as thinking does not emerge
merely from desire, but also from the will—a word that has a mean-
ing only in reference to man, not with the animal, as is the case with
desire. Not cogito, ergo sum, but rather “I think, because I still am
‘not,’”—namely, I am not what I want to be—or should be. The con-
ception of the notion [Begriff] takes root in the will to have, the con-
ception of the idea [Idee]9 in the will to be—not only in their aes-
thetic but also in their ethical meaning, the latter resulting from the
inner unbrokenness of the will that is conscious of itself, the former
following from the brokenness and unconsciousness in the wish,
from this will that has become sick and that itself dares and risks
nothing.
A whole series of words belong to the Sanskrit root “man.”
Thus the Lithuanian primanus = vordenken [forethought], while
the Greek ménos = Mut [courage] and maínomaí = ich rase [I rage],
through which the connection of meaning with the word Mut is es-
tablished in both cases. This points emphatically, on the one hand,
to the psychological correlation of thinking with desire, but on the
other hand, it suggests the connection of desire with insanity, with
this completion of the Thoulessness of the I.10 The Gothic môds =
Zorn [anger], which according to Kluge’s dictionary is an “intense
disposition of the mind, vehement agitation” and is the fundamental
concept of the common Germanic stem moda (Greek mênis = Zorn,
with the I ndo-Germanic root me mô). The Greek maíomaí = begeh-
9. A distinction that could not yet be made within the objective idealism of Plato,
because the deep rootedness of the idea in the will is still completely unrecognizable
in it.
10. Rage in the dissatisfaction of desire, rage in the anguish of being; behind it
lurks the spirituality of human existence. Only man, not the animal, goes insane.
168
ren [to desire], surely cognate with Mut, and the word maínomaí are
certainly not so close for merely psychological or random phonet-
ic reasons: does not the negating meaning of the n-sound resonate
here, with its pressing of the teeth against each other, which is so
indicative of anger and impatience? Further, the Greek dysménés
belongs to man, corresponding to the Sanskrit durmanus = feindse-
lig [hostile]. But it is in covetousness that most, though not all, of
the mutual hostility of men takes root, in the rejection [Züruckwei-
sen] of the Thou, in the s elf-assertion of the I in Mein—Mir—Mich.
Morever, the Sanskrit word manas = Geist [spirit], the Latin mens =
Geist, Gesinnung [mind], the Greek root mna in mimnésko = ich erin
nere, [I remind], mahnen [to exhort], and memnemaí = ich erinnere
mich [I remember], the Latin monere = erinnern, mahnen, and mem-
inisse = sich erinnern, gedenken [to remember] (did not the dark re-
membrance of his origin in the spirit, in God, resound in man when
he uttered his first self-created word?); the Gothic manna = Mensch,
Mann, and munan = meinen [to believe], and muns = Gedanke
[thought]; Minne [love] (originally Erinnerung [remembrance],
Gedächtnis [memory], minnen thus really meant to think of some-
thing; in Old Nordic minne = Andenken [memento], Erinnerung,
Gedächtnistrunk [memory-potion]) mahnen (English to moan = kla-
gen!), meinen [to believe]. The distant kinship of the word Mensch
with the Greek ánemos = Hauch [breath], Wind, and the Latin an-
imus = Geist, anima = Seele [soul], establishes again the so very sig-
nificant connection with the primal word, which emerged from the
cry of pain (dialect ant tuen). In the suffering of his being alive, in-
tensified by his knowledge of death, of the necessity of dying, man
reflected on his being human, on the spirituality of his existence;
in his I-aloneness and Thou-seclusion, desiring the world and life in
the face of death and consciousness thereof, and in this desire still
secretly wanting nothing but his higher life, from which he felt him-
self fall, nothing but the return to his origin in the spirit, in God;
in the powerless denial of the earth-boundedness of this existence
169
fallen from God—thus did he create the word Mensch, thus did he
give himself his name.11
11. That this primal experience of the specific human misfortune, which yielded
the psychic and spiritual soil for the genesis of the word Mensch, was experienced
first and deeply by the male; and that it was he who reflected on this experience of
being human and on that point became the thinking, above all the h igher-order
thinking being indeed has a biological basis, even though probably not exclusively,
just as sexuality is really a biological fact of nature, not, however, of the spirit—in
spite of Weininger. (The word Mann itself belongs to the Sanskrit root man and is
related to Mensch, whose Old High German form mannisco really means Männische.)
In a lecture on sex-determination, Paul Kammerer asserts that the biological exper-
iment indicates that the embryo always becomes male when it finds itself up against
the limit of its possibility of development; if things go badly for it, so that it is able to
land at its goal of development only with real difficulty, it reaches it in the male form.
Consequently, the male (Mann) already brings a weakening into life from his period
of germination, which allows him to succumb to detrimental influence more easily
than the woman—as from normal occupational stress such as the extraordinary re-
quirements of the Iron Age. This greater frailty is already in force in the embryonic
period, and it remains true for the male even up to the final age allotted to him, de-
spite all dangers.
170
Mathematical Thought and the I
Fragment 12
Mathematical Thought and the I—
Harmony—Descartes—Word and Mathematical Formula—
Substance and Ethos—The Principle
of Identity—Reality
It is perhaps a far too bold and scarcely justifiable etymological ex-

travagance to search for a special meaning in the phonetic compo-
nents of the word “mathematics” (máthema, máthesis, from mathein,
manthánein = to learn), by which one feels easily seduced after one
has learned to respect the depth of etymology. One perhaps discerns
in the theta in “theme” and “thesis” a reference to the sound-gesture
that designates the Thou, to the setting of the relation to the Thou;
and one may see in the syllable ma, just as in the m of the oblique case
of the pronoun, the expression of the rejection of the Thou, of the se-
clusion from it, and of the a t-least-attempted absolutization of the I,
of its making-itself-independent-from-the-Thou. One thing is certain,
however: all scientific and mathematical thinking, all mathematical
ideas, apperceptions, and concepts have their root in the “I-aloneness”
of human consciousness, likewise including those ideas and concepts
in which thinking believes it understands itself best in its objectivity.
Mathematics is the s elf-positing and absolutization of the I, which is
raised completely into the sphere of theoretical and abstract thinking,
and which obviously fails in the end. Mathematics has transformed
all will and desire of the I, in which it has its inner subjective reali-
171
ty, into a wholly abstract mathematical to comprehend, at the same

time renouncing the factual will to have and even the will to be; it has
thereby actually made the I unreal. As a result, the I has become com-
pletely unrecognizable, though it is always there.
One may well see the perfect geometrical body in the sphere, just
as the Greeks did. Now what is the real center of every ideal sphere?
Nothing other than the I of the apperception of space. The reality
of the I certainly does not lie in the sphere of the spatial, but of the
temporal; the conception of the idea, in which the I in its aloneness
seeks its spiritual certainty of existence, presupposes time as a real
factor of human existence, though the idea tries to pass itself off as
something eternal. For the idea takes its root in the will, and the
will, in its being directed [Gerichtetsein], even in its being directed
to the eternal, is always situated in time.1 Because this inner reality
of the will of the I that lies in time disappears in scientific and math-
ematical thought, the mathematical thesis puts forth the claim to a
timeless, eternal validity. But the eternity of its truth is an abstract
one, not like the eternity of the truth of the divine word, which will
endure even though heaven and earth pass away.
1. This does not, at first, undermine Kant’s attempted solution to the problem
of time. His transcendental aesthetics is only concerned with space abstractly con-
ceived, not concretely lived, and just so with time abstractly conceived, not con-
cretely lived. In this abstract space (of the transcendental philosopher, of mathema-
ticians, and of physicists) all destinations of direction in space are “relative” because
there is not, as in the concretely lived space, an absolute up and down, right and left,
front and behind. Perhaps biology and organic morphology will again thoroughly
examine the meaning of destinations of direction. Nevertheless, the solution of the
problem of time proposed by Kant may actually be the weak side of his transcenden-
tal aesthetics. For this problem does not belong in aesthetics at all, where it is always
misunderstood, but rather in ethics. Yet once again, it can be rightly comprehended
in its ethical nature only by religious man and in the spirit of Christianity. For the
one who believes in the incarnation of God in the life of Jesus—where in that which
is “eternal” and beyond all time of the spiritual life became “historical fact”—for
the one who becomes totally “unphilosophical” in his religiousness and in this faith,
time gains a significance of reality which neither Kant’s transcendental aesthetics
nor the misunderstanding and self-delusion of the mystics in their “experience of
God” are able to take away.
172
The idea becomes palpable in the experience of beauty. Beauty in

art and nature is the idea experienced directly as apperception. But
in every apperception, space is fixed. The experience of beauty, how-
ever, lets man forget the origin of the idea in the will—and thereby
in the temporality of human existence; it permits the I with its inner
reality in the I will to completely disappear, similar to mathemat-
ical thinking, and thus does beauty finally give the appearance of
absolutely timeless apperception. Yet it is still only a dream in which
man knows nothing of reality, even of the spiritual reality of his ex-
istence. It arches like a shining mantle and radiant bridge over the
abyss of the outer and inner brokenness of his life and conceals it.2
The abstract mathematical and physical apperception of space and
the concrete experience of beauty are of course far enough apart
from each other. Yet one of the things they do have in common is
the fact that the I, because it seems to disappear entirely, does not
become conscious of its I-aloneness.
In his sensuous apperception, man experiences the cosmos as a
sphere whose center is himself, or rather the I of his apperception
of space. We cannot do other than see in man the natural and spir-
itual center of the cosmos. Modern science long ago believed itself
to be beyond this obviously anthropocentric viewpoint for the
comprehension of the universe. So it behaves as if it can ignore that
the world, the object of its investigation and knowledge, is the ex-
perience of man; and that consequently, the world being given to
science for investigation presupposes man. Man actually experi-
ences the cosmos only as a hemisphere; and this clearly has its basis
in his vantage point on the earth, in the e arth-boundedness of his
existence, so thoroughly misunderstood by science, which has not
2. Beauty is the idea concretely experienced in beholding. The geometric deter-

mination of space, however, as body or plane, sphere, cube, triangle, circle, etc., is
something abstract; yet a concrete experience may still underlie it in some sense,
which man so to speak forgot long ago and which is recalled only in rare cases, and
then only as a dark foreboding. This then leads to the mystical comprehension of
geometric figures.
173
only an external meaning, interesting even to science, but also an

internal meaning never grasped by it. If man were to be rid of this
earth-boundedness in which nevertheless lies the reality of his exis-
tence and the brokenness of life takes root, and which appertains to
everything that exists as the decisive moment, he would then also be
able to experience in his sensuous worldview the cosmos as a com-
plete sphere, the universe as totality, so to speak. (But doesn’t the
sensuousness of his essence cohere with this earth-boundedness?)
He is never able to do that in reality. The brilliant metaphysician
certainly dreams of this totality in his worldview, which is a spir-
itual rather than sensuous apperception. He does this in the idea
of the cosmos, of the self-enclosed infinity and totality of all being,
which nothing else but the apperception of the ideal sphere secret-
ly underlies. But the philosopher is entangled in indissoluble con-
tradiction when he attempts to devise and imagine this totality. To
imagine this totality means to gain an apperception that no human
consciousness is capable of, albeit only an ideal one; and the ground
of this is none other than the I-aloneness of consciousness. In order
to envisage, without contradiction, the universe in its infinity and
its oneness as cosmos, which embraces all being in its completeness,
consciousness would have to be capable of emerging from its alone-
ness. To that end a second consciousness would be necessary, pre-
cisely as with the mental image of that “total-plane” of the physicist
Barthel.
A totality of being is obviously not thought but lived through in
the experience of beauty—the latter being the inner precondition
for the possession of a worldview in the brilliant metaphysician. It
is of course a merely dreamt totality, beyond and apart from the re-
ality of being. And being engrossed in it, in this deep relief of his
soul amidst the misery of his existence, man cannot recall that he is
only dreaming. Attention should also be drawn here to musical in-
tuition—which shares that special pneumatological circumstance
with the experience of beauty—an intuition in which the spiritu-
174
al life of man, having become objective and being transposed into

the aesthetic, takes a different and opposite direction compared to
what is found in the conception of the idea, which proceeds from
the outer and inner manifoldness of life and experience in order to
comprehend its totality in the idea. Musical intuition, so it at least
appears, goes the opposite direction, taking its departure from an
inner totality to move toward the manifoldness of life and experi-
ence. The idea embraces a manifoldness in its totality; musical in-
tuition bears the totality in itself and unfolds it from within in the
melos created by it. That is as it may be. It is correct, as Goethe said,
that there is no totality in nature; for it is not a fact of nature but of
spirit, a (to be sure only aesthetic) deed of the spirit (determining
itself aesthetically).
�
Since the beauty experienced in beholding has a relationship to
space, it goes without saying that all space relations perceived as
beautiful can be established mathematically and expressed numeri-
cally. This is a discovery that clearly made a considerable impression
on the ancient Greeks, especially in their philosophy and above all
in the Platonic theory of ideas. Without it, this people so thoroughly
gifted aesthetically would probably have never concerned itself with
mathematics at all beyond utmost necessity. Instead, mathematics
stood in such high esteem with their thinkers that Plato considered
it, along with dialectic, as the highest of all arts and sciences. It is
thus a reference back to a specific Greek notion and an attempt at
a scientific renewal and practical application of Platonism, so to
speak, when E. Zederbauer, in his book Harmony in the Cosmos, in
Nature and Art, attempted to prove with numerous examples that
the same harmonic relations “which made their appearance at all
times in the most important works of art” also govern “the endless
multiplicity of the forms of the animal and plant world,” and even
the “arrangement of the stars in the heavens.” According to him
175
these relations are as the proportions of the sides of a triangle and

of the radius of a circle, both of which are given in the “harmonic”
triangle and “harmonic” circle.3 Hence the space-forming event
in nature, in the cosmos, would actually have already been predis-
posed to the experience of beauty as its object; this is nothing else
but the experience of that creative urge of nature for harmony “in its
pure being, in the eternity of its life,” which the artist bears in him-
self as the secret of his creation and which he reveals in his works
(the poet and artist like to hear that). In them the artist imitates na-
ture less than he fulfills it in the sphere of the spiritualized—lifting
out of time and capturing that one moment of full life of a form in
nature, that moment of true, perfect beauty in which life is what it is
in all eternity and outside of which only a becoming and a passing
away befalls it. “To present in fact what exists [Seiende] in nature”
is the highest purpose that art can have. So said Schelling, who af-
ter Plato is certainly the most aesthetic of all philosophers and who
indeed philosophized most deeply about art—and for that very rea-
son his philosophy has not exactly received high honor.
Suppose that it is so. Then the only thing that really challenges
contemplation and philosophizing is that deviation from this math-
ematically represented law of harmony that is still to be explained,
that demands an interpretation, and that in individual cases at least
is to be observed again and again in the forms of nature just as in
works of art. What prohibits the pervasive and complete realization
of the harmonic formation of space?4 Or must we be content that
what is referred to is the development and hope of someday seeing
everything brought into beautiful order in the course of time (and
3. The former is an isosceles rectangular triangle, the latter a circle that circum-
scribes the squares built on the sides of this triangle, whose exterior angle points
project equally far from the bisection of the hypotenuse.
4. This amounts to the same question we are justified in raising in view of the
periodicity of the course of life, of the harmonic completion and formation of con-
cretely experienced time, which is jointly maintained by the researchers Hermann
Swoboda and Wilhelm Fliess but which is never completely validated.
176
that development and the cosmos have time enough)? Yet imagine
the realization of that harmonious world. Everything would then be
in the most beautiful order. Men would not have the slightest rea-
son to philosophize—for if there is philosophizing, it proves once
and for all that something is still not in order. They would constant-
ly behold nothing but beauty in their experience of the world, and
each being an artist or even a genius, they would use the power of
their life for nothing else but the creation of beauty in imperishable
works of art. But here the false conclusion of this way of thinking al-
ready shows itself, which is inevitable when one reasons it to its end,
because it arises from a deep misunderstanding. That is to say, ar-
tistic creation no less than philosophic thought is founded on there
being something not in order.
That harmonious world in which there would be nothing else
but the being [Sein] of this world that creates harmony and beau-
ty, even in the sphere of human life, does not exist in reality. It is
only a dream, the dream of the spirit in its aesthetic unfolding. But
supposing it does exist—would it not in the last analysis be a dream
once again? For the fact that its perfect beauty, which would be its
reality, could be completely grasped and expressed in a mathemat-
ical demonstration, turns into a projection of our inner reality that
beholds it and experiences it as beauty, as it were, into a projection
of the I. For we must bear in mind that everything mathematical,
the geometric determination of space, takes root in the I-aloneness
of consciousness, which is insufficient for the comprehension of the
reality of being and is nothing else but its abstraction. Let it remain
an open question whether, on the other hand, the assurance of the
reality of the world experienced by us resides precisely in this: that
the world is not a cosmos in perfect harmony, even though in the
course of events the beginning and way to such a harmony emerges;
in its s pace-occupying striving for harmony, the world is impeded
by something within its own events (and what could that be other
than the resistance of matter?); just as when we do not see the inner
177
law of beauty fully manifest in a work of art, we assume that some-

thing is not in order, not only in the deeply personal life of the art-
ist, but also in his creation itself, in his objective spiritual life; that,
expressed quite abstractly and rationally scientifically (but in a way
that puts a reversed value on the opposing elements in question),
the qualitative relations in the world cannot be completely reduced
to quantity. The answers to these questions lead inevitably into the
field of metaphysical speculation in which everything aesthetic al-
ways entices us.
Are we now to accept the objective and idealistic conception of
the notion of the Demiurge of the gnostics, or are we to simply per-
ceive in life the element that wrestles with the resistance of matter
in the events of the world? Or by embracing a subjectively turned
idealism—which is no longer aesthetically but in its ultimate basis
ethically directed, though it nevertheless always returns to the aes-
thetic, because in the metaphysical it seeks a mooring for the ethi-
cal, which cannot endure by itself—will we seek that resistance in
the inner reality of the being of the I itself as a fact that is to be eth-
ically inhibited or perhaps even demanded, that calls the I into ac-
tion? All such metaphysical problems (which irritate poets far more
than philosophers, and the latter also when they are poets) direct-
ly or indirectly amount to an absolutizing of our I-aloneness; they
arise in our dreams of the spirit, apart from the reality of our spir-
itual life, truly as a symptom that something is not in order in that
life. Let neither their solution, which no one has yet attained, nor
their insolvability trouble us. We must turn our glance away from
them to that place where our real spiritual life is to be sought w hile
coming to know of our I-aloneness and the earth-boundedness of
our existence in their true meaning, which is so misunderstood
by science and preferably speculated entirely away by a mystically
tinged metaphysics; and never losing sight of them as the reality of
our being in the world, in our life broken in the resistance of matter,
we have to strive toward the unbrokenness of the spiritual life. To
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that end, we need no science and mathematics, no art and philoso-

phy, and no experience of beauty in nature—we need but God, and
the word that comes from God.
�
Both of the discoverers of the I were great mathematicians: Des-
cartes—the father of modern philosophy, one of the cofounders of
modern scientific thought—of the abstractly philosophical I, and
Pascal, discoverer of the I concretely in the reality of will. Both,
however, were attentive to the aloneness of this I and the spiritual
untenability of this state, Pascal in a religious respect and Descartes
in an epistemological context—an aspect of his philosophy until
now almost completely ignored and not considered in its extraordi-
nary implications. Descartes held to be true only that which could
be perceived “clearly and distinctly”—clair et distinct—like mathe-
matical propositions; hence for him, geometry and arithmetic are
“models of methodological knowledge,” “examples for the funda-
mental science of knowledge.” He doubted that human thinking
in its objectivity could really understand itself best in these math-
ematical representations and concepts; he called into question the
implicit nature of a mathematical proposition as its evidence of
truth; he encountered the I-aloneness of human consciousness, of
mathematical thinking, and saw its inadequacy for knowledge of
the truth. For he, as Theodore Haecker said of him, had first to be
certain of God in order to have insight into the truth of a proposi-
tion of geometry. “Car, cela même que j’ai tantôt pris pour une règle, à
savior que les choses que nous concevons très clairement et très distinc-
tement sont toutes vraies, n’est assuré qu’à cause que Dieu est ou existe,”
as it states in Discours de la méthode. God is the presupposition of all
truth and of all knowledge of the truth, even in mathematical think-
ing. But the true spiritual life of man does not reside in the latter in
its pure theoretical meaning.
A science that is not spiritually supported in man by this pro-
179
found and, properly speaking, no longer scientific or philosoph-

ic consciousness of Descartes of God as the presupposition of all
knowledge of the truth has nothing but the e arth-boundedness of
human existence in view; and while of course completely misunder-
standing it, such a science takes offense at man’s glance up to heaven
and comes necessarily to relativism, for which there is no truth at
all, and in some sense to pragmatism. Strictly speaking, science is
actually godless, even if it engages in theology. It knows nothing of
God and is neither for nor against him and cannot change its spots.
But if man can be made godless by it, if man uses it for a demonstra-
tion against God, as in the course of the nineteenth century, then
one must reproach man—not science.
The situation is different with philosophy, which really seeks God
from the very beginning (without, however, being able to find him
in his reality) and in that way differs from science. It always strives
toward metaphysics—because it seeks God; yet this is at the same
time its urge to become science, to convert metaphysics into science
just like physics. And the more scientific philosophy becomes, the
more godless it becomes, so as to finally come to a demonstration
against God just as science—yet like the latter, not through its own
fault but that of man. It stands even nearer to this danger than sci-
ence. For there is no philosophy in itself like there is science in it-
self, but only the philosophy of a definite philosopher, which then
to be sure can be adopted by an entire generation and made its own.
Therefore, when science becomes a demonstration against God, not
through its own but man’s fault, man no longer simply accepts it as
such (as it knows nothing of God and is neither for nor against him),
but he has made it his philosophy, the substitution for religion, his
philosophy in opposition to God, which then contradicts the hid-
den meaning of all philosophy, which is the search for God.
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The I-aloneness of all scientific and mathematical thinking has as

consequence the word standing in diametrical opposition to the
mathematical formula. To become mathematics is the goal of all
natural science, of all knowledge about the events in the external
world, as is commonly known; final physical knowledge will per-
haps one day be expressed in a mathematical formula that can no
longer be uttered in words. Yet knowledge of the events in the inter-
nal world must become word and be tested by word, and it is quite
impossible that one could ever express it in a mathematical formula.
It is not our spiritual life, but our sensuous experience, which can-
not totally become word. The more spirit enters into our sensuous
life, the nearer it draws to the word. And that life is to become word
for its expiation.
The mathematical formula stands in the same relationship to
that which is given objectively for our thinking as substance, as the
word does to that which exists subjectively in the sense of a per-
sonality. We see once again the tendency toward substantialization
playing its inevitable role in objective thinking, and we only appear
to avoid its influence when we, overcoming the materialism of the
apprehension of nature, resolve to learn how to think energetically.
It was indeed this tendency that pushed language to naming, to the
nominalization of experience; yet it strives beyond language and
the word p recisely toward mathematical formula. Every relation-
ship of things existing as a mode of substance has to be capable of
being brought mutually to the latter; only then do we actually have
a scientific knowledge of it. But the word in the actuality of its be-
ing spoken directly expresses the relationship of that which exists
as personality.
No man will ever come to the deranged thought of turning love
into a mathematical formula. The situation is, to be sure, entirely
different with the law of sexual attraction, although it is dubious
whether even that can actually ever be formulated mathematically.
It was attempted by Otto Weininger. No mathematical proof can be
181
adduced for love and for the sense of the word. And no other proof,
either. In its ultimate consequence, mathematical knowledge is the
abrogation of the word and the death of love. We thus see mathe-
matical knowledge ultimately amount to a condition of the human
spirit that is actually nothing else but insanity: the I-aloneness and
the Thou-seclusion of the spirit carried to the extreme. The mathe-
matical formula in its abstractness relates to the material as its con-
crete content. Yet substance carried to its logical conclusion is the
absolutely I-less reality, whose subjective expression would be the
insanity of the ultimate mathematical knowledge. By the latter in
its wordlessness and lovelessness making complete the seclusion of
the I before the Thou, it would abrogate the I itself—as well as con-
sciousness itself.
Neither philosophy nor science can get over the fact that con-
sciousness is a subjective fact that is bound to individual existence.5
Objectivity enters into individual existence in the tendency for sub-
stantialization. What moreover stands behind this tendency and
all objectivity of thinking? Nothing else but the suffering from life,
from the brokenness of life, thus something very subjective, and
the will to be rid of suffering, a will to not take up one’s cross. Yet
if consciousness becomes more and more objective, and finally so
completely objective that there is no longer a vestige of subjectivity,
and thus totally wordless, the word, however, is the precondition for
the intensification of consciousness into being-conscious, and this is
the only basis for objective thinking—then, what is left? Absolutely
nothing.
The word, one could say, is the evidence of the objective concret-
ization of the spiritual life—just as beauty in its being experienced
is the evidence of the idea, of the dream of the spirit. The spiritual
5. As is generally known, objective thinking does not know what to do with indi-
vidual existence; it never has the concrete individual case in view, rather the abstract
type or law, which the phenomenon of the individual case obeys. But just in that
does the problem lie, and also the problem of the thinker himself.
182
life in its reality belongs to the sphere of the subjective. The math-
ematical formula in its abstractness is the objective expression for
the Thoulessness of the objectively knowing I. In the formula this I
(something certainly subjective and, understood spiritually as the
moi of Pascal, concrete in the reality of its will) has objectified itself
and has vanished into abstraction. In knowledge that is mathemat-
ically formulated, the knowing I has vanished just as in the experi-
ence of beauty the beholding I vanished; in the wordlessness of this
knowledge it has ceased to exist. The highest mathematics, which
could now be expressed only in formulas that are impossible to put
into words, would be the reason for man become irrational. For
there is reason only in the relationship to the word, through which
it is placed in man. And how is there still to be reason, if there were
not even this relationship as a longing for language?
With its final renunciation of the word, mathematics is not rea-
son; rather, reason lies in the longing of thought to become word
and in the ineradicable need of man to express in words a math-
ematically formulated knowledge. But in the verbalization of
thought, the I—in the I -aloneness—seeks its Thou. Reason seeks
the word, thus its origin—for it was created by the word. It seeks
God, for the word is from God. Therein lies the inner life of thought:
it seeks God, and it does so by becoming word. A thought that be-
comes totally formulated mathematically no longer seeks God in
its wordlessness. It has also forfeited its life and is now dead. Who
would want to find God—the truth and the life—in a mathematical
formula? Rather, he is to be found in the word. In the former, rea-
son renounces the relationship to the word that constitutes it, the I
renounces its relation to the Thou through which it exists, and man
renounces God who created him. Pure mathematics is reason that
in the last analysis abandons itself.
In addition to the mathematical self-sufficiency of thoughts that
in the end renounce the word, there is still an aesthetic self-suffi-
ciency of thoughts that in their verbalization, being fundamentally
183
intended as an absolute thinking in language, have the I-aloneness

of thinking for a principle (they thus rob the word of its deeper
and real meaning, no matter how much honor they may accord it),
and they therefore in no way refer to a Thou, not even rightly to an
ideal Thou. They have not nor do they want to have the power in
themselves to produce new ideas in man, to awaken spiritual life
in this sense. There is nothing in them, in their formal perfection,
that would push toward further growth, life, and thought; they can
and want only to be admired. Even more than the words of the poet,
they permit the spiritual in the word to appear totally as an aesthet-
ic value, and they thus misunderstand the word in its true meaning
for the spiritual life—while they still believe they understand and
comprehend the word and language in the latter’s interior and most
hidden life.
�
If we bear in mind how the tendency of substantialization requires
the mathematical formulation of knowledge as ultimate conse-
quence, Spinoza immediately occurs to us, this most pronounced
type of philosopher who thinks substantially, and the geometric
demonstration of his Ethics, which is by no means an accident or
philosophic caprice, but is founded deeply in the inclination of his
entire thinking. With good reason may one take offense at a sub-
stantialistic ethics that is geometrically demonstrated—truly a
contradictio in adiecto. For ethical knowledge is directly opposed
in its orientation to the tendency of substantialization. The latter
would necessarily entail the abrogation of consciousness in its fi-
nal yet never reached goal—because in the orientation given by
it the I-aloneness of consciousness would be completed in abso-
lute Thoulessness and godlessness; whereas ethical knowledge is
the completion of the specifically human consciousness (thus of
being-conscious), the realization of consciousness of human exis-
tence. But without God, since man needs him for his spiritual life
184
(while God does not need man, which the mystics appear not at all
to understand), ethical knowledge would not be what it should be:
knowledge of I-aloneness as sin, the s elf-knowledge of the I in the
knowledge of sin.
This is not possible without faith, without the personal decision
of man for or against the spirituality of his existence, and that means
precisely for or against God; for only in relation to him does man
have his true spiritual life. The ethical pushes man toward the spir-
itual reality of his life, for it speaks to the I and rouses this I to the
reality of its will. Only it is not thereby capable of placing the I into
a relation to the Thou. The ethical cannot exist separately; it must
either be anchored in the metaphysical—that means however, in
the dream of the spirit: since the metaphysical nevertheless strives
toward spiritual reality, it abrogates this dream; the idea becomes
conscious of its subjective origin in the I, in the will, and with that is
given in its ethical significance the possibility of its withdrawal and
the inducement to spiritual self-destruction; or the ethical is rooted
immovably in the religious in God’s relation to man, and then cer-
tainly that taking back of the idea is eo ipso impossible.
The tendency of substantialization leads man to unconscious-
ness; the ethical orientation of thought leads to consciousness of
himself. Yet the latter does not actually reach its goal without being
anchored in the religious: a godless ethics and a godless moral sense
[Ethos] are certainly conceivable, but in the end still spiritually un-
tenable. The one whose thinking yields to the tendency of substan-
tialization forgets himself and the reality of his life in the world; he
forgets the suffering of his existence. In all his thoughts he leaves
himself out (and this reality of life and this suffering)—he becomes
completely objective and considers it an honor. There is something
he does not take note of precisely because he forgets himself: be-
hind all his thoughts and his objectivity still lurks his suffering from
life itself, the deepest suffering of man from his natural I-aloneness.
The more objective he becomes, the more alone becomes his I, the
185
greater becomes his suffering from this isolation. But he hardly no-
tices it and knows nothing of it.6
In his ethical thinking, however, man never forgets himself and
the reality of his life in the world, his ethical, inner brokenness of
life. He has that continuously in view; he does not omit himself in
his thinking and does not look away from himself, all the less, the
more ethically he thinks—which can also drive him to despair. An
objective ethics is obviously possible, but not an objective ethical
mode of thinking. That is always subjective, and it must be. But its
goal, man’s consciousness of himself, is reached only when it has its
steadfast foothold in the relation to God—only through which this
consciousness of man in the earth-boundedness of his existence
becomes possible. The coming of the knowledge of sin—the fruit
of the ethical consciousness of the self before God—and the aware-
ness of suffering as from God, who is love, constitutes the highest
6. Even the theologian, precisely because he pursues theology as a seemingly ob-

jective science, can spiritually fall victim to the tendency of substantialization. His
thinking does indeed have its point of departure in the faith in the personality of the
existence of God, but then again, forgetting this starting point, he nonchalantly op-
erates with the concept of divine substance—as if the personality and the substan-
tiality of existing, the former a fact of the spiritual life not to be further explained
in its reality, the latter nothing but a necessity of thought, could ever be reconciled
by thinking. By rights such a theologian would consequently have to strive to put
God and his relation to man and to the world, his incarnation in the life of Jesus and
the redemption of man through it, into a mathematical formula in which not only
his own existence but also that of God, would then be abolished. Naturally, that
wouldn’t do either in one case or in the other case. But this will do: the theologian,
while speculating about God, at the same time forgets himself in his spiritual pre-
dicament—if he would remember it, he would find no time at all for speculation. He
does not reflect on the fact that the question is not in the least that of the objective
knowledge of the existence of God (not to mention the firmly substantiated impos-
sibility of this knowledge), which substantializes God and thereby also divests him
of personality; rather, it is solely a matter of he himself having, in the personality
of his existence, a personal relation to God (in which eo ipso one does not specu-
late), just as God has a personal relation to him. In the eagerness of his speculating
and demonstrating, which truly is not pleasing to God, the theologian who has be-
come entirely objective does not ponder the truth uttered by Pascal, that “ces sortes
de preuves ne peuvent nous conduire qu’à une connoissance spéculative de Dieu: et ne le
connoître que de cette c’est ne pas le connôitre.”
186
human self-consciousness, which alone is really being-conscious.

Not to recognize sin, not to reflect that all suffering from the bro-
kenness of life comes from God, and to put the blame on fate toward
which one feels defenseless and helpless, is the flight of the human
spirit from the predicament of sin and from the burden of suffering,
the flight into the unconscious, into unconsciousness.
The crucially important opposition of the substantialist to the
ethical is expressed in that, whereas the former aims at the mathe-
matical formula, the latter seeks the word—the word of God, which
utters the commandment of love. But it is not forever compelled to
find the word. Christ, in whom the word in the divinity of its origin
“became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth” (Jn 1:14),
Christ is the end of the “law” (Rom 10:4): every law desires Christ.
The law desires the reality of the spiritual life, which it cannot it-
self bring forth in man; it desires its fulfillment and its end in divine
love. Idealism seeks its own end and finds it in Christ and in the
fulfillment of his commandment of love. Since man has the reality
of his spiritual life in love, he no longer needs the law, the idea; he
lives by grace. Whoever loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law, as
the Letter to the Romans says. Whoever loves his neighbor is not
merely a hearer of the word, in which we have the grace and truth
of our life, but also its doer. And that is the ultimate meaning of the
word in the humanity of its origin: in it the commandment of love
has been expressed by Jesus; it has assimilated the word in the di-
vinity of its origin—it has become the word of love. What does a
mathematical formula know of the word and of love? What does it
know of the mystery of our life, of God?
�
The basis of all logical connections of ideas and of mathematical
thinking is the principle of identity. Fichte made the significant dis-
covery that behind this principle lies hidden nothing else but the
self-assertion, and what is more, he wrongly believed, s elf-positing,
187
of the I. A = A means I am I—from there, while speculating reso-

lutely, he ventured to deduce the whole world from this thesis,
which he could just as well have spared himself. Just like the prin-
ciple of identity—which is I-aloneness become objective and ab-
stract and wherein the I, made unrecognizable in its abstractness,
attempts to assert its existence in its seclusion before the Thou and
to find its spiritual certainty of existence in its self-positing and to
exist in its aloneness without God—and the remaining principal
presuppositions of our logical thinking are at bottom nothing else
but abstract objectification, made theoretically viable and valid, of
the subjective facts of our spiritual life, which in their turn once
again have their basis in that the word is given to man—but certain-
ly not for the purpose of speculating and theorizing. So, for exam-
ple, the principle of sufficient cause is nothing else but the abstract
consciousness of man of his origin in God, which in its darkness
does not understand itself. All principles of logic and thinking must
ultimately be related to God, just as Theodor Haecker said of the
principle of identity: it has its full meaning only in God, in its eter-
nal identity with itself.
The meaning of the primal sentence was “I am,” but not “I am I”;
it signified the I setting itself into a relationship to the Thou, but not
its self-positing in the principle of identity—in the absolutizing of
the seclusion from the Thou. This principle of identity is the presup-
position not only of logical thinking, but also of man’s ethical con-
sciousness of himself. Yet the direct result of the ethically intended
“I am I” has to be the consciousness that I should be someone fun-
damentally different than who I am. In other words, the ethically
understood principle of identity brings forth directly in man the
principle of contradiction. With that we stand before the possibility
of ethical despair, which, if the ethical is not religiously anchored,
leads to s elf-deception or to the withdrawal of the idea. But if it is
religiously anchored it leads to the gravest sin, to despair of divine
grace—in both cases the same result: absolute spiritual lostness.
188
And here lies the final and deepest, the most difficult to understand
and fulfill demand of the spiritual life: that man not concern him-
self about the salvation of his soul. To be concerned about it still
belongs to the sphere of the psychological in which the I relates to
itself and has not yet emerged from its I -aloneness; it does not yet
belong to the sphere of the pneumatological in which it has attained
its true and proper relation to the Thou. Who, knowing the serious-
ness of the spiritual life, is not terrified at the thought that the reli-
gious concern of man about himself and the salvation of his soul,
the only one about which he is to be worried in this life, and that
the anxiety of being spiritually lost, without which the spiritual life
in man is not able to begin, may in the final analysis be reprehen-
sible? For all that, this anxiety and worry are only a starting point
and a transitional stage, in no case to be avoided, but in which man
must not remain spiritually stuck. We must after all bear in mind
the words in the gospel: “Whoever wants to save his life, will lose it;
but whoever loses his life for my sake and for the sake of the Gospel
will save it.” Whoever loves his soul will lose it—and that one still
loves it who is worried about its salvation; and whoever hates his
soul in this world preserves it for eternal life. Let man learn to know
the sin of his existence, a nd he will never perceive it without horror
at himself and without anxiety about himself. But let his worry be
about his relation with God and the realization of that relation in
faith and in love. Trusting in grace unshakably, let him place the sal-
vation of his soul into the hand of him who is the spiritual ground of
his existence.
Otto Weininger maintained that the principle of identity could
neither be proved (because its proof already presupposes it) nor re-
futed but had to be believed. Further, logic fundamentally could not
do without faith—which itself does not need logic—and one could
believe only in himself; consequently, faith in logic is fundamental-
ly faith in oneself. Nevertheless, we stand before a fundamental mis-
understanding of faith—not surprising for a philosopher. An ab-
189
stract principle can never be the object and content of faith, just as a
product of the imagination can never be. The imagination, Hamann
said in his Socratic memoirs, even if it were a horse of the sun-god
and had the wings of dawn, cannot be the author of faith. Only a
concrete spiritual being can ever be believed. That is of course the
“I” as the direct declaration of personality in the sentence “I am.”
It is not the truth of a thought that must be believed, but rather the
truth of the declaration of the thought, the truth in the word. If I am
to believe the truest meaning of the word, it presupposes the being
addressed, not however the self-expression, of the spiritual in me;
it presupposes that the I in me is made into the Thou of the word
or of love by something spiritual outside of me. The fact that I am,
I do not believe; further, I myself do not believe in the truth of the
declaration of the sentence “I am”; rather the situation is this: the
thought, one could also say the consciousness and declaration, of “I
am,” is made possible only through the belief in the Thou, but not
through the faith of the I in itself. The existence of the I—and the
I exists in s elf-consciousness and in the word “I am”—presupposes
the existence of the Thou and the relationship to this existence in
faith. Weininger did not recognize that, because he grasped the es-
sence of the true I just as little as all other philosophers. No man can
believe in himself, and if he does, if the I in its I -aloneness believes
in itself, it is truly perversity of the spiritual life. Faith, one could
also say, is the personal decision for the Thou. Man can believe in
himself just as little as he can turn himself into the object of faith, as
the I can make itself the Thou of the word or of love without there-
by losing itself. In the word and in love we have the true object and
content of faith: that is God—and above all his incarnation, the lo-
gos made flesh.
The faith that Weininger has in mind is a faith without love,
which to be sure is ultimately nothing else but faith in oneself. His
ethical idealism necessarily fails to recognize the I -aloneness of hu-
man existence in its true significance—as sin—and therefore also
190
misjudges man’s need for redemption and his will to be redeemed

as cowardice. It is after all the inevitable consequence of idealism
to convert the I -aloneness into the principle of the spiritual life in
itself, the I into the absolute first person, just as Weininger did. It ac-
tually means nothing else but the deification of the I, its identifica-
tion with God. To deify the I and to identify it with God, however,
signifies the I that knows nothing of the Thou. And thus Weininger
says at the end of chapter 7 of Sex and Character: man is alone in the
cosmos, in an eternal vast aloneness. And later on: nothing is placed
over him, the alone one, the all-one. Only religious consciousness,
which Weininger lacked as he conceived and wrote his work, makes
it possible to grasp wholly the gruesome blaspheming madness of
such a thought, in the ice-coldness of which all spiritual life lies in
rigor mortis. Arriving at the consequences (at which Weininger was
skilled like few others), this idealism could understand love only as
the erotic illusion of man that belongs to the sphere of the aesthet-
ic and that is therefore ethically repudiated by it. This idealism was
thus bound to misunderstand love in its essence as fact and demand
of the spiritual life, and it did not see its indissoluble connection
with faith; it did not bear in mind the word of the apostle, that it
is love that makes faith effective. Faith, which “comes from what is
heard, and what is heard comes by the word of Christ” (Rom 10:17),
by the word of God that utters the commandment of love, faith pre-
pares the way in man for the reality of the spiritual life; but love is it-
self this reality.7 Faith is nothing without love. But the love that man
7. Faith and love belong together pneumatologically, but they are also etymo-
logically related as individual words. Glauben [faith], just as the related erlauben [to
allow] and loben [to praise], has the basic meaning gutheissen [to approve of]: Glau-
ben, the personal decision for God, is the Gutheissung [approval] and Bejahung [affir-
mation] of the spirituality of life (ja from the Old High German jehan = to confess,
admit, but usually, to say, express; it is also at the root of the word Beichte [confes-
sion], from the Old High German bijehan = to confess, admit fundamentally. Faith
is a declaration of oneself for God, for the truth, and for the spirituality of life). The
word Liebe [love] has the Sanskrit root lubh = intense desire: with faith in God, man
desires the spirituality of his life; in love he gives the will the direction to his true
191
experiences, be it from man, be it the divine love that revealed itself

in the making flesh of the logos, can never be known; it must be be-
lieved. And as with the love that we encounter, so also with every
word we hear spoken, there is something that must be believed in.
For the meaning of a word cannot be proven; speaking, seizing the
word as it is said, always signifies an operation of personality that
just as much belongs to the essence of faith as it actually requires
faith. And precisely in that the word includes the demand of faith
lies its ultimate meaning—to which we so rarely pay attention, be-
cause we are usually only aware of that in the word which can and
must be understood, which alone concerns the intellect.
The truth of the concretely spoken word in which personality
engages calls for faith from another as the personal decision for it;
the truth of the abstractly conceived thesis of science, mathemat-
ics, or metaphysics, in the formation of which personality is left out
of account, calls for the impersonal decision of the intellect. Not
only is the error of thinking, whose objective rectification is pos-
sible, the antithesis of the truth, but also the lie of the declaration,
which can be uncovered in many cases but in some cases not at all
and under no circumstances. Not only the intellect, but also reason
belong to the lie; for otherwise the animal could also lie. The lie also
signifies an engagement of the personality, but at the same time its
inner abandonment. It is possible only because man has the word
and through the word reason and personality. And it is the most
serious misuse of the word, the nullification and annihilation of its
meaning. In the word is the truth, but also the lie. If linguistics one
day should uncover the etymological relationship of “logos” and
telos, which is God. To love man in the right sense would mean as much as, hum-
bling himself before him, to admit one’s sin, thus to confess, to affirm God in him.
Moreover, that it is possible not to approve of the spirituality of one’s life, not to love
and even directly to hate it, was once disclosed with blunt clarity by a materialist
who in a natural science publication had the presumption to remark that if he were
sure of an immortal soul, he would strive for nothing else but to destroy it—remark-
ably thoughtless, as if that were at all possible.
192
“lie” (as example for the contradictory sense of the primal word), it
would only confirm through the profoundness of language what has
already been established pneumatologically. Every other kind of lie
in addition to the declaration, thus the lie of emotion, of demeanor,
of the entire attitude of a man in life, takes root in the word and its
misuse, and like the word, a lie is an unsuccessful attempt to assert
the personality. It is, as is the case with the pathological liar, a symp-
tom of a defect of personality, or it makes the personality defective
itself.
The word, which demands faith and commands love, mediates
between man and God—not between God and the world as the lo-
gos of Philo, or at least we know nothing of it. We need faith—and
the word—as the absolution of the spirit in the I -aloneness and the
earth-boundedness of our existence, which is so misunderstood
by us in our aloneness; we need faith in our constant readiness to
seclude ourselves from the Thou; we need it to realize our sin. For
this realization is not possible without faith in God and his incarna-
tion. The word has liberated us from the prison of our I -aloneness
and raised us from death to life; love shatters the Chinese wall. Per-
haps if man could make his love perfect through faith in the divini-
ty of the Thou also in man, faith would then be superfluous, for the
sin of man’s existence would have disappeared and there would be
nothing more worth knowing to learn. (And the word would have
returned to its origin in God, there being no more commandment
to love, but rather love itself.) Is there, however, such a man?
Without God the I sinks into the abyss of nothingness, for it
exists only in the relation to him, to the Thou. And without the re-
lationship to the word—which in its liveliness and actuality is the
objectification of this relation, of man to God as well as God to man
w ithout the relationship to the logos—mathematical knowledge
and the reason that becomes wordless in a mathematical formula
also sink into the abyss of nothingness.
193
�
If what was once written in a natural science journal essay is true,
it follows as a consequence of the theory of heat (the second princi-
ple of which ostensibly, which is then extremely characteristic and
significant, can no longer be completely expressed in words, but
only in a mathematical formula), that the world exists against all
physical and mathematical probability. The outcome of this theory,
which certainly strikes one as strange and which ultimately cannot
grasp the fact that the world exists and hence also why it exists, sim-
ply leaves out the I in this I-aloneness of scientific and mathemati-
cal thought carried to the extreme, which leads to an, even though
only apparent, I-lessness. That is to say, it disregards the fact that the
world is not given to us other than in our experience of the world,
which is also the case for natural science investigation and explana-
tion. Yet because it leaves out the I, the subjective factor of our expe-
rience of the world, even this finally slips away from it: it is unable to
grasp its own existence.
The assumption that the world exists has been made—contrary
to all physical and mathematical probability. Its existence must be
assumed not because it is to be proven, to be accounted for physical-
ly and mathematically, but precisely because it exists. And the world
exists because there is consciousness of which it is the object and
content; it exists because there is the I whose experience it is—in
spite of all physical and mathematical improbability of its existence.
The I -aloneness of consciousness, however, besides being in the
end encouraged by such consequences of the theory of heat, threat-
ens to dissolve the existence of the world into a dream. In the final
analysis only the I exists that dreams the world and conceives the
mathematical formula. It is the I that thinks and posits itself in the
principle of identity: in the equation x = x, to which the mathemat-
ical formulation of the completely scientized events of the world is
finally reduced, and in its unknown, the I no longer recognizes it-
194
self. But this I simply does not exist, since it has already disappeared
while conceiving the final mathematical formula in its absolute
wordlessness; it has done away with itself—and also with the world.
And thus we stand before absolute nothingness. Mathematics in its
final perfection is reason become objectless, consciousness become
entirely objective without object. It is reason that has become not
only I-less but also godless. The I, as the subject of experience who
furnishes the object to mathematical thinking and makes possible
the relationship to reality, does not actually exist outside of its re-
lationship to the Thou. It was created by the word for this relation-
ship. The world exists as experience that presupposes the I. Yet the I
exists because God created it. The world exists as creation of God to
some extent indirectly beyond the I, beyond man.
That the I is intended for a relation to the Thou grants us the
security that the world we experience is real, is not merely dreamt
and a projection of the I. This security does not reside in the con-
cretely experienced resistance of matter, nor in a difficult to attain
logical proof, which even if successful would be understood only by
a few. Since this intention for a relation to the Thou includes the de-
mand of faith, it is entirely correct when Pascal asserts that no one
has certainty outside of faith, whether he is awake or asleep: “Qui
sait, si cette autre moitié de la vie où nous pensons veiller n’est pas un
autre sommeil un peu différent du premier, dont nous éveillons quand
nous pensons dormir?” But in no way do we believe directly in the
reality of that world for which there can never be an object and con-
tent of faith; it is our positive relation to the Thou, it is our faith in
God that mediates the reality of the world for us. The I exists only
in its relationship to the Thou; this Thou, however, is in the world
of the I’s experience. And God, who is the true Thou of the I in man,
himself became man and entered into this world in order to give
us in his incarnation, in the becoming flesh of the logos, the object
and content of faith. The more the I secludes itself from the Thou in
the natural I-aloneness of human existence, the more it de-real-izes
195
[entwirklicht] the world into its own projection (even though this
does not take place in the praxis of its inner life, for that would lead
directly to insanity, but only in the theory of metaphysical specula-
tion); yet so much more the I also d e-real-izes itself, while still not
being aware of this fact. While entangled in the realities of its exter-
nal existence in the world and being blind to the spiritual realities of
life, by losing itself in this world, the I d e-real-izes itself and with it
this world as well, even though unnoticed by it. Whether the I in its
aloneness keeps itself in view and d e-real-izes the world consciously,
or conversely, whether it envisages only the world practically or the-
oretically and thereby unconsciously itself ceases to be real, amount
to one and the same thing: to the spiritual death of man. This is of
course not in reality an actual death, not an absolute annihilation,
but rather an eternal dying, in which the spiritual in man never
again comes to life—and likewise still can never die. It is therefore
really only the religious man, who is awakened to the realities of the
spiritual life through the grace of the word, who experiences this
world in its full and complete reality; and only he comprehends the
true meaning of this reality.
�
It is of no use to science to completely become mathematics. In his
I-aloneness, the consciousness of man can never comprehend the
reality of being. Indeed, it is an extremely profound thought based
on the recognition of the spiritual inadequacy of this I-aloneness
and referring to the heart of all being and reality, which in order to
grasp the actual form of the earth led to the conception of that un-
curved, self-enclosed total plane, the uncontradicted mental image
of which would be possible only in a joint thought with a second
consciousness. But can this be realized? Can man emerge from his
I-aloneness for the purpose of perception and theory? Emerge he
should, which is the demand of the spiritual life—which, however,
he does not fulfill in his worldview and obviously not in the meta-
196
physician’s brilliant dream of the cosmos, and also not in the apper-
ception of reality that is only to be realized, if it is possible at all, in
that joint thought of two conscious persons. Rather, the demand is
fulfilled only in the personal relation of his I to the Thou.
197
Verb and Sentence
Fragment 13
Verb and Sentence—The Meaning
of the T-Sound
The primal word emerged from an interjection of pain; and since

language could not begin at all other than with a sentence, it was
such. By the speaking person bringing his existence to expression in
it, he named himself. The nominative I originated from the primal
sentence, no matter how it might have been constituted phonetical-
ly. But because the primal word was a sentence in the first person,
it implied not only the s elf-naming of the I (as a mere noun or pro-
noun it would still not have been a sentence), but at the same time
a verb, which, according to the sense of the primal sentence, was
one of existential declaration, of the s elf-assertion of the speaking
person, thus am. A verb belongs to every sentence as its soul, so to
speak, as the word that creates the sentence, which molds the indi-
vidual words into the sentence form and which organically orders
and joins them.1 In the verb “in which almost all roots are repre-
sented,” Jacob Grimm saw “the greatest and real power of language,
with the exception of the life-giving pronoun.” Only the word in
the sentence is a living word, and the verbum finitum has in itself
the power to stimulate and to animate the sentence and the isolated
1. Grammar accordingly should in the main be pursued as syntax, since the in-
flexion and conjugation of individual words are a consequence of their syntactical
usage.
198
Verb and Sentence
words [Wörter] in it into unified words [Worte]. If one detaches the

word from its organic integration in the sentence through which it
lives, it withers away and becomes a dead thing and sign. Its mean-
ing, which engenders an active and spiritual life in the sentence,
stiffens into a concept with which one can operate mechanically ac-
cording to the laws of logic.
The personal pronoun is truly the primal word that creates words
and produces from itself the life of language, because it brings to
bear, while taking root in the personality of the spiritual life and
serving as its direct expression, the inner requirement of language,
the relation of the I to the Thou. The fundamental and primal
meaning of the sentence should not be sought in a psychological
or logical-grammatical factor, but rather in the pneumatological
fact that in it the spiritual life of man, created by the word, is ar-
ticulated in a literal sense: the sentence is the positing [Setzung] of
the relation between the I and the Thou. The word is the vehicle of
this relation; it is thus the means of movement through which the
I in man moves toward the Thou. Precisely for this reason, as the
expression of this movement, the sentence must have in itself as its
soul the word of movement, the finite verb—which is thus to be
interpreted in its deepest basis no longer as a logical-grammatical
but as a pneumatological necessity. The primal word was therefore a
verb and pronoun in one. Even the “am” in the primal word was the
expression of this movement turned into language and word. On
the one hand, the “am” is in a certain sense a truly passive verb be-
cause it originated from a cry of pain and expresses suffering; yet on
the other hand, as act of the spiritual life in man, it is above all not
a purposeless intransitive verb but rightly a transitive verb, which
leads the inner movement of the I toward its goal in the Thou. Nor
was it a reflexive pronoun, for the being [Sein] of the I only became
reflexive through its self-positing in the principle of identity, which
pneumatologically underlies the formation of the oblique case.
The positing of the relation between the I and the Thou is the
199
Verb and Sentence
original meaning of every thesis, which can be understood only

pneumatologically.2 A thesis refers to the relation of one being to
another, but never to an absolute being. Philosophy has perhaps
paid too little attention to that. Thus for example, the sentence “God
is,” because it asserts the existence of God completely objectively
and without connection, has no sense; it means nothing at all.3
But the sentence “God created the world,” which brings the being
of God into relationship to another being, is clearly contestable in
its objectivity. It has a meaning only as an article of faith; but that
ultimately means not in the objectivity of its form of declaration in
the third person. The case is different with the thesis “I am.” For it
is not an article of faith and can never be conceived wordlessly. It
therefore virtually presupposes the relationship to the Thou, to the
addressed person, which is not actually contestable, even though
philosophers of the I abstract from this in theoretical thinking. Phi-
losophy can of course do absolutely nothing at all with this thesis
in its subjectivity, least of all if philosophy sees in it the thesis of an
absolute existence, as it once claimed. In the objectivity of a thesis
lies its contestability, as well—unless it concerns nothing else but
the completely abstracted propositions of pure logic and mathe-
matics, which avoid any relationship to a real being. But in its orig-
inal pneumatological meaning the thesis is incontestable—as the
assertion of personality and, as such, as nothing other than the as-
sertion and positing of the relation between the I and the Thou. In
conjunction with the positing of the antithesis, the isolation of the I
from the Thou undoubtedly plays a crucial role (along with the moi
of Pascal, which actually includes a negation of the spiritual life).
The principle of contradiction is nothing other than the abstract
expression for contradiction to the spirituality of man’s existence,
in which he has become entangled and fixed through his fall from
2. Thesis is from the Greek tithénai = to set.

3. See also the remarks about the ontological proof of God in Kant’s Critique of
Pure Reason.
200
Verb and Sentence
God. It originates from the freedom of the personal being in man

and appeals to it. It does not, however, originate in thought, which
will always attempt to be rid of it, to dissolve the contradiction of
thesis and antithesis into a higher synthesis. Rather, it emerges in
faith, which presupposes it as the commitment of the personality
and as the personal decision for or against the spirit. Without the
principle of contradiction there would be no spiritual life in man.
Thus philosophy, which would be able to dissolve the former, would
also thereby dissolve the latter.
Psycholinguists distinguish between predicative sentences and
the attributive sentence equivalents that preceded them in the his-
tory of language. They see in the latter an associative achievement
that was determined essentially by emotional excitement. They
are therefore the expression of the subjective relationship of the
speaking person to the content of his declaration, of being person-
ally startled by some element of experience, of the personal con-
cern with it, which really require or presuppose the same concern
of the addressed person. They must obviously suffer a loss of ele-
mentary emotional value with the transformation into a predicative
sentence. For through the entry of the predicating verb (which re-
counts a state) into the sentence, the inner relationship of the one
who speaks to the content of his declaration is already changed.
The content of consciousness is objectified, and the verb prepares
the way both for the objective attitude of the one who speaks to-
ward the state or the proceedings that interest him and therefore
is brought to language and for the summons of the one who is ad-
dressed to impersonally judge both the content of expression and
the declaration in itself. Psychologists say that language has more
and more accommodated the development of apperceptive thought,
that the predicative sentence presupposes the working of the basic
operations of apperception—namely, relationship and comparison.
But these are once again to be regarded as the basic facts of spiritual
life, which is to be understood in a deeper sense than psychology
201
Verb and Sentence
can have in mind. Spiritual life is not the e ver-progressing differen-

tiation of an originally unarticulated conceptual continuum—the
expression of which was the primitive sentence equivalent—but is
at its root and essence the relationship of the I to the Thou, and as
such is the presupposition of language itself, especially that of the
actuality of the word.
Primitive man, when he established a relationship between him-
self and the individual elements of his experience of the world, or
when he attempted to conceive of a relation between them apart
from himself, may actually have first conceived of a personal rela-
tion, though of course a displaced one. This led to the belief in na-
ture spirits, in the spirits in plants and animals and in the proceed-
ings of nature, to the animation of nature. Science has, of course
(and most thoroughly in our time), seen to the making soulless of
nature to the point of spiritlessness; for science can only use that
which is dead for its purposes. Comparison, however, which ac-
tually has the differentiation of the experience of the world, of the
content of consciousness for its psychological presupposition, and
the principle of identity for its logical presupposition, already points
toward the isolation of the I from the Thou without which it could
not at all have become an essential process of thinking. When man
began to compare, he became the being who measures and calcu-
lates, who disputes and thinks perforce objectively and factually.
The I had become the moi of Pascal.
The finite verb lacks attributive sentence equivalents; but only
objectively, for one could say it is given subjectively in the spiritu-
al situation of the speaking to the addressed person as the inner
meaning of the sentence. How could a sentence be possible that
would not in some way be an expression of movement, of the spir-
itual movement of the I to the Thou in general, and of the psychic
excitement of the speaking person in attributive sentences in partic-
ular, or even, speaking quite abstractly, of the logical movement in
thinking? A word of movement, a verb, is involved in the formation
202
Verb and Sentence
of every sentence. The “is” sentences, however, play their role chiefly
in abstract thinking—in conjunction with defining—in which lan-
guage and the word have lost almost all liveliness. It is nothing else
but the situation in general, not only the spiritual situation in which
the person who speaks finds himself over against the one addressed,
and not only the situation created by his psychic agitation and ex-
citement, but also the external situation that makes the uttering of a
word intelligible, which in the sentence equivalent takes the place of
the predicating verb. Yet it is of special significance that possibly all
attributive sentences are originally and essentially meant demon-
stratively; hence they are even now often accompanied by a point-
ing gesture.4
The first object of indicating in language, however, was not ini-
tially an object of desire—or even of rejection, of fear and loath-
ing—but one of addressing, thus the second person, the Thou. The
deeper meaning of demonstration is not a will to seize and to grasp,
but rather a will to address, the need of the spiritual in the speak-
ing person to get in touch with something spiritual outside it.5 And
thus we see the t-sound make its appearance, with its demonstrative
meaning at once obvious in the formation of the personal pronoun
of the second person.
Must we not marvel anew at the inexhaustible depths of lan-
guage, in which is attested to us the rootedness of language in the
spiritual realities of life, if we only grasp it correctly, when we en-
counter this indicative t, which designates the addressed person and
in essence forms the word Thou, the ultimate word for God, who is
indeed the true, the first and the last Thou of the I? Thus the Latin
deus, the Greek theos, the Old Norse Tyr, the A nglo-Saxon tiv, the
Gothic Tius, the Old High German Ziu (as in “Tuesday”); also, the
Old Germanic deity Tiwaz, originally god of heaven and later god of
war, corresponding to Mars; see further the Sanskrit divyas = Greek
4. See the Greek daktylos = finger, the natural organ for pointing at something.
5. To will = Greek thelein.
203
Verb and Sentence
dîos = divine, and the Sanskrit div = heaven, from which Dyâus =
god of heaven like Zeus (Jupiter, if it is true, is to be traced back to
Diu-pater = father of light). God as the Being appealed to by man,
who is thus made the addressed person, the Thou, also lies in the
etymology of the German word Gott [God]. For this belongs to the
Sanskrit root hû = to appeal to the gods (puruhûta = the one much
appealed to, as the surname of Indra). Yet would the human spirit
in this appeal have ever been placed into a relation to God, which
cannot be understood as other than a personal one, if he were not
from the very beginning, in accordance with his origin and essence,
in a relationship to the spiritual outside him, if the I did not exist in
a relation to the Thou, and if God who created him had not placed
the word into him through which the I speaks to the Thou?
The case of the Hebrew name for God, with the word Yahweh
(formed from hâwâh = to be), however, is different than that of
the words deus and Gott in a most significant way. For the Jews (to
whom, as the chosen people preparatory to Christ, a real relation to
God was possible, because God had revealed himself to their found-
ing fathers), God was above all not the addressed but the speaking
person—that is, the person who reveals himself through the word,
and even through his name: “I am who I am”—not transposed sub-
stantively into the third person as the eternal being. Yahweh means
to “express oneself and one’s existence” and is strictly speaking not
really the name of God. But if one takes the word as a name, then
it is a nominative, as it were (and the primal meaning of that case),
which as the self-naming of God eo ipso excludes a vocative. This is
in opposition to the original deus or God, which is to be understood
as a vocative that was used only subsequently as a nominative and in
the oblique case. The meaning of the Hebrew name Yahweh is noth-
ing other than the revelation of God. In deus or God, however, man
sought this One, calling out to God from the inmost essence and
need of his spirituality. Obviously, the respect of the Jews not to ut-
ter the name had to be imposed. For Yahweh in the mouth of a man
204
Verb and Sentence
would in intention be just as much linguistically out of place as spir-

itual madness and blasphemy. Yet the written word creates an en-
tirely different relation to language, taking the latter away from its
immediate actuality. For that reason, the Jews were allowed to write
down the name of God, which they were not permitted to utter. And
when he read this written word, fully grasping its meaning in rev-
erence—in inner silence—he may well have felt himself to be the
person addressed by God. In the word Yahweh God speaks to him.
All the individual words [Wörter] etymologically related to deus,
which have the basic meaning of “heavenly one,” originate from the
root diw = to shine, illuminate (the Sanskrit word for God dêwa,
dêwas = the one who actually shines), and thus refer to the signif-
icant connection with the experience of light. In his primal expe-
rience of sunlight—this experience of the spiritual in nature—the
faint memory resounded in man of that light which had flashed in
him as the light of his life, when God spoke to him, creating him
through the word. And consequently, after his fall from God, he
may have directed his first humanly created word at the sun, seek-
ing God in it.
It also becomes evident in a few other cases how the indicative
t-sound plays a role in the formation of words that are connected
with the experience of light, first of all, in conjunction with “day”
[Tag], synonymous with the Latin dies, the Sanskrit dina (the Goth-
ic sinteins = daily [täglich]), compared by philologists to the Sanskrit
root dah = to burn, the Lithuanian dâgas, daga = harvest, the Prus-
sian dagas = summer, the Sanskrit midâgha = heat, summer. Accord-
ing to Kluge the basic meaning of “day” is the “time of the burning
of the sun, the hot time of the day or the year”: the experience of
light had become the experience of warmth, had led to the practi-
cal experience of burning and being burned. If little children point
to something with their finger that has caught their eye, something
shining and sparkling, a light, a flame, and call out “da-da,” and, if
they have not yet learned through experience, reach for the shining
205
Verb and Sentence
object and burn themselves, one has to believe that we have direct-
ly before our eyes and ears the original formation of the root word
dah. Let one also consider certain Greek words such as theâsthai,
theômai = to see, theoreîn = to look at, thermôs = warm, thýein = to
burn, sacrifice (one could perhaps also cite here thauma = miracle;
the connection, however, of the German Wunder [miracle] with the
Greek athréo = to see, view, look at, is rejected in Kluge’s Dictio-
nary). Also consider the Latin tueri = to view, as well as to protect: a
change in meaning that is to be interpreted not only psychologically
and biologically, but possibly also pneumatologically.
The phenomenon of the contrary meaning of the primal word
that some philologists make reference to would make it understand-
able that the t-sound also appears in conjunction with words that
are the antithesis of the experience of light:6 dawn, the Old Saxon
thimm = dark, the Middle Low German deemster = dark, the San-
skrit tamas = darkness ( corresponding to the Old High German de-
mar = crepusculum), tamrás = to darken, stifle, tamisra = dark night,
Irish temel = darkness, temen = dark gray, Latin tenebrae.
6. The Old Coptic should furnish the greatest number of examples of this phe-
nomenon, but it is also alleged to still be perceptible in the Greek éris and eros, the
Persian Ormuzd (from ahura mazda) and Ahriman, cold (the Latin gelidus = fro-
zen, ice-cold) and the Latin calor = warmth. Let one also keep in mind that the r
is a phonetic symbol for the experience of the resistance of matter, which is easily
demonstrable in numerous words. Look at the etymology of the word Rad [wheel]:
it is cognate and synonymous with the Old Irish roth (in addition to rethim = run),
the Latin rota, the Lithuanian rátas; the Sanskrit rathas = wagon, the root of which,
reth, belongs to rasch [rage], the latter bound to the Old High German raclo, the
A nglo-Saxon hraede = quick, hence according to Kluge the fundamental meaning
of the original root rath, roth, reth = to hurry. This contrary meaning of the primal
word is not inconceivable in conjunction with the supposedly small number of ver-
bal roots, of the economy of language and phonetics, as it were. But this is certainly
the case in connection with the fact that we cannot conceptualize any notion with-
out positing its opposite. The spirit created the word in a phonetic material given
through the interjections and the sounds of nature, which is actually very limited,
so that one and the same word root originally designated the most diverse things
and even direct opposites. The business of the differentiation of “word” [Wort] in
“words” [Wörter] is incumbent upon our comprehension.
206
Verb and Sentence
�
The primal word that emerged from a cry of pain with the meaning
“I am and suffer,” was—and is—in its first and final basis a call to
God. First the spiritual in man addressed itself to God, seeking and
appealing to him in self-expression; and only then was the spiritu-
al in another man, the Thou, addressed through the word. That the
divine is the primal thought of the childhood of the human spirit,
moreover, is attested to by science, if what a specialist in the Stone
Age asserted is correct. Paleolithic man, he said, was under the spell
of religion; and only later, another researcher added, did primal
man begin to take broad possession of the external world.7 An out-
cast in this world after his fall from God, man began his long march
through history: conquering the earth and becoming at home on
it, but nevertheless in his looking up to the heavens always secretly
seeking his true home.
Looking up to the heavens though earthbound—that is the sit-
uation of human life in the world. All life is below, but it posits an
above toward which it moves. All life is earthbound and looks to
heaven. The mute and unconscious plant, firmly rooted in the earth,
expresses most purely and beautifully this striving of natural life
to the heavens and to light. But the animal that moves freely has
diverted the organ of its experience of light from the heavens. Its
glance is not earth-fettered like the firmly rooted plant. In the life
of man, who bears in himself the spiritual that is intended for a rela-
tion to God, the way upward becomes prayer: the spiritual in him,
the I, seeks its true Thou. That he has a relation to God that finds its
expression in word and appeal (though for the present there may be
much misunderstanding about this appeal, not only regarding the
7. Hence also for the monist of our time who takes pride in the concept of devel-
opment (which has advanced so very far, hasn’t it?; we who lived through the years
1914 through 1919 know this), the religious attitude of life, the faith in God is an “ata-
vism” that is overcome by his own person.
207
Verb and Sentence
neediness of man’s existence, but also in respect to God and the re-
lation of man to God); man is the being who seeks God in prayer
and who transcends all of life and himself in prayer; only that ac-
tually makes him man. What kind of a life is it in which man has
unlearned how to pray! It is one that, because it has lost its spiritual
way upward, fades into earth-boundedness and simply perishes—
spirituality in man, secluding itself from the Thou because it is stub-
bornly attached to itself and the earth-boundedness of existence.
From the depth of his life man calls to God—de profundis clama-
vi. What depth is, is of course, usually misunderstood aesthetically
in our time, which though loving the word so very much misuses it
as a poetic euphemism: for who grasps today that depth is actually
nothing that man honors, neither the poet nor the thinker, but quite
the contrary? Whoever utters the first word of the Lord’s Prayer
with the right meaning spiritually elevates himself beyond the
earth-boundedness of his life, which belongs to prayer. But the next
word turns him back to it again. For he should not forget it, and in
every moment of prayer he should think of it, because it is the mean-
ing of prayer, to look up at heaven while earthbound. And every ad-
ditional word of the Lord’s Prayer is in accordance with this, up to
the final petition for deliverance from the power of evil in the spir-
itual situation of human existence in the world. Man must plumb
the depths of his life to pray the Lord’s Prayer with the right mean-
ing, humbling himself in his e arth-boundedness and narrowness of
life—down into the depths, but with the glance upward.
208
Existential Declaration and Personality
Fragment 14
Existential Declaration and
Personality—The Becoming and Being
of the Spiritual Realities—Love
The existential declaration of the speaking person in the primal

word was itself the self-naming of the I, which did not yet signify
a name. Since this I became conscious of its existence in the decla-
ration (through the word) and at the same time posited a relation
to the Thou, because that is the precondition of the declaration, the
I obviously must have also become aware of the existence of the
Thou. And thus immediately following the existential declaration in
the first person was that in the second person, the “I am” followed
by the “Thou art,” which already underlies the former mentally and
spiritually. It is once again no mere accident of linguistic usage that
in German, at least, the verb of the existential declaration of the sec-
ond person, the bist [art], was formed from the same stem as the bin
[am]. For the Thou exists in the same way as the I with regard to the
personality of its being, and whatever is the case for the existence of
the I is also the case for that of the Thou. The Thou has its subjective
existence from the point of view of the I in the love with which it is
loved, but it has its objective existence in the word through which
it is addressed; the Thou comes to the word, to language, from the
I—yet without, which must always be kept in mind, being a projec-
tion of the I. Just as the existence of the Thou cannot be asserted in
209
the third person without provoking the contradiction of thinking

as well as of the spirit of language, neither can that of the I. The case
may be different with the moi of Pascal, which is conceived on the
way to depersonalization.
It is not, I “is,” but rather, “I am”; nor Thou “is,” but “Thou art.”
In the sentences “I am” and “Thou art”—and only in them—a per-
sonal being is asserted and expressed. But not a being in the sense
of a substantial existing, the declaration of which can have no oth-
er form than that of the third person, thus with the verb “to be” in
“is” and “are,” and which in a sense presupposes the inception of the
tendency of substantialization of thinking, with its objectivization
of all being, and which linguistically assumes the naming that goes
hand in hand with it. The “is” somehow always expresses an imper-
sonal being. This is the case not only when it is used in reference to
something actually impersonal like plants, animals, and things, but
also when it refers to a person, be it man or God. The declaration of
being in the first and second person is a claim and address of a sub-
jective being, which means a personal one; the declaration of being
in the third person is a claim and address of an objective, imperson-
al, and substantial being. The substantivistic naming of that which
really exists in the “I am” and “Thou art” never actually touches this
existing directly—in its personality—but only indirectly by the
roundabout means of the third person, which is the sphere of sub-
stantivistic naming and verbalization and of the objective declara-
tion of being. In the spirituality of his existence, in his directly per-
sonal being, man is nameless. Just as God was originally nameless
for man and was only subsequently named substantivistically, yet
once again as the appealed to being, as in the word “God,” or as the
one pointed to in the appeal, as in deus.
Since God is the true Thou of the I in man, the existence of the
Thou can be asserted only in the second person in a sentence that,
while not directly expressing the “Thou art” as an explicit assertion
of being, as a thesis, nevertheless has that as its basis. Through this
210
sentence man posits himself as the speaking person in a personal re-

lation to the Thou—hence it follows that the existence of God can-
not be objectively stated or demonstrated at all—that is, indepen-
dent from a personal relation to him, which makes him the Thou.
The fact that the assertion of God’s existence in the third person
through the thesis “God is” or “there is a God” is nonsensical and
signifies no more than the sentence “the I is” or “the Thou is”—in
other words, that it literally says nothing; and the fact that this as-
sertion in no way concerns the real existence of God and above all
not the personality of this existence must actually bring all theology
and theologically speculative metaphysics to naught. God either has
a personal existence or he does not exist at all. Yet man cannot ap-
prehend God’s personality speculatively, but only through person-
ally relating to him (which is the demand of his spiritual life and the
summons of God)—that is, by making him the Thou of his I; and
then all speculating and every theological and metaphysical profun-
dity has ceased eo ipso. If a man states or merely thinks as the truth
for him and as his belief and conviction that “God is not” or “there
is no God” (without, however, being aware of the d eep-seated ab-
surdity of this thought of a being of God in the third person, an ab-
surdity that abides in the word “is”), he does not thereby come into
contradiction with something that could be objectively and irrefut-
ably proven, which would be objectively evident like a mathemati-
cal axiom, but rather into contradiction with himself, even though
initially he does not realize it at all. In this way man comes into
contradiction with the spirituality of his existence, which presup-
poses God, and at that point spiritually perishes. That is the direct
perversion—of the spiritual life, the reversion of life into the death
of the spirit, when man first wants to have the existence of God ob-
jectively authenticated, wants to be able to assert it irrefutably in the
third person, so as to then enter into a personal relation to him, as
God wants, from that standpoint. Yet if man has this relation in the
personal decision of his faith, he has no time at all for an objective
211
examination of the existence of God, assuming that were even pos-

sible.
If one talks with a third party about another person objective-
ly and hence in the third person while having his personality in
mind in the strict and thus thoroughly positive sense of the word,
an agreement with this third party concerning the personality in
question is presupposed. If I am, however, alone with the person,
and even if I know that I am in agreement with him about a con-
cern that develops between him and me, or if I seek this agreement,
then he is never an object to me, and never can be. The more my
relation to a personality has personally deepened, the less it can oc-
cur to me to reach an understanding with a third party about him
matter-of-factly and thus quite properly in the third person. For that
would mean nothing else but the depersonalizing of this personal-
ity and the giving up of my personal relation to him for the sake of
an objective one. But on the other hand, one is able to come to an
understanding with a third party about a man with a personality de-
fect (yet who would not have that in the depth of his being?), thus
about a man who actually has something depersonalized about him.
This will most likely take place matter-of-factly and in the third per-
son, and naturally behind his back. Obviously this does not come
about other than in lovelessness and irreverence. If one speaks with
another about God in the third person, one presupposes, if one has
God in mind in his spiritual reality, the agreement with the other
about the real existence of God, and that means just as much his
personal existence; but it once again means nothing else but the
presupposition in him of a real relation to God. It follows from this
that one can never come to an understanding about God with an
atheist (who, however, denies and disavows less the existence of
God than his own relation to God), but at best only about the idea
of the divine, unless it be the case that one were given the power
to cause the other to perceive the Thou directly in the depth of his
spirituality and to bring the I in him to complete self-realization
212
and therein to its concretization. The spirit in the third person, how-
ever, the hágion pneuma of the New Testament in whom man is re-
born and receives the name of a child of God, whom according to
the Gospel of John all those who believe in Christ are to receive;
the spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does
not see him and does not know him—may we not understand him
as the spirit of the inner agreement of men one with another about
God, in love and in reverence, and may we not regard everything
that claims to speak against this agreement and bring it to naught
as sin against him, as blasphemy against the spirit, which will not
be forgiven? And in this spirit of truth, the truth of our life and of
the inner agreement about God that unites men, in which we come
to an understanding with the third party about God in the third
person, God, one could then truly say, in this God has his objective
existence—but that must not be again abused objectively in theo-
logical and metaphysical speculation.
Strictly speaking, the reverence for and love of God, the omni
present One, should forbid us from speaking in the third person—
as if he were not there—of him who is still present and listening,
without addressing the word to him. If man is dealing with God,
then let him not speak about God—for that can be the case in the
idleness of the spiritual life—but to him. At the very least let him
reflect in his inmost heart that God listens to him and demands an
accounting for every useless word spoken (Mt 12:36). This was the
case, for example, with Augustine in his Confessions, in this proto-
col for a dialogue with God. And even Fichte, who in his writings
about the Destiny of Man really wants nothing to do with the per-
sonality of the divine being, speaks in the second person when he
speaks of God in it. That is, Fichte does not speak about God but to
him, though of course only in the ideal situation conditioned by his
rhetorical pathos. Speaking of God in the third person is doubtless
unavoidable, which theology excuses, though it does not absolutely
justify it. But when a man speaks in this manner, he possesses there-
213
in the reality of his spiritual life just as little as when he is involved

in the deepest theological thoughts, and he should be mindful of
that. There are of course rare men to whom the power of the spirit
is given in their word, that they, while speaking of God, make him
directly present in his spiritual reality to the one addressed. But that
will be true only for those who are called to that by God himself.
�
Bin bist [am art] is the verb for the existential declaration of the spir-
itual realities; sein [to be] is strictly speaking the verb for physical
realities, which is, however, useful in the sphere of abstract thinking
for the assertion of the existence of the substantial. Ist and sind [is
and are], bin and bist [am and art] are the tenses of the declaration
of the present as well as eternity,1 only with the vast difference that
bin and bist [am and art] constitute the concrete eternity of the spir-
itual life according to their inmost meaning, while ist and sind [am
and art] express the abstract and ideal eternity of thinking. Since
the infinitive of a verb (in which it can also be used substantively)
was and is formed under the influence of the tendency of the sub-
stantialization of thinking, it is not inconceivable that ist and sind
[am and art], which this tendency toward existential assertion uti-
lizes, have an infinitive in sein [to be]. And it may be a further testi-
mony to the profundity of language that bin and bist [am and art],
these primal verbs [Urverba], did not form an infinitive, but exist
only in the declarative form in which they have their true meaning,
and that has been guarded by the spirit of language and preserved
through the millennia of linguistic history. For sein [to be] is not
their real infinitive, but rather was merely conceptually added by
grammarians. If they had a real nominal form, then they could nat-
urally also be used as a substantive, like every other infinitive. But
1. The present, as timeless time, is the point of time for the breakthrough of eter-
nity, which can and may never be anticipated in time, and which in no sense can ever
belong to the past.
214
the existence of that which is expressed or expresses itself in them

defies every substantialization by thinking just as much as every
substantivization by language. The I of the sentence “the I is,” which
is substantivized linguistically and hence already substantialized in
thinking, is in fact nothing but an empty, unrelated word and word
misuse. And the same clearly holds true for the Thou.
Since the verb sein [to be] is in essence the tense of the declara-
tion of the present and of abstract eternity—in asserting the being
of substance—the German language reached for another verb of ex-
istential declaration for the construction of the past tense—namely,
wesen [to live], the etymology of which is once again informative.
The Middle High German wesen and the Old High German wesan
correspond to the Gothic wisan = sein [to be], verweilen [to stay],
bleiben [to remain]; the verbal root wes = sein, verbleiben [to remain]
(wahr [true], and währen [endure] also belong here) is in accordance
with the Sanskrit root vas = bleiben, verweilen, übernachten [to spend
the night]. One must take careful note of the connection of mean-
ing between Wesen [being, essence] and bleiben [to remain]. In its
concrete meaning Wesen is above all a living being, in contrast to a
thing, an object. But in its abstract meaning, Wesen is, so to speak,
the transtemporal being [Sein] of a living creature or even of a thing;
it is the idea that underlies the temporal being of a living creature,
its external reality, its becoming and passing away, as its nonde-
velopmental being and imperishable inner reality. Expressed less
platonically: the totality of its being, through which the individual
elements of being are determined, and hence are to be explained,
in their connection and change. Bleiben [to remain], related to the
Greek liparéo = I persevere, means to be now and in the future, to last.
Only that which lasts, but that at the same time changes in its dura-
tion, has a past—and if it is able to relate to the latter as with man
himself, it also has a history. Bleiben is also related to Leib [body]
(the body of a living being in contrast to an object, to a lifeless thing
as such), and to Leben [life, living being] itself. Leben is a being that
215
is determined in its presentness by the future (just as bleiben is also

an expression of the meeting and interpenetration of present and
future). Accordingly, having a perspective of the future is an expres-
sion of the unbrokenness of life, while being without a perspective
is a symptom of the poverty of life. One could say that wesen is the
characteristic and typical verb for the platonic-idealistic assertion
of existence and reality, and sein for the Spinozistic-substantialistic
one. But philosophy, be it Platonism or Spinozism, never grasps the
spiritual reality of life that is asserted or asserts itself in the verb bin
bist [am art].
It is once again no accident of linguistic usage that in German
the subjunctive—the form of potentiality—of the declaration of
being in the first and second person, thus sei—seist, is formed from
the root sein and not from the bin-bist of the indicative, of the form
of reality. When a man says, “I am,” it is clearly evident to anyone
who has grasped the essence of the I and knows what it means, that
that which is asserted as existing in the bin [am] and bist [art] real-
ly exists and cannot at all be thought of as only possibly existing,
which would also include the possibility of negation.
The being [Sein] in the existential declaration in the third person
can in some sense always be thought of as separate from the subject
of the being of which it is asserted and is therefore also syntactical-
ly expressed as separate from the subject. The subject makes its ap-
pearance as a specific, n on-exhaustive instance of being and is sub-
ordinate to the latter, so to speak; the subject comes into being or
develops from it. In the declaration of being in the first and second
person, however, the subject of the being can in no way be separat-
ed from the predicated being, the I from the am,2 the Thou from
the art—which is expressed linguistically as directly in the German
sentence “Ich bin” [I am] as in the Latin sum. Here the subject makes
its appearance not as a specific instance of being but is itself the
2. Ich [I] may have originally meant Ich bin [I am] according to Faulmann’s ety-
mological dictionary.
216
latter, and in a certain sense is even superior. The subject does not
come into being; rather, being arises directly out of it; being devel-
ops from the subject, one could say. In the “I am” and “Thou art,” be-
ing [Sein], as the subjective precondition for the declaration, and the
latter itself, as the objective precondition for the existence of the I,
just as the Thou, in the word, directly coincide. This identity of the
subject of the statement and of the predicate, which is not to be in-
tellectually abrogated, constitutes the essence of the existential as-
sertion in the first and second person, in which a being is affirmed in
the sense of personality, which includes in and for itself the relation
to the statement, to the word, because personality and having the
word are one and the same. The existential statement in the third
person, however, already has the being of the wordless s ubstance
secretly in mind. Substance is the objective, and in its wordlessness
impersonal being, severed from and independent of all subjective
determinations of the being of direct experience, which is thought
of as the only objectively real being—but is merely thought. For sub-
stance is not at all a requirement of being, nor simply the absolute
necessity of being; and that which is necessary may be something
independent from what is imagined and thought by us. Neither is
substance, as was maintained by Spinoza, that which is in itself and
comprehended through itself, something, the concept of which
does not need the concept of other things in order to be formed
from them. It is rather nothing other than a logical necessity, the
thought [Gedachte] “which remains unaltered in conjunction with
all change of phenomenon,” according to Kant, which we are forced
to think if we want to think of an objective being as really existing
[seiend]. Substance does not actually underlie being but is conceptu-
ally added to it by our thinking as that which exists in the process of
being [das im Sein Seiende].
Another possibility is also given with that of conceptually sep-
arating the predicated being from the subject in the existential
statement in the third person—namely, that of setting aside as ques-
217
tionable the existence that is asserted and subsequently of directly

denying its reality. The conception of the notion of substance as the
concept of absolutely necessary being is to some extent the objec-
tive precaution of thinking against the ceasing to be real [Entwirk-
lichung] of all existing, which the I that underlies thinking (with
its inner reality in the will: behind the cogito lurks the volo) seiz-
es for its own protection, since it sees itself pushed toward its own
ceasing to be real through the tendency of substantialization that
originates in the I -aloneness and through which, so to speak, it be-
comes uncertain of all reality in general, of the reality of experience.
To put forward as questionable and merely possible that existence
that asserts itself in the sentence “I am” or is asserted in “Thou art”
succeeds just as little as its direct denial. For the sentence “Thou art
not”—which in its concrete expression presupposes the Thou and
its existence—is obviously just as senseless as the sentence “I am
not” would be, which could only be thought by a lunatic.
Through the declaration in the third person, reality became de-
pendent on being imagined, thought, and uttered. Thus the sub-
junctive became the form of declaration of indirect speech, which
had to express above all the dependence of an aspect of a being or an
event on another circumstance, the limitation of a being or an activ-
ity by a circumstance that is possible in itself, but that is perhaps not
really given, even if the speech alleges something that is really the
case. Now, neither the existence of the I nor of the Thou can be con-
sidered as dependent on their being imagined and thought. For the
I, just as the Thou, is not a mental image nor a mere thought, apart
from which it would be a possibility and nothing more. Rather, the
I itself constitutes the basis of all imagining and thinking as presup-
position, but not like substance as a consequence of thinking. Sub-
stance cannot, however, really be considered as dependent on the
declaration, whereas the I exists in this declaration—in the word
and in its inmost meaning—and the existence of the Thou is actual-
ly given in the declaration precisely through the declaration, which
218
makes its existence concretely possible. The being of the I and of the
Thou—not dependent upon the declaration but, on the contrary,
its spiritual presupposition—is the most immediate being, which is
not merely thought or imagined, and not merely expressed; hence,
the verb of its declaration only allows the formation of the indica-
tive, of the form of reality, but not that of the subjunctive, the form
of possibility. This indicative bin and bist [am and art] is just as au-
thentically the indicative in its fundamental and primal meaning as
bin is the primal verb. If the being of the I and the Thou, when it is
modified and specified through some inner or outer element, is to
be addressed in indirect speech or to be expressed as a function of
our opinion and representation, thought and belief, there remains
for linguistic usage, which does not want to set itself in contradic-
tion to the spirit of language, nothing except recourse once again to
the stem sein [to be] for the construction of the subjunctive of bin
and bist.
�
That the Thou exists in exactly the same sense of personality as the
I, which is linguistically expressed in the jointly held verb of the
declaration of being, is actually not entirely correct. And it is ety-
mology that helps us again in this instance, though of course only in
part, in making clear this distinction of existing. The Sanskrit root
of bin [am] is bhu = to become. Is not the I, which utters its existence
in the bin, a something that actually becomes [Werdendes] in its re-
lation to the Thou and in the vehicles of this relation, in the word,
and in love? Only in its absolute aloneness and seclusion before the
Thou would the I be something that exists [Seiendes] of which one
could also assert an objective being. But this absolute I exists only
as idea in the metaphysical and (alas) ethical speculation of the phi-
losophers of the I, as the boasting of I -ness, and not at all in reali-
ty. The problem of the spiritual life in man is an unending one, and
in its resolution, in the relation to the Thou, the I becomes what it
219
should be. In its being in the Thou, the I finds the completion of its
becoming; in God the restlessness of the spirit finds its peace. But
now, is the Thou also something that becomes in the word or in love,
or is it not rather something that exists, obviously not in a substan-
tial but in a personal sense, and is thus the precondition for the be-
coming of the I in relation to it? Man first of all formed the verb bin
[am] in the primal word, and only thereafter bist [art]. He thereby
apprehended, via an ego-morphism intended by God himself, the
existence of the Thou in the same sense as that of the I that had be-
come conscious of it. Precisely from that point, man linguistically
formed the bist out of the bin.
In the German language there are only two verbs of the declara-
tion of being, apart from wesen [to live], that is now used only for the
construction of the past tense, but there are three kinds of being.
The latter includes one that for us is inexpressible, because it is in-
comprehensible, and that is the absolute being of God. The second
kind is the spiritual being of man, of the I, that is a being that ac-
tually becomes in the relation to something spiritual outside it, to
the Thou. Man also grasps the being of God as just such a personal
being, in whose relation to him—namely, to man—the existence of
God in the “Thou art” does not signify something to be understood
anthropomorphically from the point of view of the spiritual being
of man in the “I am,” because this being of the I actually already
includes the relationship to the personal being of God. Certainly,
God also has a relationship to the world and to the events in it. But
in this we can grasp him just as little as in his absolute being, which
does not need the existence of the I for its continuance, though con-
versely, the latter could not endure without the existence of God.
That is moreover a factor of the spiritual life, which, in spite of its
implicitness, the mystics evidently cannot understand:
I know that without me God cannot live an instant;
If I come to nothing, He must of necessity give up the ghost.
220
So runs a well-known saying from The Cherubinic Wanderer of

Angelus Silesius. The third kind of being is that of the world and the
things in it, which is recognized as direct experience [Erlebtwerden]
by philosophical circumspection. But by thinking under the urge of
the tendency toward substantialization, it is considered as the being
of substance, and as such once again as an absolute being, which is
only a conceptual and not a real being, as is the absolute being of
God, which is unimaginable, inconceivable, and unutterable.
The Thou is the goal of the inner movement in the I, which man
seeks in the restlessness of his spirit. It is the true object of the will,
and therefore it has, as it were, a kind of objective existence, but
obviously not in the sense of a substantial existing. The I, however,
quite frequently misunderstands its inner reality in the “I will” and
directs that reality toward a false object, while secluding itself from
the Thou. One may see in the Thou a certain objectivity, but not a
substantiality [Substantialität]—namely, that it is a spiritual reality
that exists outside of the I. For it is certainly not a mere projection
of the I. It exists before the I in both an ontological and an ethical
sense, and in its divinity it created the I through the word. Just as
the natural life of man in the world presupposes man in the natu-
ralness of his existence—namely, parents—so his spiritual exis-
tence presupposes that of God. The corporeality of a child is to be
accounted for, even though perhaps not entirely so, from the corpo-
reality of his ancestors. In the awakening of his consciousness, how-
ever, the child comes from God.
The I is something that becomes [Werdendes]; it is something
that either becomes or ceases becoming [entwird] in the relation to
the Thou, depending on whether it moves toward or away from the
Thou in this relation. The Thou is something that “is” [Seiendes],
something that does not first become in the relation of the I to it, as
does the I, but rather already is, its being and its becoming already
being presupposed. The I is something that becomes, the Thou is
something that is; that means in the final analysis: the former is
221
something human, the latter is something divine. God is the con-

cretization of the Thou, just as man (not, however, the idea of man
in connection with philosophers and ethicists) in his relation to
God is and is destined to be the concretization of the I.
�
God created man through the word, and the true humanity of man
will continue to be created through the word unto the end of the
world. God, who is love, became man in Jesus, who is called the
Word in the Gospel of John, in order to snatch man away from the
danger of his spiritual atrophy [Entwerdung] and to reveal to him
the meaning of his existence. For the spirit of man asks after noth-
ing else in his neediness than the meaning of life. Jesus liberated the
I from its I-aloneness, from the curse of sin and the law, under the
yoke of which man stands in his I -aloneness. Jesus, who is the Way,
the Truth, and the Life, led the I to the Thou through the word; he
restored us to life from our spiritual death and showed us the way
to God. But God does not reign in an unattainable metaphysical re-
moteness from man. He who is the God of the living, not the dead,
is near to us in life. We are therefore not to dream of him. Whoever
does that, does not want to see him in the reality of his nearness.
One could thus even say that God is near to us not only spiritually
but also physically: near to us in everyone, and above all in the man
next to us, the neighbor, in everyone who mourns—and who is not
mourning?—in those who hunger, in the sick, in everyone who
needs a deed or a word of love—and who would not need that? God
is near to us in the man whom we, emerging from our I -aloneness,
make the true Thou of our I, which obviously does not mean simply
to look at him in his humanity as God. What you have done to the
very least of my brethren, you have done to me; so we are told in the
gospel.
God became man in Jesus. According to the letter and the spirit
of the gospel, however, we must not seek Christ, who has brought
222
God near to us, among the dead. For he has been resurrected from
the dead and still lives in our midst every day to the end of the
world, and he brings God near to us and us near to God. Heaven
and earth will pass away, but his word will not pass away.
The emergence of the I from its I-aloneness, its self-unfolding
and openness to the Thou, has the meaning of an offering. God is
the “being to whom we sacrifice.”3 What does man sacrifice? Every
thing that he has grasped as his own in his I -aloneness and seclu-
sion before the Thou. Christianity first revealed the true meaning
of sacrifice: I desire mercy, not sacrifice. The I must give up all that
belongs to it, everything that it grasped or willed to grasp in the
Mein—Mir—Mich [m ine—to me—me]—then it will live. But if
the I wills to save its life, to maintain its existence in the Mein—
Mir—Mich, no matter how spiritualized this intention may pretend
to be, then it is spiritually lost. The more objectively senseless and
useless the sacrifice of love is, the less the man to whom it is offered
has in it only a token of love (which he may perhaps not at all be-
lieve in, because there is no love in him), the more the sacrifice is
offered to God. As is stated in the Sermon on the Mount, if you love
only those who love you, what reward will you have? If love has a
reward, can it be anything other than that which it receives in its
being returned? And love should lay claim to no other reward. To
love the man who loves us means to love humanly and to love the
man in man. But to love him who not only does not return our love,
but who possibly even returns love with contempt and hatred, that
truly means to love God in man. And according to the words of the
gospel, this love has its reward in God. God, so to speak, takes the
place of the one who does not return love. And to love God? This
love doubtless has its reward in its being returned. For God himself
is love. And his love was and is there before all of man’s love. All true
love is from God.
3. As one interprets the word “God” from the Sanskrit root hu = to offer, sacrifice,
and also hutá = to whom sacrifice is offered.
223
The demand of Christianity is this: that man base his relation to

other men upon his relation to God, and that he bring the latter to
expression in the former. Only in the fulfillment of the divine com-
mandment to love does man find the true Thou of his true I. He
finds it in God and in other men, and he finds God in other men. He
loves man because he loves God. Only for this reason. But there is no
greater love with which man could be loved than this. The godless
love of man only pretends to be love and is in reality a concealed
hatred of man. But the one whose I seeks its Thou in God only for
this reason, because he is never able to find it in man, also blocked
himself from the way to God. The gates to eternal life are closed to
him who seeks the kingdom of God only because he has missed out
as a stepchild of nature in the kingdom of this world—and that can
very easily come to pass.
Just as the ultimate objective meaning of the human word is to
absorb the divine commandment to love, so the ultimate meaning
of human existence is to absorb God and the word of God. And man
does not have God in himself if he is not a doer of the word, if he
does not have love within himself. The one who says that he is in
the light and hates his brother is still in the darkness, as the First
Epistle of John states. The one who does not possess God, who is
the light and the word, through which the light of God and of our
life shines out in the heart of man, is therefore in the darkness. But if
he, as the doer of the word, has found God in himself and himself in
God, then he finds God in other men as well. One must, as Tolstoy
once said, do that which the Dukhobors do: to greet each man with
a prostration, mindful that God is in him; and if one cannot do that
with the body, let him do thus in the spirit. How endlessly difficult
it is for man even to only spiritually prostrate himself before the
Thou, before the divine in another man.
Of Christian love, which is the only true love, and the only love
that is not a s elf-deception of the I that is caught up in itself in its
aloneness, of that love poets know nothing, who otherwise have so
224
much to say about love. They love only platonically—even then,

when they do not exactly love very platonically. They love only an
ideal and never a spiritual reality, while ignoring the reality of hu-
man existence as in a dream. The poetical does not seek to over-
come the aloneness of the I, so as to emerge from it into a relation to
the Thou, but rather only to detour around it. There is not love in the
poetical, but the longing for it, perpetuated through a cunning trick
of the psyche, and also the dream of love, which the I dreams in its
aloneness, locked up behind its Chinese wall, taking a secret plea-
sure in it, which prevents awakening. Plato was quite right: beauty
is loved in madness. But that the sickness of the spirit in man lies
therein, the Greek could not perceive, who doubtless grasped that
one loves the beautiful and the good. He would also have certainly
found the severe demand of Christianity completely incomprehen-
sible, probably deeming it absurdity and folly, to love man even in
his ugliness, in the brokenness of his life and in his ethical frailty.
Sache qu’il faut aimer, sans faire la grimace,
Le pauvre, le méchant, le tortu, l’hébété,
Pour que tu puisses faire à Jésus, quand il passe,
Un tapis triomphal avec ta charité
says Baudelaire in a poem.4

Not beauty and not the idea, neither truth (which we should
recognize) nor the good (which we should do); not nature and art,
neither wisdom nor science are the objects of love, but rather the
Thou. And since God is the true Thou of the I in man, he is there-
fore the sole object of true love. If we really love a man—not merely
the friend in him, in which we really only love ourselves, thus with
a love in which we emerge only relatively from the I -aloneness of
4. [Ed. Note]: See Charles Baudelaire’s sonnet “The Rebel” [Le Rebelle], in The
Flowers of Evil [Les fleurs du Mal] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), xcv:
“Know that you must love without making a wry face / The pauper, the scoundrel,
the hunchback, the dullard, / So that you can make for Jesus when he passes / A tri-
umphal carpet of your love.”
225
our spirit, which strictly speaking means not to emerge at all—if we

love the neighbor as the gospel requires of us, then we love God in
him. And if we really love God, grasping his spiritual reality in our
love for him, then we love him in man, in every neighbor, whom we
need not seek for long, as do the poets for their ideal; and we bring
our love for God to expression in our love for man. Our love must
not be a special liking for someone or something and not a condition
before love, but rather love itself, realized through us. This love has
nothing to do with desire, for its meaning resides in that the I opens
itself to the Thou in the love.
Love existed before the law and stands over it. When love went
astray and died in man, when the I closed itself off from the Thou,
then came the law. The curse of the law weighs heavily upon the
man who stands entirely under the law. For the law judges and con-
demns him. But love, and only love, redeems him from the curse.
No one is spiritually lost as long as there is still a spark of love in
him, as long as love is still able to reach him. And to whom may it
not reach? Who would not have been loved? For it is the mystery
and truly the wonder of love that even the most unworthy are loved.
And who would be worthy of love if it were not love itself that makes
one worthy? For love can reach and redeem everyone. And the
fault lies in man himself that he closes himself off from love and its
works. It is love and not the law that creates the true community
of men, the community of the spiritual life, which can have no oth-
er basis than the relation to God. The kingdom of love is also the
kingdom of God. And that, Jesus said, is within man. Some want
to translate and to understand the entós hymon of the original text
as “in your midst.” Entirely with justification. For the kingdom of
God is not in man in the inner aloneness of his existence, in the
aloneness of his I, but it dwells wherein the I opens itself to the Thou
in the word and in love, and in the word and in the deed of love—
and then it is in our midst as the community of our spiritual life.
Although man stands as the solitary one [Einzelne] in his relation to
226
God, he nevertheless cannot pray without praying in spiritual com-

munion with all men. For in this manner and not otherwise, Jesus
taught us to pray the Lord’s Prayer; and when we pray, thus we are
to pray—and in no other way than that which Jesus taught us. Not
for himself alone does man pray and speak to God, but for all men.
Yet he can only do that when true love is in him.
Once the spirit has taken possession of the word “love” and given
it its proper meaning, man truly must no longer use it with a differ-
ent meaning than that which the spirit demands. Every declaration
of love between the sexes is not only a lie, as Weininger says—and
that it certainly is—but it is also a blasphemy.
227
The Human and the Divine
Fragment 15
The Human and the Divine—God as
Mental Image and as Reality
The human and the divine must never and in no way be simply iden-
tified. The profoundness of the mystic is self-deception, based upon
the lack of perspective of the mystical sinking-into-oneself. The I is
and remains human and is not divine, and the spiritual in man is in
its deepest basis never anything other than the I, the I created by
God that is situated in that consciousness that has heightened into
being-conscious and self-consciousness. Only the Thou is divine.
Everything depends on the proper perspective from which one can
view the relation of the two; and the I, which can never turn itself
into the Thou, furnishes the viewpoint of this perspective, the only
possible one from which we can take our stand. For the I can doubt-
less objectify itself and make itself the object of its inner reality; yet
it is then no longer the true I, but the moi of Pascal and on the way to
its atrophy [Entwerdung]. But it nevertheless belongs to its essence,
for example insofar as it is a speaking person, and to have the word
is essential to it, and also to the Thou, to become the addressed per-
son. And if the I struggles against and closes itself to the address,
to the word, if it only wants to speak out and not to hear, it closes
itself off from the Thou and thereby derealizes [entwirklicht] itself.
What then obtains if the I is made the Thou of Christian love—or
even of the word in the confession of sin—by the spiritual in an-
228
other man? Then it is in fact something divine, because it really is

the Thou—precisely from the standpoint of the other, of the I in the
other. And that is the crucial factor. It can never adopt this point of
view, neither practically nor in abstract reflection. The I is not some-
thing divine by itself, in its being-given-as-the-I-itself, for it cannot
make itself the Thou. And it can in no way, either directly nor indi-
rectly, become conscious of its divinity, which lies in its being the
Thou of the I in the other; the I does not become conscious of its
divinity because it accepts being the Thou of an I in humility and in
the awareness of being unworthy of love. If the I does not abide in
this humility, if it considers (which would already be an arrogance
of the spirit) that it is the Thou of an I, thus something divine, then
it is more than ever only the I in its humanity—and Th ou-seclusion.
For by relating to itself in this reflection and losing sight of the spir-
itual neediness of its life, the I secludes itself from the Thou. While
reflecting on its divinity, the I not only ceases inwardly and of itself
to be the Thou of that other I, more correctly of the I in the other,
but in its isolation it makes its own existence questionable. In order
to understand and appreciate everything correctly, since it is not a
question of a subtle, hair-splitting chain of reasoning, one need only
understand and continually keep in mind in the concrete situation
what is neither a philosophical nor a poetic trick—namely, that the
I that this discourse concerns is the concrete I—that is, the one that
is involved in the spiritual fact that a definite man (namely, the writ-
er or reader of these lines), can say in the awareness of the spiritu-
ality of his existing: I am. Only in this concrete I is the unshakable
standpoint given together with that perspective, which is the only
correct one, which renders an identification of the I with the Thou,
of the human with the divine, absolutely impossible.
In that the I is a Thou—not becoming one by itself, through itself
and for itself—it is something divine. But in the final analysis that
means that it is the word and the love of God, which revealed them-
selves in the creation of man and the incarnation of God, which
229
turn the I into the Thou (but not the I in another merely in his hu-
manity). By this means, however, the word and the love of God have
imposed upon man an endless task, and the consciousness of its
endlessness must already fill man with humility and preserve him
from all pride about the divine in him. This endless task, which is
in accordance with the divinity of the I insofar as it is a Thou, is that
of man becoming godlike. “Be perfect, as your Father in heaven is
perfect,” demands the Sermon on the Mount. In this word the mor-
al sense [Ethos] of Christianity is expressed, and there is no spiri-
tual life in man that could ignore this moral sense without at the
same time willing its own annihilation. Yet becoming godlike is not
man’s deification.
Metaphysicians and mystics, who are always prone to identify
the divine with the human, and thereby to lose themselves in the
sphere of the imaginary, the one objectively and outwardly, the
other subjectively and inwardly, misunderstand the divinity of the
spiritual ground of human existence. The metaphysicians do so by
claiming to understand this divinity from the standpoint of the I,
while not at all being aware of the Thou—and they then dream of
the absolute and intelligible I. The mystics misunderstand divinity
by seeking it in the dissolution of the I—in which eo ipso they aban-
don the only viewpoint from which man can perceive the divine in a
spiritual sense as the true Thou of the I. When the mystic brings the
I to the brink of disappearance in the self-deception of the ecstatic
experience of God, the Thou no longer exists as well. The spiritual
in man that becomes swallowed up in itself no longer has an object
of love, and it perishes in the inner wordlessness of ecstasy.
The mystic and the metaphysician have in mind only the I in its
I-aloneness. With the I they would no doubt have the right stand-
point, but they cannot gain the right perspective because they do
not see beyond the I to the Thou. The mystic recognizes the spiri-
tual inadequacy of the I in its aloneness, but not the metaphysician,
who, once he does consider the I, deifies it. Both misunderstand
230
the essence of the true I because they disregard the significance of

its relation to the Thou, which is decisive for the existence of the I.
They abrogate the spirit of God, often without even noticing it, to
set in its place the spirit of man, which is of course made unrecog-
nizable. They do not grasp correctly the meaning of the fact that in
his spiritual existence man (who in his physical existence appears
as a mere moment in the evolution of life, the end of which he is just
as little capable of seeing as its beginning) has in God the s elf-same
beginning and goal of life.
Does not the mystic’s experience of God and beholding of God
involve a misleading use of the terms “experience” [Erleben] and
“beholding” [Schauen]? Can God be experienced and beheld? Only
the world is beheld, and man never gains a real relation to God
through his worldview, even if it be inspired and profound. Only the
world, the beauty of nature and of man, is experienced. To believe
that God is experienced in the experience of beauty, however deeply
it may move us or perhaps bring the restlessness of the spirit in us to
peace, surely constitutes a poetic-aesthetic misunderstanding and
is in itself irreligious. If man experiences God, then he experiences
him in man; not in himself as the mystic believes, but in the other
in whom man experiences the true Thou of his I. He does not, to
be sure, usually experience this Thou in his experience of man, but
rather only the I, seemingly the I of the other, and thereby the Chi-
nese wall of his own I, and thus nothing but himself once again, his
I—that is to say, simply the I. But if that is the case, it is his own fault
in a deeper, indeed the deepest sense, the fault of his I-aloneness.
And therefore let him not dispute with the other. Before the true
Thou, the finding of whom is our own concern, and not that of the
other, all of man’s claims to have rights and to be in the right cease.
Nor is God a spiritual content of feeling—in spite of the famous
passage in Faust, quoted only by those for whom God and the spir-
ituality of their lives are not a serious matter. Feeling is not some-
thing simply spiritual, nor is it a vessel in which man can inwardly
231
grasp the spiritual. In its egoism emotion is something psychologi-

cal—that is, something that presupposes the relationship of the I to
itself, thus indirectly the isolation from the Thou. Certainly there is
nothing spiritual in man that would not in some way be determined
psychologically; and conversely, there is nothing psychological in
which something spiritual would not be involved. God is not expe-
rienced in a feeling, however beautiful and deep and a ll-embracing
it may be and how subtle in its egoism. A man’s relation to God is
nothing psychological—as the psychologists, who do not even be-
lieve in God, suppose. Faith in God, this personal decision of man
for his spiritual life, is not a matter of feeling. Even the Christian
love of neighbor, which permits us to experience in man the true
Thou of the I, thus God, is not a feeling. Nothing confounds reli-
gion more than to permit poetic and aesthetic elements to trifle in
the spiritual life—and once emotion speaks and speaks a spiritual
language, one far too readily finds oneself dealing only with the po-
etical.
To the extent that man, while sinking mystically into himself
or metaphysically speculating about himself, identifies the human
with the divine and thereby loses sight of the reality of his life—
as in every imaginative excess, be it of feeling or of intellect—he
divests the reality of the divine here below of its meaning. For the
metaphysician and even finally for the mystic, the real life of Jesus
becomes rather a specific case that can nevertheless in principle be
repeated in the life of every man. That means that the demand for
the imitation of Christ is essentially misunderstood; the historical
fact of the incarnation of God, which calls for faith and which awak-
ens the man in faith to the spiritual life, becomes completely irrel-
evant. For in the ecstatic s elf-deception of his God-experience, the
mystic, so to speak, lives through the incarnation of God in himself
in a sense contrary to his becoming God—just as the metaphysi-
cian prefers to understand the divinity of Christ as the deification
of man and thus falsely understands it. And herein Eastern mysti-
232
cism, which knows nothing of the I or the life of Jesus or refuses to

learn it in any deep sense that would include the imperative of faith,
is completely in accord with Western Christian mysticism, which
proceeds from a consideration of this life, in the apprehension of the
ultimate meaning of the spiritual life in man. In his self-deification
man abrogates the reality of his earth-boundedness and the reali-
ty of time, t aking the spiritual above and below as only relative, as
does the physicist the natural above and below of concretely expe-
rienced space. This is really not to be taken otherwise and even lit-
erally, then: he wants to swindle his way out of time directly into
eternity. But the one who abrogates the reality of time—which is
situated in the restlessness of the spirit that has not yet found and
made absolutely secure the right relation to God—abrogates the re-
ality of sin. For time exists in nothing other than in the reality of
sin. Yet who can cancel sin and make it inconsequential—except
God? Of course, if man deifies himself, he consequently believes he
can cancel the reality of sin as well.
God is in man as the precondition of his spiritual life. This truth
must not be understood in that perverted direction in which, odd-
ly enough, the g od-intoxicated enthusiasm of the mystic and the
most dispassionate rationalism of the psychologist meet each oth-
er. Further, it must not be dogmatically and speculatively abused;
for it has its absolute validity only in the sphere of the personality
of the spiritual life, which takes place between the I and the Thou
and by that means establishes the right perspective for the acquisi-
tion of this truth. The existence of God, of the Thou, is obviously in
no way reduced thereby into a projection of the personality of the
I. On the contrary: precisely in the sphere of personality and never
objectively outside of it, is it revealed that God is the precondition,
and indeed the real and not merely ideal precondition, for the spiri-
tual, and that means the personal, existence of man—God exists as
something spiritual beyond the I and independent from it. And in
this sphere man understands that God created him in his own im-
233
age. For the personality of man is nothing else but theomorphism,1

but not the converse, the personality of God anthropomorphized. It
is not anthropomorphism, either, if man understands his relation
to God, as God himself wills, as a personal one, as the relation of
the I to the Thou. God as the true Thou of the I is not a mental im-
age. However, it is still a mental image to think of God as the divine
judge, even though it persistently arises from the ethical aspect of
religious life, which is not to be circumvented. So the mental image
of God is really anthropomorphism. The relationship of the I to the
Thou, in which the spiritual life of man has its true reality, does not
lie in the sphere of the life of imagination. When the latter meddles
with this relationship, it renders the spiritual life unreal, it makes
the Thou into an unreal projection of the I. There is certainly noth-
ing more human than the relationship of the I to the Thou, which is
the humanity of man in the heightened sense of the word; it is his
true humanity, not his all too—humanness—and it is therefore that
which essentially distinguishes him from the animal. There was not
at first a more or less inadequate mental image of God (and which
one would not be inadequate?) into which the Th ou-relationship
[Dubeziehung] was then inserted; rather the latter, as a fact that un-
derlies the spiritual life of man in and for itself, first made possible
in its obfuscation the mental image of God. And only to the extent
that the Th ou-relationship is grasped by man as the relationship of
his I, of the spiritual in him, to God, can it also establish the proper
and fitting relation between man and man in his actual humanity.
If one takes the truth that God is in man, which makes possible
his spiritual life, out of the sphere of personality and puts it into the
sphere of t heological-metaphysical speculation, which is objective
and impersonal, or at least appears impersonal and in any case loses
the proper perspective, it ceases to be a truth and becomes an object
of and cause for philosophical hair-splitting and dialectical quarrel-
1. This expression comes from a work of Max Scheler.
234
ing. The philosopher actually has no proper place in his worldview

for God as the Creator of all being and life, even though his philos-
ophy may very much seek God in secret; and not infrequently he
accordingly ignores God. The spiritual idleness of the question of
how God created the world out of nothing, how he maintains and
governs it, views God in the third person—that is, outside of his
personal relation to us and ours to him, where he is inconceivable to
us and remains so for all eternity. “God in the third person”—him
the imagination of man, this heavenly child fed on the earthly food
of the experience of the world, created in human image. Anthropo-
morphism is involved in it—whether it takes shape as the graphical-
ly concrete representation of God and graven image or vanishes in
a nonsensual abstraction of metaphysics—but not in the personal-
ity of God, with which we are to have a personal relation. The men-
tal construct that man makes of God and to which only the pagan
clings anxiously may be regarded as that which literally positions it-
self in us in front of God and separates us from him. At the very least
it is the inner expression of our separation and distance from God.
One must believe in God even when one is deserted by all the pow-
ers of the life of imagination, the visual no less than the intellectual.
Only then does the true relation of God to man actually begin, the
relation of the I that is itself not a mental image, but underlies every
mental image, to the Thou that stands beyond all representation.
But lest this relation, as the true relation of God to man, lose all
meaning of reality in the vacuum of a visionary abstraction, it must
find its concrete, living expression in the relation of man to man.
Man actually takes interest in the relation of God to the world,
which is in no way comprehensible to him, only when he, in being
interested in his own existence, lets the latter become anchored en-
tirely in the existence of the world instead of his whole life in his
personal relation to God, being untroubled about the doings and
happenings in this world, knowing his life is placed directly in the
hand of God. He believes that he exists not only in the world created
235
by God, but also through it. He wants to bring his faith in God into
alignment with his knowledge of the events of the world and his ei-
ther more practically or only theoretically emphasized interested-
ness in them, desiring to renounce neither the one nor the other.
The world moves between him and God, and he does not want to see
that this obstructs the view of God for him, that it hinders his per-
sonal relation to God and turns it into a seemingly m atter-of-fact,
objective relation. Perhaps the converse is the case, and this entire
world exists only in its being experienced by man, who was created
by God through the word—although it in no way exists as in itself
an unreal projection of the I. The world does not stand between man
and God, but man himself between God and the world. Man has
hidden knowledge of God in the ground of his consciousness and
being-conscious, which he does not lose in his relation to the world
(he would very much welcome this at times), although the latter re-
lation obstructs his view of God. He wants this knowledge brought
to bear and accommodated in his knowledge about the world. If the
knowledge of God is displaced and leads to that shift of perspective
from which he sees himself as existing through the world created
by God (and being interested in existing in and through it), the idle
question strikes him of how God created the world and maintains
and governs it. The glance at the world never allows him to grasp
God in his spiritual reality. In the glance, if it has not really brought
everything spiritual in man to disappearance, God is only dreamt
of—and spoken of in a religiously incoherent manner. Man has to
turn his glance away from the world; then the world will no longer
obstruct his view of God. Then he can awaken from his dream of the
spirit to the realities of the spiritual life.
236
Otto Weininger
Fragment 16
Otto Weininger—Spirit and Sexuality—
The Jews—Christ
As idealism came to its historical end, after a life that lasted almost
two thousand years, but for a long time was no longer justified, it once
more gave a sign of life, though to be sure somewhat desperate in
Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character. But the idealism of German uni-
versity professors, of such people who, speaking with Kierkegaard,
have a century or possibly even a millennium between themselves
and the shocks of life and do not fear that that sort of thing could hap-
pen again; this idealism, which sees with full optimistic confidence
an independent inwardness unfolding in the totality of the movement
of world history, truly has very little to say and was led thoroughly ad
absurdum through the entirety of the movement of world history (we
who lived through the years between 1914 and 1919 know this).
Weininger, in keeping with idealism in general, had no notion of
the realities of the spiritual life. If he had, then he would also have
had to grasp that sexuality, the opposition of the sexes, is a biolog-
ical fact and not one of the spirit; he would have had to become
aware of the sexual neutrality of everything spiritual, and he would
have spared himself the deep error of his work, perhaps even the
work itself. He did indeed see the asexuality of the spirit, but within
the opposition of man and woman in the pure man, and that means
he did not see it in its reality.
237
Otto Weininger
Since sexuality is a fact of nature, science was able to bring the

former under its control (how glad would morality be, if it were so
far advanced), transplanting the gonads of one individual into an-
other and determining its masculinity or femininity at science’s
own discretion. The ovaries and testes, from the function of which
the primary, secondary, and tertiary determination of the individu-
al arises, are only a tool in the service of organic events; sexuality is
a provision of natural life for its preservation. Therefore, the individ-
ual, who in the realization of his individuality is a fact of the spirit,
can never be simply identified with sexuality.
The sexual neutrality of the spiritual is emphatically attested
to in the gospels. It is attested to not only as a final demand of the
spiritual life in this world, which Jesus himself doubted man could
grasp, but also in these words: when men rise from the dead, they
will neither marry nor be given in marriage, but they will be like the
angels of God in heaven. In the spirituality of his existence, man
is neither male nor female; this is also documented by language,1
which is itself a creation that originated from this spirituality: the
personal pronouns of the first and second person distinguish no
sex. The I and the Thou, taken not only as pronouns, are sexless.
If one uses them as nouns, they are neuter. When Fichte says, “der
Ich” [masculinizing the I], that is not only a linguistic mistake and
against the spirit of language, but it is against the spirit itself. But
the sexual neutrality of the spiritual also comes to expression in an-
other linguistic factor that is no less significant: the Nordic form of
the word God—gudh, godh—is neuter just as the Gothic guth, while
the genus nevertheless is masculine. Kluge remarks on this point
that God in general as the word for the “addressed Being” (Sanskrit
hû), originally had a neuter word form. The spiritual is neither male
nor female; it is neither of them, it is neuter.
1. [Trans. Note]: Ebner is here describing the linguistic state of affairs for lan-
guages like German, in which nouns are classified according to gender: masculine,
feminine, and neuter, der, die, das, respectively.
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The sexual drive in man originally had just as little to do with the
I as the instinct for self-preservation. The former did not create a re-
lation to the Thou and does not presuppose one; the latter, simply
speaking, does not signify an isolation from the Thou and cannot
signify that, because it is upheld internally not by the I but by an
instinct of natural life. If these two drives assert themselves in their
primal unbrokenness and unrestrainedness, the I is simply exclud-
ed, and the Thou obviously disappears as well—man behaves like
an animal. The spiritual in man, sexless in itself, enters into relation-
ship with the sexual life—so that perhaps every man seeks to real-
ize in his relation to woman the relation of his I to the Thou. This is
quite in order if it is intended seriously and not in any poetic-erotic
way. Then there is the love of the poets—and many persons imagine
that they have to love like poets when they have a relationship to the
opposite sex; this love of the poets, for which they must be blamed,
is always a misunderstanding, on the one hand in relation to wom-
an, on the other hand to the spirit.2 That in the relationship of the
spiritual to the sexual both influence each other is not inconceiv-
able. The former seeks to express itself in the latter and in this way
also to determine it; but it thereby runs into danger of sacrificing it-
self. It alienates the sexual from its natural determination and itself
from its spiritual determination. That the spiritual, in the state of its
I-aloneness and seclusion before the Thou, interferes with the sex-
ual life eventuates in nothing else but its breaking and perversion.
The root of the various sexual perversions is not to be sought in the
natural but in the spiritual life, even if the element of somatic com-
pliance (as with insanity)—namely, that of an organic inferiority
of the sexual apparatus—plays, as it were, the role of facilitating or
2. Let it also be noted that the German word Weib [woman] is strikingly neuter:
does it not sound as if the male [Mann] once had the need to neutralize sexuality
and the antagonism of the sexes? In Kluge’s dictionary Weib is related to the Sanskrit
vip = to inspire, to be inwardly excited (of priests). And it is further noted there that
the Teutons consequently created the term Weib because they venerated in Weib the
sanctum aliquid et providum.
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provoking the interference of the spiritual and is psychologically ex-

ploited. Perversions are a misguided attempt of individual existence
to uproot itself from the life of the generation—that is, from the
natural life. In his writing about Otto Weininger’s death, Hermann
Swoboda maintained that there is mere sensuality only where there
is spirit. He meant sexual sensuality, the sensuality of the sexual life
in man broken by the interference of the spiritual.
Even enmity of the sexes takes its root in the spirit, and in that
enmity the opposition of spirit and sensuality finds expression. And
since sexuality and thereby the opposition of the sexes is empha-
sized almost more strongly in sexual enmity than in sexual attrac-
tion, instead of being canceled in the spirit, the spiritual that is los-
ing its way misunderstands itself in the enmity. Possibly underlying
it as a facet of the man is the failure of the relation of his I to the
Thou in the woman—which is not at all the fault of the woman, but
of the man. The antifeminism of the psychologist is readily inclined
to see in the enmity of the woman the coming to light of her sexual
dissatisfaction but in the enmity of the man the manifestation of his
spiritual dissatisfaction. In any case, the brokenness of life and es-
pecially of the sexual life also plays a part in the enmity of the sexes;
and the spiritual always participates in the brokenness of life, which
psychology does not always understand rightly, and often even
downright misunderstands. The brokenness of life has a charac-
teristic ambiguity in its relationship to the spirit. On the one hand,
it is the possibly unavoidable precondition for the nullification in
the spirit of sexual opposition. But on the other hand, it threatens
to bring about the downfall of the spiritual life. Sexuality, precisely
in its brokenness in man, is and remains the abyss into which the
spiritual is in danger of being lost. There is perhaps no lostness of
the spirit and no spiritual forlornness of man, be it in madness, be it
in crime, in which the annihilating powers of the broken sexual life
would not have had a hand.
The more spiritual a man is, the more he suffers from his sexual-
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ity as long as sexuality, one could say, has not yet been neutralized
through the rebirth of his existence in the spirit. Swoboda called the
combat between spirit and sensuality the occupational hazard of ge-
nius. But the genius is not the only one afflicted by it.
It is true after all: sexual man needs the erotic illusion. How
could he—as man, in the spirituality of his essence—tolerate the
physiological experience of his sexuality without it? Yet it is his
dream of the spirit that sexuality shrouds in the veil of erotic illu-
sion. If he awakens from it, must not the veil be torn and his sexual-
ity, for quite some time now no longer unbroken, stand before him
as pure physiological experience without psychic ingredients and
poetic euphemisms? From the perspective of the spirit, sexuality
demands marriage in its indissolubility—this violation of nature by
the spirit—or it becomes sin. Natural man, who dreams of the spirit
but does not awaken to its realities, surely knows nothing of sin. He
feels absolved from it through nature. And herein he deceives him-
self. For there is no innocence of the senses with the adult man—
but only with the child, to whom the sexual is still foreign.
The deeper poets know it, and subsequent to them psychologists
and psychoanalysts have also realized in their own way that the de-
sire of man for woman is nothing else but the longing for the moth-
er; that man seeks in woman the mother, his future children, but his
own children, and that he loves them and the remembrance of them
in woman. Behind his sexuality—this face of Janus, which gazes at
once into both the future and the past—lurks the yearning for secu-
rity found in the womb, an element that is incompatible with its nat-
uralness. This may even be connected in some way with the biolog-
ically given element of a fixed weakness of the masculine individual
already situated in the seed. In this way something ambiguous and
self-contradictory enters into masculine sexuality. For on the one
hand, the man seeks the renewal of his life, of his earthly life, when
he sexually desires the woman; he wants to go to gaîa, the mother
earth from which all earthly life issued, mamma, as the Tatars called
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Otto Weininger
the earth. The secret yearning for security in the womb that is in-
volved here, however, is nothing else but the need for withdrawal
[Zurücknahme] from earthly life: never to have been born is by far
the best. Here a spiritual need supported by biological elements
finds expression—but does not understand itself. It has given itself
a false direction by interfering in the sexual sphere.
Who could say outside of woman herself whether an element of
her spiritual life has not gone astray in her sexual desire as well, and
what this might mean? Yet she keeps silent.
�
Weininger drew a consequence of idealism that no one had correct-
ly attended to before him (and there in any case lies the real signifi-
cance of his work): antifeminism. Idealism is something thorough-
ly masculine; the conception of the idea is a spiritual act that takes
place in its originality and purity only in the spirit of the man, never
in the spirit of the woman. To speak of a female genius is simply a
misunderstanding. But if genius (which always spiritually presup-
poses the conception of the idea, or musical intuition, of the idea
above all in its aesthetic and metaphysical meaning) is something
masculine, then that also means it is in the last analysis not a fact of
the spiritual, but of the natural life—which idealism, and least of all
Weininger’s brand, does not grasp. Certain anatomical and physi-
ological elements, thus elements of the natural life, actually do be-
long to the conditions of works of creative genius. Genius is a fact of
nature on its way to the spirit, on this way that has never reached its
end, never attained its goal. But let it not be forgotten that we move
into the sphere of the aesthetic and the metaphysical when we speak
of genius, and if we speak of the spirit there, we really do not know
what we are talking about. Nature encounters the spiritual life of
genius and must do so, or else no creation of genius is possible. But
nature does not ever encounter the true spiritual life of a man—un-
less it were that one wanted to see nature’s encounter in the fact that
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it breaks into pieces. But that is something that the power and grace
of God, which raises the dead to life, can have no part of.
The spirituality of idealism sets the spirit against sexuality, yet is
totally caught up in this antagonism, and therefore even stresses it
when it becomes conscious of the antifeminism inherent in itself. It
overcomes neither sexuality nor the opposition of the sexes; rather,
it deepens and perpetuates the latter. The male becomes the prin-
ciple of the spiritual in general; but the female as such it excludes
from the spirit and from the emergence of man and simply drives
her down into a sexual being. Antifeminism is the demeanor of an
unfree spirit, which the chains of sexuality still secretly oppress;
that means of a spirit that has thus not yet entered its true life and
true freedom in the spirit. If idealism reveals its antifeminism, it
loses itself in the problem of the sexes (which is on the one hand
a biological and, on the other, in the case of man, an essentially
psychological problem), and the spirit feels itself standing before
a danger against which it is not able to do other than assert itself
in desperate exertion. Even the most profound metaphysics of the
relationship between the sexes remains stuck in the psychological
sphere—and psychology never advances to the spirit, a nd, howev-
er spiritual its demeanor may appear to be, with which it concerns
itself about unveiling the nothingness of the feminine psyche, it is
still more a demeanor of sexuality than the spirit. In antifeminism
the man hates his own sexuality because he has not yet spiritual-
ly overcome it, because the spirituality of his existence, which goes
astray in sexuality, remains stuck in it. And he hates woman, in the
second place, because she admonishes him for the inadequacy of his
spiritual life, which is his responsibility. Since antifeminism at all
events never fully understands itself in this, it therefore furnishes an
object of attack for psychological criticism.
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Otto Weininger
In the case of Weininger the principle of a nti-Semitism goes hand

in hand with antifeminism, the former being based on a misunder-
standing not less than the latter. It can and must be admitted, no
matter how painful it may be to a Jew to know that this kind of judg-
ment is being passed on him or even to acknowledge it: the Jew is
just as little a genius as the woman. Neither in the conception of the
idea nor in musical intuition does he dream the dream of humanity
of the spirit. He can still place himself into an abstract relation to
the former and may comprehend much through his eminent con-
ceptual gifts, capability and audacity, for which Weininger’s work is
itself a proof. But the Jew does not at all know what spiritually to
make of the latter. He is (in spite of all the singing and music-making
and composing of today) the most unmusical and musically alien
man, and, after the music of the West had begun with Beethoven, he
only moved further from its spiritual origin in musical intuition and
forced from its inwardness the superficiality of tumult and noise so
as to finally become, in the case of Wagner and Strauss, completely
alien to music’s origin and hence unmusical. Only then did he gain
the courage to pursue and even to compose music. Since the Jews in
their innate ungenius cannot creatively dream with humanity the
dream of the spirit, they prove themselves to be the appointed crit-
ics of idealism, although their critique eventuates in a wrong out-
come. In spite of that, it may be the spiritual task of Judaism to assist
in the destruction of this dream and, for the man of the white race,
to tear the final threads of idealism, long threadbare, from the body
of his culture, which is disgraceful in its clichés and lies. That the
Jew is not a genius can and must not be credited to him as a spiri-
tual deficiency. Precisely because he is not and consequently is not
tempted to dream of the spirit, he stands by nature near the reali-
ty of the spiritual life. The Jews are the most spiritual, they are the
chosen people of God. God revealed himself to them directly in his
spiritual reality, and in the natural life of their race he became man
to redeem us and awaken us to the reality of our spiritual life. Sal-
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Otto Weininger
vation comes from the Jews, the Gospel of John tells us. The Jews
once lived spiritually on the messianic promise and hope (as a gen-
eration: and thus they live today), just as the other nations and gen-
erations of the earth lived spiritually on their dream of the spirit.
Yet to become Christ means to be completely uprooted from the life
of the generation, not only its natural, but also its spiritual life. “But
to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave the pow-
er to become children of God; who were born, not of blood nor of
the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (Jn 1:12–13).
The Jews were unable to do that, and they therefore rejected Christ.
But neither has Western man been able to do that, and therefore
he has not given up his dream of the spirit, conceived so brilliantly
by the Greeks. Rather, Western man took the incarnation of God
itself—this fact of history that is decisive for the reality of the spiri-
tual life—right into this dream and de-real-ized it in endless meta-
physical speculations and in the works of an art that call themselves
Christian. Is it any wonder that the dream of the spirit was dreamt
again and again with a bad conscience, which has not ever under-
stood itself rightly?
In one of Kierkegaard’s works it is said that man must live either
poetically or religiously, or he lives foolishly. That the gravity of the
spiritual life may not be present in poetic existence can only be per-
ceived religiously. Asserted from a different standpoint (that of the
citizen, for example, or the politician), it would not only not be true,
but it would also be an attack against the spirit. Now, that the Jew is
not a genius does not mean that a poet’s existence may be ruled out
for him, or that his existence would simply be a comedy played be-
fore the world. Though he can live poetically, a remarkable circum-
stance obtains with such a Jewish poetic existence, which one does
not understand as long as everything spiritual is understood only
aesthetically: namely, it reveals directly that the seriousness of the
spiritual life is not in such an existence. It is not because the Jew is
not a genius and therefore is unable to treat the poetic seriously; but
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Otto Weininger
rather because, in the depths of his heart that can be hidden even
from him, and by nature, he assumes the standpoint of the religious,
which makes it impossible to take the poetic-aesthetic seriously.
And that is the reason he is more capable than any other man of im-
mense spiritual betrayal and profound irreligiousness. The specifi-
cally Jewish religiosity, which once included a real relation to God,
is in the extremely embarrassing position, certainly since the death
of Christ, of having become untruth.
Between the so-called Aryan and the Jew there ultimately exists
only the distinction that the latter have already been for more than
two millennia—without perishing thereby—that which the former
will inevitably become when they perish. The Jew is not guilty of the
much lamented increasing Jewish influence in the life of the spirit
in the West—both a spiritual and a biological symptom of decay,
which had its first symptom in romanticism, this dream of dreams
of the spirit. The Jewish race actually appears as a biological phe-
nomenon of decay. The remarkable thing is only that they still have
not disappeared from the earth, as Theodor Haecker has pointed
out. To live as the Jews have lived, no nation could endure for even
two hundred years. But they have lived thus ten times as long, be-
cause, though abandoned by the creative powers of nature, they
were borne directly by the spirit—as generation, and as such, the
only one in the world. Their permanence in the world, which cannot
be explained biologically, gives testimony to the reality of the spirit.
They are still the chosen people of God, though since Christ in a
contrary sense.
From time to time woman seduces the spiritual man into anti-
feminism, the Jew into a nti-Semitism. But let one not be led astray
into such a position of the spirit, which is always false. The Aryan
will always have to suffer from the Jew—who knows, after all, how
much time is still allotted to him to suffer? He should rightly under-
stand this suffering and himself in it. He must not seek to make it
easier through his a nti-Semitism. Let him take up this cross as well.
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Otto Weininger
�
The most serious mistake of the idealism of Weininger, once again
founded in idealism generally, is his apprehension of the life and the
personality of Jesus. If a philosopher were ever to understand him-
self in his philosophy, he would be forced to see himself in the worst
embarrassment through this life and the word of this life. He would
have to be clearly aware that if the word and life of Jesus are true, if
he should believe that they are the truth, he would be finished with
philosophy, if not with thought itself. Not wanting to salvage phi-
losophy and metaphysics does not in any way mean ceasing to be
a thinker. Philosophy is in truth only a path through the kingdom
of the spirit, opened by God unless countermanded, which man
traverses if he is a genius, but through which he cannot reach the
destination of his spiritual life. Something in Weininger insisted
on a completely wrong path to Christianity, and in the despair of
this urging, hidden even to him, he did not know what else to do in
order to gain a relation with Christ and to his word than to under-
stand him as genius, though as a quite special type. Now if Jesus had
been a genius, then his life would signify nothing essentially differ-
ent from that of every other man who in the e arth-boundedness of
his existence dreams the dream of the spirit; his word would not be
the absolutely binding word of God, which begets the spiritual life
in its reality; his death on the cross would have been madness, a fol-
ly not only in the eyes of the Greeks.
The spiritual life of Jesus, however, was not the concern of an
individual existence in its I-aloneness, as is the case with every ge-
nius, but rather the direct opposite. To call Jesus a genius is blas-
phemy. And when a journalist subsequently ventured to call him a
captivating idealist, it was the involution of his blasphemy, which
later turned into the ridiculous (as is so readily possible in connec-
tion with everything blasphemous) when a newspaper columnist
babbled enthusiastically about the “poet from Nazareth,” who was
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Otto Weininger
a “greater poet than Shakespeare.” These are signs of the times, in

which all standards of value have become lost in spiritual decline
and chaos. What a dreadful blunder Weininger made by calling the
greatest comedian who has ever been able to impress an unspiritual
humanity as a genius, “the greatest human after Christ.” Especial-
ly since this comedian is by no means a genius. And when he sug-
gested that the “most magnificent” sayings of Jesus (was the word
of Jesus ever magnificent?) were undoubtedly lost because the syn-
optic evangelists did not understand them and thus could not retain
them, it is just as much the expression for the typical misunder-
standing of idealism v is-á-vis the life and word of Jesus as for spiri
tual loneliness and spiritlessness. It also has the word of Jesus him-
self against it, which states, what is hidden to the wise and learned
is revealed to infants and little children. Of course, many sayings
of Christ may not have been handed down to us. But what we have
lost thereby does not come into question. For only this is decisive:
that we find in the transmitted words of Jesus the orientation and
deliverance of our spiritual life, provided that a life of the spirit is of
great consequence to us. And in view of this, one may well say that
man has lost nothing in that which was not handed down to us of
Christ’s sayings.
Never through philosophy, which, to speak in Kierkegaard’s con
text, by speculating wants to remove the element of scandal cru-
cial for faith, in order to not have to submit to the life and word of
Jesus; never through an intuition of genius, but only through faith
does man gain the right relation to Christ, who is the true object
of faith, because all faith must go through faith in him. Weininger
has reduced and by that means emptied the inner fact of faith into
faith in the principle of identity, which he traces back to the faith
of man in himself, which is in itself nonsensical. Precisely for this
reason it eludes Weininger in his philosophical and idealistic preju
dice that to believe in the divinity of the life of Jesus does not and
cannot mean to see in him the deification of man—which actual-
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Otto Weininger
ly demands no faith at all, but doubtless presupposes the concep-

tion of the idea of the divine. The opposite is instead the case, and
then literally, that in Jesus the incarnation of God has come to pass,
which eo ipso demands faith and abolishes for all time the idea of
the divine and idealism in general. Since Weininger sought to enter
into a relation to Christ through philosophy, instead of abandoning
before him all philosophy without hesitation, he saw in Christ on
the one hand the idea of the deification of man, and on the other
hand, in regard to the historical Christ, a genius who had realized
this idea (but in his view, perhaps just nearly realized it). In glimps-
ing the deification of man in Christ or in anyone else, a man has not
awakened from his dream of the spirit to the reality of the spiritual
life, because such a view presupposes the conception of the idea of
the divine. He cannot emerge from the I-aloneness of his existence
and enter into a relation to the Thou, to God in his spiritual reality;
he persists in the condition of his h aving-fallen-from-God and even
perpetuates it.
The incarnation of God is the entry [Einsatz] of his personality
into the life of this world and into the word; since there is some-
thing in the word that must be believed, the incarnation implies the
requirement of faith, the fulfillment of which signifies once again
the installation of personality into human existence. The faith of
man in this personality is, in its ultimate and truest sense, the faith
in the word—in the logos, who demands faith in his divinity. Faith,
which is the personal decision of man for the spirituality of his ex-
istence—and that means for its personality—arouses the latter and
helps toward its breakthrough. As Jesus says in the Gospel of John,
“Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me has eternal life.”
The incarnation of God, which had become absolute in the cry of
Jesus on the cross, “Eli Eli lama sabachthani” (this most horrible cry
that ever came from the mouth of a living being in this world, and
that made the earth tremble), is the greatest mystery in the events of
the world and can never be grasped except in faith. The man, how-
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ever, who gains a real relation to God through this faith, which is
put to the test in his relation to man, will not be lonely in the alone-
ness of his hour of death, for God will be with him. If the incarna-
tion of God is nevertheless to be really believed, not merely with the
mouth and with words and in abstract thoughts, of which the heart
knows nothing, then man must, as it were, go through the complete
humanity of Jesus and must make it actual for himself in every mo-
ment of his life. He must not begin with the divinity in order to be-
lieve and to understand from it the humanity of this life in order to
come to the humanity via the divinity—then he would once more
be clearly in the domain of the idea, of metaphysical speculation,
of daydreams, which removes him just as much from the reality of
his own existence as from that of Jesus. He would bring to bear his
mental image, his idea of the divine, and it would turn out in the
final analysis that he did not believe in the incarnation of God at all,
but rather the opposite, in the deification of man—that is, that his
faith is no faith at all.
The divinity of Jesus must be believed unconditionally in the
most unique meaning it can have without being idealistically and
imaginatively misunderstood, must be believed unconditionally, for
there is no single external aspect from which it could be deduced.
Even the miracles of Jesus, the healing of the sick, the multiplica-
tion of the loaves, the raising of the dead, even his own resurrection,
the factuality of which must in no way be called into question, do
not directly bear witness to it. For from them we learn above all
only that Jesus, as the Protestant theologian Daab similarly argued,
stood in a relation to nature and to the events in it that had a com-
pletely different constitution than that which we have, or even than
that which we can understand by means of scientific knowledge.
Another incarnated man could also gain the same relation to nature
to bring about the same miracles from it. But it is not in and for it-
self proof and testimony of divinity in a literal, not at all ideal, sense.
Faith and miracles have much less to do with each other than it ap-
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pears at first glance. There are miracles really only in relation to the
limitedness of our intrinsically relative knowledge and empirical
experience of nature, ultimately in relation to the inner limitedness
of our life and experience, which is doubtless never to be overcome.
It is then a question of the concept of the possible and the impossi-
ble. A miracle would be that which is impossible in itself—that is, in
no way conceivable, and yet in spite of that, is actual. In this sense
there are indeed miracles—but not in nature, where man usually
seeks them and wants exclusively to see them, but in the life of the
spirit. We must see such a miracle, for instance, in God’s forgiving
the sins of men, or in the divine love encircling even the most un-
worthy of men (of course, who would be worthy of it?). And these
miracles must be believed in not simply on their own basis, but on
the strength of the word of Jesus.
Possibility is a design in the thought of man. The impossible is
only that which cannot be reconciled with the laws of thought; rath-
er, it is placed outside validity, thereby nullifying thinking. But the
impossible is not that which appears to stand in contradiction to the
so-called laws of nature—that is, to our limited insight into the con-
nection of events in nature. That God could have raised up children
for Abraham from stones obviously does not harmonize with our
empirical knowledge and experience; but it does not, however, con-
tradict our laws of thought. With God everything is possible; and it
is man who thinks in terms of the possible. He thinks the possible
(and it is possible, even though we cannot grasp how, that the five
thousand were fed with five loaves, that the dead were raised, etc.),
but the unbelief in him bids man at the same moment to withdraw
the thought again, to conceive the possible as impossible. The belief
in the miracles of Jesus is unimportant insofar as we have to believe
in him and his divinity even if he had not performed them. Since he
did perform them, we have to believe in them as well. Yet we do not
really believe in them, but in the divinity of Jesus; and we believe in
it not because he worked miracles, but rather because we, being per-
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sonally engaged, believe in him and in his word, which calls for faith
in his divinity and promises us the salvation of our spiritual life in
this faith and through it. Faith in Christ, in whom we have our spir-
itual life in its reality and truth, is and cannot be other than faith in
the word, which is to be understood here directly and literally.
The spirit of Christianity requires of man faith in the incarna-
tion of God in the life of Jesus. No one becomes a Christian with-
out the inner fulfillment of this requirement. But it must also have
a meaning for the practice of human life that is to be stated without
recourse to metaphysical and theological speculation. And it is this:
to believe in the incarnation of God means to see in Jesus the Way,
the Truth, and the Life, and in his word the prescription, absolutely
binding for every person, of how man would have to live in order to
live the right life, which every person feels in the depths of his heart
he does not live. If man inwardly fulfills this requirement of faith in
the only meaning that it can have (and only therein does he have the
true inwardness of his life), then his life in this world, which tempts
him day by day and hour by hour to live without Christ and beyond
him, and to risk his settlement of accounts with God all by himself,
has received a rupture from which it suffers in the eyes of the world.
Yet he then also knows that God is and what God is and the mystery
of his life is revealed to him. Then only does he stand before the true
problems of his spiritual life, the solution of which is the unending
task of his life.
An inner pause between belief in God and in his incarnation
cannot and must not be made—in which man himself, as it were,
takes the time to decide for the latter after reflecting on the former.
Both belong essentially and inseparably together. The one who does
not believe in the incarnation of God does not believe in God and
cannot believe in him at all. That is, he lives spiritually in essence
as a pagan and has not overcome the unbelief that lies in the human
spirit. Before Christ, no one could actually believe in God in his re-
ality and have a spiritually real relation to him, with the exception,
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Otto Weininger
of course, of the Jews. Since the life of Jesus, however, everything

is completely different. And the Jews, because they rejected Christ,
have forfeited their first real relation to God; and their messianic
hope, without which they would not have continued to exist in the
world at all has now become a dream of the spirit, which is probably
conceived in a manner too worldly.
Along with the belief in the incarnation of God in the life of Je-
sus—which retrospectively calls for the belief in the chosenness
of the Jewish people through the messianic promise—belongs the
belief in the future return of Christ at the end of the world. In the
belief in the divinity of Jesus, time is posited [gesetzt] in the infinite
meaning of the present, of the moment; but it is also posited as the
past and the future, in a reality that Kant’s transcendental aesthetic,
which really only concerns abstract time, truly rattles in vain. The
positing of time as future, however, is precisely the faith in the re-
turn of Christ. No man knows the day and the hour. May one dare
to conjecture, without desiring to penetrate sacrilegiously into the
mystery of the divine decree, what mankind will have become when
that day (which no one knows) arrives, wherein mankind comes
to its end? It always seems as if (in times, the coming and going of
which is perhaps actually subject to a law of periodicity, which is ob-
viously valid only biologically), whenever an individual generation
is in danger of losing the breath of life, the faith in the imminent
return of Christ is especially alive in the hearts of many. Possibly
underlying this s elf-deception is the premonition of a state of af-
fairs that is not actually wrong. That generation cannot exist in the
world without the dream of the spirit. It does not awake from the
dream; only the individual does, and for the purpose of making the
final decision of his existence—for or against God. If an individu-
al generation outlives its dream of the spirit, the spiritual condition
of its continued existence in the world (and that is possible), then
nothing else remains for it, unless the natural will of the generation
be broken, but to destroy its biological, political, and economic con-
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Otto Weininger
ditions of existence in a black and desperate craving for chaos and

self-annihilation, to which it is quite helplessly subject. One day,
however, mankind as the actual totality of nations and generations
will have dreamt its dream of the spirit through to its end and will
have exhausted all the possibilities of its dream. For these possibili-
ties are not endless, and in their limitedness are subject to the gene-
sis and demise of all natural events in the world. And then mankind,
not only in his individual instance but as a generation, having ar-
rived at its end, will awake from its dream, a nd that is the moment
of the return of Christ. With the end of mankind comes the end of
the world. This is all conjecture, and whether the situation will be
thus, only God knows.
That God in his incarnation gave us the true object of faith,
which saves us and awakens us to the spiritual life, was and is the
revelation of his divine love. This love, however, which created man
for a spiritual life—that is to say, situated the personality of exist-
ing in him—could obviously not again revoke the personal freedom
of this spiritual life. For that reason, the personal decision of man
in faith did not become unnecessary after the incarnation of God,
but on the contrary—only through this means was it made relevant.
The life and word of Jesus bring and compel man to his spiritual de-
cision, whether or not he wills it. Yet Jesus himself said, he who is
not for me is against me. Hence, one who forgoes the decision has
just thereby already decided—against Christ (because he makes his
decision like most people, who do not know what to make of their
own personality, who mount it in the wrong place, or make no use
of their own personality whatsoever). Yet one also thereby decides
against himself, against the personality that is the spirituality of his
existence, even though he may maintain it in a semblance of exis-
tence right up to the moment of his own death.
There is only one religion, and that is something divine, not
human—Christianity. Only in it can man gain a real relation to
God. All other religions are that in name only, being mere human
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Otto Weininger
attempts at religion, human and therefore inherently unsuccessful

attempts to elevate the spirit to God. For how can they ever succeed
in the e arth-boundedness of our existence, in which the force and
gravity of the fall from God pulls us downward again and again, if
God himself does not come to help us? And he has come to help us.
If one takes away the faith in the incarnation of God from Christi-
anity, which is to be understood literally, or if one misunderstands
the divinity of the life of Jesus in a contrarian mystical sense, then
man stands just as spiritually helpless as in paganism—although
his pride of the spirit does not permit him to perceive that at first.
No doubt the Greek did not himself feel helpless, but only because
he did not recognize the danger of his spiritual lostness. And with-
out Christ and the faith in him we are not only without any direc-
tion, but are also spiritually lost. For man in his dark desire is by
no means conscious of the right way. If one leaves out of account
the divinity of Jesus in Christianity—taken in the sense in which
God is revealed to us as spiritual reality, and that calls for faith
from us—one again dreams the old dream of the spirit. Man may
one day awake from it. But then, this awakening without Christ is
something horrifying: the spiritual lostness of our existence as a fait
accompli.
The dazzling sagacity and truly astonishing profoundness of
Otto Weininger, this veritable ultimate philosopher of Idealism,
failed to grasp and understand any of this. He was a sign of a time
that should make obvious, in the most frightful manner, what
becomes of mankind when it dares to ignore the life and word of
Christ, living without faith and without love.
255
The Ultimate Meaning of the Cogito
Fragment 17
The Ultimate Meaning of the Cogito—
Self-Knowledge—Ethos and Grace—
Sin and the Word
In no other sphere than that of the ethical and religious is the spir-
ituality of our existence to be grasped in general, and in particular
in the I -aloneness of the human spirit in its true meaning (and both
belong inseparably together: for there is no religion without moral
sense, and an unshakable moral sense that has not found its point
of support in the religious sphere is not conceivable). And one will
misunderstand this I-aloneness as long as one does not discern in it
the fall of man from God. Its understanding, furthermore, may be
destined to play a role in philosophy and science—namely, the role
of an agent that drives toward self-consciousness. The true critique
of knowledge must apply its lever at the fact that all objective think-
ing—mathematics and natural science, as well as philosophy and
theology—takes its root in I -aloneness in order to take the cogito to
its ultimate meaning. And that meaning is not s elf-knowledge, but
the knowledge of sin, without which there is no way to God for man.
Yet that means the nullification of the objectivity of knowledge and
its turning back into the subjective. For sin can never, not in all eter-
nity, be discerned objectively (of one man by another); if man dis-
cerns it in himself, that already presupposes his faith. Yet faith can-
cels sin—for it is the absolution of the spirit. Here, moreover, the
256
intellect of man comes to a halt before the element of the transtem-

porality of spiritual life, which cannot be comprehended by him,
before the unsolvable paradox that sin, which lies in time and con-
stitutes it, and faith do not stand in temporal relation to each other.
They stand in no genetic succession, for faith does not come from
sin, and sin does not come from faith. But neither are they near one
another nor in one another at one and the same moment, although
they are nevertheless next to one another in the same moment of
consciousness. Sin, which is actually unbelief, and this unbelief are
in turn caught up in time and cannot escape it, presupposes faith for
its recognition—to recognize it means it becomes a fact in the con-
sciousness of man of himself, so that no one could know anything
of his sin without faith. Yet faith cancels sin, though again, this can-
cellation and wiping out of sin cannot be separated directly and ob-
jectively in the consciousness of man of himself. Without faith, man
knows nothing of sin; yet its forgiveness must be believed, and if it
is not believed, that is the sin. There is no sin in itself, but only sin in
man. There are thus no objectively determined actions that would
be sin in themselves, in their objectivity, but only those in which man
discerns his sin, consequently in their subjective determination.
Man discerns his mortal sin in that action through which he makes
impossible—and not only from frailty, absentmindedness, and
thoughtlessness—his spiritual life, his relation to God. He discerns
it, that is to say, in that action in which he consciously and deliber-
ately affirms and approves of his fall from God, the I -aloneness of
his existence, the original sin. In this he also affirms and approves of
the temporal relativity of his life. Is not knowledge of mortal sin to
be understood in a profound sense as prognosis, as cautionary prog-
nosis?
That which stands most of all in the way of man coming to faith,
and through faith to the knowledge and forgiveness of sin, is the
good opinion that he has of himself—actually that faith in himself
that in the final analysis is nothing else but the true perversion of
257
faith. If Rousseau meant that man is good by nature, that is simply

false. Nature is neither good nor evil, and it in no way provides a
yardstick for good and evil, but only for the useful and the detri-
mental, the pleasant and the unpleasant. For that reason, no eth-
ics can be determined by nature. Yet this is right: everyone has by
nature a good opinion of himself, which he does not want to relin-
quish at any price, and which is also the reason he understands in
inverted fashion, aesthetically instead of ethically, the feeling that
remains unfamiliar to no man, that the life he is living is neverthe-
less not the right one (this feeling is surely a clear sign of the spirit
in man). He therefore does not understand himself in this feeling.
Here we encounter the monstrous contradiction of existence in
man, which is only conquered by that recklessness with which one
takes seriously enough life in this world, but lightly the voice of the
spirit in oneself. On the one hand, every person is inclined, precise-
ly because he has a good opinion of himself by nature, to live his
life in contradiction to that feeling, as something in which every-
thing may be completely all right and in order, and even to live be-
fore others in this way and finally even before himself because one
so frequently exists alone with oneself before others. And if one day
everything is not all right, then the disorder comes of course from
without. To be sure, one only pretends with more or less personal
dexterity that everything is all right; it is at the same time, howev-
er, also the psychological presupposition for all self-assertion in life
and in the world that is distant from God. The monstrous contradic-
tion is that the spiritual life in man and his will to assert himself in
the world are founded upon inner presuppositions that oppose each
other. To come to his true spiritual life, man must drink to the full-
est extent the feeling of not living the right life. But that means his
will to assert himself in the world must be broken. That and nothing
else is demanded by the gospel. He must go to the ultimate basis of
this feeling—and that resides in the I-aloneness of his existence and
in the spiritual untenability of this state—in order to rightly un-
258
derstand this feeling and himself in it. He must relinquish the good
opinion of himself that is natural to him, and in so doing he must
pull out from under his own feet the natural ground and soil of hu-
man existing in the world. Only one who awakens to the reality of
the spiritual life can do this without spiritual injury.
We see here once again that idealism is a spiritual position of
natural man only, in which the latter has his entire humanity, but
which must still be overcome by the spirit. Idealism originates in
the spiritual neediness of human existence, which it again masks;
and it actually hinders the rebirth, the renewal of life in the spirit.
He who makes idealism aesthetically his worldview and ethically
his philosophy of life has to have personal ethical assurance in him-
self, even if there be only a final vestige unaffected by the discrepan-
cy between idea and reality—which always underlies the concep-
tion of both the aesthetic and the ethical idea as inner experiential
fact. But he who wants to live the life of the spirit, the life in which
the spirit is not only dreamt of, as in idealism, must give up even
this final vestige of personal ethical assurance, because it is a human
self-deception toward which idealism inevitably misleads us; and he
has to overcome both ethical and aesthetic idealism, together with
idealism’s personal presuppositions in man. He who sees himself in
the light of an idea even if he has overstretched it to the idea of the
divine is nowhere near seeing himself, and above all he does not un-
derstand himself, as does the one who sees his existence in relation
to God (who is a spiritual reality), who places his I in relation to the
Thou and in this relation comes to full consciousness of himself.
Self-knowledge is actually in essence a demand of the idealistic
ethos and hence should not be put into immediate practice in the
spirit and ethos of Christianity. When Luke’s Gospel (17:3) states,
“Be on your guard!,” watch yourselves, something entirely different
is demanded of man than in “Know thyself ”; a more concrete power
of his mind is challenged than the power of knowing, which appears
somewhat abstract. Idealism is pride of the spirit, as is also the ide-
259
alistic ethos. And pride lies also in self-knowledge. Yet man does not
usually realize this—because he does not take heed as the gospel in-
sists, because he does not attend carefully to himself. In the pride of
his self-knowledge man has no knowledge of grace—for to be aware
of grace requires humility—and he closes himself from love, in
which abides the genuine humility of the spirit. Nor is pride really
able to spare him from the debasement of his existence and life; on
the contrary, pride comes all the more to expression in such debase-
ment. Even this is still pride: if man understands the incomplete-
ness of his life as sin (and he cannot do that as long as there is no
ethical reflection in him; and in wishful thinking he therefore lives
aesthetically at cross purposes with the meaning of life), but does
not emerge from his I -aloneness in the consciousness of the ethos
of his existence. And in this pride he is spiritually lost—while being
driven irretrievably into the arms of desperate self-destruction, or a
no-less-desperate self-deception.
�
The more idealism deepens, the more decisively it urges man to
spiritually stand entirely on his own, to permit the ethos of life to be
found in himself, in the fact of individual existence. And idealism
can deepen only in its turning toward the ethical, no matter how
metaphysically profound the aesthetic worldview of idealism may
seem. Yet it is in no way consistent in this urge, nor can it be. For
idealism is never able to lift individual existence completely out of
the life of the generation; it is not spiritually able to bring individu-
ality to realization. Even ethical idealism seeks in the end to return
to the generation and presupposes the latter. For it always requires
faith in humanity, without which it would have to become nihilism.
And it requires faith in the sense that it expects the realization of
the idea from the life of the generation, whose conception includes
the demand for self-realization—but individual existence is not
sufficient proof of the generation’s fulfillment. And for this reason
260
Kant says, by way of example, as the only rational creature on the

earth, those talents that are geared for the employment of his reason
could not have developed in man in the individual, but only in the
species. Yet that means nothing other than that the much-praised
individualism of idealistic ethics is only an apparent one, no matter
how much it may see the ethos ultimately required of universal life
to be spiritually rooted nowhere else but in the autonomous reason
of the individual. It means that in idealistic ethics man ultimately
receives the ethos of his life from the life of the generation—if he
does not want to fall victim to spiritual s elf-destruction in the with-
drawal of the idea or to lose sight of the personal reality of existence
in its ethical inadequacy and brokenness in a metaphysical and vi-
sionary straying from oneself. But the ethos of universal life finally
loses itself, over and above all the theories of the philosophers, in
the practice of ethical relativism. Universal life allows the element
of personality in human existence only its temporal meaning; it
does not trouble about the transtemporal, eternal meaning. But that
also means universal life seeks to, if not destroy, at least to fully sub-
jugate the spiritual in man. We see here the tendency of natural life
in operation, which is indifferent to individual existence. The life
of the generation gives optimism to the individual who surrenders
himself to it; but it demands that back from him. In his optimism,
however, man deceives himself. Pessimism is a poor antidote for
this self-deception. The philosopher, this true outsider of life, tends
toward it by nature. Schopenhauer had every right to take offense
at the optimism of philosophers, which testifies against philosophy,
just as the latter does against optimism. He drew the conclusions of
pessimism in a nihilism intended, to be sure, only philosophically.
How could a man, being conscious of the deep contradiction of his
existence to nature, uprooted from the life of the generation, not yet
rooted in the reality of the spiritual life, indeed not yet even perceiv-
ing it—how could he think other than pessimistically and finally
even nihilistically? It is faith that prevents pessimism on principle;
261
faith makes it impossible for pessimism to become the attitude of

the spirit, however much it may force itself by nature on man in the
deeply felt neediness of his existence. But doesn’t faith (meant obvi-
ously as nothing other than faith in Christ) turn man into an opti-
mist? The hope of the Christian is truly something entirely different
from optimism.
That man can neither receive the ethos of his life from the life
of the generation nor have it in himself only the Christian knows
who knows that he has received that ethos in its absolute meaning
in the life and word of Jesus. This meaning makes impossible eo ipso
any spiritual withdrawal and reinterpretation into the sphere of the
relative. “Real man represents a much higher value than the desir-
able man of some prevailing ideal,” as Nietzsche says in The Will to
Power, a realization in which the end of idealism is settled and the
spiritual life of man renewed. But it is also a truth that is true and
fruitful only in the inner turning of life to the religious. The life and
word of Jesus, from which the Christian receives the ethos of his life
and without which any recognition that man is more precious than
the idea would have no meaning at all, is not the postulation of an
ideal whose materialization would have to be hoped for from the
life of the generation, but is rather, as it were, this realization itself.
For Christ is the fulfillment and final aim as well as the end of the
law. The power of faith in man (and who does not want to believe
in something?), which in idealism seeks its object in humanity or
clings to a human image of God that is always feeble and inade-
quate, if it does not go directly astray in the illusionary faith and su-
perstition of a deranged imagination; this power has found its true
object in the life and word of Jesus. For the Christian, however, this
life and word not only constitute the ethos of life, which is absolute-
ly valid for every man; they are also the guarantor of the resolution
of the discrepancy between the ethos in its divinity and the human
reality of existence in the world, obviously not in the life of the gen-
eration but in individual existence itself—namely, through faith in
262
Christ. And precisely herein lies the crucial and characteristic ele-
ment of Christian religiosity, which really means religiosity itself,
the element that demands unconditional faith. This faith alone is
the true faith in God and in the true God. It is faith in the grace,
trust in the approach of the Thou, faith in the forgiveness of sins.
We see ourselves standing once again before a fact of the spiritual
life at which the intellect of man stands still. For it can never grasp
the mutual coherence of ethos and grace. It understands only the
one or the other—even if it appeals for help to all the philosophies
of the world and to the discernment of all the theologians and the
profundity of all the metaphysicians; if it understands the one, it
cannot any longer comprehend the other. Yet ethos and grace be-
long together. Grace would have no meaning without ethos, for has
God ever made a pact with a man only in extremis? There is only
a single answer given to this question in one of the spiritual dis-
courses of Kierkegaard, for it is actually not a question at all. Ethos
without grace drives man into despair, into a spiritual pride that
no longer permits the perception of spiritual lostness, or it drives
him to a desperately helpless numbed fixation in it. Ethos is man’s
guide through the confusion of the world on his way to God; but
grace is the power behind the movement. A reliance on grace that
permits the complete forgetting of ethos would just as little bring us
near to God as that consciousness of ethos in us that knows noth-
ing of grace. The intellect does not comprehend all this. If it grasps
ethos as the categorical “Thou shalt” in its relatedness to the “I will,”
to the rebellious “Je ne veux pas!” in man,1 it does not see wherein
grace may be necessary. But if it comprehends grace and its neces-
sity, it presumes, with complete consistency, to be sure, that grace
makes ethos and the reality of the human will superfluous.
There is no other individualism than a Christian one, howev-
er little Christianity speaks of it. And it is obviously not egoism;
1. See the poem “Le Rebelle,” in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (Ed. Trans.: “I
shall not!”).
263
it does not make the s elf-relating ego into the principle of ethical
thinking and acting. Nor is Christian ethics altruism in any sense,
which always has in mind only the alter ego, even though it has equal
rights with one’s own I in its I-aloneness. Nor is altruism ever able
to do what the spirit of Christianity demands and is able to do: to
bring the I in man to its true life in the spirit, to set it into a relation
to the Thou.
�
Self-knowledge is knowledge of the discrepancy between idea and
reality in itself, but it is far from knowledge of sin. For in the lat-
ter, this discrepancy is not at issue. In self-knowledge man measures
himself according to a human standard, for the idea is something
human. In the knowledge of sin, he sees the reality of his life and
existence set over against that of Jesus, and thus compared with a
divine standard, so that one’s own reality comes to nothing ethi-
cally. In self-knowledge man is his own ethical judge; thus he has,
or at least believes himself to have, ethical certainty and assurance
in himself, however great the discrepancy may appear between
idea and reality. In the knowledge of sin, he stands before the di-
vine judge, before whom an ethical certainty and assurance in man
cannot at all be given. A man can come to know of the discrepancy
of idea and reality in another perhaps even better than in himself.
But no one can know of the sin of another outside of God and the
one whom he has chosen from among thousands and millions as the
preacher of the change of heart (John the Baptist). For sin can never
be known objectively. And even though another confesses his sin to
us, we do not know about it and do not discern it; rather, we can only
believe in it. If what is asserted in one of Kierkegaard’s writings is
right, which indeed it is, that no man can understand another in his
faith, then it must also be true that no one can understand another
in his unbelief, in his despair, in the spiritual misunderstanding of
his suffering from the worthlessness and meaninglessness of life;
264
in other words, in his sin. To understand a man and to believe in

what he says are not the same and can never be one and the same.
If one confesses his sin to me, I cannot understand it, nor must I be-
lieve that he really discerns his sin in that which he confesses as sin
(namely, because I take no spiritual part in his existence). But I can
and even should believe it. For it concerns nothing else less than the
taking seriously of a man in the spirituality of his existence. Or, for
another example: when Jesus said that he was the Son of God, no
man could or can understand it—either in a metaphysical or in a
mystical sense. Yet we are obliged to believe that it is the truth. One
cannot have other than a spiritual relation to the spiritual in anoth-
er man (and the knowledge of sin is really spirituality in its break-
through), and one does not have that insofar as one understands a
man, but rather as one believes in him, believes, namely, in his faith
or even in his unbelief, in his suffering from life. Love believes eo
ipso. Yet if it believes in the acknowledged sin in another man, does
it not in the same moment also inwardly absolve him from it? Faith
always stands in relationship to something personal—thus directly
or indirectly in relationship to the word—and sin is truly, as orig-
inal sin, on the one hand something impersonal (which robs man
of personality), but on the other hand, precisely for that reason, the
most personal of all the concerns of man.
The more knowledge deepens, moving away from the surface of
the mathematical, where everything, even though not in the most
beautiful, is nevertheless in mathematical order, the more it be-
comes knowledge of the fact that by no means everything in this
world and in this life is in order, a knowledge of paradise lost. But
it really only becomes a knowledge of one standing outside before
the closed gates—those who really know are always outsiders in
life. And precisely in this deepening, knowledge demands its final
turning: from the objective, which is still involved in the knowledge
of paradise lost, to the subjective, wherein it becomes known why
paradise was lost. In all knowledge man ultimately discerns him-
265
self in the I -aloneness of his existence, if he only presses forward to

that knowledge and does not stop halfway. So far does its influence
reach, but no farther. The one who knows stands on Mount Nebo,
like Moses, and sees the promised land before him—but entrance
is refused him. Only love and the word can liberate man from his
I-aloneness.
All knowledge comes from the word, for it is the light of our
consciousness that illuminates all life and being. And to the word
all knowledge must return. Only by this means does man in the
knowledge of sin emerge completely from his I-aloneness into a
relation to God, who is the true Thou of his I, and only when this
knowledge becomes word and confession. Through the word man
is redeemed from the curse of sin and the law. The knowledge of sin
must, in spite of its unutterability, come about through the word
spoken to a concrete Thou (not only in a mere diary entry, or to
an ideal Thou, like the word of the poet); otherwise man perish-
es spiritually from it and its unutterability. As long as this knowl-
edge renounces the word and avoids expressing itself over against
a concrete Thou, a still more spiritual pride abides in it. Even in his
knowledge of sin and its verbalization, the relation of man to God
must find its expression in the relation of man to man—just as in
love. Certainly God is in him to whom I make the concrete Thou
of my confession of sin—just as God can be represented by anyone
whom man loves with the right love—that is to say, whom he loves
because he loves God and not himself in the other, and in whom
he loves God. The word of confession originates from the love for
God; the love for God grows in the word of confession. Thus we see
here again how the word and love belong together in their deepest
basis. But the faith of man in God, which is the inwardness of his
spiritual life and as such the inwardness of the word, should there-
fore also become word and confession; and there is really no other
confession of faith than in the confession of sin. A confession that
is not the latter would be an empty and meaningless word, a misuse
266
and a sacrilege of the word. In the confession of sin man believes in

the word, which is from God and descended from heaven to dwell
among us; he believes in redemption through the word. It is stated
in Mark’s Gospel that “there is nothing hidden, except to be made
manifest; nor is anything secret, except to come to light” (4:22). But
the revelation of that which is hidden and secret is in the word. Sin
is revealed in the word, as are also divine love and grace, which take
away our sin. And if in this life man in the seclusion of his soul hin-
ders the word in time, then on the day of judgment it is hindered for
all eternity. The decision of whether the word is judge or redeemer
for him takes place in and through man himself.
Grace is in the word and in love. Knowledge without grace,
knowledge that is loveless and renounces the word, is spiritual lost-
ness. It points the way to insanity, perhaps even to crime, certain-
ly to despair. The one who recognizes his sin—only he and no one
else—also becomes aware of the justice of heaven. It is madness to
rebel against it; it leads to madness to submit oneself to it without
mercy. God, who is love and in his love became man to save us from
being spiritually lost in the e arth-boundedness of our existence,
presides over the justice of heaven. That the intellect certainly does
not grasp. But if that were not so, how could a man endure existing
in faith in God and in grace? If God were not also the wellspring of
grace, which has been poured over us in the incarnation of the word,
man’s cause before God and before the justice of heaven would also
be lost forever.
Knowledge has meaning only in time and is perpetuated only
through sin that is affirmed by man, that is countenanced and there-
by magnified. It has meaning in time—for time as scientific knowl-
edge, for eternity as knowledge of sin. But philosophical knowledge
(this long breath of the final gasp of one who is drowning) only
dreams of a meaning for eternity. Scientific knowledge moves more
and more away from the word and becomes thereby inhuman. The
knowledge of sin, however, must go to the word and must become
267
word, if it is not to perpetuate itself and sin in its unutterability and

unstatedness.
Whenever we catch hold of our spiritual life, we see that there
is no one element in it that would not have or call for a direct and
essential relationship to the word. And that is the case because
spiritual life was created through the word. In the ultimate basis of
things and all that takes place, which is a spiritual basis, the truth
of the word is not revealed in the truth of being [Sein], but rather
the opposite; the latter is revealed in the former. For the word in the
spirituality of its origin is the source of all truth and all being. “All
things were made through him, and without him was not anything
made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of
men” (John 1:3, 4). And in the letter to the Hebrews it says, “By faith
we understand that the world was created by the word of God, so
that what is seen is made out of things which do not appear” (11:3).
All being comes from the word but became wordless in its fall from
God. All truth of being is in the word, and if being moves away from
the word and becomes wordless, it becomes untrue. Thinking is a
process between the wordlessness and untruth of being, which has
fallen from God and the word and its truth. It wills to and must go
to the word, and that means to God. Even wordless mathematical
knowledge needs the relationship to God to be knowledge of the
truth, as Descartes observed—and did he really remain the only
one in this? In the word and through the word man possesses the
distinctly human consciousness of things and events in the world;
but he also possesses the consciousness of himself and of God. All
true and vivid thinking, all of man’s spiritual life, has its objective
support only in the word. The greatest of all philosophers already
had a presentiment of that, and it was the word, language itself, that
helped him to attain it. And when he has Socrates say to Phaedo that
one must not let the thought that there is no reliance on words come
up at all in the soul, he had to be sure rational argumentation was
above all in mind, in connection with the term logoi—but secretly
268
the word nevertheless, which is truly the ground of reason and the
source of truth and life.
All being, which has fallen from God and has become wordless,
is destined to return again to the word—in man and through him.
And through the grace of God, being is lifted from its untruth and
reclaimed completely into the word.
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Fragment 18
Nature and Spirit, Universal Life,
and Individual Existence—Culture and
Christianity—Conclusion
Nature is a perpetual promise of life, which is redeemed neither

in time nor in eternity. If there is a development, and above all if it
has a meaning, then this meaning is to be sought here and nowhere
else. Nature is like the “wanderer of distant paths” in the Epic of Gil-
gamesh (that amazing poem of great antiquity) who cannot find the
life that he seeks. It is restlessly on the way but reaches no goal. It
seeks the spirit but never attains to it. Nature sketches an outline of
individual existence—this “most dubious position in the balance of
community”—in order to renounce it again in the end in favor of
universal life. With nature one never clearly knows “where the indi-
vidual ceases and the species [Gattung] begins.” Its individuals are
swimmers in the stream of life whose strength is exhausted keep-
ing their heads above water—until the same flood from which they
were born swallows them again. But if that individual being that is
not only planned but realized were a fact of nature, then one would
really have to say that in its bringing forth, nature had gotten itself
involved in an experiment disquieting and dangerous to itself. The
natural individual does not possess the meaning of his existence in
himself, but in the life of the generation. Yet where does the latter
possess the meaning of his own life? It doesn’t possess one at all; it
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Nature and Spirit
only evolves. Where and to what end? To its own end. The evolu-
tionism of our time, which conducts itself very much like natural
science, though in the end it is nevert heless a metaphysical extrav-
agance, revels in the notion of the eternal becoming and passing
away of everything that exists—and betrays thereby that one must
not take evolutionary optimism too seriously. The development it-
self, as we know from experience, leads this optimism ad absurdum.
Certainly the events in nature, in which are built the human histo-
ry of the will to live of the generation and that in their ultimate ba-
sis include that history, are not meaningless. But the meaning that
those events possess, no man comprehends; only God does. History
to be sure reveals its meaning to him who wants to see it. But who
wants to see it? Not the politician, even less the idealist. The gener-
ation never asks about the meaning of its life. For this question is
raised only by and in individual existence, in the neediness of in-
dividual existing a nd as circumstantial evidence of the spirit. The
life of the generation takes place on the surface of the events in the
world. The generation has its depth in individual life. In this depth
the spirit gives light; in it the spirit breaks through. Man demands
a meaning of life because he is not merely a natural, but also a spiri-
tual individual. And only in the spiritual sphere does individuality,
which is merely an incidental design in the natural domain, have its
reality. But nature dismisses this demand as unwarranted. It says
only: simply be content with the little life that I grant you, and do
not ask about its meaning. And man does indeed content himself—
to the extent that his life is rooted in that of the generation, in the
natural life. So far as he is only a natural individual who disclaims
being also a spiritual one, he has the meaning of his existence in the
life of the generation. He has a relation only to the latter, but not
to himself, and not to God. And thus he lives wholly in time and
rises in the temporality of this life—and falls. For that reason, he
does not become conscious of the latter; time and temporality do
not become problems to him. He has no knowledge of death, and it
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Nature and Spirit
could in no way be imparted to him, for it is one with the awareness

of time.
Yet there is no such man. For everyone possesses the certainty of
his own death. Only no one wants to know of death. There is no one
whose existence could be completely rooted in universal life, who
could become fully absorbed in it. Whoever would be only a nat-
ural but not a spiritual individual would thus not be a man. There
is no one whose existence does not include the raising of the ques-
tion about the meaning of life. Something entirely different than a
philosophical problem is touched in it, although it is correct that all
thinking and philosophizing begin with it. But does man as a spiri-
tual individual bear in himself the meaning of his existence? If that
were so, he would not ask about it. Or does he seek in this question,
which is already actually an indication of the uprooting from uni-
versal life, and of the brokenness of his natural life (these, however,
are not simply one and the same); does he seek nothing else but to
become rooted once again in the life of the generation? That cannot
be, because it is the spirituality of his existence that raises the ques-
tion—no matter how consistently he may be inclined to seek the
meaning of his existence in the life of the generation, to draw from it
the answer to his question. Thus we stand once again before the ir-
reconcilable opposition of nature and spirit, which we must neither
postulate metaphysically nor metaphysically speculate away. For in
it we have the reality and the task of our existence. If man wishes
to return to the generation because he cannot find the meaning of
his life in himself and attempts to answer his question about this
meaning from its life, the spiritual in him, which does the asking
and demanding, compels him to a more or less imaginary and meta-
physical aberration. It compels him to give a meaning, even if only
an invented and imagined one, to the life of the generation, which
actually does not ask about meaning and calls for none. And then
indeed the generation receives its spiritual life from him, from the
dream of the genius of the spirit. The spiritual individual finds in
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Nature and Spirit
himself the meaning of his life just as little as the natural one, who,
however, does not seek one at all. The former does not possess it in
the life of the generation like the latter, but rather in God and in his
relation to God—and he can have it nowhere else. That man raises
the question about the meaning of life signifies in its ultimate ba-
sis that he seeks God. The spirituality of his existence uproots him
from the life of the generation. But the questioning is neither an ac-
cidental nor a natural outcome of this uprooting, not a product of
development in the brokenness of the natural life or its final refuge
in death, and least of all is it a mere surrogate of life in the poverty of
life and an indication of the bankruptcy of life in time. Since, how-
ever, the question about the meaning of life is always raised in the
I—aloneness of human existence, in the seclusion of the I before
the Thou and in no other way, it is not only a sign of the spirit, but
above all also a symptom of the sickness of the spirit of man. This is
so even when it is not taken seriously by him in the practice of exist-
ing, but only in theory, hence not taken seriously at all; and even if
the answer to this question is speculated upon metaphysically with
a great show of genius and profundity. The man who has found the
true Thou of his I, who has found the meaning of existence in God,
no longer asks about the meaning of life. He knows that his exis-
tence is placed in the hand of God, and, in spite of all the distress,
all the suffering and misfortune, all the shattering of his life in this
world, he demands no other meaning for it than that which he clear-
ly and distinctly comprehends in his relation to God from whom
all suffering comes, yet who is love and in his love draws man up to
himself through suffering. He will no longer ask about the meaning
of life, even amidst Armageddon—not in a godless and desperate
abandonment of any meaning by his spirit, but rather in an unshak-
able trust in the eternal meaning of his existence in God.
The life of the generation is rooted in the rich soil of the sexu-
al life. In its awareness, however, it is supported by a double will,
by the political and the cultural will: the will to power is exagger-
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ated by the dream of the spirit. No doubt only the genius creates
culture; and the generation receives its culture and takes its spir-
itual life from him (and behind all culture is hidden the question
about meaning, and the secret and w ell-concealed suffering from
the meaninglessness of life). The generation, because it is the gen-
eration of man, cannot continue to exist without culture, without
the dream of the spirit. It is inconceivable, says Schelling, that there
could be a people without a mythology. What is mythology, if not
a graphically versified dream of the spirit? It is to a people what the
worldview is to the individual, to the genius. Although the gener-
ation needs the dream—in order not to come to a standstill, but
to advance on the n ever-ending path of nature to the spirit—it
nevertheless dreams only at the surface of its life. Only the genius
dreams of the spirit in the depths of life. While being involved in
the life of the generation man never reflects on himself. But if the
generation reflects on itself it becomes conscious of its power—and
then for a time it always puts aside the dream of the spirit. We see
here that the generation does not take the dream seriously like the
genius. But if power seeks justification for its deployment in the
dream of the spirit—and it always does—it is hypocrisy. For it al-
ways feels secretly justified in itself. Man nevertheless lives not
only an e arth-bounded, but also a spiritually bounded life; and
this spiritual-boundedness of his existence is a boundedness with
the word and through the word. And if one takes the dream of the
spirit away from him, so long as he is not awakened to the reality
of the spiritual life, what would be left of his life? Something truly
dreadful. The generation receives its spiritual life from the genius.
The man who is not a genius, however, who dreams with others
the dream of the spirit, usually has received it from the life of the
generation. Only the individual, not the generation, can awaken
from it. This awakening of the individual is either an awakening
to the realities of the e arth-boundedness of life or an awakening
to the reality of the spirit, which leads man to freedom from his
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s piritual-boundedness. The former does not really render man spir-

itless, for that is in itself impossible; nevertheless, if it doesn’t turn
him into a dull-witted denier of the spirit, who finds in banal plea-
sure sufficient reason to be in this world, it can turn him into one
who secretly hates everything pertaining to the spiritual. Yet just in
this hatred he gives evidence of the s piritual-boundedness of his ex-
istence, which he does get free of even at his furthest distance from
the spirit, not in crime and insanity, and not in his deepest fall from
God. Regarding the latter awakening, let man beware of any misuse
of freedom, which would inevitably throw him back once more into
his spiritual-boundedness. The one who awakens from his dream to
nothing else but the realities of this earth will for the most part keep
it to himself. Rooted in the life of the generation (where else would
he find a mainstay for his now unsupported existence?), he will still
act outwardly, at official occasions, as if he continued to dream the
dream of the spirit in all seriousness, as if he took it to be the most
real reality and the purest truth. For the generation itself demands
that of him. It needs the spirit very much in connection with its of-
ficial occasions as beautiful cliché and dazzling dress uniform, and
in any case for the binding of the individual to its unspiritual aim
and object. For there is truly no greater comedy in the public life of
man than that which is acted out with the word “spirit” and every-
thing that pertains to it. Yet it is probably the final and to be sure
painful destination of the words of the poets and philosophers, of
the idealists (in the best sense of the term), that they become clichés
that the life of the generation needs in order to grant expression to
its pretended relation to the spirit—by which it must justify itself
again and again to the individual. But if man also turns the word
of God into clichés, the world would be forced to go under. In the
consciousness of his existence, the individual is involved in the life
or death of the generation in two respects (unconsciously, however,
through his sexuality): through his participation in either its politi-
cal or its cultural will. Even the genius, in whose work individuality
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and spirituality are quite active, seeks the generation and in creat-
ing presupposes it and its continuation in the world. That politics is
a hindrance to the spiritual life is understood only at a pinch—and
then only aesthetically, as today everything spiritual is understood
in general only aesthetically. Perhaps even that will no longer be
understood soon enough, when everyone is completely democrat-
ic. But that culture, art, and philosophy hinder the spiritual life no
less than politics has not yet been understood—with very few ex-
ceptions. And it is least of all understood in a time that is unaware
that it has for decades lived spiritually by the most pitiful cultural
surrogates, with beautiful vignettes and other cosmetics, and quite
seriously imagines (with a seriousness that provokes laughter) that
in its scientism it possesses culture and the true life of the spirit.
One does not comprehend (or does one not want to compre-
hend?) that the seriousness of the spiritual life is not in culture,
this dream of the spirit—even if it would be as beautiful a dream
as that of the Greeks. Such seriousness began (and only begins)
with Christianity. And only the Christian, who knows that it is a
matter of life and death of the spirit in the existence of every sin-
gle man, knows of it. When the seriousness of life begins, then all
dreaming is over, and beauty becomes a matter of indifference. The
word of the poet, which brought beauty to language and language
to beauty, grows silent before the word of God, Humanity, to be
sure, hangs onto its dream of the spirit. It does not want to part with
its ideals, even though those ideals deserted humanity long ago. It
did not want to be awakened even by Christ, and thus it came to
dream a Christian dream. All at once there was a Christian beauty,
a Christian art, poetry, and even philosophy. All seriousness of the
spiritual life, of course, had to one day disappear from this Christi-
anity, if one may still call it Christianity, and then nature began to
be discovered afresh. A Christian culture is obviously a misunder-
standing, or Christianity is a culture, and therefore not the truth of
our lives. Culture gives the life of man a spiritual form, but no spir-
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itual content. The content is always the natural life, and there is no
culture without a spiritual vacuum (not only a biological vacuum)
lurking behind it. It is not the full, unbroken life that has a style and
needs one, but rather the death of man in the midst of life. It is of
course the power of life itself that creates style, and where this pow-
er has faded to its final vestige, man lives and dies in bad taste. That
means every individual, precisely when the seriousness of the final
moment is at hand, dies in bad taste. After that, those remaining be-
hind and the survivors, whose worry it is to bury their dead, arrange
for a more or less tasteful funeral.
What is character from an ethical point of view for the particular
and the individual—capacity in dying—is style from an aesthetic
point of view in the universal and the general. Culture in the deep-
est ground of its essence is stylized dying—even though it extends
through the centuries. In the stylization of death, however, the se-
riousness of death is not grasped. For the religious man there is no
problem of style, nor of art or life. For he knows about this serious-
ness (to know of it is already religiosity), just as he knows about the
true seriousness of life, from which one cannot recover with a card
party or in the theater or the concert hall. Didn’t Michelangelo, this
greatest and most powerful of all artists, come to realize in the final
years of his life that art has a justification for existence neither in the
light nor in the shadow of the cross? Christianity, which conquers
death, stands above all form and culture. It cannot be assimilated
into any culture, and it can never contribute to the cultivation of a
people—that obviously those do not believe who believe instead in
a Christian culture—instead of in Christ. Seen in his light, all cul-
ture appears unimportant. Christianity shatters every conceivable
spiritual form; yet it also gives to human life the only spiritual con-
tent possible for it, because it is willed by God himself.
There is no Christian culture (that has to be said!), there is no
Christian worldview; nor is there a Christian worldly wisdom. For
the Christian will always be a fool for Christ, a fool in the view of
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intellectuals and wise men of this world. All culture is relative and
nationally conditioned. To have a culture, even the cultural creation
of genius, means to have only a relative relation of human existence
to the spirit, one that comes through the medium of universal life.
To become a Christian means to inwardly extricate oneself from all
of life’s relativity and to step into an absolute relation to the spirit.
That man creates and has culture, be it in the primitive or the most
highly developed sense, is due to the spiritual significance that is ac-
tually inherent in his life. Yet man is truly conscious of the latter,
even at the highest level of his culture, only as if in a dream. To be a
Christian means to be alert, means to exist with a perpetually alert
consciousness of the spiritual significance of life. Even the genius,
just like every other man, needs the inner a bout-face, the conver-
sion of the inner man. Does this bring his genius to naught? Cer-
tainly not. But by removing the aesthetic distance to the problem
of life, it transforms genius into the knowledge of sin and into love.
How can a culture dare to place itself under the sign of the cross?
To do that turns culture into untruth in the deepest sense, which
classical culture certainly was not at all. Let one only think of the
architectural lie of the Gothic construction of the cathedral and
the tower, which, as Schopenhauer similarly perceived, feigns the
overcoming of all earthly gravity and weight, so that one can then
fly directly from the earth to heaven. Such a culture bears in itself
that contradiction which leads necessarily to its disintegration and
decay. Did Western culture go to ruin—and it is already ruined—at
anything other than the stylization of the cross, at its platonic mis-
understanding of Christianity? Let one not be deceived: that and
nothing else begot the unbelief and godlessness of our time. Wheth-
er at this point the Americanization of life or Bolshevism carries out
the final c leaning-up operations, so as to clear the way to Europe
for the Mongolians, is ultimately of no consequence. As the decline
of this culture was taking place and becoming evident, there also
came into being, provoked by its bad conscience, the cultural psy-
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chologism that always stands at the end of a culture as its sign, as

well as the psychologism in literature and art, that lead the poet and
the artist to that remarkable s elf-betrayal that no one would have
been capable of in the case of the Greeks.
It was not classical culture, but rather the Gothic, this double
offense against the spirit of beauty and the spirit of Christianity,
that begot cultural psychology. The latter left Greek art, poetry, and
philosophy in peace, and did no violence to a culture, which, just as
there is only one religion, was thus the one culture. Examined in its
light, all other cultures are only groping attempts toward it, more or
less successful approximations of it, or its disfigurement and distor-
tion. It is really of no importance whether cultural psychology, like
every other complete suffisance and médisance [smugness and gos-
sip], conducts itself more metaphysically and metapsychologically,
or more psychoanalytically, or whether it permits the spiritual val-
ues of the culture to continue to exist or not. It leads to criticism in
every case, and that is the demolition of the spiritual life.
That criticism, however, is a profound spiritual necessity for this
culture. Only cultural psychology, the psychoanalytic no less than
the metapsychological, has not assumed the proper standpoint for
this criticism. For that lies within the realities of the spiritual life, or
in any case they can be perceived from that spirit.
The only question is whether a man who has gained this point
of view and has found the firm foundation of his spiritual life in it
still really exercises objective criticism, or whether he does not see
himself standing before a completely different, endlessly significant
spiritual task. It has been remarked, quite correctly from the point
of view of the psychoanalyst, that all cultural values are actually
nothing else but a dream of the spirit, the dream of man of a higher
life. The psychoanalyst sees the unhappiness that lurks behind this
dream, but surely misunderstands it. He perceives it merely in the
brokenness of the natural life, in organic inferiority, or in the per-
version of sexual life. He does not grasp, either in the psychic ex-
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Nature and Spirit
ploitation and overcompensation of the former or in the realization

and sublimation of the latter, that it is not nature, but the spirit in a
state of wretchedness that plays the crucial role. He claims to see
through and resolve the dream of the spirit in his own way. Yet he
does not perceive the spiritual behind it; he denies the reality of
the spiritual life completely. The latter is, of course, not perceived
from the metapsychological point of view, either. For in the final
analysis the metapsychologist is still caught up in the dream of the
spirit, which the serious psychoanalyst never is. Regardless of how
very ethically the metapsychologist may behave and of how aware
of the ethical dimension he may be, he nevertheless does not really
take the ethical seriously—personally, but only in an objective way.
In the end he confuses it for an object of completely nonobligato-
ry admiration, which one has to hold at a distance so as to be able
to contemplate and admire it along with the aesthetic. This is quite
characteristic for him.
The total spiritual inadequacy of his point of view, as well as that
of the psychoanalyst, is revealed in the comprehension of the life
and word of Jesus. The psychoanalyst, if he is honest, abruptly ne-
gates this life and word. That it is the infallible touchstone of every-
thing spiritual cannot perplex him, because he is not at all aware of
it. For the metapsychologist, who is of course not aware of it, either,
this life and word constitute a kind of mythology, which he treats
psychologically and metapsychologically like every mythology, and
that means noncommittal. While he sees something very beautiful
in the religiosity and Christianization of a man, whom he obviously
takes an interest in observing and admiring only from an aesthetic
distance, the psychoanalysts are always suspicious of the latter, and
it cannot be denied that they treat such religiosity with great dis-
cernment; their suspicion is based on such plausible grounds that
they could render questionable even a man who is aware of him-
self in the brokenness of his life. Questionable, that is, if he is un-
able to keep in mind the word of the gospel that warns against all
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Nature and Spirit
doubtfulness: whoever puts his hand to the plow and looks back is
not fit for the kingdom of God. Moreover it is certain that, even if
psychoanalysis were in the end to be proved correct (which is very
questionable), it would not be injurious in the least to the spiritual
meaning of faith in Christ; quite the contrary. If cultural psycholo-
gy is to be more than and something besides a mere symptom of the
end of culture—and it does recognize the latter as the dream of the
spirit and discerns it as that which grows from the psychic ground
and soil of the feeling in man that the life that he is living is still not
the right one—then it must not go astray in the interpretation of
this feeling, whose misunderstanding found its precise expression
in the culture. It must not get involved in an optimistic prophesy of
a renewal of culture on better psychic and spiritual foundations and
presuppositions than hitherto. Cultural psychology should rather
be the plowshare with which the ground of the spiritual life in man
is cultivated—but not that a new culture and a different dream of
the spirit should grow out of it. It should make that field ready for
the reception of the seed that comes from heaven. But the poor in
spirit truly do not need cultural psychology and its work of uncov-
ering only apparent spiritual riches. Yet, do those who are not poor
in spirit stand in need of it in order to become conscious of its illu-
sory riches? Perhaps it is really that which is most superfluous in the
world of the spirit, and it can be nothing else but the symptom of
sickness and decay in this world.
Christianity is not an idea. Rather, it has brought idealism to
consciousness of itself and has thereby also done away with it just as
a dream dissolves into nothingness when man becomes conscious
that he is dreaming. In the end Platonism lives spiritually only on
the idea in its aesthetic meaning, and it therefore culminates in the
possession of a worldview. One must, however, be a genius in or-
der to have a worldview, in order to be a Platonist. But the aesthetic
meaning covers up the root of the idea, which is to be sought in the
will and in the ethical sphere. The ethical idea places the problem
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Nature and Spirit
of life in its subjectivity directly before the eyes of man and replac-
es the worldview, which always determines the spirit aesthetically,
with the conception of life, which always has ethical meaning. The
problematicity of life comes about in the subject and in being the sub-
ject and therefore also requires a solution from the standpoint of the
subject and for the subject—the possibility of which, however, can
and must never be sought other than in the religious sphere. The
child is, to an extent, the solution of the problem as proposed by na-
ture. Only the problem is not really solved there; rather, the solution
(again, only apparent) is merely postponed, transmitted from one
individual to another in the chain of development, at random. And
it doesn’t always have to turn out well. Moreover, whoever sees the
problem of his life lying completely in his children is already spiri-
tually lost. Of course, whoever has children must ever bear them in
mind in the problem of his life (which not nature, but the spirit de-
mands), and must also include them and their existence in the prob-
lem. The genius, who does not want to get involved in the proposal
of nature—or sometimes even cannot?—attempts a solution with
his work. Yet it remains a mere attempt.
As long as man lives spiritually under the spell of the aesthetic
idea, he has the problematization of life objectively before himself
(namely, because he has pushed it into an aesthetic distance), and
he seeks its solution in vain in the objectivity of the possession of
a worldview, which can never admit that nothing else but his prob-
lem is at issue. If he cannot aesthetically delude himself into believ-
ing that the solution is to be found there, then despair is already at
hand, and he inwardly breaks under the clearly grasped impossi-
bility of objective solution. Nor does ethical reflection protect him
from despair. It drives him all the more into despair if he attempts
self-reflection outside of Christianity and its spirit of grace—be-
cause in such reflection he becomes aware of the impossibility of
even a subjective solution, assuming he does not want to deceive
himself again. For the individual—and he only becomes the indi-
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Nature and Spirit
vidual through being uprooted from the universal—natural life

can exist spiritually only in his humble, obviously not presumptu-
ous, confidence in grace. A man who inwardly grasps his problem
of life as entirely his problem (and not poetically and philosophi-
cally as the problem of an ideally intended man, as the problem of
mankind), and who takes completely upon himself the weight and
burden of this problem, has to be able to believe in God, in the ap-
proach of the Thou—or he will go insane.
Christianity calls for man to enter seriously into a life in the spir-
it, and this seriousness lies in the fact that the spiritual life is not
an affair and concern of the life of the generation, that it is not an
idea whose realization could come about gradually in the life of the
generation, and in which the individual would have to contribute to
with reference to universal life. It is rather totally an affair and con-
cern of the individual per se with reference to himself. No man can
become a Christian through his relation to universal life and in it;
Christianity cannot be received from the life of the generation. Let
no one wait for the generation to come to its senses, to bring him
thereby to his senses. And let no one place the hope of his spiritual
life on a religious awakener who is to come and who is to bring an
end to the woes of the time. For that would be nothing else but the
messianic hope in disguise—and thus Judaism. Just as according to
an extremely apt observation of Joseph Hauer, it is Judaism when an
unproductive man yearns for the gift of genius, and an aesthetically
unproductive generation longs for a genius to appear. Therefore, the
one who really lives the life of the spirit never relies on the nation
to which he belongs in the earth-boundedness of his existence. As
John the Baptist said to the Jews in the wilderness, “Do not pre-
sume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father’; for I tell
you God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham”
(Mt 3:9). Spirit is not something native. “The wind blows where it
wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it
comes or whither it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the
283
Nature and Spirit
spirit.” Thus spoke Jesus to Nicodemus. The one who is rooted in

the natural life does indeed know where he comes from, or at least
believes that he knows; but he does not know where he is going. The
one who is reborn in the spirit knows his origin and his end, cer-
tainly neither of which is the life of the generation, from which he
is totally uprooted. There is no racially and nationally conditioned
Christianity, but rather only the one spirit of the word and life of
Jesus, which stands above all nations and in which they all pass
away—along with a Roman Catholic, German Lutheran, and Rus-
sian Dostoyevskian misunderstanding of this spirit. The one who
lives the life of the spirit becomes homeless in this world, after the
example of his Lord: the foxes have their holes, and the birds of the
air have their nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.
Christianity does not give a meaning to the life of the generation
(which is and remains the natural life, with the single exception of
the people chosen by God), but rather to individual existence, and
only in its spirit is individuality realized, which in its being interwo-
ven in the natural life is only a plan and design that is never carried
out. The Christianity of the individual man, however, which con-
cerns him alone, is clearly not an idea or a relation to an idea. It is
rather his personal attitude toward the fact of the life and word of
Jesus, which finds expression in the entirety of existence.
All stress rests on this dimension of the personal. It can in no
way be omitted or circumvented in Christianity. For if one omits it,
if one thus shifts the center of gravity to universal life, one is then no
longer dealing with Christianity. In spiritual lostness one relapses
into the dream of the spirit. If a man has his spiritual life in the inner
attitude of his existence toward a relation to the idea, that is some-
thing entirely different than if he places it into a personal relation
to something personal. Christianity revolves essentially around the
personality of the life and word of Jesus. Precisely that is the vast
distinction and contrast between the pagan and the Christian life in
the spirit. With whom, then, can a man step into a personal relation,
284
Nature and Spirit
in order to have his spiritual therein, and nowhere else? With Pla-
to or Mozart or Goethe? They are all dead. One will, of course, say
that Christ has been dead for nearly two thousand years. But that is
not true. And one will say that though Plato, Mozart, and Goethe
and all the other geniuses are dead, their works live on. But that is
not true, either. For the spiritual life of these works is dead, and that
which we admire in them is like the afterglow that for a time illu-
minates the evening sky like a sun that set long before, at which we
glance upward. Christ left behind no immortal works that genera-
tion after generation could draw from. Yet he was resurrected from
the dead and is with us to the end of the age.
The generation has to place all of its hope for life, on the one
hand, on the non-exhaustion of the surreptitious source of sexual
life, but on the other hand, on the genius, because as a human gen-
eration it still needs a relation to the spirit in order to continue to
exist. The individual, however, who has become fully the individual
(although in no sense the absolutely alone and a ll-one), cannot base
the hope of his life on anything else but the life and word of Christ;
he becomes the individual precisely by so doing. Or else he builds
his spiritual life in the sphere of madness and illusion. The one who
is still rooted completely in the life of the generation and is assimi-
lated in it (as, for example, the Mongolian man), cannot see the im-
mortality of his life other than in his children. Whoever is a father
is immortal. That is obviously based on a mistaken spirit. For this
belief in the immortality of the race, typical above all among the
Mongolians, is nothing other than a biological illusion built into the
spirituality of human existence, which is on the one hand required
of that spirituality, but on the other hand is supposed to protect
from its very breakthrough. The one who is reborn in the spirit has
put away all paternal desires and has become a real child—a child of
God, whom God has created in his love through the word.
The gospel demands that we become like children; and we be-
come such through our faith in Christ, through faith in the Word
285
Nature and Spirit
made flesh. The word of Jesus was not the preaching of an idea, as is
the word of the poets and philosophers, but the direct revelation of
the spiritual life in its reality. It was and is the word of God, which
will not pass away, even though heaven and earth may one day pass
away. And neither was the life of Jesus a life of the spirit in the idea,
as with the poets and philosophers and the intellectuals in this
world. Rather, it was at one with the word, and was the Word made
flesh; it was the life of the spirit itself in its reality, which arouses
man from his dream of the spirit to reality, to the seriousness of the
spiritual life. Certainly the word of the poets and philosophers also
originates in the personal life. Yet by becoming the poetic or philo-
sophical word, it detaches itself from the personal life, and therefore
never speaks to the concrete personality in man, but only to the ide-
al—that is, to the possibility that lies in man but that presupposes a
definite development of the life of imagination, of being addressed
by the poetic or philosophical word. There is no worse misunder-
standing of the words of Christ than when one takes them somehow
poetically or philosophically. They are the most personal words that
have ever been spoken in the world—and for that very reason unpo-
etic and unphilosophical. They constitute the word in its personality,
pure and simple. They appeal directly to the concrete personality in
man; and to know oneself as being addressed by them means literal-
ly to come to the reification of one’s personality. To remain closed to
the word of the poets and the philosophers has a natural cause and
can never be reckoned to man as sin. But to be closed to the word of
Christ has a spiritual basis and is and remains the fault of man.
And Western man has brought this guilt down upon himself. He
forgot long ago (or never knew?) that we all live from the grace of
the word; he lost the belief in the word—his entire science, and not
only that, testifies to this; he became godless and inhuman, and at
that he spiritually perished. He acted to be sure like a dying man
who does not believe he will die, who thinks he still has time. But
let this humanity reflect on itself just once. Let it take in the bitter
286
Nature and Spirit
medicine by spoonfuls (for otherwise it could not bear it), which

is administered by the physician well experienced in the spiritual
sickness of man, who wrote the book about the Sickness unto Death,
which is the most profound book ever written about the essence of
man. Since humanity is spiritually decaying, it has also ruined it-
self politically, economically, and biologically. For politics and eco-
nomics lie only on the surface of events and, in the final analysis, are
determined by the depth of the events in the spirit. Humanity did
not want to survive the end of its culture—only it didn’t know that
and doesn’t know it even today. And so it attempted its own suicide,
which is without parallel in history. Science honestly and dishonest-
ly contributed to its suicide by making death and dying easier, thus
robbing it of all its significance.
Who has not by now felt the gravity of our era—an era that could
not prevent war through the arts of diplomacy, and in the same way
is scarcely able to achieve peace through them? But that is just it:
one senses it and perhaps even the gravity of the moment—but how
many give evidence that they understand the gravity of eternity?
What is the eternal for most people, at least it so appears, other than
a beautiful dream of the poets and philosophers, of these unrealis-
tic men who are not at home in this world? A dream and therefore
without gravitas. That would be in and for itself quite right as far as
the eternity of the poets and philosophers is concerned. Only one
still needs to know wherein the gravity resides. Here in the hustle
and bustle of this world? Time and eternity meet in the moment.
So many who do indeed grasp the gravity of the moment grasp in
it only the gravity of time—but not that of eternity. They are com-
pletely caught up in the temporal, in the e arth-boundedness of our
existence, beyond which they cannot see, which seems to make
even our spiritual boundedness impalpable to them. They do not
know that time and eternity meet in the moment; that time receives
its gravity from the gravity of eternity—but an eternity that is
something different than the dream of the poets and philosophers.
287
Nature and Spirit
That dream has finally been exhausted in Europe. Thus, the in-
telligentsia of this time, who can no longer conceal this from them-
selves, are already considering a spiritual loan from the Mongolians.
And they place all their hopes on a cultural association of Chinese
man with European man to exchange Christianity, which in any
case they don’t know what to make of, for Confucius or Lao-tse.
What is eternity for the men of this time? A cheap consolation for
the individual who is to be sacrificed. And if they are not the sac-
rificial victims themselves, then—then even eternity is nothing
to them. The cultural and political bankruptcy of Europe allowed
the social problem, this insidious sickness in the body of humani-
ty, to become acute. Did we not experience how nature all at once
stopped on its way to the spirit and abandoned its plan for the in-
dividual? That which came over Europe and is still taking place,
two men foresaw, two who sought the welfare of man in the spirit
of Christianity: Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky. The great Russian,
great even in his national-chauvinist bias, saw Europe reach the eve
of its fall long before this war, a fall that, as he wrote in the Diary of a
Writer, will be without exception dreadful and universal. He saw the
“great, final, s ettling-of-accounts, political war,” which the “comedy
of the bourgeois alliance” taking place in Europe will not withstand,
an alliance that seemed to consider itself “as the normal form for
human alliances on the earth.” But deeper still than Dostoyevsky,
Kierkegaard grasped the “divine meaning of the diabolical princi-
ple of leveling”; he saw that that which comes from evil is subject
against its will to the service of the spirit and of the spiritual deci-
sion of man. “It will then signify: behold, everything is prepared, be-
hold, the cruelty of abstraction makes finiteness in its deception clear as
such, behold, the abyss of infinity opens, the sharp scythe of leveling puts
everyone to the sword, each in his turn—behold, God waits! So spring to
the arms of God.”
It lies in the spirituality of our existence that the life of man in
this world comes down to a question. In the questionability of this
288
Nature and Spirit
life the spirit breaks through. But the answer to the question? Men
are remarkable; they are still really waiting for an answer. And was
that not given long ago, nearly two thousand years ago? And do
they not yet know even today that the spirit in them is not only that
which questions, but above all, because the answer has already been
given, that which is itself conclusive for them?1
1. [Ed. Note]: Ebner’s original handwritten manuscript ends with the notation:
“Written in Gablitz, in the Vienna Woods, during the winter of 1918–1919. The man-
uscript was completed on April 12, 1919.” Later editions omit this notation or merely
note: “Written during the winter of 1918–1919.”
289
Index
I n de x
Abraham, 251, 283 Chapel, Joseph R., x, xiv

accusative case, 158, 162 Cherubinic Wanderer, The (Silesius), 221
Adler, Alfred, 10 children, 127, 131, 131n1, 160–61, 162n6,
aloneness, 60–61, 71, 85, 92, 103, 117–18, 167, 205, 221, 241, 282, 285
135–38, 153, 169, 181, 190–91, 194, Christ, Jesus, 25–26, 35, 73, 88, 91, 95,
222–23, 230–31, 239, 249, 258, 264, 119, 146, 187, 191, 213, 222–23, 227,
266 247–53, 262, 285–86
analytical philosophy, 9 cogito ergo sum, 3–4, 154, 256–69. See
antifeminism, 240, 242–44 also Descartes, René
anti-Semitism, 244, 246 Cohen, Hermann, 15
aphorisms, 25, 25n51 Concept of Dread, The (Kierkegaard),
apperception, 173–74, 201 79
atheism, 67–70, 212 Confessions (Augustine), 213
attributive sentences, 201–3 consciousness: abrogation of, 184;
Auden, W. H., ix, x being and, 130–46; death and,
Augustine, 213 134; in Descartes, 4–5; experience
and, 131; “I-aloneness” of, 194;
Baader, Franz von, 13 “I” and, 130–31, 158–59; language
Bahr, Hermann, 102n2 and, 90; reason and, 116; suffering
Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 39 and, 132–33. See also self-
Baudelaire, Charles, 225, 225n4 consciousness
beauty, 97–115, 173, 173n2, 174–75, consonants, 126–28
225 cosmos, 173–76
being-by-itself, 60 creation, 64–65, 72–73, 75, 98–100,
Benedict XVI, Pope, 39. See also 103–12, 114–15, 122, 125, 156, 176–78,
Ratzinger, Joseph 222, 229–30, 233–35
Beziehung, 53n1 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 79,
Brunner, Emil, viii, 39 200n3
Buber, Martin, x, xi, xi–xiv, 11, 13ff, culture, 17, 48, 58, 138–39, 244, 276–79,
16–21, 20n38, 23, 26, 29, 40 281, 287
Cartesian dualism, 8 Daab, Christoph Heinrich Ludwig

Cartesian problem, 3–4 Friedrich, 250
291
Index
death, 14, 60, 70, 131, 133–35, 153, 166, Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 9
271–72 Geist: as German word, xiii; transla-
declaration, existential, 209–27 tion of, 53n1
Der Brenner (periodical), 20n38 geistig: translation of, xiii, 53n1
Descartes, René, 3–5, 163–64, 171–97, gender, of nouns, 238, 238n1
268. See also cogito ergo sum genitive case, 158
Destiny of Man (Fichte), 213 genius, 76–77, 85–86, 95–96, 133, 242,
determinism, 14 245, 247, 275–76
Dewey, John, 9 German Idealism, 5, 7
dialectic, 7, 175, 234 gnosticism, 178
dialogical philosophers, 10–24 God: atheism and, 67–70; in Buber, 16,
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 9, 15 18–19; Cartesian dualism and, 8; in
diplomacy, 2, 287 Cohen, 15; Descartes and, 179–80;
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 48–49, 288 feeling and, 231–32; in Feuerbach,
doubt, 3–4, 79 13–14; in Hamann, 12; “I” and, 193;
dualism, Cartesian, 8 I-Thou and, 18, 33; in Kierkegaard, 7,
14; in man, 233–34; as mental image,
Ebner, Ferdinand: aphorisms of, 25, 228–36; name of, 66–67, 204–5;
25n51; background of, 24–26; Freud nearness of, 222; personal existence
and, 10; impact of, 39–43; impor- of, 70–71; personality of, 234, 249;
tance of, 1–3; “new thinking” and, pneuma and, 136–37; proofs of,
11; Scheler and, 15; World War I and, 64–75; as reality, 228–36; reason
25–26 and, 118–19; relationship with man,
ego, 16, 263–64 55; in Rosenzweig, 23; self-con-
empiricism, 5–6 sciousness and, 74–75; speech and,
Epic of Gilgamesh, 270 24, 64–65, 83; spiritual neediness
Eternal We, The (Green), xiii–xiv and, 115; talking about, 212–14; as
Ethics (Spinoza), 184 “Thou,” 62, 210–11, 225; “Thou” and,
ethos, 70, 109n6, 171–97, 256–69 195; thought and, 183; word and,
existential declaration, 209–27 30–31; Word and, 29–31, 43; word of,
experience: in Buber, 16; conscious- 73–74; words for, 203–5
ness and, 131; in Kant, 5–6; senses Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 103
and, 104–5 grace, 18, 70, 151, 256–69
Green, Harold J., x, xi–xiv
faith, 185, 189–92, 191n7, 193, 211–12, Grimm, Jacob, 57–58, 61, 90, 103–4,
249–52, 257–58, 263, 266 125–26, 160–61, 198
Fehling, Fred, xiii Guardini, Romano, 39–40
feminism, 240, 242–44
Feuerbach, Ludwig, 7, 13–14 Haecker, Theodore, 20n38, 51, 146, 179,
Fichte, Johann, 7, 78, 213, 238 246
Ficker, Ludwig von, vii–viii, ix, Hamann, Johann Georg, 12–13, 42–43,
20n38 55, 59, 69, 91–92, 95, 116, 190
Freud, Sigmund, 10 Hänsel, Ludwig, viii, ix
Hansen-Löve, Friedrich, ix–x
292
Index
Häring, Bernard, 39 individualism, 261, 263–64

harmony, 38, 107–8, 175–77, 251 insanity, 86, 120, 130–46
Harmony in the Cosmos (Zederbauer), intelligible “I,” 152–53, 155, 230
175–76 International Ferdinand Ebner Society
Hauer, Joseph, 105n3, 283 (IFEG), vii–x, x
hearing, 97–115 Interpretation of Dreams, The (Freud), 10
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 7, intuition, musical, 97–115
14, 22 “I-Thou”: in Buber, 17–18; in Feuer-
Heidegger, Martin, 9, 40 bach, 13–14; God and, 18, 33; in
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 116 Jacobi, 13. See also “Thou”
Horwitz, Rivka, 20–21
Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 13, 55, 61, Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 12–13
92, 127 James, William, 9
humility, 260 Jews, 29, 204–5, 244–46, 253, 283
Husserl, Edmund, 9 John, Gospel of, 29–30, 47, 64, 66–67,
73, 91, 117, 135, 187, 213, 222, 245, 249,
“I”: becoming of, 221–22; being-by-it- 268
self of, 60; in Buber, 17–18; Carte- John Paul II, Pope, 39
sian dualism and, 8; consciousness Jone, Hildegard, 25n51
and, 130–31, 158–59; dependence of,
64–75; in Descartes, 3–5; existence Kammerer, Paul, 170n11, 172n1
of, 147–56; existential declaration Kant, Immanuel, 5–8, 16, 78, 117–18,
and, 209–10; God and, 193; insanity 172n, 200n3, 217, 253, 261
and, 143–45; intelligible, 152–53, 155, Kasper, Walter, 39
230; in Jacobi, 13; language and, 135; Kierkegaard, Søren, 7, 14, 26, 48–49,
mathematical thought and, 171–97; 51, 77–79, 94, 132, 141, 237, 245, 248,
pain and, 126; in Pascal, 11–12; as 263, 264, 288
pronoun, 56–57; self-consciousness Kluge, Friedrich, 122n1, 158n2, 161n4,
and, 72; self-expressing, 150–51; 165–66, 168, 205–6, 206n6, 238,
self-naming of, 158–59; spiritual and, 239n2
49–50; Thou-less, 57; word and, 57 knowledge: in Descartes, 4; in Kant,
“I-aloneness,” 53–55, 71, 85, 92, 103, 5–6; mathematics and, 184; pneuma-
117–18, 135–36, 153, 169, 181, 190–91, tology and, 91; in Rosenzweig, 22;
194, 222–23, 230–31, 239, 249, 258, self-, 256–69; of sin, 186–87; sin and,
264, 266 267–68; spiritual life and, 89–96;
I and Thou (Buber), xi, 16 substantialization and, 184
“I and Thou,” 56–63
idealism, 147–56; defined, 5; German, language, 2, 50, 55; consciousness
5, 7; in Kant, 6; Rosenzweig and, 23; and, 90; consonants and, 127–28;
sexuality and, 243; spiritual and, in Grimm, 90, 125–26, 160–61; in
259; transcendental, 6 Hamann, 12, 91, 95; in Humboldt,
identity, 171–97 127; “I” and, 135; Leibniz on, 89–90;
imagination, 78–79, 107, 110, 113, 161, miracle of, 29–32; onomatopoeia
190, 234–35 and, 121–22; philosophy and, 89–90;
293
Index
language, (cont.) nominative case, 157–58, 162–63, 198,

randomness and, 71; reason and, 204
91; science and, 61, 92–93; spiritual Nostra Aetate (Second Vatican Coun-
and, 58–59; “Thou” as first object of, cil), ix
203; thought and, 81–82; urge for,
57–58; word and, 61–62, 92. See also objectivity, 182, 182n5, 185–86, 200,
speech 211–12, 219
Latourelle, René, 39 oblique case, 160, 162–63, 167, 171, 199,
law, 164, 187, 222, 226, 262, 266 204
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 89–90 Olsen, Regina, 14
Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 76 onomatopoeia, 121–22
Lindner, J. G., 111 On the Essence of Musicality (Hauer),
logical atomism, 9 105n3
logical positivism, 9 On the Last Things (Weininger), 166
Lord’s Prayer, 227 Österreicher, John M., ix, 20
love, 16, 32–33, 115, 140, 147–56, 182, 187,
191–93, 191n7, 209–27, 266–67 pain, 126, 128–29, 198, 207
Luke, Gospel of, 259 Pascal, Blaise, 11–12, 53–54, 80, 92, 124,
135, 146, 155, 163–64, 179, 200, 202,
man, as word, 167–70, 172n1 228
Marcel, Gabriel, 9 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 9
Marcus, Ernst, 102n2 perception, 5, 59–60, 78, 99–100, 116,
Mark, Gospel of, 267 126, 130, 160–61, 196–97, 206n6. See
materialism, 102, 181, 192n7 also senses
materiality, 86, 98–102, 111, 164 personality, 56–63, 141, 159, 192, 200,
mathematical thought, 171–97 209–27, 234, 249, 261
mathematics, 54 pessimism, 261–62
Matthew, Gospel of, 47, 213, 283 Phaedo (Plato), 47, 268
measure, etymology of, 164–65 phenomenality, 15
Methlagl, Walter, viii phenomenology, 9, 28
miracles, 29–32, 93, 206, 250–51 Philebus (Plato), 109
mother, 160–61, 165, 241 philosophers, word and, 89–96
M-sound, 157–70 philosophical environment, 3–10
music, 10, 244 Plato, 47, 78, 90, 109, 125, 268
musical intuition, 97–115, 175 Platonism, 48, 114, 175–76, 216,
281
name, etymology of, 158–59 pneuma, 80, 128, 136–38, 213
nature, 72, 110, 127, 136–37, 161, 176, 231, pneumatology, 19, 59, 61, 73n1, 85,
241–42, 261–62, 270 90–91, 93, 96, 110, 117, 136, 142, 158,
neediness, spiritual, 97–115 162–65, 174, 189, 191n7, 193, 199–200
neo-Platonism, 48 political science, 2
neue Denken, 10–11, 21–22 positivism, 9
“new thinking,” 10–11, 21–22 potentiality, 34, 216
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 262 predicative sentences, 201–2
294
Index
pride, 207n7, 230, 255, 259–60, 263, 266 self-consciousness, 56, 64–75, 158–59,
primal word, 125, 128–29, 128n2, 147, 187
158, 164, 169, 198–99, 206–7, 206n6, self-expressing “I,” 150–51
209, 220 self-knowledge, 256–69
pronouns, 56–57, 125, 151, 157–60, 162, senses, 97–115
167, 171, 198–99, 203, 238 sentence(s), 198–208; attributive,
psyche, 80, 136–38, 225, 243 201–3; “I am,” 66, 71–72, 94, 135,
psychoanalysis, 10, 139, 141, 241, 279–81 148, 150, 154, 188, 190, 210, 216, 218;
psycholinguistics, 127, 138, 156, 201 predictive, 201–2; primal word and,
psychology, 2, 130–46, 201–2 128–29; “Thou art,” 210–11, 218; word
Pustet, Anton, ix as, 57, 120, 125, 147
Sermon on the Mount, 223, 230
Rahner, Karl, 39–40 Sex and Character (Weininger), 237
Ratzinger, Joseph, 40 sexuality, 140, 170n11, 181, 237–43,
reality, 79, 171–97, 218, 228–36, 264, 271 273–75
reason: consciousness and, 116; God Sickness unto Death (Kierkegaard), 79
and, 118–19; in Hamann, 12, 91; in Silesius, Angelus, 221
Kant, 5–6, 117–18; language and, sin, 35–39, 186–87, 228–29, 256–69
91; perception and, 116; word and, Skorulski, Krzysztof, vii–x, 27
116–23 soul: in Buber, 23; in Descartes, 4;
“Rebel, The” (Baudelaire), 225, 225n4 faith and, 67; in Hamann, 57, 67, 111;
redemption, 23, 93, 186n6, 191, 267 musical intuition and, 106; in Plato,
Ricoeur, Paul, 9 47; spiritual life and, 189; word and,
Romans, Epistle to, 187 112; words for, 128n2
Rosenzweig, Franz, 11, 19–24 space, 172–73, 175–77
Russell, Bertrand, viii, 9 speech, 24, 28, 33–35, 49, 56, 64–65, 83;
M-sound in, 157–70; science and, 92;
sacraments, 2, 38–39 word and, 125. See also language
Scheler, Max, 15, 59, 61 sphere, 172
Schelling, Friedrich, 7, 90, 92, 114, 176 Spinoza, Baruch, 184, 217
Schillebeeck, Edward, 39 spiritual: aloneness and, 60; “I” and,
Schönberg, Arnold, 10 49–50; idealism and, 259; language
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 68, 77 and, 58–59; science and, 179–80;
science, 2–3; in Kant, 5–6; knowl- sexuality and, 240–41; translation
edge and, 267–68; language and, of, xiii; word and, 126
61, 92–93; mathematics and, 196; Star of Redemption, The (Rosenzweig),
pneumatology and, 93–94; speech 23
and, 92; spiritual and, 179–80; word Stein, Heinrich von, 165
and, 89–96 Sturm und Drang movement, 42–43,
Scotus Eriugena, 90 43n98
Second Vatican Council, ix, 38–40 subjectivity, 19, 85, 110, 133–34, 155, 182,
Second Viennese School, 10 186, 200, 282
seeing, 97–115 subjunctive mood, 216, 218–19
sein, 214–17 substance, 171–97
295
Index
substantialization, 50, 99, 102, 117, 158, Weininger, Otto, 166, 181, 189–90, 227,
181–82, 184–86, 186n6, 210, 221 237, 240, 242, 244, 247–49, 255
suffering, 132–33, 185, 207 will, 77, 172
Swoboda, Hermann, 240–41 Will to Power, The (Nietzsche), 262
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, vii–viii, x, xi,
theology, viii, 2, 39, 41, 51, 180, 186n6, 9, 26–29
211, 213, 256 word: faith and, 193; for God, 203–5;
thesis, 7, 171–72, 188, 192, 200–201, 210 of God, 73–74; God and, 30–31;
Thieme, Karl, ix having, 29; human becoming and,
“Thou,” 159–64; existential declaration 64–75; “I” and, 57; language and,
and, 209–10; in Feuerbach, 15; as 61–62, 92; love and, 147–56, 193;
first object of language, 203; God origin of, 56–63; pain and, 128–29;
and, 195, 225; God as, 62, 210–11; philosophers and, 89–96; primal,
I-less, 57; insanity and, 143–45; ob- 124–29, 128n2, 147, 158, 164, 169, 198–
jectivity of, 221; as pronoun, 56–57; 99, 206–7, 206n6, 209, 220; reason
in Scheler, 15; sin and, 35–37; speech and, 116–23; in Scheler, 15; science
and, 56 and, 89–96; self-consciousness and,
thought, 35, 76–77, 79–82, 183–84 64–75; sin and, 256–69; spiritual
tone, 97, 103, 105–6, 108, 109n6, 110–13, and, 126; spiritual life and, 89–96;
127, 128n2, 167 spiritual neediness and, 97–115; tone
touch, 98–101, 103–4, 110, 112 and, 97–115; Word vs., 31
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Witt- Word, 29–33, 38–39, 43; in Gospel of
genstein), viii, xi, 27 John, 29–30; reason and, 117; word
translation: need for, vii–x; note on, vs., 31
xi–xiv Word and the Spiritual Realities, The
truth, 22, 86–87, 192, 213, 234–35, 252 (Ebner): philosophical environment
T-sound, 203, 205–6 of, 3–10; publication of, 1; transla-
tions of, 1
Uexküll, Jakob Baron von, 47 World War I, 10–11, 23, 25–26
universe, 173–74 Wort, 57n1
Worte, 57n1
Vatican II. See Second Vatican Council Wörter, 57n1
verbalization, 81–86, 163, 183, 210, 266 Wort und Liebe (Ebner), 25, 25n51
verbs, 125, 148, 158, 198–99, 201–2,
203m206n6, 214, 219 Zederbauer, E., 175–76
Verhältnis, 53n1
Vienna Circle, 9
vocative case, 158–59, 162, 204
Vogel, Manfred, xi–xiii
296

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The Word & the Spiritual Realities

The Catholic University of America Press

English translation Copyright © 2021

The Catholic University of America Press

All rights reserved

geistigen Realitäten: Pneumatologische Fragmente

National Standards for Information Science—Permanence of Paper for Printed

Library Materials, ANSI Z39.­48-1984.

Design and composition by Kachergis Book Design

Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from the

A Note on the Need for an English Translation

Editor’s Introduction and Acknowledgments

8. Fragment 8. The Primal Word 124

The International Ferdinand Ebner Society (IFEG) seeks to dissem-

At any rate, before translating the Fragments into English, the

4. Forum 12, no. 136 (April 1965): 192–93.

My way to Ferdinand Ebner was through Martin Buber. Specifical-

comparison between Ebner and Buber, respecting their religious tra-

mension of “person,” both human and divine—namely, the “We” be-

E di t or’s I n t roduc t ion a n d

The Importance of Ebner

This volume will serve to introduce the ­English-speaking world

5. Jurgen Moltmann, Anfänge der dialektischen Theologie (Munich: Christian Kai-

The Philosophical Environment

6. See René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy,

am dreaming or led into error by some evil demon. Regardless, the

7. René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings, trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff,

9. Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein, 4–5.

cause, in his view, neither offered a coherent theory of knowledge.

Kant had a great influence on the classical German Idealists—

the free individual and of human social relations suggests a dialogi-

Thus, Descartes and Kant have given us as a legacy, “a ‘philosophy

than dependent on me). This isolation of the autonomous subject in

It is worthy of note that Austria in this period was a place of great

The Dialogical Philosophers:

12. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Oxford: Oxford University

The History of the Dialogical Principle

Hamann’s asystematic line of thinking greatly affected dialogi-

15. Pascal, Pensées, bilingual ed., trans. Stewart, Fragments 277–78.

1775 letter by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819): “I open eye or

logical ersatz God.”24 He does not recognize that there is a religious

24. Buber, “History of the Dialogical Principle,” 210.

surfaced again in 1890 with Wilhelm Dilthey’s (1833–1911) principle

Buber is not so much interested in the world of experience, the

In fact, as a consequence of so much development in Western

30. Buber, I and Thou, 54.

can be no withholding of self for the whole being is involved. If not,

In God, it is not possible to have an I­ -It relationship, for even if a

Like the other dialogical philosophers, Buber maintains that

The fragments are the pneumatological fragments, the collection

God is the eternal Thou, addressed in the second person rather

Another basic component is that truth is no longer only what is

45. Rosenzweig, “New Thinking,” 193.

almost to convert to Christianity, but instead gave him a new and

47. Buber, “History of the Dialogical Principle,” 212.

Thus, God is at the heart of man’s consciousness of self and his

Ferdinand Ebner: “Bedenker des Wortes”

49. Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 110.

training. At this time, because he was preoccupied with various

was impossible during this period to avoid a confrontation with the

Ebner, as well as Wittgenstein, asked the decisive question whether or

In fact, this comparison takes into account only Wittgenstein’s

Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

A Note on the Need for an English Translation

Editor’s Introduction and Acknowledgments

This volume will serve to introduce the English-speaking world

In God, it is not possible to have an I -It relationship, for even if a

The nearness of God is discovered in the I-Thou relation with

its presupposition. In other words, it means that man was created by

The “I” is a later discovery of the self-reflecting and self-discovering

The being-by-itself of the I in its aloneness is not a primordial fact

of s elf-consciousness—and the problem of the will, since the sub-

diacy of I -consciousness, and only therein do they have their mean-

I -aloneness, all scientific objectivity and absence of presuppositions

man—but to an I -less and Thouless inwardness, which lies beyond