What is offered here is only a pamphlet, proprio Marte, propriis auspiciis, proprio stipendio [by one’s own hand, on one’s own behalf, at one’s own expense],2 without any claim to being a part of the scientific-scholarly endeavor in which one acquires legitimacy as a thoroughfare or transition, as concluding, introducing, or participating, as a co-worker or as a volunteer attendant, as a hero or at any rate as a relative hero, or at least as an absolute trumpeter. It is merely a pamphlet and will not become anything more even if I, like Holberg’s magister,3 were, volente Deo [God willing], to continue it with seventeen others. It has as little chance of becoming something more as a writer of half-hour pieces has of writing something else even if he writes folios. The accomplishment is, however, in proportion to my talents, for I do not, like that noble Roman,4 refrain from serving the system merito magis quam ignavia [from justifiable motives rather than from indolence], but I am a loafer out of indolence ex animi sententia [by inclination] and for good reasons. Yet I do not want to be guilty of άπϱαγμοσύνη [abstention from public activity],5 which is a political offense in any age, but especially in [IV 176] a time of ferment, during which, in ancient times, it was punishable even by death. But suppose someone’s intervention made him guilty of a greater crime simply by giving rise to confusion—would it not be better for him to mind his own business? It is not given to everyone to have his intellectual pursuits coincide happily with the interests of the public, so happily that it almost becomes difficult to decide to what extent he is concerned for his own good or for that of the public. Did not Archimedes sit undisturbed, contemplating his circles while Syracuse was being occupied, and was it not to the Roman soldier who murdered him that he said those beautiful words: Nolite perturbare circulos meos [Do not disturb my circles]?6 But one who is not that fortunate should look for another prototype. When Corinth was threatened with a siege by Philip and all the inhabitants were busily active—one polishing his weapons, another collecting stones, a third repairing the wall—and Diogenes7 saw all this, he hurriedly belted up his cloak and eagerly trundled his tub up and down the streets. When asked why he was doing that, he answered: I, too, am at work and roll my tub so that I will not be the one and only loafer among so many busy people. Such conduct is at least not sophistical, if Aristotle’s definition of sophistry as the art of making money8 is generally correct. Such conduct at least cannot occasion any misunderstanding, for it surely would be inconceivable for anyone to dream of regarding Diogenes as the savior and benefactor of the city. And of course it is impossible for anyone to dream of attributing world-historical importance to a pamphlet (something that I, at least, regard as the greatest danger that could threaten my undertaking) or to assume that its author is the systematic Salomon Goldkalb9 so long awaited in our dear capital city, Copenhagen. For this to happen, the guilty person would have to be singularly stupid by nature, and, most likely, by yelling day in and day out in antistrophic antiphonies every time someone deluded him into thinking that now a new era, a new epoch, etc. was beginning, he would have so completely bellowed the sparsely [IV 177] bestowed quantum satis [sufficient amount] of common sense out of his head that he would have been transported into a state of bliss, into what could be called the howling madness of the higher lunacy, symptomatized by yelling, convulsive yelling, while the sum and substance of the yelling are these words: era, epoch, era and epoch, epoch and era, the system.10 The state of one thus blissfully transported is irrational exaltation, since he lives not as if every day were just one of the intercalary days that occur only every four years but as if it were one of those that occur only once in a thousand years, while the concept, like a juggler in this carnival time,11 has to keep doing those continual flip-flopping tricks—until the man himself flips over.12 Heaven preserve me and my pamphlet from the meddling of such an uproarious, bustling oaf, lest he tear me out of my carefree contentedness as the author of a pamphlet, prevent a kind and well-disposed reader from unabashedly looking to see if there is anything in the pamphlet he can use, and place me in the tragic-comic predicament of having to laugh at my own ill fortune, just as the fine city of Fredericia must have laughed amid all its ill fortune when it read in the newspaper the news of a local fire: “The alarm drums sounded; the fire engines raced through the streets”—although there is but one fire engine in Fredericia and probably not much more than one street. The newspaper thus compelled one to conclude that the one fire engine, instead of driving straight to the scene of the fire, did considerable side-maneuvering on the street. But, of course, my pamphlet seems to be least reminiscent of the beating of an alarm drum, and its author is least of all inclined to sound an alarm.
But what is my opinion?. . . . . “Do not ask me about that. Next to the question of whether or not I have an opinion, nothing can be of less interest to someone else than what my opinion is”. To have an opinion is to me both too much and too little; it presupposes a security and well-being in existence akin to having a wife and children in this mortal life, something not granted to a person who has to be up and about night and day and yet has no fixed income. In the world of spirit, this is my case, for I have trained myself and am training myself always to be able to dance lightly in the service of thought,13 as far as possible to the honor of the god 14and for my own enjoyment, renouncing domestic bliss and civic esteem, the communio bonorum [community of goods] and the concordance of joys that go with having an opinion. [IV 178] —Do I have any reward for this? Do I myself, like the person who serves at the altar, eat of what is set on the altar?15 . . . . . That is up to me. The one I serve is good for it, as the financiers say, and good in quite another sense than the financiers understand it. If, however, anyone were to be so courteous as to assume that I have an opinion, if he were to carry his gallantry to the extreme of embracing my opinion because it is mine, I regret his courtesy, that it is extended to one unworthy, and his opinion, if he does not otherwise have one apart from mine. 16 I can stake my own life, I can in all earnestness trifle with my own life—not with another’s. I am capable of this, the only thing I am able to do for thought, I who have no learning to offer it, “scarcely enough for the one-drachma course, to say nothing of the big fifty-drachma course” (Cratylus).17 All I have is my life, which I promptly stake every time a difficulty appears. Then it is easy to dance, for the thought of death is a good dancing partner, my dancing partner. Every human being is too heavy for me, and therefore I plead, per deos obsecro [I swear by the gods]: Let no one invite me, for I do not dance.
J. C.