2: THE QUESTION TO THE SINGLE ONE (9)

Responsibility is the navel-string of creation.—P.B.

The unique one and the single one

Only by coming up against the category of the “Single One”, and by making it a concept of the utmost clarity, did Søren Kierkegaard become the one who presented Christianity as a paradoxical problem for the single “Christian”. He was only able to do this owing to the radical nature of his solitariness. His “single one” cannot be understood without his solitariness, which differed in kind from the solitariness of one of the earlier Christian thinkers, such as Augustine or Pascal, whose name one would like to link with his. It is not irrelevant that beside Augustine stood a mother and beside Pascal a sister, who maintained the organic connexion with the world as only a woman as the envoy of elemental life can; whereas the central event of Kierkegaard’s life and the core of the crystallization of his thought was the renunciation of Regina Olsen as representing woman and the world. Nor may this solitariness be compared with that of a monk or a hermit: for him the renunciation stands essentially only at the beginning, and even if it must be ever anew achieved and practised, it is not that which is the life theme, the basic problem, and the stuff out of which all teaching is woven. But for Kierkegaard this is just what renunciation is. It is embodied in the category of the single one, “the category through which, from the religious standpoint, time and history and the race must pass” (Kierkegaard, 1847).

By means of an opposition we can first of all be precisely aware what the single one, in a special and specially important sense, is not. A few years before Kierkegaard outlined his Report to History under the title The Point of View for my Work as an Author, in whose Two Notes the category of the Single One found its adequate formulation, Max Stirner published his book about “The Unique One” (10). This too is a border concept like the single one, but one from the other end. Stirner, a pathetic nominalist and unmasker of ideas, wanted to dissolve the alleged remains of German idealism (as which he regarded Ludwig Feuerbach) by raising not the thinking subject nor man but the concrete present individual as “the exclusive I” to be the bearer of the world, that is, of “his” world.

Here this Unique One “consuming himself” in “self-enjoyment” is the only one who has primary existence; only the man who comes to such a possession and consciousness of himself has primary existence—on account of the “unity and omnipotence of our I that is sufficient to itself, for it lets nothing be but itself ”. Thus the question of an essential relation between him and the other is eliminated as well. He has no essential relation except to himself (Stirner’s alleged “living participation” “in the person of the other” is without essence, since the other has in his eyes no primary existence). That is, he has only that remarkable relation with the self which does not lack certain magical possibilities (since all other existence becomes the haunting of ghosts that are half in bonds, half free), but is so empty of any genuine power to enter into relation that it is better to describe as a relation only that in which not only I but also Thou can be said. This border product of a German Protagoras is usually underrated: the loss of reality which responsibility and truth have suffered in our time has here if not its spiritual origin certainly its exact conceptual prediction. “The man who belongs to himself alone . . . is by origin free, for he acknowledges nothing but himself,” and “True is what is Mine” are formulas which forecast a congealing of the soul unsuspected by Stirner in all his rhetorical assurance. But also many a rigid collective We, which rejects a superior authority, is easily understood as a translation from the speech of the Unique One into that of the Group-I which acknowledges nothing but itself—carried out against Stirner’s intention, who hotly opposes any plural version.

Kierkegaard’s Single One has this in common with its counterpoint, Stirner’s Unique One, that both are border categories; it has no more in common than this, but also it has no less.

The category of the Single One, too, means not the subject or “man”, but concrete singularity; yet not the individual who is detecting his existence, but rather the person who is finding himself. But the finding himself, however primally remote from Stirner’s “utilize thyself”, is not akin either to that “know thyself” which apparently troubled Kierkegaard very much. For it means a becoming, and moreover in a weight of seriousness that only became possible, at least for the West, through Christianity. It is therefore a becoming which (though Kierkegaard says that his category was used by Socrates “for the dissolution of heathendom”) is decisively different from that effected by the Socratic “delivery”. “No-one is excluded from being a Single One except him who excludes himself by wishing to be ‘crowd’.” Here not only is “Single One” opposed to “crowd”, but also becoming is opposed to a particular mode of being which evades becoming. That may still be in tune with Socratic thought. But what does it mean, to become a Single One? Kierkegaard’s account shows clearly that the nature of his category is no longer Socratic. It runs, “to fulfil the first condition of all religiosity” is “to be a single man”. It is for this reason that the “Single One” is “the category through which, from the religious standpoint, time and history and the race must pass”.

Since the concept of religiosity has since lost its definiteness, what Kierkegaard means must be more precisely defined. He cannot mean that to become a Single One is the presupposition of a condition of the soul, called religiosity. It is not a matter of a condition of the soul but a matter of existence in that strict sense in which—precisely by fulfilling the personal life—it steps in its essence over the boundary of the person. Then being, familiar being, becomes unfamiliar and no longer signifies my being but my participation in the Present Being. That this is what Kierkegaard means is expressed in the fundamental word that the Single One “corresponds” to God. In Kierkegaard’s account, then, the concept “of all religiosity” has to be more precisely defined by “of all religious reality”. But since this also is all too exposed to the epidemic sickening of the word in our time, by which every word is at once covered with the leprosy of routine and changed into a slogan, we must go further, as far as possible, and, giving up vexatious “religion”, take a risk, but a necessary risk, and explain the phrase as meaning “of all real human dealings with God”. That Kierkegaard means this is shown by his reference to a “speaking with God”. And indeed a man can have dealings with God only as a Single One, as a man who has become a Single One. This is so expressed in the Old Testament, though there a people too meets the Godhead as a people, that it time and again lets only a named person, Enoch, Noah, “have dealings with Elohim”. Not before a man can say I in perfect reality—that is, finding himself—can he in perfect reality say Thou—that is, to God. And even if he does it in a community he can only do it “alone”. “As the ‘Single One’ he [every man] is alone, alone in the whole world, alone before God.” That is— what Kierkegaard, strangely, does not think of—thoroughly unsocratic: in the words “the divine gives me a sign” Socrates’s “religiosity” is represented, significant for all ages; but the words “I am alone before God” are unthinkable as coming from him. Kierkegaard’s “alone” is no longer of Socrates; it is of Abraham—Genesis 12.1 and 22.2, alike demand in the same “Go before thee” the power to free oneself of all bonds, the bonds to the world of fathers and to the world of sons; and it is of Christ.

Clarity demands a further twofold distinction. First, with respect to mysticism. It too lets the man be alone before God but not as the Single One. The relation to God which it thinks of is the absorption of the I, and the Single One ceases to exist if he cannot—even in devoting himself—say I. As mysticism will not permit God to assume the servant’s form of the speaking and acting person, of a creator, of a revealer, and to tread the way of the Passion through time as the partner of history, suffering along with it all destiny, so it forbids man, as the Single One persisting as such, from really praying and serving and loving such as is possible only by an I to a Thou. Mysticism only tolerates the Single One in order that he may radically melt away. But Kierkegaard knows, at any rate in relation to God, what love is, and thus he knows that there is no self-love that is not self-deceit (since he who loves—and it is he who matters—loves only the other and essentially not himself), but that without being and remaining oneself there is no love.

The second necessary distinction is with respect to Stirner’s “Unique One”. (For the sake of conceptual precision this expression is to be preferred to the more humanistic ones, such as Stendhal’s égotiste.)

A preliminary distinction must be made with respect to so-called individualism, which has also produced a “religious” variety. The Single One, the person ready and able for the “standing alone before God”, is the counterpart of what still, in no distant time, was called—in a term which is treason to the spirit of Goethe—personality, and man’s becoming a Single One is the counterpart of “personal development”. All individualism, whether it is styled æsthetic or ethical or religious, has a cheap and ready pleasure in man provided he is “developing”. In other words, “ethical” and “religious” individualism are only inflexions of the “æsthetic” (which is as little genuine æsthesis as those are genuine ethos and genuine religio).

Morality and piety, where they have in this way become an autonomous aim, must also be reckoned among the show-pieces and shows of a spirit that no longer knows about Being but only about its mirrorings.

Where individualism ceases to be wanton Stirner begins. He is also, it is true, concerned with the “shaping of free personality”, but in the sense of a severance of the “self” from the world: he is concerned with the tearing apart of his existential bindings and bonds, with breaking free from all ontic otherness of things and of lives, which now may only serve as “nourishment” of his selfhood. The contrapuntal position of Stirner’s Unique One to Kierkegaard’s Single One becomes clearest when the questions of responsibility and truth are raised.

For Stirner both are bound to be false questions. But it is important to see that intending to destroy both basic ideas he has destroyed only their routine forms and thus, contrary to his whole intention, has prepared for their purification and renewal. Historically-minded contemporaries have spoken disparagingly of him as a modern sophist; since then the function of the sophists, and consequently of their like, of dissolving and preparing, has been recognized. Stirner may have understood Hegel just as little as Protagoras did Heraclitus; but even as it is meaningless to reproach Protagoras with laying waste the gardens of the great cosmologist, so Stirner is untouched by being ridiculed as the unsuspecting and profane interloper in the fields of post-kantian philosophy. Stirner is not, any more than the sophists are, a curious interlude in the history of human thought. Like them he is an επεισόδιον in the original sense. In his monologue the action secretly changes, what follows is a new thing—as Protagoras leads towards his contemporary Socrates, Stirner leads towards his contemporary Kierkegaard.

Responsibility presupposes one who addresses me primarily, that is, from a realm independent of myself, and to whom I am answerable. He addresses me about something that he has entrusted to me and that I am bound to take care of loyally. He addresses me from his trust and I respond in my loyalty or refuse to respond in my disloyalty, or I had fallen into disloyalty and wrestle free of it by the loyalty of the response. To be so answerable to a trusting person about an entrusted matter that loyalty and disloyalty step into the light of day (but both are not of the same right, for now loyalty, born again, is permitted to conquer disloyalty)—this is the reality of responsibility. Where no primary address and claim can touch me, for everything is “My property”, responsibility has become a phantom. At the same time life’s character of mutuality is dissipated. He who ceases to make a response ceases to hear the Word.

But this reality of responsibility is not what is questioned by Stirner; it is unknown to him. He simply does not know what of elemental reality happens between life and life, he does not know the mysteries of address and answer, claim and disclaim, word and response. He has not experienced this because it can only be experienced when one is not closed to the otherness, the ontic and primal otherness of the other (to the primal otherness of the other, which of course, even when the other is God, must not be confined to a “wholly otherness”). What Stirner with his destructive power successfully attacks is the substitute for a reality that is no longer believed: the fictitious responsibility in face of reason, of an idea, a nature, an institution, of all manner of illustrious ghosts, all that in its essence is not a person and hence cannot really, like father and mother, prince and master, husband and friend, like God, make you answerable. He wishes to show the nothingness of the word which has decayed into a phrase; he has never known the living word, he unveils what he knows. Ignorant of the reality whose appearance is appearance, he proves its nature to be appearance. Stirner dissolves the dissolution. “What you call responsibility is a lie!” he cries, and he is right: it is a lie. But there is a truth. And the way to it lies freer after the lie has been seen through.

Kierkegaard means true responsibility when, rushing in a parabola past Stirner, he speaks thus of the crowd and the Single One: “Being in a crowd either releases from repentance and responsibility or weakens the responsibility of the Single One, since the crowd leaves only a fragment of responsibility to him.” These words, to which I intend to return, no longer have in view any illusion of a responsibility without a receiver, but genuine responsibility, recognized once more, in which the demander demands of me the entrusted good and I must open my hands or they petrify.

Stirner has unmasked as unreal the responsibility which is only ethical by exposing the non-existence of the alleged receivers as such. Kierkegaard has proclaimed anew the responsibility which is in faith.

And as with responsibility so with truth itself: here the parabolic meeting becomes still uncannier.

“Truth . . . exists only—in your head.” “The truth is a— creature.” “For Me there is no truth, for nothing passes beyond Me.” “So long as you believe in the truth you do not believe in yourself. . . . You alone are the truth.” What Stirner undertakes here is the dissolution of possessed truth, of “truth” as a general good that can be taken into possession and possessed, that is at once independent of and accessible to the person. He does not undertake this like the sophists and other sceptics by means of epistemology. He does not seem to have been acquainted with the epistemological method; he is as audaciously naive in his behaviour as though Hume and Kant had never lived. But neither would the epistemology have achieved for him what he needed; for it, and the solipsist theory as well, leads only to the knowing subject and not to the concrete human person at which Stirner aims with undeviating fanaticism. The means by which he undertakes the dissolution of possessed truth is the demonstration that it is conditioned by the person. “True is what is Mine.” There already lies hidden the fundamental principle of our day, “what I take as true is defined by what I am”. To this two sentences may be taken as alternatives or as a combination—to Stirner’s horror, certainly, but in logical continuation as an inseparable exposition—first the sentence “And what I am is conditioned by my complexes”, and second the sentence “And what I am is conditioned by the class I belong to”, with all its variants. Stirner is the involuntary father of modern psychological and sociological relativizings which for their part (to anticipate) are at once true and false.

But again Stirner is right, again he dissolves the dissolution. Possessed truth is not even a creature, it is a ghost, a succubus with which a man may succeed in effectively imagining he is living, but with which he cannot live. You cannot devour the truth, it is not served up anywhere in the world, you cannot even gape at it, for it is not an object. And yet there does exist a participation in the being of inaccessible truth—for the man who stands its test. There exists a real relation of the whole human person to the unpossessed, unpossessable truth, and it is completed only in standing its test. This real relation, whatever it is called, is the relation to the Present Being.

The re-discovery of truth, which has been disenthroned in the human world by the semblance of truth, but which is in truth eternally irremovable, which cannot be possessed but which can be served, and for which service can be given by perceiving and standing test, is accomplished by Kierkegaard in a paradoxical series of sentences. It begins with the words, “He who communicates it [the truth] is only a Single One. And then its communication is again only for the Single One; for this view of life, ‘the Single One’, is the very truth.” You must listen carefully. Not that the Single One exists and not that he should exist is described as the truth; but “this view of life” which consists in the Single One’s existing, and which is hence also simply identified with him. To be the Single One is the communication of the truth, that is, the human truth. “The crowd,” says Kierkegaard, “produces positions of advantage in human life,” which “overlook in time and the world the eternal truth—the Single One.” “You alone are the truth” is what Stirner says. “The Single One is the truth,” is what is said here. That is the uncanny parabolic phenomenon of words to which I have referred. In “a time of dissolution” (Kierkegaard) there is the blank point at which the No and the Yes move up to and past one another with all their power, but purely objectively and without consciousness. Now Kierkegaard continues: “The truth cannot be communicated and received except as it were before God’s eyes, by God’s help; so that God is there, is the medium as he is the truth. . . . For God is the truth and its medium.” Thus “ ‘The Single One’ is the truth” and “God is the truth”. That is true because the Single One “corresponds” to God. Hence Kierkegaard can say that the category of the “Single One” is and remains “the fixed point which can resist pantheist confusion”. The Single One corresponds to God. For “man is akin to the Godhead”. In Old Testament language, the Single One realizes the “image” of God precisely through having become a Single One. In the language in which alone a generation, wrestling with the problem of truth, succumbing to it, turning from it, but also exploring it ever anew, can understand the conquest, the Single One existentially stands the test of the appearing truth by “the personal existence expressing what is said” [I would say “what is unsaid”]. There is this human side of truth—in human existence. God is the truth because he is, the Single One is the truth because he reaches his existence.

Stirner has dissolved the truth which is only noetic, and against all his knowledge and desire cleared a space into which Kierkegaard’s believed and tested truth has stepped, the truth which can no longer be obtained and possessed by the noesis alone, but which must be existentially realized in order to be inwardly known and communicated.

But there is still a third and last contact and repulsion. For Stirner every man is the Unique One if only he discards all ideological ballast (to which for him the religious belongs) and settles down as owner of his world-property. For Kierkegaard “every, absolutely every man” “can and ought” to be “the Single One”—only he must . . . what, indeed, must he? He must become a Single One. For “the matter is thus: this category cannot be taught by precept; it is something that you can do, it is an art . . . and moreover an art whose practice could cost the artist, in time, his life”. But when we investigate closely to see if there is a nearer definition anywhere, even if not precisely one that can be taught by precept, one will be found—no more than one, no more than a single word, but it is found: it is “obey”. It is at any rate what is under all circumstances prohibited to Stirner’s Unique One by his author. It is easy to discover that behind all Stirner’s prohibitions to his Unique One this stands as the real, comprehensive and decisive prohibition. With this one verb Kierkegaard finally thrusts off the spirit which, without either of them knowing, had approached so near, too near, in the time of dissolution.

And yet—the illumination of our time makes it visible—the two, primally different, primally strange to one another, concerning one another in nothing but with one another concerning us, work together, not a hundred years ago but to-day, the one announcing decay as decay, the other proving the eternal structure to be inviolable. To renounce obedience to any usurping lord is Stirner’s demand; Kierkegaard has none of his own— he repeats the ancient, misused, desecrated, outworn, inviolable “obey the Lord”. If a man becomes the Single One “then the obedience is all right” even in the time of dissolution, where otherwise the obedience is not all right.

Stirner leads out of all kinds of alleys into the open country where each is the Unique One and the world is his property. There they bustle in futile and non-committal life, and nothing comes of it but bustle, till one after the other begins to notice what this country is called. Kierkegaard leads to a “narrow pass”; his task is “where possible to induce the many, to invite them, to stir them to press through this narrow pass, ‘the Single One’, through which, note well, none passes unless he becomes ‘the Single One’, since in the concept itself the opposite is excluded”. I think, however, that in actual history the way to this narrow pass is through that open country that first is called individual egoism and then collective egoism and, finally, by its true name, despair.

But is there really a way through the narrow pass? Can one really become the Single One?

“I myself do not assert of myself,” says Kierkegaard, “that I am that one. For I have indeed fought for it, but have not yet grasped it, and am in the continued fight continually reminded that it is beyond human strength to be ‘the Single One’ in the highest sense.”

“In the highest sense”—that is spoken with a Christian and a christological reference, it manifests the paradox of the Christian task. But it is also convincing to the non-christian. It has in it the assertion that no man can say of himself that he has become the Single One, since a higher sense of the category always remains unfulfilled beyond him; but it also has in it the assertion that every man can nevertheless become a Single One. Both are true.

“The eternal, the decisive, can be worked for only where one man is; and to become this one man, which all men can, means to let oneself be helped by God.” This is a way.

And yet it is not the way; for reasons of which I have not spoken in this section and of which I now have to speak.

The single one and his thou

Kierkegaard’s “to become a Single One” is, as we have seen, not meant Socratically. The goal of this becoming is not the “right” life, but the entry into a relation. “To become” means here to become for something, “for” in the strict sense which simply transcends the circle of the person himself. It means to be made ready for the one relation which can be entered into only by the Single One, the one; the relation for whose sake man exists.

This relation is an exclusive one, the exclusive one, and this means, according to Kierkegaard, that it is the excluding relation, excluding all others; more precisely, that it is the relation which in virtue of its unique, essential life expels all other relations into the realm of the unessential.

“Everyone should be chary about having to do with ‘the others’, and should essentially speak only with God and with himself,” he says in the exposition of the category. Everyone, so it is to be understood, because everyone can be the one.

The joining of the “with God” with the “with himself” is a serious incompatibility that nothing can mitigate. All the enthusiasm of the philosophers for monologue, from Plato to Nietzsche, does not touch the simple experience of faith that speaking with God is something toto genere different from “speaking with oneself ”; whereas, remarkably, it is not something toto genere different from speaking with another human being. For in the latter case there is common the fact of being approached, grasped, addressed, which cannot be anticipated in any depth of the soul; but in the former case it is not common in spite of all the soul’s adventures in doubling roles—games, intoxications, dreams, visions, surprises, overwhelmings, over-powerings—in spite of all tensions and divisions, and all the noble and strong images for traffic with oneself. “Then one became two”—that can never become ontically true, just as the reverse “one and one at one” of mysticism can never be ontically true. Only when I have to do with another essentially, that is, in such a way that he is no longer a phenomenon of my I, but instead is my Thou, do I experience the reality of speech with another—in the irrefragable genuineness of mutuality. Abyssus abyssum clamat—what that means the soul first experiences when it reaches its frontier and finds itself faced by one that is simply not the soul itself and yet is a self.

But on this point Kierkegaard seems to correct himself. In the passage in his Journals where he asks the question, “And how does one become a Single One?” the answer begins with the formulation, obviously more valid in the problem under discussion, that one should be, “regarding the highest concerns, related solely to God”.

If, in this sentence, the word “highest” is understood as limiting in its content, then the phrase is self-evident: the highest concerns can be put only to the highest. But it cannot be meant in this way; this is clear from the other sentence, “Everyone should. . . . ” If both are held together, then Kierkegaard’s meaning is evident that the Single One has to do essentially (is not “chary”) only with God.

But thereby the category of the Single One, which has scarcely been properly discovered, is already fatefully misunderstood.

Kierkegaard, the Christian concerned with “contemporaneity” with Jesus, here contradicts his master.

To the question—which was not merely aimed at “tempting” him, but was rather a current and significant controversial question of the time—which was the all-inclusive and fundamental commandment, the “great” commandment, Jesus replied by connecting the two Old Testament commandments between which above all the choice lay: “love God with all your might” and “love your neighbour as one like yourself” (11). Both are to be “loved”, God and the “neighbour” (i.e. not man in general, but the man who meets me time and again in the context of life), but in different ways. The neighbour is to be loved “as one like myself” (not “as I love myself ”; in the last reality one does not love oneself, but one should rather learn to love oneself through love of one’s neighbour), to whom, then, I should show love as I wish it may be shown to me. But God is to be loved with all my soul and all my might. By connecting the two Jesus brings to light the Old Testament truth that God and man are not rivals. Exclusive love to God (“with all your heart”) is, because is God, inclusive love, ready to accept and include all love. It is not himself that God creates, not himself he redeems, even when he “reveals himself” it is not himself he reveals: his revelation does not have himself as object. He limits himself in all his limitlessness, he makes room for the creatures, and so, in love to him, he makes room for love to the creatures.

“In order to come to love,” says Kierkegaard about his renunciation of Regina Olsen, “I had to remove the object”. That is sublimely to misunderstand God. Creation is not a hurdle on the road to God, it is the road itself. We are created along with one another and directed to a life with one another. Creatures are placed in my way so that I, their fellow-creature, by means of them and with them find the way to God. A God reached by their exclusion would not be the God of all lives in whom all life is fulfilled. A God in whom only the parallel lines of single approaches intersect is more akin to the “God of the philosophers” than to the “God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob”. God wants us to come to him by means of the Reginas he has created and not by renunciation of them. If we remove the object, then—we have removed the object altogether. Without an object, artificially producing the object from the abundance of the human spirit and calling it God, this love has its being in the void.

“The matter must be brought back to the monastery from which Luther broke out.” So Kierkegaard defines the task of the time. “Monastery” can here mean only the institutional safeguarding of man from an essential relation, inclusive of his whole being, to any others but God. And certainly to one so safeguarded the orientation towards the point called God is made possible with a precision not to be attained otherwise. But what “God” in this case means is in fact only the end-point of a human line of orientation. But the real God lets no shorter line reach him than each man’s longest, which is the line embracing the world that is accessible to this man. For he, the real God, is the creator, and all beings stand before him in relation to one another in his creation, becoming useful in living with one another for his creative purpose. To teach an acosmic relation to God is not to know the creator. Acosmic worship of a God of whom one knows, along with Kierkegaard, that it is of his grace “that he wills to be a person in relation to you”, is Marcionism, and not even consistent Marcionism; for this worship does not separate the creator and the redeemer as it would have to do if it were consistent.

But one must not overlook the fact that Kierkegaard is not at all concerned to put Luther breaking out of the monastery in the wrong. On one occasion he treats Luther’s marriage as something removed from all natural personal life, all directness between man and wife, as a symbolic action, a deed representing and expressing the turning-point of the spiritual history of the west. “The most important thing,” he makes Luther say, “is that it becomes notorious that I am married.” But behind Luther’s marrying Katharina there emerges, unnamed but clear, Kierkegaard’s not marrying Regina. “Put the other way round, one could say . . . in defiance of the whole nineteenth century I cannot marry.” Here there is added as a new perspective the qualitative difference between historical epochs. Certainly, on Kierkegaard’s view it is true for both ages that the Single One should not have to do essentially with any others but God, and according to him, then, Luther speaks not essentially but only symbolically with Katharina; though bound to the world he remains essentially worldless and “alone before God”. But the symbolic actions are opposed: by the one the word of a new bond with the world—even if perhaps in the end a bond that is not binding—is spoken to the one century; by the other the word of a new and in any event binding renunciation is spoken to the other century. What is the reason? Because the nineteenth century has given itself up to the “crowd”, and “the crowd is untruth”.

But now two things are possible. Either the bond with the world preached with his life by Luther is in Kierkegaard’s view not binding or “essential” or necessary for the leading of Luther’s age to God. But that would make Luther one who lets what is not binding be effective as something that is binding, who has a different thing to say for men than he has for God, and who treats the sacrament as though it were fulfilled outside God; it would make Luther one in whose symbolic action no authority could reside. Or else on the other hand the bond with the world preached with his life by Luther is in Kierkegaard’s view binding and essential and necessary for leading to God. Then the difference between the two epochs, which is for the rest indubitably a qualitative one, would have a say in what is basically independent of history, more so than birth and death— the relation of the Single One to God. For the essential quality of this relation cannot be of one kind in the former century and of another in the latter; it cannot in the one go right through the world and in the other go over and beyond the world. Human representations of the relation change, the truth of the relation is unchangeable because it stands in eternal mutuality; it is not man who defines his approach to it but the creator who in the unambiguity of man’s creation has instituted the approach.

It is certainly not possible to speak of God other than dialectically, for he does not come under the principle of contradiction. Yet there is a limit of dialectic where assertion ceases but where there is knowledge. Who is there who confesses the God whom Kierkegaard and I confess, who could suppose in decisive insight that God wants Thou to be truly said only to him, and to all others only an unessential and fundamentally invalid word—that God demands of us to choose between him and his creation? The objection is raised that the world as a fallen world is not to be identified with the creation. But what fall of the world could be so mighty that it could for him break it away from being his creation? That would be to make the action of the world into one more powerful than God’s action and into one compelling him.

The essential is not that we should see things as standing out from God nor as being absorbed in him, but that we should “see things in God”, the things themselves. To apply this to our relations with creatures: only when all relations, uncurtailed, are taken into the one relation, do we set the ring of our life’s world round the sun of our being.

Certainly that is the most difficult thing, and man in order to be able to do it must let himself be helped from time to time by an inner-worldly “monastery”. Our relations to creatures incessantly threaten to get incapsulated. As the world itself is sustained in its independence as the world through striving to be closed to God, though as creation it is open to him, so every great bond of man—though in it he has perceived his connexion with the infinite—defends itself vigorously against continually debouching into the infinite. Here the monastic forms of life in the world, the loneliness in the midst of life into which we turn as into hostelries, help us to prevent the connexion between the conditioned bonds and the one unconditioned bond from slackening. This too, if we do not wish to see our participation in the Present Being dying off, is an imperative interchange, the systole to the diastole of the soul; and the loneliness must know the quality of strictness, of a monastery’s strictness, in order to do its work. But it must never wish to tear us away from creatures, never refuse to dismiss us to them. By that it would act contrary to its own law and would close us, instead of enabling us, as is its office, to keep open the gates of finitude.

Kierkegaard does not conceal from us for a moment that his resistance to a bond with the world, his religious doctrine of loneliness, is based on personal nature and personal destiny. He confesses that he “ceased to have common speech” with men. He notes that the finest moment in his life is in the bath-house, before he dives into the water: “I have nothing more to do with the world”. He exposes before our eyes some of the roots of his “melancholy”. He knows precisely what has brought him to the point of being chary about having to do with others and of essentially speaking only with God and with himself. And yet, as soon as he begins with the “direct” language, he expresses it as an imperative: let everyone do so. Continually he points to his own shadow—and wants to leap across it. He is a being excepted and exposed, and certainly so are we all, for so is man as man. But Kierkegaard has moved to the fringe of being excepted and exposed, and maintains equilibrium only by means of the unheard-of balance of his “author’s” reticently communicative existence with the complicated safeguards of all the “pseudonyms”; whereas we are not on the fringe, and that is no “not yet” nor any sort of compromising, no shirking of melancholy; it is organic continuance and grace of preservation and significant for the future of the spirit. Kierkegaard behaves in our sight like a schizophrenist, who tries to win over the beloved individual into “his” world as if it were the true one. But it is not the true one. We, ourselves wandering on the narrow ridge, must not shrink from the sight of the jutting rock on which he stands over the abyss; nor may we step on it. We have much to learn from him, but not the final lesson.

Our rejection can be supported by Kierkegaard’s own teaching. He describes “the ethical” as “the only means by which God communicates with ‘man’ ” (1853). The context of the teaching naturally keeps at a distance the danger of understanding this in the sense of an absolutizing of the ethical. But it must be understood so that not merely an autarkic ethic but also an autarkic religion is inadmissible; so that as the ethical cannot be freed from the religious neither can the religious from the ethical without ceasing to do justice to the present truth. The ethical no longer appears here, as in Kierkegaard’s earlier thought, as a “stage” from which a “leap” leads to the religious, a leap by which a level is reached that is quite different and has a different meaning; but it dwells in the religious, in faith and service. This ethical can no longer mean a morality belonging to a realm of relativity and time and again overtaken and invalidated by the religious; but it means an essential action and suffering in relation to men, which are co-ordinated with the essential relation to God. But only he who has to do with men essentially can essentially act and suffer in relation to them. If the ethical is the only means by which God communicates with man then I am forbidden to speak essentially only with God and myself. And so indeed it is. I do not say that Kierkegaard on his rock, alone with the mercy of the Merciful, is forbidden. I say only that you and I are forbidden.

Kierkegaard is deeply conscious of the dubiousness which arises from the negativizing extension of the category of the Single One. “The frightful thing”, he writes in his Journal, and we read it, as he wrote it, with fear and trembling, “is that precisely the highest form of piety, to let everything earthly go, can be the highest egoism”. Here obviously a distinction is made according to motives, and the idea of egoism used here is an idea of motivation. If we put in its place an objective idea, an idea of a state of affairs, the sentence is changed to a still more frightful one: “Precisely what appears to us as the highest form of piety— to let everything earthly go—is the highest egoism.”

Is it true that the Single One “corresponds” to God? Does he realize the “image” of God solely by having become a Single One? One thing is lacking for that to be—and it is the decisive thing.

“Certainly,” says Kierkegaard, “God is no egoist, but he is the infinite Ego.” Yet thereby too little is said of the God whom we confess—if one dares to say anything at all. He hovers over his creation not as over a chaos, he embraces it. He is the infinite I that makes every It into his Thou.

The Single One corresponds to God when he in his human way embraces the bit of the world offered to him as God embraces his creation in his divine way. He realizes the image when, as much he can in a personal way, he says Thou with his being to the beings living round about him.

No-one can so refute Kierkegaard as Kierkegaard himself. Reasoning with and judging himself, he corrects his own spirit from its depths, often before it has uttered itself. In 1843 Kierkegaard enters this unforgettable confession in his Journal: “Had I had faith I would have stayed with Regina.” By this he means, “If I had really believed that ‘with God all things are possible’, hence also the resolution of this—my melancholy, my powerlessness, my fear, my alienation, fraught with destiny, from woman and from the world—then I would have stayed with Regina.” But while meaning this he says something different, too, namely, that the Single One, if he really believes, and that means if he is really a Single One (which, as we saw, he has become for the one relation of faith), can and may have to do essentially with another. And behind this there lurks the extreme that he who can and may also ought to do this. “The only means by which God communicates with man is the ethical.” But the ethical in its plain truth means to help God by loving his creation in his creatures, by loving it towards him. For this, to be sure, one must let oneself be helped by him.

“The Single One is the category through which, from the religious standpoint, time and history and the race must pass.” What is this “religious standpoint”? One beside others? The standpoint towards God, gained by standing aside from all others? God one object beside other objects, the chosen one beside the rejected ones? God as Regina’s successful rival? Is that still God? Is that not merely an object adapted to the religious genius? (Note that I am not speaking of true holiness for which, as it hallows everything, there is no “religious standpoint”.) Religious genius? Can there be religious geniuses? Is that not a contradictio in adiecto? Can the religious be a specification? “Religious geniuses” are theological geniuses. Their God is the God of the theologians. Admittedly, that is not the God of the philosophers, but neither is it the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. The God of the theologians, too, is a logicized God, and so is even the God of a theology which will speak only dialectically and makes light of the principle of contradiction. So long as they practise theology they do not get away from religion as a specification. When Pascal in a volcanic hour made that stammering distinction between God and God he was no genius but a man experiencing the primal glow of faith; but at other times he was a theological genius and dwelt in a specifying religion, out of which the happening of that hour had lifted him.

Religion as a specification misses its mark. God is not an object beside objects and hence cannot be reached by renunciation of objects. God, indeed, is not the cosmos, but far less is he Being minus cosmos. He is not to be found by subtraction and not to be loved by reduction.

The single one and the body politic

Kierkegaard’s thought circles round the fact that he essentially renounced an essential relation to a definite person. He did not resign this casually, or in the relativity of the many experiences and decisions of life, or with the soul alone, but essentially. The essential nature of his renunciation, its down-right positive essentiality, is what he wants to express by saying, “In defiance of the whole nineteenth century I cannot marry.” The renunciation becomes essential through its representing in concrete biography the renunciation of an essential relation to the world as that which hinders being alone before God. Moreover, as I have already said, this does not happen just once, as when a man enters a monastery and has thereby cut himself off from the world and lives outside it as one who has done this; but it is peculiarly enduring: the renunciation becomes the zero of a spiritual graph whose every point is determined in relation to this zero. It is in this way that the graph receives its true existential character, by means of which it has provided the impulse to a new philosophy and a new theology. And certainly there goes along with this secularly significant concreteness of biography the curiously manifold motivation—which is undoubtedly legitimate, and is to be found piecemeal in the soundings of inwardness—of the renunciation which Kierkegaard expresses directly and indirectly, by suggestion and concealment. But beyond that, on a closer consideration it is to be noted that there arises, between the renunciation and an increasingly strong point of view and attitude which is finally expressed with penetrating clarity in the Two Notes to the Report to History, a secret and unexpressed connexion important for Kierkegaard and for us.

“The crowd is untruth.” “This consideration of life, the Single One, is the truth.” “No-one is excluded from becoming a Single One except him who excludes himself by wanting to be crowd.” And again, “ ‘The Single One’ is the category of the spirit, of spiritual awakening and revival, and is as sharply opposed to politics as possible.” The Single One and the crowd, the “spirit” and “politics”—this opposition is not to be separated from that into which Kierkegaard enters with the world, expressing it symbolically by means of his renunciation.

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

If one makes a fairly comprehensive survey of the whole labyrinthine structure of Kierkegaard’s thought about renunciation it will be recognized that he is speaking not solely of a hard, hard-won renunciation, bought with the heart’s blood, of life with a person; but in addition of the downright positively valued renunciation of the life (conditioned by life with a person) with an impersonal being, which in the foreground of the happening is called “people”, in its background “the crowd”. This being, however, in its essence—of which Kierkegaard knows or wants to know nothing—refutes these descriptions as caricatures and acknowledges as its true name only that of a res publica, in English “the body politic”. When Kierkegaard says the category of the “Single One” is “as sharply opposed as possible to politics” he obviously means an activity that has essentially lost touch with its origin the polis. But this activity, however degenerate, is one of the decisive manifestations of the body politic. Every degeneration indicates its genus, and in such a way that the degeneration is never related to the genus simply as present to past, but as in a distorted face the distortion is related to the form persisting beneath it. The body politic, which is sometimes also called the “world”, that is, the human world, seeks, knowingly or unknowingly, to realize in its genuine formations men’s turning to one another in the context of creation. The false formations distort but they cannot eliminate the eternal origin. Kierkegaard in his horror of malformation turns away. But the man who has not ceased to love the human world in all its abasement sees even to-day genuine form. Supposing that the crowd is untruth, it is only a state of affairs in the body politic; how truth is here related to untruth must be part and parcel of the true question to the Single One, and that warning against the crowd can be only its preface.

From this point that special matter can be made clear of which I said that it is an additional reason for Kierkegaard’s considering marriage to be an impediment. Marriage, essentially understood, brings one into an essential relation to the “world”; more precisely, to the body politic, to its malformation and its genuine form, to its sickness and its health. Marriage, as the decisive union of one with another, confronts one with the body politic and its destiny—man can no longer shirk that confrontation in marriage, he can only prove himself in it or fail. The isolated person, who is unmarried or whose marriage is only a fiction, can maintain himself in isolation; the “community” of marriage is part of the great community, joining with its own problems the general problems, bound up with its hope of salvation to the hope of the great life that in its most miserable state is called the crowd. He who “has entered on marriage”, who has entered into marriage, has been in earnest, in the intention of the sacrament, with the fact that the other is; with the fact that I cannot legitimately share in the Present Being without sharing in the being of the other; with the fact that I cannot answer the lifelong address of God to me without answering at the same time for the other; with the fact that I cannot be answerable without being at the same time answerable for the other as one who is entrusted to me. But thereby a man has decisively entered into relation with otherness; and the basic structure of otherness, in many ways uncanny but never quite unholy or incapable of being hallowed, in which I and the others who meet me in my life are inwoven, is the body politic. It is to this, into this, that marriage intends to lead us. Kierkegaard himself makes one of his pseudonyms, the “married man” of the Stages, express this, though in the style of a lower point of view which is meant to be overcome by a higher. But it is a lower point of view only when trivialized, there is no higher, because to be raised above the situation in which we are set never yields in truth a higher point of view. Marriage is the exemplary bond, it carries us as does none other into the greater bondage, and only as those who are bound can we reach the freedom of the children of God. Expressed with a view to the man, the woman certainly stands “in a dangerous rapport to finitude”, and finitude is certainly the danger, for nothing threatens us so sharply as that we remain clinging to it. But our hope of salvation is forged on this very danger, for our human way to the infinite leads only through fulfilled finitude.

This person is other, essentially other than myself, and this otherness of his is what I mean, because I mean him; I confirm it; I wish his otherness to exist, because I wish his particular being to exist. That is the basic principle of marriage and from this basis it leads, if it is real marriage, to insight into the right and the legitimacy of otherness and to that vital acknowledgement of many-faced otherness—even in the contradiction and conflict with it—from which dealings with the body politic receive their religious ethos. That the men with whom I am bound up in the body politic and with whom I have directly or indirectly to do, are essentially other than myself, that this one or that one does not have merely a different mind, or way of thinking or feeling, or a different conviction or attitude, but has also a different perception of the world, a different recognition and order of meaning, a different touch from the regions of existence, a different faith, a different soil: to affirm all this, to affirm it in the way of a creature, in the midst of the hard situations of conflict, without relaxing their real seriousness, is the way by which we may officiate as helpers in this wide realm entrusted to us as well, and from which alone we are from time to time permitted to touch in our doubts, in humility and upright investigation, on the other’s “truth” or “untruth”, “justice” or “injustice”. But to this we are led by marriage, if it is real, with a power for which there is scarcely a substitute, by its steady experiencing of the life-substance of the other as other, and still more by its crises and the overcoming of them which rises out of the organic depths, whenever the monster of otherness, which but now blew on us with its icy demons’ breath and now is redeemed by our risen affirmation of the other, which knows and destroys all negation, is transformed into the mighty angel of union of which we dreamed in our mother’s womb.

Of course, there is a difference between the private sphere of existence, to which marriage belongs, and the public sphere of existence. Identification takes place in a qualitatively different way in each. The private sphere is that with which a man, at any rate in the healthy epochs of its existence, can in all concreteness identify himself without regard to individual differentiation, such as the bodily and spiritual one between members of a family. This identification can take place by his saying in all concreteness We, I, of this family or band of his. (A genuine band stands in this respect on the side of the private sphere, in another respect it is on the side of the public sphere.) And when he says this he means not merely the whole, but also the single persons recognized and affirmed by him in their particular being. Identification with the public sphere of existence, on the other hand, is not really able to embrace the concrete persons in a concrete way. Thus I say of my nation “we”, and this can be raised to the power of an elementary “That is I”. But as soon as concretion, direction to the persons of whom the nation consists, enters in, there is a cleavage, and knowledge of the unbridgable multiple otherness permeates the identification in a broad stream. If the like happened to a province of private existence then it would either itself become of questionable value or it would pass over into public existence. For the relation to public existence every such test can be a proof and strengthening.

There are, however, two basic attitudes in which identification with public existence wards off the concretion, the direction to actual persons, and either transitorily or enduringly asserts itself. Very different from one another though they are, they often exercise almost the same effect. The one derives from the act of enthusiasm of “historic” hours: the crowd is actualized, enters into the action and is transfigured in it, and the person, overpowered by delirious ecstasy, is submerged in the movement of public existence. Here there is no contesting and impeding knowledge about the otherness of other persons: the transfiguration of the crowd eclipses all otherness, and the fiery impulse to identification can beget a real “family” feeling for the unknown man who walks in a demonstration or in the enthusiastic confusion of the streets runs into one’s arms.

The other basic attitude is passive and constant. It is the accustomed joining in public opinion and in public “taking of a position”. Here the crowd remains latent, it does not appear as a crowd, but only becomes effective. And, as is known, this happens in such a way that I am either completely excused from forming an opinion and a decision, or as it were convicted, in a murky recess of inwardness, of the invalidity of my opinions and decisions, and in their stead fitted out with ones that are approved as valid. By this means I am not in the least made aware of others since the same thing happens to them and their otherness has been varnished over.

Of these two basic attitudes the first is of such a kind that it snatches us out and away from confrontation with the great form of otherness in public existence, from the most difficult of the inner-worldly tasks, and raises us enthusiastically into the historical paradise of crowds. The second undermines the ground on which confrontation is to be carried out; it rubs out the pathetic signs of otherness and then convinces us by the evidence of our own eyes that uniformity is the real thing.

It is from this point that Kierkegaard’s confusion of public existence, or the body politic, with the crowd, is to be understood. He knows the body politic, indeed, also in the form of the State, which is for him, however, only a fact in the world of relativity which is foreign to transcendence; it is respectable, but without significance for the individual’s religious relation. And then he knows a crowd which is not respectable, but which has the deepest negative significance, indeed concerning transcendence, but as compact devilty.

This confusion which is in increasing measure heavy with consequences for the thought of our time must be opposed with the force of distinction.

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

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

“The Single One” is not the man who has to do with God essentially, and only unessentially with others, who is unconditionally concerned with God and conditionally with the body politic. The Single One is the man for whom the reality of relation with God as an exclusive relation includes and encompasses the possibility of relation with all otherness, and for whom the whole body politic, the reservoir of otherness, offers just enough otherness for him to pass his life with it.

The single one in responsibility

The category of the Single One has changed. It cannot be that the relation of the human person to God is established by the subtraction of the world. The Single One must therefore take his world, what of the world is extended and entrusted to him in his life, without any reduction into his life’s devotion; he must let his world partake unabated of its essentiality. It cannot be that the Single One finds God’s hands when he stretches his hands out and away beyond creation. He must put his arms round the vexatious world, whose true name is creation; only then do his fingers reach the realm of lightning and of grace. It cannot be that the spirit of reduction reigns in the relation of faith as well. The Single One who lives in his relation of faith must wish to have it fulfilled in the uncurtailed measure of the life he lives. He must face the hour which approaches him, the biographical and historical hour, just as it is, in its whole world content and apparently senseless contradiction, without weakening the impact of otherness in it. He must hear the message, stark and untransfigured, which is delivered to him out of this hour, presented by this situation as it arrives. Nor must he translate for himself its wild and crude profaneness into the chastely religious: he must recognize that the question put to him, with which the speech of the situation is fraught—whether it sounds with angels’ or with devils’ tongues—remains God’s question to him, of course without the devils thereby being turned into angels. It is a question wondrously tuned in the wild crude sound. And he, the Single One, must answer, by what he does and does not do, he must accept and answer for the hour, the hour of the world, of all the world, as that which is given to him, entrusted to him. Reduction is forbidden; you are not at liberty to select what suits you, the whole cruel hour is at stake, the whole claims you, and you must answer—Him.

You must hear the claim, however unharmoniously it strikes your ear—and let no-one interfere; give the answer from the depths, where a breath of what has been breathed in still hovers—and let no-one prompt you.

This arch-command, for whose sake the Bible makes its God speak from the very time of creation, defines anew, when it is heard, the relation of the Single One to his community.

The human person belongs, whether he wants to acknowledge it and take it seriously or not, to the community in which he is born or which he has happened to get into. But he who has realized what destiny means, even if it looks like doom, and what being placed there means, even if it looks like being misplaced, knows too that he must acknowledge it and take it seriously. But then, precisely then, he notes that true membership of a community includes the experience, which changes in many ways, and which can never be definitively formulated, of the boundary of this membership. If the Single One, true to the historico-biographical hour, perceives the word, if he grasps the situation of his people, his own situation, as a sign and demand upon him, if he does not spare himself and his community before God, then he experiences the boundary. He experiences it in such agony as if the boundary-post had pierced his soul. The Single One, the man living in responsibility, can carry out his political actions as well—and of course omissions are also actions—only from that ground of his being to which the claim of the fearful and kind God, the Lord of history and our Lord, wishes to penetrate.

It is obvious that for the man living in community the ground of personal and essential decision is continually threatened by the fact of so-called collective decisions. I remind you of Kierkegaard’s warning: “That men are in a crowd either excuses a man of repentance and responsibility or at all events weakens the Single One’s responsibility, because the crowd lets the man have only a fragment of responsibility.” But I must put it differently. In practice, in the moment of action, it is only the semblance of a fragment, but afterwards, when in your waking dream after midnight you are dragged before the throne and attacked by the spurned calling to be a Single One, it is complete responsibility.

It must, of course, be added that the community to which a man belongs does not usually express in a unified and unambiguous way what it considers to be right and what not right in a given situation. It consists of more or less visible groups, which yield to a man interpretations of destiny and of his task which are utterly different yet all alike claim absolute authenticity. Each knows what benefits the community, each claims your unreserved complicity for the good of the community.

Political decision is generally understood to-day to mean joining such a group. If this is done then everything is finally in order, the time of deciding is over. From then on one has only to share in the group’s movements. One no longer stands at the cross-roads, one no longer has to choose the right action out of the possible ones; everything is decided. What you once thought—that you had to answer ever anew, situation by situation, for the choice you made—is now got rid of. The group has relieved you of your political responsibility. You feel yourself answered for in the group; you are permitted to feel it.

The attitude which has just been described means for the man of faith (I wish to speak only of him here), when he encounters it, his fall from faith—without his being inclined to confess it to himself or to admit it. It means his fall in very fact from faith, however loudly and emphatically he continues to confess it not merely with his lips but even with his very soul as it shouts down inmost reality. The relation of faith to the one Present Being is perverted into semblance and self-deceit if it is not an all-embracing relation. “Religion” may agree to be one department of life beside others which like it are independent and autonomous—it has thereby already perverted the relation of faith. To remove any realm basically from this relation, from its defining power, is to try to remove it from God’s defining power which rules over the relation of faith. To prescribe to the relation of faith that “so far and no further you may define what I have to do; here your power ends and that of the group to which I belong begins” is to address God in precisely the same way. He who does not let his relation of faith be fulfilled in the uncurtailed measure of the life he lives, however much he is capable of at different times, is trying to curtail the fulfillment of God’s rule of the world.

Certainly the relation of faith is no book of rules which can be looked up to discover what is to be done now, in this very hour. I experience what God desires of me for this hour—so far as I do experience it—not earlier than in the hour. But even then it is not given me to experience it except by answering before God for this hour as my hour, by carrying out the responsibility for it towards him as much as I can. What has now approached me, the unforeseen, the unforeseeable, is word from him, a word found in no dictionary, a word that has now become word—and it demands my answer to him. I give the word of my answer by accomplishing among the actions possible that which seems to my devoted insight to be the right one. With my choice and decision and action—committing or omitting, acting or persevering—I answer the word, however inadequately, yet properly; I answer for my hour. My group cannot relieve me of this responsibility, I must not let it relieve me of it; if I do I pervert my relation of faith, I cut out of God’s realm of power the sphere of my group. But it is not as though the latter did not concern me in my decision—it concerns me tremendously. In my decision I do not look away from the world, I look at it and into it, and before all I may see in the world, to which I have to do justice with my decision, my group to whose welfare I cling; I may before all have to do justice to it, yet not as a thing in itself, but before the Face of God; and no programme, no tactical resolution, no command can tell me how I, as I decide, have to do justice to my group before the Face of God. It may be that I may serve it as the programme and resolution and command have laid down. It may be that I have to serve it otherwise. It could even be—if such an unheard-of thing were to rise within me in my act of decision—that I might be set in cruel opposition to its success, because I became aware that God’s love ordains otherwise. Only one thing matters, that as the situation is presented to me I expose myself to it as to the word’s manifestation to me, to the very ground where hearing passes into being, and that I perceive what is to be perceived and answer it. He who prompts me with an answer in such a way as to hinder my perceiving is the hinderer, let him be for the rest who he will (12).

I do not in the least mean that a man must fetch the answer alone and unadvised out of his breast. Nothing of the sort is meant; how should the direction of those at the head of my group not enter essentially into the substance out of which the decision is smelted? But the direction must not be substituted for the decision; no substitute is accepted. He who has a master may yield “himself”, his bodily person, to him, but not his responsibility. He must find his way to that responsibility armed with all the “ought” that has been forged in the group, but exposed to destiny so that in the demanding moment all armour falls away from him. He may even hold firm with all his force to the “interest” of the group—till in the last confrontation with reality a finger, hardly to be perceived, yet never to be neglected, touches it. It is not the “finger of God”, to be sure; we are not permitted to expect that, and therefore there is not the slightest assurance that our decision is right in any but a personal way. God tenders me the situation to which I have to answer; but I have not to expect that he should tender me anything of my answer. Certainly in my answering I am given into the power of his grace, but I cannot measure heaven’s share in it, and even the most blissful sense of grace can deceive. The finger I speak of is just that of the “conscience”, but not of the routine conscience, which is to be used, is being used and worn out, the play-on-the-surface conscience, with whose discrediting they thought to have abolished the actuality of man’s positive answer. I point to the unknown conscience in the ground of being, which needs to be discovered ever anew, the conscience of the “spark” (13), for the genuine spark is effective also in the single composure of each genuine decision. The certainty produced by this conscience is of course only a personal certainty; it is uncertain certainty; but what is here called person is the very person who is addressed and who answers.

I say, therefore, that the Single One, that is, the man living in responsibility, can make even his political decisions properly only from that ground of his being at which he is aware of the event as divine speech to him; and if he lets the awareness of this ground be strangled by his group he is refusing to give God an actual reply.

What I am speaking of has nothing to do with “individualism”. I do not consider the individual to be either the starting-point or the goal of the human world. But I consider the human person to be the irremovable central place of the struggle between the world’s movement away from God and its movement towards God. This struggle takes place to-day to an uncannily large extent in the realm of public life, of course not between group and group but within each group. Yet the decisive battles of this realm as well are fought in the depth, in the ground or the groundlessness, of the person.

Our age is intent on escaping from the demanding “ever anew” of such an obligation of responsibility by a flight into a protective “once-for-all”. The last generation’s intoxication with freedom has been followed by the present generation’s craze for bondage; the untruth of intoxication has been followed by the untruth of hysteria. He alone is true to the one Present Being who knows he is bound to his place—and just there free for his proper responsibility. Only those who are bound and free in this way can still produce what can truly be called community. Yet even today the believing man, if he clings to a thing that is presented in a group, can do right to join it. But belonging to it, he must remain submissive with his whole life, therefore with his group life as well, to the One who is his Lord. His responsible decision will thus at times be opposed to, say, a tactical decision of his group. At times he will be moved to carry the fight for the truth, the human, uncertain and certain truth which is brought forward by his deep conscience, into the group itself, and thereby establish or strengthen an inner front in it. This can be more important for the future of our world than all fronts that are drawn today between groups and between associations of groups; for this front, if it is everywhere upright and strong, may run as a secret unity across all groups.

What the right is can be experienced by none of the groups of today except through men who belong to them staking their own souls to experience it and then revealing it, however bitter it may be, to their companions—charitably if it may be, cruelly if it must be. Into this fiery furnace the group plunges time and again, or it dies an inward death.

And if one still asks if one may be certain of finding what is right on this steep path, once again the answer is No; there is no certainty. There is only a chance; but there is no other. The risk does not ensure the truth for us; but it, and it alone, leads us to where the breath of truth is to be felt.

Attempts at severance

Against the position outlined here of the Single One in responsibility there is bound to rise up that powerful modern point of view, according to which in the last resort only so-called objectives, more precisely collectives, are real, while significance is attached to persons only as the workers or the tools of the collectives. Kierkegaard’s merely religious category, to be sure, may be indifferent to this point of view: according to his category only the person is essential and the objective either has only a secondary existence or, as crowd, is the negative which is to be avoided. If, however, the Single One as such has essentially to do with the world, and even with the world in particular, with the body politic, but not in order, consciously and with the emphasis of faith, henceforth to let himself be used, but in responsibility for that in which before God he participates, then he is bound to be opposed and if possible refuted once for all by that point of view. It can set about this by means of arguments taken from a certain contemporary trend of thought which conforms to the time and is apparently its expedient. It is a trend of which the representatives, first of all, with all their various differences, have in common one object of attack—it may be described as liberalism or individualism or by any other slogan you please. (In this they usually neglect—as, understandably, often happens in cases of this kind—to analyze the attacked “ism” conceptually, nor do they make a distinction between what they mean and what they do not mean, that is, between what is worth contesting and what should be spared. If such an analysis should be applied to, say, “liberalism”, individual concepts of varying tendency would arise, towards which it would be possible to adopt a standpoint in quite different clarity and unambiguousness. Thus, for example, there would be libertinism, the poor mode of thought of the released slave who only knows what is or what ought to be permitted to him, to “man”; on the other hand there would be liberism, the mode of thought of the free-born man for whom freedom is the presupposition of binding, of the true personal entry into a binding relation, no more and no less—a mode of thought worthy of being preserved in the treasure-house of the spirit and defended along with it by everyone who knows about the spirit.) But it is more significant that the representatives of this trend have also a common purpose or at least a common effect: they give the political province an exaggerated autonomy, they contrast public life with the rest of life, they remove it from the responsibility of the Single One who takes part in it.

In order to indicate what might be replied to such arguments from the standpoint of the transformed category of the Single One, two examples of the trend of thought under consideration may be discussed, one concerning the philosophy of the State and the other the theology of the State.

But first I precede these with a third example, less important but also rich in teaching, a historiosophical one.

Oswald Spengler wishes to establish the special sphere of the political, as having a value independent of our therefore inaccessible ethics, by classifying man with beasts of prey. If no longer between tamed individuals yet certainly between the groups, conditions (he says) are always, necessarily and normally, like those between packs of beasts. Here, in his existence within the group, man has remained an unweakened beast of prey, and the Single One has to guard against applying standards which are foreign to the particular sphere.

This is a trivialization of a Nietzschian thesis. Nietzsche believed that the important thing is that the power in history should keep faith with its own nature; if that is repressed then degeneration follows. Nietzsche does not move away from a presupposition. The important thing is that the power in history keeps faith with itself as with one of the partners in a dialogical event in which even the most forceful activity can signify a shirking of the answer, a refusal to give an answer.

Nietzsche’s thesis speaks the language of history, Spengler’s the language of biology. Every attempt to interpret human action in biological terms (however much one must remember biological existence when explaining man) is a trivialization; it is a poor simplification because it means the abandoning of the proper anthropological content, of that which constitutes the category of man.

Beasts of prey have no history. A panther can indeed have a biography and a colony of termites perhaps even State annals, but they do not have history in the great distinguishing sense which permits us to speak of human history as “world-history”. A life of prey yields no history. Man has acquired history by entering fundamentally on something that would be bound to appear to the beast of prey as senseless and grotesque—namely, on responsibility, and thus on becoming a person with a relation to the truth. Hence it has become impossible to comprehend man from the standpoint of biology alone.

“History” is not the sequence of conquests of power and actions of power but the context of the responsibilities of power in time.

Thus the beast of prey thesis means a denial of human essence and a falsification of human history. It is true, as Spengler says in defence of his thesis, that “the great beasts of prey are noble creations of the most perfect kind”, but this has no power to prove anything. It is a matter of man’s becoming in his kind, which is conditioned by his evolution and his history, just as “noble a creation” as they in theirs: that means that he helps to realize that “freedom of the children of God” towards which, as Paul says, all creatures “crane their necks”.

More serious consideration must be given to the conceptual definition of the political offered by a well-known Roman Catholic exponent of Constitutional Law, Carl Schmitt. In his view the political has its own criterion, which cannot be derived from the criterion of another realm. It is the distinction between friend and foe which in his view corresponds to “the relatively autonomous criteria of other oppositions, good and evil in the moral sphere, beautiful and ugly in the æsthetic, and so on”. The eventuality of a real struggle, which includes the “possibility of physical killing”, belongs to the concept of the foe, and from this possibility the life of man acquires “its specifically political tension”.

The “possibility of physical killing”—really it should be “the intention of physical killing”. For Schmitt’s thesis carries a situation of private life, the classic duel situation, over into public life.

This duel situation arises when two men experience a conflict existing between them as absolute, and therefore as capable of resolution only in the destruction of the one by the other. There is no reconciliation, no mediation, no adequate expiation, the hand that deals the blow must not be any but the opponent’s; but this is the resolution. Every classic duel is a masked “judgment of God”. In each there is an aftermath of the belief that men can bring about a judgment of God. That is what Schmitt, carrying it over to the relation of peoples to one another, calls the specifically political.

But the thesis rests on an error of method. The essential principle of a realm, the principle that constitutes it as such, cannot be taken from the labile state of the formations in this realm, but only from their lasting character. The friend-foe formula derives from the sphere of exposedness of political formations, not from the sphere of their coherence. The radical distinction which Schmitt supposes appears in times in which the common life is threatened, not in times in which it experiences its stability as self-evident and assured. The distinction, therefore, is not adequate to yield the principle of “the political”.

But the formula does not even include the whole lability of a political formation. This lability is always twofold—an outer, which is exposed by the neighbour (or attacker become neighbour) pressing on the frontier, and an inner, which is indicated by the rebel. Schmitt calls him the “inner foe”, but in this he confuses two fundamentally different kinds of lability. The foe has no interest in the preservation of the formation, but the rebel has—he wants to “change” it: it is precisely it he wants to change. Only the former is radical enough to establish the import of the formula. The friend-foe formula comprehends, therefore, only one side of lability and cannot be stretched to include the other.

The oppositions “good and evil in the moral sphere, beautiful and ugly in the æsthetic”, which Schmitt sets together with this one, are in distinction from it intended normatively, that is, only when the good, the beautiful, are understood in a content of essential significance is there any sense in defining the evil, the ugly. “Friend and foe,” however, describes not a normative concept of being but only a concept of an attitude within a situation.

Moreover, it seems to me that behind the common pairs of opposed concepts, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, there stand others in which the negative concept is intimately bound to the positive, being the emptiness to its fulness, the chaos to its cosmos. Behind good and evil as the criteria of the ethical stand direction and absence of direction, behind beautiful and ugly as the criteria of the æsthetic stand form and formlessness. For the realm of the political there is no pair of concepts in the foreground, obviously because it is more difficult, or impossible, to give autonomy to the negative pole in it. I should call the pair in the background order and absence of order, but the concept of order must be freed of the depreciation which sometimes clings to it. Right order is direction and form in the political realm. But these two concepts must not be allowed to petrify. They have their truth only from the conception of a homogeneous dynamic of order which is the real principle of the political. The true history of a commonwealth must be understood as its striving to reach the order suited to it. This striving, this wrestling for the realization of true order—wrestling between ideas, plans, outlines of true order that are so different, but also a wrestling that is simultaneously common to them all, not known, not to be expressed—constitutes the political structure’s dynamic of order. An order is gained and established again and again as a result. It becomes firm and inclusive, it consolidates itself as well against the resistance of whatever dynamic may be left. It stiffens and dies off, completely renouncing the dynamic which set it going; and yet it keeps its power for the struggle for true order flaring up again. The foe threatens the whole dynamic of order in the commonwealth, the rebel threatens only the order as it is at the time. Every order considered from the standpoint of the whole dynamic is called in doubt. That is the double life of the State: again and again realization of the political structure, again and again its being called in doubt. The “high points of concrete politics” are not, as Schmitt thinks, “at the same time the moments in which the foe is visualized in concrete clarity as the foe”; they are the moments in which an order, in face of the gravest responsibility of the individual confronting himself with it, demonstrates the legitimacy of its static character, its character (however necessarily relative) of fulfilment.

In Schmitt’s view all “genuine” political theories presuppose that man is “evil”. (Incidentally, why do the theories that do this do it? Since from Schmitt’s point of view political theory is only a department of practical politics, the answer along his line would have to be “because it seems to their authors to be politically expedient”.) This “evil”, indeed, Schmitt explains as being “in no way unproblematic” and “dangerous”—and I too take man to be both—but he finds support for the correctness of his presupposition in the theological doctrine of the absolute sinfulness of man. He has found a weighty theological associate in Friedrich Gogarten.

Gogarten explains in his Political Ethics that all ethical problems receive their ethical relevance only from the political problem. That is, the ethical is valid as the ethical only by its connexion with man’s political being. In saying this he abandons Kierkegaard’s category of the Single One. Gogarten believes that he is only fighting against individualism but at the same time he is fighting against the position of personal life in the rigour of its total responsibility. If ethical problems receive their relevance from the political realm, they cannot also receive them from the religious, not even if the political has a religious basis. But if they do not receive them from the religious realm, then we have reached again, within the life of the “religious” man—even if in a politicized form—the disconnected ethic which Kierkegaard helped us to overcome. Gogarten may speak in theological terms as emphatically as he pleases, he narrows down the Single One’s fundamental relation with God when he lets his action receive its validity from some other source, even if it is from the destiny, considered in itself, of the community to which the Single One belongs. (And what else are “ethical problems” but man’s questions about his actions and their meaning?) True as it is that he, the Single One, cannot win to a legitimate relation with God without a legitimate relation to the body politic, it is nevertheless also true that the defining force has to be ascribed not to the latter but to the former alone. That is, I must always let the boundary between co-operation and non-co-operation within my relation to my community be drawn by God. You say that often you hear nothing? Well, we have to be attentive with the unreserved effort of our being. If even then we hear nothing, then, but only then, may we turn in the direction Gogarten indicates. But if we are not attentive or if we hear but do not obey, then our omission, and not our invoking of some kind of relation of ethical problems to the political, will persist in eternity.

In Gogarten’s view man is “radically and therefore irrevocably evil, that is, in the grip of evil”. The relevance of the political arises from the fact that “only in the political” does man have, “in face of this recognition, the possibility of existence”. The ethical quality of the State consists “in its warding off the evil to which men have fallen prey by its sovereign power and by its right over the life and property of its subjects”. (Incidentally, this is a theological version of the old police-state idea.) For “whence shall the State derive sovereign power if not from the recognition of man’s fallen state”?

The concept to which Gogarten refers, of the radical evil of man, his absolute sinfulness, is taken from the realm where man confronts God and is significant there alone. What to my knowledge and understanding is taught by Christian theology, in whose name Gogarten speaks, is that man, more precisely, fallen man, considered as being unredeemed, is “before God” (coram Deo) sinful and depraved. I do not see how his being unredeemed can be broken off from its dialectic connexion with redemption (ab his malis liberemur et servemur) and used separately. Nor do I see how the concept of being evil can be translated from the realm of being “before God” into that of being before earthly authorities, and yet retain its radical nature. In the sight of God a state of radical evil can be ascribed to man because God is God and man is man, and the distance between them is absolute, and because precisely in this distance and in virtue of it God’s redeeming deed is done. In the sight of his fellow-men, of human groups and orders, man, it seems to me, cannot be properly described as simply sinful, because the distance is lacking which alone is able to establish the unconditional. Nothing is changed if a human order is considered as established or empowered by God. For that absolute distance to man, which establishes the unconditional (but at the same time discloses the place of redemption)—the distance from which alone man’s radical evil could appear also in face of the body politic—can by no means be bestowed in this way upon the human order. Hence no legitimate use can be made in politics or political theory of the concept of human sinfulness.

In my view, however, man generally is not “radically” this or that.

It is not radicality that characterizes man as separated by a primal abyss from all that is merely animal, but it is his potentiality. If we put him alone before the whole of nature then there appears embodied in him the character of possibility inherent in natural existence and which everywhere else hovers round dense reality only like a haze. Man is the crystallized potentiality of existence. But he is this potentiality in its factual limitation. The wealth of possibility in existence from which the animals are kept away by their exiguous reality is exhibited in man in a sign that is incomprehensible from the standpoint of nature. Yet this wealth of possibility does not hold free sway, so that life might be able time and again to follow on wings the anticipation of spirit, but it is confined within narrow limits. This limitation is not essential, but only factual. That means that man’s action is unforeseeable in its nature and extent, and that even if he were peripheral to the cosmos in everything else, he remains the centre of all surprise in the world. But he is fettered surprise, only inwardly is it without bonds; and his fetters are strong.

Man is not good, man is not evil; he is, in a pre-eminent sense, good and evil together. He who eats of him, as he who ate of that fruit, has the knowledge of good and evil together. That is his limitation, that is the cunning of the serpent: he was to become as God, knowing good and evil; but what he “recognizes”, what in being mixed up with it he has recognized as something mixed up, is good and evil together: he has become good and evil together; that is the nakedness in which he recognizes himself. The limitation is only factual, it does not transform his essence or destroy God’s work. To ascribe to the serpent the power of destruction is to elevate it to rivalry with God and make it for the time superior to him (as Ahriman was for a time to Ormuzd), since it perverts God’s creation. But the serpent in the Bible is not that. It is not an opposing god, it is only the creature which desires to undo man by man’s own doing. It is the “cunning” creature, the cunning of the secretly poisonous creature which foments disorder; and out of the disorder comes history which, groping and striving and failing, is concerned with God’s order. The primal event pointed out by the images of the Bible does not lie under the principle of contradiction: A and not-A are here strangely concerned with one another.

Good and evil, then, cannot be a pair of opposites like right and left or above and beneath. “Good” is the movement in the direction of home, “evil” is the aimless whirl of human potentialities without which nothing can be achieved and by which, if they take no direction but remain trapped in themselves, everything goes awry. If the two were indeed poles the man who did not see them as such would be blind; but the man would be blinder who did not perceive the lightning flash from pole to pole, the “and”.

As a condition of the individual soul evil is the convulsive shirking of direction, of the total orientation of the soul by which it stands up to personal responsibility before God. The shirking can take place from passion or from indolence. The passionate man refuses by his passion, the indolent man by his indolence. In both cases the man goes astray within himself. The real historical dæmonias are the exploiting by historical powers of this shirking.

But the State as such cannot indicate the one direction of the hour towards God, which changes time and again by concretion. Only the Single One, who stands in the depth of responsibility, can do that. And indeed a statesman can also be this Single One.

Gogarten puts the State in place of the historical State, that is, of the government of the particular time (). This government cannot ward off the “evil” as an impersonal State but can do it only on the basis of its own personal responsibility, and is for the rest itself exposed to the dynamic between good and evil. The State is the visible form of authority, and for Gogarten authority is simply what is established, the diaconal; power is full power. But if the establishment of power is taken seriously, theologically and biblically seriously, the establishing turns out to be a precise commission and the power a great duty of responsibility. The Old Testament records, in the history of the kings of Israel and the history of foreign rulers, the degeneration of legitimacy into illegitimacy and of full power into antagonistic power. As no philosophical concept of the State, so likewise no theological concept of the State leads beyond the reality of the human person in the situation of faith. None leads beyond his responsibility—be he servant or emperor—for the body politic as man in the sight of God.

The question

In the human crisis which we are experiencing to-day these two have become questionable—the person and the truth.

We know from the act of responsibility how they are linked together. For the responsible response to exist the reality of the person is necessary, whom the word meets in the happening claiming him; and the reality of the truth is necessary to which the person goes out with united being and which he is therefore able to receive only in the word, as the truth which concerns himself, in his particular situation, and not in any general way.

The question by which the person and the truth have become questionable to-day is the question to the Single One.

The person has become questionable through being collectivized.

This collectivizing of the person is joined in history to a basically different undertaking in which I too participated and to which I must therefore confess now. It is that struggle of recent decades against the idealistic concepts of the sovereign, worldembracing, world-sustaining, world-creating I. The struggle was conducted (among other ways) by reference to the neglected creaturely bonds of the concrete human person. It was shown how fundamentally important it is to know in every moment of thought this as well—that the one who thinks is bound, in different degrees of substantiality but never purely functionally, to a spatial realm, to a historical hour, to the genus man, to a people, to a family, to a society, to a vocational group, to a companionship in convictions. This entanglement in a manifold We, when known in an actual way, wards off the temptation of the thought of sovereignty: man is placed in a narrow creaturely position. But he is enabled to recognize that this is his genuine width; for being bound means being bound up in relation.

But it came about that a tendency of a quite different origin and nature assumed power over the new insights, which exaggerated and perverted the perception of bonds into a doctrine of serfdom. Primacy is ascribed here to a collectivity. The collectivity receives the right to hold the person who is bound to it bound in such a way that he ceases to have complete responsibility. The collectivity becomes what really exists, the person becomes derivatory. In every realm which joins him to the whole he is to be excused a personal response.

Thereby the immeasurable value which constitutes man is imperilled. The collectivity cannot enter instead of the person into the dialogue of the ages which the Godhead conducts with mankind. Human perception ceases, the human response is dumb, if the person is no longer there to hear and to speak. It is not possible to reduce the matter to private life; only in the uncurtailed measure of lived life, that is, only with the inclusion of participation in the body politic, can the claim be heard and the reply spoken.

The truth, on the other hand, has become questionable through being politicized.

The sociological doctrine of the age has exercised a relativizing effect, heavy with consequences, on the concept of truth, in that it has, in the dependence of the thought processes on social processes, proved the connexion of thought with existence. This relativization was justified in that it bound the “truth” of a man to his conditioning reality. But its justification was perverted into the opposite when its authors omitted to draw the basic boundary line between what can and what cannot be understood as conditioned in this way. That is, they did not comprehend the person in his total reality, wooing the truth and wrestling for it. If we begin with the Single One as a whole being, who wishes to recognize with his total being, we find that the force of his desire for the truth can at decisive points burst the “ideological” bonds of his social being. The man who thinks “existentially”, that is, who stakes his life in his thinking, brings into his real relation to the truth not merely his conditioned qualities but also the unconditioned nature, transcending them, of his quest, of his grasp, of his indomitable will for the truth, which also carries along with it the whole personal power of standing his test. We shall certainly be able to make no distinction, in what he has, time and again, discovered as the truth, between what can and what cannot be derived from the social factor. But it is an ineluctable duty to accept what cannot be so derived as a border concept and thus to point out, as the unattainable horizon of the distinction made by the sociology of knowledge, what takes place between the underivable in the recognizing person and the underivable in the object of his recognition. This duty has been neglected. Consequently, the political theory of modern collectivisms was easily able to assume power over the principle which lay ready, and to proclaim what corresponded to the (real or supposed) life interests of a group as its legitimate and unappealable truth. Over against this the Single One could no longer appeal to a truth which could be recognized and tested by him.

This marks the beginning of a disintegration of human faith in the truth, which can never be possessed and yet may be comprehended in an existentially real relation; it marks the beginning of the paralysis of the human search for the truth.

“What I speak of,” says Kierkegaard, “is something simple and straightforward—that the truth for the Single One only exists in his producing it himself in action.” More precisely, man finds the truth to be true only when he stands its test. Human truth is here bound up with the responsibility of the person.

“True is what is Mine,” says Stirner. Human truth is here bound up with the human person’s lack of responsibility. Collectivisms translate this into the language of the group: “True is what is Ours.”

But in order that man may not be lost there is need of persons who are not collectivized, and of truth which is not politicized.

There is need of persons, not merely “representatives” in some sense or other, chosen or appointed, who exonerate the represented of responsibility, but also “represented” who on no account let themselves be represented with regard to responsibility. There is need of the person as the ground which cannot be relinquished, from which alone the entry of the finite into conversation with the infinite became possible and is possible.

There is need of man’s faith in the truth as that which is independent of him, which he cannot acquire for himself, but with which he can enter into a real relation of his very life; the faith of human persons in the truth as that which sustains them all together, in itself inaccessible but disclosing itself, in the fact of responsibility which awaits test, to him who really woos the truth.

That man may not be lost there is need of the person’s responsibility to truth in his historical situation. There is need of the Single One who stands over against all being which is present to him—and thus also over against the body politic—and guarantees all being which is present to him—and thus also the body politic.

True community and true commonwealth will be realized only to the extent to which the Single Ones become real out of whose responsible life the body politic is renewed.