(1983)
Philosophers have readers and listeners. They are not seen by their readers, who are, what is more, confronted with final products, from which all is deleted that might be taken as an involuntary trace of subjectivity. Although listeners perceive what is strange and curious about the speaker in front of them, they are subject to the expectation that what is important for them will be something audible—a fact that makes many not even look up just so as to be able quietly to take their notes. To others, only in memory does the association of this or that gesture to what was said appear meaningful: perhaps a gesture that gave the secret desire to communicate something yet unspoken—the last will, maybe, to express it—its almost unnoticeable place. Memory supplants what Nietzsche claimed to be able to do even as a reader: that he “cannot read a single word without seeing gestures.”2
The philosopher of life, remembered as lecturing, promises to show something of the tension inherent in the very concept of such a philosophy that goes all out. Ludwig Marcuse recalled two unforgettable gestures of his teacher Georg Simmel, which relate to one another in a manner that needs to be brought before the mind’s eye. The first: “He, while bobbing on the very edge of the lectern, stabbed the sharpened pencil into the air—into an invisible matter, as it were.” Marcuse immediately adds his interpretation: this is to be understood as the gesture of the passionate analyst. The first gesture is followed by a second, which, although more essential, had been less noticed: “He left the exposed edge of the lectern, and the outstretched pencil sank between his fingers, and with his head lowered he went silently across the lectern until he had composed himself sufficiently to continue the lecture.” Here, too, memory helps in the understanding of this turning away from the gesture of stabbing that which offers no resistance: “In this silent second of self-forgetfulness, he inwardly annulled what he had just found by his stabbing.”3 Each of Simmel’s readers, who have been increasing in numbers ever since, recognizes this turning point of so many of his arguments, when he goes beyond what seemed to be the final formulation attainable, and considers and relativizes his barely won result from the opposite pole of possibilities. It was no different in the live performance of the teacher, who left behind what he had just seen, but was able to give only a tacit promise to go beyond it.
To memory, the scene presents itself as a moment of utter perplexity—as the “immeasurable tragedy”4 of philosophical thought becoming tangible, not only in the present thinker and his thought. He seems doomed to prevent himself from exhausting his rigor. Simmel’s thought process seemed apt to become optically perceptible when his pleasure in analysis was still in the thin airspace of the most subtle reality, or rather, no-longer-reality, which could be ruthlessly and cruelly tugged back down to the ground of empirical facts. That is why Simmel, before becoming a “philosopher of life,” had tried his hand at one of the objects most resistant to thought: the philosophy of money.
When Ludwig Marcuse made his observation on Simmel’s teaching Gestus [bearing, manner], the latter had already philosophically found “life” and appointed it the placeholder of metaphysics, whereas Husserl had not yet made the “life-world” the subject of phenomenology. His students in Göttingen considered him a realist and put all their expectations in the promised return “to the things themselves.” The confusion was great when in 1913 the master of the school published his program in the form of his Ideas.5 Helmuth Plessner, whose life’s work we can now appreciate in full,6 reports his observation of Husserl’s wishing gesture.
Plessner had submitted a treatise on Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre [Science of Knowledge] to Husserl, in order that the latter’s appraisal might clarify how his new conception of the power of consciousness was distinct from Fichte’s concept of the creative ego. One day on his way home from the seminar at his garden gate, Husserl admits he had always disliked all that German idealism. He had been looking for reality his whole life: “And saying this, he brandished his thin silver-topped cane and, leaning forward, braced it against the doorpost.”7 To Plessner, the emphasis placed in this gesture of a lifelong search for reality appears to embody phenomenology’s basic theme: “In an unsurpassably palpable manner the walking stick represented the intentional act and the post its fulfillment.”8 This was written in 1959 to mark the celebration of Husserl’s centenary at Göttingen.
The stick as an instrument of contact with reality that has become foreign to us had of course already belonged to Wilhelm Dilthey, and Max Scheler referred to it when, in 1926, he demonstrated the contrast between idealism and realism in the experience of resistance. But he refined Plessner’s image by saying, “When we brace a stick against the wall, the resistance is experienced at the end of the stick, but the tactile sensation, in the hand.”9 However, in Dilthey’s treatise of 1890, “The Origin of Our Belief in the Reality of the External World and Its Justification,”10 the instrument had been, more properly scientific, a probe, which one would hardly brace against a wall. Since Scheler, too, had had contact with Göttingen phenomenology, it is reasonable to assume that the tidings of Husserl’s use of the walking stick might have had an effect on the distortion of the Dilthey quotation.
From Husserl’s time in Freiburg a decade later, Hans-Georg Gadamer gives us a report of his teaching Gestus. During his lectures, Husserl often looked at his hands, which were kept busy “with the fingers of the right hand circling the flat palm of the left hand in a slow, turning movement.”11 Initially, Gadamer interprets this as a movement of focusing, but this does not quite meet the standard of his hermeneutical vigilance. At the same time, he adds, this gesture “brings ‘close to hand’ [handgreiflich] the hand-worked [handwerklich] ideal of precision in the Husserlian art of description.”12
The eyewitness always has the primacy of authentic transmission. But for him who comes another two decades later, such metaphorical “handiness” [Handgreiflichkeit] also appears as a helpless gesture of fear of that which Husserl called by the dreaded word “solipsism” and which for him denoted the catastrophe of the loss of reality. If one looks back at the Göttingen walking stick, it certainly must have been of contemporary elegance and, therefore, pliable thinness, so that it could appear to the observer as an arc of intentionality rather than a tool for testing the solidity of the robust gatepost. A problem had not yet reached the severity that would find its solution only in the concept of intersubjectivity.
But the circling of one hand on the inner surface of the other has something of a desperate reassurance, which takes place only in the system of one’s own lived body and gives the oldest sense of reality, touch, and something of a demonstrative satisfaction without going beyond the boundary of immanence. However remote the answers to questions may have been, the intensity of the experienced lack of reference to reality signifies belonging to the great epoch-making idiom of philosophy.
Immortality, which Plato was the first to proclaim as provable, has become a rather irritating as opposed to exhilarating piece of metaphysics. It could contribute little to the general happiness of humanity simply because the requirements for reaching and spending an “eternal life” undisturbed had been set very high, at times unattainably so, during the bloom of its undoubted validity. It no longer amounted to any loss or sacrifice when immortality was finally removed from metaphysics by Kant and degraded to the alleged harmlessness of a postulate. This initiated a century that perceived a dangerous distraction from intensive this-worldliness in such kinds of expectations: Just stand firmly and take a look around.… Promises that were to be fulfilled only after death could be but blandishments to fend off any insistence on a share of that which is of this world.
Did Nietzsche not also have to follow this tendency of the century? Could the superhuman [Übermensch] turn out right if the contenders to that title had other prospects than just earthly thoroughness?
And then we come across—surprisingly, unexpectedly—something written in the phase of the incipient Zarathustra: “That we could bear our immortality—this would be supreme.”13 Yet before one can arrive closer at the contents of the sentence, at its oddly hypothetical subjunctive, it stimulates curiosity because it seems so little to befit the necrologist of the “dead god” and other metaphysical decompositions. For the hesitant reader, assistance is readily at hand, of which earlier editors too made use when incorporating the sentence into all kinds of other writings about the eternal recurrence of the same, and about the superhuman as a repeat offender distinguished by the fact that he cannot and does not want to let it be: “And then finally: to want this entire sequence once again!”14
But it is permissible to refuse to tolerate that these two sentences are on the same page and that one should only be the complement of the other. For everything about the eternal recurrence is pure boasting, a metaphysical surrogate to balance out that expired God and to make the human fill his vacancy as someone who can deal with the most outrageous imposition. In contrast, the sentence about immortality is of the highest order. According to which criterion? According to none other than that of causing pure pensiveness and of not letting anyone wrest himself from it.
When Nietzsche, during the time of Zarathustra, jotted down the sentence about being able to bear immortality, the Philosophy of ‘As-If’ had already been written—assuming one follows Hans Vaihinger’s own account in this respect, as the work could only appear in 1911—and had formulated a compelling central question: “How is it possible that we can reach correct results through knowingly false ideas?”15 Vaihinger had studied this problem in Kant’s doctrine of postulates, among others, which he of course tore from the context in which Kant had placed it by insinuating conscious falsehoods: That which is unprovable, that which does not require proof, even more, that on which a ban on proof has been imposed, could not and should not be what is known to be false. And exactly that still applies to Nietzsche’s handling of immortality.
The way he believed he could think and allow it, as eternal recurrence, it was meant to be imposed as a threat on the human determination to surpass himself, that is, as a challenge that was to have nothing to do with the rewards and punishments of old. Undoubtedly, this quest for superlatives, by which humans could work their way up to becoming superhuman, also applies to the brief apophthegm that does not release the one pondering it all too easily: a hypothetical subjunctive, indeed, but one that is thrillingly apodictic. Averted from the abstract generality of what should be fit to become law, each man is considered to stand at the limit of his own moral capacity. He is compelled to look beyond it onto the unlimited witness he bears of himself, as which immortality alone could be the autonomous tribunal.
For humans die before they have the chance to see what becomes of the aggregate of their actions that have constituted their life. What this means is revealed by magnification: Luther died before the Thirty Years’ War, Rousseau before the French Revolution, Bismarck before the two World Wars of his short-lived empire, Freud before the collapse of all resistances to his general thesis during the sexual revolution. As an argument of immortality, this only means that one must be allowed to imagine everyone was obliged to watch their own consequences unfold. Whether they would enjoy or be troubled by it must not interest us—there may be something in humans that one can rely on once they have come to rest, in every sense.
Thus, there is no longer any talk of happiness, of which modern humans will scarcely think themselves any longer capable, even if they were still to desire it. They have become too complicated for the Christian heaven. Nietzsche’s talk moves from bearability—self-bearability—as an infinite test all the way to the finite. No court threatens him who would have to think of himself as immortal, except the sole authority that could make his continued existence harder than anything that the Valley of Jehoshaphat might have had in store: he himself, with his burden of memory, with the shame of identity.
Nietzsche turns the postulate of immortality into a thought experiment about one’s own moral subsistence, about the validity of one’s own actions, which would be capable of withstanding any future retrospection. The moral of an attitude that is wholly committed to the world corresponds to the imperative to act as if one’s actions would have to withstand, for all eternity, the scrutiny of him who had ordained that it should be so. Put into a formula: Live in such a way that you can be in agreement with yourself at any time about having wanted to live that way and wanting to live that way again! The moral subject, finite in its proportions, possesses himself of the dimension of infinity as that of a self-judgment that will never be final.
This particular equipping of immortality with the ritual of eternal recurrence can also be considered an exaggeration, a piece of postmetaphysical rhetoric: in going beyond immortality as mere catamnesis of the unique conduct of one’s life toward the supposedly greater mercilessness of being compelled to live again, Nietzsche risks the refutation that the current course of the world and all responsibilities therein might already be a cycle of the eternal recurrence. Thus, however, contrary to the intention of maximizing the burden of accountability, an excuse would be provided in the form of the justness of that which stands decided by eternity.
Certainly, the idea of return had its own allure of ancient paganism for Nietzsche: not only are we supposed to be able to bear surviving but bear having to exist, in turn, as those and only as those as whom we had, one single time, the liberty to constitute ourselves. What Nietzsche does not tell us, however, is that it must remain unknown to us whether it is this time and this life that the fate of the world has entrusted to us. Like many things in Nietzsche, this thought is a bit too magnificent not to be thought over people’s heads—including those of the aspirants to superhumanity: the rotating cosmos is not supposed to release its true demiurge from its clutches and imbue his consciousness with an almost unbearable accountability.
“Permanence does not concern him,”16 Rilke’s sixth Duino Elegy says of the “Hero.” Nietzsche wanted to prevent this heroic type of uniqueness that appears as the self-sufficiency of a deed’s magnitude by confronting it with his own type, who is concerned with nothing but permanence. The proof of having been equal to one cycle of the world would thus lie only in proving equal to all of them and, having passed that test, in whether one was subject to the compulsive desire to keep providing this force with opportunities for its enactment. “My doctrine states: to live in such a way that you must wish to live again, that is the task—you will anyway!”17
To put the discretum of living-once-again in place of the continuum of merely continuing-to-live appears to Nietzsche as the decisive step beyond classic versions of immortality. Above all, the having-to-desire in place of the being-able-to-bear—this is the very gaiety of self-excess that arose with Zarathustra. Yet because of the attached threat—“you will anyway!”—the implication of freedom is eliminated from the description of the task of getting through life to the wanting-to-live-again. From the level of the as-if, this is the relapse to metaphysics.
It marks a return to the calculation of Pascal’s wager that if further things are unavoidable, one should decide to optimize them. In the repetition of the same, there is still something from Dante’s principle of correspondence. But the relapse goes further, because—it needs to be reiterated—the current presence of a decision could already be for all time Dante’s Inferno of futility, with no possibility of thinking of any sign that might provide clarity in the matter.
Anybody able to desire what he must desire would be aware of the remorselessness about the world that bears his trace. None of the worlds to come could fill him with shame. It is tangible: this would be the superhuman. But he will not be. His chance has already passed, if it ever was. It went under in the fear of that which will arrive anyway because it will come anyway. That is why one can fall back onto Nietzsche’s other dictum: to bear immortality. This would be something that might not fully require the superhuman, as long as it meant to bear the consequences of one’s own existence within its proportions.
The talk of enduring immortality is an abbreviation; what is supposed to be the highest that can be borne is the idea, neither blurred nor distorted by any calculation of reward or punishment, of remembrance beyond the boundary of physical existence. What would compel the imagined survivor to bear himself continuously, and to be before himself only the one that he was, the one as whom he lived in this way and no other, that would be his memoria [memory], released from the protection of oblivion and from repression. Should a philosophical eschatology to succeed the theological one have to speak of a “court” to occupy the position in the economy of consciousness whose vacancy is apparently hard to bear, memoria would be the court that alone could complete the autonomy of the ethical subject.
It was a peculiar deficiency of the theological eschatologies that in encircling the otherworldly fates of humans they could not help everybody to attain their own fulfillment. That would have rendered unrecognizable the burdens as well as the reliefs of the divine order of salvation, their unforgivable sins as much as their sovereign offers of mercy. Even in Schopenhauer’s metempsychosis there was too much of a regulation of salvific fate; there it was necessary to take care of general justice as an external observer of the world would have seen it for the whole of world time. Being and justice coincide only once it is no longer required that everyone must make do with himself and his memory. As far as being able to bear immortality is concerned, it is still a boundary value in the wake of Kant’s critique regarding the substantiality of the soul, guaranteed by no ontological security, a fragile instability. To perish from shame [vor Scham vergehen zu können], this idiomatic turn of phrase, if it were translated into the eschatological, could be the form in which immortalities wither away, revert into finitude—in the paradox of their unbearability.
Might Nietzsche’s sentence contain, or even represent, the ethics that would satisfy the “principle of responsibility”?18 For the latter, it may be necessary to specify what the one who survives himself would have to bear. What remains present to him might be not only the memoria of his actions and maxims, but also the sight of his own consequences in the world, to be witness to which would mean immortality as long as they remain: the trace of his days on earth. Not wanting to perish or wishing never to have existed defines the extremes of what might arise from extending Nietzsche’s basic idea with regard to a novel, radically threatening condition of the world.
Nietzsche’s belief in the practical effectiveness of a theoretical thought—for what else was eternal recurrence and could it be—is baffling; the reality of the superhuman was to consist in the ability of being equal to the burden of this thought. Undoubtedly, only rigorisms have a chance to find their type and leave their stamp on it in the wide field of ethics. Only the Stoa and the categorical imperative have left such a stamp. Nietzsche was sure that his ideas had the power to impress because he shared the suspicion of all creators of thoughts that the thoughts shaped hitherto must have been simply too weak to assert their claim. Every subsequent thinker must surely account for the disappointment in the effect of ideas by the indecisiveness of his predecessors. To what is achieved must be added the consciousness of the utmost that is achievable, in order finally to put the capabilities of thought to the test. Because no author himself can ever attest to the outcome of this trial—hence his need for immortality!—he takes the consolation of the extremist to his grave that he has risked the utmost. One need not participate in this consolation—need not have expectations for the ultimate after the penultimate—in order still to find it inevitable that the attempt will continue to be made to find the point where the idea is content enough with itself at least no longer to allow excuses for its ineffectiveness to be found. This is part of the indefatigability of all philosophical efforts. In this they have their experimental character within the laboratory of history.
For the contemplation of Nietzsche’s sentence, this would mean: if any one idea should at all be powerful enough to change the tenor of human existence, it might as well or indeed would have to be this one. It should succeed in connecting itself with the concept of memoria in such a way that humans would not just be subject to the intimacy of their identity—not only in the candor of their memory about the I that they had been—but would also have to become witnesses of their posterity [Nachwelt], as the epitome of the history of their world [Welt].
At this point, contemplation of Nietzsche’s sentence may converge with the primal question about what the human can be thought of as capable of doing. Is he content with what has been demanded from him since the dictum of the Delphic Apollo: essentially to know himself through the thought of being able to bear immortality, in order to be as he would be able to bear himself?
Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke, neurophysiologist and Freud’s teacher, was made immortal by the fact that the student dreamed of the teacher. Brücke had been dead for almost a decade when the The Interpretation of Dreams appeared, which demonstrated its primal instituting meaning [urstiftende Bedeutung] for psychonanalysis precisely with the dream that introduces Brücke as its initiator: “Old Brücke must have set me some task; strangely enough, it related to a dissection [Präparation] of the lower part of my own body.”19 Only the superficial reader of Freud can be puzzled by the fact that while expertly disemboweling his own pelvis, he does not take the shortest path to the cardinal issue, but rather relates the reflexivity of the dreamer about his own body completely to the oddity that inevitably had to stand at the beginning of the new procedure: “The task which was imposed on me in the dream of carrying out a dissection of my own body was thus my self-analysis which was linked up with my giving an account of my dreams.”20 Freud is sober minded and careful enough to treat this dream with the understatement of not ascribing to it any legitimizing meaning for what, according to the theory, is an altogether impossible endeavor.
In the old teacher’s command itself lies the metaphor for the impossible: self-dissection. It is more important that during his lifetime the teacher did what he would do again by way of the dream: preventing the discovery from being discouraged and left half done. Old Brücke, writes Freud, rightly appears in the dream, since it had already occurred in the first years of his scientific work “that I allowed a discovery of mine to lie fallow until an energetic remonstrance on his part drove me into publishing it.”21 It is not hard for the reader as interpreter of the interpretation to recognize in the figure of Brücke the source of energy that could no longer be represented by any divine or demonic inspiration.
Three years before Freud was born, on November 8, 1853, Ernst Wilhelm Brücke led a friend through the newly built insane asylum of the city of Vienna. The friend made the following note: “Terrible: To see the masses of insane people, for it makes the abnormal seem normal again.”22 With astonishment, the visitor in the corridor of the asylum observes one inmate shaving another; he is stunned by the banal remark of the doctor that he too availed himself of the man’s service.
The friend of the young psychiatrist Brücke deserves our attention because of a duplicity that once more deserves to be called “strange enough” in Freud’s words: he, too, dreamed about Brücke and portrays him as a man about whom it was apparently fit to dream. Friedrich Hebbel, who was this friend and whose diaries tell us about this relationship, also provides a clear hint about what made Brücke so disposed for dreams and particularly for those with a grade of absurdity like that about the order for self-dissection: he was an admirer of paranoid punch lines. Once he told a story, reports Hebbel, of an argument about whether the moon was populated; a Croatian doctor had heckled, “What populated, when moon wanes, what would happen to population?”23
One will have to take notice of the difference between the intention with which this might have been related and the one with which it was recorded. The doctor, with little sense for the “sense” of the phenomena that appeared on his objects, will have brought forward the anecdote as a “case” of unenlightened Balkan backwardness in the midst of an at least slightly scientific discussion of a problem contemporaries took quite seriously: How could one still be so behind the times [hinter dem Mond] about the nature of the moon in this century!
Hebbel did not write this down as a joke about a lunatic. His sympathy is on the side of the heckler. For his interjection is of an indubitable aesthetic grace. One can feel the jealousy of ignorance’s freedom still to use an idea of such vivid force to reduce a claim to absurdity: imaginary peoples at the edge of the melting moon, fleeing from its depletion and huddled in the ever tighter space of the crescent-like remainder, finally to disappear into nothingness—which is indeed why nothingness is where they belong. What so regularly would be prevented from surviving cannot exist. Not a good argument?
It is strange that in his Vienna Letters to the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, Hebbel reports a similar story about a Hungarian astronomer, which was supposed to have circulated in Vienna—where one liked to poke fun at the backward peoples of the empire. During an educated disputation about the phases of the moon, this astronomer believed it necessary seriously to prove their merely illusory nature and for this purpose referred to inhabitants of the moon. If the changes of the moon were not just semblance, but the real disappearance and return of substance, this would result in the inhabitants of the moon “not knowing whereto they should retreat.”24
Of course, there are many variations of such stories that produce the laughable from the collision of progress and backwardness. Nevertheless, it is worth thinking about why the Hungarian variation is so much worse than the Croatian. For an aesthetic component is added here. The Hungarian astronomer assumes the population of the moon and takes as the condition for their existence the mere “seemingness” of the phases of the moon, of which his science assures him anyhow; the Croatian doctor, on the contrary, refutes the population on the moon with the interjection that it would be rendered impossible by the reality of the changes of the moon. To take the illusiveness as the real is the aesthetically more pleasing option, instead of requiring a hypothetical reality to defend the illusiveness. The Croatian doctor sees a monthly lunar tragedy before his eyes, the paradox of which is that it itself repeals the premise that makes its repetition possible.
This referentiality of the idea about the conditions of its implementation must have given greater pleasure to the man about whom it was possible to dream that he had ordered Freud to dissect his own pelvis and thus metaphorically provided the justification of psychoanalysis through self-analysis.
Translated by Florian Fuchs and Hannes Bajohr
Originally published as “Über den Rand der Wirklichkeit hinaus: Drei Kurzessays,” from Akzente 30, no. 1 (1983): 16–27.
1. [This section exists in a much more extensive version in Care Crosses the River, trans. Paul Fleming (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 33–39.]
2. [Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 41.]
3. [Ludwig Marcuse, “Erinnerungen an Simmel,” in Buch des Dankes an Georg Simmel, ed. Kurt Gassen and Michael Landmann (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1958), 191.]
4. [Marcuse, “Erinnerungen an Simmel,” 191.]
5. [Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, 3 vols. (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1983).]
6. [Helmuth Plessner’s collected works were published between 1980 and 1985 with Suhrkamp Verlag.]
7. [Helmuth Plessner, “Husserl in Göttingen,” Schriften zur Philosophie (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 1985), 367.]
8. [Plessner, “Husserl in Göttingen,” 367.]
9. [Max Scheler, Späte Schriften (Bern: Francke, 1976), 211.]
10. [Wilhelm Dilthey, “The Origin of Our Belief in the Reality of the External World and Its Justification,” Selected Works, vol. 1, Understanding the Human World, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 8–57.]
11. [Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Apprenticeships, trans. Robert R. Sullivan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 35.]
12. [Gadamer, Philosophical Apprenticeships, 35–36. Translation altered.]
13. [Friedrich Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Summer 1881–Winter 1883/84), trans. Paul S. Loeb and David F. Tinsley, vol. 14, The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Alan D. Schrift and Duncan Large (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019), 531.]
14. [Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments, 190.]
15. [Hans Vaihinger, Philosophie des Als-Ob (Leipzig: Meiner, 1922), xii (quote from the preliminary remarks not included in the English translation).]
16. [Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage, 2009), 37.]
17. [Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente: 1880–1882, vol. 9, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1977), 505.]
18. [Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethic for the Technological Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). The German original was titled Das Prinzip Verantwortung (The Principle of Responsibility).]
19. [Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams: The Complete and Definitive Text, ed. James Strachey (New York: Basic, 2010), 459.]
20. [Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 461.]
21. [Freud, 461.]
22. [Friedrich Hebbel, Tagebücher: Neue historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. Monika Ritzer (Berlin: de Gruyter), 1:673.]
23. [Hebbel, Tagebücher: Neue historisch-kritische Ausgabe, 1:673.]
24. [Friedrich Hebbel, Vermischte Schriften II (Berlin: Behr, 1903), 259.]