The sense in which the subject of our deliberation is a task of psychological interest and the sense in which, after having been the task and interest of psychology, it points directly to dogmatics.
The view that every scientific issue within the larger compass of science has its definite place, its measure and its limit, and thereby precisely its harmonious blending in the whole as well as its legitimate participation in what is expressed by the whole, is not merely a pium desiderium [pious wish] that ennobles the man of science by its enthusiastic and melancholy infatuation. This view is not merely a sacred duty that commits him to the service of the totality and bids him renounce lawlessness and the adventurous desire to lose sight of the mainland; it also serves the interest of every more specialized deliberation, for when the deliberation forgets where it properly belongs, as language often expresses with striking ambiguity, it forgets itself and becomes something else, and thereby acquires the dubious perfectibility of being able to become anything and everything. By failing to proceed in a scientific manner and by not taking care to see that the individual issues do not outrun one another, as if it were a matter of arriving first at the masquerade, a person occasionally achieves a brilliance and amazes others by giving the impression that he has already comprehended that which is still very remote. At times he makes a vague agreement with things that differ. The gain is always avenged, as is every unlawful acquisition, [IV 282] which cannot be owned legally or scientifically.
Thus when an author entitles the last section of the Logic “Actuality,”14 he thereby gains the advantage of making it appear that in logic the highest has already been achieved, or if one prefers, the lowest. In the meantime, the loss is obvious, for neither logic nor actuality is served by placing actuality in the Logic. Actuality is not served thereby, for contingency, which is an essential part of the actual, cannot be admitted within the realm of logic. Logic is not served thereby, for if logic has thought actuality, it has included something that it cannot assimilate, it has appropriated at the beginning what it should only praedisponere [presuppose]. The penalty is obvious. Every deliberation about the nature of actuality is rendered difficult, and for a long time perhaps made impossible, since the word “actuality” must first have time to collect itself, time to forget the mistake.
Thus when in dogmatics faith is called the immediate15 without any further qualification, there is gained the advantage that everybody is convinced of the necessity of not stopping with faith. The admission may be elicited even from one who subscribes to orthodoxy, because at first he perhaps does not discern the misunderstanding, that it does not have its source in a subsequent error but in that πρω̃τον ψευ̃δος [fundamental error]. The loss is quite obvious. Faith loses by being regarded as the immediate, since it has been deprived of what lawfully belongs to it, namely, its historical presupposition. Dogmatics loses thereby, because it does not begin where it properly should begin, namely, within the scope of an earlier beginning. Instead of presupposing an earlier beginning, it ignores this and begins without ceremony, just as if it were logic. Logic does indeed begin with something produced by the subtlest abstraction, namely, what is most elusive: the immediate. What is quite proper in logic, namely, that immediacy is eo ipso canceled, becomes in dogmatics idle talk. Could it ever occur to anyone to stop with the immediate (with no further qualification), since the immediate is annulled16 at the very moment it is mentioned, just as a somnambulist [IV 283] wakes up at the very moment his name is mentioned? Thus when one sometimes finds, and almost solely in propaedeutic investigation, the word “reconciliation”17 [Forsoning] used to designate speculative knowledge, or to designate the identity of the perceiving subject and the object perceived, or to designate the subjective-objective, etc., it is obvious that the author is brilliant and that by means of this brilliance he has explained every riddle, especially to all those who even in matters of science use less care than they do in daily life, where they listen carefully to the words of the riddle before they attempt to guess its meaning. Otherwise he gains the incomparable reputation of having posed by virtue of his explanation a new riddle, namely, how it could ever occur to any man that this might be the explanation. The notion that thought on the whole has reality was assumed by all ancient and medieval philosophy. With Kant, this assumption became doubtful. If it is now assumed that Hegelian philosophy has actually grasped Kant’s skepticism18 thoroughly (something that might continue to remain a great question despite all that Hegel and his school have done with the help of the slogan “method and manifestation”19 to conceal what Schelling20 with the slogan “intellectual intuition and construction” openly acknowledged as a new point of departure) and now has reconstructed the earlier in a higher form and in such a way that thought does not possess reality by virtue of a presupposition—does it therefore also follow that this reality, which is consciously brought forth by thought, is a reconciliation? In that case, philosophy has only been brought back to where the beginning was made in the old days, when reconciliation did in fact have enormous significance. There is an old, respectable philosophical terminology: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. A more recent terminology has been chosen in which “mediation” takes the third place. Is this such an extraordinary advance? “Mediation” is equivocal, for it suggests simultaneously the relation between the two and the result of the relation, that in which the two relate themselves to each other as well as the two that related themselves to each other. It indicates movement as well as repose. Whether this is a perfection must be determined by subjecting mediation to a more profound dialectical test, but, unfortunately, this is something for which we still must wait. One rejects synthesis and says “mediation.” Very well. Brilliance, however, demands more—one says “reconciliation” [Forsoning], and what [IV 284] is the result? The propaedeutic investigations are not served by it, for naturally they gain as little in clarity as does the truth, as little as a man’s soul gains in salvation by having a title conferred upon him. On the contrary, two sciences, ethics and dogmatics, become radically confused, especially when after the introduction of the term “reconciliation” it is further pointed out that logic and λόγος [the dogmatical] correspond to each other, and that logic is the proper doctrine of λόγος.21 Ethics and dogmatics struggle over reconciliation in a confinium [border area] fraught with fate. Repentance and guilt torment forth reconciliation ethically, while dogmatics, in its receptivity to the proffered reconciliation, has the historically concrete immediacy with which it begins its discourse in the great dialogue of science. And now what will be the result? Presumably language will celebrate a great sabbatical year in which speech and thought may be at rest so that we can begin at the beginning.
In logic, the negative22 is used as the impelling power to bring movement into all things. One must have movement in logic no matter how it is brought about, and no matter by what means. The negative lends a hand, and what the negative cannot accomplish, play on words and platitudes can, just [IV 285] as when the negative itself becomes a play on words.* In logic, no movement must come about, for logic is, and whatever is logical only is.* This impotence of the logical consists in the transition of logic into becoming, where existence [Tilværelse]26 and actuality come forth. So when logic becomes deeply absorbed in the concretion of the categories, that which was from the beginning is ever the same. Every movement, if for the moment one wishes to use this expression, is an immanent movement, which in a profound sense is no movement at all. One can easily convince oneself of this by considering that the concept of movement is itself a transcendence that has no place in logic. The negative, then, is immanent in the movement, is something vanishing, is that which is annulled. If everything comes about in this manner, nothing comes about at all, and the negative becomes an illusion. Nevertheless, precisely in order to make something come about in logic, the negative becomes something more; it becomes that which brings forth the opposition, not a negation but a contraposition. And thus the negative is not the stillness of the immanent movement; it is “the necessary other,”27 indeed, something that may be very necessary for logic in order to bring about movement, but it is something that the negative is not. Turning from logic to ethics, we find again the same indefatigable negative that is active in the entire Hegelian philosophy. Here one is astonished to discover that the negative is the evil.28 As a result, confusion is in full swing and there are no limits to cleverness, and what Mme Staël-Holstein29 has said of Schelling’s philosophy, namely, that it makes a man clever for his whole life, applies in every [IV 286] way to Hegelianism. One can see how illogical the movements must be in logic, since the negative is the evil, and how unethical they must be in ethics, since the evil is the negative. In logic they are too much and in ethics too little. They fit nowhere if they are supposed to fit both. If ethics has no other transcendence, it is essentially logic. If logic is to have as much transcendence as common propriety requires of ethics, it is no longer logic.
What has been developed here is probably too complicated in proportion to the space that it occupies (yet, considering the importance of the subject it deals with, it is far from too lengthy); however, it is in no way extraneous, because the details are selected in order to allude to the subject of the book. The examples are taken from a greater realm, but what happens in the greater can repeat itself in the lesser, and the misunderstanding is similar, even if there are less harmful consequences. He who presumes to develop the system30 is responsible for much, but he who writes a monograph can and also ought to be faithful over a little.31
The present work has set as its task the psychological treatment of the concept of “anxiety,” but in such a way that it constantly keeps in mente [in mind] and before its eye the dogma of hereditary sin. Accordingly, it must also, although tacitly so, deal with the concept of sin. Sin, however, is no subject for psychological concern, and only by submitting to the service of a misplaced brilliance could it be dealt with psychologically. Sin has its specific place, or more correctly, it has no place, and this is its specific nature. When sin is treated in a place other than its own, it is altered by being subjected to a nonessential refraction of reflection. The concept is altered, and thereby the mood that properly corresponds to the correct [IV 287] concept* is also disturbed, and instead of the endurance of the true mood there is the fleeting phantom of false moods. Thus when sin is brought into esthetics, the mood becomes either light-minded or melancholy, for the category in which sin lies is that of contradiction, and this is either comic or tragic. The mood is therefore altered, because the mood that corresponds to sin is earnestness. The concept of sin is also altered, because, whether it become comic or tragic, it becomes in any case something that endures, or something nonessential that is annulled, whereas, according to its true concept, sin is to be overcome. In a deeper sense, the comic and the tragic have no enemy but only a bogeyman at which one either weeps or laughs.
If sin is dealt with in metaphysics, the mood becomes that of dialectical uniformity and disinterestedness, which ponder sin as something that cannot withstand the scrutiny of thought. The concept of sin is also altered, for sin is indeed to be overcome, yet not as something to which thought is unable to give life, but as that which is, and as such concerns every man.
If sin is dealt with in psychology, the mood becomes that of persistent observation, like the fearlessness of a secret agent, but not that of the victorious flight of earnestness out of sin. The concept becomes a different concept, for sin becomes a state. However, sin is not a state. Its idea is that its concept is continually annulled. As a state (de potentia [according to possibility]), it is not, but de actu or in actu [according to actuality or in actuality] it is, again and again. The mood of psychology would be antipathetic curiosity, whereas the proper mood is earnestness expressed in courageous resistance. The mood of psychology is that of a discovering anxiety, and in its anxiety psychology portrays sin, while again and again it is in anxiety over the portrayal that it itself brings forth. When sin is dealt with in this manner, it becomes the stronger, because psychology relates itself to it in a feminine way. That this state has its truth is certain; that it occurs more or less in every human life before the ethical manifests itself is certain. But in being considered in this manner sin does not become what it is, but a more or a less.
Whenever the issue of sin is dealt with, one can observe by [IV 288] the very mood whether the concept is the correct one. For instance, whenever sin is spoken of as a disease, an abnormality, a poison, or a disharmony, the concept is falsified.
Sin does not properly belong in any science,33 but it is the subject of the sermon, in which the single individual speaks as the single individual to the single individual. In our day, scientific self-importance has tricked pastors into becoming something like professorial clerks who also serve science and find it beneath their dignity to preach. Is it any wonder then that preaching has come to be regarded as a very lowly art? But to preach is really the most difficult of all arts and is essentially the art that Socrates praised, the art of being able to converse. It goes without saying that the need is not for someone in the congregation to provide an answer, or that it would be of help continually to introduce a respondent. What Socrates criticized in the Sophists, when he made the distinction that they indeed knew how to make speeches but not how to converse,34 was that they could talk at length about every subject but lacked the element of appropriation. Appropriation is precisely the secret of conversation.
Corresponding to the concept of sin is earnestness. Now ethics should be a science in which sin might be expected to find a place. But here there is a great difficulty. Ethics is still an ideal science, and not only in the sense that every science is ideal. Ethics proposes to bring ideality into actuality. On the other hand, it is not the nature of its movement to raise actuality up into ideality.* Ethics points to ideality as a task and assumes that every man possesses the requisite conditions. Thus ethics develops a contradiction, inasmuch as it makes clear both the difficulty and the impossibility. What is said of the law35 is also true of ethics: it is a disciplinarian that demands, and by its demands only judges but does not bring [IV 289] forth life. Only Greek ethics made an exception, and that was because it was not ethics in the proper sense but retained an esthetic factor. This appears clearly in its definition of virtue36 and in what Aristotle frequently, also in Ethica Nicomachea, states with amiable Greek naiveté, namely, that virtue alone does not make a man happy and content, but he must have health, friends, and earthly goods and be happy in his family. The more ideal ethics is, the better. It must not permit itself to be distracted by the babble that it is useless to require the impossible. For even to listen to such talk is unethical and is something for which ethics has neither time nor opportunity. Ethics will have nothing to do with bargaining; nor can one in this way reach actuality. To reach actuality, the whole movement must be reversed. This ideal characteristic of ethics is what tempts one to use first metaphysical, then esthetic, and then psychological categories in the treatment of it. But ethics, more than any other science, must resist such temptations. It is, therefore, impossible for anyone to write an ethics without having altogether different categories in reserve.
Sin, then, belongs to ethics only insofar as upon this concept it is shipwrecked with the aid of repentance.* If ethics is [IV 290] to include sin, its ideality comes to an end. The more ethics remains in its ideality, and never becomes so inhuman as to lose sight of actuality, but corresponds to actuality by presenting [IV 291] itself as the task for every man in such a way that it will make him the true and the whole man, the man κατ’ ἐξοχήν [in an eminent sense], the more it increases the tension of the difficulty. In the struggle to actualize the task of ethics, sin shows itself not as something that belongs only accidentally to the accidental individual, but as something that withdraws deeper and deeper as a deeper and deeper presupposition, as a presupposition that goes beyond the individual. Then all is lost for ethics, and ethics has helped to bring about the loss of all. A category that lies entirely beyond its reach has appeared. Hereditary sin makes everything still more desperate, [IV 292] that is, it removes the difficulty, yet not with the help of ethics but with the help of dogmatics. As all ancient knowledge and speculation was based on the presupposition that thought has reality [Realitet], so all ancient ethics was based on the presupposition that virtue can be realized. Sin’s skepticism is altogether foreign to paganism. Sin is for the ethical consciousness what error is for the knowledge of it—the particular exception that proves nothing.
With dogmatics begins the science that, in contrast to that science called ideal stricte [in the strict sense], namely, ethics, proceeds from actuality. It begins with the actual in order to raise it up into ideality. It does not deny the presence of sin; on the contrary, it presupposes it and explains it by presupposing hereditary sin. However, since dogmatics is very seldom treated purely, hereditary sin is often brought within its confines in such a way that the impression of the heterogeneous originality of dogmatics does not always come clearly into view but becomes confused. This also happens when one finds in it a dogma concerning angels,44 concerning the Holy Scriptures, etc. Therefore dogmatics must not explain hereditary sin45 but rather explain it by presupposing it, like that vortex about which Greek speculation concerning nature had so much to say,46 a moving something that no science can grasp.
That such is the case with dogmatics will readily be granted if once again time is taken to understand Schleiermacher’s immortal service47 to this science. He was left behind long ago when men chose Hegel. Yet Schleiermacher was a thinker in the beautiful Greek sense, a thinker who spoke only of what he knew. Hegel, on the contrary, despite all his outstanding ability and stupendous learning, reminds us again and again by his performance that he was in the German sense a professor of philosophy on a large scale, because he à tout prix [at any price] must explain all things.
So the new science begins with dogmatics48 in the same sense that immanental science begins with metaphysics. Here ethics again finds its place as the science that has as a task for actuality the dogmatic consciousness of actuality. This ethics does not ignore sin, and it does not have its ideality in making ideal demands; rather, it has its ideality in the penetrating [IV 293] consciousness of actuality, of the actuality of sin, but note carefully, not with metaphysical light-mindedness or with psychological concupiscence.
It is easy to see the difference in the movements, to see that the ethics of which we are now speaking belongs to a different order of things. The first ethics was shipwrecked on the sinfulness of the single individual. Therefore, instead of being able to explain this sinfulness, the first ethics fell into an even greater and ethically more enigmatic difficulty, since the sin of the individual expanded into the sin of the whole race.49 At this point, dogmatics came to the rescue with hereditary sin. The new ethics presupposes dogmatics, and by means of hereditary sin it explains the sin of the single individual, while at the same time it sets ideality as a task, not by a movement from above and downward but from below and upward.
It is common knowledge that Aristotle used the term πρώτη φιλοσοφία [first philosophy]50 primarily to designate metaphysics, though he included within it a part that according to our conception belongs to theology. In paganism it is quite in order for theology to be treated there. It is related to the same lack of an infinite penetrating reflection that endowed the theater in paganism with reality as a kind of divine worship. If we now abstract from this ambiguity, we could retain the designation and by πρώτη φιλοσοφία* understand that totality of science which we might call “ethnical,” whose essence is immanence and is expressed in Greek thought by “recollection,” and by secunda philosophia [second philosophy] understand that totality of science whose essence is transcendence or repetition.**
The concept of sin does not properly belong in any science; [IV 294] only the second ethics can deal with its manifestation, but not with its coming into existence [Tilblivelse]. If any other science were to treat of it, the concept would be confused. To get closer to our present project, such would also be the case if psychology were to do so.
The subject of which psychology treats must be something in repose that remains in a restless repose, not something restless that always either produces itself or is repressed. But this abiding something out of which sin constantly arises, not by necessity (for a becoming by necessity is a state, as, for example, the whole history of the plant is a state) but by freedom—this abiding something, this predisposing presupposition, sin’s real possibility, is a subject of interest for psychology. That which can be the concern of psychology and with which it can occupy itself is not that sin comes into existence [bliver til], but how it can come into existence. Psychology can bring its concern to the point where it seems as if sin were there, but the next thing, that sin is there, is qualitatively different from the first. The manner in which this presupposition for scrupulous psychological contemplation and observation appears to be more and more comprehensive is the interest of psychology. Psychology may abandon itself, so to speak, to the disappointment that sin is there as an actuality. But this last disappointment reveals the impotence of psychology and merely shows that its service has come to an end.
That human nature is so constituted that it makes sin possible is, psychologically speaking, quite correct, but wanting to make the possibility of sin its actuality is revolting to ethics, and to dogmatics it sounds like blasphemy, because freedom is never possible; as soon as it is, it is actual, in the same sense as it was said in an older philosophy that if God’s existence [Tilværelse] is possible, it is necessary.52
As soon as sin is actually posited, ethics is immediately on the spot, and now ethics follows every move sin makes. How sin came into the world is not the concern of ethics, apart from the fact that it is certain that sin came into the world as sin. But still less than the concern of ethics with sin’s coming into existence is its concern with the still-life of sin’s possibility.
If one asks more specifically in what sense and to what extent psychology pursues the observation of its object, it is obvious in itself and from the preceding that every observation [IV 295] of the actuality of sin as an object of thought is irrelevant to it and that as observation it does not belong to ethics, for ethics is never observing but always accusing, judging, and acting. Furthermore, it is obvious in itself as well as from the preceding that psychology has nothing to do with the detail of the empirically actual except insofar as this lies outside of sin. Indeed, as a science psychology can never deal empirically with the detail that belongs to its domain, but the more concrete psychology becomes, the more the detail attains a scientific representation. In our day, this science, which indeed more than any other is allowed almost to intoxicate itself in the foaming multifariousness of life, has become as abstemious and ascetic as a flagellant. However, this is not the fault of science but of its devotees. On the other hand, when it comes to sin, the whole content of actuality is denied to psychology. Only the possibility of sin still belongs to it. But for ethics the possibility of sin never occurs.53 Ethics never allows itself to be fooled and does not waste time on such deliberations. Psychology, on the other hand, loves these, and as it sits and traces the contours and calculates the angles of possibility, it does not allow itself to be disturbed any more than did Archimedes.
As psychology now becomes deeply absorbed in the possibility of sin, it is unwittingly in the service of another science that only waits for it to finish so that it can begin and assist psychology to the explanation. This science is not ethics, for ethics has nothing at all to do with this possibility. This science is dogmatics, and here in turn the issue of hereditary sin appears. While psychology thoroughly explores the real possibility of sin, dogmatics explains hereditary sin, that is, the ideal possibility of sin. The second ethics, however, has nothing to do with the possibility of sin or with hereditary sin. The first ethics ignores sin. The second ethics has the actuality of sin within its scope, and here psychology can intrude only through a misunderstanding.
If what has been developed here is correct, it is easily seen that the author is quite justified in calling the present work a psychological deliberation, and also how this deliberation, insofar as it becomes conscious of its relation to science, belongs to the domain of psychology and in turn tends toward dogmatics.54 Psychology has been called the doctrine of the subjective spirit.55 If this is pursued more accurately,56 it will become [IV 296] apparent how psychology, when it comes to the issue of sin, must first pass over [slaa over] into the doctrine of the absolute spirit. Here lies the place of dogmatics. The first ethics presupposes metaphysics; the second ethics presupposes dogmatics but completes it also in such a way that here, as everywhere, the presupposition is brought out.
This was the task of the introduction. The introduction may be correct, while the deliberation itself concerning the concept of anxiety may be entirely incorrect. Whether this is the case remains to be seen.