The theory of sublimation of our age likes to define the artist as a notorious case of sickness or as one who is only suited or compelled by deprivations to be able to create his art in just this way. Apart from the fact that one would have to meditate for a long while on hunger and art, and, especially if the hunger is of a mental sort, the saturation of present-day artistic careers after the liberation — liberation even from all the laws of nature — would have to cause anxiety from the point of view of sublimation.
It is true that art needs laws, seeks forms, ascesis of simplicity, in order to banish the multiform, and that peoples became great through this self-limitation by the abandonment of hubris. Flowers bloom when the water that otherwise shoots into the foliage is taken away from them. And the desert was the land of inspiration, the land of god, of the spirit, of that which is laughed at today. Fate conferred life as a lineage, nature its form, without envy, through birth and circumstances, upon the creatures and plants and men, and they understood their possibilities, which some possess with all their burdens and others without complete desire, which is another thing. There are those responsible, there are others who work, there are those suffering and those bequeathing, there are those who draw the wonder of life from barren soil, and those who are full of talent, or should be, from the beginning onwards. Equality would be against Nature, against the law, against art. Never was the word freedom more a lie than where men became slaves of the power over nature, where fraternity degenerated into sociology with an art without a chance, of the unnatural estrangement of men from themselves. For nature was misused, just as art was misused, cleared away as a quarry of history, piece by piece, the pictures and tones taken away and reassembled anew, collected into new combinations, into new shapes, like old history is brought into new feelings, and new thoughts. But when we become slaves of comfort, imprisoned by freedom, which leaves us no choice between norms except to weave everything into one another, air-schedules and rail-timetables of living together, Autobahns like standardized window solutions and doors and taps without an appearance that brings pleasure, then life becomes destruction, not only of all that was previously. For the destruction of the existing can take place in order to make way for the new, which arises with brutality, barbarism and banality coming to the top, inevitably with resistance and mourning, in the battles of nations, empires, classes or styles. Only our age does not allow us to even think of this alternation, less than a king or dictator or all the saints ever did. The alternating committees of our republics and their public opinions considered the democracy of the time as the final condition of progress and modernity as the goal, after which there can be no other constitutions. Neglecting the law that those coming after destroy the previous one in order to make space for the new to establish itself. That happens indeed through brutality, the injustice of barbarians, who destroy the high cultures mercilessly: men, houses, countries, laws. We know about change from the Greeks to the Romans, from the Mediterranean culture to the northern Alpine countries of the migration of peoples, from the Ancien Régime at the hands of the French Sans-culottes in the Revolution to the Russian culture through the Bolshevik murders. Thus was Hitler to be understood, and when he was defeated, his successors. All that is human history, irreversible, cruelly progressing and always one step closer to the abyss; only one who falls without complaint falls into a grave without the dignity of the victim, which only art knew in a justice which only nations without art, and whose human life is as if it has never been from the beginning, must lack. Thus, culture in this sense means life at a higher level. One can also live on the lower floor of the marble baths and floors with artificial coverings and windows, which are not to be opened, and in the modernized rooms with ventilation systems, double glazed windows and hard-edged walls and space limitation and plastic covers. They call this condition “high culture,” a word like this “art,” which becomes a word of a business jargon of an industrialized culture. Kings can fall because of others, like rich men, holy men because of the god who lost our faith, dictators expire because of themselves and their hubris, but the peoples of the democracies, estranged from themselves on their path to world-power, can be brought down only by the world itself and its lack of culture, and then without a lament, endless like a night that has never existed.