Bergman on Dialogical Philosophy

Shmuel Hugo Bergman’s little-known but intensely readable primer, Dialogical Philosophy from Kierkegaard to Buber, presents a series of lectures given by Bergman in 1962. In his ‘Preface’, translator Arnold Gerstein – aptly, I sense – describes Bergman’s original language as ‘a semiformal but elegant conversational Hebrew that is compelling to students and philosophers alike’. The intimacy of Bergman’s lecturing style thus mirrors that of his subject: the dialogue. Nathan Rotenstreich, in his ‘Foreword’, maintains that the term ‘dialogical philosophy’ is ‘undoubtedly taken from Martin Buber’; both Rotenstreich and Gerstein, however, note that for Bergman it is Kierkegaard who emerges as ‘the central link in the history of the philosophy of the dialogue’ (in Gerstein’s words).

Later sections of Bergman’s study address other thinkers of central importance to Weimar era philosophy: Eugen Rosenstock, Franz Rosenzweig. Yet the first and by far the longest part of the book focusses on Kierkegaard’s thought. In some introductory statements prefacing this part, Bergman suggests the affinity of dialogical thinking to existentialist thinking: ‘What distinguishes any genuine dialogue is the fact that the participants are individuals, each bearing their own specific and generic traits. They are not abstractions but men of flesh and blood.’ On the following page Bergman adds a caveat: ‘The philosophy of dialogue which we will discuss in these lectures is not the same as “existentialism,” since not every existential philosophy stresses the dialogical factor; however, the two schools are identical with respect to the position of the individual within the philosophical system.’ As Bergman puts it later, ‘With this stress on the importance of the individual self, the single man in all his existential individuality, Kierkegaard lays the foundation for what has subsequently been called dialogical philosophy.’ But, as Rotenstreich rightly observes, Bergman’s treatment of dialogical philosophers’ relationship to existentialism is ultimately of lesser importance than the emphasis his book places on ‘the centrality of man’s individuality and the relationships and encounters between individuals and with God’. Bergman notes, for instance, that Kierkegaard’s dislike for German Romanticism’s ‘tempestuousness and exaggerated subjectivism that isolated man’, meant that he ‘strenuously sought the way to religion through the use of subjective irony’.

Crucially, in connection with Weimar political philosophy’s decisionism, Bergman shows how Kierkegaard’s thinking of the decision forms an aspect of his thinking of man’s emergent relationship with God, repeatedly referring to ‘the autonomous activity and self possession [sic] which are necessary in order to probe the true meaning of religion’. Because, as Bergman writes, for Kierkegaard ‘Real action is in the internal decision of man’, therefore for him ‘Man’s relation to God is not direct or objective; it is an inner relation, a relation of risk’. For Kierkegaard, as Bergman notes, within the moral and religious dimension of life ‘direct communication is impossible’. ‘In order to see God, one must break the direct-passive relationship. Man’s inner nature then bursts forth in an independent act, and he confronts the reality of God.’ 

Bergman emphasizes that the I-Thou relation, the relationship of man to man, is the concern of post-Kierkegaardian dialogical philosophy:

‘Actually, in spite of the tremendous importance of dialogue for Kierkegaard, the major dialogue for him is between man and God. The dialogue between man and man has no function in religious life because religious man leads a solitary life and cannot disclose to others the task that is imposed on him.’

Bergman’s attention to the importance of religious ‘silence’ or ‘speechlessness’ reappears within the context of his discussion of the modality of ‘non-Socratic learning’ within which, for Kierkegaard (as Bergman puts it), ‘a genuine mutual relationship between God and man is created’: learning as divine revelation.

‘The relationship between man and man is invariably Socratic – that is, it will always be such that one man, when he teaches another, even when he teaches him about revelation and faith, can only be an agent or a midwife. He cannot take the place of direct revelation, which comes through God as teacher.’

Commenting on Kierkegaard’s Repetition, Bergman stresses how ‘the essence of revelation’ involves a recreation of man by God, and that ‘God alone can recreate man’. ‘The learner is given something that was not within him and for which he was unprepared, and so the moment in which he receives the doctrine or revelation is of crucial importance.’ It is here that Bergman evokes the sort of divine revocation of speechlessness ‘which is expressed among Jews in the prayer: “Oh Lord, open thou my lips and my mouth may declare thy praise”’. We remember how Bergman wrote of how in relation to God, man’s ‘inner nature […] bursts forth in an independent act’: ‘Man enters this personal dialogue with God only through God’s action.’ It is as if the spiritual release afforded by the human decision is matched by – though it does not have the power to solicit – a divine revocation of our silence.

For instance when it juxtaposes Ferdinand Ebner’s view that (in Bergman’s words) ‘Man’s spirit is in its essence a receiving spirit dwelling in a relationship to a giving spirit’, with Wilhelm von Humboldt’s argument that (as Bergman puts it) ‘logos finds its way to our physical life and awakens it to the life of the spirit’, Bergman’s book foregrounds the position that ‘language is the revelation of God to man’. Noting that ‘this viewpoint predominates in the thought of Rosenstock, a friend of Rosenzweig’, Bergman explores the philosophy of language presented by Rosenstock in his Angewandte Seelenkunde [Applied Psychology], a text published in 1924 (but largely written some years before).

Bergman focusses on the concept of ‘true speech’ – revelational speech – which Rosenstock developed as a result of his view that, as Bergman phrases it, ‘The word, “logos,” is a revelation of divine presence’:

‘In speech [for Rosenstock] there are two levels, reflecting the distinction between true and ordinary speech. The two levels are the compulsion (or necessity) of speaking, and the ability to speak. True speech is not voluntary or arbitrary; it is not a matter of will but a necessity whose force causes speech to spring forth. True speech springs forth almost against the will of man, and thus all true speech is revelation.’

With this idea that ‘The word is given to man or forces itself upon him’, Bergman clearly echoes his earlier commentary on Kierkegaard – where he wrote of how ‘Man’s inner nature then bursts forth in an independent act’. It is as if Bergman’s exegesis of the philosophers’ views of the experience of revelation has become as compulsive and involuntary as the experience itself. Yet though for Rosenstock ‘true speech’ entails that (as Bergman puts it) ‘the speaker is entirely subject to his own speech’, this does not mean that for Bergman such involuntary revelational speech divorces the speaking/spoken subject from his own existential individuality. The example of revelational speech which Bergman provides – the Jewish hermeneutic practice of ‘the law of intra-linear parallelisms in the Book of Psalms’ – is itself, Bergman observes, ‘grounded in distress and necessity’.

‘In prayer Israel encircles the prayer leader, who passes in front of the Ark, while others release him by repeating the prayer which he has recited with such total self-absorption and compulsion that he does not hear it. The congregation repeats his prayer, paralleling it by half-lines in such a way that he can and must hear what he has prayed, and in this way they free him from his distress. This is true speech.’  

At the end of his book Bergman returns to this logic of call and response – of sacred language or prayer and hermeneutics – which characterizes revelational speech, noting how Buber (in his ‘The History of the Dialogical Principle’) situated the event of call and response at the core of his thinking influenced by Hasidism:

‘[…] the question of the possibility and reality of a dialogical relationship between man and God, thus of a free partnership of man in a conversation between heaven and earth whose speech in address and answer is the happening itself, the happening from above and the happening from below, had already accosted me in my youth. In particular since the Hasidic tradition has grown for me into the supporting ground of my own thinking, hence since about 1905, that had become an innermost question for me.’

The de-individualizing tendency within the dialogical philosophy of language treated by Bergman emerges clearly however, when he discusses Rosenstock’s idea of ‘liturgical grammar’. Bergman glosses Rosenstock’s notion of calling as recreation: ‘Rosenstock says that liturgical grammar would change Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum” to read, “God, you have called me, therefore I am.”’ Bergman underlines how ‘The calling comes first and establishes the “I.”’ He also stresses the scriptural precedence for the idea that ‘only from the “Thou” can the “I” be created’. ‘The classic example is I Samuel, 3:5, where young Samuel turns to Eli and says: “Here am I for thou called me.”’ Within Bergman’s study of dialogical philosophy therefore, there seems to be a tension between his emphasis on the involuntary (and even de-individualizing) aspect of religious experience, and his emphasis on the contrasting ‘autonomous activity and self possession [sic] which are necessary in order to probe the true meaning of religion’ – on an individual’s decisive, committed, risk-taking experience. This tension seems to me to be resolved, though, by Bergman’s ongoing attention to the concept of redemption as recreation: that is, to a redemption of man by God which precisely enables man’s exercise of personal agency.

Bergman’s reading of Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption suggests that ‘the redemption of the world must be perceived as a vital process, as the animation of the world’. This sort of redemption is evoked again within Bergman’s account of Buber’s notion of the state of ‘realization’, which Bergman describes as ‘the perception of reality in its immediacy, when one leaps into it, as it were, and identifies with it’. Towards the end of his book, Bergman relays the illustration of realization offered by Buber in one essay in his 1913 Daniel, Dialogues on Realization – a precursor of Buber’s I and Thou of 1923:

‘Buber illustrates this with the example of a Swiss pine […]. If […] I open myself to the tree with all my energy directed toward it, if I assimilate it, as it were, commit myself to it, then I am transformed and I become the tree itself. […] I experience a particular tree. I identify myself with it, without surrendering my unique position. I succeed, in other words, in conjoining the two, myself and the tree. I have access thereby to the mystery of reality. […] Entering the mystery of reality is […] a higher state of activity which I initiate and through which I open myself and transform my energy into a magical strength that fascinates and gratifies, while quieting the chaos around me. […] This is the great miracle of realization which this essay attempts to describe. Something of the philosophy of the dialogue emerges here, because the true dialogue also has the same openness and commitment along with the self-preservation of the person speaking.’       

Walser Addendum: Two Anthropologies

It may be that my reading of Walser in recent posts – with its reliance upon Simmel’s theory of depersonalization and then Jaspers’ projection of a hermeneutic of transcendence – is riven by a tension between two conflicting anthropologies, functionalist and transcendental. In his Karl Jaspers, Thornhill notes that whilst a functionalist anthropology ‘views human life as both produced, and adequately described, by its objective forms’, a transcendental anthropology such as Jaspers’ promotes the view that ‘the human being is most human, most existent, insofar as it is least material, and least bound by the objective forms (laws) of scientific rationality and social orientation’. Thornhill observes:

‘The constructive receptions of Kant which underpin the philosophies of Jaspers and Heidegger [...] describe an unbridgeable fissure at the centre of German existential thinking. On one side of this, Jaspers insists on the ethical difference of humanity from its forms. On the other side, Heidegger insists on its ethical adequacy to these. Jaspers’ philosophy is a morally transcendental anthropology, in which humanity interprets itself most truthfully in its unconditioned imperatives. This has later echoes in the neo-Kantian writings of Habermas. Heidegger, by contrast, provides the basis for a functionalist anthropology, anticipated already by Georg Simmel and Carl Schmitt, and echoed later by Arnold Gehlen, in which human life interprets itself as delivered unto its realized objective forms. Jaspers’ anthropology is strongly obligated to the remnants of idealism and transcendental subjectivism, and it creates a metaphysic of the person on the foundation of these. In Heidegger’s anthropology, in contrast, the transcendental subject, and its ethical derivates in practical reason, are replaced by a historicist metaphysic of the Volk, or of the functions which the Volk imposes upon its members.’

In my presentation of Simmel’s theory of depersonalization here it is unclear whether I am maintaining that Simmel critiques the functionalization of the human or (as Thornhill indicates) merely discerns it.

Behind the Mountains, part 2

Gass returns to the characteristically depersonalized and depersonalizing quality of Walser’s writing when he notes the ‘detached, desperate “inhumanity” of his work’. The narrator’s depersonalizing self-negation is foregrounded explicitly in ‘The Alphabet’: ‘I. I skip over, for this is I myself.’ Depersonalizing narratorial strategies are most evident in ‘Tobold (II)’ however, in numerous instances of self-negating narration such as this sentence:

‘Concerning a keg of the finest rye whiskey that, to the delight of the steward and that of a certain additional person – namely, to my very own, grinning, hand-rubbing delight – showed up only to be closely inspected and quite thoroughly investigated and examined by the two abovementioned important or insignificant personages, I shall take care not to waste another word.’

In ‘Tobold (II)’, the ‘certain additional person’ that is the modern self is brushed aside and reduced to the point where his very moods and their attendant whims are directed by an invisible heteronomy. The narrator’s investigation of his workplace is less a focussed product of individual agency, than a dissipated effect of being seduced by that which is more powerful: ‘The castle itself was an imposing edifice, and the many beautiful rooms and chambers I was permitted to glance into as the mood struck me naturally captured my attention and interest with their aristocratic appearance.’ Narration once more becomes a vehicle for expressing the narrator’s self-alienation and loss of personal agency, in the following presentation of vigilant attention directed by the formless authority which it tends:   

‘One of the choicest duties I had to perform was caring for the numerous lamps, an occupation that gave me great pleasure, for I developed quite a fondness for it. Each evening at nightfall I brought light, so to speak, into the dubious twilight that reigned on all sides, or if you prefer, into the darkness. As the count was a fancier of beautiful lamps and lampshades, these always had to be tended and treated with the greatest care. On beautiful evenings, as I crept about the rooms, all quiet as a mouse, a delicate mood in the air, the entire castle seemed bewitched. All the rooms were as if enchanted, the park an enchanted park, and with my soft, discreet, cautious lamplight, I seemed like Aladdin leaping one evening with his magic or miraculous lamp up the high, broad palace steps spread with splendid oriental rugs.’  

In this passage the radical modesty of the narrator – as he creeps about the rooms, ‘all quiet as a mouse’ – renders him indistinguishable from the narrated environment: the succeeding clause, ‘a delicate mood in the air’, could refer to him just as easily as to the castle. Then this submersion of the narrator’s identity within the described environment blends into a self-alienation in the form of a self-fictionalization: ‘I seemed like Aladdin’. The sense of narratorial self-alienation has already been generated by the recurrently self-qualifying, self-negating prose: ‘I brought light, so to speak, […] or if you prefer […]’. Here we are reminded of Walser’s foregrounding of the depersonalized quality of his writing in ‘The Green Spider’, where the narrator refers to ‘my mouth and its modest tool, my inherited language’, so divorcing a potential description enabled by such language from his human physicality ‘incapable of […] stammering it out’. By self-consciously stressing that this is writing removed from its writer, Walser emphasizes his own radical alienation from the reader. This is the effect of the final lines of ‘A Flaubert Prose Piece’ too, which once more draw attention to Walser’s writerly self-abnegation and the depersonalized quality of his prose. ‘Her report contained nothing that might have surprised him. They glided and passed among the people gliding and passing by, like a dream vision within the vision of a dream.’  

I want to draw out the radical implications of Walser’s articulation of modern self-abnegation; of the radical modesty of being, as Gass puts it, ‘Lightly attached to people, to the formalities of society, to any work which lies beneath another’s will like a leg beneath a log’. To take a first example, Walser’s position of self-abnegation enables his writing to develop a powerful critique of self-interest. In her translator’s ‘Preface’ to the collection, Susan Bernofsky quotes Elias Canetti on Walser, in the former’s The Human Province : ‘His deep and instinctive distaste for everything “lofty”, for everything that has rank and privilege, makes him an essential writer of our time, which is choking on power.’ Walser’s fascination with power struggles – his typical focus on human relations in terms of conflict or war – is communicated, for instance, in the following passage in ‘Tobold (II)’. Here the narrator discerns two distinct forms of human conflict, low battles concerning self-interest and ‘noble’ battles concerning natural morality:

‘Intrigues show up in castles, the same as in all other major establishments and institutions. Now the cook wanted to incite me against the steward, now the steward against the cook, but all this factional bickering and class conflict left me cold, for I had no interest in it. Anywhere a noble, splendid, sensible struggle can be found, I’ll be glad, perhaps, to take part in it – why not? – for instance in the struggle of the good versus the wicked, the benevolent versus the malevolent, the open and flexible versus the hardened and insensitive, the quick-witted versus the unenlightened, the diligent and industrious versus those who do nothing yet always stay on top, the struggle of the guileless versus the crafty and sly. This could be a battle I might like to lend a hand in, it can rain blows and punches for all I care, the more the merrier.’     

Walser’s critique of modern, institutional self-interest relates to the way in which his writing – as I want to suggest – projects a similar opposition of modern purposive rationality to natural human life, to that proposed within Georg Simmel’s contemporaneous The Philosophy of Money. (Simmel’s text was published in 1907, whilst Walser’s ‘Aschinger’ and ‘The Battle of Sempach’ – to which we will refer soon – date from 1907 and 1908 respectively). In his German Political Philosophy, Chris Thornhill outlines how Simmel’s political and sociological theory involved ‘the first major step on the path towards a reconstruction of vitalist philosophy, especially that of Nietzsche’.

‘Like Nietzsche, […] Simmel saw the capitalist economy as marking the final triumph of the human being as a formally purposive agent, and he also saw the purposive rationality of capitalism as weakening or neutralizing the relation between people and the purposes or objects of their possession, and even between people and their own actions. Under the generalized rationality of capitalism, therefore, the purposes of economically constructed persons assume a heteronomous primacy over human life itself.’

Indeed, as Thornhill summarizes, because the formal purposiveness of modern monetary subjects involves an alienation of those subjects from their own true purposes, it generates – Simmel maintained in The Philosophy of Money – an experience of depersonalization, such as we have seen reflected throughout Walser’s prose pieces:

‘As an agent seeking purposes, he [Simmel] argued, the modern subject alienates itself from the experiential sources of genuine subjectivity, and it constructs itself as a thinly neutralized set of contents and objectives. The monetary alienation of the human subject from its purposes and actions, then, also leads to a weakening or dissipation of the relation between people and other people, and ultimately, to a weakening or dissipation of the person itself – to a lack of “definite substance in the centre of the soul” or to a diffuse experience of depersonalization.’

We can find Walser detailedly projecting an opposition of formal purposiveness to natural human life within the following extraordinary description of war in ‘The Battle of Sempach’.

‘The rushing crowd, apparently full of passion, drew closer. And the knights stood their ground; suddenly they seemed fused together. Iron men held out their lances; you could have gone for a buggy ride across this bridge of lances, the knights were squeezed in so tightly, lance upon lance stuck out so mindlessly, firm and unyielding – just the thing, you might think, for such an impetuous, raging human breast to impale itself on. Here, an idiotic wall of spikes; there, people half-covered with shirts. Here, the art of war, the most prejudiced there is; there, people seized with helpless rage. Just to put an end to this loathsome horror, one man after the other recklessly charged into a lance tip, maddened, insane, flung by fury and rage. Flung to the ground, that is, without even having struck the helmeted, plumed iron scoundrel with his hand weapon, bleeding pitiably from his breast, tumbling head over heels, face down into the dusty excrement left behind by the noble steeds. This was the fate of all these almost naked men, while the lances, already red with blood, seemed to smile in scorn.’     

Walser’s tableau foregrounds two aspects of human experience. The ‘people half-covered with shirts’ represent passionate humanity. Their behaviour, their purposes, are self-directed: these are people simply ‘impetuous’ or ‘seized with helpless rage’, who are representatives of uncontrolled nature – ‘maddened, insane, flung by fury and rage’. On the other hand, there are the knights reified into their weapons: ‘an idiotic wall of spikes’, ‘the art of war, the most prejudiced there is’. On this side it is impossible to separate reified humans (‘Iron men’, ‘the helmeted, plumed iron scoundrel’), from humanized lances which ‘seemed to smile in scorn’. These knights emblematize an alienated condition of formal purposiveness. Their behaviour is rigidly purposeful, to the point where they are themselves indistinguishable – ‘squeezed in so tightly, lance upon lance stuck out so mindlessly, firm and unyielding’ – from the object-world of instrumentality and neutralization that they project. Walser obsessively delineates what he intuits to be the structuring conflict underlying modern life, and his forecast of the outcome is not utopian: as he writes in the preceding sentence, ‘Nature is always annihilated in a battle’. 

Thornhill shows how Simmel’s opposition of formal purposiveness to natural human life was grounded in Nietzsche’s thinking about law, reason and nature. Nietzsche, Thornhill summarizes, thought that fear of nature stimulates the legislation of ‘rational or moral purposes for humans to pursue, so that they are distracted from their naturalness’. Laws are formed in order to differentiate human life from ‘the cyclical temporal processes of mere nature or from the chaotic temporal events of historical contingency’. ‘Laws and values produced in this manner serve to humanize the world’, Thornhill notes; ‘they allow human beings to live, at least, in an illusion of human justification and moral purpose’. But they also reflect ‘a fearful will to obtain power, a power that can only be secured through the extirpation of whatever is residually natural – including the residues of nature in reason itself’:

‘Whilst possessing the obvious psychological utility that they protect people from knowledge of their own naturalness, however, Nietzsche argued that the laws created by reason form highly coercive and dominatory intellectual structures, which, in seeking to suppress fear, fixate human reason on the acquisition of power.’ 

For Nietzsche, as Thornhill writes, this is ‘invariably the will to power of weak people’; it is ‘power resentfully desired by those who cannot contentedly tolerate the naturalness and spontaneous futility of life’. Those who cannot accept contingency, and remain trapped in nihilistic horror vacui, ‘produce sense for their lives only through the pursuit of obligatory, yet ultimately illusory laws and purposes’.  

We can argue that Walser’s writing articulates the perspective of those whom competitive capitalist society labels ‘weak’ or ‘vulnerable’ – of the radically modest – in order to discern, with Nietzsche and Simmel, the true weakness of those who pursue ‘obligatory, yet ultimately illusory laws and purposes’. In Walser’s ‘Aschinger’, their rushed, non-accepting satisfaction of appetitive processes of mere nature is not enough for the competitive and power-seeking, who must then flee into ‘the commercial air’.

‘The dissatisfied quickly find satisfaction at the beer spring and the warm sausage tower, and the satiated dash out again into the commercial air, generally with a briefcase beneath their arm, a letter in their pocket, an assignment in their brain, firm plans in their skull, and in their open palm a watch that says the time has come.’   

Walser suggests that, slotted into their new, artificial time (of money, not of nature), the supposedly ‘firm’ purposes of economically constructed persons do not derive from their own natural brains – or from any ‘definite substance in the centre of the soul’ – but are instead plucked out, as if at random, from the empty, depersonalized skulls within which they float. A critique of the modern differentiation of ‘plans’ from naturalness or contingency may also be said to lie behind Walser’s ironization of the self-with-attainments in ‘Tobold (II)’: ‘Incidentally, it should also be mentioned that the secretary was an excellent pianist. Why shouldn’t we have a fondness for people who bring us pleasure with their skills, gifts, sciences, or knowledge?’ Walser proposes, in ‘Marie’, that the illusory plans and instrumentalized attainments which animate the capitalist city merely sustain a society in which both ‘work’ and ‘sophisticated pleasure’ are paratactically, and barbarically, inseparable from ‘privation’:

            ‘“Where are you going?” Frau Bandi asked.

            “I’m not quite sure yet. Well, to one of the centres of contemporary civilization, culture, work, privation, sophisticated pleasure, modern elegance and education, to one of the big, noisy cities where I’ll learn how to go about winning some respect and repute for myself among my fellow men.”’

Tbc.

Behind the Mountains

The world of the prose pieces of Robert Walser’s assembled in the collection Masquerade and Other Stories is one of those who hold to ‘modest being’, as Walser phrases it in ‘Tobold (II)’. It may be easy, at first sight and when one is aware of Walser’s own history of depressive illness, to confuse such modesty – perhaps particularly when expressed in terms of an abdication of agency or occupation – with mental incapacity. In his ‘Introduction’ to the collection, William H. Gass describes Walser’s eventual institutional mode of existence, when he deliberately abandoned his lifelong, modernist vocation of obscurity.

‘His mind pleads incompetence. Asylums are asylums. There he can guiltlessly surrender his fate and pass his days at the behest of others. He will no longer need to write in such a way that its public obscurity is assured. He will no longer need to write. The daily walk will suffice.’

Yet, in the course of his description of the narrator’s unemployment in ‘Marie’, Walser places depression – or the radical form of modesty which is a personal refusal of occupation – in dialectical relation to an impulse towards freedom. Even as he is ‘confined, restrained, imprisoned’ by, or reified within, his obsessive negative thought patterns, Walser’s narrator ‘should have liked to wander far off, out into the bright, wide, open, healthy world’. However self-ironizing, repetitious and concentric Walser’s depressive’s prose may be here, this conjunction shines out: ‘I was free, then suddenly wasn’t at all free.’

‘Sometimes I did in fact reproach myself most sternly about my idleness, but without being too terribly worried about it. Employment was always on my mind; I resolved to get to work, but for all that was still a long way from working, and instead kept running around jobless, without anything at all in the way of occupation. Melancholia and pensiveness held me strangely captive; all day long I was unable to free myself from any number of thoughts, found myself bound by my ideas. I was, so to speak, both prisoner and prison, felt confined, restrained, imprisoned. I was free, then suddenly wasn’t at all free. […] I should have liked to wander far off, out into the bright, wide, open, healthy world, but then again didn’t have the least desire, the slightest urge to do so, though I was by no means really too indolent.’       

Precisely the unfreedom of the narrator in ‘Marie’, the way in which he is crippled by his depression, conditions his particular form of freedom, which consists of an impulse towards freedom or a desire to be free: the ‘certain ardent searching and longing’ upon which Walser expands on the following page. Walser’s hyper-irony notes that this longing too is a mode of unfreedom, though one that we ‘should not even strive’ to escape. Indeed, as (in) a sort of beneficient infinite recursion, it is itself ‘desirable’, and more so than any utopian end-point:

‘Around this time I went for a walk across the mountain with an honest, straightforward man. I vividly recall a good and most agreeable conversation we had along the way, in the course of which the person in question, my walking companion, pursued a train of thought according to which we humans, as long as we live, are generally incapable of freeing ourselves from a certain ardent searching and longing, and should not even strive to; that our longing for happiness seems far more beautiful, always far more sensitive, more significant and all in all probably far more desirable than happiness itself, which perhaps need not even exist, since the fervent, gratifying pursuit of happiness and an everlasting, deep desire for it perhaps not only suit perfectly our needs, but satisfy them far better, far more profoundly; that being happy is by no means to be taken casually, unquestioningly as the meaning of the world, the goal and purpose of life, and so on.’

The physical activity of exploring nature – the mountain walk – is an appropriate stimulant of these cogitations on this ‘ardent searching and longing’: in later pieces Walser explicitly conceives of longing in organic, natural terms. ‘The One of Fairy Tales’ has the phrase ‘The mountain fire of longing’. A 1927-28 ‘Prose Piece’ ends with this sentence:

‘Waves and branches have snakelike shapes, and there come moments when we know we are no more and no less than waves and snowflakes, or than that which surely feels, now and then, from its so wonderfully charming confinement, the pull of longing: the leaf.’

 

Whilst this prose piece highlights the passivity of a plant’s experience of longing, other pieces of Walser’s, such as ‘Fritz’, do emphasize human active longing and its attendant agencies. Fritz would dazzle his potential employer with his general positivity, his resolve and ‘willingness to lay it on as thick as possible’, in order to satisfy his ‘profound longing for rewarding and long-term employment’. Yet his ironical attitude towards all this is reinforced by the page’s typography.

‘She remarked that only ardent

OPTIMISTS

who had a mind to go all the way could be taken into consideration, whereupon I replied I was resolved to be every bit as ardent and to go ever bit as far as I thought would please her; she’d be astonished. I was beyond all doubt an optimist.’

The narrator of ‘Tobold (II)’ again foregrounds longing, ardency and resolution: ‘Some day what I have long wished to do should and must be achieved.’ With this emphasis on will and courage, Walser here could be said to promulgate a radical decision theory:

‘That an act requires courage is, in my opinion, enough to make it worthwhile, that is, healthy and honest. Whether or not the enterprise has a chance of succeeding strikes me, as I said before, as irrelevant. What really counts, what has weight and significance, is showing courage and firmness, not failing to undertake some day the thing you’ve proposed.’

Yet because decisive undertaking is more about pure will than carried-through, practical action or the achievement of an objective goal, and because Walser’s narrators tend to verbalize or theorize undertaking rather than actually undertake anything, it is easy to describe Walser’s creations as passive, depersonalized selves, as does Gass.

‘Walser’s narrators (and we can presume, in this case, Walser himself) have become will-less wanderers, impotent observers of life, passive perceivers of action and passion. Only on the page, will the Will risk the expression and exercise of its considerable means.’ 

Tbc.