Henrik Ibsen and his Dramatic Poem, Peer Gynt

(for the author's 75th birthday)

In our relationship to the works of an artist, we would be wise to distinguish a variety of aspects. We may find in them thoughts that enlighten us, a solution that liberates us, a form that pleases us and appears to fit the subject, skill for which we envy the artist, imagination that can stir our love or fear, and on the other hand, whatever of the artist himself, in all his subjectivity, has entered into the work – of the artist, not as a great thinker and creative genius but simply as an ordinary human being. It may well look as though it were just this latter element that determines the “style” of his art. Granted, only men of genius do find a style, that is, their own personal style, but differences in style stem from other differences in their personalities. According to how close or distant these are to our own, we can measure our emotional response to the artist – and the great majority of people base their ultimate judgement of him exclusively on this. ¹

One must take this into consideration in order to understand the relationship which the current generation and their spokesmen have to Ibsen. People no longer get worked up about him, either for or against. He is a “modern”, but not at all the “mode”. Everyone has read him long since; one reader he notably attracted, another he left indifferent, to a third he was utterly antipathetic. People know that he is for women and against living a lie, and they praise his dialogue. They do not agitate for him as for Goethe, nor abuse him as they do Schiller. A man whose books can be bought for a few pennies can scarcely satisfy the need for costly intellectual furnishings felt by the culture mob, whose reading them, too, is merely a matter of rare meublements.² This explanation of the current Ibsen-rejection, or cool Ibsen-reception, may appear wrong-headed, but it is no more wrong-headed than the list of motives which today leads to dethroning and dismissing the artistic greats. An era that dimly feels an inner unrest over its own loutishness, and which desperately seeks trendy art as a counter-weight, rather rashly believed it had found this in every mediocre writer of mere idylls, like Gottfried Keller or Theodor Storm. It dared to name them in the same breath with Goethe without fear of being laughed at, instead of thinking, in lively mistrust of itself, of inner self-examination, a task of which it must have felt uncomfortably reminded by Ibsen.

Admittedly, Ibsen had the misfortune to be badly compromised three times. As a young man he fell into the hands of a Danish journalist who mainly owed his fame to the circumstance that he was the first to feel no shame for indulging his urge to interview all the famous men of Europe.³ His incredibly superficial, pretty rhetoric about tendencies in 19th-century literature could only succeed because professorial writing about the history of literature had become insufferable. The second misfortune was that his writing coincided with the demand of women for admission to the civil professions, a coincidence which people considered causal, and not merely accidental. Understandably, it was contrary to men of a deeper nature to support a man who was praised by women for his views. Finally, third, he was seized upon by the male theoreticians of the contemporary culture. He was claimed by socialism and by humanist ethics. The greatest dust was always stirred up by those of his works which were topical, and therefore transitory. Just as the last words of Faust⁴ were brought into ever closer relation to the workers' movement during the second half of the 19th century, so all women (of both sexes) interpreted the conclusion of Little Eyolf as the clarion call for the “century of the child”.⁵ The other side of womanliness, the “life of love”, was fully accounted for by Ghosts, the drama that had made Ibsen's name most famous. The Darwinists also liked it, because it gave a terrifying example of simply applying hygienic heredity-theory at home and in school. The blasé socialists finally accepted Ibsen as an unclear and indecisive forerunner of Nietzsche. If his rich symbolism was offensive to the cliché-masters of both of those movements, he was also, for the Symbolists themselves, not emotional enough, too logical, too cold.

All this came together to create the bored, morose tone in which one almost always hears the name Ibsen spoken today. To the avant-garde his name is a triviality, a rallying cry against the latter-day classicists; in the hard-fought victory over them it had served its purpose. What Ibsen said, people believe they have more than sufficiently understood and long since inwardly digested. He is for them the forerunner of a time that has already arrived anyway, the author of such works as are already the common property of the learned. Nothing, however, is more deadly for a work of art than this. That everyone knows him, and his dramas are everywhere produced without objections, only contributes to consigning him to the past.

Anyone today, then, who wants to say something more about Ibsen, is in an embarrassing position. He runs the risk of being immediately grouped with those stragglers to whom the news of the latest fashion only penetrates after several decades, like the light of stars to the earth. And anyone who sees in Ibsen's work, and above all in his most powerful “dramatic poem”, Peer Gynt, not the products of a period but creations for eternity, knows full well for whom, but not exactly against whom, he is bearing witness.⁶

Before discussing the essential thought content of Peer Gynt we must explicitly renounce an explanation based on the generally current opinion that sees in this work merely a mockery of Norwegianism, something which would be understandable only to the author's countrymen. Certainly in Peer Gynt there are scenes and passages like that. The hero of Peer Gynt however, is humanity itself. Anyone who takes the trouble to read further, or who looks forward to the pleasure of taking up the play, itself, again, will find that that viewpoint strikes him just the same way as would someone's insisting that, with Faust, Goethe only wanted to write a satire on German student life. Moreover, Ibsen is nowhere so little understood as in his homeland, a land where people think of Knut Hamsun, whose Pan is perhaps the most beautiful novel ever written, as a common scribbler, far inferior to the talented Garborg; where they always say “Ibsen and Björnson”; and where, in Christiania⁷ to be precise, Peer Gynt is performed in a field in a circus atmosphere – a performance that with the best of wills can only be called idiotic. In such a land, Ibsen must indeed have suffered frightfully. In fact he has admitted in his epilogue⁸ how little understood he is.

Peer Gynt is a redemption drama, and indeed, just to admit this right away, it is one of the greatest. It is deeper and more comprehensive than any of Shakespeare's, without being any less beautiful; it is superior in sensuous brilliance to all of Ibsen's other works; in the significance of its conception it is the equal of, and in the power of its execution it is far above, Goethe's Faust; and it very nearly reaches the heights of Richard Wagner's Tristan and Parsifal. Together with these three great works, it presents the problem of humankind in its widest range and with its most implacable opposites.

The central point of Peer Gynt concerns the role of the loved woman in man's life, and one cannot hope to understand man until one has got clear about woman.

At first we are reminded less of Parsifal and Tristan than of the role of the women in Wagner's earlier dramas, The Flying Dutchman and Tannhäuser, of Dante and of Goethe. Solveig is the virgo immaculata⁹, beloved but no longer desired, the Madonna¹⁰, Beatrice¹¹. Man – every man, and herein lies the great puzzle of love, as well as, briefly stated, the true meaning of Peer Gynt pure and simple – is never so truly himself as when he loves. Love is a path, and the easiest and most common path, to achieving consciousness of oneself, of one's person, his individuality, his soul. That he is he, a particular person, a centre of the world, and not lost and drowning in a sea of sensations – if he is aware of this at all, and does not deny it like those who now reject the existence of soul – comes to him mostly when he loves. That is why love turns so many people into mystics, and even converted such a philistine empiricist as Auguste Comte.¹²¹³ Philosophers are more likely to attain the individuation which they (Schelling, Bahnsen, Maine de Biran, Augustine) describe as “intuitive self-understanding of the subject” through becoming aware of their being alone in the universe, and through reflection on the problem of ethics. For artists, what draws them on is above all “the eternal feminine”, even if it is ultimately the problem of morality which underlies their and the philosophers’ final certainties and uncertainties.

What redeems in Peer Gynt (this deepest feature of the work is the least comprehended), according to Ibsen (here his realism surpasses the young Wagner's), is not the living, embodied Solveig, who could be just any chick¹⁴; rather it is the Solveig in Peer Gynt, his capacity for realizing her in him. This possibility of attaining his better self through Solveig and in loving her is something he has disregarded all his life. That is why Solveig can say to him: “You, your true (intelligible) being, was with me your whole life long”; when he in wild consternation asks her, or much better asks himself -

Where was my real self

Since we last met, the Peer who bore

The stamp of God upon his brow? [Act V: scene 11]¹⁵

To Peer Gynt, himself, his existence seemed like an onion: many skins and no core, many attributes and modes, but no substance.[Act V: scene 5]¹⁶

It may be surprising that Ibsen is interpreted very philosophically, here, even though in Peer Gynt he makes fun of German (especially Hegelian) philosophy.

Ibsen belongs, however, to the list of great men who have no very intimate relation to what was thought and written before them, rather like, e.g., Zola, or Knut Hamsun; extreme examples of this type are Kleist and Shelley; among philosophers one thinks of Giordano Bruno and Kant, but especially of Descartes, Socrates and Fechner. The other sort of great man feels it one of his starkest duties to come to terms with the cultural past that lies behind him.¹⁷ Extreme examples are Goethe and Wagner, also Grillparzer and Herder, the romantics in general. Among the philosophers, examples are Plato¹⁸, Leibniz, Hegel, Nietzsche, and even more so, Schopenhauer.

#todo Here now.

Among composers, Beethoven and Bruckner have to belong to the first group, Schumann to the second. Naturally, only extremes are being signposted here; many intermediate steps lie between them. The Carlyle-Emerson distinction between the “poet” and the “writer” may be somewhat related, and seems to be broadened and more rigorously grounded through our new classification.¹⁹ Whether the distinction between these two categories has deeper roots, constitutes a difficult problem to which I have not found the solution.

I was speaking of Ibsen. His obviously limited acquaintance with the philosophical literature, given his so strong and naturally deep interest in the chief problem of ethics, can only have that one explanation. Otherwise, he would have to have known that his poetry is Kant's philosophy. No one else, only Kant and Ibsen, took truth and the lie to be the deepest problem of ethics (I can legitimately ignore Fichte, who simply took over exactly where Kant left off). They were the only ones who recognized that truth can only flow from having an ego in the higher sense, having individuality. This, however, is the lesson of Ibsen's Peer Gynt no less than of the Critique of Practical Reason. While all other religion, philosophy and art agreed to compromises, they alone dared to express, and thus to display before humanity, the moral command in all its strength and implacability, just as the inner voice in people actually puts it. “All or nothing” is just as much Kant's motto as it is that of Ibsen's Brand. Their fates are the same, too, even to the label “rigorist”, which all those of incomplete and insincere nature have used in replying to them. Ibsen was specially occupied, from beginning to end, with the problem of the lie, from the Love's Comedy, through Skule, the Enemy of the People, and Hjalmar, to Gabriel Borkman's friendship with Foldal. He pursued it furthest, however, in his greatest work, in Peer Gynt.

Dr. Begriffenfeld, who is usually viewed merely as a parody of the German scholar, is rather more than a mere caricature. He recognizes very clearly the hollowness of the Gyntian self (his “empirical ego”), and knows that the only place where Peer Gynt is really an emperor is in the madhouse, among the insane, whose reason (again in the Kantian sense) is totally wanting. 12

Ibsen knows (and if he does not teach it in concepts, he shows it clearly in his portrayal of Peer Gynt), that the only thing that lends a person value is the possession of an (“intelligible”) ego, of a personality, and that when this is lacking in a person, he needs to assume value from somewhere else outside of himself. Nietzsche's great realization, that the will to power lies endlessly deep in all living things, has been long under-appreciated because of our preoccupation with his breeding ideal.13 Particularly relevant for humans, however, and lying even deeper in them, is not the will to power but the will to value, which I believe is

12 No one is ever fully himself as long as he lives on earth. Only someone totally deluded is able to believe that he has fully found himself because he is no longer looking.

13 I.e., of the “overman” or “superman”. See especially Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra. (sb)

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what finally distinguishes them from the animals. From the lack of intrinsic value comes the striving to gain value from elsewhere; that is the source of all fame-seeking, and all confidence trickery in the wider sense. All humans, man and woman, are constituted as such by the will to value. If someone cannot create value of and for himself – and this is always the case with women – then he tries to get it from someone else and for someone else; one always acts for the audience that makes the value judgement. In contrast to animals, which strive only for pleasure, for the satisfaction of natural drives, every human being constantly seeks, wherever and however, to gain the greatest possible value for himself.

We learn in Act 1 that Peer Gynt has no such value in himself, when we get to know him right away as a braggart and a showoff.

Ibsen knows that having a personality is revealed above all through striving to follow the moral law. Peer Gynt, who lacks what Schopenhauer calls a “centre of gravity”14, gets thereby into the Kingdom of the Trolls, whose slogan is: “Troll, to thyself be enough.” A being who lacks the morality derived from the intelligible subject, also lacks the drive to become this intelligible being, the pure ego; it has no need to perfect itself, it does not know the “progressus” towards the ethical ideal of which Kant spoke (without often being understood). Animals are to themselves enough. That is why Peer Gynt deserves his monkey's tail. Ibsen knows that only the possession of an “I” in the higher sense leads to the recognition of a “Thou” in others. It is the fundamental condition of altruism that self-awareness is a prerequisite of the awareness of others. This is why individualism is the exact opposite of egoism, and it is why he shows us Peer Gynt as petty and self-seeking.

The human is, for Ibsen as for Kant, an intermediate being between animal and something higher; made of mud and fire, to cite Goethe; both clay and sculptor, to cite Nietzsche. Will moral thought triumph, or will man, lacking soul and lacking value, be destroyed? That is the question that Ibsen poses through his character, Peer Gynt. Humanity would be a failed attempt by the deity, and would have to be melted down and recast, if we “defied our destiny to the end”, i.e., if we proved ourselves to be unfaithful and disobedient in the service of the highest within us, of logos, of spirit, of reason (in Kant's sense). The Button Molder in Peer Gynt represents in name and demeanour, though with as little so-

14 Has it been observed what kind of name Ibsen has chosen for his hero? Peer Gynt – it has so little gravity. The name is like a rubber ball that keeps bouncing off the ground.

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lemnity as possible, the deity which signifies for Ibsen, as for Kant and Plato, the moral idea and its claim on humanity.

You were meant to be a gleaming button

On the world's waistcoat; but the eyelet was missing. [V: 7]

In a magnificent scene, Peer Gynt, on whom (as on most people) only two apparently moral things, love and death, have any effect whatever, begins just before his death to question the course of his life. He calls up memory after memory, which ought to prove to him that all is not lost, that his life is not to be seen as totally pointless. The allegory here is followed through with strength and skill, as perhaps nowhere else in world literature. The characters are handled with the greatest economy, and have not in the slightest been cast to justify their essence and existence. They act in such a way that we relate to them the way children do to a fairy-tale; we find it natural that they appear, so natural that Ibsen could refuse to give them the more appropriate abstract names which would have made their deeper, universal significance more understandable. The Button-Molder is conscience, through which (for Ibsen, as for Kant and Socrates) the divine (the “Master”) speaks to the human; and as his conscience demands and requests, Peer tries to establish his identity using his past life. For he does not yet feel at all guilty, he accepts responsibility for no crimes. He just wants to protect himself from the threatening claim of the moral law – as if one could fulfil that by doing something else instead, as if one could pay it off with a single instalment, and then need to do nothing more. Peer Gynt is still too deluded to recognize that, “only he who has to conquer them anew each day deserves his freedom or his life.”15 The thing that he seeks just to placate his conscience, however, never does occur to him. On the contrary. What he is forced to remember is the Old Man of the Dovrë, and his life in the Kingdom of the Trolls. He never did tie on the monkey's tail, so he did not become wholly animal. He did, however, incur guilt in the animal realm; he had a child with the daughter of the Troll King, and accepted her slogan, became complacent instead of “trying to make an effort”. Now he sees for the first time that the soul is not the sanction of the body, and of its lust and sloth. Earlier he had always indulged them, deflecting any misgivings on principle (beginning of Act 4), indeed doing all he could for the benefit of this self. Now he sees that it does less harm to lose a finger, to give up something of the empirical

15 A quote from Faust II, Act V, scene 5. (sb)

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ego, when one can, for this price, affirm his individuality (something he could not earlier comprehend). “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”16 He now sees that the higher self is at war with the lower, and that the complete victory of one is the death of the other. “To be thyself, is to slay thyself.”17 [V: 9] He must say all this to himself, and convict himself. It now occurs to him that perhaps it is exactly his destiny (“his Master's will”, which he ought to have worn “as a sign-board”), consciously and in principle to offend against that other destiny, to oppose it. Perhaps he was just a little bit evil, at least a little bit something, not just blotted out, common, nothing. But no, even there he had not really meant anything. “Sinners in the true grand style are seldom met with nowadays.” [V: 7] He cannot even believe in the great offender, and the Thin One (the Devil) to whom he willingly pledged himself in order not to be nothing would not get much fatter on his account. The Napoleons and Don Juans, the Iagos and Hagens, are just as thinly distributed as the saints. Here one feels all the scorn, the deep contempt of the poet for the bulk of humanity. They should not imagine themselves worthy of hell, which is much too noble, too magnificent for them. The Devil exists for completely different people, not for monkeys and for swine. To the thought of Satan, whose majesty they ought not to insult, Ibsen contrasts his conception of the Button-Molder. He is what humanity richly deserves; he is necessary for them.

Think of the passage in “Revelation” (3: [15-]16): “I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.” Peer Gynt would be “undying in God” or “undying in Satan” if he had consciously maintained an individuality, either good or evil. However, he was altogether without an ego that would have removed him from time, and guaranteed him a higher existence and an afterlife, independent of the physical, natural law of birth and death; he did not have a white soul, nor a black one either. Peer Gynt is the paradigm of the countless immoral, inconstant people among us, who are deemed to be moral because they are not anti-moral, who do not have enough greatness either of instinct or of free decision to reject morality. They do not openly act on a

16 Mark 8: 36; cf. Matthew 16: 26; Luke 9: 25. (sb)

17 Cf. the Gospel of Mark, 8: 34-36. (“For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel's, the same shall save it.”)

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declared unbelief in the good and the true, demonstrating in practice their derision for morality18, but without deep inner devotion they think that they do believe. Thus they are not criminals in deed or in intent, and yet are criminals in-themselves, because they deceive themselves, for the command they obey is not from the heart. They behave legally, and outwardly often more than legally, but though they do not clearly know it their motive is that they would otherwise lose, not their self-esteem, but the esteem of others. Peer Gynt thus stands for all those for whom the other person is the measure, all those who really worship Jehovah. For Jehovah is just the colossal personification of the other person, so far as he gains influence over an individual's thinking and behaviour.19 Peer Gynt believed himself to be acting autonomously where he was living the most heteronomously (compare his lecture on the Gyntian self in Act 4), to be a cool and selfdetermined individualist when he was merely a miserable and cowardly egoist.

He did not grant power over himself to his eternal personality, his true self, and so he “was already long dead before his death”. We find here already20 the form in which the fundamental thought of his last, dramatic “epilogue” appears: the motif of the higher, eternal life, the fundamental thought of the teaching of Christ as the determining factor in his thinking and writing. Without individuality, without an essential core that merely looks at the things of this world through the medium of unreal time, no immortality. Immortality of the soul is only for beings who have a soul. So Peer Gynt goes into the great melting pot, where he loses his

18 I was duty-bound here to adopt and portray an example of greatness in anti-morality, in order not to be untrue to Ibsen. I, myself, hold greatness in evil to be a fiction (Sex and Character, 1st ed., pp. 235 ff. [E. pp. 182 ff]).

19 People have tried to pretend that Ibsen, the greatest and most profound individualist since Kant, is a social ethicist, to exploit the author of Brand, The Pillars of Society and The Lady from the Sea as maintaining the superiority of the collectivity over the freedom of the individual. Certainly, Ibsen is no disrespecter of the social, of the idea of society, as are those modern pseudo-individualists who bear the responsibility for the common identification of individualism with egoism. They are the ones who interpret Nietzsche as a Darwinist, and use his name as a cover for their desire never to be disturbed, e.g., by phenomena like illness or poverty, in their enjoyment of the pleasures of the table or the bedroom, or even just in their eagerness to read the paper or to gossip in a warm salon. Ibsen's individualism is much more decisive than Nietzsche's, because more refined. However, Ibsen takes care to give the same answer to each of his commentators, who all seek his approval for their own interpretations, namely, that each of them has understood him best of all. Thus he has apparently not found it worth the trouble to utter a word of protest even to those who wanted to label him a social ethicist. But how could those who rave on about the species exploit a man whose main problem is truth and the lie, the individual ethical problem par excellence.

20 If not even earlier (in Catiline). Cf. Schlenther, Ibsens Werke, Vol. I, 1903, Introduction, p. 48. [Catiline was Ibsen's first play. It was rejected for performance in 1849, and published in 1850.]

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form, and only matter persists (like the metal that survives when coins are melted down). Here Ibsen touches on the Buddhist teaching on the fate of humans after death, although he did not know the esoteric Buddhist doctrine, which had not yet penetrated to Europe. One is also reminded here of the Aristotelian view of the soul as form.

Finally, tormented by the most frightful anguish at departing after a life bare of all eternity, Peer Gynt finally recognizes, in thinking about Solveig, what he could have been and what he had not become. After all, he was most himself in his love for her; and just as love was able to carry him high above a miserable earthly existence, so now he is going to be carried out of this earthly existence – in love. At last he is entering a higher life, and can sustain his self – though not on earth. Solveig appears to him as a little old woman, and simultaneously as death. No one has explicitly conceived this before, but Ibsen's creative genius makes an unfathomably deep, unconscious discovery here, the same one that lies behind the Mandrake of Kleist's Herrmann's Battle, that announces to Varus his approaching demise (fifth Act, fourth scene).21 The old woman has a mysterious relation to death (one thinks also of the Rat-Wife in Little Eyolf). Everything that stands in a close relation to physical life is also related to physical death. The woman, through motherhood, has an intimate relation to earthly life, and thus also to earthly death. Fear of old women is just fear of death. Thus in the Solveig of the final Act, two things come together: Peer Gynt's pure self, which can only come into full existence with the death of the empirical ego, and the dying of that ego in its own unique way. That is why Solveig is death for Peer Gynt; that is why Peer Gynt – dies. The Button-Molder exhorts, demands, and insists; but louder yet, in the Whitsun-morning sunrise, an indescribably wonderful song rings out, the lullaby of Solveig:

Jeg skal vugge dig, jeg skal våge –

Sov og drøm du, gutten min!

I will rock you, I will guard you

Sleep and dream, my dearest boy. [V: 11]

Peer Gynt is redeemed.

21 Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) was imprisoned for six months by the French in 1807. He then turned to polemical drama, and wrote Herrmannsschlacht in 1808 as a call to arms against Napoleon. (sb)

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At the end of his life, victory goes to his invisible self after all, to the higher life of his spirit, which was only revealed to him in his love of Solveig.

It is now clear that this Peer Gynt is not a particular person, and not a particular people. Humanity itself is being chastised in this man, who thinks that he is rid of the animal in him, who boasts of his humanity without having any idea of what this ought to mean.

The ape-man, personified by the Old Man of the Dovrë [the Troll-King], complains of the injustice that he has been given up for dead.

My daughter's children, as already said,

No longer ask after old granddad.

They think that I am already dead,

Or at most live in legends they've already read. [V: 8]

The human being, for Ibsen as for all deep thinkers, consists from the outset of body and soul, or, in the formulation that the oldest dualism has been given by Kant, of phenomenal and noumenal subject, or empirical ego and intelligible ego (as the moral law-giver). Most people, however, know nothing of the existence of a soul, and deny its existence, because the great majority of them, except perhaps momentarily, live a completely soulless life. Peer Gynt is the tragedy of the person who seeks his soul, and surely, therefore, it is the poem written for the greatest number of people (if not for all).

It is soullessness that plays the biggest role in the work. Anitra represents it in the most developed form that is possible for humans. She is the coquette who arouses a man sensually without giving him an occasion for higher emotion. She does not even strive after an inner self, here; instead she is enticed like a magpie by a shining gem.22 In Peer Gynt, the man, on the other hand, there is such a striving, even if it is thoroughly misdirected. It is a seeking for self that cannot succeed, because it continually piles as much as possible on its empirical ego. From this it cannot get more than sham value, which can at any moment fall off him like the Prophet's cloak. Ibsen shows us this essence of Peer Gynt – and this is one of the most powerful effects and one of the most inspired ideas in the work – as staying continually the same through all changes, as being eternally itself. For Ibsen is permeated by the unshakeable truth that there is a constant which remains

22 Women seek souls, as they seek sexual characteristics like a beard and muscular strength, only as embodied in men and not for themselves.

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the same through all the moments of life, that the real character of a person does not change.23

In the first Act, we see how Peer Gynt tries desperately to improve his reputation by inventing tall tales. He is not concerned about respecting himself; it is merely disrespect from the others that he cannot abide. He cries out:

If only I could, with one blow, like a butcher,

Tear all the scorn and contempt from your breast! [1: 3]

However, in the moment when he shouts this out, he feels that there is something more there, beyond his words; this is a moment of enormous eeriness – despite its brevity. He peers around him, as if a disdainful dwarf had said to him that that, the admiration of others, was not all there is. This is the only moral impulse that Peer Gynt feels before he meets Solveig. In the second Act [scene 5], the ironic slogan is: “Great folk are known by the steeds that they ride.”24 For at this point Peer Gynt has renounced, in revenge, all that is better. This is the phenomenon of introspection scorned, of remorse rejected. In its place there comes a forceful return to the earthly treasures he had given up (Tannhäuser, following the judgement of the Pope). Now he compensates by joining with nature and her demons who are foreign to all morality. This absolute immorality of nature is admirably personified by the three dairymaids who wantonly flirt with Peer Gynt [11: 3]. Ibsen has created demons of nature here that are in no way inferior to the maenads and satyrs of Greek mythology.

His encounter with the green-clad Troll-Princess, which follows his adventures with the dairymaids, shows how his will to value is at the same level as hers. The slogan, “Great folk are known by the steeds that they ride”, fits them both. It reminds one of the way Goethe, in Faust, lets the devil say, about the extension of the Ego to the microcosm:

When I count six stallions as mine,

Mine, too, is the strength of six stallions.25

Peer Gynt is through and through just such a Mr. Microcosm (as Mephisto wanted him to be). However, the illusion that he could make a noble racehorse of an old boar is not only a moral but a logical illusion; it is not only fruitless from

23 Cf. Schopenhauer, New Paralipomena, §220.

25 Faust I, “Faust's Study iii”. (sb)

24 In the fourth Act, it turns out that despite the passing of years he has been faithful to this slogan.

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the start to seek to elevate one's own worth through the admiration of others – the more he attends to his empirical ego, the more indifferent he is to his intelligible ego – but it is also a complete revaluation of reality, a wilful misinterpretation of the experience which he has in common not only with the Troll-Princess but also with the Fellah in the insane asylum in Act 4. This is already preparing us for the scene in the madhouse, for unegoistic participation in the outer world, which is a thirst for knowledge that emanates from the scientific search for truth, flows from the same intelligible human essence that is so weak in Peer. That is the only way to justify seeing a fantasist as a heroic personality, and Peer Gynt should not be seen just as a caricature of the poet. All poetry is only a higher truth, not unlike religion, music, and philosophy. The illusions about the external world from which Peer suffers, are merely the objective side of his internal illusions about himself. His inadequate sense of reality is identical with his inadequate love of truth; they both flow from the identity of logic and ethics, which together culminate in the final, supreme concept of truth as the supreme good.26 That is why for Kant there is only one reason, which is theoretical and practical at the same time. Animals do without it, so in the Troll-Kingdom Peer Gynt is supposed to adopt another viewpoint; an operation must be performed on his eyes before he can see things as a Troll does. Laughing and crying, rejoicing and pain, are exclusively human, not animal. That is why the Troll-King adds, in recommending the alteration from a human to an animal:

Just think how much worry and trouble

You'll be rid of with one blow.

Remember, too, that your own clear eye

Was the source of bitter, searing tears. [II: 6]

Can it be put with less emphasis or sentimentality, yet at the same time be more wonderfully expressed, that the human being, insofar as he affirms his own humanity, accepts pain27 and renounces happiness.

Peer is so seriously blinkered, that the poet can easily put in his mouth, in answer to the Troll-King's question what distinguishes human from troll, the satirical answer: “They're exactly the same, in every way.” [II: 6] That is how ready

26 This thesis is elaborated in section I of Chapter 6, below. (sb)

27 The true and profound words of Relling, in The Wild Duck I [Act V], should be recalled here: “Take the life-lie away from the average man, and you will take his happiness from him at the same time.”

15

he is to abandon his convictions, in order to enjoy the delights of the Troll-Princess. Even so, he still retains the residue of an ego, so that even this visit to the Troll-Kingdom must pass in time. And so, he refuses to sell himself to the trolls forever. Eternity is the measure in this decision, and the flickering up of his higher self in emotion and feeling is what made it possible for him to hear the priest's bell in the valley, and to understand its peal. It is a measure of how Christian this poem is that the Trolls have to fade away at the sound of the bell.

In the third Act, however, he is again dreaming about the impression that his hoped-for palace will make on others. He had no great plans for the building on his own account; it was intended to impress others. On this point, one can compare Ibsen with Friedrich Hebbel, a man whose significance I will not question, but who is unjustly thought to rank decisively higher than Ibsen by almost everyone you would want to ask. Hebbel deals with the same problem in Gyges and his Ring, but how scantily, how one-sidedly limited to a single point. What shallowness, how little will or need for depth, Hebbel28 displays, in this investigation of a man who cannot refrain from showing off his beautiful wife to others.

This is so finely conceived by Ibsen that he often lets Peer Gynt think of himself in the third person. This is particularly so in his emperor day-dreams, e.g., in the first Act [scene 2]:

There rides Peer Gynt at the head of his henchmen,

His charger gold-shod, silver-crested his harness.

Peer carries gauntlets and sabre and scabbard,

Wears a long coat with a fine silky lining.

Splendid the men in his retinue following;

But there's not one sits his charger so proudly,

Not one that glitters like him in the sunshine.

The people in groups by the wayside are gathered,

Lifting their hats as they stare up in wonder;

The women are curtseying, everyone knows

Hebbel's significance, which is made much clearer in other writings, in Judith and Genovefa (sic), as well as in his aphoristic epigrams, is not being questioned, here. Nor are the many subtleties of Gyges and his Ring being unappreciated. Hebbel is certainly greater than Schiller, Grillparzer and Lessing together; but he remains far behind Ibsen or Wagner.

[Christian Friedrich Hebbel (1813-63), published these plays in 1841 (Judith), 1843 (Genoveva), and 1856 (Gyges). Born and educated in Germany, he moved to Vienna in 1845 and remained there the rest of his life.]

16

It is Kaiser Peer Gynt and his thousand retainers. Sixpenny pieces and glittering shillings Are strewn on the roadway as if they were pebbles.

This treatment of himself, this relating to himself in the third person, has very deep roots. Is Peer Gynt perhaps setting up a picture outside himself to be admired, and then later identifying himself with the picture in order to be pleased by this admiration of himself in effigie mentali, and to admire this picture among a series of others? One could interpret this trait as his vanity's untruthfulness; but that would be feminine, and Peer Gynt is a man. That would be a girl's dream of a nobleman who would come to hire her, to pick her ahead of all her playmates. It would be the way a woman always lies to a man, by feigning virtuousness and domesticity because his need for love or service calls for them. Peer Gynt's lack of subjectivity lies deeper than this. It comes from rejecting the freedom of the will, which amounts to the abnegation of personhood. Peer Gynt only relates functionally to something else; as soon as intelligible freedom has stopped working in him as a determining idea, he stands in the nexus of empirical causality. Thus he puts himself in bondage to other people; he needs them to observe and to applaud, so he is their slave precisely when he believes he is their emperor. Napoleon was a poseur in front of everyone he conquered. Perhaps he was sincere with himself as a younger general, at least at moments. Peer Gynt has up until now led a completely lying life; he never was himself, he has no I, and thus is third-person (a he, she or it). Now, however, he catches himself from time to time in his vices, and at the same time he suffers severely from these recurrent relapses into the basest vanity; indeed, all self-observing has a moral character. His sinful past comes up again and again, and its consequences drag him down; he does not have the strength, does not feel self-confident enough, to reject it for a better future at Solveig's side. That is why he wants to kill the past: he drives his mother in a sleigh to her death, for he must “forget what weighs him down”. His mother29 always represented morality and self-examination for him; now he withdraws, as it were, from his native soil. Here too, perhaps, lies the germ of the idea that it was only in his relation to women that he was really himself.30

29 One of most distinguished of Ibsen's portraits of women, even if handled without particular depth.

30 Here I am trying out an interpretation of the concluding scene of Act 3, which is, I feel, very daring- and I can only support it by referring to Act 5, where, in the context of this last ride, the mother appears as the accuser of the son, who has only just become conscious of his guilt. This scene from Act 3, however – the easiest one in the play when naïvely conceived – must also have a deeper meaning in such a thoroughly symbolical tragedy. Could it be this: that there now appears in Peer the egoism of the patient who is oblivious to the sufferings of others because tormented by his own? That he wishes to wreak vengeance on all other beings because no happiness with Solveig is allotted to him? I cannot quite believe this. Only the following interpretation seems to me to be possible. Ibsen, who by the time he produces his really outstanding plays is thoroughly masochistic (the best proof of this is The Vikings in Helgeland and The Master Builder), was in his youth not free of sadistic tendencies. (In many of the poems that he long withheld, and in Olaf Li1jekrans, as well as in The Feast at Solhaug, there is still a trace of sadism.) Sadistic tendencies are encountered in the Peer Gynt of Act 2 (the abduction of Ingrid) and of Act I (where he threatens Solveig). It is possible that Ibsen wanted to take this punishment upon himself. That, however, would be thoroughly inessential to the character of Peer Gynt, and thus a flaw in the poem.

17

We see him, then, in Act 4 [scene 4], sunk as low as possible. The human being is living in full community with the monkeys, which the Troll pack of Act 2 finally turned out to be (Ibsen intentionally repeats the line: “The old man was bad, the young ones are beasts”). Yes, Gyntism has become the rallying-cry of humankind in general; Peer Gynt has become a prophet. In this capacity he does everything he can – to gain the attention of a young woman, and thereby to gain something for himself. In the end, his old dream is fulfilled: he becomes an emperor. Finally, however, he notices in horror that he is in a madhouse, and is the emperor of insane and bestialized humankind.

In this scene in the insane asylum, we find the most horrible irony, the most frightful satire, that anyone has ever conceived.

Peer Gynt is in the company of the insane, one of whom thinks he is a pen who is only used as blotting paper, never used to write; another thinks he is a sheet of paper that is never written on, an unopened book in his mother's lap that proves to be misprinted when it is opened. The absolute lack of an ego, and the related total lack of an ought; a man who no longer knows who he is, and accordingly cries out for someone else to lead him to his own destiny, which he cannot find and can no longer actively achieve; the doubt that he can ever be what one is born to be – all this is expressed in the few, wild rhythms of the dialogue with the minister Hussein. [IV: 13]

It is not my intention to produce a continuous commentary on the play, in which some details are not at all transparent to me. Such undertakings are always too pretentious, apart from being lengthy, and so can only appear tasteless.

I still want to point out a few of the play's great beauties, however: besides the conclusion to Act 3, which in this respect is generally celebrated, there is also

18

the first scene of Act 2; and the extraordinary middle [scene 6] of Act 5, where Peer Gynt is forced to remember the unlived life of his higher ego (“threadballs”, “withered leaves”, etc.) in the night on the meadow: “We are songs, have you sung us?”; and then the very powerful, gripping story of the reindeer right at the beginning of the play; and Peer's monologue following the debauchery with the dairy-maids [II: 3]. More terrible, however, more deeply heart-grabbing, almost comparable in this respect to the cursing of life in the third Act of Tristan and Isolde, is the place in Act 5 [scene 10] where Peer sees the shooting star (the symbol of the fallen angels) hurrying through space, and calls out to it:

Greetings from Peer Gynt, Brother Meteor,

Shine, fade away, and disappear through the gate

Of darkness…!

Having earlier pushed aside any thought about the sense and purpose of life – for the Strange Passenger, who suggests this thought, is death – he now, after this message from infinity, suddenly shudders deep within. At last the feeling of a life lost, like the meteor, fights its way through all his vanities; he achieves the premonition (if not yet the assertion) of his true self, and at the same time of his need for immortality. The wealthy industrialist, the Emperor who has the whole world in his hands, awakens from his dream worlds, and sees:

So miserably poor may a soul return

To the dark mists of night, and turn to naught.

Beautiful earth, forgive me for having

Mindlessly trodden thy grass in vain.

Beautiful sun, thy glorious rays

Have shone upon an empty shell.

No one's within to get warmth and comfort

From thee, the owner's not in his house.

Beautiful sun, beautiful earth,

For nothing you warmed and nourished my mother.

Nature's a spendthrift, the Spirit a miser.

One's life's a big price to pay for one's birth.

I'll clamber up to the highest of mountains,

To see the sun rise once again,

And gaze till I'm tired on the promised land.

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Then the snow may fall and cover me,

And on my resting-place be writ

As epitaph: “No one lies here”.

And – after that – well, come what may. [V: 10]

(Here I have combined the best from the two translations of Passarge and Morgenstern, and have tried to improve them in a very few places where they do not catch the original.31 The line, “One's life's a big price to pay for one's birth,” is the only place in Ibsen's work where original sin is mentioned.)

Great people are generally not considered independently of their works. We believe that their life is production, and is exhausted in production. Granted, this opinion is more unconscious than clearly articulated, and is therefore all the more difficult to overcome. Some of its factors are nevertheless easy to identify.

Very few people feel a need to form a clear idea of the character either of important men of action or important men of thought. They are not only used to tipping their hats at the mention of big names, but also, as if on command, to empty themselves of all thought. “Wagner” and “Goethe” are just interjections. It is true that this way of thinking contains a respect for the phenomenon that should not be underestimated, and even a deep and ancient appreciation of genius as divine revelation. Moreover, people feel much happier than they would in that other mode of thought, which prefers to show famous men in their underwear, and triumphantly to surprise them on their way to the lavatory. This eudaimonistic argument, however, cannot serve to recommend the view. Only a commitment to verecundia will do, of the sort that Moreau de Tours and Lombroso, e.g., clearly did not possess.32

Nevertheless, this refusal to think about great men, this irritation over every attempt by someone else to make out some particular characteristic in their inner being, reflects a terrible lack of dignity, a spontaneous serfdom of the spirit, which is as blind as it is impatient about every free man. Every name becomes an “Open, Sesame”, with which all sober sight is quashed. Hero-worship33, too, is heter-

31 Ludwig Passarge's translation dates from 1881, Christian Morgenstern's from the 1890s. I have translated Weininger's version, trying, to maintain the rhythm. (sb)

32 I.e., a commitment to humility, or a capacity for shame. Cesare Lombroso (1836-1909), Italian medic and anthropologist, developed a theory of the psycho-physical causes of criminality. He also wrote about two other Weininger themes, in Genius and Insanity (1864). (sb)

33 Weininger uses the English expression. (sb)

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onomous in Kant's sense, and this belief in authority is also immoral. Whenever someone is made into a god, no matter whether he is Buddha or Beethoven, when his name becomes a password, then all calm, deliberate reflection of one's own reason is silenced, and all spiritual development is blocked off.

Recently a new element has been added to that earlier, thoughtless obsequiousness. The light-footed, dancing-legs of the Zarathustra-ideal, the relaxed grace of the South-German waltz, the student's apathetic refrain, and the armchair raving of the arts and crafts set all had to come together in order to produce and maintain this new element against all Nordic-German seriousness. I mean by this the lie about the “stylish life” of great men that has degraded those men to circus performers, has degraded those who always took life most seriously because they felt themselves taken most seriously by life, those who have found themselves the least private and happy – to “performers” of their own lives!

The audacity with which the most significant names were formerly misused in order to lend an air of genius to lightweight minds, should not detain us here for long.

We should, however, at least reject the wide-spread view which considers the outstanding person as a receptacle out of which works of art fall one by one, as a creature designed by nature to present us with certain things, like a mechanical organ, whose purpose is exhausted by playing a number of tunes.

This view turns poets into butterflies, painters into professional photographers, and philosophers into bakers of theories, and strips them all of every greatness. The strongest impressions of all, to speak only of artists, are too overwhelming to lead directly to expression in a work of art.

Certainly the life of the great person is not a harmony granted by fortune, but is much more troubled and stormy than the life of others; certainly it often contains the greatest of unresolved contradictions, inclination toward the most remarkable confusions; but it also contains the greatest struggle with himself, and simply not that “gaya scienza” and “serenita”34 that Nietzsche so much wanted to gain, once he had gotten to know the Riviera.

How horrible things can be within the most outstanding people, how much can be in them, how much they can suffer, and how much they can doubt, Ibsen's

34 “Joyful wisdom” and “serenity”. See Nietzsche's The Gay Science, which has also been translated by Oscar Levy as The Joyful Wisdom (New York: Macmillan, 1909-11). (sb)

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Peer Gynt is able to teach to anyone who has got clear that one can only understand and only portray what he, himself, has within him.

People can be divided into those who love themselves and those who hate themselves. I do not mean hatred of what they consider to be immoral in themselves. Granted every man hates that in himself, at least at the moment when he says so to himself, and even more when he wants to repress this acknowledgement. But what makes this interesting distinction come to mind in the first place is one's behaviour toward morally indifferent traits in one's own person. There are people who find their entire subjectivity (not the subject, itself, naturally) hateful, and persecute it (in abstracto, too, as a concept) with a sad fury. The others are more inclined to find everything in themselves worthy of love; they exercise leniency with themselves, show the utmost delicacy in dealing with themselves, and if occasion arises, hold themselves up as a model for others. Given two nonsmokers, to take a deliberately trivial example of the lowest category, one will be self-loving, the other self-hating.35 The former will be very pleased with himself, and consider it a very superior trait in himself, that he does not smoke. The latter will rather distrustfully conclude that his not smoking must be a defect in his disposition, and will be inclined to rank smokers above himself. Nonetheless, every man evaluates somehow or other each of his traits, even each of his morally indifferent character traits.36 The omen of this evaluation, I now believe, determines, even essentially decides, the tone of a person's inner life. To be sure, it is only the man, not the woman, who has an inner life37, and even the man has more the higher he stands. The general content of all inner life, however, if I disregard reflection on the past and dreams of the future, is discerning self-observation, and moral self-evaluation. There are only two possibilities here: either a person is a pessimist from birth and never really believes in redemption, but in eternal discord, and damnation on earth; he is the type who scolds and brutalizes people of lower standing. Or else he believes in redemption, is committed to the world as he

35 Weininger here introduces terms constructed from Greek roots, “philautisch” and “misautisch” (on the model, as it were, of “philanthropic” and “misanthropic”); I have translated them as “self-loving” and “self-hating”. (sb)

36 One thinks, too, of those people who are pleased with their own style, and those who are always displeased. Nietzsche's stylistic practices are in part to be explained on the latter basis.

37 The inner life of women always lasts at most nine months.

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affirms it, at least while on earth. He is the mild, good-natured person, who is not easily or sharply critical. He is often biting, but never caustic. They behave in that fashion in the first instance towards themselves. Suppose they both catch themselves in an equally strong or weak immoral impulse. The one screws up the corners of his mouth, the other grits his teeth. The one gives a pained smile: “Yet again!” The other murmurs, not without rancour, about his own meanness: “Always happens!” The former readily pardons himself, protects his sensitivity; he goes only once in a while to confession, which always entails absolution. The other tears himself apart, silently, mercilessly, even though his vanity is thereby increased38 (because the will to value becomes ever stronger from each negative evaluation of one's own person); he judges and convicts himself endlessly. On the whole, the one posits, the other negates; the self-loving person affirms, the self-hating denies himself and the world.39

The self-loving person is strongly and constantly erotic. One must first love or hate oneself in order to love or to hate other people. One loves and hates only that with which one has some similarity; what is totally dissimilar one can at most fear (the old woman is the woman whom the man does not understand, and only fears), just as he – the other extreme – fears that with which he perfectly agrees (the doppelgänger). The self-haters, to be sure, will always say of themselves that they could only love a person who had no similarity to them at all, and assert that love is nothing but an attempt to get away from oneself – because they cannot love at all, and nevertheless have the greatest need to love. What they resemble, however, they can only hate, and so they seek to satisfy their need to love with those whom they do not resemble, although in the nature of things this can never be successful. To love something means to lend soul to it, to project one's own soul fully into it, to heap all value upon it; for that purpose it has to be indifferent or similar, but not opposite. And yet: how could the negativist conceive a child which directly embodies positiveness in love? Just as the lower sex drive affirms, posits, life, so love is the highest form of positing. It is the affirmation of the higher, eternal life, and so it appears in the Evangelium Christi.40 He who loves, loves altogether; he who hates, hates altogether; he who affirms, affirms alto-

38 That is why he is the genuine aphorist.

39 This does not prevent the self-hating person from having the greatest need to affirm.

40 I.e. the gospel of Christ, the first four books of the New Testament. (sb)

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gether; he who denies, denies altogether. This is not to be understood as if denial were for the self-hater more than a transit point to affirmation. There are no great men who have not in the end affirmed. This is also the ultimate reason – the introductory remark notwithstanding – why there is no genius who is not productive. Off-spring are also produced by the love and affirmation of ideas, in which Plato and Schopenhauer most profoundly recognized the essence of genius. For the self-hating type, negation is never an end-in-itself, but just a means41 to loving that, and only that, which is truly worthy of love. But he is not able to affirm anything except the eternal. He cannot love an actual woman, and as often as he makes an attempt, i.e., to love, to confirm a passion, he always quickly falls out of it; he cannot love.

For that reason, only the self-loving man is also really, strictly speaking, a father. He has the need for a physical child, for he wants to rediscover himself in the child, with all of his characteristics, including his subjecthood, his outer and inner appearances. The extreme self-hater does not have any genuine, warm, heartfelt relation even to his intellectual creations. For fatherhood can extend itself to the intellectual. Indeed, the teacher is actually of the father type; like him he disseminates and promotes sameness, but in the intellect rather than in the purely physical. I will come back later to the idea that a man only loves himself in a woman, but even his child is only his child insofar as it is himself.42 Naturally, the fatherhood I have analyzed here, and whose relationship to love I have established, is one which satisfies a permanent mental need, and has to mean more than mere accidental “paternité”.

It is possible, however, to go a step further and deeper into this matter. Remember the role that the idea of fatherhood plays in the New Testament. God as the father of humankind. That is not how the Jews experienced their God. For them he was the Lord, and they were his servants, whom he rebuked or rewarded, each according to his service. In the gospels, the new idea stands in intimate relation to those other two Christian, un-Jewish, ideas, of love and eternal life, and with this the offered interpretation of fatherhood gets a new affirmation. “I am the bread of life”, said the godhead of the Gospel of John (6: 35). Jesus Christ, how-

41 The self-loving person loves, and the self-hating hates, his empirical ego; both love their intelligible ego. The intelligible being hates only the criminal.

42 If he loves the child because it resembles its mother, he still is loving himself, too; in general this only really happens when the mother has died early.

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ever, was not one of those who love themselves and their subjectivity. In the Gospel of Luke (14: 26), it is said: “If any man come to me and hate not his father, and mother, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own self43 also, he cannot be my disciple.” Surely no man has ever felt himself to be so little a father as the founder of Christianity; perhaps that is exactly why as the son he had need of divinity in the particular form of the loving father. Nor is Jesus a teacher by calling, as for instance Socrates eminently was. “Who hath ears to hear, let him hear!” “Hear the Word, who will hear” – no teacher speaks like that.44 One sees how fatherhood, teacherhood, and self-love are always present or absent together.

He who feels like a son can only hate himself; the Son was driven to become a son, to let himself be conceived, to come into existence as an empirically limited subject. All this subjecthood he attributed to himself, and therefore hated himself. The son knew himself as eternally unfree, and so he gave up his own will, and looked for support when he was born into this world.

Thus the types of the self-loving man and the self-hating man encompass the ideas of father and son. That there are fathers and there are sons is in the deepest sense just an expression of the dualism in the substance of the world. As spiritual beings people are the sons of God, just as they are earthly beings as the children of parents: strictly speaking, of course, only the men. For God has no daughters, and only to that extent does the notion of being a child of God require correction. The Son can only resurrect his freedom by ascending to the Father, ceasing to be merely a son, and becoming one with the father again.

*

The self-loving person can also hate; namely, he hates whatever disturbs his life … he is the “aesthete”. The self-hating person, on the other hand, cannot love no matter what. In extreme cases, even sexual intercourse is fully impossible for him. He is thus certainly much unhappier than the other. Shakespeare and Sophocles (particularly the former) belong, in the highest degree, to the self-loving type, which gives an essentially tender form to their castigations – this is likewise a condition of writing an autobiography. Goethe is not purely self-loving – many passages in Faust attest to how false it would be to classify him without further

43 The Greek word is “yuc»n” (™ti d™ t¾n ˜autoà yuc»n). Luther incorrectly translates this as “life”.

44 See verses 9 and 43 in Matthew 13, as well as similar texts in other gospels. (sb)

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qualifications in this type.45 One is altogether deceived if he supposes Goethe to be a harmonious person, as he has been commonly said to be since Heine, and as is repeated ad nauseam today. Rather, Goethe was one of the unhappiest people there has ever been, and thus more modest and more rigorous than so many others in concealing his unhappiness. – The person who hated himself the most had to be Nietzsche. His hatred of Wagner and of asceticism, and his wish to switch allegiance to Bizet and Gottfried Keller, was merely a hatred of the Wagnerian, the ascetic and totally non-idyllic person that he was himself. Self-hate is certainly morally superior to self-love. Thus the insincerity is bad, with which Nietzsche pretended to have achieved the transition (the “recovery” from Wagner, from his “illness”) – this is not the only pose which Nietzsche affected in front of himself and everyone else.46 Pascal, who certainly hated himself terribly, ranks high above Nietzsche in this – moreover, he is never as superficial as Nietzsche can sometimes be. While Pascal was able openly to declare as a fundamental principle, “le moi est haïsable”,47 (Pensées I, 9, 24), Nietzsche even denied this, his own hatred of himself, and – he hated himself so – slandered it and disparaged it – of course only as a characteristic of Pascal. There is only one passage where Zarathustra is sincere about this: in the glorious song, which is absolutely to be understood as an ethical symbol, “Before Sunrise” (in Part III): “O, heaven above me, pure… What I want with all my will is to fly, to fly up into you! And whom did I hate more than drifting clouds and all that stains you? And I hated even my own hatred because it stained you. I loathe the drifting clouds, those stealthy great cats which prey on what you and I have in common – the uncaring, unbounded Yes and Amen.”48

It was precisely in Nietzsche that hatred of oneself sprang from the most intense will to affirm. That is why in him this hatred could become creative and

45 Only haters are really great connoisseurs of women, because they are readier to make distasteful confessions in such matters. Shakespeare, Sophocles, Zola and Goethe believe in the “noble” woman, they want to believe in her. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Strindberg, Hebbel, Michelangelo are different.

46 In the Nuova Antologia there once appeared a report on a visit which someone made to Nietzsche's apartment and landlords in Turin. This person reported how Nietzsche, at the same time as he was writing The Case of Wagner, kept coming back to their daughter, a skilful pianist, and again and again demanded to hear only the Ring of the Nibelung.

47 The self is hateful. (sb)

48 Thus Spake Zarathustra: a book for all and none, tr. Walter Kaufmann (London: Penguin Books, 1978) III: 4, pp. 164-65. (sb)

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tragic. Creative – because it called him to seek for what he missed in Schopenhauer, and it forced him to turn away from him who had not taught him Kant. Tragic – because he was not great enough to struggle independently, with his own pure strength, through to Kant, whom he had never read. That is why he never arrived at religion; when he affirmed life most passionately, life denied him – that is, the life which resists untruthfulness. Nietzsche's decline is to be explained by his lack of religion. A person can perish from nothing other than a lack of religion. The genius shows this most horribly, for the man of genius is the most devoted man, and when devotion leaves him, his genius has left him. It was not without deep reason that the “unscrupulousness of the mind” became a problem for Nietzsche; the “unscrupulousness of the mind” is the “clever” man, and the “clever” man was the fate that menaced Nietzsche, and the abyss that finally dragged him down. Would he otherwise have considered it necessary to stress explicitly when he meant something seriously, and really wanted to be taken seriously? What Nietzsche lacked was mercy, but without mercy, loneliness, even Zarathustra's, is not bearable. Thus logic was not a uniquely valuable good for him, but an external constraint (for he felt too weak not to scent danger everywhere). However, he who negates logic has already been abandoned by it, he is on the road to insanity.

Spinoza, otherwise the complete opposite of Nietzsche, was a hater of himself just like Nietzsche. In him, however, it was not a hate that somehow became creative or tragic. Not creative – for no one has so little understood the problem of free will, to which the superior person is led by his hatred of himself; no one has dismissed this whole problem as rudely and intolerantly as he (Ethics, I: 32; II: 35, 48; III: 2). Not tragic – for Spinoza's worldview was not a courageous, open faith, but a system of protective measures, which he strung around himself like barbed wire, and behind which he sheltered a cowardly need for calm.

Women appear to be quite incapable of hatred of themselves. They do not, however, love themselves; they are merely, but always, in love with themselves. When a child resembles her, the mother has nothing like the joy that a father feels in the other case.

49 David Hume accepted this point, too, but ascribed it to the mother's not needing the same kind of evidence that the child was indeed hers. Cf. Steven Burns, “The Humean Female”, Dialogue, 1976. (sb)

27

Michelangelo and Beethoven were men who resolutely hated themselves, and who, certainly no less than Pascal and Nietzsche, lived perfectly chastely – Beethoven with an almost as great, and just as unsatisfied, need to find the woman whom he could love, as Nietzsche. On the other hand, Mozart always loved himself, as did Jean Paul50 and Richard Wagner for the most part. A sense of humour is a sign of love, and satire a sign of hatred, of oneself and in general – for a sense of humour is itself merely a well-disguised eroticism. Of philosophers who loved themselves I shall name Socrates (the teacher) and Fechner, Leibniz a little less and Plato less again; of artists who belong to the self-hating type, Grillparzer and Rembrandt.

With a man like Kant, however, this division entirely fails, no matter how widely it may otherwise find application; surely there is no way that a person like that, who lacks all subjectivity, can be either loved or hated.

There may also be both in the same person: complaisance and forbearance, as well as envy and intolerance of one's moral indifference. This will even be the rule.

Self-haters are the greatest self-observers. All self-observation is a haters' phenomenon; their motto is: “catch you by surprise”. They are the least solemn of people because they are the most ashamed; they are generally highly perceptive of false solemnity. Even simple speech is impossible for them, because they are perpetually suffering because of their whole ego, and would have to deny this suffering when they had to be solemn. As a result, the self-hating person tolerates loneliness with infinitely more difficulty than the self-loving; and yet no attempts at joining the company of others are as unlucky as his, for he suffers from the most terrible fate that a good person can meet: being unable really to love another person. Their essence, that is, can never flow freely, cannot overflow into another whom they wish to love, who loves them! That is how terrible their ego always is for them. They are like a house with the shutters eternally closed; the sunlight would like to shine on this house, too, and warm it up, but the house does not open. Seemingly gloomy, hard, repellent and bitter, it refuses the light, it is terrified by happiness. What does it look like inside the house? There is a wild and despairing activity in there, a slow and timid seeing in the dark, an endless rear-

50 Jean Paul is the pen name of Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763-1825), a celebrated and prolific German humanist and man of letters. (sb)

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ranging of things – within. One dare not ask them what it looks like inside the house.

A man who has written Peer Gynt can only be a self-hater. At first, Ibsen himself51 certainly thought of the poem as a tragedy of vanity (in the most general sense, cf., Solomon), and only gradually did it become clear to him that all vanity in front of others, all primary respect for others, has as a condition the giving up of one's own self and one's own self-worth.

However, the long digression from which I have now returned to Peer Gynt, and to whose justification in principle my opening observations about the elevated moral inner life of great men also contributed, was necessary to help us to understand one of the author's creations which I have not yet mentioned. Although it, in the whole of the much-interpreted Peer Gynt, has given us the most to puzzle over, none of the interpretations has even satisfied the interpreters themselves. “The great Boyg”, the most puzzling and at the same time most original figure in the work52, now becomes as clear as its peculiar nature will allow it to be. The “great Boyg” plays the most important role in the second and fifth Acts53; it is well worth observing, that both times it is conquered through Solveig. It is the power that again and again leaves a person unfaithful to himself, and shows him to be vain. Indeed, whenever he has mercilessly stirred himself up and chastised himself it still lets him become aware of the vanity, not displaced, not disabled, but unchanged in the furthest corners of his inner self, in the same place and with the same assets:

Here and back – it's ever so wide!

Outside and inside – ever so broad!

There he is! There! Around where I'm pointing!

When I get outside, still I'm surrounded! [II: 7]

51 The most un-solemn person there has even been.

52 Perhaps the falcon, in the very overrated Brand, means something similar to the Boyg of Peer Gynt. [“Böyg” is now a common Norwegian term for obstacle, something one has to go around. The German homonym, Beug, = bend / turn. “Die Krumme”, as it is called in the German version used by Weininger, = curve / twist – as, e.g., curved with age. Allan Janik uses the vivid phrase, “The Great Crooked Thing” (Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited, p. 190). It is also called “the Boyg” because the human, in battling it, has to move in a circle, and finds himself against his will shifted back to his starting point.]

53 In Act II, scene 7. The Boyg does not reappear as such (i.e., as a Voice, which is how it appears in Act II), but it is invoked in IV: 11, and the Button-Molder of Act V, scenes 7-11, who blocks Peer's path again and again, and who could also be said to be conquered by Solveig, is identified with the Boyg by Peer just before he hears Solveig singing (scene 11). (sb)

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As a child I heard a school teacher tell the class that I found myself in, the following story about the method by which one kills bears in Russia: a block of wood is suspended between two tree trunks; in order to pass between them the bear has to shove the beam aside. Now the beam swings back and hits him ever harder in the head, which so enrages the bear that he repeats the same thing until a powerful shove smashes his skull. Ibsen could also have used this story as a parable for what he wanted to express. The “great Boyg” is the whole force of the empirical ego, with which it raises itself again and again against the intelligible ego, although it still supposes that it has fully and definitively vanquished it; and at the same time it is the voice with which it advises the others, after constantly repeated relapses, to give up the hopeless, senseless struggle. Hence the selfconfident irony with which the Boyg meets Peer Gynt's boisterous assault, tells him to walk around him, urges him to put up with him, to move on and let him be, instead of wanting to take the invincible fortress by storm. The Boyg is the redemption-negating principle in general; in him Ibsen tried to grasp the great negater in himself. One may call him comfort, or indolence, the tie between the soul and the body (he conquers without striking a blow, and gradually); in any case he is that which Ibsen wanted to break in himself, as he established this Peer Gynt, his Peer Gynt. He himself, however, felt that we will not be finished with him before death.

We thus find ourselves brought back once again to the sense of the whole work, to the answer that Ibsen had for his question. In this concluding scene of Peer Gynt one can find the two main problems of his thought and work running together. On one hand the problem: truth – lie. On the other hand, no matter how well-grounded and satisfying the meaning that I have given to the Boyg appears to me to be, he represents yet another idea. The symbols of the true artist are not allegories, to be translated back into personifications of sharply defined, unambiguous philosophical concepts bearing proper names, and in the language of a particular philosophical system, just as soon as the key to the code is discovered. What the poet immediately saw and felt in his symbols, the philosopher is only able to discover slowly and with much forethought. The Boyg, which Peer Gynt never broke through in his lifetime, because he never went straight ahead – this twist is at the same time the lie.

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In this life, the human being cannot live in complete truth; Ibsen used the Boyg to indicate that something – this residue of lies, error, cowardice and impenitence – always cuts him off from it.54 A full view of truth is possible in the other life, but in this life it can only be aspired to; the Boyg can only be conquered in death. Thus, what is expressed in this aspect of the Boyg is just another differentiation of the same idea that salvation is delayed. Here, Peer Gynt ranks incomparably higher than Hjalmar Ekdal in The Wild Duck, who is complacent about lying; Hjalmar actually feels the demand for truth to be a personal insult, a demand that is placed on him from the outside, and when it is forced on him only outwardly accepts it in order to continue living in the lie undisturbed. He poses as unlucky, and experiences the little nuisances of his little life as an injustice of fate towards his person, which, indeed, he blames on others. Hjalmar is the absolutely un-tragic person; Peer Gynt is not that at all. On the contrary, the whole drama is almost completely filled up with the problem of the subject; its hero himself is mostly concerned with this cardinal question. Peer Gynt, therefore, conforms more completely than any other work in world literature to the idea, which is contained in the very concept of tragedy, of the seeking and struggling, erring and failing individuality that attains consciousness of guilt, and struggles for salvation.

Peer Gynt wants to get away from the lying which is indissolubly connected to life – no one is so holy that he has not seen himself forced over and over again into a white lie, and the white lie is as morally inexcusable as any other – Peer Gynt wants to get away from the life-lie, and he cannot. Redemption, in spite of the Boyg, is brought about in the end by a female. And here lies Ibsen's second main problem: the problem of redemption with respect to male and female. How does the matter of the woman, and the love for a woman, stand in regard to the problem of humanity in general? That is the question with which Ibsen was almost constantly engaged for the last thirty years of his creative life. It is not the simple woman-question in its popular form, about having the same capacities and the same political rights, that Ibsen has at heart; he was never an advocate for the individual woman or for the collectivity of living women. The contempt for Ibsen that is becoming ever more fashionable is psychologically understandable, to be sure – one involuntarily finds that when women call attention to their alleged de-

54 That is why the Sphinx, which is both woman and lion, and yet is neither, reminds us of the Boyg.

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fender, the defender, himself, is a little compromised – but it is wholly unjustified, and evidence of drawing a parallel much too hastily.

When women claim the poet for themselves, this should not be held against them; he is through and through too masculine for them to stand in a true relation to his work, and to be able to grasp his true intention. Ibsen demanded for women not so much the same rights as the same duties – and duty is an absolutely unfeminine concept.

In Peer Gynt the man is drawn aloft by the woman, or rather, he lets himself rise aloft. Nothing is so ridiculous and so vulgar as the view that the mere passivity of being loved could have any influence on the moral destiny of an individual, could affect his final evaluation as good or evil. Someone who has loved much may be forgiven, but never someone just because he has been loved, no matter how much. Nevertheless, these superficialities are so current in the official Ibsen and Wagner interpretations that one unfortunately cannot pass over them in silence. They completely block the understanding of redemption through love, and the logical mystery becomes paradoxical sentimentality. It is humiliating enough not to be able to contrast the deep conception of the erotic which Ibsen reveals in Peer Gynt, with anything more than this current interpretation. Even though Ibsen is still uncommonly brief and obscure in Peer Gynt, there nevertheless shines forth even here the view that he brought out more powerfully in his later works. In Peer Gynt, love, and the possibility of redemption through it, consists precisely in this: that the man projects onto the woman his better self, all that he wants to love and cannot love in himself because there it is contaminated – and through this division, he attains more easily a willing, striving relationship with the idea of the beautiful, and the good and the true.55 That is the deep psychological ground for that act of masculine egoism which puts a much higher moral demand on the woman than on the man – moral, naturally, only in external appearance, as satisfaction of the need for illusion – the deep root of the postulate of purity, of virginity, for the woman. A projection phenomenon similar to the one for love, applies to hatred; the devil is the inspired objectification of a thought that has given relief to millions of people in their struggle with the evil in their own breasts. They set the devil outside themselves, and thereby both distinguish themselves and sepa-

55 It cannot be denied, however, that this idea that Solveig is only there for, and because of, Peer Gynt is not expressed with full clarity in the play.

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rate themselves from him.56 A metaphysical act of projection is accordingly the general root of all the dualism in the world: God wants to find himself in human being. Dualism must obtain, or else monism, and the striving after it, is senseless, an empty word.

In Peer Gynt, the only role the woman plays is the redeemer of the man; she has no independent life, other than the function bestowed on her by the man. She is de-souled in order to gain a soul, murdered in order to gain life. Herein lies the explanation, which so many since Novalis have sought, for why sexuality is associated with cruelty.57 There is an element in coitus that is psychologically analogous to murder, because the begetting of life is related to its destruction. Similarly there is in each love, even the highest, a peculiar decreation of the person loved, in order to substitute for him or her the lover's own highest reality. Here, too, lies the root of the jealousy, in which a man always thinks that he has a right of possession over himself, even if he has localized his self in a woman.58 That is why Constant is right when he calls love, which seems to represent the feeling of altruism itself, “de tous les sentiments le plus égoïste”.59 Love means: the man wants to rediscover himself indirectly through the woman. That is why love so often begins with castigations, self-reproaches, and self-humiliation, and enlivens the guilty conscience. The woman is thus only a means to an end, in the highest as well as the lowest eroticism.

This injustice, that the loving man perpetrates on the woman, was already felt by Ibsen in Peer Gynt; certainly he criticizes there the sensual form of love, in order to contrast it with the spiritual, and he is ironic above all about the soulless Peer, who still thinks he can bestow a soul on his girlfriend, Anitra.

Give me youth! I mean to rule Like a sultan, hot and hearty – Not the banks of Gyntiana

56 This gives a new psychological twist to Ludwig Feuerbach's notion (in The Essence of Christianity, 1841) of projecting some of one's own characteristics onto another being. (sb)

57 Novalis (Friedrich Leopold, Freiherr von Hardenberg) (1772-1801), German poet and novelist. In Hymns to the Night, for instance, he wrote of love cut off by early death. (sb)

58 Women do not suffer from jealousy, they are just envious or vindictive, for they have no self that they might seek to affirm in someone else.

59 The most egoistic of all the emotions. (sb)

[Benjamin Constant (1767-1830), born Swiss, became engaged in anti-Napoleonic politics and literature in Paris. His relationship with Mme. de Staël is reflected in the romantic novel, Adolphe (1816), which portrays the psychological complexity of love and egoism.]

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With its palm trees and its vines, But the inner realm of thoughts That dwells within a maiden pure! Don't you now see why, my child, I've graciously bestowed my love On you, and chose your heart to be The place where, so to speak, I've grounded My own nature's Caliphate? I alone shall know your longings, I'm all powerful in my realm! You are mine and mine alone. Peer with all his mind and might Is more to you than gold and gems. If we part, then life is over – Life for you, at any rate! For all your “you” is given to me, Devotedly, without a will, To be fulfilled by my own “I”. [IV: 7]

All relationship of man to woman, however, is expropriation, deprival of rights, insofar as it is erotic. That became clear to Ibsen later, the first step in this direction is taken in A Doll's House. People made use of Nora for the woman's right to vote, and Ibsen, who during his lifetime tried to lie to himself less about women than any other artist before or since, was branded as the typical champion of the doctrine of equality and as the creator of Hedda Gabler, the living woman whom he appraised (according to her actual qualities) just as highly as the man. However, exactly therein lies the whole moral greatness of Ibsen, and his pure heroism. He demanded of the man that he respect the woman as an independent human being, and honour the idea of humanity in the person of the woman as well, and not, as in every erotic relationship, merely use her as a means to an end. He demanded this even though reality, when cleared of the steam clouds of eroticism, makes respect for the woman – which the woman in reality certainly never asked the man for – so much more difficult.

His Nora is also not a real person, and the famous transformation from the childish, lying sweet-toothed chatterbox to the person with free will, is not a de-

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ducible character trait of any actual woman; it is just the mystery of conversion, which appeared to Ibsen, on general moral grounds, to be necessary for women. In Nora, Ibsen honours the first female individuality, he shows how a woman ought to behave, not how she really behaves. The alteration in Nora is just a miracle, thoroughly incomprehensible from what went before; and no one misunderstands this play more fundamentally than the person who seeks to mediate the changeover, and to motivate it through the Nora of the first Act. The Nora-problem comes back again in The Lady from the Sea, who in the end is able to choose in freedom, and thereby frees herself from external, material constraints, but at the same time takes upon herself responsibility and thus duty. Rosmersholm marks the second peak, after Peer Gynt, in the development of Ibsen's thought about these problems. For a second time he returned to the problem of redemption in its relation to the problem of sexual love. Here, however, the matter is very much differently situated than in Peer Gynt. Above all, the rebirth is experienced by the woman, under the influence of the man. The once thoroughly immoral Rebecca, says that Rosmersholm, which is symbolically the citadel of pure moral strength, the place of moral goodness, has broken her, has subdued her wild instincts. However, she, too, had on the whole worked a refining, purifying influence on Rosmer, towards the liberation of his pure self, and her new guilty conscience is almost more intense than Rosmer's remorse over his unconscious encouragement of her actions against Beata. So the work ends with the question: “But first tell me this, do you go with me, or do I go with you?” And the answer that Ibsen gives is: “We will not in all eternity get to the bottom of that question.”

However, Ibsen did not remain standing on this second level, either. The problem of guilt from Rosmersholm is taken up anew in Little Eyolf. The subject here, however, is not a Beata, not a former wife, as in Rosmersholm, but – and this is a different, deeper thought – a child who has been murdered. The whole play is to be understood as an allegory: nothing eternal can grow from sinful eroticism; murder, the murder of the child, is already contained in it. Coitus, which begets life, also begets death, into which what originates in sin necessarily sinks back. The immorality of procreating in pleasure, the interrelation between death and birth, the parents' offence against the child, whom they have casually brought into the world without first conceiving him as a person, this is the sin that hangs over the marriage of Alfred and Rita, which represents human marriage in gen-

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eral. (Eyolf's crippling accident happens at the same time as his parents are enjoying the most impetuous passion.)

Rita interprets the guilty conscience to which she finally awakes, as wholly Alfred's doing; yet he, too, in the end, is kept from growing callous by her sincere repentance. They work together from then on towards the goal of production, of labour as the offspring of pure love.

The whole problem of the rebirth of man and woman, appears for the last time in the “dramatic epilogue”, When we Dead Awaken. Ibsen called it the last word that he had to say on the question, and a man of nearly seventy-two years must have known why he called it that. We are confronted here, therefore, with the culminating point of the third phase of his thought, the definitive conclusion of the task that was his life's work. Here, too, we find the trinity of man, woman and child. However, it is now often declared that the man, in loving her, kills the woman as an independent metaphysical entity, as a soul, because the woman is just a tool of this love, with which he achieves a lighter work-load for himself. This murder, which all love commits, has to be avenged itself, the loving murderer's fear is called jealousy, and his regret is that puzzling, guilty conscience that each man feels toward the woman he loves. There is fear and guilt, however, only because of injustice committed independently of the person. For Rubek, the sculptor, the feeling that he has committed a murder is a dark and gloomy burden, and that is why he portrays himself in stone as a guilt-laden man, trying to cleanse himself in the fountain of sin.60 In general, however, one negates and one murders oneself at the same time, through doing it to others. Rubek had blocked the source of higher life in himself through killing the soul in Irene. Now he, himself, has to awaken to higher life. The meaning of this is the same as the deeper significance (scarcely understood by its compilers) of the beautiful legend of poor Heinrich: the man can be cured of evil (of his serious leprosy) through love, but for this a woman must sacrifice herself.61 However, it is first the knight's refusal to take the woman's life that is the moral act which really, uniquely, saves him. So Rubek should no longer want a woman for himself (as Lyngstrand does in The Lady from the Sea), but want her as a human being, as an end-in-herself; and the woman

60 Viz., in his masterpiece, “The Resurrection”, introduced in Act I of When we Dead Awaken as “figured in the likeness of a young woman, awakening from the sleep of death”. We learn in Act II that Rubek later enlarged the sculpture, adding other figures, including his own likeness. (sb)

61 Armer Heinrich is a mediaeval legend, set to verse by Hartmann von Aue (1165-1220). (sb)

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should no longer want a man merely to produce children with her, the woman should no longer treat herself, as in the past, as a means to an end. A bodily child is no longer the point. That can be produced by Ulfheim and Maja, people from the lower, earthly sphere, who do not risk going up the path that leads “through night in the mountains”, and in “the stormy winds of the summits” [Act 3], to the sunrise of the higher, eternal life, because this path can cost their earthly lives. They have never felt already dead, in order to have to wake anew.

Thus, after long doubt, Ibsen believed in the end in the resurrection of the woman, in a higher life of man and woman together, removed from the lower sphere, in the sacrament of marriage as a metaphysical symbol of an unio mystica62. The woman is no longer for him a paradox of nature imposed on the man, so that he takes her with him against her own will. It is true, this was always for him the greatest danger, but still not a permanent barrier to striving after the ideal of higher humanity. To be sure, according to Ibsen, even the most sublime eroticism of the artists has so far always been egoistic; nonetheless, man and woman can both posit themselves as individuals. Thus, and only thus, is an ideal union of the two possible. That is the meaning of When we Dead Awaken.

We find a remarkable analogue of Ibsen's course of development in this question, taken by a man whose being compared to Ibsen could appear to many to require an apology, namely Richard Wagner. If one takes into consideration to begin with just the young Wagner, there is no non-Wagner work that is more Wagnerian than Peer Gynt, ending as it does just like The Flying Dutchman and Tannhäuser, with the mystery of redemption through a woman. In Dutchman and Tannhäuser Wagner, like the young Ibsen in Peer Gynt, believed in the redemption of the man through a woman, in redemption of human longing and suffering through his love for this woman.

The Nibelung saga in its Nordic and mythical form enticed both Ibsen and Wagner to interpret it in their own way (Ibsen's The Vikings in Helgeland, also known as The Nordic Expedition). Meanwhile, Hebbel, much more a seeker than Wagner and even than Ibsen, and who did not possess a very deep relationship to nature, preferred the civilized South-German version.63 Wagner's Ring of the Ni-

62 Mystical union. (sb)

63 On the whole, Ibsen as a character stands in the middle between Hebbel and Wagner, between Fichte and Schopenhauer. In addition, he is in many ways more like Kant than is any other historical person. [Hebbel published his tragedy trilogy, The Nibelungs, in 1862.]

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belung corresponds, rather as Rosmersholm does for Ibsen, to the same middle phase in their thought. Brünnhilde is indeed awakened by Siegfried from a sleep that symbolizes death in a metaphysical sense; but even Siegfried, in his wedding with the “holy bride”, only celebrates in dying his union with the universe. This indicates, so to speak, the cosmic encounter of the male and female principles in the universe. That Brünnhilde also calls herself Siegfried's mother, reminds us of Peer Gynt and the identification at the very end of Solveig with Aase.64 She represents the immortality of the species, with which Siegfried the individual, as “an awaker of life”, enters into union.65 In Ibsen, too, this identification of mother and lover is not just a thoughtless, reconciliation-effect right before death, but is an indication of what mother and lover always have in common. Surely the loving young woman very often (if not always) stands in a certain motherly relationship to the man who loves her, and the man from whom she can acquire a child, is himself, in a certain sense, already her child. On the other side, the loving man himself becomes a child to this young woman, and can address her as a mother. It is precisely the spirit of the immortal species that Peer encounters in Solveig before his death. Ibsen's idea here bears a remarkable resemblance to Schopenhauer's about the indestructibility of our essential being, which is merely the species' will to live. Later, Ibsen overcame this worldview, which denies the logic of the individual human life, and never returned to it. At the end of Peer Gynt, however, to the detriment of the play, it shines through a little. As representatives of the eternal life of the species, that they have only to pass on, the mothers appear to be endowed with a symbolic consecration that lends a deep justification to the childlike feelings of the man towards Brünnhilde and to Solveig. With regard to this question, Wagner's Tristan, who is pessimistic and seeks not to get through life but to get out of life and up to a higher life, does not come into consideration.

The combining of the two functions of women, mother and lover, in one person, also calls to mind the double nature of Kundry in Wagner's Parsifal. This work is the result of a revision that Wagner undertook of the views of his youth and early manhood, and it is his final word on many things, including the same problem that Ibsen dealt with for the last time in his “epilogue”. This final word, however, is different from Ibsen's; the emendation that Wagner makes to his ear-

64 Aase is Peer's mother. (sb)

65 “Eternal was I, eternally in sweet, longing rapture”, etc., (Siegfried, Act 3).

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lier work is a far more radical reversal of his earlier view than occurred with Ibsen. In Parsifal the woman might at best have been redeemed by the man. But she does not want this redemption, she resists it. Thus, for Wagner, the woman no longer has a place in the kingdom of God; Kundry dies on the threshold. The woman can no longer exist as woman, after she has seen the Grail. It is shocking to see how the same Wagner who once sang praises to Elizabeth has re-oriented himself to the woman; that could not have been accomplished without deep pain. He now negates the woman by affirming the complete chastity of the man. She is thus robbed of her function, and has become purposeless in the world; she must die. The man's transgression against the woman, which is contained in all eroticism, was much more deeply understood by Ibsen than by Wagner, and more intensely regretted. The motive of a man sinning against himself, which is contained in sexuality as his wishing, to be able to forget himself completely in the arms of a woman, is stressed by Wagner as early as Tannhäuser, while Ibsen put very little stress on it. This weak emphasis on the demand for asceticism66 in the man, may simply be grounded in the fact that Ibsen, in life and in art, has a much less sensual nature than Wagner, and certainly all his life maintained more proper personal relations with women than Wagner did. However, the question whether the deeper erotic guilt of the male, which had distressed Ibsen more powerfully than nearly anyone before him, and which certainly no one had thought about more than he – whether this male guilt did not let Ibsen hope too much for a female in an imaginary future who would no longer be misused and despised, whether indeed the whole meaning of the woman in the universe (as is doubtless the intention of every actual woman), is to give the man an opportunity to become guilty, whether she may not embody the object in-itself in which, always and for ever, only a subject will be able to attain consciousness of its self, would require answers that far exceed the limits of this essay. It has already gone far beyond the impressionistic and technical criticism that is so generally common today, in order to acquire a higher point-of-view. The aim of this essay, to be sure, has always been to bring Ibsen's Peer Gynt, his greatest and therefore least understood work,

66 This is why asceticism, for Ibsen, is more a matter to be taken for granted (as the man's sexual continence). The usual interpretation of the “epilogue” as the pain of a man in his seventies at missing the Mount of Venus, I shall only mention and not reject.

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closer to a wider circle of people.67 It could meet with no higher honour than to be called a critique that is not unworthy of the work of art itself.

J. J. Bachofen (in Das Mutterrecht, Stuttgart, 1901, p. XXVII) says about the idea of human fatherhood, in contrast to the preponderant consideration given to the bond between mother and child: “If the bond between mother and child rests on a material relationship, if it is perceivable by the senses and is a fact of nature, then biological fatherhood has a thoroughly opposite character in every respect. Since it has no visible relation to the child, it cannot even in a matrimonial relationship cast off its purely fictional nature. Since the father is related to the birth only through the mediation of the mother, he always appears as the power from afar. At the same time, fatherhood carries in its essence as the original cause an immaterial quality, in contrast to which the mother who protects and nourishes presents herself as Þlh [matter], as cèra [space] and dexamšnV genšsewj [receptacle of generation], as tiq»nh [nurse; all of these terms are found in Plato's Timaeus, 49 ff.]. All these characteristics of fatherhood lead to the conclusion that the freeing of the mind from the phenomena of nature is found in emphasizing paternity, that an elevation of human existence above the laws of material life is found in paternity's victorious accomplishment. If the principle of motherhood is common to all spheres of earthly creation, then the man, through the superiority that he grants to his procreative power, steps out of that bond and becomes conscious of his higher vocation. Mental existence raises itself above physical existence, and the connection with the lower spheres of creation is now confined to the latter. Motherhood belongs to the bodily side of the human being, and this will remain our only connection with the other animals; the fatherly-intellectual principle belongs to us alone… Victorious fatherhood will be just as decisively connected to the heavenly light, as child-bearing motherhood is to the all-bearing earth.”

67Unfortunately, in the course of his life Ibsen stopped wanting the same greatness that he did at the time he was writing Peer Gynt. Emperor and Galilean marks the stretch of his life in which he tackled one of the most tremendous problems, but with only weak remnants of the will to solve it. If Ibsen had remained the Ibsen of Peer Gynt, he would have become greater than Goethe; for a person can do everything he wills. The most outstanding play of the later period, Rosmersholm, is weak compared to Peer Gynt; and Ibsen's will sinks further after Rosmersholm

[Bachofen's Das Mutterrecht first appeared in 1861, and introduced the idea that matriarchal social organization had preceded the patriarchal. An English translation by Ralph Mannheim was published in 1967 (Myth, Religion, and Mother Right: selected writings of J.J. Bachofen, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; and Princeton: Princeton University Press). Here, I have translated the slightly altered version that Weininger cites. The passage can be found on pp. 109-10 in Mannheim's version.]

Footnotes

1. 魏宁格在此嘲讽大众对艺术家的评价本质上是一种自恋式的情感投射。 ↩

2. 「meublements」是法语中「家具/陈设」的意思，与前文的「furnishings」对应，在此故意混用法语词讽刺意味更加明显。 ↩

3. The reference is to Georg Brandes, who wrote Main Currents of 19th-Century Literature. See the Weininger and Ibsen chapter in Allan Janik, Wittgenstein's Vienna Revisited (Full bibliographical details will normally be given in the Bibliography) (sb) ↩

4. I.e., his speech beginning: “How good to hear the sound of shovels! / The mass of workers serve my pleasure…” Goethe, Faust, Part 11, Act V, scene 5. (sb) ↩

5. This is a reference to The Century of the Child (1900), by Ellen Key, a Swedish feminist and educator. (sb) ↩

6. 古典主义，实际上就是永恒主义。 ↩

7. Christiania, Norway's capital and the site of the National Theatre, became Oslo in 1925. (sb) ↩

8. I.e., in When we Dead Awaken (1899), which Ibsen called a “dramatic epilogue”. (sb) ↩

9. 拉丁语，意味无玷圣母，指圣母玛利亚。 ↩

10. 意大利语，同样指圣母玛利亚。 ↩

11. 但丁笔下的贝雅特丽齐。 ↩

12. Auguste Comte (1798-1857), French father of sociology and of the term “positivism”. See Auguste Comte and Positivism: the essential writings, ed. Gertrud Lenzer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975). (sb) ↩

13. 1844年底孔德遇上了克洛蒂尔德·德沃并坠入爱河，德沃是一个天主教徒，当时已与丈夫分居。出于天主教传统，德沃拒绝了孔德的追求，但二人仍然保持书信往来。1946年德沃因肺结核去世，对孔德造成了毁灭性打击，促使他从纯粹的实证主义哲学家转向人道主义，将爱视为社会的最高原则。孔德死后葬于拉雪兹神父公墓，其墓旁立有德沃的衣冠冢。 ↩

14. 「chick」带有轻佻之意。在此使用是为了刻意贬损外在的、经验型的 Solveig。 ↩

15. I shall sometimes add scene references to Peer Gynt in square brackets. Ibsen, himself, does not number the scenes, but many editors do. I have consulted various English translations of Peer Gynt, but have made my own translation from the German version that Weininger quotes. (sb) ↩

16. Substance, attribute and mode are the key metaphysical terms in Spinoza's Ethics. (sb) ↩

17. Without being less original on that account. ↩

18. Who always lets Socrates do the talking! ↩

19. Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), English writer and historian, and Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), American poet and essayist, met several times and formed a life-long friendship. Emerson thought that his “poetic” nature explained his eclectic and unsystematic use of the thoughts of his predecessors. (sb) ↩