grandest star and humblest clod.
All the straining, all the striving
is eternal peace in God.”[[153]]
On the surface of history it is the unforeseen that reigns. Every individual event, decision and personality is stamped with its hall-mark. No one foreknew the storm of Islam at the coming of Mohammed, nor foresaw Napoleon in the fall of Robespierre. The coming of great men, their doings, their fortune, are all incalculables. No one knows whether a development that is setting in powerfully will accomplish its course in a straight line like that of the Roman patrician order or will go down in doom like that of the Hohenstaufen or the Maya Culture. And—science notwithstanding—it is just the same with the destinies of every single species of beast and plant within earth-history and beyond even this, with the destiny of the earth itself and all the solar systems and Milky Ways. The insignificant Augustus made an epoch, and the great Tiberius passed away ineffective. Thus, too, with the fortunes of artists, artworks and art-forms, dogmas and cults, theories and discoveries. That, in the whirl of becoming, one element merely succumbed to destiny when another became (and often enough has continued and will continue to be) a destiny itself—that one vanishes with the wave-train of the surface while the other makes this, is something that is not to be explained by any why-and-wherefore and yet is of inward necessity. And thus the phrase that Augustine in a deep moment used of Time is valid also of destiny—“if no one questions me, I know: if I would explain to a questioner, I know not.”
So, also, the supreme ethical expression of Incident and Destiny is found in the Western Christian’s idea of Grace—the grace, obtained through the sacrificial death of Jesus, of being made free to will.[[154]] The polarity of Disposition (original sin) and Grace—a polarity which must ever be a projection of feeling, of the emotional life, and not a precision of learned reasoning—embraces the existence of every truly significant man of this Culture. It is, even for Protestants, even for atheists, hidden though it may be behind a scientific notion of “evolution” (which in reality is its direct descendant[[155]]), the foundation of every confession and every autobiography; and it is just its absence from the constitution of Classical man that makes confession, by word or thought, impossible to him. It is the final meaning of Rembrandt’s self-portraits and of music from Bach to Beethoven. We may choose to call that something which correlates the life-courses of all Western men disposition, Providence or “inner evolution”[[156]] but it remains inaccessible to thought. “Free will” is an inward certitude. But whatever one may will or do, that which actually ensues upon and issues from the resolution—abrupt, surprising, unforeseeable—subserves a deeper necessity and, for the eye that sweeps over the picture of the distant past, visibly conforms to a major order. And when the Destiny of that which was willed has been Fulfilment we are fain to call the inscrutable “Grace.” What did Innocent III, Luther, Loyola, Calvin, Jansen, Rousseau and Marx will, and what came of the things that they willed in the stream of Western history? Was it Grace or Fate? Here all rationalistic dissection ends in nonsense. The Predestination doctrine of Calvin and Pascal—who, both of them more upright than Luther and Thomas Aquinas, dared to draw the causal conclusion from Augustinian dialectic—is the necessary absurdity to which the pursuit of these secrets by the reason leads. They lost the destiny-logic of the world-becoming and found themselves in the causal logic of notion and law; they left the realm of direct intuitive vision for that of a mechanical system of objects. The fearful soul-conflicts of Pascal were the strivings of a man, at once intensely spiritual and a born mathematician, who was determined to subject the last and gravest problems of the soul both to the intuitions of a grand instinctive faith and to the abstract precision of a no less grand mathematical plan. In this wise the Destiny-idea—in the language of religion, God’s Providence—is brought within the schematic form of the Causality Principle, i.e., the Kantian form of mind activity (productive imagination); for that is what Predestination signifies, notwithstanding that thereby Grace—the causation-free, living Grace which can only be experienced as an inward certainty—is made to appear as a nature-force that is bound by irrevocable law and to turn the religious world-picture into a rigid and gloomy system of machinery. And yet was it not a Destiny again—for the world as well as for themselves—that the English Puritans, who were filled with this conviction, were ruined not through any passive self-surrender but through their hearty and vigorous certainty that their will was the will of God?
VIII
We can proceed to the further elucidation of the incidental (or casual) without running the risk of considering it as an exception or a breach in the causal continuity of “Nature,” for Nature is not the world-picture in which Destiny is operative. Wherever the sight emancipates itself from the sensible-become, spiritualizes itself into Vision, penetrates through the enveloping world and lets prime phenomena instead of mere objects work upon it, we have the grand historical, trans-natural, super-natural outlook, the outlook of Dante and Wolfram and also the outlook of Goethe in old age that is most clearly manifested in the finale of Faust II. If we linger in contemplation in this world of Destiny and Incident, it will very likely seem to us incidental that the episode of “world-history” should have played itself out in this or that phase of one particular star amongst the millions of solar systems; incidental that it should be men, peculiar animal-like creatures inhabiting the crust of this star, that present the spectacle of “knowledge” and, moreover, present it in just this form or in just that form, according to the very different versions of Aristotle, Kant and others; incidental that as the counter-pole of this “knowing” there should have arisen just these codes of “natural law,” each supposedly eternal and universally-valid and each evoking a supposedly general and common picture of “Nature.” Physics—quite rightly—banishes incidentals from its field of view, but it is incidental, again, that physics itself should occur in the alluvial period of the earth’s crust, uniquely, as a particular kind of intellectual composition.
The world of incident is the world of once-actual facts that longingly or anxiously we live forward to (entgegenleben) as Future, that raise or depress us as the living Present, and that we contemplate with joy or with grief as Past. The world of causes and effects is the world of the constantly-possible, of the timeless truths which we know by dissection and distinction.
The latter only are scientifically attainable—they are indeed identical with science. He who is blind to this other, to the world as Divina Commedia or drama for a god, can only find a senseless turmoil of incidents,[[157]] and here we use the word in its most trivial sense. So it has been with Kant and most other systematists of thought. But the professional and inartistic sort of historical research too, with its collecting and arranging of mere data, amounts for all its ingenuity to little more than the giving of a cachet to the banal-incidental. Only the insight that can penetrate into the metaphysical is capable of experiencing in data symbols of that which happened, and so of elevating an Incident into a Destiny. And he who is to himself a Destiny (like Napoleon) does not need this insight, since between himself as a fact and the other facts there is a harmony of metaphysical rhythm which gives his decisions their dreamlike certainty.[[158]]
It is this insight that constitutes the singularity and the power of Shakespeare. Hitherto, neither our research nor our speculation has hit upon this in him—that he is the Dramatist of the Incidental. And yet this Incidental is the very heart of Western tragedy, which is a true copy of the Western history idea and with it gives the clue to that which we understand in the world—so misconstrued by Kant—“Time.” It is incidental that the political situation of “Hamlet,” the murder of the King and the succession question impinge upon just that character that Hamlet is. Or, take Othello—it is incidental that the man at whom Iago, the commonplace rogue that one could pick up in any street, aims his blow is one whose person possesses just this wholly special physiognomy. And Lear! Could anything be more incidental (and therefore more “natural”) than the conjunction of this commanding dignity with these fateful passions and the inheritance of them by the daughters? No one has even to-day realized all the significance of the fact that Shakespeare took his stories as he found them and in the very finding of them filled them with the force of inward necessity, and never more sublimely so than in the case of the Roman dramas. For the will to understand him has squandered itself in desperate efforts to bring in a moral causality, a “therefore,” a connexion of “guilt” and “expiation.” But all this is neither correct nor incorrect—these are words that belong to the World-as-Nature and imply that something causal is being judged—but superficial, shallow, that is, in contrast to the poet’s deep subjectivizing of the mere fact-anecdote. Only one who feels this is able to admire the grand naïveté of the entrances of Lear and Macbeth. Now, Hebbel is the exact opposite, he destroys the depth of the anecdote by a system of cause and effect. The arbitrary and abstract character of his plots, which everyone feels instinctively, comes from the fact that the causal scheme of his spiritual conflicts is in contradiction with the historically-motived world-feeling and the quite other logic proper to that feeling. These people do not live, they prove something by coming on. One feels the presence of a great understanding, not that of a deep life. Instead of the Incident we get a Problem.