Lost Son. Hermann Broch

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       7.

      HERMANN TO ARMAND

      SPINNFABRIK “TEESDORF”

      Telephone 64-2-96

      Austrian Postal Savings Bank Acct No. 10235

      Telegraph address: SPINTEES WIEN

      Factory: Teesdorf, Lower Austria,

      Mail: Tattendorf, Lower Austria.

      Telephone: Leobersdorf 13

      Vienna, 6. February, 1925

       1., Gonzagagasse 7 No. 4

       Hello, old boy:

       I am indeed mistrustful of you, as was Adele about that unloaded toy pistol, but of course with more reason—still, your letter pleased me. I shall answer it in reverse order, so philosophy first, then:

       In general I naturally have the view that philosophy cannot be taught, but that everyone must tackle these universal questions through one’s own consistent, serious reflection, but I would like to give you a few guidelines.

       Life seems meaningless in view of death: that is an incontrovertible fact. The only question is whether we can oppose another fact to this one, one which is just as incontrovertible, or rather, one of greater significance.

       Now it is obvious that most people experience life as a positive value, and are not misled by this apparent pointlessness. It’s even more obvious, however, that all values that human beings strive to hold onto are in some way connected with eternity, thus, with overcoming the power of death: the joy they take in nature, which not for nothing is called “eternal nature,” the joy they find in works of art, which also have validity that lasts over the centuries, and most especially the joy of knowledge, in the discovering of every new “eternal truth,” which should be as eternal as 2 x 2 = 4; all these true joys come from people’s sense of the eternal contained within them, and of their own potential eternalness. If you ask what road you should take in life, given that the question isn’t just a nice rhetorical phrase—you, too, would be incomparably happier and more satisfied if you had the great answer to the riddle of life in your hands.

       Of course I could give you many more examples to demonstrate how anything of value is connected to the eternal: for example, the respect for one’s own name and family, the continuation of which over generations proves that a father’s love for his son, and vice versa (a large part of Chinese religion is based on this!) takes into account this idea of eternity. Or to stay in the dimension of reality: the diamond is the most valuable material because it is the longest lasting.

       Still, examples are not proofs, and we need a fact just as unassailable as the fact of death. Now, the fact of death is only unassailably a fact if one views man as a two-legged being which was born and thus must also die, since all animals die. This is a view of man seen, so to speak, from the “outside.”

       But here is where our second fact begins, which has much, much more weight than the first. For your own alive-ness, your being a human, your experience exists only in your thinking. You stand there, singularly alone with your thinking in the midpoint of your experience, and if you now look at yourself, so to speak from the inside out, no longer are you a human being in the usual sense of the word, that is, mortal per se; you are simply a thinking “I” and nothing else. This fact is of course a much firmer, solider fact than that of death, because all the dying that you see around you is merely the content of your thinking.

       But now we come to the crux of the matter: for the “I,” life would be just a dream, and would be like a dream, as you correctly say, pointless and valueless, if there were no “eternal truths,” no “eternal values,” or as philosophy terms it, nothing “absolute.” Since your “I” is totally alone, however, it has to create all these beautiful things for itself: and in fact the human spirit has done exactly that. For all the truth one can experience, all the beauty, every value, in short, all “reality,” has been created by the mind itself. It’s reality that the stars move in elliptical paths, but to find them, or rather, to invent them, required the mind of Kepler. Even just to recognize the beauty of nature, let alone imitate it, required thousands of years of intellectual effort.

       So it is the task of the “I,” insofar as it yearns for absolute truth and absolute value (out of this fear of death), to constantly create anew its own reality, and to constantly expand it. The human mind of course will never grasp the final truth about the world and life, for “to know all would mean to be God.” But what makes all value-creating work rewarding is that it allows us, makes it possible in the first place for us to approach this ultimate goal. Even learning in itself is a part of this reward, because it keeps enlarging the breadth of reality available to the learning “I”; and if it is ever your fate to accomplish productive, value-creating work of your own, in the artistic, scientific, or whatever other field it may be, then you will experience a joy, a joyousness that will make it clear to you that the idea of death, even more than that, death itself can at least partially if not wholly be overcome. The founders of the great religions were not idiots in preaching the doctrine of eternal life: as philosophers, they created their own personal immortality from within themselves. Granted, this doesn’t mean that they are flitting around heaven as little angels with harps or pianos, or that they are wandering about the earth as spirits whom we can lure into saying “hello” to us at spiritualist séances, but that the individual human being, the single “I” looking out from within himself, can overcome death.

       I do not know if this is all too difficult for you, or whether I have already said too much. But you can always ask questions. Still, if you think about all this, and think about it seriously, you won’t lose your way. The most important thing for you to know is that every possibility is open to you, that your are getting the kind of education that will enable you to direct the rest of your life in any and every direction. That is why I keep pushing you to be as well prepared as possible in the sciences as in sports or the more practical subjects such as languages, etc. For that reason I don’t wish you to give up your sketching, either.

       This letter has gotten terribly long; I will write you again tomorrow. I am out of time for today. Grandpapa is quite seriously ill, Dr. Langer is on a business trip, and you can imagine that I am doubly overworked. Grandmama also has an awful lot to do caring for him; she and Grandpapa send their very best to you. Your letter was of course confidential, I did not even show it to Mama. And I didn’t tell her anything about your injury, so as not to upset her.

       That’s all for now, more tomorrow. P.

      [KW13/1, 64–67]

      HELLO, OLD BOY: There is a draft of this letter, written on February 5, 1925, which was never sent.

      STILL, YOUR LETTER PLEASED ME: this letter is lost, as were many of Armand’s to his father.

      VALUES: Broch was then working on a formal value theory, the results of which, fitted to the plot, he integrated into the third volume of his trilogy The Sleepwalkers, under the title “The Disintegration of Values.”