I recently read Heinrich von Kleist’s short essay, “On the Marionette Theatre,” in which he recounts a conversation with a dancer friend, known as Mr. C. To von Kleist’s surprise, Mr. C expresses delight in watching marionettes. Von Kleist “had regarded the handling of marionettes as something rather spiritless, approximate to the turning of the crank that plays a hand organ.” On the contrary, Mr. C responds that these puppets have much to teach us about grace and elegance. Indeed, they typify the standard of grace to which human dancers strive. Marionettes, according to Mr. C, have two advantages. First, its appendages follow the center of gravity in pure ellipses: “the limbs … are what they ought to be: dead, mere pendula.” Second, they are unbound by gravity. They need only pause briefly on the earth, whereas humans are inescapably stuck on the ground: “we need the earth: for rest, for repose from the effort of the dance…and we can do no better than disguise our moments of rest as much as possible.” Von Kleist still resisted the idea that a doll could dance more gracefully than a human. Mr. C replied: “It is simply impossible for a human being to reach the grace of the jointed doll. Only a god can duel with matter on this level, and it as this point that the two ends of the ring-formed world grasp each other.”
The doll, because of its complete lack of freedom, enjoys a greater freedom than humans do. It is not held back by limitations imposed by self-consciousness. Only a god, a being of supreme consciousness, can match the grace of the puppet whose actions are entirely determined. Unlike the other animals in Eden, humans ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and they acquired consciousness. Adam and Eve were then aware of their nudity. In paradise, there can be no free, moral thought.
Humans, not the puppets of Eden but not quite an almighty god, occupy a tragic limbo in which they are aware enough to despair, yet not enough to be free of their animalistic impulses. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. In the Garden of Eden, the two extremes of consciousness meet, “the two ends of the ring-formed world grasp each other.” A supremely conscious god and animals bereft of it can cohabitate.
This minimal consciousness is the irresolvable conflict between passion and reason inherent in each of us.
The twentieth century saw the culminations of two attempts to reconcile this conflict. Fascism sought to realize the hope of passion subjugating reason — the attempt to return to the Garden of Eden as an animal, rid of our consciousness. Nazism glorified the eruption of will to power — pure impulse. Hitler deemed race war to be not just an element, but the essence of humanity. He thought that Jews, a pestilence on mankind, try to pervert the natural order through the use of ideas. All ideas as such are devious ways of enabling the inferior to prevail over the superior. In a life characterized primarily by scarcity, cooperation among races is unnatural. The weak must be beaten, else the strong will perish. Hitler adamantly rejected the prospect that scientific progress could increase agricultural efficiency to the point of making coexistence feasible. Rational proposals were nothing more than Jewish perfidy. Mr. C tells von Kleist of a young dancer with a “wonderful quality of physical grace.” But, once his brain fully matured and acquired consciousness, “one by one his charms fell away from him.” We are so fascinated with youth, with the innocence of childhood, because they have yet to consume the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.
Communism took a different approach, the attempt to conquer passion with reason. We hope that by acquiring divine consciousness, we can re-enter the Garden of Eden – this time, not as an animal, but as a god. Von Kleist declared that “we must wander about the world, and see if, perhaps, we can find an unguarded back door.” Fully consuming the fruits from the tree of knowledge – achieving the communist utopia – would mark ‘the last chapter in the history of the world.’” Marx professed to have discovered the laws of history. This historical determinism – the apotheosis of reason – would reforge our bonds and finally relieve humanity of freedom. By achieving divine consciousness, we would be effectively deprived of any consciousness. The complete freedom of a god would grant us access to the marionette’s enviable state of slavery. Such is the allure of Marxism and monotheisms — all totalitarian creeds. They promise to shepherd us along the path to surrendering our freedom in exchange for an omniscient deity that controls every aspect of our existence. We do not want to live in a world of freedom, but yearn to live in a panopticon, in which every act is not a product of choice, but is determined — either by God or the laws of history.
Steven Weinberg has remarked that “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” The unprecedented destruction of the last century was the product of our attempts to use the awesome power of science to overcome a reality whose meaninglessness was exposed by science. But, these attempts are doomed to fail, because the problems of human nature are innately insoluble. Yet, today I see these Gnostic remnants manifest as a faith in science. However, no matter how much knowledge we accumulate, Eden’s back door will be perpetually beyond our grasp.
Science has done so much more to better our lives than religion has, and so the faith in it is that much easier to maintain. Our naïve faith in the inevitability of progress concerns me greatly. The serious danger of reflexively invoking such catechisms is all the more foreboding, because, free of conspicuous superstitions, scientism is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. We walk blindfolded as always, except now we are armed with nuclear weapons and are destroying the Earth in our endeavor to control it.
When Marx commented on religion, his tone was not one of cynicism but one of sympathy. The full quote: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the masses.” He didn’t regard religion simply as an opiate doled out by the elite to dupe — or dope — the masses into acquiescence. Rather, he understood that religion provided sincere hope of absolution for a fallen creature. (Of course, his proposal also failed). Unfortunately, addiction to illusions is an irresponsible way to live. Our endeavors to contort reality to our imagined utopias end only in ruinous failure. The best we can do is acknowledge our tragic condition and learn to somehow manage it and live with it.
Art allows us to play out these fantasies of a perfect world. Bach has been praised as the greatest musician. In particular, Christians hold him in high regard because his music came closest to resembling the perfect order of heaven. He managed to create music with 11 lines of harmony playing simultaneously. Bach best imitated God in creating order from chaos. Of course, none of man’s creations can compare to God’s grace, because “we can do no better than disguise our moments of rest as much as possible.” Our obsession with sprezzatura evinces our unquenchable desire to reject our freedom. We seek to mimic the marionette as best we can, but, our best is never good enough: “we look in vain for this quality in the majority of our dancers.”
In reality, time moves in one direction and at one speed. In literature, time jumps forwards and backwards, it contracts and expands according to the wishes of its godly author. In reality, cause precedes effect. In literature, effect commands primacy. The author then concocts the causes necessary to bring about the predetermined effect. In our fictional realms, the means are subservient to some — in principle — knowable end. The laws of nature are twisted and warped in service of the author’s design. The characters, like marionettes, have no freedom, and so have meaning. On the other hand, reality is indifferent to us. It continues as it does regardless of our protests or praise. We are free of any determined fate. What a cruel God to have condemned us to a life of uncertainty and futility. As W.H. Auden writes in “The More Loving One,” “Looking up at the stars, I know quite well // That, for all they care, I can go to hell.”
Art is supposed to reveal the fictions of our quixotic optimism, but it must also cloud our vision. If it attempts to present the invisible, it will fail in its cathartic mission. To be successful, it must give us the illusion of encroaching on truth, while actually guiding us through a perpetual maze. Imagine you are looking on an empty stage. The complete bareness will drive you insane, so you pull the curtain, hopefully not a drab one. Now the object of your sight is at least bearable. If someone asks you, “Is the stage empty?” at least you can profess agnosticism. You know that the stage is empty, but you cannot say so for certain. Art at once aims to reveal and to obscure. This paradox, as with all the others, should not surprise us, for they all follow naturally from the paradox of the human condition — the irredeemable conflict between passion and reason. As a child, I frequently asked, “What’s the point of art? I just don’t get it.” Well, now it seems that not everything has to have a point, ultimately because nothing has a point. Some questions just don’t have an answer. What is the color of jealousy? What is the meaning of it all?
