9. Balzac

On the centenary of his birth

In Honore de Balzac, a man was born in France on May 20, 1799 who, as an artist, expressed the world view of our century with all the one-sidedness that it initially needed in order to effectively assert itself against the school of thought that centuries of Christology had inculcated in people. If this modern world view is to be characterized in one word, it must be said that it sought to understand man on the basis of scientific knowledge. Just as we seek to understand the composition and movements of the universe purely in terms of natural law, today we also seek to explain the actions of human beings. We no longer think about why God allows evil in the world, but we seek to understand the human organization in order to be able to say how it comes to such expressions that are regarded as evil. Balzac exaggerated this current of thought. He wanted to be the naturalist of human society. Just as Dante wrote a "divine" comedy, he wanted to write a "human" one, because he thought: "There are social species, just as there are zoological species. Just as in the animal world the difference between [lion] and dog, between mammal and bird must be understood, so in human society the difference between civil servant and merchant, between financier and aristocrat by birth. One thing is overlooked. The animal species lion is so exhausted by the single individual that nothing else about it can interest us essentially once we have grasped the peculiarity of its species. The old maid may still have a special interest in the individual peculiarities of her lapdog. Such peculiarities cannot attract general attention. The situation is quite different with humans. Every individual becomes a problem for us here. The species is not limited to the individual. Each person presents us with a riddle. A psychological riddle for the explainer; an artistic task for the performer. Balzac did not understand this. That is why he did not portray individuals. All his characters lack the latter. We see in them representatives of their social types. The interests, goals and lifestyles of their class dominate them and hover over their heads like fixed ideas. The social costume, the milieu alone is drawn. Man is only a specimen. The truth of Balzac's view of the world will only be revealed when the individual, which he ignores, is clearly presented to us in a scientific way. This is how we must understand Balzac today. Then we will see in him the ancestor of many a contemporary representative of the new world view, who basically did not penetrate to the point where the individual begins. To name one of the greatest, it is Nietzsche's intellectual tragedy that he never pursued man into the secrets of individuality. For Nietzsche, so often characterized as an individualist, almost only generic ideas exist in broad areas. Nietzsche saw the proletarian, the Christian, the woman, the scholar and many others only as genera. And this circumstance explains many of Nietzsche's contradictions. Basically, all of Nietzsche's assertions, which he makes as an observer, as a philosopher, contradict the conclusions and judgments he forms. What he should have said of the individual, he asserts as generally characteristic truths. He suffers from the same prejudice under which Balzac wrote novels. Both lack the ability to draw the final conclusions, the truly unbiased view of reality. They cannot apply the truths gained from natural science to human society. They simply transfer what is valid there to here. But this literal transfer is wrong. When we today wind our way through the long series of Balzac's novels, we stand there, like Hölderlin before the people of his time: we see masters and servants, aristocrats and people, peasants and burghers; but we do not see people. Finally, we must realize that we can only understand the great prophets of the modern worldview if we understand how to go beyond them at the right moment. We do not understand Goethe today by organizing celebrations in his honour, by repeating and commenting on his words, but by drawing conclusions from his views that he was not yet able to draw. History only concerns us to the extent that it promotes our own activities.