The Second Stage: Speech and Enterprise

How long the age of the armed hand lasted — that is, since when there has been man — we do not know. The number of years is, moreover, of no consequence, although it is even today assumed far too high. It is not a question of millions, not even of several hundred-thousands; still, a considerable number of millennia must have elapsed.

But now there sets in a second transformation, epoch-making, just as abrupt and violent, re-forming the destiny of man from the ground up, as the first was — again a genuine mutation in the sense just discussed. Prehistoric research has long since remarked it. In fact the things that lie in our museums show all at once another face. Earthen vessels appear, traces of “agriculture” and “cattle-breeding,” as one has named it carelessly enough and far too modernly; hut-building, graves, intimations of traffic. A new world of technical thinking and procedure announces itself. From the museum standpoint — far too shallow, and bent upon the mere arrangement of finds — one has separated an older and a younger Stone Age, Palaeolithic and Neolithic. But this division of the last century has long awakened unease, and for decades men have tried to replace it by something else. Expressions like Mesolithic, Mio-, Mixoneolithic prove, however, that one still cleaves to a mere ordering of the objects and therefore gets no further. But what transforms itself is not the implements; it is man. Once again: only from the soul can the history of man be unlocked.

This mutation can be fixed fairly exactly, at about the fifth millennium B.C. At the latest two millennia later there already begin the high Cultures in Egypt and Mesopotamia. One sees, the tempo of history takes on tragic measures. Before, millennia scarcely mattered; now every century becomes important. The rolling stone nears the abyss in headlong leaps.

But what has happened? If one presses deeper into this new form-world of human deeds, one soon sees very confused and complicated connections. All these techniques presuppose one another. The keeping of tamed animals demands the planting of fodder; the sowing and harvest of food-plants the presence of draught- and pack-animals; these in turn the building of enclosures; every kind of building the making and transport of building-materials; traffic the road, the pack-animal and the ship.

What is it, in soul, that is overturning in all this? I give the answer: planful doing in numbers. Until then each man lives his own life, makes his own weapon for himself, carries out alone his tactic in the daily struggle. None needs the other. That changes suddenly. These new procedures extend over long spans of time, under circumstances over years — think of the road from the felling of the trees to the putting-out of the ship built from them — and likewise over wide stretches of space. They fall apart into series of exactly ordered single acts and into groups of actions carried out side by side. But these whole-procedures presuppose, as an indispensable means, the speech of words.

Speaking in sentences and words cannot have arisen earlier or later; it must have arisen then, swiftly, like everything decisive, and indeed in close connection with the new kind of human procedures. That can be proved.

What is “speaking”?⁵ Without doubt a procedure for the purpose of communications, an activity that is continuously exercised by numerous men among one another. “Language” is only an abstraction from it, the inner — grammatical — form of speaking, including the word-forms. This form must be widespread and have a certain duration if communications are really to take place. I had earlier shown that speaking in sentences is preceded by simpler forms of communication — signs for the eye, signals, gestures, cries of warning and of threat — which all subsist on in support of speaking in sentences, even today, as speech-melody, stress, play of features, movements of the hand, and in present-day writing as punctuation.

Nevertheless “flowing” speech is, in its content, something quite new. Ever since Hamann and Herder, men have again and again set themselves the question of its origin. If all the answers to the present day leave us unsatisfied, that is because the question was wrongly meant. For the origin of speaking in words cannot be sought in the activity of speaking itself. So thought the Romantics, unworldly as ever, who derived language from the “primal poetry of humanity” — no, more than that: language was the primal poesy of man; it was myth, lyric, prayer at once, and prose was only the later debasement to the common use of the day. But then the inner form of language, the grammar, the logical structure of the sentences, would have to look quite otherwise. Precisely primitive languages, like those of the Bantu and the Turkic tribes, show the tendency with special clearness to make quite clear, sharp, unmistakable distinctions.

But that leads to the basic error of the enemies of all Romanticism, the rationalists.⁶ They run always after the opinion that the sentence expresses a judgement or a thought. They sit at their desk full of books and brood over their own thinking and writing. There the “thought” seems to them to be the purpose of speaking. Because they are accustomed to sit alone, they forget, over the speaking, the hearing; over the question, the answer; over the I, the Thou. They say “language” and mean the oration, the lecture, the treatise. Their view of the arising of language is monological and therefore false. The rightly put question runs not: How, but When does speaking in words arise? And then very soon everything becomes clear. The mostly misunderstood or overlooked purpose of speaking in sentences results from the time since which men have spoken thus — namely, flowingly. And the purpose lies plain in the form of the sentence-building. Speaking proceeds not monologically but dialogically; the series of sentences follow not as oration, but between several men as conversation. The purpose is not an understanding out of reflection, but a mutual coming-to-terms by question and answer. What, then, are the original forms of speaking? Not the judgement, the statement, but the command, the expression of obedience, the establishing, the question, the affirmation, the denial. They are sentences that turn always to another, originally surely quite short: Do that! Ready? Yes! Begin! The words as designations of concepts follow only from the purpose of the sentences, so that from the start the vocabulary of a hunter-tribe is quite other than that of a village of cattle-breeders or of a seafaring coastal population. Originally speaking was a difficult activity, and men spoke surely only the most necessary. Even today the peasant is silent in relation to the city-man, who, in consequence of his speech-habituation, cannot hold his mouth and chatters and makes conversation out of boredom, the moment he has nothing to do, and whether he has something to say or not.

The original purpose of speaking is the carrying-through of a deed according to intention, time, place, means. The clear, unambiguous formulation of it is the first thing, and out of the difficulty of making oneself understood, of imposing one’s own will upon others, there results the technics of grammar, the technics of the building of sentences and kinds of sentence, of correct commanding, questioning, answering, of the forming of word-classes on the ground of practical, not theoretical, intentions and aims. Theoretical reflection has, in the arising of speaking in sentences, as good as no share whatever. All speaking is of a practical nature and proceeds from the “thinking of the hand.”

The doing-in-numbers we call enterprise. Speaking and enterprise presuppose each other in precisely the same way as, earlier, hand and tool. Speaking-in-numbers has developed its inner, grammatical form at the carrying-through of enterprises, and the habit of enterprise has been schooled by the method of speech-bound thinking. For to speak means to communicate oneself thinkingly to others. If speaking is a doing, then it is a spiritual doing with sensuous means. It very soon no longer needs the immediate connection with bodily doing. For that is the new thing which now, since the fifth millennium B.C., is epoch-making: thinking, the spirit, the understanding, or whatever one will call that which has emancipated itself, through speech, from the bond with the active hand, now steps over against the soul and life as a power for itself. The purely spiritual deliberation, the “reckoning,” which here suddenly, decisively, altering everything, emerges, is this: that common doing has, as a unity, an effect as if a giant did something. Or, as Mephistopheles ironically expresses it in Faust:

If I can pay for six stallions, / are not their forces mine? / I tear along, a proper man, / as though I had four-and-twenty legs.

The beast of prey man wants consciously to heighten his superiority, far beyond the bounds of his bodily strength. He sacrifices to his will to greater power an important trait of his very life. The thinking, the reckoning of the greater effect, is the first thing. For its sake one resigns oneself to giving up a little of one’s personal freedom. Inwardly, after all, one remains independent. But no step in history can be taken back. Time, and therefore life, are not reversible. Once accustomed to the doing-in-numbers and to its successes, man entangles himself ever deeper in these fateful bonds. The enterprising thinking reaches ever more strongly into the soul-life. Man has become the slave of his thought.

The step from the use of personal tools to the enterprise of several signifies a monstrously growing artificiality of the procedures. The working with artificial materials — the potting, weaving, plaiting — does not yet say much, although it is far more spiritualized, far more creative, than everything earlier. But above numerous procedures, of which we can know nothing more, there tower some of mighty thought-force which have left traces. Above all they are the ones that have grown out of the “thought of building.” We know mines of flint, long before all knowledge of metals, in Belgium, England, Austria, Sicily, Portugal, which surely reach back into this time, with shafts and galleries, ventilation and props, in which men worked with tools of stag-horn.⁷ There are, in “early Neolithic” time, strong relations between Portugal and north-west Spain and Brittany, bypassing southern France, between Brittany and Ireland, which presuppose a regulated navigation and therefore the building of efficient vessels of unknown kind. There are in Spain megalithic structures of hewn stones of mighty size, with cover-slabs weighing more than 100,000 kg, which often had to be brought from afar and set in their place by a technics unknown to us. Does one make clear to oneself what is necessary for such enterprises in the way of reflection, counsel, supervision, commanding, of months- and years-long preparation for the winning and the bringing-up of the material, for the temporal and spatial distribution of the tasks, the drafting of the plan, the taking-over and direction of the execution? What long forethought does the enterprise of seafaring on the high sea demand, compared with the dressing of a flint knife? Even the “composite bow,” which occurs on Spanish rock-pictures of this time, requires for its making, out of alternating layers of sinew-mass, horn and definite woods, a complicated procedure that extends over five to seven years. And the “invention of the wagon,” as we very naively say, what reflection, ordering and doing does it presuppose, extending from the purpose, the way and the kind of “driving,” the choice and making of the road — of which mostly no one thinks — the procuring or breeding of draught-animals, to deliberations about the size and kind of the load, its securing, about steering and shelter!

A quite other world of creations proceeds from the “thought of begetting” — namely, the breeding of plants and animals, through which man himself represents, imitates, alters, improves and violates the creator Nature.⁸ Ever since he — then — cultivated plants, instead of gathering them, he has surely re-formed them with consciousness for his ends. In any case the finds belong to species that are not demonstrable growing wild. And the oldest finds of animal-bones, which prove cattle-keeping in any form, show already the consequences of “domestication,” which were certainly in part willed and reached through breeding. The concept of the prey of the beast of prey widens: not only the killed animal is prey and property, but already the wild herd grazing free, whether one hedges it in or not. It belongs to someone, to a tribe or hunting-troop, and this defends its right to exploitation. The bringing-over into captivity for the purpose of breeding, which presupposes the cultivation of fodder, is only one of several kinds of possessing.

I had shown that the arising of the armed hand had as its consequence the logical separation of two procedures: the making and the use of the weapon. Just so there now follows, from the speech-led enterprise, the separation of the activities of thinking and of the hand. In every enterprise the devising and the executing can be distinguished, and from now on the achievement of practical thinking is the first and most important. There is leader-work and executing work: that has become, for all ages to come, the technical ground-form of the whole of human life. Whether it is a hunt for big game or a temple-building, a warlike or an agricultural enterprise, the founding of a firm or of a State, a caravan, an uprising, even a crime — always there must first be an enterprising, inventive head present, who has the idea, directs the execution, who commands, distributes the tasks; in short, who is born to be a leader over others who are not.

But there are, in the age of the speech-led enterprise, not only two kinds of technics, which step ever more sharply apart from century to century, but also two kinds of men, who distinguish themselves by their gift for one of them. There is, in every procedure, a technics of leading and another of executing, but just as self-evidently there are by nature commanders and obeyers, subjects and objects of the political or economic procedures. That is the ground-form of human life, become so manifold, since this transformation, which is to be done away with only along with life itself.

Granted that it is contrary to Nature and artificial — but that, after all, is “Culture.” It may be fateful, and has at times really been so, because men imagined they could artificially do away with it; but it is, none the less, an unshakeable fact. To govern, to decide, to lead, to command is an art, a difficult technics, which, like every other, presupposes an inborn gift. Only children believe that the king goes to bed with his crown, and sub-men of the great cities, Marxists, literary men, believe something similar of the leaders of economic life. Enterprise is a work that first makes hand-work possible. And just so the inventing, devising, reckoning, carrying-through of new procedures is a creative activity of gifted heads, which has as its necessary consequence the executing activity of the uncreative. Here belongs the somewhat old-fashioned distinction of genius and talent. Genius is — literally — the creative force, the holy spark in the single life, which emerges and is extinguished enigmatically in streams of generations and suddenly lights up an age far and wide. Talent is a gift for existing single tasks, which lets itself develop through tradition, learning, practice, drill to strong effect. Talent presupposes genius in order to be able to be applied, not the other way round.

There is, finally, a natural difference of rank between men who are born to rule and to serve, between the leaders and the led of life. It is simply present, and is, in healthy times and populations, involuntarily acknowledged by everyone, as a fact, although in centuries of decline most men force themselves to deny it or not to see it. But precisely the talk of the “natural equality of all” proves that there is here something to be explained away.

The speech-led enterprise is now bound up with a mighty loss of freedom, of the old freedom of the beast of prey — for the leaders as for the led. They become, both, in spirit, in soul, with body and life, members of a greater unity. That we call organization. It is the gathering-together of the active life into fixed forms, the being-in-form for enterprises of any kind. With the doing-in-numbers there follows the decisive step from organic to organized existence, from life in natural to that in artificial groups, from the pack to people, tribe, estate and State.

Out of beast-of-prey struggles between individuals there has become war, an enterprise of tribe against tribe, with leaders and followings, with organized marches, raids and engagements. Out of the annihilation of the conquered there becomes the law that is imposed upon the one who succumbs. Human right is always a right of the stronger, which the weaker has to follow,⁹ and this right between tribes, thought of as lasting, is “peace.” Such a peace there is also within the tribe, in order to keep its forces available for tasks toward the outside: the State is the inner order of a people for the outer purpose. The State is, as form, as possibility, what the history of a people is as actuality. But history is war-history, then as now. Politics is only the temporary substitute of war by the struggle with more spiritual weapons. And the manhood of a people is originally one and the same with its army. The character of the free beast of prey has, in essential traits, passed over from the individual to the organized people, the animal with one soul and many hands. The technics of government, of war and of diplomacy have the same root and, at all times, a deep inner kinship.

There are peoples whose strong race has preserved the beast-of-prey character, predatory, conquering, master-peoples, lovers of the struggle against men, who leave the economic struggle against Nature to others in order to plunder and subject them. With seafaring there is given, at once, sea-robbery; with nomad life, the raid upon trade-roads; with peasantry, its enserfment by a warlike nobility.

For with the organization into enterprises there separates itself also the political and the economic side of life, the direction toward power or toward prey. There is not only an articulation within peoples according to activities — warriors and craftsmen, chieftains and peasants — but also the organization of whole tribes for a single economic calling. There must already then have been hunter-, cattle-breeder-, peasant-tribes, mining-, potter- and fisher-villages, political organizations of seafarers and traders. And beyond that there are conqueror-peoples without economic work. The harder the struggle for power and prey, the closer and stricter the bonds of the individual through right and force.

In the tribes of this early kind the single life means little or nothing. One has only to make clear to oneself — the Icelandic sagas give an insight — that on every voyage over sea only a part of the ships arrives, that at every great building a considerable part of the workers perishes, that whole tribes starve in times of drought — it matters only that so many remain over as to represent the soul of the whole. The number quickly grows again. As annihilation one feels not the going-under of individuals or of many, but the extinction of the organization, of the “We.”

In this growing mutual dependence lies the quiet and deep revenge of Nature upon the being that wrested from her the prerogative of creating.¹⁰ This little creator against Nature, this revolutionary in the world of life, has become the slave of his creation. Culture, the sum of artificial, personal, self-created life-forms, develops into a cage with narrow bars for this unruly soul. The beast of prey, who made other beings his domestic animals in order to exploit them for himself, has captured himself. The house of man is the great symbol of it.

And his growing number, in which the individual loses himself meaninglessly. For it belongs to the most consequential effects of the human enterprising spirit that the population multiplies. Where once a pack of a few hundred heads roved, there now sits a people of tens of thousands. There are scarcely any man-empty spaces left. People borders on people, and the mere fact of the border, of the border of one’s own power, irritates the old instincts to hatred, attack and annihilation. The border of every kind, the spiritual too, is the deadly enemy of the will-to-power.

It is not true that human technics spares labour. It belongs to the essence of the altering, personal human technics, as against the genus-technics of the animals, that every invention contains the possibility and the necessity of new inventions, that every fulfilled wish awakens a thousand others, that every triumph over Nature provokes to still greater ones. The soul of this beast of prey is insatiable, its willing never to be satisfied — that is the curse that lies upon this kind of life, but also the greatness in its destiny. Rest, happiness, enjoyment are unknown precisely to the highest specimens. And no inventor has ever rightly foreseen the practical effect of his deed. The more fruitful the leader-work is, the greater becomes the need of executing hands. Therefore one begins to exploit the prisoners of hostile tribes, instead of killing them, with respect to their bodily strength. That is the beginning of slavery, which must be exactly as old as the slavery of the domestic animals.

These peoples and tribes multiply, so to speak, downward. Not the number of “heads” grows, but that of the hands. The group of the leader-natures remains small. It is the pack of the proper beasts of prey, the pack of the gifted, that disposes in some manner over the growing herd of the others.

But even this rule of the few is far removed from the old freedom. That lies in the word of Frederick the Great: “I am the first servant of my State.” Hence the deep, despairing urge of the exceptional men to remain inwardly free. Here, and only here, begins individualism as the contradiction against the psychology of the “mass.” It is the last rearing-up of the beast-of-prey soul against the captivity in Culture, the last attempt to withdraw oneself from the spiritual and intellectual levelling that is effected and represented by the fact of the great number. Hence the life-types of the conqueror, the adventurer, the hermit, even a certain type of criminals and bohemians. One wants to escape the effect of the sucking number by setting oneself above it, fleeing before it, despising it. The idea of personality, darkly beginning, is a protest against the man of the mass. The tension between the two grows to the tragic end. Hatred, the proper race-feeling of beasts of prey, presupposes that one respects the opponent. There lies in it a certain acknowledgement of equality of soul-rank. Beings that stand lower one despises. Beings that themselves stand low are envious. All early tales, god-myths and hero-sagas are full of such motives. The eagle hates only his own kind. He envies no one; he despises many, all. Contempt looks down from on high; envy squints up from below — they are the world-historical feelings of a humanity organized into States and estates, whose peaceful specimens rattle powerlessly at the bars of the cage that encloses them together. From this fact and its consequences nothing can free. So it was, so it will be — or there will be nothing at all any more. It has a meaning to respect this fact or to despise it. To alter it is impossible. The destiny of man is on its course and must fulfil itself.