should not the living of this life mean that it is enjoyed, that it makes us happy? Why should not the affirmation of life be commanded in the sense of an affirmation of the happiness of life? What would gratitude to the Creator mean if we did not want to be merry when we can? On the other hand, why should not the same will be bad?—that is, when our pleasure in life is not, perhaps, pleasure in our real creaturely life but pleasure in a demonic abstraction, in a life of our own which is lived to its own glory and in whose affirmation and cultivation we take pleasure, but a bad pleasure, a pleasure that has nothing to do with gratitude, a pleasure through which we lose pleasure in our real creaturely life. We ourselves cannot possibly draw the line between good pleasure and bad. But it is in fact drawn. We always have at least a warning in this regard when the will to enjoy life collides with the affirmation of its primitive needs or the will to be healthy. But we have an even clearer warning when the will to be happy, instead of fulfilling itself as the affirmation of happiness already present, as the expression of joy one already
has, must seek means of stimulation to summon up that joy which precedes the joy that is a mark of real joy in life, experiencing its fulfillment only after first establishing this presupposition. This can mean that our will has nothing whatever to do with our real life nor our pleasure with real pleasure. It is clear that from this standpoint all the human possibilities that can be summed up under the concept of
festivity are in a very serious crisis, for a special
apparatus of joy is part and parcel of this concept. This apparatus can mean that man
is not merry but wants to be and needs some spur to be so. His will to enjoy life does not spring from the self-evident gratitude of real creaturely life but from the self-will of that fictional demonic life. If, for example, one needs to be a little or very much drunk to be merry; if music is enough to evoke the mood (Saul and David [cf. 1 Sam. 16:23]); if the average man in the cinema or at the fairground can find joy only by the paradoxical detour of a little thrill at the danger, sin, or need of others; if a number of individuals or married couples who would be bored on their own gather together to overcome this unhappy state, and from 8 o’clock to 1, over a meal, etc., most unnecessarily share most unnecessary things under the title of fellowship; if a society (or even a university) anxiously searches the records for the possibility of a jubilee because it wants a celebration; if.… These are not bad things—we must not be too schoolmasterish—but they are things in face of which we have to ask whether they can be justified as an exercise of real joy in life or whether there is not something forced about them which makes real joy in life impossible. It
might be different. We do not know what these things mean for others. For some they could perhaps be genuinely pleasurable, expressing a joy that is already there and therefore expressing gratitude. We on the Christian side would certainly do well to be very restrained in passing definitive judgments on the final meaning of the pleasures of the world. But whether the things that please the world and Christianity really express gratitude is the question, the question of the divine command, which is raised in face of what the human race does in this regard. Nor can we evade the further consideration that if our life as creaturely life does not belong to us, then we obviously cannot be unequivocal about what constitutes real pleasure in our real life. As the affirmation of life in general can sometimes be meaningful only as a presupposition of readiness for sacrifice, so life’s pleasure in particular may perhaps show itself at times only in readiness for life’s pain. The intensive enhancement of the affirmation of life may perhaps occur only in the form of openness to unlimited affliction in the same creaturely life. Merry feasts can sometimes make sense only in inseparable correlation to bitter weeks.11 The test of our obedience in relation to the will to be happy is not laughter nor of course crying, nor again the Stoic “apathy” which can neither laugh nor cry, but this correlation between the capacity for pleasure and the capacity for pain; the readiness to honor the miracle of creaturely life, the beauty of the life loaned to us by God, both in its heights
and also in its depths, both when we speak of happiness and also when we speak of unhappiness; the maturity which can handle both. Whether and how this test is really imposed on anyone is another question. It is beyond question, however, that the will to live in this form, too, finds its criterion within itself in the sense that our real life belongs to God, so that our joy in life is according to his good pleasure and not ours.
Another form of the intensive affirmation of life is obviously the will to be distinctive, individual. Living, whether it be in strength or weakness, in pleasure or pain, means living one’s own life. It means following one’s native bent, becoming a definite personality, being a character. Discovery of the concept of individuality by Romanticism was analogous to a scientific insight. This does not count against it—why should nature be bad in this regard either?—but it counts against overestimation of the concept. That I find myself; that my one life as such becomes an experience to me; that I recognize the structural laws of my nature, which is mine alone, and that in so doing I recognize the possibilities that are given to me and also, of course, the limits that are set for me; that I try to realize these possibilities of mine and respect my limits; that I try as little to imitate or put on the intellectual face of another as I can alter what is distinctive about my physical face—all this is to live. In this sense the young especially want to live, battling for their own lives against parents and teachers, only to see later, perhaps, that really being oneself, having to be oneself as it was so fiercely desired in youth, is also a very problematic affair. For if, as we can, we want to take Goethe’s view that “personality” is “the supreme happiness of the children of earth,”12 this is not to say that the achieving of personality has in itself anything to do with the good. Even to be full of character is not as such to be good. If, however, willing to act in one’s own way is an inalienable part of the life-act as such, and if the life-act as such stands in the crisis of the divine command, then here, too, the question of good and bad can and must obviously arise. What is commanded is obviously not the individuality of life in itself. If this were so, it would mean the worship of all kinds of demons that have nothing whatever to do with our real creaturely life. What is in fact commanded—and this is something very different—is the individuality of this creaturely life of ours. As we understand our life as such, renouncing our right to ourselves, our will-to-be-ourselves becomes a relative thing compared to the only true will-to-be-himself of God. It becomes a matter of obedience instead of desire. Lack of character, lack of the courage to confess oneself, the sloth of making less of oneself than one should, the torment of making oneself other than one is—all these are threatened by the question whether there is any will to take seriously the life that one has been loaned. At the same time there is an exaggeration of character, a commitment to character in and for itself, which reminds us that we cannot take ourselves seriously with final seriousness; that the picture we see in the mirror, for all the interest we may have in what it shows, primarily and finally deserves only friendly-serious irony and not the fervor that Schleiermacher showed for it in his Monologues;13 that real personalities are usually much less concerned about themselves that they should be according to the rules for the cultivation of personality. Individuality is obedience. This is its necessity and it is also its limit. The same may be said of the individuality of nations and families and voluntary societies. It is wholly right that the positive meaning of the command should be in force in relation to them too. Societies have by creation a certain nature which they must realize and not deny. But the fact that this nature is by creation constitutes also its limit. It denotes the glory of the Creator, not the creature. There is no point in trying to speak final words here, for we cannot do so. In the language of modern advertising a car can be a “thoroughbred.” The leaf on a tree is “distinctive”—the favorite word of Romanticism. And if we are inclined to speak solemnly of the special nature of our own nation or federation we have to remember that particularity is not a content but a form which is filled with good and bad, and that we are somewhere in the middle between humility and loyalty or indolence and arrogance, not as owners but as good or bad stewards of our particularity—in a middle which concretely can mean either its assertion or its surrender. For in this regard, too, God as the Lord of life can at any moment, with the same creative power and wisdom, cause us to live or to die. Here, too, to be ready for both is what is always required by his command.
In conclusion we return to the extensive affirmation of life when we understand the will to live as a will for power. Asserting our creaturely life takes place under demands and restrictions that are not primarily under our own control. For my creaturely life does not exhaust God’s creation. It
