Aphoristic Writings, Notebook, and Letters to a Friend, by Otto ...

What also always leads to determinism is the fact that struggle is made necessary
continuously. In a particular case the decision may follow quite ethically, and man
may decide himself for the Good; yet the decision is not lasting, he must struggle
anew. There is freedom, one might say, only for the moment.
And that lies in the concept of a freedom. For what kind of a freedom would it be
which I, through a good act from some earlier time, had brought forth, caused, for all
time? It is the very pride of man that he can be free anew at every moment.
So for the future, as for the past, there is no freedom; man has no power over
them.
That is why man can also never understand himself: For he is himself a timeless
act; an act which he performs continuously, and there is no moment in which he might
not perform it, as there would have to be to understand himself. 6
Morality expresses itself thus: Act in full consciousness, that is, act so that in
every moment you are whole, your entire individuality is there. Man experiences this
individuality over the course of his life only in successive moments: that is why time
is immoral and no living person ever holy, perfect. If man once acts with the strongest
will so that all universality of his self (and of the world, for he is indeed the
microcosm) is set in the moment, then has he overcome time and become divine.
The most powerful musical motifs of the world’s music are those which attempt to
represent this breaking through time within time, this breaking forth out of time,
where such an ictus 7 falls on one note that it absorbs the remaining parts of the
melody (which represent time as a whole, individual points integrated by the I) and
thereby transcends the melody. The end of the Grail motif in Parsifal, and the
Siegfried motif, are such melodies.
There is however one act which, so to speak, resorbs the future into itself,
experiences in advance all future falling back into immorality already as guilt, no less
than all past immorality, and thereby surpasses both: a timeless positing of character,
rebirth. It is the act through which genius arises.
It is a moral demand that in every action the whole individuality of the person
should become apparent, each should be a complete overcoming of time, of the
unconscious, and of the narrowness of consciousness. Most of the time however, man
does not do what he wills, but what he has willed. Through his decisions, he always
gives himself only a certain direction, in which he then moves until the next moment
of reflection. We do not will continuously, we only will intermittently, piece by piece.
We thus save ourselves from willing: principle of the economy of the will. But the
higher man always experiences this as thoroughly immoral. Present and eternity are
connected; timeless, universal, logical reasonings have the form of the present (logic
is achieved ethics): and so also should all eternity lie in every present. We also must
6
Parsifal motif (variation), Act III, (“The hallow’d spear, I bring it back to thee”.) [Rappaport]
7
ictus n [L, lit., blow, fr. icere to strike] (1752): the recurring stress or beat in a rhythmic or metrical
series of sounds. [Trans]
2