Of Freedom and God

2/2014/LII/138

Društvo slovenskih pisateljev, Slovenski center PEN, Društvo slovenskih književnih prevajalcev

The Association of Slovenian Writers, The Slovenian PEN Centre, The Slovenian Literary Translators' Association

Marjan Rožanc: Of Freedom and God. Selected Essays

Originally published as: O svobodi in Bogu. Izbrani eseji

© original: Marjan Rožanc (contact: tonca.novotny@gmail.com)

© translation: Jason Blake, Jeremi Slak and Slovene Writers’ Association, Ljubljana 2014

Published by Slovene Writers’ Association, Ljubljana

Ivo Svetina, President

Managing editors of the Litteræ Slovenicæ edition

Tina Kozin, Tanja Petrič

Managing editor for this publication

Tanja Petrič

Translation

Jason Blake, Jeremi Slak

Afterword

Andrej Inkret

Copy editor

Noah Charney

Cover photograph

Tihomir Pinter

E-Book

Available online at

http://www.biblos.si/lib/

Ljubljana 2015

This book was published with the financial support of the Slovenian Book Agency

CIP - Kataložni zapis o publikaciji

Narodna in univerzitetna knjižnica, Ljubljana

821.163.6-4(0.034.2)

ROŽANC, Marjan

Of freedom and God [Elektronski vir] : selected essays / Marjan Rožanc ; translated from Slovenian by Jason Blake and Jeremi Slak ; afterword Andrej Inkret. - El. knjiga. - Ljubljana : Društvo slovenskih pisateljev = Association des écrivains slovènes, 2015. - (Litterae Slovenicae : Slovenian literary magazine, ISSN 1318-0177 ; 2014, 2)

Prevod dela: O svobodi in bogu

ISBN 978-961-6995-02-3 (ePub)

COBISS ID 283508736

Marjan Rožanc

Of Freedom and God

Selected Essays

Translated from Slovenian by Jason Blake and Jeremi Slak

Afterword Andrej Inkret

Društvo slovenskih pisateljev

The Slovene Writers’ Association

Ljubljana, 2015 

Table of Contents

Litteræ Slovenicæ

Colophon

Marjan Rožanc: Of Freedom and God (selected Essays)

Nothingness in Slovenia

20th Century Mass

Planica

The Two Foundational Structure

Humanism

Politics and Culture

Literature

How I Wrestled with Sexuality and God, Or Søren Kierkegaard and Miguel de Unamuno

An Essay on Ideology and Slovenians, on Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky and on Russian Per­son­alist Thought

An Essay on the Other Half of Eu­rope. On Miguel de Unamuno and the Immortality of the Soul

Choosing a Calling

Perverted Catholicism

Liberalism and Slovenian Liberalism

Essence

Andrej Inkret: Afterword

About the Author

Litteræ Slovenicæ 1991-2016

Subscription Form

Landmarks

Cover

Nothingness in Slovenia

Slovenia is witnessing the rise of Nothingness. And this Nothingness is not the self-substance of some extreme activism, or a mere fashion of the intelligentsia, even if it is, of course, intellectuals who have driven it to its clearest ex­pression, and who have developed it into a sharp for­mu­lation. This Noth­ingness is of a more general nature: it has smuggled it­self into the existential mood of the majority of the popu­lation, and into all classes, where it is feeds on a va­ri­ety of sources and undergoes numerous modifications – every­where and al­ways, however, maintaining the char­ac­ter­is­tics of a fun­da­men­tal re-evaluating of humanist values.

It’s not just for a handful of intellectuals, but also for the broadest circle of consumers, that the chimerical heroes of classic novels, those rebels in the name of man and world-changers, no longer stoke any enthusiasm. On the contrary, to one and the other, they contend that the soaring passions of the human spirit are pre-doomed to collapse in the face of the world’s obstinacy, that the most fervent and convincing truths people pour into the foundations of their actions are, simply, Nothing. All of this, all this passionate zeal, is merely human narcissism that tries, against all odds, to assert itself as something divine but that, in the end, has to admit the immovable idiosyncrasy of the world, which changes the con­quering spirit into alienated forms of objectivity, freedom into ser­vi­tude, redemption into defeat, eternal life into death…

In Slovenia, not even the omnipotent powers that be are spared this bitter knowledge – especially not them, since they, more than anyone else, encounter, day after day, the stubborn arbitrariness of the world. Since precisely those who have at their disposal unlimited avenues of action see their efforts to be most tangibly revealed as futile struggle, regardless of whether or not they admit it before the public. Nothingness, in short, spreads with unsuccessful social praxis from the head down, and vice versa.

The sentiment belongs to workers and students alike who, faced with the potent nature of the single recognized and per­mitted humanistic spirit, defiantly cling to defeats, and laud them as the sole human truth. It belongs to the middle class who try, under the guise of worldly wisdom, to assert Noth­ingness as a social norm. This most numerous class, which is still being shaped and should express, in the logic of history, a youthful audacity, loftily renounces any sort of their own ideals. Buried from head to foot in a tangible reality, they agree, from the very outset, to an alliance with bureaucracy and to the separation of powers. And this class’s wisdom – as eve­ry­thing indicates – is becoming, with its ongoing development, increasingly binding for all.

Under the pressure of this nihilistic mood, the eternal spark that perhaps still smoulders in some shamefully hushed and reserved, the religious attitude towards man and society is naïve, and the previous self-confidence already nipped in the bud. Nothingness is so general and all-pervasive that even true believers, who have not yet renounced harmony with the world or eternal life, carry out their religious duties, quietly and tim­idly. Faith still has its place in some intimate corner, but re­al­is­tic experience and life wisdom, even to those people, affirm that any sort of lofty aim is no longer worth raising a finger for. In this seemingly heroic wisdom and certainty, where people live without any true hope, without fire for acts of re­demption, the number of the despairing and suicidal is on the rise.

From this we could, in the first instance, surmise an extra­ordinary reality. At first glance, everything indicates that, in Slovenia, there no longer exists only a one-sided ideo­logical truth of the world but that, finally, another aspect of re­ality is now gaining ground, forgotten in the activist’s ea­gerness: the world itself. This antipode of man himself, which we, in our apparent freedom, are ready to forget at any moment, simply imposed itself on people through bitter ex­pe­rience and, supposedly, now lives in reasonable harmony with their freedom. And yet this conclusion is not quite true. In many ways, it is already denounced by the fact of the rapidly increasing sui­cidal tendencies.

Nothingness in Slovenia is not the truth of the world which, in its harmoniousness, is almost inhumane, and accessible to man only as the recognition of a shortage of breath. Noth­ingness in Slovenia has hypertrophied. A somewhat closer look convinces us that this hypertrophy has ideological bases, that Nothingness is hypertrophied humanistic enthusiasm, hyper­tro­phied Everything, hypertrophied Man and his freedom in relation to the world. At the same time, this view leads us to the historical roots of Slovenian Nothingness. Certainly, there is no other people that, in a concrete historical moment, would pursue such a total resolution of their problems, and to whom their own will, at a given moment, would mean so much, and reality so little, as has been exhibited by the Slovenian nation, during its liberation struggle and revolution.

This was not just an idealized mirage of social equality and spiritual freedom that was to illuminate all classes. It was a mirage of complete and definitive transparency among the people, a new life as a single individual entity. At the same time, when the simplest souls were still getting to know them­selves as something separate, as something torn from the world and its people, and were suffering in their loneliness and limi­tations, they already bore within themselves the harmonious existence of everything within everything. The final result of their suffering was to be crowned with the realization of tor­tured individuals in a new physical and spiritual centre, one in which the individual will develop to its fullest. In short, this was to be the realization of Man, with his own powers working for his own ends. Man, who would henceforth replace God himself. And the result of this elation?

The result is Nothingness! And Nothingness in a position when, to our crushing disappointment, it is impossible to find any tangible guilty party, when we enumerate the sins of po­litical leaders, their indulgence or negligence for naught, when the only truth is that our failure was, in fact, an altogether human action, in which everyone involved selflessly gave their last ounce of strength. Nothingness, in a position when it is sim­ply necessary to admit that such is the very nature of the world, as soon as we allow it to express itself fully. At the end of this humanistic legend, the sole thing that expressed itself was reality, which we, in our enthusiasm, overlooked: the sim­ple truth that man cannot realise himself as God. And now, in the wake of this thorough attempt to abolish God in our own name, it is painfully obvious that only a thin veneer of the sacred ­remains in Slovenia.

And yet this defeat still does not reveal the true content of Slovenian Nothingness. This remains, in some sense, natural Nothingness, the antipode of Everything, exaggerated and oversensitive in its self-pity merely to the degree in which our self-confidence was once exaggerated. No matter how in­ti­mately the defeat of humanism affects and humiliates us, that reflection of the past cannot encompass and account for the entire extent of Slovenian Nothingness. The true explanation for it lies in the present, in the false extension of the previous illusion, in the advocacy of an idea whose reality has long been revealed as a lie, and next to which Nothingness – Noth­ingness as the other side of its reality – simply must not be allowed to exist.

Even today, blind trust in the omnipotence of the human spirit and human aspirations is, in Slovenia, an almost-leg­is­lated convention with which the ruling class tries to repel its own Nothingness and protect itself from reality. Criticism of this spirit may be permitted but, as it has already passed into the vernacular, it must be constructive, must perpetuate in­tact the illusion of Man-God and perpetuate, in spite of un­am­biguous historical experiences, the same illusion and the same arrogance.

The more clearly the common man realises that people do not shape the world according to their wishes, but con­stantly repair what the world does unto us, the less this tan­gi­ble clarity asserts itself as truth! It is persecuted as a con­spira­torial assassination against a common God. The more the world affirms its self-reliance, the more our plans degenerate into something completely unlike our intentions; the more this process is ascribed to a world which has only mo­men­tarily slipped from our hands, and which we will, by means of more reasonable reason, yet master and subdue, through more determined interventions and more radical social changes.

Only in the violence of Man-God is the true content of Slovenian Nothingness finally revealed. Slovenian Noth­ingness is no ordinary Nothingness. Slovenian Nothingness is a counter-programme that is supposed to, and simply must, assert itself as a truth opposite to illusion. Already in its seed a contradictory truth of those classes who want to develop their own religious spirit, in addition to the commanded con­vention, but who are prevented from doing so. And herein lies its hypertrophy: in its unreasonable extent and its suicidal power. The disaster is all the greater because this counter-pro­gramme of Nothingness is, once again, a programme just as arbitrary, just as much an imagined matter of the zealous spirit, as the illusion of omnipotence.

Man-God has in it an equal opponent. Nothingness is the new, inverted violence of human arbitrariness that wants to resist the official conventions and refers to a more real, a more humble truth about man and the world, whereby it remains only an activist reacting to a partial reality. Just as the first side with all the available means absolutizes man and his free­dom and, with that, forgets about the self-reliance of the world, the other side absolutizes the self-reliance of the world, and forgets about man and his freedom. And so, even Noth­ingness is just a single-sided truth about man and the world, which moves inside unsustainable boundaries and, in Slovenia, has a role no more fortunate than that of Man-God.

From the confrontational relationship it would, according to the logic of dialectics, be reasonable to expect a terminal conflict, a new Reality. The division of spirits, acute tension on both sides, an intolerable contradiction which is often con­di­tioned even by material position and influence in society – all this dictates thought to conflict, to overcoming the given status quo, to a renewed effort towards realization.

And yet the Nothingness, which is asserting itself on all sides, is not showing excessive interest in any sort of tran­scendence, and Everything, as well, is seen as self-satisfied, safe and per­missive – as if both aspects, in spite of their fer­vent con­viction, froze in the realization that the world is, not­with­standing eve­ry­thing, indeed unchangeable, and God in­deed un­attainable, as if the audacity, which otherwise in­stantly splits the har­mo­nious world into spirit and matter, into true Noth­ingness and true Everything were, in light of all the bitter experiences, mere foolishness.

This wisdom, of course, cannot be harmonised with passion, with the agony of unfulfilled desire and the increasing prevalence of suicide – or with anything at all, since it is en­tirely obvious that the people of Slovenia do not explore their lives, but simply live them, a life filled with metaphysical di­chotomy, and a wealth of burned out sacral values. Tran­scending the world – they would say – remains, for them, an ­unconditional ultimatum, present in each of their acts, even when they wish to remain in a passive relationship and aim for the most prac­tical objectives. Speaking in favour of meta­physics is, not least, also the co-existence of two superfluous concepts that are aggressively opposed and entirely ideological in char­ac­ter, while also speaking in its favour is the hypertrophy of Noth­ingness…

And yet nothing moves. Intellectuals – the initiators of Nothingness as a programme – are content with the mini­mum possibility of action that is frugally awarded by the au­thorities, and feel no need for autonomy, while the workers are no longer hell-bent on moving mountains, and try only to reap as much as possible from the reality at hand. The middle class, the largest and most powerful class, is engaged in a rabid consumerist spree within this spiritual tension, and doesn’t feel the slightest need to declare its own Idea, much less alle­giance, to one side or the other — it is primarily interested in manipulating the world as it is. Thus, the middle class has become stuck between Nothingness and Everything as an in­al­ienable reality. And through it, as well as in its mind, Noth­ingness and Everything merely exchange jealous, disdainful glances. And so the Slovenian world remains divided into two entrenched half-truths, which live side-by-side and decay to­gether, in spite of their apparent belligerence, self-satisfied.

With that, the situation in Slovenia reveals to us a more significant truth about the modern world, and about man in general – the failure of humanism and the plight of tran­scendence. Today’s Nothingness and Everything means it is im­possi­ble to be mobile, least of all upwardly. The moment man places himself in a constructive relationship with the world and wants, instead of God, to assert himself, the last remnants of the sacred become rotten to him and every act in the name of humanity is blocked. Man can no longer be Man, when God is no longer God. As soon as he arbitrarily empties the heavens, in which he once conceptualised all his harmonies, his actions can no longer be made sense of. He spins in a vicious circle of his own decaying, in which his tragic sense of the fallen hero is just an extension of narcissism.

(Most, Trieste, 4/1967, n. 13-14)

20th Century Mass

I

To write about football with the sobriety with which I plan to devote myself to it here, to examine football not as a Sun­day spectacle or some opiate, but as a human reality which is no less real than our other realities – that is, of course, still a some­what sacrilegious undertaking. We must begin by jus­ti­fying such an approach to football, and fighting for the right to do so, which is by no means easy.

For what is football, if not a Sunday escape? After all, it is not indispensable to any of our lives. This first reproach is already rather difficult to reject, unless we evoke the fact that we simply play or watch Sunday afternoon football; that we, therefore, cannot just think it away. But that won’t really con­vince anybody that football is necessary to our existence. It is true that this ambiguity does not stem from football alone, but in equal part from the reproach itself, which contains the presupposition that our world is divided into serious and unserious areas, into the spiritual and the physical, where the existence of the physical is presumed to be above everything else. This reproach tells us that football does not produce any