It was confusion worse confounded.
“The Object,” cried one, the other: “The Ego!” “Art” and “critique” were bandied back and forth, then once more “nature” and “soul,” and as to which was the nobler, and concerning the “aristocratic problem.” But there was no order nor clarity, not even of a dualistic and militant kind. Things went not only by contraries, but also all higgledy-piggledy. The disputant not only contradicted each other, they contradicted themselves. How often had Settembrini not spent his oratory in praise of criticism, as being the aristocratic principle? Yet now it was for its opposite, for “art,” that he made the same claim. How often had Naphta not stood for instinct, what time Settembrini called nature a blind force, mere “factum et fatum,” before which reason and human pride must never abdicate! But here now was Naphta on the side of the soul and disease, wherein alone true nobility and humanity resided, while Settembrini flung himself into advocacy of nature and her noble sanity, regardless of his inconsistency on the score of emancipation from her. The “Object” and the “Ego” were no less involved in confusion—yes, and here the confusion, moreover, remained constant, was the most literal and incorrigible; so that nobody any longer knew who was the devout and who the freethinker. Naphta sharply forbade Settembrini to call himself an individualist, for so long as he denied the antithesis between God and nature, saw in the problem of man’s inward conflict no more than the struggle between individual and collective interest, and was vowed to a materialistic and bourgeois ethic, in which life became an end in itself, limited to utilitarian aims, and the moral law subserved the interest of the State. He, Naphta, was well aware that man’s inner conflict based upon the antagonism between the sensible and the supra-sensible; it was he, not Settembrini, who represented the true, the mystical individualism. He, not Settembrini, was in reality the freethinker, the man who looked for guidance within himself. Hans Castorp reflected that if that were true, then what about the “anonymous and communal”—not to mention any other contradiction? And what about those striking comments he had made to Father Unterpertinger on the subject of Hegel’s Catholicism, and the affinity between Catholicism and politics, and the category of the objective which they together comprised? Had not statecraft and education always been the special province of the Society to which Naphta belonged? And what an education! Herr Settembrini himself was certainly a zealous pedagogue, zealous to the point of tedium; but he could simply not compete with Naphta in the matter of ascetic, self-mortifying objectivity. Absolute authority, iron discipline, coercion, submission, the Terror! All that might have its own value, but it paid scant homage to the individual and the dignity of his critical faculty. It was the army regulations of the Prussian Frederick, the Exercise-book of the Spanish Loyola all over again; it was rigid, it was devout, to the very marrow. But one question remained to be asked: how had Naphta arrived at this savage absolutism, he who, by his own account, believed not at all in pure knowledge or unfettered research, in other words not in truth, the objective, scientific truth, to strive after which was for Ludovico Settembrini the highest law of human morality. Here was the object of his rigid devotion, whereas Naphta with reprehensible looseness referred truth back to mankind itself, and declared that that was truth which advantaged man. Wasn’t it the most utter bourgeoisiedom, the sheerest utilitarian Philistinism, to make truth depend on the interest of mankind? It certainly could not be considered strict objectivity, there was much more freethinking and subjectivity about it than Leo Naphta would admit—it was, indeed, quite as much politics as Herr Settembrini’s didactic phrase: “Freedom is the law of love of one’s kind.” That, obviously, was to make freedom, as Naphta made truth, depend upon man, and thus was more orthodox than liberal. But here again were distinctions that tended to disappear in the process of definition.
Ah, this Settembrini—it was not for nothing he was a man of letters, son of a politician and grandson of a humanist! He had lofty ideas about emancipation and criticism—and chirruped to the girls in the street. On the other hand, knife-edged little Naphta was bound by the strictest sort of vows; yet in thought he was almost a libertine, whereas the other was a very fool of virtue, in a manner of speaking. Herr Settembrini was afraid of “Absolute Spirit,” and would like to see it everywhere wedded to democratic progress; he was simply outraged at the religious licence of his militant opponent, which would jumble up together God and the Devil, sanctification and bad behaviour, genius and disease, and which knew no standards of value, no rational judgment, no exercise of the will. But who then was the orthodox, who the freethinker? Where lay the true position, the true state of man? Should he descend into the all-consuming all-equalizing chaos, that ascetic-libertine state; or should he take his stand on the “Critical-Subjective,” where empty bombast and a bourgeois strictness of morals contradicted each other? Ah, the principles and points of view constantly did that; it became so hard for Hans Castorp’s civilian responsibility to distinguish between opposed positions, or even to keep the premises apart from each other and clear in his mind, that the temptation grew well-nigh irresistible to plunge head foremost into Naphta’s “morally chaotic All.”
