IV. Fate

IV. Fate.IV. Schicksal.

There are probably times for every person that let the belief germinate in him that his experiences are guided by a mysterious power; that behind the outward connections of the events playing out around him and with him there stand invisible, far more significant relations which, if one could behold them, would reveal the real sense of what happens. In such cases one may say that everything is as if bewitched; or one believes one is experiencing a dispensation of heaven, feeling the requiting hand of justice, the finger of God. Important and unimportant occurrences put on a face, as if there were a secret understanding among them all, or better: as if they were the tools and means of expression of a power of fate that knew how to use them, with supernaturally sure hand, for purposes that are dark to us, good or evil. One may then also have the feeling that the things and beings of the outer world, and all the processes that take place in them, are only symbols of something ungraspable; mere copies of a reality that would be far deeper than what we usually call by that name. “Deeper”? Or should I say “higher”? It does not matter, for all these spatial concepts are equally meaningless before the abyss into which the question of the unsearchable sets us.

Especially in looking back over a larger stretch of our earthly way, events that at first looked like blind hazard gain a meaning that fits them exactly into the web of those guiding ideas which we finally believe to be at work as the regents of fate. This shows itself even in small things. Taken on the large scale, however, there arises the appearance of an “apparent deliberateness in the fate of the individual,” which Schopenhauer treated in one of the finest pieces of his Parerga and Paralipomena.^†XVII Far more often than in the turns in the course of experience brought about from outside, the good observer of himself will be struck by the unified trait in those occurrences which, though withdrawn from conscious intention, are brought about from within. In other words: much of what one would at first be inclined to take as outward powers (hindrances or furtherances) goes back in truth, just as we have come to know well enough on the small scale, to a refined influence of hidden tendencies of our soul. This part of our fate (I do not know whether as a rule it is the larger or the smaller part) could be characterized by the verse from Wallenstein: