Redeeming Words: Language and the Promise of Happiness in the Stories of Döblin and Sebald

6. Paradise in Words: The Promise of Happiness

6 Paradise in Words The Promise of Happiness The Messiah will be the last—and first—philosopher of language. —Gershom Scholem, Diaries1 Biberkopf seeks happiness; he seeks it in a decent, “anständig” life, renouncing his old ways—violence, brutality, crime. For him, the promise of happiness is not the promise of a world of universal justice, peace, and human dignity, but simply the promise of material satisfactions, the rewards he believes are due him for avoiding his old, brutal dispositions. In his Critique of Practical Reason, Kant discusses the promise of happiness in relation to the moral life: Happiness is the condition of a rational being in the world, in whose whole existence everything goes according to wish and will. It thus rests on the harmony of nature with his entire end and with the essential determining ground of his will. But the moral law commands as a law of freedom through motives wholly independent of nature and of its harmony with our faculty of desires (as incentives). Still, the acting rational being in the world is not at the same time the cause of the world and of nature itself. Hence there is not the slightest ground in the moral law for a necessary connection between the morality and the proportionate happiness of a being which belongs to the world [. . .]. Not being nature’s cause, his will cannot by its own strength bring nature, as it touches on his happiness, into complete harmony with his practical principles. Nevertheless , in the practical task of pure reason, i.e., in the necessary 77 78 / REDEEMING WORDS endeavour after the highest good, such a connection is postulated as necessary: we should seek to further the highest good, which must therefore be at least possible.2 To live a life of virtue, one must neither make one’s happiness as such the end of one’s actions nor expect that a lifetime of virtuous actions will necessarily be rewarded with material happiness. But, says Kant, we need to believe that, in a life of virtue, happiness is at least possible. The moral law, he argues, commands us to make the highest possible good in the world the final object of all our conduct. This I cannot hope to effect except through the agreement of my will with that of a holy and beneficent Author of the world. And although my own happiness is included in the concept of the highest good as a whole wherein the greatest happiness is thought of as connected in exact proportion to the greatest degree of moral perfection possible to creatures, still it is not happiness but the moral law (which, in fact, sternly places restricting conditions upon my boundless longing for happiness) which is proved to be the ground determining the will to further the highest good.3 Therefore, morality is not about “how to make ourselves happy, but [about] how we are to become worthy of happiness.” But this analysis implies, for Kant, that— Only if religion is added to it [the doctrine of morality] can the hope arise of someday participating in happiness in proportion as we endeavoured not to be unworthy of it.4 A virtuous life must be its own reward, since there can be no guarantee, no promise of happiness. However, happiness in the conduct of an ethical life must at least be a possibility. Even so, the restoration of Paradise here on earth could only be an extremely doubtful postulate. In any case, though, Paradise on earth, a new humanity, is not the symbol of happiness on Franz’s mind. His thoughts never venture beyond his own needs; others exist for him only in relation to those needs. Does he think himself “worthy” of happiness? The measure by which he judges that is a questionable sense of worthiness and justice. The second chapter of Berlin Alexanderplatz is prefaced by an evocation of the biblical Paradise, promise of happiness still to come: PARADISE IN WORDS / 79 Once upon a time there lived in Paradise [Es lebten einmal im Paradies] two human beings, Adam and Eve. They had been settled there by the Lord, who had also created the beasts and plants and heaven and earth. And Paradise was the wonderful Garden of Eden. Flowers and trees were growing there, animals were playing about, and none oppressed the other. The sun rose and set, the moon did the same, there...