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!'ARTISAN Rl!YIEW
stroy also the contradiction between his individual life and an alien
society. But this new integration is not contained within the original
life of the individual; it is something on a higher plane. There is
im–
plied in it an absolute supremacy with respect both to ability and
rights; and it is personified by people quite removed from "the herd."
All men are not created free and equal, is the credo of this philosophy.
As Ramon Fernandez said, describing the value-producing "senti–
ment" which raised the individual to the order of the Elite: "Nothing
material guarantees it, but it is able to guarantee itself by that I know
not what which is eternal and which appears in its slightest testi–
monies: and one may say that the true sentiment, whatever it may
be, imprints the seal of justice upon the most terrible actions."
After the ironical catharsis of the common man's feelings and
duties, after the more or less fierce balloting for or against personal
and impersonal, consciousness and dream, asceticism and self-indul–
gence, there emerges a higher justice and terrible actions-there
emerges something eternal, a
je ne sais quoi,
the Superman.
If
Mynheer Peeperkorn escapes being trapped, like Castorp,
Aschenbach, Settembrini, Naphta, Consul Tienappel, His Royal
Highness, and the rest, in the humiliating dual-dilemma of life and
death it is because he is a creature of this different order.
"But the result is what we see, the dynamic effect-he puts
us
in his pocket. We've only one word for that-personality. We use it
in another, more regular sense too, in which we are all personalities–
morally, legally, and otherwise. But that is not the sense in which I
am using it now. I am speaking of the mystery of personality, some–
thing above either cleverness or stupidity, and something we all have
to take into account: partly to try to understand it; but partly, where
that is not possible, to be edified by it. You are all for values; but
isn't personality a value too? It seems so to me, more so than either
cleverness or stupidity, it seems positive and absolute, like life-in
short, something quite worth while, and calculated to make us trouble
about it."
There are, then, two orders of humanity, one of .which
is
entirely intelligible to the analytics of the rational-emotional anti–
thesis, while the other is a mysterious absolute, something rare and
powerful in life.
Peeperkorn might seem to belong to the "life-side" of the earlier
dualism. He is perhaps more Dionysian that Apollonian, more ob–
viously a representative of will and intuition than of reason or re–
straint. · But he is on a higher level of passion and wilfulness than
Castorp or Aschenbach in their limp love-states. In him energy has
become an affirmative good; it is no longer disease and dying. In
contrast with the democratic mediocrities, whose individualism Mann
