A CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN TWO CORNERS
Everything that is objective is conceived in the individual and orig–
inally belongs only to him. Whatever value is in question, its biography
comprises the same three phases that Napoleon went through: first, it
is nothip.g for the world, then it is a warrior and leader on the battle–
field, finally a ruler. And just like Napoleon in Ajaccio, a value is
free and true only in childhood, when born unknown it plays, grows,
and suffers in freedom, without attracting anyone's covetous glances.
"Hamlet" flowered only once in the complete fulness of its truth-within
Shakespeare, and the Sistine Madonna with Raphael. Then the world
draws these flowering values into its everyday battles. In the world no
one needs their fulness. The world has felt in the value the original force
with which its creator endowed it, and wants to exploit this force for its
own needs; its relation to the value is dictated by greed, and greed is
always specific. Therefore, the value always becomes differentiated
when it is in general use, it disintegrates into particular forces, special
meanings which do not contain its fulness and therefore, its essence.
Just as men need an oak not in its natural state, but sawed up in
parts, so they cherish a value only in the fragmentation of its essence, as a
multiple utility. Finally this utility becomes a generally accepted value,
and the value receives the royal crown. The crowned value is cold and
cruel, and in the course of years it completely petrifies, turns into a fetish.
Its features no longer show even a trace of that free and open energy
which its face once breathed. It has served so many passions, high and
low! One wanted a bucket, another a rainfall, and it satisfied everyone,
confirming each in his false, subjective truth. Now it autocratically dic–
tates its laws to the world, heedless of individual prayers. What was
alive and individual, immersed in, and fed on, one man's blood, now be–
comes an idol, which demands that living people, similar to what it
itself was when it came into the world, be sacrificed to it. Napoleon as
emperor and a painting enthroned in a museum are equally despotic.
In addition to fetish values, concrete and tangible, there are vampire
values, the so-called abstract values, something like legal persons in the
realm of values. They are fleshless and invisible; they are formed by
means of abstraction from concrete values, because the law of cohesion
operates in the spiritual as well as in the physical world, where the
vapors from the earthly reservoirs gather into clouds. By way of ab–
straction from many Hamlets and Sistine Madonnas there arose a gene–
ral value-Art; and in the same manner all the rest of them were
born-Property and Morality, the State, the Nation, the Church, Reli–
gion, Culture, and many, many others-all of them from the emanations
of the best blood of the most ardent human hearts. And each of them
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