A Confession

: I feared life, desired to escape from it, yet still hoped something of it.

We have de­cided that the mas­ter is stu­pid, or does not ex­ist, and that we are wise, only we feel that we are quite use­less and that we must some­how do away with ourselves.

has first to define faith and then God, and not define faith through God); it not only agree­ment with what has been told one (as faith is most usu­ally sup­posed to be), but faith is a know­ledge of the mean­ing of hu­man life in con­sequence of which man does not des­troy him­self but lives. Faith is the strength of life. If a man lives he be­lieves in some­thing. If he did not be­lieve that one must live for some­thing, he would not live. If he does not see and re­cog­nize the il­lus­ory nature of the fi­nite, he be­lieves in the fi­nite; if he un­der­stands the il­lus­ory nature of the fi­nite, he must be­lieve in the in­fin­ite. Without faith he can­not live.

Evidently I might learn much, but noth­ing of what I needed.

Whatever the faith may be, and whatever an­swers it may give, and to whom­so­ever it gives them, every such an­swer gives to the fi­nite ex­ist­ence of man an in­fin­ite mean­ing, a mean­ing not des­troyed by suf­fer­ings, depriva­tions, or death. This means that only in faith can we find for life a mean­ing and a pos­sib­il­ity. What, then, is this faith? And I un­der­stood that faith is not merely “the evid­ence of things not seen,” etc., and is not a rev­el­a­tion (that defines only one of the in­dic­a­tions of faith, is not the re­la­tion of man to God (one

“But what if there is some­thing I do not yet know? Ignor­ance be­haves just in that way. Ignor­ance al­ways says just what I am say­ing. When it does not know some­thing, it says that what it does not know is stu­pid. Indeed, it ap­pears that there is a whole hu­man­ity that lived and lives as if it un­der­stood the mean­ing of its life, for without un­der­stand­ing it could not live; but I say that all this life is sense­less and that I can­not live.

I asked: “What is the mean­ing of my life, bey­ond time, cause, and space?” And I replied to quite an­other ques­tion: “What is the mean­ing of my life within time, cause, and space?” With the res­ult that, after long ef­forts of thought, the an­swer I reached was: “None.”

In my reas­on­ings I con­stantly com­pared (nor could I do oth­er­wise) the fi­nite with the fi­nite, and the in­fin­ite with the in­fin­ite; but for that reason I reached the in­ev­it­able res­ult: force is force, mat­ter is mat­ter, will is will, the in­fin­ite is the in­fin­ite, noth­ing is noth­ing—and that was all that could res­ult.

The fourth way out is that of weak­ness. It con­sists in see­ing the truth of the situ­ation and yet cling­ing to life, know­ing in ad­vance that noth­ing can come of it. People of this kind know that death is bet­ter than life, but not hav­ing the strength to act ra­tion­ally—to end the de­cep­tion quickly and kill them­selves—they seem to wait for some­thing. This is the es­cape of weak­ness, for if I know what is best and it is within my power, why not yield to what is best? … I found my­self in that cat­egory.

It was like this: I, my reason, have ac­know­ledged that life is sense­less. If there is noth­ing higher than reason (and there is not: noth­ing can prove that there is), then reason is the cre­ator of life for me. If reason did not ex­ist there would be for me no life. How can reason deny life when it is the cre­ator of life? Or to put it the other way: were there no life, my reason would not ex­ist; there­fore reason is life’s son. Life is all. Reason is its fruit yet reason re­jects life it­self! I felt that there was some­thing wrong here.

It is no good de­ceiv­ing one­self. It is all—van­ity! Happy is he who has not been born: death is bet­ter than life, and one must free one­self from life.