“The morality of our time, no matter what else may be said about it, is the morality of achievement. Five more or less fraudulent bankruptcies are good so long as the fifth one is followed by a time of blessings and beneficence. Success can make anything be forgotten. When you reach the point where you fund elections and buy paintings, you have also acquired the indulgence of the State. There are unwritten rules: If someone gives money to the Church, to charities, and to political parties, it need not be more than a tenth of what he would have to spend if he came up with the idea of proving his goodwill by patronizing the arts. Also, some limits are still imposed on success: one cannot yet achieve every end by every means: some principles of Crown, Aristocracy, and Society still exert a certain retarding influence on the “parvenu.” The State, on the other hand, avows, with respect to its own suprapersonal person, the most naked commitment to the principle that one may rob, murder, and cheat so long as the result is power, civilization, and glory. Of course I am not saying that all this is acknowledged in theory as well; on the contrary, theoretically it is all quite murky. But what I just told you sums up the most ordinary facts. Moral reasoning is, in this context, just one more means to an end, a weapon one uses in pretty much the same way as a lie. That is what the world made by men looks like, and I would want to be a woman if only—women did not love men!

“What is considered good nowadays is anything that gives us the illusion that it will get us somewhere: but this conviction is precisely what you called the “flying man without remorse,” and what I said is a problem that can’t be solved because we lack a method. As a scientifically educated person, I feel in every situation that my knowledge is incomplete and a guideline at best, and that maybe tomorrow I will already possess new experience that will allow me to think differently than today; on the other hand, even a person wholly in the grip of emotion, a “man in ascent,” as you imagined him, will experience every one of his acts as a step that is raising him up to the next one. So there is something in our minds and in our souls, a “morality of the next step,” but is this merely the morality of the five bankruptcies, does the entrepreneurial morality of our time reach that far into the interior life, or is this seeming correspondence an illusion, or is the careerist’s morality a miscarriage—grotesquely disfigured and born before its time—of more profound possibilities? At the moment I wouldn’t be able to give you an answer!”

The short breathing space Ulrich admitted into his exposition was entirely rhetorical, for he intended to develop his views still further. But Agathe, who so far had been listening with the alert impassivity that was sometimes characteristic of her, gave the conversation an unplanned direction with the simple remark that this answer was of no interest to her, because all she wanted to know was Ulrich’s position, and she was incapable of taking in all the different possible ways of thinking. “But if you should demand of me that I accomplish something in any way whatsoever, I would rather not have any morality at all,” she added.