Of Responsibility

A: Why do you go around with such cold and eternal eyes? Why do you feel that you have such a heavy responsibility for the world?
B: Because I do.
A: Why?
B: Now you’re asking me why I have this responsibility? Well, that involves a whole–
A: No, I am asking you why you FEEL that you have this responsibility. If I were just asking why you have the responsibility, I would be assuming that you have it. Let me make myself clear: for me it is doubtful that you have this responsibility in the first place. Responsibility is like witchcraft and like guilt, real for a time, but only because of certain obsessions of ours, but then seen through and as unreal after a good while, after we have struggled with them awhile. I want to know what it is that gives you this feeling of responsibility, because I don’t think it is necessary.
B: I think you would be getting rid of a lot more in ridding yourself of the feeling of responsibility than you realize. Responsibility is tied to responding, being able to respond or having to respond. In German, it is tied to answering, being able to answer or having to answer. Look at all of our questions and answers now, our sayings and the responses to our sayings now…. What would we do with them if we felt we lived in the world without…responsibility?
A: Not much, or not anything really. It would be what it is, a play of expressions and counter-expressions, a play of posings and counter-posings, a play of riddles altogether, but without a player, and without the weight of the world and the viciousness of the world being put on this player. I think that feelings of responsibility are like and tied to feels of guilt and shame. Human beings have felt some wild pride in bearing this weight for so long, that the guilt and the shame have become part and parcel of the pride. We now live such that we cannot imagine life and the world without weight, as it gives us ourselves weight and importance among all the flitting things about us. The feeling, feeling guilt or shame or responsibility, reinforces and fulfills the desire that we mean something amid all the meaninglessness of things.
B: Even if the play is all insane frivolity, I do not see how beings like us, or any beings really, can be a part of the play without responding to it somehow. It can all be mirages and mirrors and dreamscapes as far as I’m concerned, and it would still be necessary to respond to it somehow. That is, if the being is present for the happening, if the being is to somehow be a part of the happening. You are seeing responsibility as something that we have given ourselves, something we are cultivating ourselves. Hence the tie to guilt and shame–although I am not quite sure whether these too might not be bestowed upon us, part of our endowment, as it were, a gift. I see it differently, I see responsibility as something given to us and at the same time something that gives us new passageways through and viewpoints of this life. When we respond to something, we are part of the making of new ways not only for us to respond to what comes next, but for all beings in their own responses to the future. Responses now open and shape further responses. It goes on and on in this way–
A: I gather. And I think I see: that freedom, or responsibility, can be different from something we have. Rather it is something we are. Something inescapable no matter how paradoxical. Something dreadful, but also the only hope we have at the leaving of dread. It is like we are responding always to the question posed to us, the question that we ourselves also are.
B: Exactly. Think of the man who never saw the edge of the town, but dreamed that he had. He told stories of the edge, even of what was past the edge, to all of his neighbors for decades, so that even the children in the town believed his stories and described the edge of the town in a way similar to him. These stories and descriptions then passed from generation to generation, and the townspeople even began to build their homes and their roads based on them. The world was transformed without their knowing it, notwithstanding the lasting few in the town who claimed to draw real and accurate maps of the town and its surroundings, who claimed to know the real rim of the world. Now these two factions, the one larger the one smaller, bicker on endlessly about the shape of things.