If the demand for ties is nothing more than a demand for an artificial order in obedience to authority and written law, the real task is being evaded, the [result] being that the unconditioned becomes impossible and freedom is paralysed. Man, therefore, is faced by two alternatives. Either he must seek to calm his self-forgetful life by a return to authoritative forms which can sanctify the apparatus for supplying the elementary needs of human life; or else, as an individual, he must grasp the very foundations by building upon which an exclusive unconditioned always determines life. […]
Historical Immersion. He only who freely enters into ties is thereby endowed with the power of revolting despairingly against himself. The unfulfillable and yet only task left for contemporary man as man, has been, in the face of Nothingness, to find the true path at his own risk, the path on which life will once more become a whole, notwithstanding all its dispersal in the restlessness of prevailing commotions. As in the days of the mythical heroes of antiquity, everything seems thrust back upon the individual.
But what is requisite is that a man, in conjunction with other men, should merge himself in the world as a historically concrete entity, so that, amid the universal homelessness, he may win for himself a new home. His remoteness from the world sets him free to immerse his being. This remoteness is not achievable by an intellectualist abstraction, but only through a simultaneous getting into touch with all reality. The immersion is not a visible act of one who plumes himself on it, but is effected in a tranquil unconditionedness. Remoteness from the world gives an inward distinction; but immersion, on the other hand, awakens all that is human in selfhood. The former demands self-discipline; but the latter is love.