Every truth
of a time is its fixed idea, and, if people later found another truth, this
always happened only because they sought for another; they only reformed the
folly and put a modern dress on it. For they did want -- who would dare doubt
their justification for this? -- they wanted to be "inspired by an idea."
They wanted to be dominated -- possessed, by a thought! The most modern ruler
of this kind is "our essence," or "man."
For all free criticism a thought was the criterion;
for own criticism I am, I the unspeakable, and so not the merely thought-of;
for what is merely thought of is always speakable, because word and thought
coincide. That is true which is mine, untrue that whose own I am; true, e. g.
the union; untrue, the State and society. "Free and true" criticism
takes care for the consistent dominion of a thought, an idea, a spirit; "own"
criticism, for nothing butmy self-enjoyment. But in this the latter is in fact
-- and we will not spare it this "ignominy"! -- like the bestial criticism
of instinct. I, like the criticizing beast, am concerned only for myself, not
"for the cause." I am the criterion of truth, but I am not an idea,
but more than idea, e. g., unutterable. My criticism is not a "free"
criticism, not free from me, and not "servile," not in the service
of an idea, but an own criticism.
True or human criticism makes out only whether
something is suitable to man, to the true man; but by own criticism you ascertain
whether it is suitable to you.
Free criticism busies itself with ideas, and therefore
is always theoretical. However it may rage against ideas, it still does
not get clear of them. It pitches into the ghosts, but it can do this only as
it holds them to be ghosts. The ideas it has to do with do not fully disappear;
the morning breeze of a new day does not scare them away.
The critic may indeed come to ataraxia before
ideas, but he never gets rid of them; i.e. he will never comprehend that above
the bodily man there does not exist something higher -- to wit, liberty, his
humanity, etc. He always has a "calling" of man still left, "humanity."
And this idea of humanity remains unrealized, just because it is an "idea"
and is to remain such.
If, on the other hand, I grasp the idea as my
idea, then it is already realized, because I am its reality; its reality consists
in the fact that I, the bodily, have it.
They say, the idea of liberty realizes itself
in the history of the world. The reverse is the case; this idea is real as a
man thinks it, and it is real in the measure in which it is idea, i. e. in which
I think it or have it. It is not the idea of liberty that develops itself, but
men develop themselves, and, of course, in this self-development develop their
thinking too.
In short, the critic is not yet owner, because
he still fights with ideas as with powerful aliens -- as the Christian is not
owner of his "bad desires" so long as he has to combat them; for him
who contends against vice, vice exists.
Criticism remains stuck fast in the "freedom
of knowing," the freedom of the spirit, and the spirit gains its proper
freedom when it fills itself with the pure, true idea; this is the freedom of
thinking, which cannot be without thoughts.
Criticism smites one idea only by another,
e. g. that of privilege by that of manhood, or that of egoism by that of unselfishness.
In general, the beginning of Christianity comes
on the stage again in its critical end, egoism being combated here as there.
I am not to make myself (the individual) count, but the idea, the general.
Why, warfare of the priesthood with egoism, of
the spiritually minded with the worldly-minded, constitutes the substance of
all Christian history. In the newest criticism this war only becomes all-embracing,
fanaticism complete. Indeed, neither can it pass away till it passes thus, after
it has had its life and its rage out.
________ Whether what I think and do is Christian,
what do I care? Whether it is human, liberal, humane, whether unhuman, illiberal,
inhuman, what do I ask about that? If only it accomplishes what I want, if only
I satisfy myself in it, then overlay it with predicates as you will; it is all
alike to me.
Perhaps I too, in the very next moment, defend
myself against my former thoughts; I too am likely to change suddenly my mode
of action; but not on account of its not corresponding to Christianity, not
on account of its running counter to the eternal rights of man, not on account
of its affronting the idea of mankind, humanity, and humanitarianism, but --
because I am no longer all in it, because it no longer furnishes me any full
enjoyment, because I doubt the earlier thought or no longer please myself in
the mode of action just now practiced.
As the world as property has become a material with which
I undertake what I will, so the spirit too as property must sink down into a
material before which I no longer entertain any sacred dread. Then, firstly,
I shall shudder no more before a thought, let it appear as presumptuous and
"devilish" as it will, because, if it threatens to become too inconvenient
and unsatisfactory for me, its end lies in my power; but neither shall I recoil
from any deed because there dwells in it a spirit of godlessness, immorality,
wrongfulness. as little as St. Boniface pleased to desist, through religious
scrupulousness, from cutting down the sacred oak of the heathens. If the things
of the world have once become vain, the thoughts of the spirit must also become
vain.
No thought is sacred, for let no thought rank
as "devotions"; no feeling is sacred (no sacred feeling of friendship,
mother's feelings, etc.), no belief is sacred. They are all alienable, my alienable
property, and are annihilated, as they are created, by me.
The Christian can lose all things or objects,
the most loved persons, these "objects" of his love, without giving
up himself (i.e., in the Christian sense, his spirit, his soul! as lost. The
owner can cast from him all the thoughts that were dear to his heart and kindled
his zeal, and will likewise "gain a thousandfold again," because he,
their creator, remains.
Unconsciously and involuntarily we all strive
toward ownness, and there will hardly be one among us who has not given up a
sacred feeling, a sacred thought, a sacred belief; nay, we probably meet no
one who could not still deliver himself from one or another of his sacred thoughts.
All our contention against convictions starts from the opinion that maybe we
are capable of driving our opponent out of his entrenchments of thought. But
what I do unconsciously I half-do, and therefore after every victory over a
faith I become again the prisoner (possessed) of a faith which then takes my
whole self anew into its service, and makes me an enthusiast for reason after
I have ceased to be enthusiastic for the Bible, or an enthusiast for the idea
of humanity after I have fought long enough for that of Christianity.
Doubtless, as owner of thoughts, I shall cover
my property with my shield, just as I do not, as owner of things, willingly
let everybody help himself to them; but at the same time I shall look forward
smilingly to the outcome of the battle, smilingly lay the shield on the corpses
of my thoughts and my faith, smilingly triumph when I am beaten. That is the
very humor of the thing. Every one who has "sublimer feelings" is
able to vent his humor on the pettiness of men; but to let it play with all
"great thoughts, sublime feelings, noble inspiration, and sacred faith"
presupposes that I am the owner of all.
If religion has set up the proposition that we
are sinners altogether, I set over against it the other: we are perfect altogether!
For we are, every moment, all that we can be; and we never need be more. Since
no defect cleaves to us, sin has no meaning either. Show me a sinner in the
world still, if no one any longer needs to do what suits a superior! If I only
need do what suits myself, I am no sinner if I do not do what suits myself,
as I do not injure in myself a "holy one"; if, on the other hand,
I am to be pious, then I must do what suits God; if I am to act humanly, I must
do what suits the essence of man, the idea of mankind, etc. What religion calls
the "sinner," humanitarianism calls the "egoist." But, once
more: if I need not do what suits any other, is the "egoist," in whom
humanitarianism has borne to itself a new-fangled devil, anything more than
a piece of nonsense? The egoist, before whom the humane shudder, is a spook
as much as the devil is: he exists only as a bogie and phantasm in their brain.
If they were not unsophisticatedly drifting back and forth in the antediluvian
opposition of good and evil, to which they have given the modern names of "human"
and "egoistic," they would not have freshened up the hoary "sinner"
into an "egoist" either, and put a new patch on an old garment. But
they could not do otherwise, for they hold it for their task to be "men."
They are rid of the Good One; good is left!
We are perfect altogether, and on the whole earth
there is not one man who is a sinner! There are crazy people who imagine that
they are God the Father, God the Son, or the man in the moon, and so too the
world swarms with fools who seem to themselves to be sinners; but, as the former
are not the man in the moon, so the latter are -- not sinners. Their sin is
imaginary
Yet, it is insidiously objected, their craziness
or their possessedness is at least their sin. Their possessedness is nothing
but what they -- could achieve, the result of their development, just as Luther's
faith in the Bible was all that he was -- competent to make out. The one brings
himself into the madhouse with his development, the other brings himself therewith
into the Pantheon and to the loss of --Valhalla.
There is no sinner and no sinful egoism!
Get away from me with your "philanthropy"!
Creep in, you philanthropist, into the "dens of vice," linger awhile
in the throng of the great city: will you not everywhere find sin, and sin,
and again sin? Will you not wail over corrupt humanity, not lament at the monstrous
egoism? Will you see a rich man without finding him pitiless and "egoistic?"
Perhaps you already call yourself an atheist, but you remain true to the Christian
feeling that a camel will sooner go through a needle's eye than a rich man not
be an "un-man." How many do you see anyhow that you would not throw
into the "egoistic mass"? What, therefore, has your philanthropy [love
of man] found? Nothing but unlovable men! And where do they all come from? From
you, from your philanthropy! You brought the sinner with you in your head, therefore
you found him, therefore you inserted him everywhere. Do not call men sinners,
and they are not: you alone are the creator of sinners; you, who fancy that
you love men, are the very one to throw them into the mire of sin, the very
one to divide them into vicious and virtuous, into men and un-men, the very
one to befoul them with the slaver of your possessedness; for you love
not men, but man. But I tell you, you have never seen a sinner, you have only
-- dreamed of him.
Self-enjoyment is embittered to me by my thinking
I must serve another, by my fancying myself under obligation to him, by my holding
myself called to "self-sacrifice," "resignation," "enthusiasm."
All right: if I no longer serve any idea, any "higher essence," then
it is clear of itself that I no longer serve any man either, but -- under all
circumstances -- myself. But thus I am not merely in fact or in being, but also
for my consciousness, the -- unique.
There pertains to you more than the divine, the
human, etc.; yours pertains to you.
Look upon yourself as more powerful than they
give you out for, and you have more power; look upon yourself as more, and you
have more.
You are then not merely called to everything divine,
entitled to everything human, but owner of what is yours, i.e. of all that you
possess the force to make your own; i.e. you are appropriate and capacitated
for everything that is yours.
People have always supposed that they must give
me a destiny lying outside myself, so that at last they demanded that I should
lay claim to the human because I am -- man. This is the Christian magic circle.
Fichte's ego too is the same essence outside me, for every one is ego; and,
if only this ego has rights, then it is "the ego," it is not I. But
I am not an ego along with other egos, but the sole ego: I am
unique. Hence my wants too are unique, and my deeds; in short, everything about
me is unique. And it is only as this unique I that I take everything for my
own, as I set myself to work, and develop myself, only as this. I do not develop
men, nor as man, but, as I, I develop -- myself.
This is the meaning of the -- unique one.
III .- THE UNIQUE ONE
Pre-Christian and Christian times pursue opposite
goals; the former wants to idealize the real, the latter to realize the ideal;
the former seeks the "holy spirit," the latter the "glorified
body." Hencethe former closes with insensitivity to the real, with "contempt
for the world"; the latter will end with the casting off of the ideal,
with "contempt for the spirit."
The opposition of the real and the ideal is an
irreconcilable one, and the one can never become the other: if the ideal became
the real, it would no longer be the ideal; and, if the real became the ideal,
the ideal alone would be, but not at all the real. The opposition of the two
is not to be vanquished otherwise than if some one annihilates both. Only in
this "some one," the third party, does the opposition find its end;
otherwise idea and reality will ever fail to coincide. The idea cannot be so
realized as to remain idea, but is realized only when it dies as idea; and it
is the same with the real.
But now we have before us in the ancients adherents
of the idea, in the moderns adherents of reality. Neither can get clear of the
opposition, and both pine only, the one party for the spirit, and, when this
craving of the ancient world seemed to be satisfied and this spirit to have
come, the others immediately for the secularization of this spirit again, which
must forever remain a "pious wish."
The pious wish of the ancients was sanctity, the
pious wish of the moderns is corporeity. But, as antiquity had to go down if
its longing was to be satisfied (for it consisted only in the longing), so too
corporeity can never be attained within the ring of Christianness. As the trait
of sanctification or purification goes through the old world (the washings,
etc.), so that of incorporation goes through the Christian world: God plunges
down into this world, becomes flesh, and wants to redeem it,
e. g., fill it with himself; but, since he is "the idea" or "the
spirit," people (e. g. Hegel) in the end introduce the idea into everything,
into the world, and prove "that the idea is, that reason is, in everything."
"Man" corresponds in the culture of today to what the heathen Stoics
set up as "the wise man"; the latter, like the former, a -- fleshless
being. The unreal "wise man," this bodiless "holy one" of
the Stoics, became a real person, a bodily "Holy One," in God made
flesh; the unreal "man," the bodiless ego, will become real in the
corporeal ego, in me.
There winds its way through Christianity the question
about the "existence of God," which, taken up ever and ever again,
gives testimony that the craving for existence, corporeity, personality, reality,
was incessantly busying the heart because it never found a satisfying solution.
At last the question about the existence of God fell, but only to rise up again
in the proposition that the "divine" had existence (Feuerbach). But
this too has no existence, and neither will the last refuge, that the "purely
human" is realizable, afford shelter much longer. No idea has existence,
for none is capable of corporeity. The scholastic contention of realism and
nominalism has the same content; in short, this spins itself out through all
Christian history, and cannot end in it.
The world of Christians is working at realizing
ideas in the individual relations of life, the institutions and laws of the
Church and the State; but they make resistance, and always keep back something
unembodied (unrealizable). Nevertheless this embodiment is restlessly rushed
after, no matter in what degree corporeity constantly fails to result.
For realities matter little to the realizer, but
it matters everything that they be realizations of the idea. Hence he is ever
examining anew whether the realized does in truth have the idea, its kernel,
dwelling in it; and in testing the real he at the same time tests the idea,
whether it is realizable as he thinks it, or is only thought by him incorrectly,
and for that reason unfeasibly.
The Christian is no longer to care for family,
State, etc., as existences; Christians are not to sacrifice themselves for these
"divine things" like the ancients, but these are only to be utilized
to make the spirit alive in them. The real family has become indifferent, and
there is to arise out of it an ideal one which would then be the "truly
real," a sacred family, blessed by God, or, according to the liberal way
of thinking, a "rational" family. With the ancients, family, State,
fatherland, is divine as a thing extant; with the moderns it is still awaiting
divinity, as extant it is only sinful, earthly, and has still to be "redeemed,"
i. e., to become truly real. This has the following meaning: The family, etc.,
is not the extant and real, but the divine, the idea, is extant and real; whether
this family will make itself real by taking up the truly real, the idea, is
still unsettled. It is not the individual's task to serve the family as the
divine, but, reversely, to serve the divine and to bring to it the still undivine
family, to subject everything in the idea's name, to set up the idea's banner
everywhere, to bring the idea to real efficacy.
But, since the concern of Christianity, as of
antiquity, is for the divine, they always come out at this again on their opposite
ways. At the end of heathenism the divine becomes the extramundane, at the end
of Christianity the intramundane. Antiquity does not succeed in putting it entirely
outside the world, and, when Christianity accomplishes this task, the divine
instantly longs to get back into the world and wants to "redeem" the
world. But within Christianity it does not and cannot come to this, that the
divine as intramundane should really become the mundane itself: there is enough
left that does and must maintain itself unpenetrated as the "bad,"
irrational, accidental, "egoistic," the "mundane" in the
bad sense. Christianity begins with God's becoming man, and carries on its work
of conversion and redemption through all time in order to prepare for God a
reception in all men and in everything human, and to penetrate everything with
the spirit: it sticks to preparing a place for the "spirit."
When the accent was at last laid on Man or mankind,
it was again the idea that they "pronounced eternal. " "Man does
not die!" They thought they had now found the reality of the idea: Man
is the I of history, of the world's history; it is he, this ideal, that really
develops, i.e. realizes, himself. He is the really real and corporeal one, for
history is his body, in which individuals are only members. Christ is the I
of the world's history, even of the pre-Christian; in modern apprehension it
is man, the figure of Christ has developed into the figure of man: man as such,
man absolutely, is the "central point" of history. In "man"
the imaginary beginning returns again; for "man" is as imaginary as
Christ is. "Man," as the I of the world's history, closes the cycle
of Christian apprehensions.
Christianity's magic circle would be broken if
the strained relation between existence and calling, e. g., between me as I
am and me as I should be, ceased; it persists only as the longing of the idea
for its bodiliness, and vanishes with the relaxing separation of the two: only
when the idea remains -- idea, as man or mankind is indeed a bodiless idea,
is Christianity still extant. The corporeal idea, the corporeal or "completed"
spirit, floats before the Christian as "the end of the days" or as
the "goal of history"; it is not present time to him.
The individual can only have a part in the founding
of the Kingdom of God, or, according to the modern notion of the same thing,
in the development and history of humanity; and only so far as he has a part
in it does a Christian, or according to the modern expression human, value pertain
to him; for the rest he is dust and a worm-bag. That the individual is of himself
a world's history, and possesses his property in the rest of the world's history,
goes beyond what is Christian. To the Christian the world's history is the higher
thing, because it is the history of Christ or "man"; to the egoist
only his history has value, because he wants to develop only himself not the
mankind-idea, not God's plan, not the purposes of Providence, not liberty, etc.
He does not look upon himself as a tool of the idea or a vessel of God, he recognizes
no calling, he does not fancy that he exists for the further development of
mankind and that he must contribute his mite to it, but he lives himself out,
careless of how well or ill humanity may fare thereby. If it were not open to
confusion with the idea that a state of nature is to be praised, one might recall
Lenau's "Three Gypsies."- What, am I in the world to realize ideas?
To do my part by my citizenship,say, toward the realization of the idea "State,"
or by marriage, as husband and father, to bring the idea of the family into
an existence? What does such a calling concern me! I live after a calling as
little as the flower grows and gives fragrance after a calling.
The ideal "Man" is realized when the
Christian apprehension turns about and becomes the proposition, "I, this
unique one, am man." The conceptual question, "what is man?"
-- has then changed into the personal question, "who is man?" With
"what" the concept was sought for, in order to realize it; with "who"
it is no longer any question at all, but the answer is personally on hand at
once in the asker: the question answers itself.
They say of God, "Names name thee not."
That holds good of me: no concept expresses me, nothing that is designated as
my essence exhausts me; they are only names. Likewise they say of God that he
is perfect and has no calling to strive after perfection. That too holds good
of me alone.
I am owner of my might, and I am so when I know
myself as unique. In the unique one the owner himself returns into his creative
nothing, of which he is born. Every higher essence above me, be it God, be it
man, weakens the feeling of my uniqueness, and pales only before the sun of
this consciousness. If I concern myself for myself, the unique one, then my
concern rests on its transitory, mortal creator, who consumes himself, and I
may say:
All things are nothing to me.