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as God, Christ, the world, were and are conceived of in the most
manifold wise. In this every one is a "dissenter," and
after bloody combats so much has at last been attained, that opposite
views about one and the same object are no longer condemned as
heresies worthy of death. The "dissenters" reconcile
themselves to each other. But why should I only dissent (think
otherwise) about a thing? Why not push the thinking otherwise
to its last extremity, that of no longer having any regard at
all for the thing, and therefore thinking its nothingness, crushing
it? Then the conception itself has an end, because there
is no longer anything to conceive of. Why am I to say, let us
suppose, "God is not Allah, not Brahma, not Jehovah, but
-- God"; but not, "God is nothing but a deception"?
Why do people brand me if I am an "atheist"? Because
they put the creature above the creator ("They honor and
serve the creature more than the Creator"*) and require a
ruling object, that the subject may be right submissive.
I am to bend beneath the absolute, I ought to.
By the "realm of thoughts"
Christianity has completed itself; the thought is that inwardness
in which all the world's lights go out, all existence becomes
existenceless, the inward. man (the heart, the head) is all in
all. This realm of thoughts awaits its deliverance, awaits, like
the Sphinx, Oedipus's key- word to the riddle, that it may enter
in at last to its death. I am the annihilator of its continuance,
for in the creator's realm it no longer forms a realm of its own,
not a
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452 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
State in the State, but a creature of my creative -- thoughtlessness.
Only together and at the same time with the benumbed thinking
world can the world of Christians, Christianity and religion itself,
come to its downfall; only when thoughts run out are there no
more believers. To the thinker his thinking is a "sublime
labor, a sacred activity," and it rests on a firm faith,
the faith in truth. At first praying is a sacred activity, then
this sacred "devotion" passes over into a rational and
reasoning "thinking," which, however, likewise retains
in the "sacred truth" its underangeable basis of faith,
and is only a marvelous machine that the spirit of truth winds
up for its service. Free thinking and free science busy me
-- for it is not I that am free, not I that busy
myself, but thinking is free and busies me -- with heaven and
the heavenly or "divine"; e. g., properly,
with the world and the worldly, not this world but "another"
world; it is only the reversing and deranging of the world, a
busying with the essence of the world, therefore a derangement.
The thinker is blind to the immediateness of things, and incapable
of mastering them: he does not eat, does not drink, does not enjoy;
for the eater and drinker is never the thinker, nay, the latter
forgets eating and drinking, his getting on in life, the cares
of nourishment, etc., over his thinking; he forgets it as the
praying man too forgets it. This is why he appears to the forceful
son of nature as a queer Dick, a fool -- even if he does
look upon him as holy, just as lunatics appeared so to the ancients.
Free thinking is lunacy, because it is pure movement of the
inwardness, of the merely inward
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man, which guides and regulates the rest of the man.
The shaman and the speculative philosopher mark the bottom and
top rounds on the ladder of the inward man, the -- Mongol.
Shaman and philosopher fight with ghosts, demons, spirits,
gods.
Totally different from this free
thinking is own thinking, my thinking, a thinking
which does not guide me, but is guided, continued, or broken off,
by me at my pleasure. The distinction of this own thinking from
free thinking is similar to that of own sensuality, which I satisfy
at pleasure, from free, unruly sensuality to which I succumb.
Feuerbach, in the Principles
of the Philosophy of the Future, is always harping upon being.
In this he too, with all his antagonism to Hegel and the absolute
philosophy, is stuck fast in abstraction; for "being"
is abstraction, as is even "the I." Only I am
not abstraction alone: I am all in all, consequently
even abstraction or nothing; I am all and nothing; I am not a
mere thought, but at the same time I am full of thoughts, a thought-world.
Hegel condemns the own, mine,* -- "opinion." ** "Absolute
thinking" is that which forgets that it is my thinking,
that I think, and that it exists only through me.
But I, as I, swallow up again what is mine, am its master; it
is only my opinion, which I can at any moment change,
i.e. annihilate, take back into myself, and consume.
Feuerbach wants to smite Hegel's "absolute thinking"
with unconquered being. But in me being is as much conquered
as thinking is. It
*[das Meinige]
**[die --"Meinung"]
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454 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
is my being, as the other is my thinking.
With this, of course, Feuerbach
does not get further than to the proof, trivial in itself, that
I require the senses for everything, or that I cannot
entirely do without these organs. Certainly I cannot think if
I do not exist sensuously. But for thinking as well as for feeling,
and so for the abstract as well as for the sensuous, I need above
all things myself, this quite particular myself, this
unique myself. If I were not this one, e. g.
Hegel, I should not look at the world as I do look at it, I should
not pick out of it that philosophical system which just I as Hegel
do, etc. I should indeed have senses, as do other people too,
but I should not utilize them as I do.
Thus the reproach is brought up
against Hegel by Feuerbach* that he misuses language, understanding
by many words something else than what natural consciousness takes
them for; and yet he too commits the same fault when he gives
the "sensuous" a sense of unusual eminence. Thus it
is said, p. 69, "the sensuous is not the profane, the destitute
of thought, the obvious, that which is understood of itself."
But, if it is the sacred, the full of thought, the recondite,
that which can be understood only through mediation -- well, then
it is no longer what people call the sensuous. The sensuous is
only that which exists for the senses; what, on the other
hand, is enjoyable only to those who enjoy with more
than the senses, who go beyond sense-enjoyment or sense-reception,
is at most mediated or introduced by the senses, i. e.,
the senses constitute
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a condition for obtaining it, but it is no longer anything
sensuous. The sensuous, whatever it may be, when taken up into
me becomes something non-sensuous, which, however, may again have
sensuous effects, e. g. as by the stirring of my emotions
and my blood.
It is well that Feuerbach brings
sensuousness to honor, but the only thing he is able to do with
it is to clothe the materialism of his "new philosophy"
with what had hitherto been the property of idealism, the "absolute
philosophy." As little as people let it be talked into them
that one can live on the "spiritual" alone without bread,
so little will they believe his word that as a sensuous being
one is already everything, and so spiritual, full of thoughts,
etc.
Nothing at all is justified by being.
What is thought of is as well as what is not thought
of; the stone in the street is, and my notion of it is
too. Both are only in different spaces, the former in
airy space, the latter in my head, in me; for I am space
like the street.
The professionals, the privileged,
brook no freedom of thought, i.e. no thoughts that do
not come from the "Giver of all good," be he called
God, pope, church, or whatever else. If anybody has such illegitimate
thoughts, he must whisper them into his confessor's ear, and have
himself chastised by him till the slave-whip becomes unendurable
to the free thoughts. In other ways too the professional spirit
takes care that free thoughts shall not come at all: first and
foremost, by a wise education. He on whom the principles of morality
have been duly inculcated never becomes free again from moralizing
thoughts, and rob-
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bery, perjury, overreaching, etc., remain to him fixed ideas against
which no freedom of thought protects him. He has his thoughts
"from above," and gets no further.
It is different with the holders
of concessions or patents. Every one must be able to have and
form thoughts as he will. If he has the patent, or the concession,
of a capacity to think, he needs no special privilege.
But, as "all men are rational," it is free to every
one to put into his head any thoughts whatever, and, to the extent
of the patent of his natural endowment, to have a greater or less
wealth of thoughts. Now one hears the admonitions that one "is
to honor all opinions and convictions," that "every
conviction is authorized," that one must be "tolerant
to the views of others," etc.
But "your thoughts are not
my thoughts, and your ways are not my ways." Or rather, I
mean the reverse: Your thoughts are my thoughts, which
I dispose of as I will, and which I strike down unmercifully;
they are my property, which I annihilate as I list. I do not wait
for authorization from you first, to decompose and blow away your
thoughts. It does not matter to me that you call these thoughts
yours too, they remain mine nevertheless, and how I will proceed
with them is my affair, not a usurpation. It may please
me to leave you in your thoughts; then I keep still. Do you believe
thoughts fly around free like birds, so that every one may get
himself some which he may then make good against me as his inviolable
property? What is flying around is all -- mine.
Do you believe you have your thoughts
for your-
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selves and need answer to no one for them, or as you do also say,
you have to give an account of them to God only? No, your great
and small thoughts belong to me, and I handle them at my pleasure.
The thought is my own only
when I have no misgiving about bringing it in danger of death
every moment, when I do not have to fear its loss as a loss
for me, a loss of me. The thought is my own only when I can
indeed subjugate it, but it never can subjugate me, never fanaticizes
me, makes me the tool of its realization.
So freedom of thought exists when
I can have all possible thoughts; but the thoughts become property
only by not being able to become masters. In the time of freedom
of thought, thoughts (ideas) rule; but, if I attain to
property in thought, they stand as my creatures.
If the hierarchy had not so penetrated
men to the innermost as to take from them all courage to pursue
free thoughts, e. g., thoughts perhaps displeasing to
God, one would have to consider freedom of thought just as empty
a word as, say, a freedom of digestion.
According to the professionals'
opinion, the thought is given to me; according to the
freethinkers', I seek the thought. There the truth
is already found and extant, only I must -- receive it from its
Giver by grace; here the truth is to be sought and is my goal,
lying in the future, toward which I have to run.
In both cases the truth (the true
thought) lies outside me, and I aspire to get it, be
it by presentation (grace), be it by earning (merit of my own).
Therefore, (1) The truth is a privilege; (2) No, the
way to
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it is patent to all, and neither the Bible nor the holy fathers
nor the church nor any one else is in possession of the truth;
but one can come into possession of it by -- speculating.
Both, one sees, are property-less
in relation to the truth: they have it either as a fief
(for the "holy father," e. g. is not a unique
person; as unique he is this Sixtus, Clement, but he does not
have the truth as Sixtus, Clement, but as "holy father,"
i.e. as a spirit) or as an ideal. As a fief,
it is only for a few (the privileged); as an ideal, for all
(the patentees).
Freedom of thought, then, has the
meaning that we do indeed all walk in the dark and in the paths
of error, but every one can on this path approach the truth
and is accordingly on the right path ("All roads lead to
Rome, to the world's end, etc."). Hence freedom of thought
means this much, that the true thought is not my own;
for, if it were this, how should people want to shut me off from
it?
Thinking has become entirely free,
and has laid down a lot of truths which I must accommodate myself
to. It seeks to complete itself into a system and to
bring itself to an absolute "constitution." In the State
e. g. it seeks for the idea, say, till it has brought
out the "rational State," in which I am then obliged
to be suited; in man (anthropology), till it "has found man."
The thinker is distinguished from
the believer only by believing much more than the latter, who
on his part thinks of much less as signified by his faith (creed).
The thinker has a thousand tenets of faith
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where the believer gets along with few; but the former brings
coherence into his tenets, and takes the coherence in
turn for the scale to estimate their worth by. If one or the other
does not fit into his budget, he throws it out.
The thinkers run parallel to the
believers in their pronouncements. Instead of "If it is from
God you will not root it out," the word is "If it is
from the truth, is true, etc."; instead of "Give
God the glory" -- "Give truth the glory." But it
is very much the same to me whether God or the truth wins; first
and foremost I want to win.
Aside from this, how is an "unlimited
freedom" to be thinkable inside of the State or society?
The State may well protect one against another, but yet it must
not let itself be endangered by an unmeasured freedom, a so-called
unbridledness. Thus in "freedom of instruction" the
State declares only this -- that it is suited with every
one who instructs as the State (or, speaking more comprehensibly,
the political power) would have it. The point for the competitors
is this "as the State would have it." If the clergy,
e. g., does not will as the State does, then it itself
excludes itself from competition (vid. France).
The limit that is necessarily drawn in the State for any and all
competition is called "the oversight and superintendence
of the State." In bidding freedom of instruction keep within
the due bounds, the State at the same time fixes the scope of
freedom of thought; because, as a rule, people do not think farther
than their teachers have thought.
Hear Minister Guizot: "The
great difficulty of
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460 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
today is the guiding and dominating of the mind. Formerly
the church fulfilled this mission; now it is not adequate to it.
It is from the university that this great service must be expected,
and the university will not fail to perform it. We, the government,
have the duty of supporting it therein. The charter calls for
the freedom of thought and that of conscience."* So, in favor
of freedom of thought and conscience, the minister demands "the
guiding and dominating of the mind."
Catholicism haled the examinee before
the forum of ecclesiasticism, Protestantism before that of biblical
Christianity. It would be but little bettered if one haled him
before that of reason, as Ruge, e. g., wants to. ** Whether
the church, the Bible, or reason (to which, moreover, Luther and
Huss already appealed) is the sacred authority makes
no difference in essentials.
The "question of our time"
does not become soluble even when one puts it thus: Is anything
general authorized, or only the individual? Is the generality
(e. g. State, law, custom, morality, etc.) authorized,
or individuality? It becomes soluble for the first time when one
no longer asks after an "authorization" at all, and
does not carry on a mere fight against "privileges."
-- A "rational" freedom of teaching, which recognizes
only the conscience of reason," *** does not bring us to
the goal; we require an egoistic freedom of teaching
rather, a freedom of teaching for all own-
*Chamber of peers, Apr. 25, 1844.
** "Anekdota,"
1, 120.
***"Anekdota,"
1, 127.
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ness, wherein I become audible and can announce myself
unchecked. That I make myself "audible"*, this
alone is "reason,"** be I ever so irrational; in my
making myself heard, and so hearing myself, others as well as
I myself enjoy me, and at the same time consume me.
What would be gained if, as formerly
the orthodox I, the loyal I, the moral I, etc., was free, now
the rational I should become free? Would this be the freedom of
me?
If I am free as "rational I,"
then the rational in me, or reason, is free; and this freedom
of reason, or freedom of the thought, was the ideal of the Christian
world from of old. They wanted to make thinking -- and, as aforesaid,
faith is also thinking, as thinking is faith -- free; the thinkers,
i.e. the believers as well as the rational, were to be
free; for the rest freedom was impossible. But the freedom of
thinkers is the "freedom of the children of God," and
at the same time the most merciless --hierarchy or dominion of
the thought; for I succumb to the thought. If thoughts
are free, I am their slave; I have no power over them, and am
dominated by them. But I want to have the thought, want to be
full of thoughts, but at the same time I want to be thoughtless,
and, instead of freedom of thought, I preserve for myself thoughtlessness.
If the point is to have myself understood
and to make communications, then assuredly I can make use only
of human means, which are at my command because I am
at the same time man. And really I
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462 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
have thoughts only as man; as I, I am at the same time
thoughtless.* He who cannot get rid of a thought is so
far only man, is a thrall of language, this
human institution, this treasury of human thoughts. Language
or "the word" tyrannizes hardest over us, because it
brings up against us a whole army of fixed ideas. Just
observe yourself in the act of reflection, right now, and you
will find how you make progress only by becoming thoughtless and
speechless every moment. You are not thoughtless and speechless
merely in (say) sleep, but even in the deepest reflection; yes,
precisely then most so. And only by this thoughtlessness, this
unrecognized "freedom of thought" or freedom from the
thought, are you your own. Only from it do you arrive at putting
language to use as your property.
If thinking is not my thinking,
it is merely a spun-out thought; it is slave work, or the work
of a "servant obeying at the word." For not a thought,
but I, am the beginning for my thinking, and therefore I am its
goal too, even as its whole course is only a course of my self-enjoyment;
for absolute or free thinking, on the other hand, thinking itself
is the beginning, and it plagues itself with propounding this
beginning as the extremest "abstraction" (e. g.
as being). This very abstraction, or this thought, is then spun
out further.
Absolute thinking is the affair
of the human spirit, and this is a holy spirit. Hence this thinking
is an affair of the parsons, who have "a sense for it,"
a sense
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for the "highest interests of mankind," for "the
spirit."
To the believer, truths are a settled
thing, a fact; to the freethinker, a thing that is still to be
settled. Be absolute thinking ever so unbelieving, its
incredulity has its limits, and there does remain a belief in
the truth, in the spirit, in the idea and its final victory: this
thinking does not sin against the holy spirit. But all thinking
that does not sin against the holy spirit is belief in spirits
or ghosts.
I can as little renounce thinking
as feeling, the spirit's activity as little as the activity of
the senses. As feeling is our sense for things, so thinking is
our sense for essences (thoughts). Essences have their existence
in everything sensuous, especially in the word. The power of words
follows that of things: first one is coerced by the rod, afterward
by conviction. The might of things overcomes our courage, our
spirit; against the power of a conviction, and so of the word,
even the rack and the sword lose their overpoweringness and force.
The men of conviction are the priestly men, who resist every enticement
of Satan.
Christianity took away from the
things of this world only their irresistibleness, made us independent
of them. In like manner I raise myself above truths and their
power: as I am supersensual, so I am supertrue. Before me
truths are as common and as indifferent as things; they do not
carry me away, and do not inspire me with enthusiasm. There exists
not even one truth, not right, not freedom, humanity, etc., that
has stability before me, and to which I subject myself. They are
words, nothing but words, as
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464 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
to the Christian nothing but "vain things." In words
and truths (every word is a truth, as Hegel asserts that one cannot
tell a lie) there is no salvation for me, as little as
there is for the Christian in things and vanities. As the riches
of this world do not make me happy, so neither do its truths.
It is now no longer Satan, but the spirit, that plays the story
of the temptation; and he does not seduce by the things of this
world, but by its thoughts, by the "glitter of the idea."
Along with worldly goods, all sacred
goods too must be put away as no longer valuable.
Truths are phrases, ways of speaking,
words (lógos); brought into connection, or into an articulate
series, they form logic, science, philosophy.
For thinking and speaking I need
truths and words, as I do foods for eating; without them I cannot
think nor speak. Truths are men's thoughts, set down in words
and therefore just as extant as other things, although extant
only for the mind or for thinking. They are human institutions
and human creatures, and, even if they are given out for divine
revelations, there still remains in them the quality of alienness
for me; yes, as my own creatures they are already alienated from
me after the act of creation.
The Christian man is the man with
faith in thinking, who believes in the supreme dominion of thoughts
and wants to bring thoughts, so-called "principles,"
to dominion. Many a one does indeed test the thoughts, and chooses
none of them for his master without criticism, but in this he
is like the dog who sniffs at people to smell out "his master";
he is always aim-
| THE OWNER 465 |
ing at the ruling thought. The Christian may reform and
revolt an infinite deal, may demolish the ruling concepts of centuries;
he will always aspire to a new "principle" or new master
again, always set up a higher or "deeper" truth again,
always call forth a cult again, always proclaim a spirit called
to dominion, lay down a law for all.
If there is even one truth only
to which man has to devote his life and his powers because he
is man, then he is subjected to a rule, dominion, law; he is a
servingman. It is supposed that, e. g. man, humanity,
liberty, etc., are such truths.
On the other hand, one can say thus:
Whether you will further occupy yourself with thinking depends
on you; only know that, if in your thinking you would
like to make out anything worthy of notice, many hard problems
are to be solved, without vanquishing which you cannot get far.
There exists, therefore, no duty and no calling for you to meddle
with thoughts (ideas, truths); but, if you will do so, you will
do well to utilize what the forces of others have already achieved
toward clearing up these difficult subjects.
Thus, therefore, he who will think
does assuredly have a task, which he consciously or unconsciously
sets for himself in willing that; but no one has the task of thinking
or of believing. In the former case it may be said, "You
do not go far enough, you have a narrow and biased interest, you
do not go to the bottom of the thing; in short, you do not completely
subdue it. But, on the other hand, however far you may come at
any time, you are still always at the end, you have no call to
step farther, and you can have it as you will or as
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466 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
you are able. It stands with this as with any other piece of work,
which you can give up when the humor for it wears off. Just so,
if you can no longer believe a thing, you do not have
to force yourself into faith or to busy yourself lastingly as
if with a sacred truth of the faith, as theologians or philosophers
do, but you can tranquilly draw back your interest from it and
let it run. Priestly spirits will indeed expound this your lack
of interest as "laziness, thoughtlessness, obduracy, self-deception,"
etc. But do you just let the trumpery lie, notwithstanding. No
thing,* no so-called "highest interest of mankind,"
no "sacred cause,"** is worth your serving it, and occupying
yourself with it for its sake; you may seek its worth
in this alone, whether it is worth anything to you for
your sake. Become like children, the biblical saying admonishes
us. But children have no sacred interest and know nothing of a
"good cause." They know all the more accurately what
they have a fancy for; and they think over, to the best of their
powers, how they are to arrive at it.
Thinking will as little cease as
feeling. But the power of thoughts and ideas, the dominion of
theories and principles, the sovereignty of the spirit, in short
the -- hierarchy, lasts as long as the parsons, i.e.,
theologians, philosophers, statesmen, philistines, liberals, schoolmasters,
servants, parents, children, married couples, Proudhon, George
Sand, Bluntschli, etc., etc., have the floor; the hierarchy will
endure as long as people believe in, think of, or even criticize,
principles;
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THE OWNER 467 |
for even the most inexorable criticism, which undermines all current
principles, still does finally believe in the principle.
Every one criticises, but the criterion
is different. People run after the "right" criterion.
The right criterion is the first presupposition. The critic starts
from a proposition, a truth, a belief. This is not a creation
of the critic, but of the dogmatist; nay, commonly it is actually
taken up out of the culture of the time without further ceremony,
like e. g. "liberty," "humanity,"
etc. The critic has not "discovered man," but this truth
has been established as "man" by the dogmatist, and
the critic (who, besides, may be the same person with him) believes
in this truth, this article of faith. In this faith, and possessed
by this faith, he criticises.
The secret of criticism is some
"truth" or other: this remains its energizing mystery.
But I distinguish between servile
and own criticism. If I criticize under the presupposition
of a supreme being, my criticism serves the being and
is carried on for its sake: if e. g. I am possessed by
the belief in a "free State," then everything that has
a bearing on it I criticize from the standpoint of whether it
is suitable to this State, for I love this State; if
I criticize as a pious man, then for me everything falls into
the classes of divine and diabolical, and before my criticism
nature consists of traces of God or traces of the devil (hence
names like Godsgift, Godmount, the Devil's Pulpit), men of believers
and unbelievers; if I criticize while believing in man as the
"true essence," then for me everything falls primarily
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468 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
into the classes of man and the un-man, etc.
Criticism has to this day remained
a work of love: for at all times we exercised it for the love
of some being. All servile criticism is a product of love, a possessedness,
and proceeds according to that New Testament precept, "Test
everything and hold fast the good."* "The good"
is the touchstone, the criterion. The good, returning under a
thousand names and forms, remained always the presupposition,
remained the dogmatic fixed point for this criticism, remained
the -- fixed idea.
The critic, in setting to work,
impartially presupposes the "truth," and seeks for the
truth in the belief that it is to be found. He wants to ascertain
the true, and has in it that very "good."
Presuppose means nothing else than
put a thought in front, or think something before everything
else and think the rest from the starting-point of this that has
been thought, i.e. measure and criticize it
by this. In other words, this is as much as to say that thinking
is to begin with something already thought. If thinking began
at all, instead of being begun, if thinking were a subject, an
acting personality of its own, as even the plant is such, then
indeed there would be no abandoning the principle that thinking
must begin with itself. But it is just the personification of
thinking that brings to pass those innumerable errors. In the
Hegelian system they always talk as if thinking or "the thinking
spirit" (i.e. personified thinking, thinking as
a ghost) thought and acted; in critical
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liberalism it is always said that "criticism" does this
and that, or else that "self- consciousness" finds this
and that. But, if thinking ranks as the personal actor, thinking
itself must be presupposed; if criticism ranks as such, a thought
must likewise stand in front. Thinking and criticism could be
active only starting from themselves, would have to be themselves
the presupposition of their activity, as without being they could
not be active. But thinking, as a thing presupposed, is a fixed
thought, a dogma; thinking and criticism, therefore,
can start only from a dogma, i. e. from a thought, a
fixed idea, a presupposition.
With this we come back again to
what was enunciated above, that Christianity consists in the development
of a world of thoughts, or that it is the proper "freedom
of thought," the "free thought," the "free
spirit." The "true" criticism, which I called "servile,"
is therefore just as much "free" criticism, for it is
not my own.
The case stands otherwise when what
is yours is not made into something that is of itself, not personified,
not made independent as a "spirit" to itself. Your
thinking has for a presupposition not "thinking," but
you. But thus you do presuppose yourself after all? Yes,
but not for myself, but for my thinking. Before my thinking, there
is -- I. From this it follows that my thinking is not preceded
by a thought, or that my thinking is without a "presupposition."
For the presupposition which I am for my thinking is not one made
by thinking, not one thought of, but it is posited
thinking itself, it is the owner of the thought,
and proves only that thinking is nothing more than -- prop-
| 470 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
erty, i. e. that an "independent"
thinking, a "thinking spirit," does not exist at all.
This reversal of the usual way of
regarding things might so resemble an empty playing with abstractions
that even those against whom it is directed would acquiesce in
the harmless aspect I give it, if practical consequences were
not connected with it.
To bring these into a concise expression,
the assertion now made is that man is not the measure of all things,
but I am this measure. The servile critic has before his eyes
another being, an idea, which he means to serve; therefore he
only slays the false idols for his God. What is done for the love
of this being, what else should it be but a -- work of love? But
I, when I criticize, do not even have myself before my eyes, but
am only doing myself a pleasure, amusing myself according to my
taste; according to my several needs I chew the thing up or only
inhale its odor.
The distinction between the two
attitudes will come out still more strikingly if one reflects
that the servile critic, because love guides him, supposes he
is serving the thing (cause) itself.
The truth, or "truth
in general," people are bound not to give up, but to seek
for. What else is it but the Être suprême,
the highest essence? Even "true criticism" would have
to despair if it lost faith in the truth. And yet the truth is
only a -- thought; but it is not merely "a"
thought, but the thought that is above all thoughts, the irrefragable
thought; it is the thought itself, which gives the first
hallowing to all others; it is the consecration of thoughts, the
"absolute," the "sacred" thought. The truth
wears longer
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THE OWNER 471 |
than all the gods; for it is only in the truth's service, and
for love of it, that people have overthrown the gods and at last
God himself. "The truth" outlasts the downfall of the
world of gods, for it is the immortal soul of this transitory
world of gods, it is Deity itself.
I will answer Pilate's question,
What is truth? Truth is the free thought, the free idea, the free
spirit; truth is what is free from you, what is not your own,
what is not in your power. But truth is also the completely unindependent,
impersonal, unreal, and incorporeal; truth cannot step forward
as you do, cannot move, change, develop; truth awaits and receives
everything from you, and itself is only through you; for it exists
only -- in your head. You concede that the truth is a thought,
but say that not every thought is a true one, or, as you are also
likely to express it, not every thought is truly and really a
thought. And by what do you measure and recognize the thought?
By your impotence, to wit, by your being no longer able
to make any successful assault on it! When it overpowers you,
inspires you, and carries you away, then you hold it to be the
true one. Its dominion over you certifies to you its truth; and,
when it possesses you, and you are possessed by it, then you feel
well with it, for then you have found your -- lord and master.
When you were seeking the truth, what did your heart then long
for? For your master! You did not aspire to your might,
but to a Mighty One, and wanted to exalt a Mighty One ("Exalt
ye the Lord our God!"). The truth, my dear Pilate, is --
the Lord, and all who seek the truth are seeking and
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472 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
praising the Lord. Where does the Lord exist? Where else but in
your head? He is only spirit, and, wherever you believe you really
see him, there he is a -- ghost; for the Lord is merely something
that is thought of, and it was only the Christian pains and agony
to make the invisible visible, the spiritual corporeal, that generated
the ghost and was the frightful misery of the belief in ghosts.
As long as you believe in the truth,
you do not believe in yourself, and you are a -- servant,
a -- religious man. You alone are the truth, or rather,
you are more than the truth, which is nothing at all before you.
You too do assuredly ask about the truth, you too do assuredly
"criticize," but you do not ask about a "higher
truth" -- to wit, one that should be higher than you -- nor
criticize according to the criterion of such a truth. You address
yourself to thoughts and notions, as you do to the appearances
of things, only for the purpose of making them palatable to you,
enjoyable to you, and your own: you want only to subdue them and
become their owner, you want to orient yourself and feel
at home in them, and you find them true, or see them in their
true light, when they can no longer slip away from you, no longer
have any unseized or uncomprehended place, or when they are right
for you, when they are your property. If afterward
they become heavier again, if they wriggle themselves out of your
power again, then that is just their untruth -- to wit, your impotence.
Your impotence is their power, your humility their exaltation.
Their truth, therefore, is you, or is the nothing which you are
for them and in which they dissolve: their
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THE OWNER 473 |
truth is their nothingness.
Only as the property of me do the
spirits, the truths, get to rest; and they then for the first
time really are, when they have been deprived of their sorry existence
and made a property of mine, when it is no longer said "the
truth develops itself, rules, asserts itself; history (also a
concept) wins the victory," etc. The truth never has won
a victory, but was always my means to the victory, like
the sword ("the sword of truth"). The truth is dead,
a letter, a word, a material that I can use up. All truth by itself
is dead, a corpse; it is alive only in the same way as my lungs
are alive -- to wit, in the measure of my own vitality. Truths
are material, like vegetables and weeds; as to whether vegetable
or weed, the decision lies in me.
Objects are to me only material
that I use up. Wherever I put my hand I grasp a truth, which I
trim for myself. The truth is certain to me, and I do not need
to long after it. To do the truth a service is in no case my intent;
it is to me only a nourishment for my thinking head, as potatoes
are for my digesting stomach, or as a friend is for my social
heart. As long as I have the humor and force for thinking, every
truth serves me only for me to work it up according to my powers.
As reality or worldliness is "vain and a thing of naught"
for Christians, so is the truth for me. It exists, exactly as
much as the things of this world go on existing although the Christian
has proved their nothingness; but it is vain, because it has its
value not in itself but in me. Of itself
it is valueless. The truth is a -- creature.
| 474 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
As you produce innumerable things
by your activity, yes, shape the earth's surface anew and set
up works of men everywhere, so too you may still ascertain numberless
truths by your thinking, and we will gladly take delight in them.
Nevertheless, as I do not please to hand myself over to serve
your newly discovered machines mechanically, but only help to
set them running for my benefit, so too I will only use your truths,
without letting myself be used for their demands.
All truths beneath me are
to my liking; a truth above me, a truth that I should
have to direct myself by, I am not acquainted with. For
me there is no truth, for nothing is more than I! Not even my
essence, not even the essence of man, is more than I! than I,
this "drop in the bucket," this "insignificant
man"!
You believe that you have done the
utmost when you boldly assert that, because every time has its
own truth, there is no "absolute truth." Why, with this
you nevertheless still leave to each time its truth, and thus
you quite genuinely create an "absolute truth," a truth
that no time lacks, because every time, however its truth may
be, still has a "truth."
Is it meant only that people have
been thinking in every time, and so have had thoughts or truths,
and that in the subsequent time these were other than they were
in the earlier? No, the word is to be that every time had its
"truth of faith"; and in fact none has yet appeared
in which a "higher truth" has not been recognized, a
truth that people believed they must subject themselves to as
"highness and majesty."
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THE OWNER 475 |
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 but
my 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