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MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 51 |
nence one degrades the hitherto misapprehended appearance to a
bare semblance, a deception. The essence of the world,
so attractive and splendid, is for him who looks to the bottom
of it -- emptiness; emptiness is = world's essence (world's doings).
Now, he who is religious does not occupy himself with the deceitful
semblance, with the empty appearances, but looks upon the essence,
and in the essence has -- the truth.
The essences which are deduced from
some appearances are the evil essences, and conversely from others
the good. The essence of human feeling, e. g., is love;
the essence of human will is the good; that of one's thinking,
the true, etc.
What at first passed for existence,
e. g. the world and its like, appears now as bare semblance,
and the truly existent is much rather the essence, whose
realm is filled with gods, spirits, demons, with good or bad essences.
Only this inverted world, the world of essences, truly exists
now. The human heart may be loveless, but its essence exists,
God, "who is love"; human thought may wander in error,
but its essence, truth, exists; "God is truth," and
the like.
To know and acknowledge essences
alone and nothing but essences, that is religion; its realm is
a realm of essences, spooks, and ghosts.
The longing to make the spook comprehensible,
or to realize non-sense, has brought about a corporeal
ghost, a ghost or spirit with a real body, an embodied ghost.
How the strongest and most talented Christians have tortured themselves
to get a conception of this ghostly apparition! But there always
remained
| 52 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
the contradiction of two natures, the divine and human, i.
e., the ghostly and sensual; there remained the most wondrous
spook, a thing that was not a thing. Never yet was a ghost more
soul torturing, and no shaman, who pricks himself to raving fury
and nerve-lacerating cramps to conjure a ghost, can endure such
soul-torment as Christians suffered from that most incomprehensible
ghost.
But through Christ the truth of
the matter had at the same time come to light, that the veritable
spirit or ghost is -- man. The corporeal or embodied
spirit is just man; he himself is the ghostly being and at the
same time the being's appearance and existence. Henceforth man
no longer, in typical cases, shudders at ghosts outside
him, but at himself; he is terrified at himself. In the depth
of his breast dwells the spirit of sin; even the faintest
thought (and this is itself a spirit, you know) may be a devil,
etc. -- The ghost has put on a body, God has become man, but now
man is himself the gruesome spook which he seeks to get back of,
to exorcise, to fathom, to bring to reality and to speech; man
is -- spirit. What matter if the body wither, if only
the spirit is saved? Everything rests on the spirit, and the spirit's
or "soul's" welfare becomes the exclusive goal. Man
has become to himself a ghost, an uncanny spook, to which there
is even assigned a distinct seat in the body (dispute over the
seat of the soul, whether in the head, etc.).
You are not to me, and I am not
to you, a higher essence. Nevertheless a higher essence may be
hidden in each of us, and call forth a mutual reverence. To take
at once the most general, Man lives in you and
|
MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 53 |
me. If I did not see Man in you, what occasion should I have to
respect you? To be sure, you are not Man and his true and adequate
form, but only a mortal veil of his, from which he can withdraw
without himself ceasing; but yet for the present this general
and higher essence is housed in you, and you present before me
(because an imperishable spirit has in you assumed a perishable
body, so that really your form is only an "assumed"
one) a spirit that appears, appears in you, without being bound
to your body and to this particular mode of appearance -- therefore
a spook. Hence I do not regard you as a higher essence but only
respect that higher essence which '"walks" in you; I
"respect Man in you." The ancients did not observe anything
of this sort in their slaves, and the higher essence "Man"
found as yet little response. To make up for this, they saw in
each other ghosts of another sort. The People is a higher essence
than an individual, and, like Man or the Spirit of Man, a spirit
haunting the individual -- the Spirit of the People. For this
reason they revered this spirit, and only so far as he served
this or else a spirit related to it (e. g. the Spirit
of the Family) could the individual appear significant; only for
the sake of the higher essence, the People, was consideration
allowed to the "member of the people." As you are hallowed
to us by "Man" who haunts you, so at every time men
have been hallowed by some higher essence or other, like People,
Family, and such. Only for the sake of a higher essence has any
one been honored from of old, only as a ghost has he been regarded
in the light of a hallowed, i.e., protected and
|
54 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
recognized person. If I cherish you because I hold you dear, because
in you my heart finds nourishment, my need satisfaction, then
it is not done for the sake of a higher essence, whose hallowed
body you are, not on account of my beholding in you a ghost, i.e.
an appearing spirit, but from egoistic pleasure; you yourself
with your essence are valuable to me, for your essence
is not a higher one, is not higher and more general than you,
is unique* like you yourself, because it is you.
But it is not only man that "haunts";
so does everything. The higher essence, the spirit, that walks
in everything, is at the same time bound to nothing, and only
-- "appears" in it. Ghosts in every corner!
Here would be the place to pass
the haunting spirits in review, if they were not to come before
us again further on in order to vanish before egoism. Hence let
only a few of them be particularized by way of example, in order
to bring us at once to our attitude toward them.
Sacred above all, e. g.,
is the "holy Spirit," sacred the truth, sacred are right,
law, a good cause, majesty, marriage, the common good, order,
the fatherland, etc.
Man, your head is haunted; you have
wheels in your head! You imagine great things, and depict to yourself
a whole world of gods that has an existence for you, a spirit-realm
to which you suppose yourself
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MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 55 |
to be called, an ideal that beckons to you. You have a fixed idea!
Do not think that I am jesting or
speaking figuratively when I regard those persons who cling to
the Higher, and (because the vast majority belongs under this
head) almost the whole world of men, as veritable fools, fools
in a madhouse. What is it, then, that is called a "fixed
idea"? An idea that has subjected the man to itself. When
you recognize, with regard to such a fixed idea, that it is a
folly, you shut its slave up in an asylum. And is the truth of
the faith, say, which we are not to doubt; the majesty of (e.
g.) the people, which we are not to strike at (he who does
is guilty of -- lese-majesty); virtue, against which the censor
is not to let a word pass, that morality may be kept pure; --
are these not "fixed ideas"? Is not all the stupid chatter
of (e. g.) most of our newspapers the babble of fools
who suffer from the fixed idea of morality, legality, Christianity,
etc., and only seem to go about free because the madhouse in which
they walk takes in so broad a space? Touch the fixed idea of such
a fool, and you will at once have to guard your back against the
lunatic's stealthy malice. For these great lunatics are like the
little so-called lunatics in this point too -- that they assail
by stealth him who touches their fixed idea. They first steal
his weapon, steal free speech from him, and then they fall upon
him with their nails. Every day now lays bare the cowardice and
vindictiveness of these maniacs, and the stupid populace hurrahs
for their crazy measures. One must read the journals of this period,
and must hear the Philistines talk, to get the horrible conviction
| 56 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
that one is shut up in a house with fools. "Thou shalt not
call thy brother a fool; if thou dost -- etc." But I do not
fear the curse, and I say, my brothers are arch-fools. Whether
a poor fool of the insane asylum is possessed by the fancy that
he is God the Father, Emperor of Japan, the Holy Spirit, etc.,
or whether a citizen in comfortable circumstances conceives that
it is his mission to be a good Christian, a faithful Protestant,
a loyal citizen, a virtuous man -- both these are one and the
same "fixed idea." He who has never tried and dared
not to be a good Christian, a faithful Protestant, a virtuous
man, etc., is possessed and prepossessed* by faith, virtuousness,
etc. Just as the schoolmen philosophized only inside
the belief of the church; as Pope Benedict XIV wrote fat books
inside the papist superstition, without ever throwing
a doubt upon this belief; as authors fill whole folios on the
State without calling in question the fixed idea of the State
itself; as our newspapers are crammed with politics because they
are conjured into the fancy that man was created to be a zoon
politicon -- so also subjects vegetate in subjection, virtuous
people in virtue, liberals in humanity, without ever putting to
these fixed ideas of theirs the searching knife of criticism.
Undislodgeable, like a madman's delusion, those thoughts stand
on a firm footing, and he who doubts them -- lays hands on the
sacred! Yes, the "fixed idea," that is the
truly sacred!
Is it perchance only people possessed
by the devil
*[gefangen und befangen, literally "imprisoned and prepossessed."]
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MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 57 |
that meet us, or do we as often come upon people possessed
in the contrary way -- possessed by "the good," by virtue,
morality, the law, or some "principle" or other? Possessions
of the devil are not the only ones. God works on us, and the devil
does; the former "workings of grace," the latter "workings
of the devil." Possessed* people are set** in their opinions.
If the word "possession"
displeases you, then call it prepossession; yes, since the spirit
possesses you, and all "inspirations" come from it,
call it -- inspiration and enthusiasm. I add that complete enthusiasm
-- for we cannot stop with the sluggish, half- way kind -- is
called fanaticism.
It is precisely among cultured people
that fanaticism is at home; for man is cultured so far
as he takes an interest in spiritual things, and interest in spiritual
things, when it is alive, is and must be fanaticism;
it is a fanatical interest in the sacred (fanum). Observe
our liberals, look into the Sächsischen Vaterlandsblätter,
hear what Schlosser says:*** "Holbach's company constituted
a regular plot against the traditional doctrine and the existing
system, and its members were as fanatical on behalf of their unbelief
as monks and priests, Jesuits and Pietists, Methodists, missionary
and Bible societies, commonly are for mechanical worship and orthodoxy."
Take notice how a "moral man"
behaves, who today often thinks he is through with God and throws
off Christianity as a bygone thing. If you ask him
*[besessene]
**[versessen]
***"Achtzehntes Jahrhundert",
II, 519.
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58 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
whether he has ever doubted that the copulation of brother and
sister is incest, that monogamy is the truth of marriage, that
filial piety is a sacred duty, then a moral shudder will come
over him at the conception of one's being allowed to touch his
sister as wife also, etc. And whence this shudder? Because he
believes in those moral commandments. This moral faith
is deeply rooted in his breast. Much as he rages against the pious
Christians, he himself has nevertheless as thoroughly remained
a Christian -- to wit, a moral Christian. In the form
of morality Christianity holds him a prisoner, and a prisoner
under faith. Monogamy is to be something sacred, and
he who may live in bigamy is punished as a criminal;
he who commits incest suffers as a criminal. Those who
are always crying that religion is not to be regarded in the State,
and the Jew is to be a citizen equally with the Christian, show
themselves in accord with this. Is not this of incest and monogamy
a dogma of faith? Touch it, and you will learn by experience
how this moral man is a hero of faith too, not less than
Krummacher, not less than Philip II. These fight for the faith
of the Church, he for the faith of the State, or the moral laws
of the State; for articles of faith, both condemn him who acts
otherwise than their faith will allow. The brand of "crime"
is stamped upon him, and he may languish in reformatories, in
jails. Moral faith is as fanatical as religious faith! They call
that "liberty of faith" then, when brother and sister,
on account of a relation that they should have settled with their
"conscience," are thrown into prison. "But they
set a pernicious exam-
|
MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 59 |
ple." Yes, indeed: others might have taken the notion that
the State had no business to meddle with their relation, and thereupon
"purity of morals" would go to ruin. So then the religious
heroes of faith are zealous for the "sacred God," the
moral ones for the "sacred good."
Those who are zealous for something
sacred often look very little like each other. How the strictly
orthodox or old-style believers differ from the fighters for "truth,
light, and justice," from the Philalethes, the Friends of
Light, the Rationalists, and others. And yet, how utterly unessential
is this difference! If one buffets single traditional truths (i.e.
miracles, unlimited power of princes), then the Rationalists buffet
them too, and only the old-style believers wail. But, if one buffets
truth itself, he immediately has both, as believers,
for opponents. So with moralities; the strict believers are relentless,
the clearer heads are more tolerant. But he who attacks morality
itself gets both to deal with. "Truth, morality, justice,
light, etc.," are to be and remain "sacred." What
any one finds to censure in Christianity is simply supposed to
be "unchristian" according to the view of these rationalists,
but Christianity must remain a "fixture," to buffet
it is outrageous, "an outrage." To be sure, the heretic
against pure faith no longer exposes himself to the earlier fury
of persecution, but so much the more does it now fall upon the
heretic against pure morals.
Piety has for a century received so many blows, and had to hear its superhuman essence reviled as an "in-
| 60 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
human" one so often, that one cannot feel tempted to draw
the sword against it again. And yet it has almost always been
only moral opponents that have appeared in the arena, to assail
the supreme essence in favor of -- another supreme essence. So
Proudhon, unabashed, says:* "Man is destined to live without
religion, but the moral law is eternal and absolute. Who would
dare today to attack morality?" Moral people skimmed off
the best fat from religion, ate it themselves, and are now having
a tough job to get rid of the resulting scrofula. If, therefore,
we point out that religion has not by any means been hurt in its
inmost part so long as people reproach it only with its superhuman
essence, and that it takes its final appeal to the "spirit"
alone (for God is spirit), then we have sufficiently indicated
its final accord with morality, and can leave its stubborn conflict
with the latter lying behind us. It is a question of a supreme
essence with both, and whether this is a superhuman or a human
one can make (since it is in any case an essence over me, a super-mine
one, so to speak) but little difference to me. In the end the
relation to the human essence, or to "Man," as soon
as ever it has shed the snake-skin of the old religion, will yet
wear a religious snake-skin again.
So Feuerbach instructs us that,
"if one only inverts speculative philosophy, i.e.
always makes the predicate the subject, and so makes the subject
the object and principle, one has the undraped truth, pure and
clean."* Herewith, to be sure, we lose the narrow
*"De la Création
de l'Ordre" etc., p. 36.
**"Anekdota,
II, 64.
|
MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 61 |
religious standpoint, lost the God, who from this standpoint
is subject; but we take in exchange for it the other side of the
religious standpoint, the moral standpoint. Thus we no
longer say "God is love," but "Love is divine."
If we further put in place of the predicate "divine"
the equivalent "sacred," then, as far as concerns the
sense, all the old comes back-again. According to this, love is
to be the good in man, his divineness, that which does
him honor, his true humanity (it "makes him Man
for the first time," makes for the first time a man out of
him). So then it would be more accurately worded thus: Love is
what is human in man, and what is inhuman is the loveless
egoist. But precisely all that which Christianity and with it
speculative philosophy (i.e., theology) offers as the
good, the absolute, is to self-ownership simply not the good (or,
what means the same, it is only the good). Consequently,
by the transformation of the predicate into the subject, the Christian
essence (and it is the predicate that contains the essence,
you know) would only be fixed yet more oppressively. God and the
divine would entwine themselves all the more inextricably with
me. To expel God from his heaven and to rob him of his "transcendence"
cannot yet support a claim of complete victory, if therein he
is only chased into the human breast and gifted with indelible
immanence. Now they say, "The divine is the truly
human!"
The same people who oppose Christianity
as the basis of the State, i.e. oppose the so-called
Christian State, do not tire of repeating that morality is "the
fundamental pillar of social life and of the State."
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62 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
As if the dominion of morality were not a complete dominion of
the sacred, a "hierarchy."
So we may here mention by the way
that rationalist movement which, after theologians had long insisted
that only faith was capable of grasping religious truths, that
only to believers did God reveal himself, and that therefore only
the heart, the feelings, the believing fancy was religious, broke
out with the assertion that the "natural understanding,"
human reason, was also capable of discerning God. What does that
mean but that the reason laid claim to be the same visionary as
the fancy?* In this sense Reimarus wrote his Most Notable
Truths of Natural Religion. It had to come to this -- that
the whole man with all his faculties was found to be
religious; heart and affections, understanding and reason,
feeling, knowledge, and will -- in short, everything in man --
appeared religious. Hegel has shown that even philosophy is religious.
And what is not called religion today? The "religion of love,"
the "religion of freedom," "political religion"
-- in short, every enthusiasm. So it is, too, in fact.
To this day we use the Romance word
"religion," which expresses the concept of a condition
of being bound. To be sure, we remain bound,
so far as religion takes possession of our inward parts; but is
the mind also bound? On the contrary, that is free, is sole lord,
is not our mind, but absolute. Therefore the correct affirmative
translation of the word religion would be "freedom of
mind"! In whomsoever the
*[dieselbe Phantastin wie die Phantasie.]
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MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 63 |
mind is free, he is religious in just the same way as he in whom
the senses have free course is called a sensual man. The mind
binds the former, the desires the latter. Religion, therefore,
is boundness or religion with reference to me -- I am
bound; it is freedom with reference to the mind -- the mind is
free, or has freedom of mind. Many know from experience how hard
it is on us when the desires run away with us, free and
unbridled; but that the free mind, splendid intellectuality, enthusiasm
for intellectual interests, or however this jewel may in the most
various phrase be named, brings us into yet more grievous
straits than even the wildest impropriety, people will not perceive;
nor can they perceive it without being consciously egoists.
Reimarus, and all who have shown
that our reason, our heart, etc., also lead to God, have therewithal
shown that we are possessed through and through. To be sure, they
vexed the theologians, from whom they took away the prerogative
of religious exaltation; but for religion, for freedom of mind,
they thereby conquered yet more ground. For, when the mind is
no longer limited to feeling or faith, but also, as understanding,
reason, and thought in general, belongs to itself the mind --
when therefore, it may take part in the spiritual* and heavenly
truths in the form of understanding, as well as in its other forms
-- then the whole mind is occupied only with spiritual things,
i. e., with itself, and is therefore free. Now we are
so through-and-through religious that "jurors," i.e.
"sworn men," condemn us to death, and every
*[The same word as "intellectual", as "mind"
and "spirit" are the same.]
| 64 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
policeman, as a good Christian, takes us to the lock-up by virtue
of an "oath of office."
Morality could not come into opposition
with piety till after the time when in general the boisterous
hate of everything that looked like an "order" (decrees,
commandments, etc.) spoke out in revolt, and the personal "absolute
lord" was scoffed at and persecuted; consequently it could
arrive at independence only through liberalism, whose first form
acquired significance in the world's history as "citizenship,"
and weakened the specifically religious powers (see "Liberalism"
below). For, when morality not merely goes alongside of piety,
but stands on feet of its own, then its principle lies no longer
in the divine commandments, but in the law of reason, from which
the commandments, so far as they are still to remain valid, must
first await justification for their validity. In the law of reason
man determines himself out of himself, for "Man" is
rational, and out of the "essence of Man" those laws
follow of necessity. Piety and morality part company in this --
that the former makes God the law-giver, the latter Man.
From a certain standpoint of morality
people reason about as follows: Either man is led by his sensuality,
and is, following it, immoral, or he is led by the good,
which, taken up into the will, is called moral sentiment (sentiment
and prepossession in favor of the good); then he shows himself
moral. From this point of view how, e. g., can
Sand's act against Kotzebue be called immoral? What is commonly
understood by unselfish it certainly was, in the same measure
as (among other things) St. Crispin's thiev-
|
MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 65 |
eries in favor of the poor. "He should not have murdered,
for it stands written, Thou shalt not murder!" Then to serve
the good, the welfare of the people, as Sand at least intended,
or the welfare of the poor, like Crispin -- is moral; but murder
and theft are immoral; the purpose moral, the means immoral. Why?
"Because murder, assassination, is something absolutely bad."
When the Guerrillas enticed the enemies of the country into ravines
and shot them down unseen from the bushes, do you suppose that
was assassination? According to the principle of morality, which
commands us to serve the good, you could really ask only whether
murder could never in any case be a realization of the good, and
would have to endorse that murder which realized the good. You
cannot condemn Sand's deed at all; it was moral, because in the
service of the good, because unselfish; it was an act of punishment,
which the individual inflicted, an -- execution inflicted
at the risk of the executioner's life. What else had his scheme
been, after all, but that he wanted to suppress writings by brute
force? Are you not acquainted with the same procedure as a "legal"
and sanctioned one? And what can be objected against it from your
principle of morality? -- "But it was an illegal execution."
So the immoral thing in it was the illegality, the disobedience
to law? Then you admit that the good is nothing else than -- law,
morality nothing else than loyalty. And to this externality
of "loyalty" your morality must sink, to this righteousness
of works in the fulfillment of the law, only that the latter is
at once more tyrannical and more revolting than
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66 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
the old-time righteousness of works. For in the latter only the
act is needed, but you require the disposition
too; one must carry in himself the law, the statute;
and he who is most legally disposed is the most moral. Even the
last vestige of cheerfulness in Catholic life must perish in this
Protestant legality. Here at last the domination of the law is
for the first time complete. "Not I live, but the law lives
in me." Thus I have really come so far to be only the "vessel
of its glory." "Every Prussian carries his gendarme
in his breast," says a high Prussian officer.
Why do certain opposition parties
fail to flourish? Solely for the reason that they refuse to forsake
the path of morality or legality. Hence the measureless hypocrisy
of devotion, love, etc., from whose repulsiveness one may daily
get the most thorough nausea at this rotten and hypocritical relation
of a "lawful opposition." -- In the moral relation
of love and fidelity a divided or opposed will cannot have place;
the beautiful relation is disturbed if the one wills this and
the other the reverse. But now, according to the practice hitherto
and the old prejudice of the opposition, the moral relation is
to be preserved above all. What is then left to the opposition?
Perhaps the will to have a liberty, if the beloved one sees fit
to deny it? Not a bit! It may not will to have the freedom,
it can only wish for it, "petition" for it,
lisp a "Please, please!" What would come of it, if the
opposition really willed, willed with the full energy
of the will? No, it must renounce will in order to live to love,
renounce liberty -- for love of morality. It may never "claim
as a right" what it is permitted only to "beg
|
MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 67 |
as a favor." Love, devotion. etc., demand with undeviating
definiteness that there be only one will to which the others devote
themselves, which they serve, follow, love. Whether this will
is regarded as reasonable or as unreasonable, in both cases one
acts morally when one follows it, and immorally when one breaks
away from it. The will that commands the censorship seems to many
unreasonable; but he who in a land of censorship evades the censoring
of his book acts immorally, and he who submits it to the censorship
acts morally. If some one let his moral judgment go, and set up
e. g. a secret press, one would have to call him immoral,
and imprudent in the bargain if he let himself be caught; but
will such a man lay claim to a value in the eyes of the "moral"?
Perhaps! -- That is, if he fancied he was serving a "higher
morality."
The web of the hypocrisy of today
hangs on the frontiers of two domains, between which our time
swings back and forth, attaching its fine threads of deception
and self-deception. No longer vigorous enough to serve morality
without doubt or weakening, not yet reckless enough to live wholly
to egoism, it trembles now toward the one and now toward the other
in the spider-web of hypocrisy, and, crippled by the curse of
halfness, catches only miserable, stupid flies. If one
has once dared to make a "free" motion, immediately
one waters it again with assurances of love, and -- shams
resignation; if, on the other side, they have had the face
to reject the free motion with moral appeals to confidence,
immediately the moral courage also sinks, and they assure one
how they hear the free words with special pleasure, etc.;
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68 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
they -- sham approval. In short, people would like to
have the one, but not go without the other; they would like to
have a free will, but not for their lives lack the moral
will. Just come in contact with a servile loyalist, you Liberals.
You will sweeten every word of freedom with a look of the most
loyal confidence, and he will clothe his servilism in the most
flattering phrases of freedom. Then you go apart, and he, like
you, thinks "I know you, fox!" He scents the devil in
you as much as you do the dark old Lord God in him.
A Nero is a "bad" man
only in the eyes of the "good"; in mine he is nothing
but a possessed man, as are the good too. The good see
in him an arch-villain, and relegate him to hell. Why did nothing
hinder him in his arbitrary course? Why did people put up with
so much? Do you suppose the tame Romans, who let all their will
be bound by such a tyrant, were a hair the better? In old Rome
they would have put him to death instantly, would never have been
his slaves. But the contemporary "good" among the Romans
opposed to him only moral demands, not their will; they
sighed that their emperor did not do homage to morality, like
them; they themselves remained "moral subjects," till
at last one found courage to give up "moral, obedient subjection."
And then the same "good Romans" who, as "obedient
subjects," had borne all the ignominy of having no will,
hurrahed over the nefarious, immoral act of the rebel. Where then
in the "good" was the courage for the revolution,
that courage which they now praised, after another had mustered
it up? The
| MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 69 |
good could not have this courage, for a revolution, and an insurrection
into the bargain, is always something "immoral," which
one can resolve upon only when one ceases to be "good"
and becomes either "bad" or -- neither of the two. Nero
was no viler than his time, in which one could only be one of
the two, good or bad. The judgment of his time on him had to be
that he was bad, and this in the highest degree: not a milksop,
but an arch-scoundrel. All moral people can pronounce only this
judgment on him. Rascals e. g. he was are still living
here and there today (see e. g. the Memoirs
of Ritter von Lang) in the midst of the moral. It is not convenient
to live among them certainly, as one is not sure of his life for
a moment; but can you say that it is more convenient to live among
the moral? One is just as little sure of his life there, only
that one is hanged "in the way of justice," but least
of all is one sure of his honor, and the national cockade is gone
before you can say Jack Robinson. The hard fist of morality treats
the noble nature of egoism altogether without compassion.
"But surely one cannot put
a rascal and an honest man on the same level!" Now, no human
being does that oftener than you judges of morals; yes, still
more than that, you imprison as a criminal an honest man who speaks
openly against the existing constitution, against the hallowed
institutions, and you entrust portfolios and still more important
things to a crafty rascal. So in praxi you have nothing
to reproach me with. "But in theory!" Now there I do
put both on the same level, as two opposite poles -- to
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wit, both on the level of the moral law. Both have meaning only
in the "moral world, just as in the pre-Christian time a
Jew who kept the law and one who broke it had meaning and significance
only in respect to the Jewish law; before Jesus Christ, on the
contrary, the Pharisee was no more than the "sinner and publican."
So before self-ownership the moral Pharisee amounts to as much
as the immoral sinner.
Nero became very inconvenient by
his possessedness. But a self-owning man would not sillily oppose
to him the "sacred," and whine if the tyrant does not
regard the sacred; he would oppose to him his will. How often
the sacredness of the inalienable rights of man has been held
up to their foes, and some liberty or other shown and demonstrated
to be a "sacred right of man!" Those who do that deserve
to be laughed out of court -- as they actually are -- were it
not that in truth they do, even though unconsciously, take the
road that leads to the goal. They have a presentiment that, if
only the majority is once won for that liberty, it will also will
the liberty, and will then take what it will have. The
sacredness of the liberty, and all possible proofs of this sacredness,
will never procure it; lamenting and petitioning only shows beggars.
The moral man is necessarily narrow
in that he knows no other enemy than the "immoral" man.
"He who is not moral is immoral!" and accordingly reprobate,
despicable, etc. Therefore the moral man can never comprehend
the egoist. Is not unwedded cohabitation an immorality? The moral
man may turn as he pleases, he will have to stand by this verdict;
Emilia Galotti gave up her life for this moral
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MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 71 |
truth. And it is true, it is an immorality. A virtuous girl may
become an old maid; a virtuous man may pass the time in fighting
his natural impulses till he has perhaps dulled them, he may castrate
himself for the sake of virtue as St. Origen did for the sake
of heaven: he thereby honors sacred wedlock, sacred chastity,
as inviolable; he is -- moral. Unchastity can never become a moral
act. However indulgently the moral man may judge and excuse him
who committed it, it remains a transgression, a sin against a
moral commandment; there clings to it an indelible stain. As chastity
once belonged to the monastic vow, so it does to moral conduct.
Chastity is a -- good. -- For the egoist, on the contrary, even
chastity is not a good without which he could not get along; he
cares nothing at all about it. What now follows from this for
the judgment of the moral man? This: that he throws the egoist
into the only class of men that he knows besides moral men, into
that of the -- immoral. He cannot do otherwise; he must find the
egoist immoral in everything in which the egoist disregards morality.
If he did not find him so, then he would already have become an
apostate from morality without confessing it to himself, he would
already no longer be a truly moral man. One should not let himself
be led astray by such phenomena, which at the present day are
certainly no longer to be classed as rare, but should reflect
that he who yields any point of morality can as little be counted
among the truly moral as Lessing was a pious Christian when, in
the well-known parable, he compared the Christian religion, as
well as the Mohammedan and Jewish, to a
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"counterfeit ring." Often people are already further
than they venture to confess to themselves. For Socrates, because
in culture he stood on the level of morality, it would have been
an immorality if he had been willing to follow Crito's seductive
incitement and escape from the dungeon; to remain was the only
moral thing. But it was solely because Socrates was -- a moral
man. The "unprincipled, sacrilegious" men of the Revolution,
on the contrary, had sworn fidelity to Louis XVI, and decreed
his deposition, yes, his death; but the act was an immoral one,
at which moral persons will be horrified to all eternity.
Yet all this applies, more or less,
only to "civic morality," on which the freer look down
with contempt. For it (like civism, its native ground, in general)
is still too little removed and free from the religious heaven
not to transplant the latter's laws without criticism or further
consideration to its domain instead of producing independent doctrines
of its own. Morality cuts a quite different figure when it arrives
at the consciousness of its dignity, and raises its principle,
the essence of man, or "Man," to be the only regulative
power. Those who have worked their way through to such a decided
consciousness break entirely with religion, whose God no longer
finds any place alongside their "Man," and, as they
(see below) themselves scuttle the ship of State, so too they
crumble away that "morality" which flourishes only in
the State, and logically have no right to use even its name any
further. For what this "critical" party calls morality
is very positively distinguished from the
| MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 73 |
so-called "civic or political morality," and must appear
to the citizen like an "insensate and unbridled liberty."
But at bottom it has only the advantage of the "purity of
the principle," which, freed from its defilement with the
religious, has now reached universal power in its clarified definiteness
as "humanity."
Therefore one should not wonder
that the name "morality" is retained along with others,
like freedom, benevolence, self-consciousness, and is only garnished
now and then with the addition, a "free" morality --
just as, though the civic State is abused, yet the State is to
arise again as a "free State," or, if not even so, yet
as a "free society."
Because this morality completed
into humanity has fully settled its accounts with the religion
out of which it historically came forth, nothing hinders it from
becoming a religion on its own account. For a distinction prevails
between religion and morality only so long as our dealings with
the world of men are regulated and hallowed by our relation to
a superhuman being, or so long as our doing is a doing "for
God's sake." If, on the other hand, it comes to the point
that "man is to man the supreme being," then that distinction
vanishes, and morality, being removed from its subordinate position,
is completed into -- religion. For then the higher being who had
hitherto been subordinated to the highest, Man, has ascended to
absolute height, and we are related to him as one is related to
the highest being, i.e. religiously. Morality and piety
are now as synonymous as in the beginning of Christianity, and
it is only because the supreme being has come to be a different
one that a holy walk is no
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longer called a "holy" one, but a "human"
one. If morality has conquered, then a complete -- change
of masters has taken place.
After the annihilation of faith
Feuerbach thinks to put in to the supposedly safe harbor of love.
"The first and highest law must be the love of man to man.
Homo homini Deus est -- this is the supreme practical
maxim, this is the turning point of the world's history."*
But, properly speaking, only the god is changed -- the deus;
love has remained: there love to the superhuman God, here love
to the human God, to homo as Deus. Therefore man is to
me -- sacred. And everything "truly human" is to me
-- sacred! "Marriage is sacred of itself. And so it is with
all moral relations. Friendship is and must be sacred
for you, and property, and marriage, and the good of every man,
but sacred in and of itself.** " Haven't we the
priest again there? Who is his God? Man with a great M! What is
the divine? The human! Then the predicate has indeed only been
changed into the subject, and, instead of the sentence "God
is love," they say "love is divine"; instead of
"God has become man," "Man has become God,"
etc. It is nothing more or less than a new -- religion.
"All moral relations are ethical, are cultivated with a moral
mind, only where of themselves (without religious consecration
by the priest's blessing) they are counted religious.
" Feuerbach's proposition, "Theology is anthropology,"
means only "religion must be ethics, ethics alone is religion."
*"Essence of Christianity," second edition,
p. 402.
**P. 403.
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MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 75 |
Altogether Feuerbach accomplishes
only a transposition of subject and predicate, a giving of preference
to the latter. But, since he himself says, "Love is not (and
has never been considered by men) sacred through being a predicate
of God, but it is a predicate of God because it is divine in and
of itself," he might judge that the fight against the predicates
themselves, against love and all sanctities, must be commenced.
How could he hope to turn men away from God when he left them
the divine? And if, as Feuerbach says, God himself has never been
the main thing to them, but only his predicates, then he might
have gone on leaving them the tinsel longer yet, since the doll,
the real kernel, was left at any rate. He recognizes, too, that
with him it is "only a matter of annihilating an illusion";*
he thinks, however, that the effect of the illusion on men is
"downright ruinous, since even love, in itself the truest,
most inward sentiment, becomes an obscure, illusory one through
religiousness, since religious love loves man** only for God's
sake, therefore loves man only apparently, but in truth God only."
Is this different with moral love? Does it love the man, this
man for this man's sake, or for morality's sake, and
so -- for homo homini Deus -- for God's sake?
The wheels in the head have a number
of other formal aspects, some of which it may be useful to indicate
here.
Thus self-renunciation is
common to the holy with
*P. 408.
**[Literally "the man."]