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THE EGO AND HIS
OWN

by

MAX STIRNER

A Reproduction of the First English Edition.

Translated from the German by
Steven T. Byington

With an Introduction by
J. L. Walker

New York
BENJ. R. TUCKER, Publisher
1907

Brought to you through the cooperative efforts of
Larry Schiereck, Svein Olav Nyberg, and Daniel T. Davis

This transcription is a copy intended for electronic reading. Page numbering
etc are not consistent to that of the original text. This electronic edition
was created by Linus Walleij the year 2001, for supporting electronic books,
PDF file generation and the like, to serve the casual reader. For this reason,
and others, there is no index available in this version. The scientifically
intresested are recommended to consult the HTML version originally created by
Schiereck, Nyberg and Davis.

Version 0.1



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Copyright, 1907, by
BENJAMIN R. TUCKER



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TO MY SWEETHEART
MARIE DÄHNHARDT



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PUBLISHER'S PREFACE

For more than twenty years I have entertained the design of publishing an
English translation of *"Der Einzige und Sein Eigentum*." When I formed this
design, the number of English-speaking persons who had ever heard of the book
was very limited. The memory of Max Stirner had been virtually extinct for an
entire generation. But in the last two decades there has been a remarkable
revival of interest both in the book and in its author. It began in this
country with a discussion in the pages of the Anarchist periodical, "Liberty,"
in which Stirner's thought was clearly expounded and vigorously championed by
Dr. James L. Walker, who adopted for this discussion the pseudonym "Tak Kak."
At that time Dr. Walker was the chief editorial writer for the Galveston
"News." Some years later he became a practicing physician in Mexico, where he
died in 1904. A series of essays which he began in an Anarchist periodical,
"Egoism," and which he lived to complete, was published after his death in a
small volume, "The Philosophy of Egoism." It is a very able and convincing
exposition of Stirner's teachings, and almost the only one that exists in the
English language. But the chief instrument in the revival of Stirnerism was
and is the German poet, John Henry Mackay. Very early in his career he met
Stirner's name in Lange's "History of Materialism," and was moved thereby to
read his book. The work made such an impression on him that he resolved to
devote a portion of his life to the rediscovery and rehabilitation of the lost
and forgotten genius. Through years of toil and correspondence and travel, and
triumphing over tremendous obstacles, he carried his task to completion, and
his biography of Stirner appeared in Berlin in 1898. It is a tribute to the
thoroughness of Mackay's work that since its publication not one important
fact about Stirner has been discovered by anybody. During his years of
investigation Mackay's advertising for information had created a new interest
in Stirner, which was enhanced by the sudden fame of the writings of Friedrich
Nietzsche, an author whose intellectual kinship with Stirner has been a
subject of much controversy. *"Der Einzige,"* previously obtainable only in an
expensive form, was included in Philipp Reclam's Universal-Bibliothek, and
this cheap edition has enjoyed a wide and ever-increasing circulation. During
the last dozen years the book has been translated twice into French, once into
Italian, once into Russian, and possibly into other languages. The
Scandinavian critic, Brandes, has written on Stirner. A large and appreciative
volume, entitled *"L'Individualisme Anarchiste: Max Stirner,"* from the pen of
Prof Victor Basch, of the University of Rennes, has appeared in Paris. Another
large and sympathetic volume, "Max Stirner," written by Dr. Anselm Ruest, has
been published very recently in Berlin. Dr. Paul Eltzbacher, in his work,
*"Der Anarchismus*," gives a chapter to Stirner, making him one of the seven
typical Anarchists, beginning with William Godwin and ending with Tolstoi, of
whom his book treats. There is hardly a notable magazine or a review on the
Continent that has not given at least one leading article to the subject of
Stirner. Upon the initiative of Mackay and with the aid of other admirers a
suitable stone has been placed above the philosopher's previously neglected
grave, and a memorial tablet upon the house in Berlin where he died in 1856;
and this spring another is to be placed upon the house in Bayreuth where he
was born in 1806. As a result of these various efforts, and though but little
has been written about Stirner in the English language, his name is now known
at least to thousands in America and England where formerly it was known only
to hundreds.

Therefore conditions are now more favorable for the reception of this volume
than they were when I formed the design of publishing it, more than twenty
years ago.

The problem of securing a reasonably good translation (for in the case of a
work presenting difficulties so enormous it was idle to hope for an adequate
translation) was finally solved by entrusting the task to Steven T. Byington,
a scholar of remarkable attainments, whose specialty is philology, and who is
also one of the ablest workers in the propaganda of Anarchism. But, for
further security from error, it was agreed with Mr. Byington that his
translation should have the benefit of revision by Dr. Walker, the most
thorough American student of Stirner, and by Emma Heller Schumm and George
Schumm, who are not only sympathetic with Stirner, but familiar with the
history of his time, and who enjoy a knowledge of English and German that
makes it difficult to decide which is their native tongue. It was also agreed
that, upon any point of difference between the translator and his revisers
which consultation might fail to solve, the publisher should decide. This
method has been followed, and in a considerable number of instances it has
fallen to me to make a decision. It is only fair to say, therefore, that the
responsibility for special errors and imperfections properly rests on my
shoulders, whereas, on the other hand, the credit for whatever general
excellence the translation may possess belongs with the same propriety to Mr.
Byington and his coadjutors. One thing is certain: its defects are due to no
lack of loving care and pains. And I think I may add with confidence, while
realizing fully how far short of perfection it necessarily falls, that it may
safely challenge comparison with the translations that have been made into
other languages.

In particular, I am responsible for the admittedly erroneous rendering of the
title. "The Ego and His Own" is not an exact English equivalent of *"Der
Einzige und Sein Eigentum."* But then, there is no exact English equivalent.
Perhaps the nearest is "The Unique One and His Property." But the unique one
is not strictly the *Einzige,* for uniqueness connotes not only singleness but
an admirable singleness, while Stirner's *Einzigkeit* is admirable in his eyes
only as such, it being no part of the purpose of his book to distinguish a
particular *Einzigkeit* as more excellent than another. Moreover, "The Unique
One and His Property " has no graces to compel our forgiveness of its slight
inaccuracy. It is clumsy and unattractive. And the same objections may be
urged with still greater force against all the other renderings that have been
suggested, -- "The Single One and His Property," "The Only One and His
Property," "The Lone One and His Property," "The Unit and His Property," and,
last and least and worst, "The Individual and His Prerogative." " The Ego and
His Own," on the other hand, if not a precise rendering, is at least an
excellent title in itself; excellent by its euphony, its monosyllabic
incisiveness, and its telling -- *Einzigkeit*. Another strong argument in its
favor is the emphatic correspondence of the phrase "his own" with Mr.
Byington's renderings of the kindred words, *Eigenheit* and *Eigner.*
Moreover, no reader will be led astray who bears in mind Stirner's
distinction: "I am not an ego along with other egos, but the sole ego; I am
unique." And, to help the reader to bear this in mind, the various renderings
of the word *Einzige* that occur through the volume are often accompanied by
foot-notes showing that, in the German, one and the same word does duty for
all.

If the reader finds the first quarter of this book somewhat forbidding and
obscure, he is advised nevertheless not to falter. Close attention will master
almost every difficulty, and, if he will but give it, he will find abundant
reward in what follows. For his guidance I may specify one defect in the
author's style. When controverting a view opposite to his own, he seldom
distinguishes with sufficient clearness his statement of his own view from his
re-statement of the antagonistic view. As a result, the reader is plunged into
deeper and deeper mystification, until something suddenly reveals the cause of
his misunderstanding, after which he must go back and read again. I therefore
put him on his guard. The other difficulties lie, as a rule, in the structure
of the work. As to these I can hardly do better than translate the following
passage from Prof. Basch's book, alluded to above: "There is nothing more
disconcerting than the first approach to this strange work. Stirner does not
condescend to inform us as to the architecture of his edifice, or furnish us
the slightest guiding thread. The apparent divisions of the book are few and
misleading. From the first page to the last a unique thought circulates, but
it divides itself among an infinity of vessels and arteries in each of which
runs a blood so rich in ferments that one is tempted to describe them all.
There is no progress in the development, and the repetitions are
innumerable... The reader who is not deterred by this oddity, or rather
absence, of composition gives proof of genuine intellectual courage. At first
one seems to be confronted with a collection of essays strung together, with a
throng of aphorisms... But, if you read this book several times; if, after
having penetrated the intimacy of each of its parts, you then traverse it as a
whole, -- gradually the fragments weld themselves together, and Stirner's
thought is revealed in all its unity, in all its force, and in all its depth."

A word about the dedication. Mackay's investigations have brought to light
that Marie Dähnhardt had nothing whatever in common with Stirner, and so was
unworthy of the honor conferred upon her. She was no *Eigene.* I therefore
reproduce the dedication merely in the interest of historical accuracy.

Happy as I am in the appearance of this book, my joy is not unmixed with
sorrow. The cherished project was as dear to the heart of Dr. Walker as to
mine, and I deeply grieve that he is no longer with us to share our delight in
the fruition. Nothing, however, can rob us of the masterly introduction that
he wrote for this volume (in 1903, or perhaps earlier), from which I will not
longer keep the reader. This introduction, no more than the book itself, shall
that *Einzige*, Death, make his *Eigentum.*

February, 1907.
*B. R. T.*



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INTRODUCTION

Fifty years sooner or later can make little difference in the; case of a book
so revolutionary as this. It saw the light when a so-called revolutionary
movement was preparing in men's minds which agitation was, however, only a
disturbance due to desires to participate in government, and to govern and to
be governed, in a manner different to that which prevails. The
"revolutionists" of 1848 were bewitched with an idea. They were not at all the
masters of ideas. Most of those who since that time have prided themselves
upon being revolutionists have been and are likewise but the bondmen of an
idea, -- that of the different lodgment of authority.

The temptation is, of course, present to attempt an explanation of the central
thought of this work; but such an effort appears to be unnecessary to one who
has the volume in his hand. The author's care in illustrating his meaning
shows that he realized how prone the possessed man is to misunderstand
whatever is not moulded according to the fashions in thinking. The author's
learning was considerable, his command of words and ideas may never be
excelled by another, and he judged it needful to develop his argument in
manifold ways. So those who enter into the spirit of it will scarcely hope to
impress others with the same conclusion in a more summary manner. Or, if one
might deem that possible after reading Stirner, still one cannot think that it
could be done so surely. The author has made certain work of it, even though
he has to wait for his public; but still, the reception of the book by its
critics amply proves the truth of the saying that one can give another
arguments, but not understanding. The system-makers and system-believers thus
far cannot get it out of their heads that any discourse about the nature of an
ego must turn upon the common characteristics of egos, to make a systematic
scheme of what they share as a generality. The critics inquire what kind of
man the author is talking about. They repeat the question: What does he
believe in? They fail to grasp the purport of the recorded answer: "I believe
in myself"; which is attributed to a common soldier long before the time of
Stirner. They ask, what is the principle of the self-conscious egoist, the
Einzige? To this perplexity Stirner says: Change the question; put "who?"
instead of "what?" and an answer can then be given by naming him!

This, of course, is too simple for persons governed by ideas, and for persons
in quest of new governing ideas. They wish to classify the man. Now, that in
me which you can classify is not my distinguishing self. "Man" is the horizon
or zero of my existence as an individual. Over that I rise as I can. At least
I am something more than "man in general." Pre-existing worship of ideals and
disrespect for self had made of the ego at the very most a Somebody, oftener
an empty vessel to be filled with the grace or the leavings of a tyrannous
doctrine; thus a Nobody. Stirner dispels the morbid subjection, and recognizes
each one who knows and feels himself as his own property to be neither humble
Nobody nor befogged Somebody, but henceforth flat-footed and level-headed Mr.
Thisbody, who has a character and good pleasure of his own, just as he has a
name of his own. The critics who attacked this work and were answered in the
author's minor writings, rescued from oblivion by John Henry Mackay, nearly
all display the most astonishing triviality and impotent malice.

We owe to Dr. Eduard von Hartmann the unquestionable service which he rendered
by directing attention to this book in his "Philosophie des Unbewußten," the
first edition of which was published in 1869, and in other writings. I do not
begrudge Dr. von Hartmann the liberty of criticism which he used; and I think
the admirers of Stirner's teaching must quite appreciate one thing which Von
Hartmann did at a much later date. In "Der Eigene" of August 10, 1896, there
appeared a letter written by him and giving, among other things, certain data
from which to judge that, when Friedrich Nietzsche wrote his later essays,
Nietzsche was not ignorant of Stirner's book.

Von Hartmann wishes that Stirner had gone on and developed his principle. Von
Hartmann suggests that you and I are really the same spirit, looking out
through two pairs of eyes. Then, one may reply, I need not concern myself
about you, for in myself I have -- us; and at that rate Von Hartmann is merely
accusing himself of inconsistency: for, when Stirner wrote this book, Von
Hartmann's spirit was writing it; and it is just the pity that Von Hartmann in
his present form does not indorse what he said in the form of Stirner, -- that
Stirner was different from any other man; that his ego was not Fichte's
transcendental generality, but "this transitory ego of flesh and blood." It is
not as a generality that you and I differ, but as a couple of facts which are
not to be reasoned into one. "I" is somewise Hartmann, and thus Hartmann is
"I"; but I am not Hartmann, and Hartmann is not -- I. Neither am I the "I" of
Stirner; only Stirner himself was Stirner's "I." Note how comparatively
indifferent a matter it is with Stirner that one is an ego, but how
all-important it is that one be a self-conscious ego, -- a self-conscious,
self-willed person.

Those not self-conscious and self-willed are constantly acting from
self-interested motives, but clothing these in various garbs. Watch those
people closely in the light of Stirner's teaching, and they seem to be
hypocrites, they have so many good moral and religious plans of which
self-interest is at the end and bottom; but they, we may believe, do not know
that this is more than a coincidence.

In Stirner we have the philosophical foundation for political liberty. His
interest in the practical development of egoism to the dissolution of the
State and the union of free men is clear and pronounced, and harmonizes
perfectly with the economic philosophy of Josiah Warren. Allowing for
difference of temperament and language, there is a substantial agreement
between Stirner and Proudhon. Each would be free, and sees in every increase
of the number of free people and their intelligence an auxiliary force against
the oppressor. But, on the other hand, will any one for a moment seriously
contend that Nietzsche and Proudhon march together in general aim and
tendency, -- that they have anything in common except the daring to profane
the shrine and sepulchre of superstition?

Nietzsche has been much spoken of as a disciple of Stirner, and, owing to
favorable cullings from Nietzsche's writings, it has occurred that one of his
books has been supposed to contain more sense than it really does -- so long
as one had read only the extracts.

Nietzsche cites scores or hundreds of authors. Had he read everything, and not
read Stirner?

But Nietzsche is as unlike Stirner as a tight-rope performance is unlike an
algebraic equation.

Stirner loved liberty for himself, and loved to see any and all men and women
taking liberty, and he had no lust of power. Democracy to him was sham
liberty, egoism the genuine liberty.

Nietzsche, on the contrary, pours out his contempt upon democracy because it
is not aristocratic. He is predatory to the point of demanding that those who
must succumb to feline rapacity shall be taught to submit with resignation.
When he speaks of "Anarchistic dogs" scouring the streets of great civilized
cities; it is true, the context shows that he means the Communists; but his
worship of Napoleon, his bathos of anxiety for the rise of an aristocracy that
shall rule Europe for thousands of years, his idea of treating women in the
oriental fashion, show that Nietzsche has struck out in a very old path --
doing the apotheosis of tyranny. We individual egoistic Anarchists, however,
may say to the Nietzsche school, so as not to be misunderstood: We do not ask
of the Napoleons to have pity, nor of the predatory barons to do justice. They
will find it convenient for their own welfare to make terms with men who have
learned of Stirner what a man can be who worships nothing, bears allegiance to
nothing. To Nietzsche's rhodomontade of eagles in baronial form, born to prey
on industrial lambs, we rather tauntingly oppose the ironical question: Where
are your claws? What if the "eagles" are found to be plain barn-yard fowls on
which more silly fowls have fastened steel spurs to hack the victims, who,
however, have the power to disarm the sham "eagles" between two suns? Stirner
shows that men make their tyrants as they make their gods, and his purpose is
to unmake tyrants.

Nietzsche dearly loves a tyrant.

In style Stirner's work offers the greatest possible contrast to the puerile,
padded phraseology of Nietzsche's "Zarathustra" and its false imagery. Who
ever imagined such an unnatural conjuncture as an eagle "toting" a serpent in
friendship? which performance is told of in bare words, but nothing comes of
it. In Stirner we are treated to an enlivening and earnest discussion
addressed to serious minds, and every reader feels that the word is to him,
for his instruction and benefit, so far as he has mental independence and
courage to take it and use it. The startling intrepidity of this book is
infused with a whole-hearted love for all mankind, as evidenced by the fact
that the author shows not one iota of prejudice or any idea of division of men
into ranks. He would lay aside government, but would establish any regulation
deemed convenient, and for this only our convenience in consulted. Thus there
will be general liberty only when the disposition toward tyranny is met by
intelligent opposition that will no longer submit to such a rule. Beyond this
the manly sympathy and philosophical bent of Stirner are such that rulership
appears by contrast a vanity, an infatuation of perverted pride. We know not
whether we more admire our author or more love him.

Stirner's attitude toward woman is not special. She is an individual if she
can be, not handicapped by anything he says, feels, thinks, or plans. This was
more fully exemplified in his life than even in this book; but there is not a
line in the book to put or keep woman in an inferior position to man, neither
is there anything of caste or aristocracy in the book. Likewise there is
nothing of obscurantism or affected mysticism about it. Everything in it is
made as plain as the author could make it. He who does not so is not Stirner's
disciple nor successor nor co-worker. Some one may ask: How does plumb-line
Anarchism train with the unbridled egoism proclaimed by Stirner? The
plumb-line is not a fetish, but an intellectual conviction, and egoism is a
universal fact of animal life. Nothing could seem clearer to my mind than that
the reality of egoism must first come into the consciousness of men, before we
can have the unbiased Einzige in place of the prejudiced biped who lends
himself to the support of tyrannies a million times stronger over me than the
natural self-interest of any individual. When plumb-line doctrine is
misconceived as duty between unequal-minded men, -- as a religion of humanity,
- -- it is indeed the confusion of trying to read without knowing the alphabet
and of putting philanthropy in place of contract. But, if the plumb-line be
scientific, it is or can be my possession, my property, and I choose it for
its use -- when circumstances admit of its use. I do not feel bound to use it
because it is scientific, in building my house; but, as my will, to be
intelligent, is not to be merely wilful, the adoption of the plumb-line
follows the discarding of incantations. There is no plumb-line without the
unvarying lead at the end of the line; not a fluttering bird or a clawing cat.

On the practical side of the question of egoism versus self-surrender and for
a trial of egoism in politics, this may be said: the belief that men not moved
by a sense of duty will be unkind or unjust to others is but an indirect
confession that those who hold that belief are greatly interested in having
others live for them rather than for themselves. But I do not ask or expect so
much.

I am content if others individually live for themselves, and thus cease in so
many ways to act in opposition to my living for myself, -- to our living for
ourselves.

If Christianity has failed to turn the world from evil, it is not to be
dreamed that rationalism of a pious moral stamp will succeed in the same task.
Christianity, or all philanthropic love, is tested in non-resistance. It is a
dream that example will change the hearts of rulers, tyrants, mobs. If the
extremest self-surrender fails, how can a mixture of Christian love and
worldly caution succeed? This at least must be given up. The policy of Christ
and Tolstoi can soon be tested, but Tolstoi's belief is not satisfied with a
present test and failure. He has the infatuation of one who persists because
this ought to be. The egoist who thinks "I should like this to be" still has
the sense to perceive that it is not accomplished by the fact of some
believing and submitting, inasmuch as others are alert to prey upon the
unresisting. The Pharaohs we have ever with us.

Several passages in this most remarkable book show the author as a man full of
sympathy. When we reflect upon his deliberately expressed opinions and
sentiments, -- his spurning of the sense of moral obligation as the last form
of superstition, -- may we not be warranted in thinking that the total
disappearance of the sentimental supposition of duty liberates a quantity of
nervous energy for the purest generosity and clarifies the intellect for the
more discriminating choice of objects of merit?

J. L. WALKER.



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TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

If the style of this book is found unattractive, it will show that I have done
my work ill and not represented the author truly; but, if it is found odd, I
beg that I may not bear all the blame. I have simply tried to reproduce the
author's own mixture of colloquialisms and technicalities, and his preference
for the precise expression of his thought rather than the word conventionally
expected.

One especial feature of the style, however, gives the reason why this preface
should exist. It is characteristic of Stirner's writing that the thread of
thought is carried on largely by the repetition of the same word in a modified
form or sense. That connection of ideas which has guided popular instinct in
the formation of words is made to suggest the line of thought which the writer
wishes to follow. If this echoing of words is missed, the bearing of the
statements on each other is in a measure lost; and, where the ideas are very
new, one cannot afford to throw away any help in following their connection.
Therefore, where a useful echo (and then are few useless ones in the book)
could not be reproduced in English, I have generally called attention to it in
a note. My notes are distinguished from the author's by being enclosed in
parentheses.

One or two of such coincidences of language, occurring in words which are
prominent throughout the book, should be borne constantly in mind as a sort of
*Keri perpetuum;* for instance, the identity in the original of the words
"spirit" and "mind," and of the phrases "supreme being" and "highest essence."
In such cases I have repeated the note where it seemed that such repetition
might be absolutely necessary, but have trusted the reader to carry it in his
head where a failure of his memory would not be ruinous or likely.

For the same reason--that is, in order not to miss any indication of the drift
of the thought -- I have followed the original in the very liberal use of
italics, and in the occasional eccentric use of a punctuation mark, as I might
not have done in translating a work of a different nature.

I have set my face as a flint against the temptation to add notes that were
not part of the translation. There is no telling how much I might have
enlarged the book if I had put a note at every sentence which deserved to have
its truth brought out by fuller elucidation -- or even at every one which I
thought needed correction. It might have been within my province, if I had
been able, to explain all the allusions to contemporary events, but I doubt
whether any one could do that properly without having access to the files of
three or four well-chosen German newspapers of Stirner's time. The allusions
are clear enough, without names and dates, to give a vivid picture of certain
aspects of German life then. The tone of some of them is explained by the fact
that the book was published under censorship.

I have usually preferred, for the sake of the connection, to translate
Biblical quotations somewhat as they stand in the German, rather than conform
them altogether to the English Bible. I am sometimes quite as near the
original Greek as if I had followed the current translation.

Where German books are referred to, the pages cited are those of the German
editions even when (usually because of some allusions in the text) the titles
of the books are translated.

Steven T. Byington



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_THE EGO AND HIS OWN_




All Things Are Nothing To Me(1)

What is not supposed to be my concern!(2) First and foremost, the Good
Cause,(3) then God's cause, the cause of mankind, of truth, of freedom, of
humanity, of justice; further, the cause of my people, my prince, my
fatherland; finally, even the cause of Mind, and a thousand other causes. Only
*my* cause is never to be my concern. "Shame on the egoist who thinks only of
himself!"

Let us look and see, then, how they manage *their* concerns -- they for whose
cause we are to labor, devote ourselves, and grow enthusiastic.

You have much profound information to give about God, and have for thousands
of years "searched the depths of the Godhead," and looked into its heart, so
that you can doubtless tell us how God himself attends to "God's cause," which
we are called to serve. And you do not conceal the Lord's doings, either. Now,
what is his cause? Has he, as is demanded of us, made an alien cause, the
cause of truth or love, his own? You are shocked by this misunderstanding, and
you instruct us that God's cause is indeed the cause of truth and love, but
that this cause cannot be called alien to him, because God is himself truth
and love; you are shocked by the assumption that God could be like us poor
worms in furthering an alien cause as his own. "Should God take up the cause
of truth if he were not himself truth?" He cares only for *his* cause, but,
because he is all in all, therefore all is his cause! But we, we are not all
in all, and our cause is altogether little and contemptible; therefore we must
"serve a higher cause." -- Now it is clear, God cares only for what is his,
busies himself only with himself, thinks only of himself, and has only himself
before his eyes; woe to all that is not well-pleasing to him. He serves no
higher person, and satisfies only himself. His cause is -- a purely egoistic
cause.

How is it with mankind, whose cause we are to make our own? Is its cause that
of another, and does mankind serve a higher cause? No, mankind looks only at
itself, mankind will promote the interests of mankind only, mankind is its own
cause. That it may develop, it causes nations and individuals to wear
themselves out in its service, and, when they have accomplished what mankind
needs, it throws them on the dung-heap of history in gratitude. Is not
mankind's cause -- a purely egoistic cause?

I have no need to take up each thing that wants to throw its cause on us and
show that it is occupied only with itself, not with us, only with its good,
not with ours. Look at the rest for yourselves. Do truth, freedom, humanity,
justice, desire anything else than that you grow enthusiastic and serve them?

They all have an admirable time of it when they receive zealous homage. Just
observe the nation that is defended by devoted patriots. The patriots fall in
bloody battle or in the fight with hunger and want; what does the nation care
for that? By the manure of their corpses the nation comes to "its bloom"! The
individuals have died "for the great cause of the nation," and the nation
sends some words of thanks after them and -- has the profit of it. I call that
a paying kind of egoism.

But only look at that Sultan who cares so lovingly for his people. Is he not
pure unselfishness itself, and does he not hourly sacrifice himself for his
people? Oh, yes, for "his people." Just try it; show yourself not as his, but
as your own; for breaking away from his egoism you will take a trip to jail.
The Sultan has set his cause on nothing but himself; he is to himself all in
all, he is to himself the only one, and tolerates nobody who would dare not to
be one of "his people."

And will you not learn by these brilliant examples that the egoist gets on
best? I for my part take a lesson from them, and propose, instead of further
unselfishly serving those great egoists, rather to be the egoist myself.

God and mankind have concerned themselves for nothing, for nothing but
themselves. Let me then likewise concern myself for *myself,* who am equally
with God the nothing of all others, who am my all, who am the only one.(4)

If God, if mankind, as you affirm, have substance enough in themselves to be
all in all to themselves, then I feel that I shall still less lack that, and
that I shall have no complaint to make of my "emptiness." I am not nothing in
the sense of emptiness, but I am the creative nothing, the nothing out of
which I myself as creator create everything.

Away, then, with every concern that is not altogether my concern! You think at
least the "good cause" must be my concern? What's good, what's bad? Why, I
myself am my concern, and I am neither good nor bad. Neither has meaning for
me.

The divine is God's concern; the human, man's. My concern is neither the
divine nor the human, not the true, good, just, free, etc., but solely what is
*mine*, and it is not a general one, but is -- unique,(5) as I am unique.

Nothing is more to me than myself!




Footnotes:

(1) *"Ich hab' Mein' Sach' auf Nichts gestellt*, first line of Goethe's poem,
*"Vanitas! Vanitatum Vanitas!*" Literal translation: "I have set my affair on
nothing."

(2) *Sache*

(3) *Sache*

(4) *Der Einzige*

(5) *Einzig*




Part First

MAN



- ---- * ----

*Man is to man the supreme being,*, says Feuerbach.

*Man has just been discovered,*says Bruno Bauer.

Then let us take a more careful look at this supreme being and this new
discovery.



- ---- * ----

I
A HUMAN LIFE

From the moment when he catches sight of the light of the world a man seeks to
find out *himself* and get hold of *himself* out of its confusion, in which
he, with everything else, is tossed about in motley mixture.

But everything that comes in contact with the child defends itself in turn
against his attacks, and asserts its own persistence.

Accordingly, because each thing*cares for itself* at the same time comes into
constant collision with other things, the *combat* of self-assertion is
unavoidable.

*Victory or defeat* -- between the two alternatives the fate of the combat
wavers. The victor becomes the *lord,* the vanquished one the *subject*: the
former exercises *supremacy* and "rights of supremacy," the latter fulfills in
awe and deference the "duties of a subject.

But both remain *enemies*, and always lie in wait: they watch for each other's
*weaknesses* -- children for those of their parents and parents for those of
their children (*e.g.,* their fear); either the stick conquers the man, or the
man conquers the stick.

In childhood liberation takes the direction of trying to get to the bottom of
things, to get at what is "back of" things; therefore we spy out the weak
points of everybody, for which, it is well known, children have a sure
instinct; therefore we like to smash things, like to rummage through hidden
corners, pry after what is covered up or out of the way, and try what we can
do with everything. When we once get at what is back of the things, we know we
are safe; when, *e.g.,* we have got at the fact that the rod is too weak
against our obduracy, then we no longer fear it, "have out-grown it."

Back of the rod, mightier than it, stands our -- obduracy, our obdurate
courage. By degrees we get at what is back of everything that was mysterious
and uncanny to us, the mysteriously-dreaded might of the rod, the father's
stern look, etc., and back of all we find our ataraxia, *i. e.*
imperturbability, intrepidity, our counter force, our odds of strength, our
invincibility. Before that which formerly inspired in us fear and deference we
no longer retreat shyly, but take *courage*. Back of everything we find our
*courage*, our superiority; back of the sharp command of parents and
authorities stands, after all, our courageous choice or our outwitting
shrewdness. And the more we feel ourselves, the smaller appears that which
before seemed invincible. And what is our trickery, shrewdness, courage,
obduracy? What else but -- *mind!*(1)

Through a considerable time we are spared a fight that is so exhausting later
- -- the fight against *reason.* The fairest part of childhood passes without
the necessity of coming to blows with reason. We care nothing at all about it,
do not meddle with it, admit no reason. We are not to be persuaded to anything
by *conviction*, and are deaf to good arguments, principles, etc.; on the
other hand, coaxing, punishment, etc. are hard for us to resist.

This stern life-and-death combat with *reason* enters later, and begins a new
phase; in childhood we scamper about without racking our brains much.

*Mind* is the name of the *first* self-discovery, the first self-discovery,
the first undeification of the divine; *i. e.*, of the uncanny, the spooks,
the "powers above." Our fresh feeling of youth, this feeling of self, now
defers to nothing; the world is discredited, for we are above it, we are
*mind*.

Now for the first time we see that hitherto we have not looked at the world
*intelligently* at all, but only stared at it.

We exercise the beginnings of our strength on *natural powers*. We defer to
parents as a natural power; later we say: Father and mother are to be
forsaken, all natural power to be counted as riven. They are vanquished. For
the rational, *i.e.* the "intellectual" man, there is no family as a natural
power; a renunciation of parents, brothers, etc., makes its appearance. If
these are "born again" as *intellectual, rational powers*, they are no longer
at all what they were before.

And not only parents, but *men in general*, are conquered by the young man;
they are no hindrance to him, and are no longer regarded; for now he says: One
must obey God rather than men.

From this high standpoint everything *"earthly"* recedes into contemptible
remoteness; for the standpoint is -- the *heavenly*.

The attitude is now altogether reversed; the youth takes up an *intellectual*
position, while the boy, who did not yet feel himself as mind, grew up on
mindless learning. The former does not try to get hold of *things* (*e.g.* to
get into his head the *data* of history), but of the *thoughts* that lie
hidden in things, and so, *e.g.*, of the *spirit* of history. On the other
hand, the boy understands *connections* no doubt, but not ideas, the spirit;
therefore he strings together whatever can be learned, without proceeding *a
priori* and theoretically, *i.e.* without looking for ideas.

As in childhood one had to overcome the resistance of the *laws of the world*,
so now in everything that he proposes he is met by an objection of the mind,
of reason, of his *own conscience*. "That is unreasonable, unchristian,
unpatriotic," etc., cries conscience to us, and -- frightens us away from it.
Not the might of the avenging Eumenides, not Poseidon's wrath, not God, far as
he sees the hidden, not the father's rod of punishment, do we fear, but --
*conscience.*

We "run after our thoughts" now, and follow their commands just as before we
followed parental, human ones. Our course of action is determined by our
thoughts (ideas, conceptions, *faith*) as it is in childhood by the commands
of our parents.

For all that, we were already thinking when we were children, only our
thoughts were not fleshless, abstract, *absolute*, *i. e.*, NOTHING BUT
THOUGHTS, a heaven in themselves, a pure world of thought, *logical* thoughts.

On the contrary, they had been only thoughts that we had about a *thing*; we
thought of the thing so or so. Thus we may have thought "God made the world
that we see there," but we did not think of ("search") the "depths of the
Godhead itself"; we may have thought "that is the truth about the matter," but
we do not think of Truth itself, nor unite into one sentence "God is truth."
The "depths of the Godhead, who is truth," we did not touch. Over such purely
logical, *i.e.* theological questions, "What is truth?" Pilate does not stop,
though he does not therefore hesitate to ascertain in an individual case "what
truth there is in the thing," *i.e.* whether the *thing* is true.

Any thought bound to a *thing* is not yet *nothing but a thought*, absolute
thought.

To bring to light the *pure thought*, or to be of its party, is the delight of
youth; and all the shapes of light in the world of thought, like truth,
freedom, humanity, Man, etc., illumine and inspire the youthful soul.

But, when the spirit is recognized as the essential thing, it still makes a
difference whether the spirit is poor or rich, and therefore one seeks to
become rich in spirit; the spirit wants to spread out so as to found its
empire -- an empire that is not of this world, the world just conquered. Thus,
then, it longs to become all in all to itself; *i.e.*, although I am spirit, I
am not yet *perfected* spirit, and must first seek the complete spirit.

But with that I, who had just now found myself as spirit, lose myself again at
once, bowing before the complete spirit as one not my own but *supernal*, and
feeling my emptiness.

Spirit is the essential point for everything, to be sure; but then is every
spirit the "right" spirit? The right and true spirit is the ideal of spirit,
the "Holy Spirit." It is not my or your spirit, but just -- an ideal, supernal
one, it is "God." "God is spirit." And this supernal "Father in heaven gives
it to those that pray to him."(2)

The man is distinguished from the youth by the fact that he takes the world as
it is, instead of everywhere fancying it amiss and wanting to improve it,
*i.e.* model it after his ideal; in him the view that one must deal with the
world according to his *interest,* not according to his *ideals*, becomes
confirmed.

So long as one knows himself only as *spirit*, and feels that all the value of
his existence consists in being spirit (it becomes easy for the youth to give
his life, the "bodily life," for a nothing, for the silliest point of honor),
so long it is only *thoughts* that one has, ideas that he hopes to be able to
realize some day when he has found a sphere of action; thus one has meanwhile
only *ideals*, unexecuted ideas or thoughts.

Not till one has fallen in love with his *corporeal* self, and takes a
pleasure in himself as a living flesh-and-blood person -- but it is in mature
years, in the man, that we find it so -- not till then has one a personal or
*egoistic* interest, *i.e.* an interest not only of our spirit, *e. g.*, but
of total satisfaction, satisfaction of the whole chap, a *selfish* interest.
Just compare a man with a youth, and see if he will not appear to you harder,
less magnanimous, more selfish. Is he therefore worse? No, you say; he has
only become more definite, or, as you also call it, more "practical." But the
main point is this, that he makes *himself* more the center than does the
youth, who is infatuated about other things, *e.g.* God, fatherland, etc.

Therefore the man shows a *second* self-discovery. The youth found himself as
*spirit* and lost himself again in the *general* spirit, the complete, holy
spirit, Man, mankind -- in short, all ideals; the man finds himself as
*embodied* spirit.

Boys had only *unintellectual* interests (*i.e.* interests devoid of thoughts
and ideas), youths only *intellectual* ones; the man has bodily, personal,
egoistic interests.

If the child has not an *object* that it can occupy itself with, it feels
*ennui*; for it does not yet know how to occupy itself with *itself*. The
youth, on the contrary, throws the object aside, because for him *thoughts*
arose out of the object; he occupies himself with his *thoughts*, his dreams,
occupies himself intellectually, or "his mind is occupied."

The young man includes everything not intellectual under the contemptuous name
of "externalities." If he nevertheless sticks to the most trivial
externalities (*e.g.* the customs of students' clubs and other formalities),
it is because, and when, he discovers *mind* in them, *i.e.* when they are
*symbols* to him.

As I find myself back of things, and that as mind, so I must later find
*myself* also back of *thoughts* -- to wit, as their creator and owner. In the
time of spirits thoughts grew till they overtopped my head, whose offspring
they yet were; they hovered about me and convulsed me like fever-phantasies --
an awful power. The thoughts had become *corporeal* on their own account, were
ghosts, *e. g.* God, Emperor, Pope, Fatherland, etc. If I destroy their
corporeity, then I take them back into mine, and say: "I alone am corporeal."
And now I take the world as what it is to me, as *mine*, as my property; I
refer all to myself.

If as spirit I had thrust away the world in the deepest contempt, so as owner
I thrust spirits or ideas away into their "vanity." They have no longer any
power over me, as no "earthly might" has power over the spirit.

The child was realistic, taken up with the things of this world, till little
by little he succeeded in getting at what was back of these very things; the
youth was idealistic, inspired by thoughts, till he worked his way up to where
he became the man, the egoistic man, who deals with things and thoughts
according to his heart's pleasure, and sets his personal interest above
everything. Finally, the old man? When I become one, there will still be time
enough to speak of that.




Footnotes:

(1) *Geist*. This word will be translated sometimes "mind" and sometimes
"spirit" in the following pages.

(2) Luke 11, 13.




II.
MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW



- ---- * ----

How each of us developed himself, what he strove for, attained, or missed,
what objects he formerly pursued and what plans and wishes his heart is now
set on, what transformation his views have experienced, what perturbations his
principles -- in short, how he has today become what yesterday or years ago he
was not -- this he brings out again from his memory with more or less ease,
and he feels with especial vividness what changes have taken place in himself
when he has before his eyes the unrolling of another's life.

Let us therefore look into the activities our forefathers busied themselves
with.



- ---- * ----

1. THE ANCIENTS

Custom having once given the name of "the ancients" to our pre-Christian
ancestors, we will not throw it up against them that, in comparison with us
experienced people, they ought properly to be called children, but will rather
continue to honor them as our good old fathers. But how have they come to be
antiquated, and who could displace them through his pretended newness?

We know, of course, the revolutionary innovator and disrespectful heir, who
even took away the sanctity of the fathers' sabbath to hallow his Sunday, and
interrupted the course of time to begin at himself with a new chronology; we
know him, and know that it is -- the Christian. But does he remain forever
young, and is he today still the new man, or will he too be superseded, as he
has superseded the "ancients"?

The fathers must doubtless have themselves begotten the young one who entombed
them. Let us then peep at this act of generation.

"To the ancients the world was a truth," says Feuerbach, but he forgets to
make the important addition, "a truth whose untruth they tried to get back of,
and at last really did." What is meant by those words of Feuerbach will be
easily recognized if they are put alongside the Christian thesis of the
"vanity and transitoriness of the world." For, as the Christian can never
convince himself of the vanity of the divine word, but believes in its eternal
and unshakable truth, which, the more its depths are searched, must all the
more brilliantly come to light and triumph, so the ancients on their side
lived in the feeling that the world and mundane relations (*e.g.* the natural
ties of blood) were the truth before which their powerless "I" must bow. The
very thing on which the ancients set the highest value is spurned by
Christians as the valueless, and what they recognized as truth these brand as
idle lies; the high significance of the fatherland disappears, and the
Christian must regard himself as "a stranger on earth";(1) the sanctity of
funeral rites, from which sprang a work of art like the Antigone of Sophocles,
is designated as a paltry thing ("Let the dead bury their dead"); the
infrangible truth of family ties is represented as an untruth which one cannot
promptly enough get clear of;(2) and so in everything.

If we now see that to the two sides opposite things appear as truth, to one
the natural, to the other the intellectual, to one earthly things and
relations, to the other heavenly (the heavenly fatherland, "Jerusalem that is
above," etc.), it still remains to be considered how the new time and that
undeniable reversal could come out of antiquity. But the ancients themselves
worked toward making their truth a lie.

Let us plunge at once into the midst of the most brilliant years of the
ancients, into the Periclean century. Then the Sophistic culture was
spreading, and Greece made a pastime of what had hitherto been to her a
monstrously serious matter.

The fathers had been enslaved by the undisturbed power of existing things too
long for the posterity not to have to learn by bitter experience to *feel
themselves*. Therefore the Sophists, with courageous sauciness, pronounce the
reassuring words, "Don't be bluffed!" and diffuse the rationalistic doctrine,
"Use your understanding, your wit, your mind, against everything; it is by
having a good and well-drilled understanding that one gets through the world
best, provides for himself the best lot, the most pleasant *life."* Thus they
recognize in *mind* man's true weapon against the world. This is why they lay
such stress on dialectic skill, command of language, the art of disputation,
etc. They announce that mind is to be used against everything; but they are
still far removed from the holiness of the Spirit, for to them it is a
*means*, a weapon, as trickery and defiance serve children for the same
purpose; their mind is the unbribable *understanding*.

Today we should call that a one-sided culture of the understanding, and add
the warning, "Cultivate not only your understanding, but also, and especially,
your heart." Socrates did the same. For, if the heart did not become free from
its natural impulses, but remained filled with the most fortuitous contents
and, as an uncriticized *avidity*, altogether in the power of things, *i.e.*
nothing but a vessel of the most various *appetites* -- then it was
unavoidable that the free understanding must serve the "bad heart" and was
ready to justify everything that the wicked heart desired.

Therefore Socrates says that it is not enough for one to use his understanding
in all things, but it is a question of what *cause* one exerts it for. We
should now say, one must serve the "good cause." But serving the good cause is
- -- being moral. Hence Socrates is the founder of ethics.

Certainly the principle of the Sophistic doctrine must lead to the possibility
that the blindest and most dependent slave of his desires might yet be an
excellent sophist, and, with keen understanding, trim and expound everything
in favor of his coarse heart. What could there be for which a "good reason"
might not be found, or which might not be defended through thick and thin?

Therefore Socrates says: "You must be 'pure-hearted' if your shrewdness is to
be valued." At this point begins the second period of Greek liberation of the
mind, the period of *purity of heart*. For the first was brought to a close by
the Sophists in their proclaiming the omnipotence of the understanding. But
the heart remained *worldly-minded*, remained a servant of the world, always
affected by worldly wishes. This coarse heart was to be cultivated from now on
- -- the era of *culture of the heart*. But how is the heart to be cultivated?
What the understanding; this one side of the mind, has reached -- to wit, the
capability of playing freely with and over every concern -- awaits the heart
also; everything *worldly* must come to grief before it, so that at last
family, commonwealth, fatherland, etc., are given up for the sake of the
heart, *i. e.*, *of blessedness*, the heart's blessedness.

Daily experience confirms the truth that the understanding may have renounced
a thing many years before the heart has ceased to beat for it. So the
Sophistic understanding too had so far become master over the dominant,
ancient powers that they now needed only to be driven out of the heart, in
which they dwelt unmolested, to have at last no part at all left in man. This
war is opened by Socrates, and not till the dying day of the old world does it
end in peace.

The examination of the heart takes its start with Socrates, and all the
contents of the heart are sifted. In their last and extremest struggles the
ancients threw all contents out of the heart and let it no longer beat for
anything; this was the deed of the Skeptics. The same purgation of the heart
was now achieved in the Skeptical age, as the understanding had succeeded in
establishing in the Sophistic age.

The Sophistic culture has brought it to pass that one's understanding no
longer *stands still* before anything, and the Skeptical, that his heart is no
longer *moved* by anything.

So long as man is entangled in the movements of the world and embarrassed by
relations to the world -- and he is so till the end of antiquity, because his
heart still has to struggle for independence from the worldly -- so long he is
not yet spirit; for spirit is without body, and has no relations to the world
and corporeality; for it the world does not exist, nor natural bonds, but only
the spiritual, and spiritual bonds. Therefore man must first become so
completely unconcerned and reckless, so altogether without relations, as the
Skeptical culture presents him -- so altogether indifferent to the world that
even its falling in ruins would not move him -- before he could feel himself
as worldless; *i. e.*, as spirit. And this is the result of the gigantic work
of the ancients: that man knows himself as a being without relations and
without a world, as *spirit*.

Only now, after all worldly care has left him, is he all in all to himself, is
he only for himself, *i.e.* he is he spirit for the spirit, or, in plainer
language, he cares only for the spiritual.

In the Christian wisdom of serpents and innocence of doves the two sides --
understanding and heart -- of the ancient liberation of mind are so completed
that they appear young and new again, and neither the one nor the other lets
itself be bluffed any longer by the worldly and natural.

Thus the ancients mounted to *spirit*, and strove to become *spiritual*. But a
man who wishes to be active as spirit is drawn to quite other tasks than he
was able to set himself formerly: to tasks which really give something to do
to the spirit and not to mere sense or acuteness,(3) which exerts itself only
to become master *of things*. The spirit busies itself solely about the
spiritual, and seeks out the "traces of mind" in everything; to the
*believing* spirit "everything comes from God," and interests him only to the
extent that it reveals this origin; to the *philosophic* spirit everything
appears with the stamp of reason, and interests him only so far as he is able
to discover in it reason, *i. e.*, spiritual content.

Not the spirit, then, which has to do with absolutely nothing unspiritual,
with no *thing*, but only with the essence which exists behind and above
things, with *thoughts --* not that did the ancients exert, for they did not
yet have it; no, they had only reached the point of struggling and longing for
it, and therefore sharpened it against their too-powerful foe, the world of
sense (but what would not have been sensuous for them, since Jehovah or the
gods of the heathen were yet far removed from the conception "God is
*spirit*," since the "heavenly fatherland" had not yet stepped into the place
of the sensuous, etc.?) -- they sharpened against the world of sense their
*sense*, their acuteness. To this day the Jews, those precocious children of
antiquity, have got no farther; and with all the subtlety and strength of
their prudence and understanding, which easily becomes master of things and
forces them to obey it, they cannot discover *spirit*, which *takes no account
whatever of things*.

The Christian has spiritual interests, because he allows himself to be a
*spiritual* man; the Jew does not even understand these interests in their
purity, because he does not allow himself to assign *no value* to things. He
does not arrive at pure *spirituality*, a spirituality *e. g.* is religiously
expressed, *e. g.*, in the *faith* of Christians, which alone (*i.e.* without
works) justifies. Their *unspirituality* sets Jews forever apart from
Christians; for the spiritual man is incomprehensible to the unspiritual, as
the unspiritual is contemptible to the spiritual. But the Jews have only "the
spirit of this world."

The ancient acuteness and profundity lies as far from the spirit and the
spirituality of the Christian world as earth from heaven.

He who feels himself as free spirit is not oppressed and made anxious by the
things of this world, because he does not care for them; if one is still to
feel their burden, he must be narrow enough to attach *weight* to them -- as
is evidently the case, *e. g.*, when one is still concerned for his "dear
life." He to whom everything centers in knowing and conducting himself as a
free spirit gives little heed to how scantily he is supplied meanwhile, and
does not reflect at all on how he must make his arrangements to have a
thoroughly inconveniences of the life that depends on things, because he lives
only spiritually and on spiritual food, while aside from this he only gulps
things down like a beast, hardly knowing it, and dies bodily, to be sure, when
his fodder gives out, but knows himself immortal as spirit, and closes his
eyes with an adoration or a thought. His life is occupation with the
spiritual, is -- thinking; the rest does not bother him; let him busy himself
with the spiritual in any way that he can and chooses -- in devotion, in
contemplation, or in philosophic cognition -- his doing is always thinking;
and therefore Descartes, to whom this had at last become quite clear, could
lay down the proposition: "I think, that is -- I am." This means, my thinking
is my being or my life; only when I live spiritually do I live; only as spirit
am I really, or -- I am spirit through and through and nothing but spirit.
Unlucky Peter Schlemihl, who has lost his shadow, is the portrait of this man
become a spirit; for the spirit's body is shadowless. -- Over against this,
how different among the ancients! Stoutly and manfully as they might bear
themselves against the might of things, they must yet acknowledge the might
itself, and got no farther than to protect their *life* against it as well as
possible. Only at a late hour did they recognize that their "true life" was
not that which they led in the fight against the things of the world, but the
"spiritual life," "turned away" from these things; and, when they saw this,
they became Christians, *i.e.* the moderns, and innovators upon the ancients.
But the life turned away from things, the spiritual life, no longer draws any
nourishment from nature, but "lives only on thoughts," and therefore is no
longer "life," but -- *thinking*.

Yet it must not be supposed now that the ancients were *without thoughts*,
just as the most spiritual man is not to be conceived of as if he could be
without life. Rather, they had their thoughts about everything, about the
world, man, the gods, etc., and showed themselves keenly active in bringing
all this to their consciousness. But they did not know *thought*, even though
they thought of all sorts of things and "worried themselves with their
thoughts." Compare with their position the Christian saying, "My thoughts are
not your thoughts; as the heaven is higher than the earth, so are my thoughts
higher than your thoughts," and remember what was said above about our
child-thoughts.

What is antiquity seeking, then? The true *enjoyment of life!* You will find
that at bottom it is all the same as "the true life."

The Greek poet Simonides sings: "Health is the noblest good for mortal man,
the next to this is beauty, the third riches acquired without guile, the
fourth the enjoyment of social pleasures in the company of young friends."
These are all *good things of life*, pleasures of life. What else was Diogenes
of Sinope seeking for than the true enjoyment of life, which he discovered in
having the least possible wants? What else Aristippus, who found it in a
cheery temper under all circumstances? They are seeking for cheery, unclouded
*life-courage*, for *cheeriness*; they are seeking to "be of good *cheer*."

The Stoics want to realize the *wise man*, the man with *practical
philosophy*, the man who *knows how to live --* a wise life, therefore; they
find him in contempt for the world, in a life without development, without
spreading out, without friendly relations with the world, thus in the
*isolated life*, in life as life, not in life with others; only the Stoic
*lives*, all else is dead for him. The Epicureans, on the contrary, demand a
moving life.

The ancients, as they want to be of good cheer, desire *good living* (the Jews
especially a long life, blessed with children and goods), *eudaemonia*,
well-being in the most various forms. Democritus, *e. g.*, praises as such the
"calm of the soul" in which one *"lives* smoothly, without fear and without
excitement."

So what he thinks is that with this he gets on best, provides for himself the
best lot, and gets through the world best. But as he cannot get rid of the
world -- and in fact cannot for the very reason that his whole activity is
taken up in the effort to get rid of it, *i. e.*, in *repelling the world*
(for which it is yet necessary that what can be and is repelled should remain
existing, otherwise there would be no longer anything to repel) -- he reaches
at most an extreme degree of liberation, and is distinguishable only in degree
from the less liberated. If he even got as far as the deadening of the earthly
sense, which at last admits only the monotonous whisper of the word "Brahm,"
he nevertheless would not be essentially distinguishable from the *sensual*
man.

Even the stoic attitude and manly virtue amounts only to this -- that one must
maintain and assert himself against the world; and the ethics of the Stoics
(their only science, since they could tell nothing about the spirit but how it
should behave toward the world, and of nature (physics) only this, that the
wise man must assert himself against it) is not a doctrine of the spirit, but
only a doctrine of the repelling of the world and of self-assertion against
the world. And this consists in "imperturbability and equanimity of life," and
so in the most explicit Roman virtue.

The Romans too (Horace, Cicero, etc.) went no further than this *practical
philosophy*.

The *comfort* (*hedone*) of the Epicureans is the same *practical philosophy*
the Stoics teach, only trickier, more deceitful. They teach only another
*behavior* toward the world, exhort us only to take a shrewd attitude toward
the world; the world must be deceived, for it is my enemy.

The break with the world is completely carried through by the Skeptics. My
entire relation to the world is "worthless and truthless." Timon says, "The
feelings and thoughts which we draw from the world contain no truth." "What is
truth?" cries Pilate. According to Pyrrho's doctrine the world is neither good
nor bad, neither beautiful nor ugly, etc., but these are predicates which I
give it. Timon says that "in itself nothing is either good or bad, but man
only *thinks* of it thus or thus"; to face the world only *ataraxia*
(unmovedness) and *aphasia* (speechlessness -- or, in other words, isolated
*inwardness)* are left. There is "no longer any truth to be recognized" in the
world; things contradict themselves; thoughts about things are without
distinction (good and bad are all the same, so that what one calls good
another finds bad); here the recognition of "truth" is at an end, and only the
man *without power of recognition*, the *man* who finds in the world nothing
to recognize, is left, and this man just leaves the truth-vacant world where
it is and takes no account of it.

So antiquity gets through with the *world of things*, the order of the world,
the world as a whole; but to the order of the world, or the things of this
world, belong not only nature, but all relations in which man sees himself
placed by nature, *e. g.* the family, the community -- in short, the so-called
"natural bonds." With the *world of the spirit* Christianity then begins. The
man who still faces the world *armed* is the ancient, the -- *heathen* (to
which class the Jew, too, as non-Christian, belongs); the man who has come to
be led by nothing but his "heart's pleasure," the interest he takes, his
fellow-feeling, his --*spirit*, is the modern, the -- Christian.

As the ancients worked toward the *conquest of the world* and strove to
release man from the heavy trammels of connection with *other things*, at last
they came also to the dissolution of the State and giving preference to
everything private. Of course community, family, etc., as *natural* relations,
are burdensome hindrances which diminish my *spiritual freedom.*



- ---- * ----

2. THE MODERNS

"If any man be in Christ, he is a *new creature*; the old is passed away,
behold, all is become new."(4)

As it was said above, "To the ancients the world was a truth," we must say
here, "To the moderns the spirit was a truth"; but here, as there, we must not
omit the supplement, "a truth whose untruth they tried to get back of, and at
last they really do."

A course similar to that which antiquity took may be demonstrated in
Christianity also, in that the *understanding* was held a prisoner under the
dominion of the Christian dogmas up to the time preparatory to the
Reformation, but in the pre-Reformation century asserted itself
*sophistically* and played heretical pranks with all tenets of the faith. And
the talk then was, especially in Italy and at the Roman court, "If only the
heart remains Christian-minded, the understanding may go right on taking its
pleasure."

Long before the Reformation, people were so thoroughly accustomed to fine-spun
"wranglings" that the pope, and most others, looked on Luther's appearance too
as a mere "wrangling of monks" at first. Humanism corresponds to Sophisticism,
and, as in the time of the Sophists Greek life stood in its fullest bloom (the
Periclean age), so the most brilliant things happened in the time of Humanism,
or, as one might perhaps also say, of Machiavellianism (printing, the New
World, etc.). At this time the heart was still far from wanting to relieve
itself of its Christian contents.

But finally the Reformation, like Socrates, took hold seriously of the *heart*
itself, and since then hearts have kept growing visibly -- more unchristian.
As with Luther people began to take the matter to heart, the outcome of this
step of the Reformation must be that the heart also gets lightened of the
heavy burden of Christian faith. The heart, from day to day more unchristian,
loses the contents with which it had busied itself, till at last nothing but
empty *warmheartedness* is left it, the quite general love of men, the love of
*Man*, the consciousness of freedom, "self-consciousness."

Only so is Christianity complete, because it has become bald, withered, and
void of contents. There are now no contents whatever against which the heart
does not mutiny, unless indeed the heart unconsciously or without "self-
consciousness" lets them slip in. The heart *criticises* to death with
*hard-hearted* mercilessness everything that wants to make its way in, and is
capable (except, as before, unconsciously or taken by surprise) of no
friendship, no love. What could there be in men to love, since they are all
alike "egoists," none of them man as such, *i.e.* none *spirit only*? The
Christian loves only the spirit; but where could one be found who should be
really nothing but spirit?

To have a liking for the corporeal man with hide and hair -- why, that would
no longer be a "spiritual" warmheartedness, it would be treason against "pure"
warmheartedness, the "theoretical regard." For pure warmheartedness is by no
means to be conceived as like that kindliness that gives everybody a friendly
hand-shake; on the contrary, pure warmheartedness is warm-hearted toward
nobody, it is only a theoretical interest, concern for man as man, not as a
person. The person is repulsive to it because of being "egoistic," because of
not being that abstraction, Man. But it is only for the abstraction that one
can have a theoretical regard. To pure warmheartedness or pure theory men
exist only to be criticized, scoffed at, and thoroughly despised; to it, no
less than to the fanatical parson, they are only "filth" and other such nice
things.

Pushed to this extremity of disinterested warmheartedness, we must finally
become conscious that the spirit, which alone the Christian loves, is nothing;
in other words, that the spirit is -- a lie.

What has here been set down roughly, summarily, and doubtless as yet
incomprehensibly, will, it is to be hoped, become clear as we go on.

Let us take up the inheritance left by the ancients, and, as active workmen,
do with it as much as -- can be done with it! The world lies despised at our
feet, far beneath us and our heaven, into which its mighty arms are no longer
thrust and its stupefying breath does not come. Seductively as it may pose, it
can delude nothing but our *sense*; it cannot lead astray the spirit -- and
spirit alone, after all, we really are. Having once got *back of* things, the
spirit has also got *above* them, and become free from their bonds,
emancipated, supernal, free. So speaks "spiritual freedom."

To the spirit which, after long toil, has got rid of the world, the worldless
spirit, nothing is left after the loss of the world and the worldly but -- the
spirit and the spiritual.

Yet, as it has only moved away from the world and made of itself a being *free
from the world*, without being able really to annihilate the world, this
remains to it a stumbling-block that cannot be cleared away, a discredited
existence; and, as, on the other hand, it knows and recognizes nothing but the
spirit and the spiritual, it must perpetually carry about with it the longing
to spiritualize the world, *i.e.* to redeem it from the "black list."
Therefore, like a youth, it goes about with plans for the redemption or
improvement of the world.

The ancients, we saw, served the natural, the worldly, the natural order of
the world, but they incessantly asked themselves of this service; and, when
they had tired themselves to death in ever-renewed attempts at revolt, then,
among their last sighs, was born to them the *God*, the "conqueror of the
world." All their doing had been nothing but *wisdom of the world*, an effort
to get back of the world and above it. And what is the wisdom of the many
following centuries? What did the moderns try to get back of? No longer to get
back of the world, for the ancients had accomplished that; but back of the God
whom the ancients bequeathed to them, back of the God who "is spirit," back of
everything that is the spirit's, the spiritual. But the activity of the
spirit, which "searches even the depths of the Godhead," is *theology*. If the
ancients have nothing to show but wisdom of the world, the moderns never did
nor do make their way further than to theology. We shall see later that even
the newest revolts against God are nothing but the extremest efforts of
"theology," *i. e.*, theological insurrections.

§1. The Spirit

The realm of spirits is monstrously great, there is an infinite deal of the
spiritual; yet let us look and see what the spirit, this bequest of the
ancients, properly is.

Out of their birth-pangs it came forth, but they themselves could not utter
themselves as spirit; they could give birth to it, it itself must speak. The
"born God, the Son of Man," is the first to utter the word that the spirit,
*i.e.* he, God, has to do with nothing earthly and no earthly relationship,
but solely, with the spirit and spiritual relationships.

Is my courage, indestructible under all the world's blows, my inflexibility
and my obduracy, perchance already spirit in the full sense, because the world
cannot touch it? Why, then it would not yet be at enmity with the world, and
all its action would consist merely in not succumbing to the world! No, so
long as it does not busy itself with itself alone, so long as it does not have
to do with *its* world, the spiritual, alone, it is not *free* spirit, but
only the "spirit of this world," the spirit fettered to it. The spirit is free
spirit, *i. e.*, really spirit, only in a world of *its own*; in "this," the
earthly world, it is a stranger. Only through a spiritual world is the spirit
really spirit, for "this" world does not understand it and does not know how
to keep "the maiden from a foreign land"(5) from departing.

But where is it to get this spiritual world? Where but out of itself? It must
reveal itself; and the words that it speaks, the revelations in which it
unveils itself, these are *its* world. As a visionary lives and has his world
only in the visionary pictures that he himself creates, as a crazy man
generates for himself his own dream-world, without which he could not be
crazy, so the spirit must create for itself its spirit world, and is not
spirit till it creates it.

Thus its creations make it spirit, and by its creatures we know it, the
creator; in them it lives, they are its world.

Now, what is the spirit? It is the creator of a spiritual world! Even in you
and me people do not recognize spirit till they see that we have appropriated
to ourselves something spiritual, -- *i.e.* though thoughts may have been set
before us, we have at least brought them to live in ourselves; for, as long as
we were children, the most edifying thoughts might have been laid before us
without our wishing, or being able, to reproduce them in ourselves. So the
spirit also exists only when it creates something spiritual; it is real only
together with the spiritual, its creature.

As, then, we know it by its works, the question is what these works are. But
the works or children of the spirit are nothing else but -- spirits.

If I had before me Jews, Jews of the true metal, I should have to stop here
and leave them standing before this mystery as for almost two thousand years
they have remained standing before it, unbelieving and without knowledge. But,
as you, my dear reader, are at least not a full-blooded Jew -- for such a one
will not go astray as far as this -- we will still go along a bit of road
together, till perhaps you too turn your back on me because I laugh in your
face.

If somebody told you were altogether spirit, you would take hold of your body
and not believe him, but answer: "I *have* a spirit, no doubt, but do not
exist only as spirit, but as a man with a body." You would still distinguish
*yourself* from "your spirit." "But," replies he, "it is your destiny, even
though now you are yet going about in the fetters of the body, to be one day a
'blessed spirit,' and, however you may conceive of the future aspect of your
spirit, so much is yet certain, that in death you will put off this body and
yet keep yourself, *i.e.* your spirit, for all eternity; accordingly your
spirit is the eternal and true in you, the body only a dwelling here below,
which you may leave and perhaps exchange for another."

Now you believe him! For the present, indeed, you are not spirit only; but,
when you emigrate from the mortal body, as one day you must, then you will
have to help yourself without the body, and therefore it is needful that you
be prudent and care in time for your proper self. "What should it profit a man
if he gained the whole world and yet suffered damage in his soul?"

But, even granted that doubts, raised in the course of time against the tenets
of the Christian faith, have long since robbed you of faith in the immortality
of your spirit, you have nevertheless left one tenet undisturbed, and still
ingenuously adhere to the one truth, that the spirit is your better part, and
that the spiritual has greater claims on you than anything else. Despite all
your atheism, in zeal against *egoism* you concur with the believers in
immortality.

But whom do you think of under the name of egoist? A man who, instead of
living to an idea, *i. e.*, a spiritual thing, and sacrificing to it his
personal advantage, serves the latter. A good patriot brings his sacrifice to
the altar of the fatherland; but it cannot be disputed that the fatherland is
an idea, since for beasts incapable of mind,(6) or children as yet without
mind, there is no fatherland and no patriotism. Now, if any one does not
approve himself as a good patriot, he betrays his egoism with reference to the
fatherland. And so the matter stands in innumerable other cases: he who in
human society takes the benefit of a prerogative sins egoistically against the
idea of equality; he who exercises dominion is blamed as an egoist against the
idea of liberty, -- etc.

You despise the egoist because he puts the spiritual in the background as
compared with the personal, and has his eyes on himself where you would like
to see him act to favor an idea. The distinction between you is that he makes
himself the central point, but you the spirit; or that you cut your identity
in two and exalt your "proper self," the spirit, to be ruler of the paltrier
remainder, while he will hear nothing of this cutting in two, and pursues
spiritual and material interests just *as he pleases*. You think, to be sure,
that you are falling foul of those only who enter into no spiritual interest
at all, but in fact you curse at everybody who does not look on the spiritual
interest as his "true and highest" interest. You carry your knightly service
for this beauty so far that you affirm her to be the only beauty of the world.
You live not to *yourself*, but to your *spirit* and to what is the spirit's,
*i. e.* ideas.

As the spirit exists only in its creating of the spiritual, let us take a look
about us for its first creation. If only it has accomplished this, there
follows thenceforth a natural propagation of creations, as according to the
myth only the first human beings needed to be created, the rest of the race
propagating of itself. The first creation, on the other hand, must come forth
"out of nothing" -- *i.e.* the spirit has toward its realization nothing but
itself, or rather it has not yet even itself, but must create itself; hence
its first creation is itself, *the spirit*. Mystical as this sounds, we yet go
through it as an every-day experience. Are you a thinking being before you
think? In creating the first thought you create yourself, the thinking one;
for you do not think before you think a thought, *i.e.* have a thought. Is it
not your singing that first makes you a singer, your talking that makes you a
talker? Now, so too it is the production of the spiritual that first makes you
a spirit.

Meantime, as you distinguish *yourself* from the thinker, singer, and talker,
so you no less distinguish yourself from the spirit, and feel very clearly
that you are something beside spirit. But, as in the thinking ego hearing and
sight easily vanish in the enthusiasm of thought, so you also have been seized
by the spirit-enthusiasm, and you now long with all your might to become
wholly spirit and to be dissolved in spirit. The spirit is your *ideal*, the
unattained, the other-worldly; spirit is the name of your -- god, "God is
spirit."

Against all that is not spirit you are a zealot, and therefore you play the
zealot against *yourself* who cannot get rid of a remainder of the
non-spiritual. Instead of saying, "I am *more* than spirit," you say with
contrition, "I am less than spirit; and spirit, pure spirit, or the spirit
that is nothing but spirit, I can only think of, but am not; and, since I am
not it, it is another, exists as another, whom I call 'God'."

It lies in the nature of the case that the spirit that is to exist as pure
spirit must be an otherworldly one, for, since I am not it, it follows that it
can only be *outside* me; since in any case a human being is not fully
comprehended in the concept "spirit," it follows that the pure spirit, the
spirit as such, can only be outside of men, beyond the human world -- not
earthly, but heavenly.

Only from this disunion in which I and the spirit lie; only because "I" and
"spirit" are not names for one and the same thing, but different names for
completely different things; only because I am not spirit and spirit not I --
only from this do we get a quite tautological explanation of the necessity
that the spirit dwells in the other world, *i. e.* is God.

But from this it also appears how thoroughly theological is the liberation
that Feuerbach(7) is laboring to give us. What he says is that we had only
mistaken our own essence, and therefore looked for it in the other world, but
that now, when we see that God was only our human essence, we must recognize
it again as ours and move it back out of the other world into this. To God,
who is spirit, Feuerbach gives the name "Our Essence." Can we put up with
this, that "Our Essence" is brought into opposition to *us* -- that we are
split into an essential and an unessential self? Do we not therewith go back
into the dreary misery of seeing ourselves banished out of ourselves?

What have we gained, then, when for a variation we have transferred into
ourselves the divine outside us? *Are we* that which is in us? As little as we
are that which is outside us. I am as little my heart as I am my sweetheart,
this "other self" of mine. Just because we are not the spirit that dwells in
us, just for that reason we had to take it and set it outside us; it was not
we, did not coincide with us, and therefore we could, not think of it as
existing otherwise than outside us, on the other side from us, in the other
world.

With the strength of *despair* Feuerbach clutches at the total substance of
Christianity, not to throw it away, no, to drag it to himself, to draw it, the
long-yearned-for, ever-distant, out of its heaven with a last effort, and keep
it by him forever. Is not that a clutch of the uttermost despair, a clutch for
life or death, and is it not at the same time the Christian yearning and
hungering for the other world? The hero wants not to go into the other world,
but to draw the other world to him, and compel it to become this world! And
since then has not all the world, with more or less consciousness, been crying
that "this world" is the vital point, and heaven must come down on earth and
be experienced even here?

Let us, in brief, set Feuerbach's theological view and our contradiction over
against each other! "The essence of man is man's supreme being;(8) now by
religion, to be sure, the *supreme being is* called *God* and regarded as an
objective essence, but in truth it is only man's own essence; and therefore
the turning point of the world's history is that henceforth no longer *God*,
but man, is to appear to man as God."(9)

To this we reply: The supreme being is indeed the essence of man, but, just
because it is his *essence* and not he himself, it remains quite immaterial
whether we see it outside him and view it as "God," or find it in him and call
it "Essence of Man" or "Man." I am neither God nor Man,(10) neither the
supreme essence nor my essence, and therefore it is all one in the main
whether I think of the essence as in me or outside me. Nay, we really do
always think of the supreme being as in both kinds of otherworldliness, the
inward and outward, at once; for the "Spirit of God" is, according to the
Christian view, also "our spirit," and "dwells in us."(11) It dwells in heaven
and dwells in us; we poor things are just its "dwelling," and, if Feuerbach
goes on to destroy its heavenly dwelling and force it to move to us bag and
baggage, then we, its earthly apartments, will be badly overcrowded.

But after this digression (which, if we were at all proposing to work by line
and level, we should have had to save for later pages in order to avoid
repetition) we return to the spirit's first creation, the spirit itself.

The spirit is something other than myself. But this other, what is it?



- ---- * ----

§2. The Possessed.

Have you ever seen a spirit? "No, not I, but my grandmother." Now, you see,
it's just so with me too; I myself haven't seen any, but my grandmother had
them running between her feet all sorts of ways, and out of confidence in our
grandmothers' honesty we believe in the existence of spirits.

But had we no grandfathers then, and did they not shrug their shoulders every
time our grandmothers told about their ghosts? Yes, those were unbelieving men
who have harmed our good religion much, those rationalists! We shall feel
that! What else lies at the bottom of this warm faith in ghosts, if not the
faith in "the existence of spiritual beings in general," and is not this
latter itself disastrously unsettled if saucy men of the understanding may
disturb the former? The Romanticists were quite conscious what a blow the very
belief in God suffered by the laying aside of the belief in spirits or ghosts,
and they tried to help us out of the baleful consequences not only by their
reawakened fairy world, but at last, and especially, by the "intrusion of a
higher world," by their somnambulists of Prevorst, etc. The good believers and
fathers of the church did not suspect that with the belief in ghosts the
foundation of religion was withdrawn, and that since then it had been floating
in the air. He who no longer believes in any ghost needs only to travel on
consistently in his unbelief to see that there is no separate being at all
concealed behind things, no ghost or -- what is naively reckoned as synonymous
even in our use of words -- no *"spirit."*

"Spirits exist!" Look about in the world, and say for yourself whether a
spirit does not gaze upon you out of everything. Out of the lovely little
flower there speaks to you the spirit of the Creator, who has shaped it so
wonderfully; the stars proclaim the spirit that established their order; from
the mountain-tops a spirit of sublimity breathes down; out of the waters a
spirit of yearning murmurs up; and -- out of men millions of spirits speak.
The mountains may sink, the flowers fade, the world of stars fall in ruins,
the men die -- what matters the wreck of these visible bodies? The spirit, the
"invisible spirit," abides eternally!

Yes, the whole world is haunted! Only is haunted? Nay, it itself "walks," it
is uncanny through and through, it is the wandering seeming-body of a spirit,
it is a spook. What else should a ghost be, then, than an apparent body, but
real spirit? Well, the world is "empty," is "naught," is only glamorous
"semblance"; its truth is the spirit alone; it is the seeming-body of a
spirit.

Look out near or far, a *ghostly* world surrounds you everywhere; you are
always having "apparitions" or visions. Everything that appears to you is only
the phantasm of an indwelling spirit, is a ghostly "apparition"; the world is
to you only a "world of appearances," behind which the spirit walks. You "see
spirits."

Are you perchance thinking of comparing yourself with the ancients, who saw
gods everywhere? Gods, my dear modern, are not spirits; gods do not degrade
the world to a semblance, and do not spiritualize it.

But to you the whole world is spiritualized, and has become an enigmatical
ghost; therefore do not wonder if you likewise find in yourself nothing but a
spook. Is not your body haunted by your spirit, and is not the latter alone
the true and real, the former only the "transitory, naught" or a "semblance"?
Are we not all ghosts, uncanny beings that wait for "deliverance" -- to wit,
"spirits"?

Since the spirit appeared in the world, since "the Word became flesh," since
then the world has been spiritualized, enchanted, a spook.

You have spirit, for you have thoughts. What are your thoughts? "Spiritual
entities." Not things, then? "No, but the spirit of things, the main point in
all things, the inmost in them, their -- idea." Consequently what you think is
not only your thought?

"On the contrary, it is that in the world which is most real, that which is
properly to be called true; it is the truth itself; if I only think truly, I
think the truth. I may, to be sure, err with regard to the truth, and *fail to
recognize* it; but, if I *recognize* truly, the object of my cognition is the
truth." So, I suppose, you strive at all times to recognize the truth? "To me
the truth is sacred. It may well happen that I find a truth incomplete and
replace it with a better, but *the* truth I cannot abrogate. I *believe* in
the truth, therefore I search in it; nothing transcends it, it is eternal."

Sacred, eternal is the truth; it is the Sacred, the Eternal. But you, who let
yourself be filled and led by this sacred thing, are yourself hallowed.
Further, the sacred is not for your senses -- and you never as a sensual man
discover its trace -- but for your faith, or, more definitely still, for your
*spirit*; for it itself, you know, is a spiritual thing, a spirit -- is spirit
for the spirit.

The sacred is by no means so easily to be set aside as many at present affirm,
who no longer take this "unsuitable" word into their mouths. If even in a
single respect I am still *upbraided* as an "egoist," there is left the
thought of something else which I should serve more than myself, and which
must be to me more important than everything; in short, somewhat in which I
should have to seek my true welfare,(12) something -- "sacred."(13) However
human this sacred thing may look, though it be the Human itself, that does not
take away its sacredness, but at most changes it from an unearthly to an
earthly sacred thing, from a divine one to a human.

Sacred things exist only for the egoist who does not acknowledge himself, the
*involuntary egoist*, for him who is always looking after his own and yet does
not count himself as the highest being, who serves only himself and at the
same time always thinks he is serving a higher being, who knows nothing higher
than himself and yet is infatuated about something higher; in short, for the
egoist who would like not to be an egoist, and abases himself (*i.e.* combats
his egoism), but at the same time abases himself only for the sake of "being
exalted," and therefore of gratifying his egoism. Because he would like to
cease to be an egoist, he looks about in heaven and earth for higher beings to
serve and sacrifice himself to; but, however much he shakes and disciplines
himself, in the end he does all for his own sake, and the disreputable egoism
will not come off him. On this account I call him the involuntary egoist.

His toil and care to get away from himself is nothing but the misunderstood
impulse to self-dissolution. If you are bound to your past hour, if you must
babble today because you babbled yesterday,(14) if you cannot transform
yourself each instant, you feel yourself fettered in slavery and benumbed.
Therefore over each minute of your existence a fresh minute of the future
beckons to you, and, developing yourself, you get away "from yourself," *i.
e.*, from the self that was at that moment. As you are at each instant, you
are your own creature, and in this very "creature" you do not wish to lose
yourself, the creator. You are yourself a higher being than you are, and
surpass yourself. But that you are the one who is higher than you, *i. e.*,
that you are not only creature, but likewise your creator -- just this, as an
involuntary egoist, you fail to recognize; and therefore the "higher essence"
is to you -- an alien(15) essence. Every higher essence, *e. g.* truth,
mankind, etc., is an essence *over* us.

Alienness is a criterion of the "sacred." In everything sacred there lies
something "uncanny," *i.e.* strange,(16) *e. g.* we are not quite familiar and
at home in. What is sacred to me is *not my own*; and if, *e. g.,*, the
property of others was not sacred to me, I should look on it as *mine*, which
I should take to myself when occasion offered. Or, on the other side, if I
regard the face of the Chinese emperor as sacred, it remains strange to my
eye, which I close at its appearance.

Why is an incontrovertible mathematical truth, which might even be called
eternal according to the common understanding of words, not -- sacred? Because
it is not revealed, or not the revelation of, a higher being. If by revealed
we understand only the so-called religious truths, we go far astray, and
entirely fail to recognize the breadth of the concept "higher being." Atheists
keep up their scoffing at the higher being, which was also honored under the
name of the "highest" or *Être suprême*, and trample in the dust one "proof of
his existence" after another, without noticing that they themselves, out of
need for a higher being, only annihilate the old to make room for a new. Is
"Man" perchance not a higher essence than an individual man, and must not the
truths, rights, and ideas which result from the concept of him be honored and
- --counted sacred, as revelations of this very concept? For, even though we
should abrogate again many a truth that seemed to be made manifest by this
concept, yet this would only evince a misunderstanding on our part, without in
the least degree harming the sacred concept itself or taking their sacredness
from those truths that must "rightly" be looked upon as its revelations. *Man*
reaches beyond every individual man, and yet -- though he be "his essence" --
is not in fact *his* essence (which rather would be as single(17) as he the
individual himself), but a general and "higher," yes, for atheists "the
highest essence."(18) And, as the divine revelations were not written down by
God with his own hand, but made public through "the Lord's instruments," so
also the new highest essence does not write out its revelations itself, but
lets them come to our knowledge through "true men." Only the new essence
betrays, in fact, a more spiritual style of conception than the old God,
because the latter was still represented in a sort of embodiedness or form,
while the undimmed spirituality of the new is retained, and no special
material body is fancied for it. And withal it does not lack corporeity, which
even takes on a yet more seductive appearance because it looks more natural
and mundane and consists in nothing less than in every bodily man -- yes, or
outright in "humanity" or "all men." Thereby the spectralness of the spirit in
a seeming body has once again become really solid and popular.

Sacred, then, is the highest essence and everything in which this highest
essence reveals or will reveal itself; but hallowed are they who recognize
this highest essence together with its own, *i.e.* together with its
revelations. The sacred hallows in turn its reverer, who by his worship
becomes himself a saint, as Likewise what he does is saintly, a saintly walk,
saintly thoughts and actions, imaginations and aspirations.

It is easily understood that the conflict over what is revered as the highest
essence can be significant only so long as even the most embittered opponents
concede to each other the main point -- that there is a highest essence to
which worship or service is due. If one should smile compassionately at the
whole struggle over a highest essence, as a Christian might at the war of
words between a Shiite and a Sunnite or between a Brahman and a Buddhist, then
the hypothesis of a highest essence would be null in his eyes, and the
conflict on this basis an idle play. Whether then the one God or the three in
one. whether the Lutheran God or the *Être suprême* or not God at all, but
"Man," may represent the highest essence, that makes no difference at all for
him who denies the highest essence itself, for in his eyes those servants of a
highest essence are one and all-pious people, the most raging atheist not less
than the most faith-filled Christian.

In the foremost place of the sacred,(19) then, stands the highest essence and
the faith in this essence, our "holy(20) faith."



- ---- * ----

The spook

With ghosts we arrive in the spirit-realm, in the realm of *essences*.

What haunts the universe, and has its occult, "incomprehensible" being there,
is precisely the mysterious spook that we call highest essence. And to get to
the bottom of this *spook*, to comprehend it, to discover *reality* in it (to
prove "the existence of God") -- this task men set to themselves for thousands
of years; with the horrible impossibility, the endless Danaid-labor, of
transforming the spook into a non-spook, the unreal into something real, the
*spirit* into an entire and *corporeal* person -- with this they tormented
themselves to death. Behind the existing world they sought the "thing in
itself," the essence; behind the *thing* they sought the *un-thing*.

When one looks to the *bottom* of anything, *i.e.* searches out its *essence*,
one often discovers something quite other than what it *seems* to be; honeyed
speech and a lying heart, pompous words and beggarly thoughts, etc. By
bringing the essence into prominence 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 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 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 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(21) 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.

Wheels in the Head

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 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 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(22) 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 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(23)
people are set(24) 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:(25) "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 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 example."
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 "inhuman" 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:(26) "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."(27)
Herewith, to be sure, we lose the narrow 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." 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?(28) 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 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(29)
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
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 thieveries 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 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
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.; 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 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 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 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 "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 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 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."(30) 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*.(31) " 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."

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";(32) 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(33) 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 the unholy, to the pure
and the impure. The impure man *renounces* all "better feelings," all shame,
even natural timidity, and follows only the appetite that rules him. The pure
man renounces his natural relation to the world ("renounces the world") and
follows only the "desire" which rules him. Driven by the thirst for money, the
avaricious man renounces all admonitions of conscience, all feeling of honor,
all gentleness and all compassion; he puts all considerations out of sight;
the appetite drags him along. The holy man behaves similarly. He makes himself
the "laughing-stock of the world," is hard-hearted and "strictly just"; for
the desire drags him along. As the unholy man renounces *himself* before
Mammon, so the holy man renounces *himself* before God and the divine laws. We
are now living in a time when the *shamelessness* of the holy is every day
more and more felt and uncovered, whereby it is at the same time compelled to
unveil itself, and lay itself bare, more and more every day. Have not the
shamelessness and stupidity of the reasons with which men antagonize the
"progress of the age" long surpassed all measure and all expectation? But it
must be so. The self-renouncers must, as holy men, take the same course that
they do so as unholy men; as the latter little by little sink to the fullest
measure of self-renouncing vulgarity and *lowness*, so the former must ascend
to the most dishonorable *exaltation*. The mammon of the earth and the *God*
of heaven both demand exactly the same degree of -- self-renunciation. The low
man, like the exalted one, reaches out for a "good" -- the former for the
material good, the latter for the ideal, the so-called "supreme good"; and at
last both complete each other again too, as the "materially-minded" man
sacrifices everything to an ideal phantasm, his *vanity*, and the
"spiritually-minded" man to a material gratification, the *life of enjoyment*.

Those who exhort men to "unselfishness"(34) think they are saying an uncommon
deal. What do they understand by it? Probably something like what they
understand by "self-renunciation." But who is this self that is to be
renounced and to have no benefit? It seems that you yourself are supposed to
be it. And for whose benefit is unselfish self-renunciation recommended to
you? Again for *your* benefit and behoof, only that through unselfishness you
are procuring your "true benefit."

You are to benefit *yourself*, and yet you are not to seek *your* benefit.

People regard as unselfish the *benefactor* of men, a Francke who founded the
orphan asylum, an O'Connell who works tirelessly for his Irish people; but
also the *fanatic* who, like St. Boniface, hazards his life for the conversion
of the heathen, or, like Robespierre," sacrifices everything to virtue -- like
Körner, dies for God, king, and fatherland. Hence, among others, O'Connell's
opponents try to trump up against him some selfishness or mercenariness, for
which the O'Connell fund seemed to give them a foundation; for, if they were
successful in casting suspicion on his "unselfishness," they would easily
separate him from his adherents.

Yet what could they show further than that O'Connell was working for another
*end* than the ostensible one? But, whether he may aim at making money or at
liberating the people, it still remains certain, in one case as in the other,
that he is striving for an end, and that *his* end; selfishness here as there,
only that his national self-interest would be beneficial to *others too*, and
so would be for the *common* interest.

Now, do you suppose unselfishness is unreal and nowhere extant? On the
contrary, nothing is more ordinary! One may even call it an article of fashion
in the civilized world, which is considered so indispensable that, if it costs
too much in solid material, people at least adorn themselves with its tinsel
counterfeit and feign it. Where does unselfishness begin? Right where an end
ceases to be *our* end and our *property*, which we, as owners, can dispose of
at pleasure; where it becomes a fixed end or a -- fixed idea; where it begins
to inspire, enthuse, fantasize us; in short, where it passes into our
*stubbornness* and becomes our -- master. One is not unselfish so long as he
retains the end in his power; one becomes so only at that "Here I stand, I
cannot do otherwise," the fundamental maxim of all the possessed; one becomes
so in the case of a *sacred* end, through the corresponding sacred zeal.

I am not unselfish so long as the end remains my own, and I, instead of giving
myself up to be the blind means of its fulfillment, leave it always an open
question. My zeal need not on that account be slacker than the most fanatical,
but at the same time I remain toward it frostily cold, unbelieving, and its
most irreconcilable enemy; I remain its *judge*, because I am its owner.

Unselfishness grows rank as far as possessedness reaches, as much on
possessions of the devil as on those of a good spirit; there vice, folly,
etc.; here humility, devotion, etc.

Where could one look without meeting victims of self-renunciation? There sits
a girl opposite me, who perhaps has been making bloody sacrifices to her soul
for ten years already. Over the buxom form droops a deathly-tired head, and
pale cheeks betray the slow bleeding away of her youth. Poor child, how often
the passions may have beaten at your heart, and the rich powers of youth have
demanded their right! When your head rolled in the soft pillow, how awakening
nature quivered through your limbs, the blood swelled your veins, and fiery
fancies poured the gleam of voluptuousness into your eyes! Then appeared the
ghost of the soul and its eternal bliss. You were terrified, your hands folded
themselves, your tormented eyes turned their look upward, you -- prayed. The
storms of nature were hushed, a calm glided over the ocean of your appetites.
Slowly the weary eyelids sank over the life extinguished under them, the
tension crept out unperceived from the rounded limbs, the boisterous waves
dried up in the heart, the folded hands themselves rested a powerless weight
on the unresisting bosom, one last faint "Oh dear!" moaned itself away, and --
*the soul was at rest*. You fell asleep, to awake in the morning to a new
combat and a new -- prayer. Now the habit of renunciation cools the heat of
your desire, and the roses of your youth are growing pale in the -- chlorosis
of your heavenliness. The soul is saved, the body may perish! O Lais, O Ninon,
how well you did to scorn this pale virtue! One free *grisette* against a
thousand virgins grown gray in virtue!

The fixed idea may also be perceived as "maxim," "principle," "standpoint,"
etc. Archimedes, to move the earth, asked for a standpoint *outside* it. Men
sought continually for this standpoint, and every one seized upon it as well
as he was able. This foreign standpoint is the *world of mind*, of ideas,
thoughts, concepts, essences; it is *heaven*. Heaven is the "standpoint" from
which the earth is moved, earthly doings surveyed and -- despised. To assure
to themselves heaven, to occupy the heavenly standpoint firmly and for ever --
how painfully and tirelessly humanity struggled for this!

Christianity has aimed to deliver us from a life determined by nature, from
the appetites as actuating us, and so has meant that man should not let
himself be determined by his appetites. This does not involve the idea that
*he* was not to have appetites, but that the appetites were not to have him,
that they were not to become *fixed*, uncontrollable, indissoluble. Now, could
not what Christianity (religion) contrived against the appetites be applied by
us to its own precept that *mind* (thought, conceptions, ideas, faith) must
determine us; could we not ask that neither should mind, or the conception,
the idea, be allowed to determine us, to become fixed and inviolable or
"sacred"? Then it would end in the *dissolution of mind*, the dissolution of
all thoughts, of all conceptions. As we there had to say, "We are indeed to
have appetites, but the appetites are not to have us," so we should now say,
"We are indeed to have *mind*, but mind is not to have us." If the latter
seems lacking in sense, think *e. g.* of the fact that with so many a man a
thought becomes a "maxim," whereby he himself is made prisoner to it, so that
it is not he that has the maxim, but rather it that has him. And with the
maxim he has a "permanent standpoint" again. The doctrines of the catechism
become our *principles* before we find it out, and no longer brook rejection.
Their thought, or -- mind, has the sole power, and no protest of the "flesh"
is further listened to. Nevertheless it is only through the "flesh" that I can
break tyranny of mind; for it is only when a man hears his flesh along with
the rest of him that he hears himself wholly, and it is only when he wholly
hears *himself* that he is a hearing or rational(35) being. The Christian does
not hear the agony of his enthralled nature, but lives in "humility";
therefore he does not grumble at the wrong which befalls his *person*; he
thinks himself satisfied with the "freedom of the spirit." But, if the flesh
once takes the floor, and its tone is "passionate," "indecorous," "not
well-disposed," "spiteful" (as it cannot be otherwise), then he thinks he
hears voices of devils, voices *against the spirit* (for decorum,
passionlessness, kindly disposition, and the like, is -- spirit), and is
justly zealous against them. He could not be a Christian if he were willing to
endure them. He listens only to morality, and slaps unmorality in the mouth;
he listens only to legality, and gags the lawless word. The *spirit* of
morality and legality holds him a prisoner; a rigid, unbending *master*. They
call that the "mastery of the spirit" -- it is at the same time the
*standpoint* of the spirit.

And now whom do the ordinary liberal gentlemen mean to make free? Whose
freedom is it that they cry out and thirst for? The *spirit's!* That of the
spirit of morality, legality, piety, the fear of God. That is what the
anti-liberal gentlemen also want, and the whole contention between the two
turns on a matter of advantage -- whether the latter are to be the only
speakers, or the former are to receive a "share in the enjoyment of the same
advantage." The *spirit* remains the absolute *lord* for both, and their only
quarrel is over who shall occupy the hierarchical throne that pertains to the
"Viceregent of the Lord." The best of it is that one can calmly look upon the
stir with the certainty that the wild beasts of history will tear each other
to pieces just like those of nature; their putrefying corpses fertilize the
ground for -- our crops.

We shall come back later to many another wheel in the head -- *e. g.*, those
of vocation, truthfulness, love, etc.

- --------

When one's own is contrasted with what is *imparted* to him, there is no use
in objecting that we cannot have anything isolated, but receive everything as
a part of the universal order, and therefore through the impression of what is
around us, and that consequently we have it as something "imparted"; for there
is a great difference between the feelings and thoughts which are *aroused* in
me by other things and those which are *given* to me. God, immortality,
freedom, humanity, etc. are drilled into us from childhood as thoughts and
feelings which move our inner being more or less strongly, either ruling us
without our knowing it, or sometimes in richer natures manifesting themselves
in systems and works of art; but are always not aroused, but imparted,
feelings, because we must believe in them and cling to them. That an Absolute
existed, and that it must be taken in, felt, and thought by us, was settled as
a faith in the minds of those who spent all the strength of their mind on
recognizing it and setting it forth. The *feeling* for the Absolute exists
there as an imparted one, and thenceforth results only in the most manifold
revelations of its own self. So in Klopstock the religious feeling was an
imparted one, which in the *Messiad* simply found artistic expression. If, on
the other hand, the religion with which he was confronted had been for him
only an incitation to feeling and thought, and if he had known how to take an
attitude completely *his own* toward it, then there would have resulted,
instead of religious inspiration, a dissolution and consumption of the
religion itself. Instead of that, he only continued in mature years his
childish feelings received in childhood, and squandered the powers of his
manhood in decking out his childish trifles.

The difference is, then, whether feelings are imparted to me or only aroused.
Those which are aroused are my own, egoistic, because they are not *as
feelings* drilled into me, dictated to me, and pressed upon me; but those
which are imparted to me I receive, with open arms -- I cherish them in me as
a heritage, cultivate them, and am *possessed* by them. Who is there that has
never, more or less consciously, noticed that our whole education is
calculated to produce *feelings* in us, *i.e.* impart them to us, instead of
leaving their production to ourselves however they may turn out? If we hear
the name of God, we are to feel veneration; if we hear that of the prince's
majesty, it is to be received with reverence, deference, submission; if we
hear that of morality, we are to think that we hear something inviolable; if
we hear of the Evil One or evil ones, we are to shudder. The intention is
directed to these *feelings*, and he who *e. g.* should hear with pleasure the
deeds of the "bad" would have to be "taught what's what" with the rod of
discipline. Thus stuffed with *imparted feelings*, we appear before the bar of
majority and are "pronounced of age." Our equipment consists of "elevating
feelings, lofty thoughts, inspiring maxims, eternal principles," etc. The
young are of age when they twitter like the old; they are driven through
school to learn the old song, and, when they have this by heart, they are
declared of age.

We *must not* feel at every thing and every name that comes before us what we
could and would like to feel thereat; *e. g.* at the name of God we must think
of nothing laughable, feel nothing disrespectful, it being prescribed and
imparted to us what and how we are to feel and think at mention of that name.
That is the meaning of the *care of souls --* that my soul or my mind be tuned
as others think right, not as I myself would like it. How much trouble does it
not cost one, finally to secure to oneself a feeling of one's own at the
mention of at least this or that name, and to laugh in the face of many who
expect from us a holy face and a composed expression at their speeches. What
is imparted is *alien* to us, is not our own, and therefore is "sacred," and
it is hard work to lay aside the "sacred dread of it."

Today one again hears "seriousness" praised, "seriousness in the presence of
highly important subjects and discussions," "German seriousness," etc. This
sort of seriousness proclaims clearly how old and grave lunacy and possession
have already become. For there is nothing more serious than a lunatic when he
comes to the central point of his lunacy; then his great earnestness
incapacitates him for taking a joke. (See madhouses.)



- ---- * ----

§3. The Hierarchy

The historical reflections on our Mongolism which I propose to insert
episodically at this place are not given with the claim of thoroughness, or
even of approved soundness, but solely because it seems to me that they may
contribute toward making the rest clear.

The history of the world, whose shaping properly belongs altogether to the
Caucasian race, seems till now to have run through two Caucasian ages, in the
first of which we had to work out and work off our innate *negroidity*; this
was followed in the second by *Mongoloidity* (Chineseness), which must
likewise be terribly made an end of. Negroidity represents *antiquity*, the
time of dependence on *things* (on cocks' eating, birds' flight, on sneezing,
on thunder and lightning, on the rustling of sacred trees, etc.); Mongoloidity
the time of dependence on thoughts, the *Christian* time. Reserved for the
future are the words, "I am the owner of the world of things, I am the owner
of the world of mind."

In the negroid age fall the campaigns of Sesostris and the importance of Egypt
and of northern Africa in general. To the Mongoloid age belong the invasions
of the Huns and Mongols, up to the Russians.

The value of *me* cannot possibly be rated high so long as the hard diamond of
the *not-me* bears so enormous a price as was the case both with God and with
the world. The not-me is still too stony and indomitable to be consumed and
absorbed by me; rather, men only creep about with extraordinary *bustle* on
this *immovable* entity, on this *substance*, like parasitic animals on a body
from whose juices they draw nourishment, yet without consuming it. It is the
bustle of vermin, the assiduity of Mongolians. Among the Chinese, we know,
everything remains as it used to be, and nothing "essential" or "substantial"
suffers a change; all the more actively do they work away *at* that which
remains, which bears the name of the "old," "ancestors," etc.

Accordingly, in our Mongolian age all change has been only reformatory or
ameliorative, not destructive or consuming and annihilating. The substance,
the object, *remains*. All our assiduity was only the activity of ants and the
hopping of fleas, jugglers' tricks on the immovable tight-rope of the
objective, *corvée* -service under the leadership of the unchangeable or
"eternal." The Chinese are doubtless the most *positive* nation, because
totally buried in precepts; but neither has the Christian age come out from
the *positive*, *i.e.* from "limited freedom," freedom "within certain
limits." In the most advanced stage of civilization this activity earns the
name of *scientific* activity, of working on a motionless presupposition, a
*hypothesis* that is not to be upset.

In its first and most unintelligible form morality shows itself as *habit*. To
act according to the habit and usage *(mores)* of one's country -- is to be
moral there. Therefore pure moral action, clear, unadulterated morality, is
most straightforwardly practiced in China; they keep to the old habit and
usage, and hate each innovation as a crime worthy of death. For *innovation*
is the deadly enemy of *habit*, of the *old*, of *permanence*. In fact, too,
it admits of no doubt that through habit man secures himself against the
obtrusiveness of things, of the world, and founds a world of his own in which
alone he is and feels at home, builds himself a *heaven*. Why, heaven has no
other meaning than that it is man's proper home, in which nothing alien
regulates and rules him any longer, no influence of the earthly any longer
makes him himself alien; in short, in which the dross of the earthly is thrown
off, and the combat against the world has found an end -- in which, therefore,
nothing is any longer *denied* him. Heaven is the end of *abnegation*, it is
*free enjoyment*. There man no longer denies himself anything, because nothing
is any longer alien and hostile to him. But now habit is a "second nature,"
which detaches and frees man from his first and original natural condition, in
securing him against every casualty of it. The fully elaborated habit of the
Chinese has provided for all emergencies, and everything is "looked out for";
whatever may come, the Chinaman always knows how he has to behave, and does
not need to decide first according to the circumstances; no unforeseen case
throws him down from the heaven of his rest. The morally habituated and inured
Chinaman is not surprised and taken off his guard; he behaves with equanimity
(*i. e.*, with equal spirit or temper) toward everything, because his temper,
protected by the precaution of his traditional usage, does not lose its
balance. Hence, on the ladder of culture or civilization humanity mounts the
first round through habit; and, as it conceives that, in climbing to culture,
it is at the same time climbing to heaven, the realm of culture or second
nature, it really mounts the first round of the -- ladder to heaven.

If Mongoldom has settled the existence of spiritual beings -- if it has
created a world of spirits, a heaven -- the Caucasians have wrestled for
thousands of years with these spiritual beings, to get to the bottom of them.
What were they doing, then, but building on Mongolian ground? They have not
built on sand, but in the air; they have wrestled with Mongolism, stormed the
Mongolian heaven, Tien. When will they at last annihilate this heaven? When
will they at last become *really Caucasians*, and find themselves? When will
the "immortality of the soul," which in these latter days thought it was
giving itself still more security if it presented itself as "immortality of
mind," at last change to the *mortality of mind?*

It was when, in the industrious struggle of the Mongolian race, men had *built
a heaven*, that those of the Caucasian race, since in their Mongolian
complexion they have to do with heaven, took upon themselves the opposite
task, the task of storming that heaven of custom, *heaven-storming*(36)
activity. To dig under all human ordinance, in order to set up a new and --
better one on the cleared site, to wreck all customs in order to put new and
- -- better customs in their place -- their act is limited to this. But is it
thus already purely and really what it aspires to be, and does it reach its
final aim? No, in this creation of *a "better"* it is tainted with Mongolism.
It storms heaven only to make a heaven again, it overthrows an old power only
to legitimate a new power, it only -- *improves*. Nevertheless the point aimed
at, often as it may vanish from the eyes at every new attempt, is the real,
complete downfall of heaven, customs, etc. -- in short, of man secured only
against the world, of the *isolation* or *inwardness* of man. Through the
heaven of culture man seeks to isolate himself from the world, to break its
hostile power. But this isolation of heaven must likewise be broken, and the
true end of heaven-storming is the -- downfall of heaven, the annihilation of
heaven. *Improving* and *reforming* is the Mongolism of the Caucasian, because
thereby he is always getting up again what already existed -- to wit, a
*precept*, a generality, a heaven. He harbors the most irreconcilable enmity
to heaven, and yet builds new heavens daily; piling heaven on heaven, he only
crushes one by another; the Jews' heaven destroys the Greeks', the Christians'
the Jews', the Protestants' the Catholics', etc. -- If the *heaven-storming*
men of Caucasian blood throw off their Mongolian skin, they will bury the
emotional man under the ruins of the monstrous world of emotion, the isolated
man under his isolated world, the paradisiacal man under his heaven. And
heaven is the *realm of spirits*, the realm *of freedom of the spirit*.

The realm of heaven, the realm of spirits and ghosts, has found its right
standing in the speculative philosophy. Here it was stated as the realm of
thoughts, concepts, and ideas; heaven is peopled with thoughts and ideas, and
this "realm of spirits" is then the true reality.

To want to win freedom for the *spirit* is Mongolism; freedom of the spirit is
Mongolian freedom, freedom of feeling, moral freedom, etc.

We may find the word "morality" taken as synonymous with spontaneity,
self-determination. But that is not involved in it; rather has the Caucasian
shown himself spontaneous only *in spite* of his Mongolian morality. The
Mongolian heaven, or morals,(37) remained the strong castle, and only by
storming incessantly at this castle did the Caucasian show himself moral; if
he had not had to do with morals at all any longer, if he had not had therein
his indomitable, continual enemy, the relation to morals would cease, and
consequently morality would cease. That his spontaneity is still a moral
spontaneity, therefore, is just the Mongoloidity of it -- is a sign that in it
he has not arrived at himself. "Moral spontaneity" corresponds entirely with
"religious and orthodox philosophy," "constitutional monarchy," "the Christian
State," "freedom within certain limits," "the limited freedom of the press,"
or, in a figure, to the hero fettered to a sick-bed.

Man has not really vanquished Shamanism and its spooks till he possesses the
strength to lay aside not only the belief in ghosts or in spirits, but also
the belief in the spirit.

He who believes in a spook no more assumes the "introduction of a higher
world" than he who believes in the spirit, and both seek behind the sensual
world a supersensual one; in short, they produce and believe *another* world,
and this other *world, the product of their mind*, is a spiritual world; for
their senses grasp and know nothing of another, a non-sensual world, only
their spirit lives in it. Going on from this Mongolian belief in the
*existence of spiritual beings* to the point that the *proper being* of man
too is his *spirit*, and that all care must be directed to this alone, to the
"welfare of his soul," is not hard. Influence on the spirit, so-called "moral
influence," is hereby assured.

Hence it is manifest that Mongolism represents utter absence of any rights of
the sensuous, represents non-sensuousness and unnature, and that sin and the
consciousness of sin was our Mongolian torment that lasted thousands of years.

But who, then, will dissolve the spirit into its *nothing?* He who by means of
the spirit set forth nature as the *null*, finite, transitory, he alone can
bring down the spirit too to like nullity. I can; each one among you can, who
does his will as an absolute I; in a word, the *egoist* can.

- --------

Before the sacred, people lose all sense of power and all confidence; they
occupy a *powerless* and *humble* attitude toward it. And yet no thing is
sacred of itself, but by my *declaring it sacred*, by my declaration, my
judgment, my bending the knee; in short, by my -- conscience.

Sacred is everything which for the egoist is to be unapproachable, not to be
touched, outside his *power --* *i.e.* above *him*; sacred, in a word, is
every *matter of conscience*, for "this is a matter of conscience to me" means
simply, "I hold this sacred."

For little children, just as for animals, nothing sacred exists, because, in
order to make room for this conception, one must already have progressed so
far in understanding that he can make distinctions like "good and bad,"
"warranted and unwarranted"; only at such a level of reflection or
intelligence -- the proper standpoint of religion -- can unnatural (*i. e.*,
brought into existence by thinking) *reverence*, "sacred dread," step into the
place of natural fear. To this sacred dread belongs holding something outside
oneself for mightier, greater, better warranted, better, etc.; *i.e.* the
attitude in which one acknowledges the might of something alien -- not merely
feels it, then, but expressly acknowledges it, *i.e.* admits it, yields,
surrenders, lets himself be tied (devotion, humility, servility, submission).
Here walks the whole ghostly troop of the "Christian virtues."

Everything toward which you cherish any respect or reverence deserves the name
of sacred; you yourselves, too, say that you would feel a *"sacred dread"* of
laying hands on it. And you give this tinge even to the unholy (gallows,
crime, etc.). You have a horror of touching it. There lies in it something
uncanny, that is, unfamiliar or not *your own*.

 "If something or other did not rank as sacred in a man's mind, why, then all
bars would be let down to self-will, to unlimited subjectivity!" Fear makes
the beginning, and one can make himself fearful to the coarsest man; already,
therefore, a barrier against his insolence. But in fear there always remains
the attempt to liberate oneself from what is feared, by guile, deception,
tricks, etc. In reverence,(38) on the contrary, it is quite otherwise. Here
something is not only feared,(39) but also honored(40): what is feared has
become an inward power which I can no longer get clear of; I honor it, am
captivated by it and devoted to it, belong to it; by the honor which I pay it
I am completely in its power, and do not even attempt liberation any longer.
Now I am attached to it with all the strength of faith; I *believe*. I and
what I fear are one; "not I live, but the respected lives in me!" Because the
spirit, the infinite, does not allow of coming to any end, therefore it is
stationary; it fears *dying*, it cannot let go its dear Jesus, the greatness
of finiteness is no longer recognized by its blinded eye; the object of fear,
now raised to veneration, may no longer be handled; reverence is made eternal,
the respected is deified. The man is now no longer employed in creating, but
in *learning* (knowing, investigating, etc.), *i.e.* occupied with a fixed
*object*, losing himself in its depths, without return to himself. The
relation to this object is that of knowing, fathoming, basing, not that of
*dissolution* (abrogation, etc.). "Man is to be religious," that is settled;
therefore people busy themselves only with the question how this is to be
attained, what is the right meaning of religiousness, etc. Quite otherwise
when one makes the axiom itself doubtful and calls it in question, even though
it should go to smash. Morality too is such a sacred conception; one must be
moral, and must look only for the right "how," the right way to be so. One
dares not go at morality itself with the question whether it is not itself an
illusion; it remains exalted above all doubt, unchangeable. And so we go on
with the sacred, grade after grade, from the "holy" to the "holy of holies."

- --------

Men are sometimes divided into two classes: *cultured* and *uncultured*. The
former, so far as they were worthy of their name, occupied themselves with
thoughts, with mind, and (because in the time since Christ, of which the very
principle is thought, they were the ruling ones) demanded a servile respect
for the thoughts recognized by them. State, emperor, church, God, morality,
order, are such thoughts or spirits, that exist only for the mind. A merely
living being, an animal, cares as little for them as a child. But the
uncultured are really nothing but children, and he who attends only to the
necessities of his life is indifferent to those spirits; but, because he is
also weak before them, he succumbs to their power, and is ruled by --
thoughts. This is the meaning of hierarchy.

*Hierarchy is dominion of thoughts, dominion of mind!*

We are hierarchic to this day, kept down by those who are supported by
thoughts. Thoughts are the sacred.

But the two are always clashing, now one and now the other giving the offence;
and this clash occurs, not only in the collision of two men, but in one and
the same man. For no cultured man is so cultured as not to find enjoyment in
things too, and so be uncultured; and no uncultured man is totally without
thoughts. In Hegel it comes to light at last what a longing for things even
the most cultured man has, and what a horror of every "hollow theory" he
harbors. With him reality, the world of things, is altogether to correspond to
the thought, and no concept is to be without reality. This caused Hegel's
system to be known as the most objective, as if in it thought and thing
celebrated their union. But this was simply the extremest case of violence on
the part of thought, its highest pitch of despotism and sole dominion, the
triumph of mind, and with it the triumph of *philosophy*. Philosophy cannot
hereafter achieve anything higher, for its highest is the *omnipotence of
mind*, the almightiness of mind.(41)

Spiritual men have *taken into their head* something that is to be realized.
They have *concepts* of love, goodness, etc., which they would like to see
*realized*; therefore they want to set up a kingdom of love on earth, in which
no one any longer acts from selfishness, but each one "from love." Love is to
*rule*. What they have taken into their head, what shall we call it but --
*fixed idea?* Why, "their head is *haunted."* The most oppressive spook is
*Man*. Think of the proverb, "The road to ruin is paved with good intentions."
The intention to realize humanity altogether in oneself, to become altogether
man, is of such ruinous kind; here belong the intentions to become good,
noble, loving, etc.

In the sixth part of the *Denkwürdigkeiten,"* p. 7, Bruno Bauer says: "That
middle class, which was to receive such a terrible importance for modern
history, is capable of no self-sacrificing action, no enthusiasm for an idea,
no exaltation; it devotes itself to nothing but the interests of its
mediocrity; *i.e.* it remains always limited to itself, and conquers at last
only through its bulk, with which it has succeeded in tiring out the efforts
of passion, enthusiasm, consistency -- through its surface, into which it
absorbs a part of the new ideas." And (p. 6) "It has turned the revolutionary
ideas, for which not it, but unselfish or impassioned men sacrificed
themselves, solely to its own profit, has turned spirit into money. -- That
is, to be sure, after it had taken away from those ideas their point, their
consistency, their destructive seriousness, fanatical against all egoism."
These people, then, are not self-sacrificing, not enthusiastic, not
idealistic, not consistent, not zealots; they are egoists in the usual sense,
selfish people, looking out for their advantage, sober, calculating, etc.

Who, then, is "self-sacrificing?"(42) In the full sense, surely, he who
ventures everything else for *one thing*, one object, one will, one passion.
Is not the lover self-sacrificing who forsakes father and mother, endures all
dangers and privations, to reach his goal? Or the ambitious man, who offers up
all his desires, wishes, and satisfactions to the single passion, or the
avaricious man who denies himself everything to gather treasures, or the
pleasure-seeker, etc.? He is ruled by a passion to which he brings the rest as
sacrifices.

And are these self-sacrificing people perchance not selfish, not egoist? As
they have only one ruling passion, so they provide for only one satisfaction,
but for this the more strenuously, they are wholly absorbed in it. Their
entire activity is egoistic, but it is a one-sided, unopened, narrow egoism;
it is possessedness.

"Why, those are petty passions, by which, on the contrary, man must not let
himself be enthralled. Man must make sacrifices for a great idea, a great
cause!" A "great idea," a "good cause," is, it may be, the honor of God, for
which innumerable people have met death; Christianity, which has found its
willing martyrs; the Holy Catholic Church, which has greedily demanded
sacrifices of heretics; liberty and equality, which were waited on by bloody
guillotines.

He who lives for a great idea, a good cause, a doctrine, a system, a lofty
calling, may not let any worldly lusts, any self-seeking interest, spring up
in him. Here we have the concept of *clericalism*, or, as it may also be
called in its pedagogic activity, school-masterliness; for the idealists play
the schoolmaster over us. The clergyman is especially called to live to the
idea and to work for the idea, the truly good cause. Therefore the people feel
how little it befits him to show worldly haughtiness, to desire good living,
to join in such pleasures as dancing and gaming -- in short, to have any other
than a "sacred interest." Hence, too, doubtless, is derived the scanty salary
of teachers, who are to feel themselves repaid by the sacredness of their
calling alone, and to "renounce" other enjoyments.

Even a directory of the sacred ideas, one or more of which man is to look upon
as his calling, is not lacking. Family, fatherland, science, etc., may find in
me a servant faithful to his calling.

Here we come upon the old, old craze of the world, which has not yet learned
to do without clericalism -- that to live and work *for an idea* is man's
calling, and according to the faithfulness of its fulfillment his *human*
worth is measured.

This is the dominion of the idea; in other words, it is clericalism. Thus
Robespierre and St. Just were priests through and through, inspired by the
idea, enthusiasts, consistent instruments of this idea, idealistic men. So St.
Just exclaims in a speech, "There is something terrible in the sacred love of
country; it is so exclusive that it sacrifices everything to the public
interest without mercy, without fear, without human consideration. It hurls
Manlius down the precipice; it sacrifices its private inclinations; it leads
Regulus to Carthage, throws a Roman into the chasm, and sets Marat, as a
victim of his devotion, in the Pantheon."

Now, over against these representatives of ideal or sacred interests stands a
world of innumerable "personal" profane interests. No idea, no system, no
sacred cause is so great as never to be outrivaled and modified by these
personal interests. Even if they are silent momentarily, and in times of rage,
and fanaticism, yet they soon come uppermost again through "the sound sense of
the people." Those ideas do not completely conquer till they are no longer
hostile to personal interests, till they satisfy egoism.

The man who is just now crying herrings in front of my window has a personal
interest in good sales, and, if his wife or anybody else wishes him the like,
this remains a personal interest all the same. If, on the other hand, a thief
deprived him of his basket, then there would at once arise an interest of
many, of the whole city, of the whole country, or, in a word, of all who abhor
theft; an interest in which the herring-seller's person would become
indifferent, and in its place the category of the "robbed man" would come into
the foreground. But even here all might yet resolve itself into a personal
interest, each of the partakers reflecting that he must concur in the
punishment of the thief because unpunished stealing might otherwise become
general and cause him too to lose his own. Such a calculation, however, can
hardly be assumed on the part of many, and we shall rather hear the cry that
the thief is a "criminal." Here we have before us a judgment, the thief's
action receiving its expression in the concept "crime." Now the matter stands
thus: even if a crime did not cause the slightest damage either to me or to
any of those in whom I take an interest, I should nevertheless denounce it.
Why? Because I am enthusiastic for *morality*, filled with the *idea* of
morality; what is hostile to it I everywhere assail. Because in his mind theft
ranks as abominable without any question, Proudhon, *e. g.*, thinks that with
the sentence "Property is theft" he has at once put a brand on property. In
the sense of the priestly, theft is always a *crime*, or at least a misdeed.

Here the personal interest is at an end. This particular person who has stolen
the basket is perfectly indifferent to my person; it is only the thief, this
concept of which that person presents a specimen, that I take an interest in.
The thief and man are in my mind irreconcilable opposites; for one is not
truly man when one is a thief; one degrades *Man* or "humanity" in himself
when one steals. Dropping out of personal concern, one gets into
*philanthropy*, friendliness to man, which is usually misunderstood as if it
was a love to men, to each individual, while it is nothing but a love of
*Man*, the unreal concept, the spook. It is not *tous anthropous,* men, but
*ton anthropon*, Man, that the philanthropist carries in his heart. To be
sure, he cares for each individual, but only because he wants to see his
beloved ideal realized everywhere.

So there is nothing said here of care for me, you, us; that would be personal
interest, and belongs under the head of "worldly love." Philanthropy is a
heavenly, spiritual, a -- priestly love. *Man* must be restored in us, even if
thereby we poor devils should come to grief. It is the same priestly principle
as that famous *fiat justitia, pereat mundus*; man and justice are ideas,
ghosts, for love of which everything is sacrificed; therefore, the priestly
spirits are the "self-sacrificing" ones.

He who is infatuated with *Man* leaves persons out of account so far as that
infatuation extends, and floats in an ideal, sacred interest. *Man*, you see,
is not a person, but an ideal, a spook.

Now, things as different as possible can belong to *Man* and be so regarded.
If one finds Man's chief requirement in piety, there arises religious
clericalism; if one sees it in morality, then moral clericalism raises its
head. On this account the priestly spirits of our day want to make a
"religion" of everything, a "religion of liberty," "religion of equality,"
etc., and for them every idea becomes a "sacred cause," *e. g.* even
citizenship, politics, publicity, freedom of the press, trial by jury, etc.

Now, what does "unselfishness" mean in this sense? Having only an ideal
interest, before which no respect of persons avails!

The stiff head of the worldly man opposes this, but for centuries has always
been worsted at least so far as to have to bend the unruly neck and "honor the
higher power"; clericalism pressed it down. When the worldly egoist had shaken
off a higher power (*e. g.* the Old Testament law, the Roman pope, etc.), then
at once a seven times higher one was over him again, *e. g.* faith in the
place of the law, the transformation of all laymen into divines in place of
the limited body of clergy, etc. His experience was like that of the possessed
man into whom seven devils passed when he thought he had freed himself from
one.

In the passage quoted above, all ideality is denied to the middle class. It
certainly schemed against the ideal consistency with which Robespierre wanted
to carry out the principle. The instinct of its interest told it that this
consistency harmonized too little with what its mind was set on, and that it
would be acting against itself if it were willing to further the enthusiasm
for principle. Was it to behave so unselfishly as to abandon all its aims in
order to bring a harsh theory to its triumph? It suits the priests admirably,
to be sure, when people listen to their summons, "Cast away everything and
follow me," or "Sell all that thou hast and give to the poor, and thou shalt
have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me." Some decided idealists obey
this call; but most act like Ananias and Sapphira, maintaining a behavior half
clerical or religious and half worldly, serving God and Mammon.

I do not blame the middle class for not wanting to let its aims be frustrated
by Robespierre, *i.e.* for inquiring of its egoism how far it might give the
revolutionary idea a chance. But one might blame (if blame were in place here
anyhow) those who let their own interests be frustrated by the interests of
the middle class. However, will not they likewise sooner or later learn to
understand what is to their advantage? August Becker says:(43) "To win the
producers (proletarians) a negation of the traditional conception of right is
by no means enough. Folks unfortunately care little for the theoretical
victory of the idea. One must demonstrate to them *ad oculos* how this victory
can be practically utilized in life." And (p.32): "You must get hold of folks
by their real interests if you want to work upon them." Immediately after this
he shows how a fine looseness of morals is already spreading among our
peasants, because they prefer to follow their real interests rather than the
commands of morality.

Because the revolutionary priests or schoolmasters served *Man*, they cut off
the heads of *men*. The revolutionary laymen, those outside the sacred circle,
did not feel any greater horror of cutting off heads, but were less anxious
about the rights of Man than about their own.

How comes it, though, that the egoism of those who affirm personal interest,
and always inquire of it, is nevertheless forever succumbing to a priestly or
schoolmasterly (*i. e.* an ideal) interest? Their person seems to them too
small, too insignificant -- and is so in fact -- to lay claim to everything
and be able to put itself completely in force. There is a sure sign of this in
their dividing themselves into two persons, an eternal and a temporal, and
always caring either only for the one or only for the other, on Sunday for the
eternal, on the work-day for the temporal, in prayer for the former, in work
for the latter. They have the priest in themselves, therefore they do not get
rid of him, but hear themselves lectured inwardly every Sunday.

How men have struggled and calculated to get at a solution regarding these
dualistic essences! Idea followed upon idea, principle upon principle, system
upon system, and none knew how to keep down permanently the contradiction of
the "worldly" man, the so-called "egoist." Does not this prove that all those
ideas were too feeble to take up my whole will into themselves and satisfy it?
They were and remained hostile to me, even if the hostility lay concealed for
a considerable time. Will it be the same with *self-ownership?* Is it too only
an attempt at mediation? Whatever principle I turned to, it might be to that
of *reason*, I always had to turn away from it again. Or can I always be
rational, arrange my life according to reason in everything? I can, no doubt,
*strive* after rationality, I can *love* it, just as I can also love God and
every other idea. I can be a philosopher, a lover of wisdom, as I love God.
But what I love, what I strive for, is only in my idea, my conception, my
thoughts; it is in my heart, my head, it is in me like the heart, but it is
not I, I am not it.

To the activity of priestly minds belongs especially what one often hears
called *"moral influence."*

Moral influence takes its start where *humiliation* begins; yes, it is nothing
else than this humiliation itself, the breaking and bending of the temper(44)
down to humility.(45) If I call to some one to run away when a rock is to be
blasted, I exert no moral influence by this demand; if I say to a child "You
will go hungry if you will not eat what is put on the table," this is not
moral influence. But, if I say to it, "You will pray, honor your parents,
respect the crucifix, speak the truth, for this belongs to man and is man's
calling," or even "this is God's will," then moral influence is complete; then
a man is to bend before the *calling* of man, be tractable, become humble,
give up his will for an alien one which is set up as rule and law; he is to
*abase* himself before something *higher*: self-abasement. "He that abaseth
himself shall be exalted." Yes, yes, children must early be *made* to practice
piety, godliness, and propriety; a person of good breeding is one into whom
"good maxims" have been *instilled* and *impressed*, poured in through a
funnel, thrashed in and preached in.

If one shrugs his shoulders at this, at once the good wring their hands
despairingly, and cry: "But, for heaven's sake, if one is to give children no
good instruction, why, then they will run straight into the jaws of sin, and
become good-for-nothing hoodlums!" Gently, you prophets of evil.
Good-for-nothing in your sense they certainly will become; but your sense
happens to be a very good-for-nothing sense. The impudent lads will no longer
let anything be whined and chattered into them by you, and will have no
sympathy for all the follies for which you have been raving and driveling
since the memory of man began; they will abolish the law of inheritance; they
will not be willing to *inherit* your stupidities as you inherited them from
your fathers; they destroy *inherited sin*.(46) If you command them, "Bend
before the Most High," they will answer: "If he wants to bend us, let him come
himself and do it; we, at least, will not bend of our own accord." And, if you
threaten them with his wrath and his punishment, they will take it like being
threatened with the bogie-man. If you are no more successful in making them
afraid of ghosts, then the dominion of ghosts is at an end, and nurses' tales
find no -- *faith*.

And is it not precisely the liberals again that press for good education and
improvement of the educational system? For how could their liberalism, their
"liberty within the bounds of law," come about without discipline? Even if
they do not exactly educate to the fear of God, yet they demand the *fear of
Man* all the more strictly, and awaken "enthusiasm for the truly human
calling" by discipline.

- --------

A long time passed away, in which people were satisfied with the fancy that
they had the *truth*, without thinking seriously whether perhaps they
themselves must be true to possess the truth. This time was the *Middle Ages*.
With the common consciousness -- *i.e.* the consciousness which deals with
things, that consciousness which has receptivity only for things, or for what
is sensuous and sense-moving -- they thought to grasp what did not deal with
things and was not perceptible by the senses. As one does indeed also exert
his eye to see the remote, or laboriously exercise his hand till its fingers
have become dexterous enough to press the keys correctly, so they chastened
themselves in the most manifold ways, in order to become capable of receiving
the supersensual wholly into themselves. But what they chastened was, after
all, only the sensual man, the common consciousness, so-called finite or
objective thought. Yet as this thought, this understanding, which Luther
decries under the name of reason, is incapable of comprehending the divine,
its chastening contributed just as much to the understanding of the truth as
if one exercised the feet year in and year out in dancing, and hoped that in
this way they would finally learn to play the flute. Luther, with whom the
so-called Middle Ages end, was the first who understood that the man himself
must become other than he was if he wanted to comprehend truth -- must become
as true as truth itself. Only he who already has truth in his belief, only he
who *believes* in it, can become a partaker of it; *i.e.* only the believer
finds it accessible and sounds its depths. Only that organ of man which is
able to blow can attain the further capacity of flute-playing, and only that
man can become a partaker of truth who has the right organ for it. He who is
capable of thinking only what is sensuous, objective, pertaining to things,
figures to himself in truth only what pertains to things. But truth is spirit,
stuff altogether inappreciable by the senses, and therefore only for the
"higher consciousness," not for that which is "earthly-minded."

With Luther, accordingly, dawns the perception that truth, because it is a
*thought*, is only for the *thinking* man. And this is to say that man must
henceforth take an utterly different standpoint, to wit, the heavenly,
believing, scientific standpoint, or that of *thought* in relation to its
object, the -- *thought* -- that of mind in relation to mind. Consequently:
only the like apprehend the like. "You are like the spirit that you
understand."(47)

Because Protestantism broke the medieval hierarchy, the opinion could take
root that hierarchy in general had been shattered by it, and it could be
wholly overlooked that it was precisely a "reformation," and so a
reinvigoration of the antiquated hierarchy. That medieval hierarchy had been
only a weakly one, as it had to let all possible barbarism of unsanctified
things run on uncoerced beside it, and it was the Reformation that first
steeled the power of hierarchy. If Bruno Bauer thinks:(48) "As the Reformation
was mainly the abstract rending of the religious principle from art, State,
and science, and so its liberation from those powers with which it had joined
itself in the antiquity of the church and in the hierarchy of the Middle Ages,
so too the theological and ecclesiastical movements which proceeded from the
Reformation are only the consistent carrying out of this abstraction of the
religious principle from the other powers of humanity," I regard precisely the
opposite as correct, and think that the dominion of spirits, or freedom of
mind (which comes to the same thing), was never before so all-embracing and
all-powerful, because the present one, instead of rending the religious
principle from art, State, and science, lifted the latter altogether out of
secularity into the "realm of spirit" and made them religious.

Luther and Descartes have been appropriately put side by side in their "He who
believes in God" and "I think, therefore I am" (*cogito, ergo sum*). Man's
heaven is thought -- mind. Everything can be wrested from him, except thought,
except faith. *Particular* faith, like faith of Zeus, Astarte, Jehovah, Allah,
may be destroyed, but faith itself is indestructible. In thought is freedom.
What I need and what I hunger for is no longer granted to me by any *grace*,
by the Virgin Mary. by intercession of the saints, or by the binding and
loosing church, but I procure it for myself. In short, my being (the *sum*) is
a living in the heaven of thought, of mind, a *cogitare*. But I myself am
nothing else than mind, thinking mind (according to Descartes), believing mind
(according to Luther). My body I am not; my flesh may *suffer* from appetites
or pains. I am not my flesh, but I am *mind*, only mind.

This thought runs through the history of the Reformation till today.

Only by the more modern philosophy since Descartes has a serious effort been
made to bring Christianity to complete efficacy, by exalting the "scientific
consciousness." to be the only true and valid one. Hence it begins with
absolute *doubt, dubitare*, with grinding common consciousness to atoms, with
turning away from everything that "mind," "thought," does not legitimate. To
it *Nature* counts for nothing; the opinion of men, their "human precepts,"
for nothing: and it does not rest till it has brought reason into everything,
and can say "The real is the rational, and only the rational is the real."
Thus it has at last brought mind, reason, to victory; and everything is mind,
because everything is rational, because all nature, as well as even the most
perverse opinions of men, contains reason; for "all must serve for the best,"
*i. e.*, lead to the victory of reason.

Descartes's *dubitare* contains the decided statement that only *cogitare*,
thought, mind -- *is*. A complete break with "common" consciousness, which
ascribes reality to *irrational* things! Only the rational is, only mind is!
This is the principle of modern philosophy, the genuine Christian principle.
Descartes in his own time discriminated the body sharply from the mind, and
"the spirit 'tis that builds itself the body," says Goethe.

But this philosophy itself, Christian philosophy, still does not get rid of
the rational, and therefore inveighs against the "merely subjective," against
"fancies, fortuities, arbitrariness," etc. What it wants is that the *divine*
should become visible in everything, and all consciousness become a knowing of
the divine, and man behold God everywhere; but God never is, without the
*devil*. For this very reason the name of philosopher is not to be given to
him who has indeed open eyes for the things of the world, a clear and
undazzled gaze, a correct judgment about the world, but who sees in the world
just the world, in objects only objects, and, in short, everything prosaically
as it is; but he alone is a philosopher who sees, and points out or
demonstrates, heaven in the world, the supernal in the earthly, the --
*divine* in the mundane. The former may be ever so wise, there is no getting
away from this:

     What wise men see not by their wisdom's art
     Is practiced simply by a childlike heart.(49)

It takes this childlike heart, this eye for the divine, to make a philosopher.
The first-named man has only a "common" consciousness, but he who knows the
divine, and knows how to tell it, has a "scientific" one. On this ground Bacon
was turned out of the realm of philosophers. And certainly what is called
English philosophy seems to have got no further than to the discoveries of
so-called "clear heads," *e. g.* Bacon and Hume. The English did not know how
to exalt the simplicity of the childlike heart to philosophic significance,
did not know how to make -- philosophers out of childlike hearts. This is as
much as to say, their philosophy was not able to become *theological* or
*theology*, and yet it is only as theology that it can really *live itself*
out, complete itself. The field of its battle to the death is in theology.
Bacon did not trouble himself about theological questions and cardinal points.

Cognition has its object in life. German thought seeks, more than that of
others, to reach the beginnings and fountain-heads of life, and sees no life
till it sees it in cognition itself. Descartes's *cogito, ergo sum* has the
meaning "One lives only when one thinks." Thinking life is called
"intellectual life"! Only mind lives, its life is the true life. Then, just so
in nature only the "eternal laws," the mind or the reason of nature, are its
true life. In man, as in nature, only the thought lives; everything else is
dead! To this abstraction, to the life of generalities or of that which is
*lifeless*, the history of mind had to come. God, who is spirit, alone lives.
Nothing lives but the ghost.

How can one try to assert of modern philosophy or modern times that they have
reached freedom, since they have not freed us from the power of objectivity?
Or am I perhaps free from a despot when I am not afraid of the personal
potentate, to be sure, but of every infraction of the loving reverence which I
fancy I owe him? The case is the same with modern times. They only changed the
*existing* objects, the real ruler, into *conceived* objects, *i.e.* into
*ideas*, before which the old respect not only was not lost, but increased in
intensity. Even if people snapped their fingers at God and the devil in their
former crass reality, people devoted only the greater attention to their
ideas. "They are rid of the Evil One; evil is left."(50) The decision having
once been made not to let oneself be imposed on any longer by the extant and
palpable, little scruple was felt about revolting against the existing State
or overturning the existing laws; but to sin against the *idea* of the State,
not to submit to the *idea* of law, who would have dared that? So one remained
a "citizen" and a "law-respecting," loyal man; yes, one seemed to himself to
be only so much more law-respecting, the more rationalistically one abrogated
the former defective law in order to do homage to the "spirit of the law." In
all this the objects had only suffered a change of form; they had remained in
their preponderance and pre-eminence; in short, one was still involved in
obedience and possessedness, lived in reflection, and had an object on which
one reflected, which one respected, and before which one felt reverence and
fear. One had done nothing but transform the *things* into *conceptions* of
the things, into thoughts and ideas, whereby one's *dependence* became all the
more intimate and indissoluble. So, *e. g.*, it is not hard to emancipate
oneself from the commands of parents, or to set aside the admonitions of uncle
and aunt, the entreaties of brother and sister; but the renounced obedience
easily gets into one's conscience, and the less one does give way to the
individual demands, because he rationalistically, by his own reason,
recognizes them to be unreasonable, so much the more conscientiously does he
hold fast to filial piety and family love, and so much the harder is it for
him to forgive himself a trespass against the *conception* which he has formed
of family love and of filial duty. Released from dependence as regards the
existing family, one falls into the more binding dependence on the idea of the
family; one is ruled by the spirit of the family. The family consisting of
John, Maggie, etc., whose dominion has become powerless, is only internalized,
being left as "family" in general, to which one just applies the old saying,
"We must obey God rather than man," whose significance here is this: "I
cannot, to be sure, accommodate myself to your senseless requirements, but, as
my 'family,' you still remain the object of my love and care"; for "the
family" is a sacred idea, which the individual must never offend against. --
And this family internalized and desensualized into a thought, a conception,
now ranks as the "sacred," whose despotism is tenfold more grievous because it
makes a racket in my conscience. This despotism is broken when the conception,
family, also becomes a *nothing* to me The Christian dicta, "Woman, what have
I to do with thee?"(51) "I am come to stir up a man against his father, and a
daughter against her mother,"(52) and others, are accompanied by something
that refers us to the heavenly or true family, and mean no more than the
State's demand, in case of a collision between it and the family, that we obey
*its* commands.

The case of morality is like that of the family. Many a man renounces morals,
but with great difficulty the conception, "morality." Morality is the "idea"
of morals, their intellectual power, their power over the conscience; on the
other hand, morals are too material to rule the mind, and do not fetter an
"intellectual" man, a so-called independent, a "freethinker."

The Protestant may put it as he will, the "holy(53) Scripture," the "Word of
God," still remains sacred(54) for him. He for whom this is no longer "holy"
has ceased to -- be a Protestant. But herewith what is "ordained" in it, the
public authorities appointed by God, etc., also remain sacred for him. For him
these things remain indissoluble, unapproachable, "raised above all doubt";
and, as *doubt*, which in practice becomes a *buffeting*, is what is most
man's own, these things remain "raised" above himself. He who cannot *get
away* from them will -- *believe*; for to believe in them is to be *bound* to
them. Through the fact that in Protestantism the *faith* becomes a more inward
faith, the *servitude* has also become a more inward servitude; one has taken
those sanctities up into himself, entwined them with all his thoughts and
endeavors, made them a *"matter of conscience"*, constructed out of them a
*"sacred duty"* for himself. Therefore what the Protestant's conscience cannot
get away from is sacred to him, and *conscientiousness* most clearly
designates his character.

Protestantism has actually put a man in the position of a country governed by
secret police. The spy and eavesdropper, "conscience," watches over every
motion of the mind, and all thought and action is for it a "matter of
conscience," *i. e.*, police business. This tearing apart of man into "natural
impulse" and "conscience" (inner populace and inner police) is what
constitutes the Protestant. The reason of the Bible (in place of the Catholic
"reason of the church") ranks as sacred, and this feeling and consciousness
that the word of the Bible is sacred is called -- conscience. With this, then,
sacredness is "laid upon one's conscience." If one does not free himself from
conscience, the consciousness of the sacred, he may act unconscientiously
indeed, but never consciencelessly.

The Catholic finds himself satisfied when he fulfills the *command*; the
Protestant acts according to his "best judgment and conscience." For the
Catholic is only a *layman*; the Protestant is himself a *clergyman*.(55) Just
this is the progress of the Reformation period beyond the Middle Ages, and at
the same time its curse -- that the *spiritual* became complete.

What else was the Jesuit moral philosophy than a continuation of the sale of
indulgences? Only that the man who was relieved of his burden of sin now
gained also an *insight* into the remission of sins, and convinced himself how
really his sin was taken from him, since in this or that particular case
(casuists) it was so clearly no sin at all that he committed. The sale of
indulgences had made all sins and transgressions permissible, and silenced
every movement of conscience. All sensuality might hold sway, if it was only
purchased from the church. This favoring of sensuality was continued by the
Jesuits, while the strictly moral, dark, fanatical, repentant, contrite,
praying Protestants (as the true completers of Christianity, to be sure)
acknowledged only the intellectual and spiritual man. Catholicism, especially
the Jesuits, gave aid to egoism in this way, found involuntary and unconscious
adherents within Protestantism itself, and saved us from the subversion and
extinction of *sensuality*. Nevertheless the Protestant spirit spreads its
dominion farther and farther; and, as, beside it the "divine," the Jesuit
spirit represents only the "diabolic" which is inseparable from everything
divine, the latter can never assert itself alone, but must look on and see how
in France, *e. g.*, the Philistinism of Protestantism wins at last, and mind
is on top.

Protestantism is usually complimented on having brought the mundane into
repute again, *e. g.* marriage, the State, etc. But the mundane itself as
mundane, the secular, is even more indifferent to it than to Catholicism,
which lets the profane world stand, yes, and relishes its pleasures, while the
rational, consistent Protestant sets about annihilating the mundane
altogether, and that simply by *hallowing* it. So marriage has been deprived
of its naturalness by becoming sacred, not in the sense of the Catholic
sacrament, where it only receives its consecration from the church and so is
unholy at bottom, but in the sense of being something sacred in itself to
begin with, a sacred relation. Just so the State, also. Formerly the pope gave
consecration and his blessing to it and its princes, now the State is
intrinsically sacred, majesty is sacred without needing the priest's blessing.
The order of nature, or natural law, was altogether hallowed as "God's
ordinance." Hence it is said *e. g.* in the Augsburg Confession, Art. II: "So
now we reasonably abide by the saying, as the jurisconsults have wisely and
rightly said: that man and woman should be with each other is a natural law.
Now, if it is a *natural law, then it is God's ordinance*, therefore implanted
in nature, and therefore a *divine* law also." And is it anything more than
Protestantism brought up to date, when Feuerbach pronounces moral relations
sacred, not as God's ordinance indeed, but, instead, for the sake of the
*spirit* that dwells in them? "But marriage as a free alliance of love, of
course -- is *sacred of itself*, by the nature of the union that is formed
here. *That* marriage alone is a *religious* one that is a *true* one, that
corresponds to the *essence* of marriage, love. And so it is with all moral
relations. They are *ethical*, are cultivated with a moral mind, only where
they rank as *religious of themselves*. True friendship is only where the
*limits* of friendship are preserved with religious conscientiousness, with
the same conscientiousness with which the believer guards the dignity of his
God. Friendship is and must be *sacred* for you, and property, and marriage,
and the good of every man, but sacred *in and of itself."*(56)

That is a very essential consideration. In Catholicism the mundane can indeed
be *consecrated* or *hallowed*, but it is not sacred without this priestly
blessing; in Protestantism, on the contrary, mundane relations are sacred *of
themselves*, sacred by their mere existence. The Jesuit maxim, "the end
hallows the means," corresponds precisely to the consecration by which
sanctity is bestowed. No means are holy or unholy in themselves, but their
relation to the church, their use for the church, hallows the means. Regicide
was named as such; if it was committed for the church's behoof, it could be
certain of being hallowed by the church, even if the hallowing was not openly
pronounced. To the Protestant, majesty ranks as sacred; to the Catholic only
that majesty which is consecrated by the pontiff can rank as such; and it does
rank as such to him only because the pope, even though it be without a special
act, confers this sacredness on it once for all. If he retracted his
consecration, the king would be left only a "man of the world or layman," an
"unconsecrated" man, to the Catholic.

If the Protestant seeks to discover a sacredness in the sensual itself, that
he may then be linked only to what is holy, the Catholic strives rather to
banish the sensual from himself into a separate domain, where it, like the
rest of nature, keeps its value for itself. The Catholic church eliminated
mundane marriage from its consecrated order, and withdrew those who were its
own from the mundane family; the Protestant church declared marriage and
family ties to be holy, and therefore not unsuitable for its clergymen.

A Jesuit may, as a good Catholic, hallow everything. He needs only, *e. g.*,
to say to himself: "I as a priest am necessary to the church, but serve it
more zealously when I appease my desires properly; consequently I will seduce
this girl, have my enemy there poisoned, etc.; my end is holy because it is a
priest's, consequently it hallows the means." For in the end it is still done
for the benefit of the church. Why should the Catholic priest shrink from
handing Emperor Henry VII the poisoned wafer for the -- church's welfare?

The genuinely churchly Protestants inveighed against every "innocent
pleasure," because only the sacred, the spiritual, could be innocent. What
they could not point out the holy spirit in, the Protestants had to reject --
dancing, the theatre, ostentation (*e. g.* in the church), and the like.

Compared with this puritanical Calvinism, Lutheranism is again more on the
religious, spiritual, track -- is more radical. For the former excludes at
once a great number of things as sensual and worldly, and *purifies* the
church; Lutheranism, on the contrary, tries to bring *spirit* into all things
as far as possible, to recognize the holy spirit as an essence in everything,
and so to *hallow* everything worldly. ("No one can forbid a kiss in honor."
The spirit of honor hallows it.) Hence it was that the Lutheran Hegel (he
declares himself such in some passage or other: he "wants to remain a
Lutheran") was completely successful in carrying the idea through everything.
In everything there is reason, *i.e.* holy spirit, or "the real is rational."
For the real is in fact everything; as in each thing, *e. g.*, each lie, the
truth can be detected: there is no absolute lie, no absolute evil, etc.

Great "works of mind" were created almost solely by Protestants, as they alone
were the true disciples and consummators of *mind*.

- --------

How little man is able to control! He must let the sun run its course, the sea
roll its waves, the mountains rise to heaven. Thus he stands powerless before
the *uncontrollable*. Can he keep off the impression that he is helpless
against this gigantic world? It is a fixed *law* to which he must submit, it
determines his *fate*. Now, what did pre-Christian humanity work toward?
Toward getting rid of the irruptions of the destinies, not letting oneself be
vexed by them. The Stoics attained this in apathy, declaring the attacks of
nature *indifferent*, and not letting themselves be affected by them. Horace
utters the famous *Nil admirari*, by which he likewise announces the
indifference of the *other*, the world; it is not to influence us, not to
rouse our astonishment. And that *impavidum ferient ruinae* expresses the very
same *imperturbability* as Ps. 46.3: "We do not fear, though the earth should
perish." In all this there is room made for the Christian proposition that the
world is empty, for the Christian *contempt of the world*.

The *imperturbable* spirit of "the wise man," with which the old world worked
to prepare its end, now underwent an *inner perturbation* against which no
ataraxia, no Stoic courage, was able to protect it. The spirit, secured
against all influence of the world, insensible to its shocks and *exalted*
above its attacks, admiring nothing, not to be disconcerted by any downfall of
the world -- foamed over irrepressibly again, because gases (spirits) were
evolved in its own interior, and, after the *mechanical shock* that comes from
without had become ineffective, *chemical tensions*, that agitate within,
began their wonderful play.

In fact, ancient history ends with this -- that *I* have struggled till I won
my ownership of the world. "All things have been delivered to me by my Father"
(Matt. 11. 27). It has ceased to be overpowering, unapproachable, sacred,
divine, for me; it is *undeified*, and now I treat it so entirely as I please
that, if I cared, I could exert on it all miracle-working power, *i. e.*,
power of mind -- remove mountains, command mulberry trees to tear themselves
up and transplant themselves into the sea (Luke 17.6), and do everything
possible, *thinkable* : "All things are possible to him who believes."(57) I
am the *lord* of the world, mine is the "glory."(58) The world has become
prosaic, for the divine has vanished from it: it is my property, which I
dispose of as I (to wit, the mind) choose.

When I had exalted myself to be the *owner of the world*, egoism had won its
first complete victory, had vanquished the world, had become worldless, and
put the acquisitions of a long age under lock and key.

The first property, the first "glory," has been acquired!

But the lord of the world is not yet lord of his thoughts, his feelings, his
will: he is not lord and owner of the spirit, for the spirit is still sacred,
the "Holy Spirit," and the "worldless" Christian is not able to become
"godless." If the ancient struggle was a struggle against the *world*, the
medieval (Christian) struggle is a struggle against self, the mind; the former
against the outer world, the latter against the inner world. The medieval man
is the man "whose gaze is turned inward," the thinking, meditative

All wisdom of the ancients is *the science of the world*, all wisdom of the
moderns is *the science of God*.

The heathen (Jews included) got through with the *world*; but now the thing
was to get through with self, the spirit, too; *i.e.* to become spiritless or
godless.

For almost two thousand years we have been working at subjecting the Holy
Spirit to ourselves, and little by little we have torn off and trodden under
foot many bits of sacredness; but the gigantic opponent is constantly rising
anew under a changed form and name. The spirit has not yet lost its divinity,
its holiness, its sacredness. To be sure, it has long ceased to flutter over
our heads as a dove; to be sure, it no longer gladdens its saints alone, but
lets itself be caught by the laity too; but as spirit of humanity, as spirit
of Man, it remains still an *alien* spirit to me or you, still far from
becoming our unrestricted *property*, which we dispose of at our pleasure.
However, one thing certainly happened, and visibly guided the progress of
post-Christian history: this one thing was the endeavor to make the Holy
Spirit *more human*, and bring it nearer to men, or men to it. Through this it
came about that at last it could be conceived as the "spirit of humanity,"
and, under different expressions like "idea of humanity, mankind, humaneness,
general philanthropy," appeared more attractive, more familiar, and more
accessible.

Would not one think that now everybody could possess the Holy Spirit, take up
into himself the idea of humanity, bring mankind to form and existence in
himself?

No, the spirit is not stripped of its holiness and robbed of its
unapproachableness, is not accessible to us, not our property; for the spirit
of humanity is not *my* spirit. My *ideal* it may be, and as a thought I call
it mine; the *thought* of humanity is my property, and I prove this
sufficiently by propounding it quite according to my views, and shaping it
today so, tomorrow otherwise; we represent it to ourselves in the most
manifold ways. But it is at the same time an entail, which I cannot alienate
nor get rid of.

Among many transformations, the Holy Spirit became in time the *"absolute
idea"*, which again in manifold refractions split into the different ideas of
philanthropy, reasonableness, civic virtue, etc.

But can I call the idea my property if it is the idea of humanity, and can I
consider the Spirit as vanquished if I am to serve it, "sacrifice myself" to
it? Antiquity, at its close, had gained its ownership of the world only when
it had broken the world's overpoweringness and "divinity," recognized the
world's powerlessness and "vanity."

The case with regard to the *spirit* corresponds. When I have degraded it to a
*spook* and its control over me to a *cranky notion*, then it is to be looked
upon as having lost its sacredness, its holiness, its divinity, and then I
*use* it, as one uses *nature* at pleasure without scruple.

The "nature of the case," the "concept of the relationship," is to guide me in
dealing with the case or in contracting the relation. As if a concept of the
case existed on its own account, and was not rather the concept that one forms
of the case! As if a relation which we enter into was not, by the uniqueness
of those who enter into it, itself unique! As if it depended on how others
stamp it! But, as people separated the "essence of Man" from the real man, and
judged the latter by the former, so they also separate his action from him,
and appraise it by "human value." *Concepts* are to decide everywhere,
concepts to regulate life, concepts to *rule*. This is the religious world, to
which Hegel gave a systematic expression, bringing method into the nonsense
and completing the conceptual precepts into a rounded, firmly-based dogmatic.
Everything is sung according to concepts, and the real man, *i.e.* I, am
compelled to live according to these conceptual laws. Can there be a more
grievous dominion of law, and did not Christianity confess at the very
beginning that it meant only to draw Judaism's dominion of law tighter? ("Not
a letter of the law shall be lost!")

Liberalism simply brought other concepts on the carpet; human instead of
divine, political instead of ecclesiastical, "scientific" instead of
doctrinal, or, more generally, real concepts and eternal laws instead of
"crude dogmas" and precepts.

Now nothing but *mind* rules in the world. An innumerable multitude of
concepts buzz about in people's heads, and what are those doing who endeavor
to get further? They are negating these concepts to put new ones in their
place! They are saying: "You form a false concept of right, of the State, of
man, of liberty, of truth, of marriage, etc.; the concept of right, etc., is
rather that one which we now set up." Thus the confusion of concepts moves
forward.

The history of the world has dealt cruelly with us, and the spirit has
obtained an almighty power. You must have regard for my miserable shoes, which
could protect your naked foot, my salt, by which your potatoes would become
palatable, and my state-carriage, whose possession would relieve you of all
need at once; you must not reach out after them. Man is to recognize the
*independence* of all these and innumerable other things: they are to rank in
his mind as something that cannot be seized or approached, are to be kept away
from him. He must have regard for it, respect it; woe to him if he stretches
out his fingers desirously; we call that "being light-fingered!"

How beggarly little is left us, yes, how really nothing! Everything has been
removed, we must not venture on anything unless it is given us; we continue to
live only by the *grace* of the giver. You must not pick up a pin, unless
indeed you have got *leave* to do so. And got it from whom? From *respect!*
Only when this lets you have it as property, only when you can *respect* it as
property, only then may you take it. And again, you are not to conceive a
thought, speak a syllable, commit an action, that should have their warrant in
you alone, instead of receiving it from morality or reason or humanity. Happy
*unconstraint* of the desirous man, how mercilessly people have tried to slay
you on the altar of *constraint!*

But around the altar rise the arches of a church, and its walls keep moving
further and further out. What they enclose is *sacred*. You can no longer get
to it, no longer touch it. Shrieking with the hunger that devours you, you
wander round about these walls in search of the little that is profane, and
the circles of your course keep growing more and more extended. Soon that
church will embrace the whole world, and you be driven out to the extreme
edge; another step, and the *world of the sacred* has conquered: you sink into
the abyss. Therefore take courage while it is yet time, wander about no longer
in the profane where now it is dry feeding, dare the leap, and rush in through
the gates into the sanctuary itself. If you *devour the sacred*, you have made
it your *own!* Digest the sacramental wafer, and you are rid of it!

3. The Free

The ancients and the moderns having been presented above in two divisions, it
may seem as if the free were here to be described in a third division as
independent and distinct. This is not so. The free are only the more modern
and most modern among the "moderns," and are put in a separate division merely
because they belong to the present, and what is present, above all, claims our
attention here. I give "the free" only as a translation of "the liberals," but
must with regard to the concept of freedom (as in general with regard to so
many other things whose anticipatory introduction cannot be avoided) refer to
what comes later.

§1. Political Liberalism

After the chalice of so-called absolute monarchy had been drained down to the
dregs, in the eighteenth century people became aware that their drink did not
taste human -- too clearly aware not to begin to crave a different cup. Since
our fathers were "human beings" after all, they at last desired also to be
regarded as such.

Whoever sees in us something else than human beings, in him we likewise will
not see a human being, but an inhuman being, and will meet him as an unhuman
being; on the other hand, whoever recognizes us as human beings and protects
us against the danger of being treated inhumanly, him we will honor as our
true protector and guardian.

Let us then hold together and protect the man in each other; then we find the
necessary protection in our *holding together*, and in ourselves, *those who
hold together*, a fellowship of those who know their human dignity and hold
together as "human beings." Our holding together is the *State*; we who hold
together are the *nation*.

In our being together as nation or State we are only human beings. How we
deport ourselves in other respects as individuals, and what self-seeking
impulses we may there succumb to, belongs solely to our *private* life; our
public or State life is a *purely human* one. Everything un-human or
"egoistic" that clings to us is degraded to a "private matter" and we
distinguish the State definitely from "civil society," which is the sphere of
"egoism's" activity.

The true man is the nation, but the individual is always an egoist. Therefore
strip off your individuality or isolation wherein dwells discord and egoistic
inequality, and consecrate yourselves wholly to the true man -- the nation or
the State. Then you will rank as men, and have all that is man's; the State,
the true man, will entitle you to what belongs to it, and give you the "rights
of man"; Man gives you his rights!

So runs the speech of the commonalty.

The commonalty(59) is nothing else than the thought that the State is all in
all, the true man, and that the individual's human value consists in being a
citizen of the State. In being a good citizen he seeks his highest honor;
beyond that he knows nothing higher than at most the antiquated -- "being a
good Christian."

The commonalty developed itself in the struggle against the privileged
classes, by whom it was cavalierly treated as "third estate" and confounded
with the *canaille*. In other words, up to this time the State had recognized
caste.(60) The son of a nobleman was selected for posts to which the most
distinguished commoners aspired in vain. The civic feeling revolted against
this. No more distinction, no giving preference to persons, no difference of
classes! Let all be alike! No *separate interest* is to be pursued longer, but
the *general interest of all*. The State is to be a fellowship of free and
equal men, and every one is to devote himself to the "welfare of the whole,"
to be dissolved in the *State*, to make the State his end and ideal. State!
State! so ran the general cry, and thenceforth people sought for the "right
form of State," the best constitution, and so the State in its best
conception. The thought of the State passed into all hearts and awakened
enthusiasm; to serve it, this mundane god, became the new divine service and
worship. The properly *political* epoch had dawned. To serve the State or the
nation became the highest ideal, the State's interest the highest interest,
State service (for which one does not by any means need to be an official) the
highest honor.

So then the separate interests and personalities had been scared away, and
sacrifice for the State had become the shibboleth. One must give up *himself*,
and live only for the State. One must act "disinterestedly," not want to
benefit *himself*, but the State. Hereby the latter has become the true
person. before whom the individual personality vanishes; not I live, but it
lives in me. Therefore, in comparison with the former self-seeking, this was
unselfishness and *impersonality* itself. Before this god -- State -- all
egoism vanished, and before it all were equal; they were without any other
distinction -- men, nothing but men.

The Revolution took fire from the inflammable material of *property*. The
government needed money. Now it must prove the proposition that it *is
absolute*, and so master of all property, sole proprietor; it must *take* to
itself *its* money, which was only in the possession of the subjects, not
their property. Instead of this, it calls States-general, to have this money
*granted* to it. The shrinking from strictly logical action destroyed the
illusion of an *absolute* government; he who must have something "granted" to
him cannot be regarded as absolute. The subjects recognized that they were
*real proprietors*, and that it was *their* money that was demanded. Those who
had hitherto been subjects attained the consciousness that they were
*proprietors*. Bailly depicts this in a few words: "If you cannot dispose of
my property without my assent, how much less can you of my person, of all that
concerns my mental and social position? All this is my property, like the
piece of land that I till; and I have a right, an interest, to make the laws
myself." Bailly's words sound, certainly, as if *every one* was a proprietor
now. However, instead of the government, instead of the prince, *the --
nation* now became proprietor and master. From this time on the ideal is
spoken of as -- "popular liberty" -- "a free people," etc.

As early as July 8, 1789, the declaration of the bishop of Autun and Barrere
took away all semblance of the importance of each and every *individual* in
legislation; it showed the complete *powerlessness* of the constituents; the
*majority of the representatives* has become *master*. When on July 9 the plan
for division of the work on the constitution is proposed, Mirabeau remarks
that "the government has only power, no rights; only in the *people* is the
source of all *right* to be found." On July 16 this same Mirabeau exclaims:
"Is not the people the source of all *power?"* The source, therefore, of all
right, and the source of all -- power!(61) By the way, here the substance of
"right" becomes visible; it is -- *power*. "He who has power has right."

The commonalty is the heir of the privileged classes. In fact, the rights of
the barons, which were taken from them as "usurpations," only passed over to
the commonalty. For the commonalty was now called the "nation." "Into the
hands of the nation" all *prerogatives* were given back. Thereby they ceased
to be "prerogatives":(62) they became "rights."(63) From this time on the
nation demands tithes, compulsory services; it has inherited the lord's court,
the rights of vert and venison, the -- serfs. The night of August 4 was the
death-night of privileges or "prerogatives" (cities, communes, boards of
magistrates, were also privileged, furnished with prerogatives and seigniorial
rights), and ended with the new morning of "right," the "rights of the State,"
the "rights of the nation."

The monarch in the person of the "royal master" had been a paltry monarch
compared with this new monarch, the "sovereign nation." This *monarchy* was a
thousand times severer, stricter, and more consistent. Against the new monarch
there was no longer any right, any privilege at all; how limited the "absolute
king" of the *ancien regime* looks in comparison! The Revolution effected the
transformation of *limited monarchy* into *absolute monarchy*. From this time
on every right that is not conferred by this monarch is an "assumption"; but
every prerogative that he bestows, a "right." The times demanded *absolute
royalty*, absolute monarchy; therefore down fell that so-called absolute
royalty which had so little understood how to become absolute that it remained
limited by a thousand little lords.

What was longed for and striven for through thousands of years -- to wit, to
find that absolute lord beside whom no other lords and lordlings any longer
exist to clip his power -- the *bourgeoisie* has brought to pass. It has
revealed the Lord who alone confers "rightful titles," and without whose
warrant *nothing is justified*. "So now we know that an idol is nothing in the
world, and that there is no other god save the one."(64)

Against *right* one can no longer, as against a right, come forward with the
assertion that it is "a wrong." One can say now only that it is a piece of
nonsense, an illusion. If one called it wrong, one would have to set up
*another right* in opposition to it, and measure it by this. If, on the
contrary, one rejects right as such, right in and of itself, altogether, then
one also rejects the concept of wrong, and dissolves the whole concept of
right (to which the concept of wrong belongs).

What is the meaning of the doctrine that we all enjoy "equality of political
rights"? Only this -- that the State has no regard for my person, that to it
I, like every other, am only a man, without having another significance that
commands its deference. I do not command its deference as an aristocrat, a
nobleman's son, or even as heir of an official whose office belongs to me by
inheritance (as in the Middle Ages countships, etc., and later under absolute
royalty, where hereditary offices occur). Now the State has an innumerable
multitude of rights to give away, *e. g.* the right to lead a battalion, a
company, etc.; the right to lecture at a university, and so forth; it has them
to give away because they are its own, *i.e.*, State rights or "political"
rights. Withal, it makes no difference to it to whom it gives them, if the
receiver only fulfills the duties that spring from the delegated rights. To it
we are all of us all right, and -- *equal --* one worth no more and no less
than another. It is indifferent to me who receives the command of the army,
says the sovereign State, provided the grantee understands the matter
properly. "Equality of political rights" has, consequently, the meaning that
every one may acquire every right that the State has to give away, if only he
fulfills the conditions annexed thereto -- conditions which are to be sought
only in the nature of the particular right, not in a predilection for the
person (*persona grata*): the nature of the right to become an officer brings
with it, *e. g.* the necessity that one possess sound limbs and a suitable
measure of knowledge, but it does not have noble birth as a condition; if, on
the other hand, even the most deserving commoner could not reach that station,
then an inequality of political rights would exist. Among the States of today
one has carried out that maxim of equality more, another less.

The monarchy of estates (so I will call absolute royalty, the time of the
kings before the revolution) kept the individual in dependence on a lot of
little monarchies. These were fellowships (societies) like the guilds, the
nobility, the priesthood, the burgher class, cities, communes. Everywhere the
individual must regard himself *first* as a member of this little society, and
yield unconditional obedience to its spirit, the *esprit de corps*, as his
monarch. More, *e. g.* than the individual nobleman himself must his family,
the honor of his race, be to him. Only by means of his *corporation*, his
estate, did the individual have relation to the greater corporation, the State
- -- as in Catholicism the individual deals with God only through the priest. To
this the third estate now, showing courage to negate *itself as an estate*,
made an end. It decided no longer to be and be called an *estate* beside other
estates, but to glorify and generalize itself into the *"nation."* Hereby it
created a much more complete and absolute monarchy,' and the entire previously
ruling *principle of estates*, the principle of little monarchies inside the
great, went down. Therefore it cannot be said that the Revolution was a
revolution against the first two privileged estates. It was against the little
monarchies of estates in general. But, if the estates and their despotism were
broken (the king too, we know, was only a king of estates, not a
citizen-king), the individuals freed from the inequality of estate were left.
Were they now really to be without estate and "out of gear," no longer bound
by any estate, without a general bond of union? No, for the third estate had
declared itself the nation only in order not to remain an estate *beside*
other estates, but to become the *sole estate*. This sole *estate* is the
nation, the *"State."* What had the individual now become? A political
Protestant, for he had come into immediate connection with his God, the State.
He was no longer, as an aristocrat, in the monarchy of the nobility; as a
mechanic, in the monarchy of the guild; but he, like all, recognized and
acknowledged only -- *one lord*, the State, as whose servants they all
received the equal title of honor, "citizen."

The *bourgeoisie* is the aristocracy of DESERT; its motto, "Let desert wear
its crowns." It fought against the "lazy" aristocracy, for according to it
(the industrious aristocracy acquired by industry and desert) it is not the
"born" who is free, nor yet I who am free either, but the "deserving" man, the
honest *servant* (of his king; of the State; of the people in constitutional
States). Through *service* one acquires freedom, *i. e.*, acquires "deserts,"
even if one served -- mammon. One must deserve well of the State, *i.e.* of
the principle of the State, of its moral spirit. He who *serves* this spirit
of the State is a good citizen, let him live to whatever honest branch of
industry he will. In its eyes innovators practice a "breadless art." Only the
"shopkeeper" is "practical," and the spirit that chases after public offices
is as much the shopkeeping spirit as is that which tries in trade to feather
its nest or otherwise to become useful to itself and anybody else.

But, if the deserving count as the free (for what does the comfortable
commoner, the faithful office-holder, lack of that freedom that his heart
desires?), then the "servants" are the -- free. The obedient servant is the
free man! What glaring nonsense! Yet this is the sense of the *bourgeoisie*,
and its poet, Goethe, as well as its philosopher, Hegel, succeeded in
glorifying the dependence of the subject on the object, obedience to the
objective world. He who only serves the cause, "devotes himself entirely to
it," has the true freedom. And among thinkers the cause was -- *reason*, that
which, like State and Church, gives -- general laws, and puts the individual
man in irons by the *thought of humanity*. It determines what is "true,"
according to which one must then act. No more "rational" people than the
honest servants, who primarily are called good citizens as servants of the
State.

Be rich as Croesus or poor as Job -- the State of the commonalty leaves that
to your option; but only have a "good disposition." This it demands of you,
and counts it its most urgent task to establish this in all. Therefore it will
keep you from "evil promptings," holding the "ill-disposed" in check and
silencing their inflammatory discourses under censors' canceling-marks or
press-penalties and behind dungeon walls, and will, on the other hand, appoint
people of "good disposition" as censors, and in every way have a *moral
influence* exerted on you by "well-disposed and well-meaning" people. If it
has made you deaf to evil promptings, then it opens your ears again all the
more diligently to good *promptings*.

With the time of the *bourgeoisie* begins that of *liberalism*. People want to
see what is "rational," "suited to the times," etc., established everywhere.
The following definition of liberalism, which is supposed to be pronounced in
its honor, characterizes it completely: "Liberalism is nothing else than the
knowledge of reason, applied to our existing relations."(65) Its aim is a
"rational order," a "moral behavior," a "limited freedom," not anarchy,
lawlessness, selfhood. But, if reason rules, then the *person* succumbs. Art
has for a long time not only acknowledged the ugly, but considered the ugly as
necessary to its existence, and takes it up into itself; it needs the villain.
In the religious domain, too, the extremest liberals go so far that they want
to see the most religious man regarded as a citizen -- *i. e.*, the religious
villain; they want to see no more of trials for heresy. But against the
"rational law" no one is to rebel, otherwise he is threatened with the
severest penalty. What is wanted is not free movement and realization of the
person or of me, but of reason -- *i.e.* a dominion of reason, a dominion. The
liberals are *zealots*, not exactly for the faith, for God, but certainly for
*reason*, their master. They brook no lack of breeding, and therefore no
self-development and self- determination; they *play the guardian* as
effectively as the most absolute rulers.

"Political liberty," what are we to understand by that? Perhaps the
individual's independence of the State and its laws? No; on the contrary, the
individual's *subjection* in the State and to the State's laws. But why
"liberty"? Because one is no longer separated from the State by
intermediaries, but stands in direct and immediate relation to it; because one
is a -- citizen, not the subject of another, not even of the king as a person,
but only in his quality as "supreme head of the State." Political liberty,
this fundamental doctrine of liberalism, is nothing but a second phase of --
Protestantism, and runs quite parallel with "religious liberty."(66) Or would
it perhaps be right to understand by the latter an independence of religion?
Anything but that. Independence of intermediaries is all that it is intended
to express, independence of mediating priests, the abolition of the "laity,"
and so, direct and immediate relation to religion or to God. Only on the
supposition that one has religion can he enjoy freedom of religion; freedom of
religion does not mean being without religion, but inwardness of faith,
unmediated intercourse with God. To him who is "religiously free" religion is
an affair of the heart, it is to him his *own affair*, it is to him a
"sacredly serious matter." So, too, to the "politically free" man the State is
a sacredly serious matter; it is his heart's affair, his chief affair, his own
affair.

Political liberty means that the *polis*, the State, is free; freedom of
religion that religion is free, as freedom of conscience signifies that
conscience is free; not, therefore, that I am free from the State, from
religion, from conscience, or that I am *rid* of them. It does not mean *my*
liberty, but the liberty of a power that rules and subjugates me; it means
that one of my *despots*, like State, religion, conscience, is free. State,
religion, conscience, these despots, make me a slave, and *their* liberty is
my slavery. That in this they necessarily follow the principle, "the end
hallows the means," is self-evident. If the welfare of the State is the end,
war is a hallowed means; if justice is the State's end, homicide is a hallowed
means, and is called by its sacred name, "execution"; the sacred State
*hallows* everything that is serviceable to it.

"Individual liberty," over which civic liberalism keeps jealous watch, does
not by any means signify a completely free self-determination, by which
actions become altogether *mine*, but only independence of *persons*.
Individually free is he who is responsible to no *man*. Taken in this sense --
and we are not allowed to understand it otherwise -- not only the ruler is
individually free, *i.e.*, *irresponsible* toward men ("before God," we know,
he acknowledges himself responsible), but all who are "responsible only to the
law." This kind of liberty was won through the revolutionary movement of the
century -- to wit, independence of arbitrary will, or *tel est notre plaisir*.
Hence the constitutional prince must himself be stripped of all personality,
deprived of all individual decision, that he may not as a person, as an
*individual man*, violate the "individual liberty" of others. The *personal
will of the ruler* has disappeared in the constitutional prince; it is with a
right feeling, therefore, that absolute princes resist this. Nevertheless
these very ones profess to be in the best sense "Christian princes." For this,
however, they must become a *purely spiritual* power, as the Christian is
subject only to *spirit* ("God is spirit"). The purely spiritual power is
consistently represented only by the constitutional prince, he who, without
any personal significance, stands there spiritualized to the degree that he
can rank as a sheer, uncanny "spirit," as an *idea*. The constitutional king
is the truly *Christian* king, the genuine, consistent carrying-out of the
Christian principle. In the constitutional monarchy individual dominion --
*i.e.* a real ruler that *wills* -- has found its end; here, therefore,
*individual liberty* prevails, independence of every individual dictator, of
everyone who could dictate to me with a *tel est notre plaisir*. It is the
completed *Christian* State-life, a spiritualized life.

The behavior of the commonalty is *liberal* through and through. Every
*personal* invasion of another's sphere revolts the civic sense; if the
citizen sees that one is dependent on the humor, the pleasure, the will of a
man as individual (*i.e.* as not as authorized by a "higher power"), at once
he brings his liberalism to the front and shrieks about "arbitrariness." In
fine, the citizen asserts his freedom from what is called *orders*
(*ordonnance*)*: "No one has any business to give me -- orders!" Orders*
carries the idea that what I am to do is another man's will, while law does
not express a personal authority of another. The liberty of the commonalty is
liberty or independence from the will of another person, so-called personal or
individual liberty; for being personally free means being only so free that no
other person can dispose of mine, or that what I may or may not do does not
depend on the personal decree of another. The liberty of the press, *e. g.*,
is such a liberty of liberalism, liberalism fighting only against the coercion
of the censorship as that of personal wilfulness, but otherwise showing itself
extremely inclined and willing to tyrannize over the press by "press laws";
*i.e.* the civic liberals want liberty of writing *for themselves*; for, as
they are *law-abiding*, their writings will not bring them under the law. Only
liberal matter, *i.e.* only lawful matter, is to be allowed to be printed;
otherwise the "press laws" threaten "press-penalties." If one sees personal
liberty assured, one does not notice at all how, if a new issue happens to
arise, the most glaring unfreedom becomes dominant. For one is rid of *orders*
indeed, and "no one has any business to give us orders," but one has become so
much the more submissive to the -- *law*. One is enthralled now in due legal
form.

In the citizen-State there are only "free people," who are *compelled* to
thousands of things (*e. g.* to deference, to a confession of faith, etc.).
But what does that amount to? Why, it is only the -- State, the law, not any
man, that compels them!

What does the commonalty mean by inveighing against every personal order,
*i.e.* every order not founded on the "cause," on "reason"? It is simply
fighting in the interest of the "cause"(67) against the dominion of "persons"!
But the mind's cause is the rational, good, lawful, etc.; that is the "good
cause." The commonalty wants an *impersonal* ruler.

Furthermore, if the principle is this, that only the cause is to rule man --
to wit, the cause of morality, the cause of legality, etc., then no personal
balking of one by the other may be authorized either (as formerly, *e. g.* the
commoner was balked of the aristocratic offices, the aristocrat of common
mechanical trades, etc.); *free competition* must exist. Only through the
thing(68) can one balk another (*e. g.* the rich man balking the impecunious
man by money, a thing), not as a person. Henceforth only one lordship, the
lordship of the *State*, is admitted; personally no one is any longer lord of
another. Even at birth the children belong to the State, and to the parents
only in the name of the State, which *e. g.* does not allow infanticide,
demands their baptism etc.

But all the State's children, furthermore, are of quite equal account in its
eyes ("civic or political equality"), and they may see to it themselves how
they get along with each other; they may *compete*.

Free competition means nothing else than that every one can present himself,
assert himself, fight, against another. Of course the feudal party set itself
against this, as its existence depended on an absence of competition. The
contests in the time of the Restoration in France had no other substance than
this -- that the *bourgeoisie* was struggling for free competition, and the
feudalists were seeking to bring back the guild system.

Now, free competition has won, and against the guild system it had to win.
(See below for the further discussion.)

If the Revolution ended in a reaction, this only showed what the Revolution
*really was*. For every effort arrives at reaction when it *comes to discreet
reflection*, and storms forward in the original action only so long as it is
an *intoxication*, an "indiscretion." "Discretion" will always be the cue of
the reaction, because discretion sets limits, and liberates what was really
wanted, *i. e.*, the principle, from the initial "unbridledness" and
"unrestrainedness." Wild young fellows, bumptious students, who set aside all
considerations, are *really* Philistines, since with them, as with the latter,
considerations form the substance of their conduct; only that as swaggerers
they are mutinous against considerations and in negative relations to them,
but as Philistines, later, they give themselves up to considerations and have
positive relations to them. In both cases all their doing and thinking turns
upon "considerations," but the Philistine is *reactionary* in relation to the
student; he is the wild fellow come to discreet reflection, as the latter is
the unreflecting Philistine. Daily experience confirms the truth of this
transformation, and shows how the swaggerers turn to Philistines in turning
gray.

So, too, the so-called reaction in Germany gives proof that it was only the
*discreet* continuation of the warlike jubilation of liberty.

The Revolution was not directed against *the established*, but against the
*establishment in question*, against a *particular* establishment. It did away
with *this* ruler, not with *the* ruler -- on the contrary, the French were
ruled most inexorably; it killed the old vicious rulers, but wanted to confer
on the virtuous ones a securely established position, *i. e.*, it simply set
virtue in the place of vice. (Vice and virtue, again, are on their part
distinguished from each other only as a wild young fellow from a Philistine.)
Etc.

To this day the revolutionary principle has gone no farther than to assail
only *one or another* particular establishment, *i.e.* be *reformatory*. Much
as may be *improved*, strongly as "discreet progress" may be adhered to,
always there is only a *new master* set in the old one's place, and the
overturning is a -- building up. We are still at the distinction of the young
Philistine from the old one. The Revolution began in *bourgeois* fashion with
the uprising of the third estate, the middle class; in *bourgeois* fashion it
dries away. It was not the *individual man --* and he alone is *Man* -- that
became free, but the *citizen*, the *citoyen*, the *political* man, who for
that very reason is not *Man* but a specimen of the human species, and more
particularly a specimen of the species Citizen, a *free citizen*.

In the Revolution it was not the *individual* who acted so as to affect the
world's history, but a *people*; the *nation*, the sovereign nation, wanted to
effect everything. A fancied *I*, an idea, *e. g.* the nation is, appears
acting; the individuals contribute themselves as tools of this idea, and act
as "citizens."

The commonalty has its power, and at the same time its limits, in the
*fundamental law of the State*, in a charter, in a legitimate(69) or
"just"(70) prince who himself is guided, and rules, according to "rational
laws," in short, in *legality*. The period of the *bourgeoisie* is ruled by
the British spirit of legality. An assembly of provincial estates, *e. g.* is
ever recalling that its authorization goes only so and so far, and that it is
called at all only through favor and can be thrown out again through disfavor.
It is always reminding itself of its -- *vocation*. It is certainly not to be
denied that my father begot me; but, now that I am once begotten, surely his
purposes in begetting do not concern me a bit and, whatever he may have
*called* me to, I do what I myself will. Therefore even a called assembly of
estates, the French assembly in the beginning of the Revolution, recognized
quite rightly that it was independent of the caller. It *existed*, and would
have been stupid if it did not avail itself of the right of existence, but
fancied itself dependent as on a father. The called one no longer has to ask
"what did the caller want when he created me?" but "what do I want after I
have once followed the call?" Not the caller, not the constituents, not the
charter according to which their meeting was called out, nothing will be to
him a sacred, inviolable power. He is *authorized* for everything that is in
his power; he will know no restrictive "authorization," will not want to be
*loyal*. This, if any such thing could be expected from chambers at all, would
give a completely *egoistic* chamber, severed from all navel-string and
without consideration. But chambers are always devout, and therefore one
cannot be surprised if so much half-way or undecided,

*i. e.*, hypocritical, "egoism" parades in them.

The members of the estates are to remain within the *limits* that are traced
for them by the charter, by the king's will, etc. If they will not or can not
do that, then they are to "step out." What dutiful man could act otherwise,
could put himself, his conviction, and his will as the *first* thing? Who
could be so immoral as to want to assert *himself*, even if the body corporate
and everything should go to ruin over it? People keep carefully within the
limits of their *authorization*; of course one must remain within the limits
of his *power* anyhow, because no one can do more than he can. "My power, or,
if it be so, powerlessness, be my sole limit, but authorizations only
restraining -- precepts? Should I profess this all-subversive view? No, I am a
- -- law-abiding citizen!"

The commonalty professes a morality which is most closely connected with its
essence. The first demand of this morality is to the effect that one should
carry on a solid business, an honourable trade, lead a moral life. Immoral, to
it, is the sharper, the, demirep, the thief, robber, and murderer, the
gamester, the penniless man without a situation, the frivolous man. The
doughty commoner designates the feeling against these "immoral" people as his
"deepest indignation."

All these lack settlement, the *solid* quality of business, a solid, seemly
life, a fixed income, etc.; in short, they belong, because their existence
does not rest on a *secure basis* to the dangerous "individuals or isolated
persons," to the dangerous *proletariat*; they are "individual bawlers" who
offer no "guarantee" and have "nothing to lose," and so nothing to risk. The
forming of family ties, *e. g.*, *binds* a man: he who is bound furnishes
security, can be taken hold of; not so the street-walker. The gamester stakes
everything on the game, ruins himself and others -- no guarantee. All who
appear to the commoner suspicious, hostile, and dangerous might be comprised
under the name "vagabonds"; every vagabondish way of living displeases him.
For there are intellectual vagabonds too, to whom the hereditary
dwelling-place of their fathers seems too cramped and oppressive for them to
be willing to satisfy themselves with the limited space any more: instead of
keeping within the limits of a temperate style of thinking, and taking as
inviolable truth what furnishes comfort and tranquillity to thousands, they
overlap all bounds of the traditional and run wild with their impudent
criticism and untamed mania for doubt, these extravagating vagabonds. They
form the class of the unstable, restless, changeable, *i.e.* of the
*prolétariat*, and, if they give voice to their unsettled nature, are called
"unruly fellows."

Such a broad sense has the so-called *proletariat*, or pauperism. How much one
would err if one believed the commonalty to be desirous of doing away with
poverty (pauperism) to the best of its ability! On the contrary, the good
citizen helps himself with the incomparably comforting conviction that "the
fact is that the good things of fortune are unequally divided and will always
remain so -- according to God's wise decree." The poverty which surrounds him
in every alley does not disturb the true commoner further than that at most he
clears his account with it by throwing an alms, or finds work and food for an
"honest and serviceable" fellow. But so much the more does he feel his quiet
enjoyment clouded by *innovating* and *discontented* poverty, by those poor
who no longer behave quietly and endure, but begin to *run wild* and become
restless. Lock up the vagabond, thrust the breeder of unrest into the darkest
dungeon! He wants to "arouse dissatisfaction and incite people against
existing institutions" in the State -- stone him, stone him!

But from these identical discontented ones comes a reasoning somewhat as
follows: It need not make any difference to the "good citizens" who protects
them and their principles, whether an absolute king or a constitutional one, a
republic, if only they are protected. And what is their principle, whose
protector they always "love"? Not that of labor; not that of birth either.
But, that of *mediocrity*, of the golden mean: a little birth and a little
labor, *i. e.*, an *interest-bearing possession*. Possession is here the
fixed, the given, inherited (birth); interest-drawing is the exertion about it
(labor); *laboring capital*, therefore. Only no immoderation, no ultra, no
radicalism! Right of birth certainly, but only hereditary possessions; labor
certainly, yet little or none at all of one's own, but labor of capital and of
the -- subject laborers.

If an age is imbued with an error, some always derive advantage from the
error, while the rest have to suffer from it. In the Middle Ages the error was
general among Christians that the church must have all power, or the supreme
lordship on earth; the hierarchs believed in this "truth" not less than the
laymen, and both were spellbound in the like error. But by it the hierarchs
had the *advantage* of power, the laymen had to *suffer* subjection. However,
as the saying goes, "one learns wisdom by suffering"; and so the laymen at
last learned wisdom and no longer believed in the medieval "truth." -- A like
relation exists between the commonalty and the laboring class. Commoner and
laborer believe in the "truth" of *money*; they who do not possess it believe
in it no less than those who possess it: the laymen, therefore, as well as the
priests.

"Money governs the world" is the keynote of the civic epoch. A destitute
aristocrat and a destitute laborer, as "starvelings," amount to nothing so far
as political consideration is concerned; birth and labor do not do it, but
*money* brings *consideration*.(71) The possessors rule, but the State trains
up from the destitute its "servants," to whom, in proportion as they are to
rule (govern) in its name, it gives money (a salary).

I receive everything from the State. Have I anything without the *State's
assent?* What I have without this it *takes* from me as soon as it discovers
the lack of a "legal title." Do I not, therefore, have everything through its
grace, its assent?

On this alone, on the *legal title*, the commonalty rests. The commoner is
what he is through the *protection of the State*, through the State's grace.
He would necessarily be afraid of losing everything if the State's power were
broken.

But how is it with him who has nothing to lose, how with the proletarian? As
he has nothing to lose, he does not need the protection of the State for his
"nothing." He may gain, on the contrary, if that protection of the State is
withdrawn from the *protégé*.

Therefore the non-possessor will regard the State as a power protecting the
possessor, which privileges the latter, but does nothing for him, the
non-possessor, but to -- suck his blood. The State is *a -- commoners' State*,
is the estate of the commonalty. It protects man not according to his labor,
but according to his tractableness ("loyalty") -- to wit, according to whether
the rights entrusted to him by the State are enjoyed and managed in accordance
with the will, *i. e.*, laws, of the State.

Under the *regime* of the commonalty the laborers always fall into the hands
of the possessors, of those who have at their disposal some bit of the State
domains (and everything possessible in State domain, belongs to the State, and
is only a fief of the individual), especially money and land; of the
capitalists, therefore. The laborer cannot *realize* on his labor to the
extent of the value that it has for the consumer. "Labor is badly paid!" The
capitalist has the greatest profit from it. -- Well paid, and more than well
paid, are only the labors of those who heighten the splendor and *dominion* of
the State, the labors of high State *servants*. The State pays well that its
"good citizens," the possessors, may be able to pay badly without danger; it
secures to itself by good payment its servants, out of whom it forms a
protecting power, a "police" (to the police belong soldiers, officials of all
kinds, *e. g.* those of justice, education, etc. -- in short, the whole
"machinery of the State") for the "good citizens," and the "good citizens"
gladly pay high tax-rates to it in order to pay so much lower rates to their
laborers.

But the class of laborers, because unprotected in what they essentially are
(for they do not enjoy the protection of the State as laborers, but as its
subjects they have a share in the enjoyment of the police, a so-called
protection of the law), remains a power hostile to this State, this State of
possessors, this "citizen kingship." Its principle, labor, is not recognized
as to its *value*; it is exploited,(72) a spoil(73) of the possessors, the
enemy.

The laborers have the most enormous power in their hands, and, if they once
became thoroughly conscious of it and used it, nothing would withstand them;
they would only have to stop labor, regard the product of labor as theirs, and
enjoy it. This is the sense of the labor disturbances which show themselves
here and there.

The State rests on the -- *slavery of labor*. If *labor* becomes *free*. the
State is lost.

§2. Social Liberalism

We are freeborn men, and wherever we look we see ourselves made servants of
egoists! Are we therefore to become egoists too! Heaven forbid! We want rather
to make egoists impossible! We want to make them all "ragamuffins"; all of us
must have nothing, that "all may have."

So say the Socialists.

Who is this person that you call "All"? -- It is "society"! -- But is it
corporeal, then? -- *We* are its body! -- You? Why, you are not a body
yourselves -- you, sir, are corporeal to be sure, you too, and you, but you
all together are only bodies, not a body. Accordingly the united society may
indeed have bodies at its service, but no one body of its own. Like the
"nation of the politicians, it will turn out to be nothing but a "spirit," its
body only semblance.

The freedom of man is, in political liberalism, freedom from *persons*, from
personal dominion, from the *master*; the securing of each individual person
against other persons, personal freedom.

No one has any orders to give; the law alone gives orders.

But, even if the persons have become *equal*, yet their *possessions* have
not. And yet the poor man *needs the rich*, the rich the poor, the former the
rich man's money, the latter the poor man's labor. So no one needs another as
a *person*, but needs him as a *giver*, and thus as one who has something to
give, as holder or possessor. So what he *has* makes the *man*. And in
*having*, or in "possessions," people are unequal.

Consequently, social liberalism concludes, *no one must have*, as according to
political liberalism *no one was to give orders*; *i.e.* as in that case the
*State* alone obtained the command, so now *society* alone obtains the
possessions.

For the State, protecting each one's person and property against the other,
*separates* them from one another; each one *is* his special part and has his
special part. He who is satisfied with what he is and has finds this state of
things profitable; but he who would like to be and have more looks around for
this "more," and finds it in the power of other *persons*. Here he comes upon
a contradiction; as a person no one is inferior to another, and yet one person
*has* what another has not but would like to have. So, he concludes, the one
person is more than the other, after all, for the former has what he needs,
the latter has not; the former is a rich man, the latter a poor man.

He now asks himself further, are we to let what we rightly buried come to life
again? Are we to let this circuitously restored inequality of persons pass?
No; on the contrary, we must bring quite to an end what was only half
accomplished. Our freedom from another's person still lacks the freedom from
what the other's person can command, from what he has in his personal power --
in short, from "personal property." Let us then do away with *personal
property*. Let no one have anything any longer, let every one be a --
ragamuffin. Let property be *impersonal*, let it belong to -- *society*.

Before the supreme *ruler*, the sole *commander*, we had all become equal,
equal persons, *i. e.*, nullities.

Before the supreme *proprietor* we all become equal -- ragamuffins. For the
present, one is still in another's estimation a "ragamuffin," a
"have-nothing"; but then this estimation ceases. We are all ragamuffins
together, and as the aggregate of Communistic society we might call ourselves
a "ragamuffin crew."

When the proletarian shall really have founded his purposed "society" in which
the interval between rich and poor is to be removed, then he *will be* a
ragamuffin, for then he will feel that it amounts to something to be a
ragamuffin, and might lift "Ragamuffin" to be an honourable form of address,
just as the Revolution did with the word "Citizen." Ragamuffin is his ideal;
we are all to become ragamuffins.

This is the second robbery of the "personal" in the interest of "humanity."
Neither command nor property is left to the individual; the State took the
former, society the latter.

Because in society the most oppressive evils make themselves felt, therefore
the oppressed especially, and consequently the members of the lower regions of
society, think they found the fault in society, and make it their task to
discover the *right society*. This is only the old phenomenon -- that one
looks for the fault first in everything but *himself*, and consequently in the
State, in the self-seeking of the rich, etc., which yet have precisely our
fault to thank for their existence.

 The reflections and conclusions of Communism look very simple. As matters lie
at this time -- in the present situation with regard to the State, therefore
- -- some, and they the majority, are at a disadvantage compared to others, the
minority. In this *state* of things the former are in a *state of prosperity*,
the latter in *state of need*. Hence the present *state* of things, *i.e.* the
State itself, must be done away with. And what in its place? Instead of the
isolated state of prosperity -- a *general state of prosperity*, a *prosperity
of all*.

Through the Revolution the *bourgeoisie* became omnipotent, and all inequality
was abolished by every one's being raised or degraded to the dignity of a
*citizen* : the common man -- raised, the aristocrat -- degraded; the *third*
estate became sole estate, *viz.*, namely, the estate of -- *citizens of the
State*. Now Communism responds: Our dignity and our essence consist not in our
being all -- the *equal children* of our mother, the State, all born with
equal claim to her love and her protection, but in our all existing *for each
other*. This is our equality, or herein we are *equal*, in that we, I as well
as you and you and all of you, are active or "labor" each one for the rest; in
that each of us is a *laborer*, then. The point for us is not what we are *for
the State* (citizens), not our *citizenship* therefore, but what we are *for
each other*, that each of us exists only through the other, who, caring for my
wants, at the same time sees his own satisfied by me. He labors *e. g.* for my
clothing (tailor), I for his need of amusement (comedy-writer, rope-dancer),
he for my food (farmer), I for his instruction (scientist). It is *labor* that
constitutes our dignity and our -- equality.

What advantage does citizenship bring us? Burdens! And how high is our labor
appraised? As low as possible! But labor is our sole value all the same: that
we are *laborers* is the best thing about us, this is our significance in the
world, and therefore it must be our consideration too and must come to receive
*consideration*. What can you meet us with? Surely nothing but -- *labor* too.
Only for labor or services do we owe you a recompense, not for your bare
existence; not for what you are *for yourselves* either, but only for what you
are *for us*. By what have you claims on us? Perhaps by your high birth? No,
only by what you do for us that is desirable or useful. Be it thus then: we
are willing to be worth to you only so much as we do for you; but you are to
be held likewise by us. *Services* determine value, -- *i.e.* those services
that are worth something to us, and consequently *labors for each other,
labors for the common good*. Let each one be in the other's eyes a *laborer*.
He who accomplishes something useful is inferior to none, or -- all laborers
(laborers, of course, in the sense of laborers "for the common good," *i. e.*,
communistic laborers) are equal. But, as the laborer is worth his wages,(74)
let the wages too be equal.

As long as faith sufficed for man's honor and dignity, no labor, however
harassing, could be objected to if it only did not hinder a man in his faith.
Now, on the contrary, when every one is to cultivate himself into man,
condemning a man to *machine-like labor* amounts to the same thing as slavery.
If a factory worker must tire himself to death twelve hours and more, he is
cut off from becoming man. Every labor is to have the intent that the man be
satisfied. Therefore he must become a *master* in it too, *i.e.* be able to
perform it as a totality. He who in a pin factory only puts on the heads, only
draws the wire, works, as it were, mechanically, like a machine; he remains
half-trained, does not become a master: his labor cannot *satisfy* him, it can
only *fatigue* him. His labor is nothing by itself, has no object *in*
*itself*, is nothing complete in itself; he labors only into another's hands,
and is *used* (exploited) by this other. For this laborer in another's service
there is no *enjoyment of a cultivated mind*, at most, crude amusements:
*culture*, you see, is barred against him. To be a good Christian one needs
only to *believe*, and that can be done under the most oppressive
circumstances. Hence the Christian-minded take care only of the oppressed
laborers' piety, their patience, submission, etc. Only so long as the
downtrodden classes were *Christians* could they bear all their misery: for
Christianity does not let their murmurings and exasperation rise. Now the
*hushing* of desires is no longer enough, but their *sating* is demanded. The
*bourgeoisie* has proclaimed the gospel of the *enjoyment of the world*, of
material enjoyment, and now wonders that this doctrine finds adherents among
us poor: it has shown that not faith and poverty, but culture and possessions,
make a man blessed; we proletarians understand that too.

The commonalty freed us from the orders and arbitrariness of individuals. But
that arbitrariness was left which springs from the conjuncture of situations,
and may be called the fortuity of circumstances; favoring *fortune*. and those
"favored by fortune," still remain.

When, *e. g.*, a branch of industry is ruined and thousands of laborers become
breadless, people think reasonably enough to acknowledge that it is not the
individual who must bear the blame, but that "the evil lies in the situation."
Let us change the situation then, but let us change it thoroughly, and so that
its fortuity becomes powerless. and *a law!* Let us no longer be slaves of
chance! Let us create a new order that makes an end of *fluctuations*. Let
this order then be sacred!

Formerly one had to suit the *lords* to come to anything; after the Revolution
the word was "Grasp *fortune!"* Luck-hunting or hazard-playing, civil life was
absorbed in this. Then, alongside this, the demand that he who has obtained
something shall not frivolously stake it again.

Strange and yet supremely natural contradiction. Competition, in which alone
civil or political life unrolls itself, is a game of luck through and through,
from the speculations of the exchange down to the solicitation of offices, the
hunt for customers, looking for work, aspiring to promotion and decorations,
the second-hand dealer's petty haggling, etc. If one succeeds in supplanting
and outbidding his rivals, then the "lucky throw" is made; for it must be
taken as a piece of luck to begin with that the victor sees himself equipped
with an ability (even though it has been developed by the most careful
industry) against which the others do not know how to rise, consequently that
- -- no abler ones are found. And now those who ply their daily lives in the
midst of these changes of fortune without seeing any harm in it are seized
with the most virtuous indignation when their own principle appears in naked
form and "breeds misfortune" as -- *hazard-playing*. Hazard-playing, you see,
is too clear, too barefaced a competition, and, like every decided nakedness,
offends honourable modesty.

The Socialists want to put a stop to this activity of chance, and to form a
society in which men are no longer dependent on *fortune*, but free.

In the most natural way in the world this endeavor first utters itself as
hatred of the "unfortunate" against the "fortunate," *i.e.*, of those for whom
fortune has done little or nothing, against those for whom it has done
everything. But properly the ill- feeling is not directed against the
fortunate, but against *fortune*, this rotten spot of the commonalty.

As the Communists first declare free activity to be man's essence, they, like
all work-day dispositions, need a Sunday; like all material endeavors, they
need a God, an uplifting and edification alongside their witless "labor."

That the Communist sees in you the man, the brother, is only the Sunday side
of Communism. According to the work-day side he does not by any means take you
as man simply, but as human laborer or laboring man. The first view has in it
the liberal principle; in the second, illiberality is concealed. If you were a
"lazy-bones," he would not indeed fail to recognize the man in you, but would
endeavor to cleanse him as a "lazy man" from laziness and to convert you to
the *faith* that labor is man's "destiny and calling."

Therefore he shows a double face: with the one he takes heed that the
spiritual man be satisfied, with the other he looks about him for means for
the material or corporeal man. He gives man a twofold *post* -- an office of
material acquisition and one of spiritual.

The commonalty had *thrown open* spiritual and material goods, and left it
with each one to reach out for them if he liked.

Communism really procures them for each one, presses them upon him, and
compels him to acquire them. It takes seriously the idea that, because only
spiritual and material goods make us men, we must unquestionably acquire these
goods in order to be man. The commonalty made acquisition free; Communism
*compels* to acquisition, and recognizes only the acquirer, him who practices
a trade. It is not enough that the trade is free, but you must *take it up*.

So all that is left for criticism to do is to prove that the acquisition of
these goods does not yet by any means make us men.

With the liberal commandment that every one is to make a man of himself, or
every one to make himself man, there was posited the necessity that every one
must gain time for this labor of humanization, *i. e.*, that it should become
possible for every one to labor on *himself*.

The commonalty thought it had brought this about if it handed over everything
human to competition, but gave the individual a right to every human thing.
"Each may strive after everything!"

Social liberalism finds that *the* matter is not settled with the "may,"
because may means only "it is forbidden to none" but not "it is made possible
to every one." Hence it affirms that the commonalty is liberal only with the
mouth and in words, supremely illiberal in act. It on its part wants to give
all of us the *means* to be able to labor on ourselves.

By the principle of labor that of fortune or competition is certainly outdone.
But at the same time the laborer, in his consciousness that the essential
thing in him is "the laborer," holds himself aloof from egoism and subjects
himself to the supremacy of a society of laborers, as the commoner clung with
self-abandonment to the competition-State. The beautiful dream of a "social
duty" still continues to be dreamed. People think again that society *gives*
what we need, and we are *under obligations* to it on that account, owe it
everything.(75) They are still at the point of wanting to *serve* a "supreme
giver of all good." That society is no ego at all, which could give, bestow,
or grant, but an instrument or means, from which we may derive benefit; that
we have no social duties, but solely interests for the pursuance of which
society must serve us; that we owe society no sacrifice, but, if we sacrifice
anything, sacrifice it to ourselves -- of this the Socialists do not think,
because they -- as liberals -- are imprisoned in the religious principle, and
zealously aspire after -- a sacred society, *e. g.* the State was hitherto.

Society, from which we have everything, is a new master, a new spook, a new
"supreme being," which "takes us into its service and allegiance!"

The more precise appreciation of political as well as social liberalism must
wait to find its place further on. For the present we pass this over, in order
first to summon them before the tribunal of humane or critical liberalism.

§ 3. Humane Liberalism

As liberalism is completed in self-criticizing, "critical"(76) liberalism --
in which the critic remains a liberal and does not go beyond the principle of
liberalism, Man -- this may distinctively be named after Man and called the
"humane."

The laborer is counted as the most material and egoistical man. He does
nothing at all *for humanity*, does everything for *himself*, for his welfare.

The commonalty, because it proclaimed the freedom of *Man* only as to his
birth, had to leave him in the claws of the un-human man (the egoist) for the
rest of life. Hence under the regime of political liberalism egoism has an
immense field for free utilization.

The laborer will *utilize* society for his *egoistic* ends as the commoner
does the State. You have only an egoistic end after all, your welfare, is the
humane liberal's reproach to the Socialist; take up a *purely human interest*,
then I will be your companion. "But to this there belongs a consciousness
stronger, more comprehensive, than a *laborer-consciousness"*. "The laborer
makes nothing, therefore he has nothing; but he makes nothing because his
labor is always a labor that remains individual, calculated strictly for his
own want, a labor day by day."(77) In opposition to this one might, *e. g.*,
consider the fact that Gutenberg's labor did not remain individual, but begot
innumerable children, and still lives today; it was calculated for the want of
humanity, and was an eternal, imperishable labor.

The humane consciousness despises the commoner-consciousness as well as the
laborer-consciousness: for the commoner is "indignant" only at vagabonds (at
all who have "no definite occupation") and their "immorality"; the laborer is
"disgusted" by the idler ("lazy-bones") and his "immoral," because parasitic
and unsocial, principles. To this the humane liberal retorts: The
unsettledness of many is only your product, Philistine! But that you,
proletarian, demand the *grind* of all, and want to make *drudgery* general,
is a part, still clinging to you, of your pack-mule life up to this time.
Certainly you want to lighten drudgery itself by *all* having to drudge
equally hard, yet only for this reason, that all may gain *leisure* to an
equal extent. But what are they to do with their leisure? What does your
"society" do, that this leisure may be passed *humanly?* It must leave the
gained leisure to egoistic preference again, and the very *gain* that your
society furthers falls to the egoist, as the gain of the commonalty, the
*masterlessness of man*, could not be filled with a human element by the
State, and therefore was left to arbitrary choice.

It is assuredly necessary that man be masterless: but therefore the egoist is
not to become master over man again either, but man over the egoist. Man must
assuredly find leisure: but, if the egoist makes use of it, it will be lost
for man; therefore you ought to have given leisure a human significance. But
you laborers undertake even your labor from an egoistic impulse, because you
want to eat, drink, live; how should you be less egoists in leisure? You labor
only because having your time to yourselves (idling) goes well after work
done, and what you are to while away your leisure time with is left to
*chance*.

But, if every door is to be bolted against egoism, it would be necessary to
strive after completely "disinterested" action, *total* disinterestedness.
This alone is human, because only Man is disinterested, the egoist always
interested.

- --------

If we let disinterestedness pass unchallenged for a while, then we ask, do you
mean not to take an interest in anything, not to be enthusiastic for anything,
not for liberty, humanity, etc.? "Oh, yes, but that is not an egoistic
interest, not *interestedness*, but a human, *i.e.* a -- *theoretical*
interest, to wit, an interest not for an individual or individuals ('all'),
but for the *idea*, for Man!"

And you do not notice that you too are enthusiastic only for *your* idea,
*your* idea of liberty?

And, further, do you not notice that your disinterestedness is again, like
religious disinterestedness, a heavenly interestedness? Certainly benefit to
the individual leaves you cold, and abstractly you could cry *fiat libertas,
pereat mundus*. You do not take thought for the coming day either, and take no
serious care for the individual's wants anyhow, not for your own comfort nor
for that of the rest; but you make nothing of all this, because you are a --
dreamer.

Do you suppose the humane liberal will be so liberal as to aver that
everything possible to man is *human?* On the contrary! He does not, indeed,
share the Philistine's moral prejudice about the strumpet, but "that this
woman turns her body into a money-getting machine"(78) makes her despicable to
him as "human being." His judgment is, the strumpet is not a human being; or,
so far as a woman is a strumpet, so far is she unhuman, dehumanized. Further:
The Jew, the Christian, the privileged person, the theologian, etc., is not a
human being; so far as you are a Jew, etc., you are not a human being. Again
the imperious postulate: Cast from you everything peculiar, criticize it away!
Be not a Jew, not a Christian, but be a human being, nothing but a human
being. Assert your *humanity* against every restrictive specification; make
yourself, by means of it, a human being, and free from those limits; make
yourself a "free man" -- *i.e.* recognize humanity as your all-determining
*essence*.

I say: You are indeed more than a Jew, more than a Christian, etc., but you
are also more than a human being. Those are all ideas, but you are corporeal.
Do you suppose, then, that you can ever become a "human being as such?" Do you
suppose our posterity will find no prejudices and limits to clear away, for
which our powers were not sufficient? Or do you perhaps think that in your
fortieth or fiftieth year you have come so far that the following days have
nothing more to dissipate in you, and that you are a human being? The men of
the future will yet fight their way to many a liberty that we do not even
miss. What do you need that later liberty for? If you meant to esteem yourself
as nothing before you had become a human being, you would have to wait till
the "last judgment," till the day when man, or humanity, shall have attained
perfection. But, as you will surely die before that, what becomes of your
prize of victory?

Rather, therefore, invert the case, and say to yourself, *I am a human being!*
I do not need to begin by producing the human being in myself, for he belongs
to me already, like all my qualities.

But, asks the critic, how can one be a Jew and a man at once? In the first
place, I answer, one cannot be either a Jew or a man at all, if "one" and Jew
or man are to mean the same; "one" always reaches beyond those specifications,
and -- let Isaacs be ever so Jewish -- a Jew, nothing but a Jew, he cannot be,
just because he is *this* Jew. In the second place, as a Jew one assuredly
cannot be a man, if being a man means being nothing special. But in the third
place -- and this is the point -- I can, as a Jew, be entirely what I -- *can*
be. From Samuel or Moses, and others, you hardly expect that they should have
raised themselves above Judaism, although you must say that they were not yet
"men." They simply were what they could be. Is it otherwise with the Jews of
today? Because you have discovered the idea of humanity, does it follow from
this that every Jew can become a convert to it? If he can, he does not fail
to, and, if he fails to, he -- cannot. What does your demand concern him? What
the *call* to be a man, which you address to him?

- --------

As a universal principle, in the "human society" which the humane liberal
promises, nothing "special" which one or another has is to find recognition,
nothing which bears the character of "private" is to have value. In this way
the circle of liberalism, which has its good principle in man and human
liberty, its bad in the, egoist and everything private, its God in the former,
its devil in the latter, rounds itself off completely; and, if the special or
private person lost his value in the State (no personal prerogative), if in
the "laborers' or ragamuffins' society" special (private) property is no
longer recognized, so in "human society" everything special or private will be
left out of account; and, when "pure criticism" shall have accomplished its
arduous task, then it will be known just what we must look upon as private,
and what, "penetrated with a sense of our nothingness," we must -- let stand.

Because State and Society do not suffice for humane liberalism, it negates
both, and at the same time retains them. So at one time the cry is that the
task of the day is "not a political, but a social, one," and then again the
"free State" is promised for the future. In truth, "human society" is both --
the most general State and the most general society. Only against the limited
State is it asserted that it makes too much stir about spiritual private
interests (*e. g.* people's religious belief), and against limited society
that it makes too much of material private interests. Both are to leave
private interests to private people, and, as human society, concern themselves
solely about general human interests.

The politicians, thinking to abolish *personal will*, self-will or
arbitrariness, did not observe that through *property*(79) our *self-will*(80)
gained a secure place of refuge.

The Socialists, taking away *property* too, do not notice that this secures
itself a continued existence in *self-ownership*. Is it only money and goods,
then, that are a property. or is every opinion something of mine, something of
my own?

So every *opinion* must be abolished or made impersonal. The person is
entitled to no opinion, but, as self-will was transferred to the State,
property to society, so opinion too must be transferred to something
*general*, "Man," and thereby become a general human opinion.

If opinion persists, then I have my God (why, God exists only as "my God," he
is an opinion or my "faith"), and consequently *my* faith, my religion, my
thoughts, my ideals. Therefore a general human faith must come into existence,
the *"fanaticism of liberty."* For this would be a faith that agreed with the
"essence of man," and, because only "man" is reasonable (you and I might be
very unreasonable!), a reasonable faith.

As self-will and property become *powerless*, so must self-ownership or egoism
in general.

In this supreme development of "free man" egoism, self-ownership, is combated
on principle, and such subordinate ends as the social "welfare" of the
Socialists, etc., vanish before the lofty "idea of humanity." Everything that
is not a "general human" entity is something separate, satisfies only some or
one; or, if it satisfies all, it does this to them only as individuals, not as
men, and is therefore called "egoistic."

To the Socialists *welfare* is still the supreme aim, as free *rivalry* was
the approved thing to the political liberals; now welfare is free too, and we
are free to achieve welfare, just as he who wanted to enter into rivalry
(competition) was free to do so.

But to take part in the rivalry you need only to be *commoners*; to take part
in the welfare, only to be *laborers*. Neither reaches the point of being
synonymous with "man." It is "truly well" with man only when he is also
"intellectually free!" For man is mind: therefore all powers that are alien to
him, the mind -- all superhuman, heavenly, unhuman powers -- must be
overthrown and the name "man" must be above every name.

So in this end of the modern age (age of the moderns) there returns again, as
the main point, what had been the main point at its beginning: "intellectual
liberty."

To the Communist in particular the humane liberal says: If society prescribes
to you your activity, then this is indeed free from the influence of the
individual, *i.e.* the egoist, but it still does not on that account need to
be a *purely human* activity, nor you to be a complete organ of humanity. What
kind of activity society demands of you remains *accidental*, you know; it
might give you a place in building a temple or something of that sort, or,
even if not that, you might yet on your own impulse be active for something
foolish, therefore unhuman; yes, more yet, you really labor only to nourish
yourself, in general to live, for dear life's sake, not for the glorification
of humanity. Consequently free activity is not attained till you make yourself
free from all stupidities, from everything non-human, *i.e.*, egoistic
(pertaining only to the individual, not to the Man in the individual),
dissipate all untrue thoughts that obscure man or the idea of humanity: in
short, when you are not merely unhampered in your activity, but the substance
too of your activity is only what is human, and you live and work only for
humanity. But this is not the case so long as the aim of your effort is only
your *welfare* and that of all; what you do for the society of ragamuffins is
not yet anything done for "human society."

Laboring does not alone make you a man, because it is something formal and its
object accidental; the question is who you that labor are. As far as laboring
goes, you might do it from an egoistic (material) impulse, merely to procure
nourishment and the like; it must be a labor furthering humanity, calculated
for the good of humanity, serving historical (*i.e.* human) evolution -- in
short, a *human* labor. This implies two things: one, that it be useful to
humanity; next, that it be the work of a "man." The first alone may be the
case with every labor, as even the labors of nature, *e. g.* of animals, are
utilized by humanity for the furthering of science, etc.; the second requires
that he who labors should know the human object of his labor; and, as he can
have this consciousness only when he *knows himself as man*, the crucial
condition is -- *self-consciousness.*

Unquestionably much is already attained when you cease to be a
"fragment-laborer,"(81) yet therewith you only get a view of the whole of your
labor, and acquire a consciousness about it, which is still far removed from a
self-consciousness, a consciousness about your true "self" or "essence," Man.
The laborer has still remaining the desire for a "higher consciousness,"
which, because the activity of labor is unable to quiet it, he satisfies in a
leisure hour. Hence leisure stands by the side of his labor, and he sees
himself compelled to proclaim labor and idling human in one breath, yes, to
attribute the true elevation to the idler, the leisure-enjoyer. He labors only
to get rid of labor; he wants to make labor free, only that he may be free
from labor.

In fine, his work has no satisfying substance, because it is only imposed by
society, only a stint, a task, a calling; and, conversely, his society does
not satisfy, because it gives only work.

His labor ought to satisfy him as a man; instead of that, it satisfies
society; society ought to treat him as a man, and it treats him as -- a
rag-tag laborer, or a laboring ragamuffin.

Labor and society are of use to him not as he needs them as a man, but only as
he needs them as an "egoist."

Such is the attitude of criticism toward labor. It points to "mind," wages the
war "of mind with the masses,"(82) and pronounces communistic labor
unintellectual mass-labor. Averse to labor as they are, the masses love to
make labor easy for themselves. In literature, which is today furnished in
mass, this aversion to labor begets the universally-known *superficiality*,
which puts from it "the toil of research."(83)

Therefore humane liberalism says: You want labor; all right, we want it
likewise, but we want it in the fullest measure. We want it, not that we may
gain spare time, but that we may find all satisfaction in it itself. We want
labor because it is our self-development.

But then the labor too must be adapted to that end! Man is honored only by
human, self-conscious labor, only by the labor that has for its end no
"egoistic" purpose, but Man, and is Man's self-revelation; so that the saying
should be *laboro, ergo sum*, I labor, therefore I am a man. The humane
liberal wants that labor of the *mind* which *works up* all material; he wants
the mind, that leaves no thing quiet or in its existing condition, that
acquiesces in nothing, analyzes everything, criticises anew every result that
has been gained. This restless mind is the true laborer, it obliterates
prejudices, shatters limits and narrownesses, and raises man above everything
that would like to dominate over him, while the Communist labors only for
himself, and not even freely, but from necessity, -- in short, represents a
man condemned to hard labor.

The laborer of such a type is not "egoistic," because he does not labor for
individuals, neither for himself nor for other individuals, not for *private*
men therefore, but for humanity and its progress: he does not ease individual
pains, does not care for individual wants, but removes limits within which
humanity is pressed, dispels prejudices which dominate an entire time,
vanquishes hindrances that obstruct the path of all, clears away errors in
which men entangle themselves, discovers truths which are found through him
for all and for all time; in short -- he lives and labors for humanity.

Now, in the first place, the discoverer of a great truth doubtless knows that
it can be useful to the rest of men, and, as a jealous withholding furnishes
him no enjoyment, he communicates it; but, even though he has the
consciousness that his communication is highly valuable to the rest, yet he
has in no wise sought and found his truth for the sake of the rest, but for
his own sake, because he himself desired it, because darkness and fancies left
him no rest till he had procured for himself light and enlightenment to the
best of his powers.

He labors, therefore, for his own sake and for the satisfaction of his want.
That along with this he was also useful to others, yes, to posterity, does not
take from his labor the *egoistic* character.

In the next place, if he did labor only on his own account, like the rest, why
should his act be human, those of the rest unhuman, *i. e.*, egoistic? Perhaps
because this book, painting, symphony, etc., is the labor of his whole being,
because he has done his best in it, has spread himself out wholly and is
wholly to be known from it, while the work of a handicraftsman mirrors only
the handicraftsman, *i.e.* the skill in handicraft, not "the man?" In his
poems we have the whole Schiller; in so many hundred stoves, on the other
hand, we have before us only the stove-maker, not "the man."

But does this mean more than "in the one work you see *me* as completely as
possible, in the other only my skill?" Is it not me again that the act
expresses? And is it not more egoistic to offer *oneself* to the world in a
work, to work out and shape *oneself*, than to remain concealed behind one's
labor? You say, to be sure, that you are revealing Man. But the Man that you
reveal is you; you reveal only yourself, yet with this distinction from the
handicraftsman -- that he does not understand how to compress himself into one
labor, but, in order to be known as himself, must be searched out in his other
relations of life, and that your want, through whose satisfaction that work
came into being, was a -- theoretical want.

But you will reply that you reveal quite another man, a worthier, higher,
greater, a man that is more man than that other. I will assume that you
accomplish all that is possible to man, that you bring to pass what no other
succeeds in. Wherein, then, does your greatness consist? Precisely in this,
that you are more than other men (the "masses"), more than *men* ordinarily
are, more than "ordinary men"; precisely in your elevation above men. You are
distinguished beyond other men not by being man, but because you are a
"unique"(84) man. Doubtless you show what a man can do; but because you, a
man, do it, this by no means shows that others, also men, are able to do as
much; you have executed it only as a *unique* man, and are unique therein.

It is not man that makes up your greatness, but you create it, because you are
more than man, and mightier than other -- men.

It is believed that one cannot be more than man. Rather, one cannot be less!

It is believed further that whatever one attains is good for Man. In so far as
I remain at all times a man -- or, like Schiller, a Swabian; like Kant, a
Prussian; like Gustavus Adolfus, a near-sighted person -- I certainly become
by my superior qualities a notable man, Swabian, Prussian, or near-sighted
person. But the case is not much better with that than with Frederick the
Great's cane, which became famous for Frederick's sake.

To "Give God the glory" corresponds the modern "Give Man the glory." But I
mean to keep it for myself.

Criticism, issuing the summons to man to be "human," enunciates the necessary
condition of sociability; for only as a man among men is one *companionable*.
Herewith it makes known its *social* object, the establishment of "human
society."

Among social theories criticism is indisputably the most complete, because it
removes and deprives of value everything that *separates* man from man: all
prerogatives, down to the prerogative of faith. In it the love-principle of
Christianity, the true social principle, comes to the purest fulfillment, and
the last possible experiment is tried to take away exclusiveness and repulsion
from men: a fight against egoism in its simplest and therefore hardest form,
in the form of singleness,(85) exclusiveness, itself.

"How can you live a truly social life so long as even one exclusiveness still
exists between you?"

I ask conversely, How can you be truly single so long as even one connection
still exists between you? If you are connected, you cannot leave each other;
if a "tie" clasps you, you are something only *with another*, and twelve of
you make a dozen, thousands of you a people, millions of you humanity.

"Only when you are human can you keep company with each other as men, just as
you can understand each other as patriots only when you are patriotic!"

All right; then I answer, Only when you are single can you have intercourse
with each other as what you are.

It is precisely the keenest critic who is hit hardest by the curse of his
principle. Putting from him one exclusive thing after another, shaking off
churchliness, patriotism, etc., he undoes one tie after another and separates
himself from the churchly man, from the patriot, till at last, when all ties
are undone, he stands -- alone. He, of all men, must exclude all that have
anything exclusive or private; and, when you get to the bottom, what can be
more exclusive than the exclusive, single person himself!

Or does he perhaps think that the situation would be better if *all* became
"man" and gave up exclusiveness? Why, for the very reason that "all" means
"every individual" the most glaring contradiction is still maintained, for the
"individual" is exclusiveness itself. If the humane liberal no longer concedes
to the individual anything private or exclusive, any private thought, any
private folly; if he criticises everything away from him before his face,
since his hatred of the private is an absolute and fanatical hatred; if he
knows no tolerance toward what is private, because everything private is
*unhuman* -- yet he cannot criticize away the private person himself, since
the hardness of the individual person resists his criticism, and he must be
satisfied with declaring this person a "private person" and really leaving
everything private to him again.

What will the society that no longer cares about anything private do? Make the
private impossible? No, but "subordinate it to the interests of society, and,
*e. g.*, leave it to private will to institute holidays as many as it chooses,
if only it does not come in collision with the general interest."(86)
Everything private is *left free*; *i.e.*, it has no interest for society.

"By their raising barriers against science the church and religiousness have
declared that they are what they always were, only that this was hidden under
another semblance when they were proclaimed to be the basis and necessary
foundation of the State -- a matter of purely private concern. Even when they
were connected with the State and made it Christian, they were only the proof
that the State had not yet developed its general political idea, that it was
only instituting private rights -- they were only the highest expression for
the fact that the State was a private affair and had to do only with private
affairs. When the State shall at last have the courage and strength to fulfil
its general destiny and to be free; when, therefore, it is also able to give
separate interests and private concerns their true position -- then religion
and the church will be free as they have never been hitherto. As a matter of
the most purely private concern, and a satisfaction of purely personal want,
they will be left to themselves; and every individual, every congregation and
ecclesiastical communion, will be able to care for the blessedness of their
souls as they choose and as they think necessary. Every one will care for his
soul's blessedness so far as it is to him a personal want, and will accept and
pay as spiritual caretaker the one who seems to him to offer the best
guarantee for the satisfaction of his want. Science is at last left entirely
out of the game."(87)

What is to happen, though? Is social life to have an end, and all affability,
all fraternization, everything that is created by the love or society
principle, to disappear?

As if one will not always seek the other because he *needs* him; as if one
must accommodate himself to the other when he *needs* him. But the difference
is this, that then the individual really *unites* with the individual, while
formerly they were *bound together* by a tie; son and father are bound
together before majority, after it they can come together independently;
before it they *belonged* together as members of the family, after it they
unite as egoists; sonship and fatherhood remain, but son and father no longer
pin themselves down to these.

The last privilege, in truth, is "Man"; with it all are privileged or
invested. For, as Bruno Bauer himself says, "privilege remains even when it is
extended to all."(88)

Thus liberalism runs its course in the following transformations: "First, the
individual is not man, therefore his individual personality is of no account:
no personal will, no arbitrariness, no orders or mandates!

"Second, the individual *has* nothing human, therefore no mine and thine, or
property, is valid.

"Third, as the individual neither is man nor has anything human, he shall not
exist at all: he shall, as an egoist with his egoistic belongings, be
annihilated by criticism to make room for Man, 'Man, just discovered.'"

But, although the individual is not Man, Man is yet present in the individual,
and, like every spook and everything divine, has its existence in him. Hence
political liberalism awards to the individual everything that pertains to him
as "a man by birth," as a born man, among which there are counted liberty of
conscience, the possession of goods, etc. -- in short, the "rights of man";
Socialism grants to the individual what pertains to him as an *active* man, as
a "laboring" man; finally. humane liberalism gives the individual what he has
as "a man," *i. e.*, everything that belongs to humanity. Accordingly the
single one(89) has nothing at all, humanity everything; and the necessity of
the "regeneration" preached in Christianity is demanded unambiguously and in
the completest measure. Become a new creature, become "man!"

One might even think himself reminded of the close of the Lord's Prayer. To
Man belongs the *lordship* (the "power" or *dynamis*); therefore no individual
may be lord, but Man is the lord of individuals; -- Man's is the *kingdom*,
*i.e.* the world, consequently the individual is not to be proprietor, but
Man, "all," command the world as property -- to Man is due renown,
*glorification* or "glory" (*doxa*) from all, for Man or humanity is the
individual's end, for which he labors, thinks, lives, and for whose
glorification he must become "man."

Hitherto men have always striven to find out a fellowship in which their
inequalities in other respects should become "nonessential"; they strove for
equalization, consequently for *equality*, and wanted to come all under one
hat, which means nothing less than that they were seeking for one lord, one
tie, one faith ("`Tis in one God we all believe"). There cannot be for men
anything more fellowly or more equal than Man himself, and in this fellowship
the love-craving has found its contentment: it did not rest till it had
brought on this last equalization, leveled all inequality, laid man on the
breast of man. But under this very fellowship decay and ruin become most
glaring. In a more limited fellowship the Frenchman still stood against the
German, the Christian against the Mohammedan, etc. Now, on the contrary, *man*
stands against *men*, or, as men are not man, man stands against the un-man.

The sentence "God has become man" is now followed by the other, "Man has
become I." This is *the human 1*. But we invert it and say: I was not able to
find myself so long as I sought myself as Man. But, now that it appears that
Man is aspiring to become I and to gain a corporeity in me, I note that, after
all, everything depends on me, and Man is lost without me. But I do not care
to give myself up to be the shrine of this most holy thing, and shall not ask
henceforward whether I am man or un-man in what I set about; let this *spirit*
keep off my neck!

Humane liberalism goes to work radically. If you want to be or have anything
especial even in one point, if you want to retain for yourself even one
prerogative above others, to claim even one right that is not a "general right
of man," you are an egoist.

Very good! I do not want to have or be anything especial above others, I do
not want to claim any prerogative against them, but -- I do not measure myself
by others either, and do not want to have any *right* whatever. I want to be
all and have all that I can be and have. Whether others are and have anything
*similar*, what do I care? The equal, the same, they can neither be nor have.
I cause no *detriment* to them, as I cause no detriment to the rock by being
"ahead of it" in having motion. If they could have it, they would have it.

To cause other men no *detriment* is the point of the demand to possess no
prerogative; to renounce all "being ahead," the strictest theory of
*renunciation*. One is not to count himself as "anything especial," *e. g.* a
Jew or a Christian. Well, I do not count myself as anything especial, but as
unique.(90) Doubtless I have *similarity* with others; yet that holds good
only for comparison or reflection; in fact I am incomparable, unique. My flesh
is not their flesh, my mind is not their mind. If you bring them under the
generalities "flesh, mind," those are your *thoughts*, which have nothing to
do with *my* flesh, *my* mind, and can least of all issue a "call" to mine.

I do not want to recognize or respect in you any thing, neither the proprietor
nor the ragamuffin, nor even the man, but to *use you*. In salt I find that it
makes food palatable to me, therefore I dissolve it; in the fish I recognize
an aliment, therefore I eat it; in you I discover the gift of making my life
agreeable, therefore I choose you as a companion. Or, in salt I study
crystallization, in the fish animality, in you men, etc. But to me you are
only what you are for me -- to wit, my object; and, because *my* object,
therefore my property.

In humane liberalism ragamuffinhood is completed. We must first come down to
the most ragamuffin-like, most poverty-stricken condition if we want to arrive
at *ownness*, for we must strip off everything alien. But nothing seems more
ragamuffin-like than naked -- Man.

It is more than ragamuffinhood, however, when I throw away Man too because I
feel that he too is alien to me and that T can make no pretensions on that
basis. This is no longer mere ragamuffinhood: because even the last rag has
fallen off, here stands real nakedness, denudation of everything alien. The
ragamuffin has stripped off ragamuffinhood itself, and therewith has ceased to
be what he was, a ragamuffin.

I am no longer a ragamuffin, but have been one.

- --------

Up to this time the discord could not come to an outbreak, because properly
there is current only a contention of modern liberals with antiquated
liberals, a contention of those who understand "freedom" in a small measure
and those who want the "full measure" of freedom; of the *moderate* and
*measureless*, therefore. Everything turns on the question, *how free* must
*man* be? That man must be free, in this all believe; therefore all are
liberal too. But the un-man(91) who is somewhere in every individual, how is
he blocked? How can it be arranged not to leave the un-man free at the same
time with man?

Liberalism as a whole has a deadly enemy, an invincible opposite, as God has
the devil: by the side of man stands always the un-man, the individual, the
egoist. State, society, humanity, do not master this devil.

Humane liberalism has undertaken the task of showing the other liberals that
they still do not want "freedom."

If the other liberals had before their eyes only isolated egoism and were for
the most part blind, radical liberalism has against it egoism "in mass,"
throws among the masses all who do not make the cause of freedom their own as
it does, so that now man and un-man rigorously separated, stand over against
each other as enemies, to wit, the "masses" and "criticism";(92) namely,
"free, human criticism," as it is called *(Judenfrage*, p. 114), in opposition
to crude, that is, religious criticism.

Criticism expresses the hope that it will be victorious over all the masses
and "give them a general certificate of insolvency."(93) So it means finally
to make itself out in the right, and to represent all contention of the
"faint-hearted and timorous" as an egoistic *stubbornness*,(94) as pettiness,
paltriness. All wrangling loses significance, and petty dissensions are given
up, because in criticism a common enemy enters the field. "You are egoists
altogether, one no better than another!" Now the egoists stand together
against criticism. Really the egoists? No, they fight against criticism
precisely because it accuses them of egoism; they do not plead guilty of
egoism. Accordingly criticism and the masses stand on the same basis: both
fight against egoism, both repudiate it for themselves and charge it to each
other.

Criticism and the masses pursue the same goal, freedom from egoism, and
wrangle only over which of them approaches nearest to the goal or even attains
it.

The Jews, the Christians, the absolutists, the men of darkness and men of
light, politicians, Communists -- all, in short -- hold the reproach of egoism
far from them; and, as criticism brings against them this reproach in plain
terms and in the most extended sense, all *justify* themselves against the
accusation of egoism, and combat -- egoism, the same enemy with whom criticism
wages war.

Both, criticism and masses, are enemies of egoists, and both seek to liberate
themselves from egoism, as well by clearing or whitewashing *themselves* as by
ascribing it to the opposite party.

The critic is the true "spokesman of the masses" who gives them the "simple
concept and the phrase" of egoism, while the spokesmen to whom the triumph is
denied were only bunglers. He is their prince and general in the war against
egoism for freedom; what he fights against they fight against. But at the same
time he is their enemy too, only not the enemy before them, but the friendly
enemy who wields the knout behind the timorous to force courage into them.

Hereby the opposition of criticism and the masses is reduced to the following
contradiction: "You are egoists!" "No, we are not!" "I will prove it to you!"
"You shall have our justification!"

Let us then take both for what they give themselves out for, non-egoists, and
what they take each other for, egoists. They are egoists and are not.

Properly criticism says: You must liberate your ego from all limitedness so
entirely that it becomes a *human* ego. I say: Liberate yourself as far as you
can, and you have done your part; for it is not given to every one to break
through all limits, or, more expressively: not to every one is that a limit
which is a limit for the rest. Consequently, do not tire yourself with toiling
at the limits of others; enough if you tear down yours. Who has ever succeeded
in tearing down even one limit *for all men?* Are not countless persons today,
as at all times, running about with all the "limitations of humanity?" He who
overturns one of *his* limits may have shown others the way and the means; the
overturning of *their* limits remains their affair. Nobody does anything else
either. To demand of people that they become wholly men is to call on them to
cast down all human limits. That is impossible, because *Man* has no limits. I
have some indeed, but then it is only *mine* that concern me any, and only
they can be overcome by me. A human ego I cannot become, just because I am I
and not merely man.

Yet let us still see whether criticism has not taught us something that we can
lay to heart! I am not free if I am not without interests, not man if I am not
disinterested? Well, even if it makes little difference to me to be free or
man, yet I do not want to leave unused any occasion to realize *myself* or
make myself count. Criticism offers me this occasion by the teaching that, if
anything plants itself firmly in me, and becomes indissoluble, I become its
prisoner and servant, *i.e.* a possessed man. An interest, be it for what it
may, has kidnapped a slave in me if I cannot get away from it, and is no
longer my property, but I am its. Let us therefore accept criticism's lesson
to let no part of our property become stable, and to feel comfortable only in
- -- *dissolving* it.

So, if criticism says: You are man only when you are restlessly criticizing
and dissolving! then we say: Man I am without that, and I am I likewise;
therefore I want only to be careful to secure my property to myself; and, in
order to secure it, I continually take it back into myself, annihilate in it
every movement toward independence, and swallow it before it can fix itself
and become a "fixed idea" or a "mania."

But I do that not for the sake of my "human calling," but because I call
myself to it. I do not strut about dissolving everything that it is possible
for a man to dissolve, and, *e. g.*, while not yet ten years old I do not
criticize the nonsense of the Commandments, but I am man all the same, and act
humanly in just this -- that I still leave them uncriticized. In short, I have
no calling, and follow none, not even that to be a man.

Do I now reject what liberalism has won in its various exertions? Far be the
day that anything won should be lost! Only, after "Man" has become free
through liberalism, I turn my gaze back upon myself and confess to myself
openly: What Man seems to have gained, *I* alone have gained.

Man is free when "Man is to man the supreme being." So it belongs to the
completion of liberalism that every other supreme being be annulled, theology
overturned by anthropology, God and his grace laughed down, "atheism"
universal.

The egoism of property has given up the last that it had to give when even the
"My God" has become senseless; for God exists only when he has at heart the
individual's welfare, as the latter seeks his welfare in him.

Political liberalism abolished the inequality of masters and servants: it made
people masterless, anarchic. The master was now removed from the individual,
the "egoist," to become a ghost -- the law or the State. Social liberalism
abolishes the inequality of possession, of the poor and rich, and makes people
*possessionless* or propertyless. Property is withdrawn from the individual
and surrendered to ghostly society. Humane liberalism makes people *godless*,
atheistic. Therefore the individual's God, "My God," must be put an end to.
Now masterlessness is indeed at the same time freedom from service,
possessionlessness at the same time freedom from care, and godlessness at the
same time freedom from prejudice: for with the master the servant falls away;
with possession, the care about it; with the firmly-rooted God, prejudice.
But, since the master rises again as State, the servants appears again as
subject; since possession becomes the property of society, care is begotten
anew as labor; and, since God as Man becomes a prejudice, there arises a new
faith, faith in humanity or liberty. For the individual's God the God of all,
*viz*., "Man," is now exalted; "for it is the highest thing in us all to be
man." But, as nobody can become entirely what the idea "man" imports, Man
remains to the individual a lofty other world, an unattained supreme being, a
God. But at the same time this is the "true God," because he is fully adequate
to us -- to wit, our own *"self"*; we ourselves, but separated from us and
lifted above us.

- --------

Postscript

The foregoing review of "free human criticism" was written by bits immediately
after the appearance of the books in question, as was also that which
elsewhere refers to writings of this tendency, and I did little more than
bring together the fragments. But criticism is restlessly pressing forward,
and thereby makes it necessary for me to come back to it once more, now that
my book is finished, and insert this concluding note.

I have before me the latest (eighth) number of the *Allgemeine
Literatur-Zeitung* of Bruno Bauer.

There again "the general interests of society" stand at the top. But criticism
has reflected, and given this "society" a specification by which it is
discriminated from a form which previously had still been confused with it:
the "State," in former passages still celebrated as "free State," is quite
given up because it can in no wise fulfil the task of "human society."
Criticism only "saw itself compelled to identify for a moment human and
political affairs" in 1842; but now it has found that the State, even as "free
State," is not human society, or, as it could likewise say, that the people is
not "man." We saw how it got through with theology and showed clearly that God
sinks into dust before Man; we see it now come to a clearance with politics in
the same way, and show that before Man peoples and nationalities fall: so we
see how it has its explanation with Church and State, declaring them both
unhuman, and we shall see -- for it betrays this to us already -- how it can
also give proof that before Man the "masses," which it even calls a "spiritual
being," appear worthless. And how should the lesser "spiritual beings" be able
to maintain themselves before the supreme spirit? "Man" casts down the false
idols.

So what the critic has in view for the present is the scrutiny of the
"masses," which he will place before "Man" in order to combat them from the
standpoint of Man. "What is now the object of criticism?" "The masses, a
spiritual being!" These the critic will "learn to know," and will find that
they are in contradiction with Man; he will demonstrate that they are unhuman,
and will succeed just as well in this demonstration as in the former ones,
that the divine and the national, or the concerns of Church and of State, were
the unhuman.

The masses are defined as "the most significant product of the Revolution, as
the deceived multitude which the illusions of political Illumination, and in
general the entire Illumination movement of the eighteenth century, have given
over to boundless disgruntlement." The Revolution satisfied some by its
result, and left others unsatisfied; the satisfied part is the commonalty
(*bourgeoisie*, etc.), the unsatisfied is the -- masses. Does not the critic,
so placed, himself belong to the "masses"?

But the unsatisfied are still in great mistiness, and their discontent utters
itself only in a "boundless disgruntlement." This the likewise unsatisfied
critic now wants to master: he cannot want and attain more than to bring that
"spiritual being," the masses, out of its disgruntlement, and to "uplift"
those who were only disgruntled, *i.e.* to give them the right attitude toward
those results of the Revolution which are to be overcome; -- he can become the
head of the masses, their decided spokesman. Therefore he wants also to
"abolish the deep chasm which parts him from the multitude." From those who
want to "uplift the lower classes of the people" he is distinguished by
wanting to deliver from "disgruntlement," not merely these, but himself too.

But assuredly his consciousness does not deceive him either, when he takes the
masses to be the "natural opponents of theory," and foresees that, "the more
this theory shall develop itself, so much the more will it make the masses
compact." For the critic cannot enlighten or satisfy the masses with his
*presupposition*, Man. If over against the commonalty they are only the "lower
classes of the people," politically insignificant masses, over against "Man"
they must still more be mere "masses," humanly insignificant -- yes, unhuman
- -- masses, or a multitude of un-men.

The critic clears away everything human; and, starting from the presupposition
that the human is the true, he works against himself, denying it wherever it
had been hitherto found. He proves only that the human is to be found nowhere
except in his head, but the unhuman everywhere. The unhuman is the real, the
extant on all hands, and by the proof that it is "not human" the critic only
enunciates plainly the tautological sentence that it is the unhuman.

But what if the unhuman, turning its back on itself with resolute heart,
should at the same time turn away from the disturbing critic and leave him
standing, untouched and unstung by his remonstrance? "You call me the
unhuman," it might say to him, "and so I really am -- for you; but I am so
only because you bring me into opposition to the human, and I could despise
myself only so long as I let myself be hypnotized into this opposition. I was
contemptible because I sought my 'better self' outside me; I was the unhuman
because I dreamed of the 'human'; I resembled the pious who hunger for their
'true self' and always remain 'poor sinners'; I thought of myself only in
comparison to another; enough, I was not all in all, was not -- *unique*.(95)
But now I cease to appear to myself as the unhuman, cease to measure myself
and let myself be measured by man, cease to recognize anything above me:
consequently -- adieu, humane critic! I only have been the unhuman, am it now
no longer, but am the unique, yes, to your loathing, the egoistic; yet not the
egoistic as it lets itself be measured by the human, humane, and unselfish,
but the egoistic as the -- unique."

We have to pay attention to still another sentence of the same number.
"Criticism sets up no dogmas, and wants to learn to know nothing but *things*.
"

The critic is afraid of becoming "dogmatic" or setting up dogmas. Of course:
why, thereby he would become the opposite of the critic -- the dogmatist; he
would now become bad, as he is good as critic, or would become from an
unselfish man an egoist, etc. "Of all things, no dogma!" This is his -- dogma.
For the critic remains on one and the same ground with the dogmatist -- that
of *thoughts*. Like the latter he always starts from a thought, but varies in
this, that he never ceases to keep the principle-thought in the *process of
thinking*, and so does not let it become stable. He only asserts the
thought-process against the thought-faith, the progress of thinking against
stationariness in it. From criticism no thought is safe, since criticism is
thought or the thinking mind itself.

Therefore I repeat that the religious world -- and this is the world of
thought -- reaches its completion in criticism, where thinking extends its
encroachments over every thought, no one of which may "egoistically" establish
itself. Where would the "purity of criticism," the purity of thinking, be left
if even one thought escaped the process of thinking? This explains the fact
that the critic has even begun already to gibe gently here and there at the
thought of Man, of humanity and humaneness, because he suspects that here a
thought is approaching dogmatic fixity. But yet he cannot decompose this
thought till he has found a -- "higher" in which it dissolves; for he moves
only -- in thoughts. This higher thought might be enunciated as that of the
movement or process of thinking itself, *i.e.* as the thought of thinking or
of criticism, for example.

Freedom of thinking has in fact become complete hereby, freedom of mind
celebrates its triumph: for the individual, "egoistic" thoughts have lost
their dogmatic truculence. There is nothing left but the -- dogma of free
thinking or of criticism.

Against everything that belongs to the world of thought, criticism is in the
right, *i. e.*, in might: it is the victor. Criticism, and criticism alone, is
"up to date." From the standpoint of thought there is no power capable of
being an overmatch for criticism's, and it is a pleasure to see how easily and
sportively this dragon swallows all other serpents of thought. Each serpent
twists, to be sure, but criticism crushes it in all its "turns."

I am no opponent of criticism, *i.e.* I am no dogmatist, and do not feel
myself touched by the critic's tooth with which he tears the dogmatist to
pieces. If I were a "dogmatist," I should place at the head a dogma, *i.e.* a
thought, an idea, a principle, and should complete this as a "systematist,"
spinning it out to a system, a structure of thought. Conversely, if I were a
critic, *viz*., an opponent of the dogmatist, I should carry on the fight of
free thinking against the enthralling thought, I should defend thinking
against what was thought. But I am neither the champion of a thought nor the
champion of thinking; for "I," from whom I start, am not a thought, nor do I
consist in thinking. Against me, the unnameable, the realm of thoughts,
thinking, and mind is shattered.

Criticism is the possessed man's fight against possession as such, against all
possession: a fight which is founded in the consciousness that everywhere
possession, or, as the critic calls it, a religious and theological attitude,
is extant. He knows that people stand in a religious or believing attitude not
only toward God, but toward other ideas as well, like right, the State, law;
*i.e.* he recognizes possession in all places. So he wants to break up
thoughts by thinking; but I say, only thoughtlessness really saves me from
thoughts. It is not thinking, but my thoughtlessness, or I the unthinkable,
incomprehensible, that frees me from possession.

A jerk does me the service of the most anxious thinking, a stretching of the
limbs shakes off the torment of thoughts, a leap upward hurls from my breast
the nightmare of the religious world, a jubilant Hoopla throws off year-long
burdens. But the monstrous significance of unthinking jubilation could not be
recognized in the long night of thinking and believing.

"What clumsiness and frivolity, to want to solve the most difficult problems,
acquit yourself of the most comprehensive tasks, by *a breaking off*!"

But have you tasks if you do not set them to yourself? So long as you set
them, you will not give them up, and I certainly do not care if you think,
and, thinking, create a thousand thoughts. But you who have set the tasks, are
you not to be able to upset them again? Must you be bound to these tasks, and
must they become absolute tasks?

To cite only one thing, the government has been disparaged on account of its
resorting to forcible means against thoughts, interfering against the press by
means of the police power of the censorship, and making a personal fight out
of a literary one. As if it were solely a matter of thoughts, and as if one's
attitude toward thoughts must be unselfish, self-denying, and
self-sacrificing! Do not those thoughts attack the governing parties
themselves, and so call out egoism? And do the thinkers not set before the
attacked ones the *religious* demand to reverence the power of thought, of
ideas? They are to succumb voluntarily and resignedly, because the divine
power of thought, Minerva, fights on their enemies' side. Why, that would be
an act of possession, a religious sacrifice. To be sure, the governing parties
are themselves held fast in a religious bias, and follow the leading power of
an idea or a faith; but they are at the same time unconfessed egoists, and
right here, against the enemy, their pent-up egoism breaks loose: possessed in
their faith, they are at the same time unpossessed by their opponents' faith,
*i.e.* they are egoists toward this. If one wants to make them a reproach, it
could only be the converse -- to wit, that they are possessed by their ideas.

Against thoughts no egoistic power is to appear, no police power etc. So the
believers in thinking believe. But thinking and its thoughts are not sacred to
me, and I defend my *skin* against them as against other things. That may be
an unreasonable defense; but, if I am in duty bound to reason, then I, like
Abraham, must sacrifice my dearest to it!

In the kingdom of thought, which, like that of faith, is the kingdom of
heaven, every one is assuredly wrong who uses unthinking force, just as every
one is wrong who in the kingdom of love behaves unlovingly, or, although he is
a Christian and therefore lives in the kingdom of love, yet acts
un-Christianly; in these kingdoms, to which he supposes himself to belong
though he nevertheless throws off their laws, he is a "sinner" or "egoist."
But it is only when he becomes a criminal against these kingdoms that he can
throw off their dominion.

Here too the result is this, that the fight of the thinkers against the
government is indeed in the right, namely, in might -- so far as it is carried
on against the government's thoughts (the government is dumb, and does not
succeed in making any literary rejoinder to speak of), but is, on the other
hand, in the wrong, to wit, in impotence, so far as it does not succeed in
bringing into the field anything but thoughts against a personal power (the
egoistic power stops the mouths of the thinkers). The theoretical fight cannot
complete the victory, and the sacred power of thought succumbs to the might of
egoism. Only the egoistic fight, the fight of egoists on both sides, clears up
everything.

This last now, to make thinking an affair of egoistic option, an affair of the
single person,(96) a mere pastime or hobby as it were, and, to take from it
the importance of "being the last decisive power"; this degradation and
desecration of thinking; this equalization of the unthinking and thoughtful
ego; this clumsy but real "equality" -- criticism is not able to produce,
because it itself is only the priest of thinking, and sees nothing beyond
thinking but -- the deluge.

Criticism does indeed affirm, *e. g.* that free criticism may overcome the
State, but at the same time it defends itself against the reproach which is
laid upon it by the State government, that it is "self-will and impudence"; it
thinks, then, that "self-will and impudence" may not overcome, it alone may.
The truth is rather the reverse: the State can be really overcome only by
impudent self-will.

It may now, to conclude with this, be clear that in the critic's new change of
front he has not transformed himself, but only "made good an oversight,"
"disentangled a subject," and is saying too much when he speaks of "criticism
criticizing itself"; it, or rather he, has only criticized its "oversight" and
cleared it of its "inconsistencies." If he wanted to criticize criticism, he
would have to look and see if there was anything in its presupposition.

I on my part start from a presupposition in presupposing *myself*; but my
presupposition does not struggle for its perfection like "Man struggling for
his perfection," but only serves me to enjoy it and consume it. I consume my
presupposition, and nothing else, and exist only in consuming it. But that
presupposition is therefore not a presupposition at all: for, as I am the
Unique, I know nothing of the duality of a presupposing and a presupposed ego
(an "incomplete" and a "complete" ego or man); but this, that I consume
myself, means only that I am. I do not presuppose myself, because I am every
moment just positing or creating myself, and am I only by being not
presupposed but posited, and, again, posited only in the moment when I posit
myself; *i. e.*, I am creator and creature in one.

If the presuppositions that have hitherto been current are to melt away in a
full dissolution, they must not be dissolved into a higher presupposition
again -- *i.e.* a thought, or thinking itself, criticism. For that dissolution
is to be for *my* good; otherwise it would belong only in the series of the
innumerable dissolutions which, in favor of others (*e. g.* this very Man,
God, the State, pure morality, etc.), declared old truths to be untruths and
did away with long-fostered presuppositions.




Footnotes:

(1) Heb. 11. 13.

(2) Mark 10. 29.

(3) Italicized in the original for the sake of its etymology, *Scharfsinn* --
"sharp-sense". Compare next paragraph.

(4) 2 Cor. 5. 17. [The words "new" and "modern" are the same in German.]

(5) [Title of a poem by Schiller]

(6) [The reader will remember (it is to be hoped has never forgotten) that
"mind" and "spirit" are one and the same word in German. For several pages
back the connection of the discourse has seemed to require the almost
exclusive use of the translation "spirit," but to complete the sense it has
often been necessary that the reader recall the thought of its identity with
"mind," as stated in a previous note.]

(7) "Essence of Christianity"

(8) [Or, "highest essence." The word *Wesen*, which means both "essence" and
"being," will be translated now one way and now the other in the following
pages. The reader must bear in mind that these two words are identical in
German; and so are "supreme" and "highest."]

(9) Cf. *e. g.* "Essence of Christianity", p. 402.

(10) [That is, the abstract conception of man, as in the preceding sentence.]

(11) *E.g.*Rom. 8. 9, 1 Cor. 3. 16, John 20. 22 and innumerable other
passages.

(12) [Heil]

(13) [heiling]

(14) [How the priests tinkle! how important they
Would make it out, that men should come their way
And babble, just as yesterday, today!

Oh, blame them not! They know man's need, I say!
For he takes all his happiness this way,
To babble just tomorrow as today.

Translated from Goethe's "Venetian Epigrams."]

(15) [*fremd*]

(16) [*fremd*]

(17) [*einzig*]

(18) [*"the supreme being*."]

(19) [*heilig*]

(20) [*heilig*]

(21) [*einzig*]

(22) [*gefangen und befangen*, literally "imprisoned and prepossessed."]

(23) [*besessene*]

(24) [*versessen*]

(25) *"Achtzehntes Jahrhundert*", II, 519.

(26) *"De la Création de l'Ordre*" etc., p. 36.

(27) *"Anekdota*, II, 64.

(28) [*dieselbe Phantastin wie die Phantasie.*]

(29) [The same word as "intellectual", as "mind" and "spirit" are the same.]

(30) "Essence of Christianity," second edition, p. 402.

(31) P. 403.

(32) P. 408.

(33) [Literally "the man."]

(34) [*uneigennützigkeit*, literally "un-self-benefitingness."]

(35) [*vernünftig*, derived from *vernehmen*, to hear.]

(36) [A German idiom for destructive radicalism.]

(37) [The same word that has been translated "custom" several times in this
section.]

(38) [*Ehrfurcht*]

(39) [*gefürchtet*]

(40) [*geehrt*]

(41) [Rousseau, the Philanthropists; and others were hostile to culture and
intelligence, but they overlooked the fact that this is present in *all*men of
the Christian type, and assailed only learned and refined culture.]

(42) [*Literally, "sacrificing"; the German word has not the prefix "self."*]

(43) *"Die Volksphilosophie unserer Tage*", p. 22.

(44) [*Muth*]

(45) [*Demuth*]

(46) [Called in English theology "original sin."]

(47) [Goethe, "Faust".]

(48) *"Anekdota*, II, 152.

(49) [Schiller, *"Die Worte des Glaubens*".]

(50) [Parodied from the words of Mephistopheles in the witch's kitchen in
"Faust".]

(51) Matt. 10. 35.

(52) John 2. 4.

(53) [*heilig*]

(54) [*heilig*]

(55) [*Geistlicher*, literally "spiritual man."]

(56) "Essence of Christianity, p. 403.

(57) Mark. 9. 23.

(58) [*Herrlichkeit*, which, according to its derivation, means "lordliness."]

(59) [Or "citizenhood." The word [*das Buergertum*] means either the condition
of being a citizen, or citizen-like principles, of the body of citizens or of
the middle or business class, the *bourgeoisie*.]

(60) [*Man hatte im Staate "die ungleiche Person angesehen,"* there had been
"respect of unequal persons" in the State.]

(61) [*Gewalt*, a word which is also commonly used like the English
"violence," denoting especially unlawful violence.]

(62) [*Vorrechte*]

(63) [*Rechte*]

(64) 1 Corinthians 8. 4.

(65) *"Ein und zwanzig Bogen*", p. 12

(66) Louis Blanc says (*"Histoire des dix Ans*", I, p. 138) of the time of the
Restoration: *"Le protestantisme devint le fond des idées et des moeurs*."

(67) [*Sache*, which commonly means *thing*].

(68) [*Sache*]

(69) [Or "righteous." German *rechtlich*].

(70) [*gerecht*]

(71) [*das Geld gibt Geltung*.]

(72) [*ausgebeutet*]

(73) [*Kriegsbeute*]

(74) [In German an exact quotation of Luke 10. 7.]

(75) Proudhon (*Création de l'Ordre*) cries out, p. 414, "In industry, as in
science, the publication of an invention is the first and *most sacred of
duties*!"

(76) [In his strictures on "criticism" Stirner refers to a special movement
known by that name in the early forties of the last century, of which Bruno
Bauer was the principal exponent. After his official separation from the
faculty of the university of Bonn on account of his views in regard to the
Bible, Bruno Bauer in 1843 settled near Berlin and founded the *Allgemeine
Literatur-Zeitung*, in which he and his friends, at war with their
surroundings, championed the "absolute emancipation" of the individual within
the limits of "pure humanity" and fought as their foe "the mass,"
comprehending in that term the radical aspirations of political liberalism and
the communistic demands of the rising Socialist movement of that time. For a
brief account of Bruno Bauer's movement of criticism, see John Henry Mackay,
*Max Stirner. Sein Leben und sein Werk*.]

(77) Br. Bauer, *"Lit. Ztg*." V, 18

(78) *"Lit. Ztg*." V, 26

(79) [*Eigentum*, "owndom"]

(80) [*Eigenwille* "own-will"]

(81) [Referring to minute subdivision of labor, whereby the single workman
produces, not a whole, but a part.]

(82) *"Lit. Ztg*." V, 34.

(83) *"Lit. Ztg* *ibid*.

(84) [*"einziger"*]

(85) [*"Einzigkeit"*]

(86) Br. Bauer, *"Judenfrage*," p. 66

(87) Br. Bauer, *"Die gute Sache der Freiheit*," pp. 62-63.

(88) Br. Bauer, *"Judenfrage*," p. 60.

(89) [*"Einzige"*]

(90) [*"einzig"*]

(91) [It should be remembered that to be an *Unmensch*["un-man"] one must be a
man. The word means an inhuman or unhuman man, a man who is not man. A tiger,
an avalanche, a drought, a cabbage, is not an un-man.]

(92) *"Lit. Ztg*., V, 23; as comment, V, 12ff.

(93) *"Lit. Ztg*, V 15.

(94) [*Rechthaberei*, literally the character of always insisting on making
one's self out to be in the right.]

(95) [*"einzig"*]

(96) [*"des Einzigen"*]




Part Second

I



- ---- * ----

At the entrance of the modern time stands the "God-man." At its exit will only
the God in the God-man evaporate? And can the God-man really die if only the
God in him dies? They did not think of this question, and thought they were
through when in our days they brought to a victorious end the work of the
Illumination, the vanquishing of God: they did not notice that Man has killed
God in order to become now -- "sole God on high." The *other world outside us*
is indeed brushed away, and the great undertaking of the Illuminators
completed; but the *other world in us*has become a new heaven and calls us
forth to renewed heaven-storming: God has had to give place, yet not to us,
but to -- Man. How can you believe that the God-man is dead before the Man in
him, besides the God, is dead?



- ---- * ----

I.
OWNNESS(1)

"Does not the spirit thirst for freedom?" -- Alas, not my spirit alone, my
body too thirsts for it hourly! When before the odorous castle-kitchen my nose
tells my palate of the savory dishes that are being prepared therein, it feels
a fearful pining at its dry bread; when my eyes tell the hardened back about
soft down on which one may lie more delightfully than on its compressed straw,
a suppressed rage seizes it; when -- but let us not follow the pains further.
- -- And you call that a longing for freedom? What do you want to become free
from, then? From your hardtack and your straw bed? Then throw them away! --
But that seems not to serve you: you want rather to have the freedom to enjoy
delicious foods and downy beds. Are men to give you this "freedom" -- are they
to permit it to you? You do not hope that from their philanthropy, because you
know they all think like you: each is the nearest to himself! How, therefore,
do you mean to come to the enjoyment of those foods and beds? Evidently not
otherwise than in making them your property!

If you think it over rightly, you do not want the freedom to have all these
fine things, for with this freedom you still do not have them; you want really
to have them, to call them *yours* and possess them as *your property*. Of
what use is a freedom to you, indeed, if it brings in nothing? And, if you
became free from everything, you would no longer have anything; for freedom is
empty of substance. Whoso knows not how to make use of it, for him it has no
value, this useless permission; but how I make use of it depends on my
personality.(2)

I have no objection to freedom, but I wish more than freedom for you: you
should not merely *be rid* of what you do not want; you should not only be a
"freeman," you should be an "owner" too.

Free -- from what? Oh! what is there that cannot be shaken off? The yoke of
serfdom, of sovereignty, of aristocracy and princes, the dominion of the
desires and passions; yes, even the dominion of one's own will, of self-will,
for the completest self-denial is nothing but freedom -- freedom, to wit, from
self-determination, from one's own self. And the craving for freedom as for
something absolute, worthy of every praise, deprived us of ownness: it created
self-denial. However, the freer I become, the more compulsion piles up before
my eyes; and the more impotent I feel myself. The unfree son of the wilderness
does not yet feel anything of all the limits that crowd a civilized man: he
seems to himself freer than this latter. In the measure that I conquer freedom
for myself I create for myself new bounds and new tasks: if I have invented
railroads, I feel myself weak again because I cannot yet sail through the
skies like the bird; and, if I have solved a problem whose obscurity disturbed
my mind, at once there await me innumerable others, whose perplexities impede
my progress, dim my free gaze, make the limits of my *freedom* painfully
sensible to me. "Now that you have become free from sin, you have become
servants of righteousness."(3) Republicans in their broad freedom, do they not
become servants of the law? How true Christian hearts at all times longed to
"become free," how they pined to see themselves delivered from the "bonds of
this earth-life"! They looked out toward the land of freedom. ("The Jerusalem
that is above is the freewoman; she is the mother of us all." Gal. 4. 26.)

Being free from anything -- means only being clear or rid. "He is free from
headache" is equal to "he is rid of it." "He is free from this prejudice" is
equal to "he has never conceived it" or "he has got rid of it." In "less" we
complete the freedom recommended by Christianity, in sinless, godless,
moralityless, etc.

 Freedom is the doctrine of Christianity. "Ye, dear brethren, are called to
freedom."(4) "So speak and so do, as those who are to be judged by the law of
freedom."(5)

Must we then, because freedom betrays itself as a Christian ideal, give it up?
No, nothing is to be lost, freedom no more than the rest; but it is to become
our own, and in the form of freedom it cannot.

What a difference between freedom and ownness! One can get *rid* of a great
many things, one yet does not get rid of all; one becomes free from much, not
from everything. Inwardly one may be free in spite of the condition of
slavery, although, too, it is again only from all sorts of things, not from
everything; but from the whip, the domineering temper, of the master, one does
not as slave become *free*. "Freedom lives only in the realm of dreams!"
Ownness, on the contrary, is my whole being and existence, it is I myself. I
am free from what I am *rid* of, owner of what I have in my *power* or what I
*control. My own* I am at all times and under all circumstances, if I know how
to have myself and do not throw myself away on others. To be free is something
that I cannot truly *will*, because I cannot make it, cannot create it: I can
only wish it and -- aspire toward it, for it remains an ideal, a spook. The
fetters of reality cut the sharpest welts in my flesh every moment. But *my
own* I remain. Given up as serf to a master, I think only of myself and my
advantage; his blows strike me indeed, I am not *free* from them; but I endure
them only for *my benefit*, perhaps in order to deceive him and make him
secure by the semblance of patience, or, again, not to draw worse upon myself
by contumacy. But, as I keep my eye on myself and my selfishness, I take by
the forelock the first good opportunity to trample the slaveholder into the
dust. That I then become *free* from him and his whip is only the consequence
of my antecedent egoism. Here one perhaps says I was "free" even in the
condition of slavery -- to wit, "intrinsically" or "inwardly." But
"intrinsically free" is not "really free," and "inwardly" is not "outwardly."
I was own, on the other hand, my own, altogether, inwardly and outwardly.
Under the dominion of a cruel master my body is not "free" from torments and
lashes; but it is *my* bones that moan under the torture, *my* fibres that
quiver under the blows, and *I* moan because *my* body moans. That *I* sigh
and shiver proves that I have not yet lost *myself*, that I am still my own.
My leg is not "free" from the master's stick, but it is my leg and is
inseparable. Let him tear it off me and look and see if he still has my leg!
He retains in his hand nothing but the -- corpse of my leg, which is as little
my leg as a dead dog is still a dog: a dog has a pulsating heart, a so-called
dead dog has none and is therefore no longer a dog.

If one opines that a slave may yet be inwardly free, he says in fact only the
most indisputable and trivial thing. For who is going to assert that any man
is *wholly* without freedom? If I am an eye-servant, can I therefore not be
free from innumerable things, *e. g.* from faith in Zeus, from the desire for
fame, etc.? Why then should not a whipped slave also be able to be inwardly
free from un-Christian sentiments, from hatred of his enemy, etc.? He then has
"Christian freedom," is rid of the un-Christian; but has he absolute freedom,
freedom from everything, *e. g.* from the Christian delusion, or from bodily
pain?

In the meantime, all this seems to be said more against names than against the
thing. But is the name indifferent, and has not a word, a shibboleth, always
inspired and -- fooled men? Yet between freedom and ownness there lies still a
deeper chasm than the mere difference of the words.

All the world desires freedom, all long for its reign to come. Oh,
enchantingly beautiful dream of a blooming "reign of freedom," a "free human
race"! -- who has not dreamed it? So men shall become free, entirely free,
free from all constraint! From all constraint, really from all? Are they never
to put constraint on themselves any more? "Oh yes, that, of course; don't you
see, that is no constraint at all?" Well, then at any rate they -- are to
become free from religious faith, from the strict duties of morality, from the
inexorability of the law, from -- "What a fearful misunderstanding!" Well,
*what* are they to be free from then, and what not?

The lovely dream is dissipated; awakened, one rubs his half-opened eyes and
stares at the prosaic questioner. "What men are to be free from?" -- From
blind credulity, cries one. What's that? exclaims another, all faith is blind
credulity; they must become free from all faith. No, no, for God's sake --
inveighs the first again -- do not cast all faith from you, else the power of
brutality breaks in. We must have the republic -- a third makes himself heard,
- -- and become -- free from all commanding lords. There is no help in that,
says a fourth: we only get a new lord then, a "dominant majority"; let us
rather free ourselves from this dreadful inequality. -- O, hapless equality,
already I hear your plebeian roar again! How I had dreamed so beautifully just
now of a paradise of *freedom*, and what -- impudence and licentiousness now
raises its wild clamor! Thus the first laments, and gets on his feet to grasp
the sword against "unmeasured freedom." Soon we no longer hear anything but
the clashing of the swords of the disagreeing dreamers of freedom.

What the craving for freedom has always come to has been the desire for a
*particular* freedom, *e. g.* freedom of faith; *i.e.* the believing man
wanted to be free and independent; of what? of faith perhaps? no! but of the
inquisitors of faith. So now "political or civil" freedom. The citizen wants
to become free not from citizenhood, but from bureaucracy, the arbitrariness
of princes, etc. Prince Metternich once said he had "found a way that was
adapted to guide men in the path of *genuine* freedom for all the future." The
Count of Provence ran away from France precisely at the time when he was
preparing the "reign of freedom," and said: "My imprisonment had become
intolerable to me; I had only one passion, the desire for *freedom*; I thought
only of it."

The craving for a *particular* freedom always includes the purpose of a new
*dominion*, as it was with the Revolution, which indeed "could give its
defenders the uplifting feeling that they were fighting for freedom," but in
truth only because they were after a particular freedom, therefore a new
*dominion*, the "dominion of the law."

Freedom you all want, you want *freedom*. Why then do you haggle over a more
or less? *Freedom* can only be the whole of freedom; a piece of freedom is not
*freedom*. You despair of the possibility of obtaining the whole of freedom,
freedom from everything -- yes, you consider it insanity even to wish this? --
Well, then leave off chasing after the phantom, and spend your pains on
something better than the -- *unattainable*.

"Ah, but there is nothing better than freedom!"

What have you then when you have freedom, *viz*., -- for I will not speak here
of your piecemeal bits of freedom -- complete freedom? Then you are rid of
everything that embarrasses you, everything, and there is probably nothing
that does not once in your life embarrass you and cause you inconvenience. And
for whose sake, then, did you want to be rid of it? Doubtless *for your* sake,
because it is in *your* way! But, if something were not inconvenient to you;
if, on the contrary, it were quite to your mind (*e. g.* the gently but
*irresistibly commanding* look of your loved one) -- then you would not want
to be rid of it and free from it. Why not? For *your sake* again! So you take
*yourselves* as measure and judge over all. You gladly let freedom go when
unfreedom, the "sweet service of love," suits *you*; and you take up your
freedom again on occasion when it begins to suit *you* better -- *i. e.*,
supposing, which is not the point here, that you are not afraid of such a
Repeal of the Union for other (perhaps religious) reasons.

Why will you not take courage now to really make *yourselves* the central
point and the main thing altogether? Why grasp in the air at freedom, your
dream? Are you your dream? Do not begin by inquiring of your dreams, your
notions, your thoughts, for that is all "hollow theory." Ask yourselves and
ask after yourselves -- that is *practical*, and you know you want very much
to be "practical." But there the one hearkens what his God (of course what he
thinks of at the name God is his God) may be going to say to it, and another
what his moral feelings, his conscience, his feeling of duty, may determine
about it, and a third calculates what folks will think of it -- and, when each
has thus asked his Lord God (folks are a Lord God just as good as, nay, even
more compact than, the other-worldly and imaginary one: *vox populi, vox
dei)*, then he accommodates himself to his Lord's will and listens no more at
all for what *he himself* would like to say and decide.

Therefore turn to yourselves rather than to your gods or idols. Bring out from
yourselves what is in you, bring it to the light, bring yourselves to
revelation.

How one acts only from himself, and asks after nothing further, the Christians
have realized in the notion "God." He acts "as it pleases him." And foolish
man, who could do just so, is to act as it "pleases God" instead. -- If it is
said that even God proceeds according to eternal laws, that too fits me, since
I too cannot get out of my skin, but have my law in my whole nature, *i.e.* in
myself.

But one needs only admonish you of yourselves to bring you to despair at once.
"What am I?" each of you asks himself. An abyss of lawless and unregulated
impulses, desires, wishes, passions, a chaos without light or guiding star!
How am I to obtain a correct answer, if, without regard to God's commandments
or to the duties which morality prescribes, without regard to the voice of
reason, which in the course of history, after bitter experiences, has exalted
the best and most reasonable thing into law, I simply appeal to myself? My
passion would advise me to do the most senseless thing possible. -- Thus each
deems himself the -- devil; for, if, so far as he is unconcerned about
religion, etc., he only deemed himself a beast, he would easily find that the
beast, which does follow only *its* impulse (as it were, its advice), does not
advise and impel itself to do the "most senseless" things, but takes very
correct steps. But the habit of the religious way of thinking has biased our
mind so grievously that we are -- terrified at *ourselves* in our nakedness
and naturalness; it has degraded us so that we deem ourselves depraved by
nature, born devils. Of course it comes into your head at once that your
calling requires you to do the "good," the moral, the right. Now, if you ask
*yourselves* what is to be done, how can the right voice sound forth from you,
the voice which points the way of the good, the right, the true, etc.? What
concord have God and Belial?

But what would you think if one answered you by saying: "That one is to listen
to God, conscience, duties, laws, and so forth, is flim-flam with which people
have stuffed your head and heart and made you crazy"? And if he asked you how
it is that you know so surely that the voice of nature is a seducer? And if he
even demanded of you to turn the thing about and actually to deem the voice of
God and conscience to be the devil's work? There are such graceless men; how
will you settle them? You cannot appeal to your parsons, parents, and good
men, for precisely these are designated by them as your *seducers*, as the
true seducers and corrupters of youth, who busily sow broadcast the tares of
self-contempt and reverence to God, who fill young hearts with mud and young
heads with stupidity.

But now those people go on and ask: For whose sake do you care about God's and
the other commandments? You surely do not suppose that this is done merely out
of complaisance toward God? No, you are doing it -- *for your sake* again. --
Here too, therefore, *you* are the main thing, and each must say to himself,
*I* am everything to myself and I do everything *on my* account. If it ever
became clear to you that God, the commandments, etc., only harm you, that they
reduce and ruin *you*, to a certainty you would throw them from you just as
the Christians once condemned Apollo or Minerva or heathen morality. They did
indeed put in the place of these Christ and afterward Mary, as well as a
Christian morality; but they did this for the sake of *their* souls' welfare
too, therefore out of egoism or ownness.

And it was by this egoism, this ownness, that they got *rid* of the old world
of gods and became *free* from it. Ownness *created* a new *freedom*; for
ownness is the creator of everything, as genius (a definite ownness), which is
always originality, has for a long time already been looked upon as the
creator of new productions that have a place in the history of the world.

If your efforts are ever to make "freedom" the issue, then exhaust freedom's
demands. Who is it that is to become free? You, I, we. Free from what? From
everything that is not you, not I, not we. I, therefore, am the kernel that is
to be delivered from all wrappings and -- freed from all cramping shells. What
is left when I have been freed from everything that is not I? Only I; nothing
but I. But freedom has nothing to offer to this I himself. As to what is now
to happen further after I have become free, freedom is silent -- as our
governments, when the prisoner's time is up, merely let him go, thrusting him
out into abandonment.

Now why, if freedom is striven after for love of the I after all -- why not
choose the I himself as beginning, middle, and end? Am I not worth more than
freedom? Is it not I that make myself free, am not I the first? Even unfree,
even laid in a thousand fetters, I yet am; and I am not, like freedom, extant
only in the future and in hopes, but even as the most abject of slaves I am --
present.

Think that over well, and decide whether you will place on your banner the
dream of "freedom" or the resolution of "egoism," of "ownness." "Freedom"
awakens your *rage* against everything that is not you; "egoism" calls you to
*joy* over yourselves, to self-enjoyment; "freedom" is and remains a *longing*
, a romantic plaint, a Christian hope for unearthliness and futurity;
"ownness" is a reality, which *of itself* removes just so much unfreedom as by
barring your own way hinders you. What does not disturb you, you will not want
to renounce; and, if it begins to disturb you, why, you know that "you must
obey *yourselves* rather than men!"

Freedom teaches only: Get yourselves rid, relieve yourselves, of everything
burdensome; it does not teach you who you yourselves are. Rid, rid! So call,
get rid even of yourselves, "deny yourselves." But ownness calls you back to
yourselves, it says "Come to yourself!" Under the aegis of freedom you get rid
of many kinds of things, but something new pinches you again: "you are rid of
the Evil One; evil is left."(6) As *own* you are *really rid of everything*,
and what clings to you *you have accepted*; it is your choice and your
pleasure. The *own* man is the *free-born*, the man free to begin with; the
free man, on the contrary, is only the *eleutheromaniac*, the dreamer and
enthusiast.

The former is *originally free*, because he recognizes nothing but himself; he
does not need to free himself first, because at the start he rejects
everything outside himself, because he prizes nothing more than himself, rates
nothing higher, because, in short, he starts from himself and "comes to
himself." Constrained by childish respect, he is nevertheless already working
at "freeing" himself from this constraint. Ownness works in the little egoist,
and procures him the desired -- freedom.

Thousands of years of civilization have obscured to you what you are, have
made you believe you are not egoists but are *called* to be idealists ("good
men"). Shake that off! Do not seek for freedom, which does precisely deprive
you of yourselves, in "self-denial"; but seek for *yourselves*, become
egoists, become each of you an *almighty ego*. Or, more clearly: Just
recognize yourselves again, just recognize what you really are, and let go
your hypocritical endeavors, your foolish mania to be something else than you
are. Hypocritical I call them because you have yet remained egoists all these
thousands of years, but sleeping, self-deceiving, crazy egoists, you
*Heautontimorumenoses*, you self- tormentors. Never yet has a religion been
able to dispense with "promises," whether they referred us to the other world
or to this ("long life," etc.); for man is *mercenary* and does nothing
"gratis." But how about that "doing the good for the good's sake" without
prospect of reward? As if here too the pay was not contained in the
satisfaction that it is to afford. Even religion, therefore, is founded on our
egoism and -- exploits it; calculated for our *desires*, it stifles many
others for the sake of one. This then gives the phenomenon of *cheated*
egoism, where I satisfy, not myself, but one of my desires, *e. g.* the
impulse toward blessedness. Religion promises me the -- "supreme good"; to
gain this I no longer regard any other of my desires, and do not slake them.
- -- All your doings are *unconfessed* , secret, covert, and concealed egoism.
But because they are egoism that you are unwilling to confess to yourselves,
that you keep secret from yourselves, hence not manifest and public egoism,
consequently unconscious egoism -- therefore they are *not egoism*, but
thraldom, service, self-renunciation; you are egoists, and you are not, since
you renounce egoism. Where you seem most to be such, you have drawn upon the
word "egoist" -- loathing and contempt.

I secure my freedom with regard to the world in the degree that I make the
world my own, *i.e.* "gain it and take possession of it" for myself, by
whatever might, by that of persuasion, of petition, of categorical demand,
yes, even by hypocrisy, cheating, etc.; for the means that I use for it are
determined by what I am. If I am weak, I have only weak means, like the
aforesaid, which yet are good enough for a considerable part of the world.
Besides, cheating, hypocrisy, lying, look worse than they are. Who has not
cheated the police, the law? Who has not quickly taken on an air of honourable
loyalty before the sheriff's officer who meets him, in order to conceal an
illegality that may have been committed, etc.? He who has not done it has
simply let violence be done to him; he was a *weakling* from -- conscience. I
know that my freedom is diminished even by my not being able to carry out my
will on another object, be this other something without will, like a rock, or
something with will, like a government, an individual; I deny my ownness when
- -- in presence of another -- I give myself up, *i.e.* give way, desist,
submit; therefore by *loyalty, submission*. For it is one thing when I give up
my previous course because it does not lead to the goal, and therefore turn
out of a wrong road; it is another when I yield myself a prisoner. I get
around a rock that stands in my way, till I have powder enough to blast it; I
get around the laws of a people, till I have gathered strength to overthrow
them. Because I cannot grasp the moon, is it therefore to be "sacred" to me,
an Astarte? If I only could grasp you, I surely would, and, if I only find a
means to get up to you, you shall not frighten me! You inapprehensible one,
you shall remain inapprehensible to me only till I have acquired the might for
apprehension and call you my *own*; I do not give myself up before you, but
only bide my time. Even if for the present I put up with my inability to touch
you, I yet remember it against you.

Vigorous men have always done so. When the "loyal" had exalted an unsubdued
power to be their master and had adored it, when they had demanded adoration
from all, then there came some such son of nature who would not loyally
submit, and drove the adored power from its inaccessible Olympus. He cried his
"Stand still" to the rolling sun, and made the earth go round; the loyal had
to make the best of it; he laid his axe to the sacred oaks, and the "loyal"
were astonished that no heavenly fire consumed him; he threw the pope off
Peter's chair, and the "loyal" had no way to hinder it; he is tearing down the
divine-right business, and the "loyal" croak in vain, and at last are silent.

My freedom becomes complete only when it is my -- *might*; but by this I cease
to be a merely free man, and become an own man. Why is the freedom of the
peoples a "hollow word"? Because the peoples have no might! With a breath of
the living ego I blow peoples over, be it the breath of a Nero, a Chinese
emperor, or a poor writer. Why is it that the G.....(7) legislatures pine in
vain for freedom, and are lectured for it by the cabinet ministers? Because
they are not of the "mighty"! Might is a fine thing, and useful for many
purposes; for "one goes further with a handful of might than with a bagful of
right." You long for freedom? You fools! If you took might, freedom would come
of itself. See, he who has might "stands above the law." How does this
prospect taste to you, you "law-abiding" people? But you have no taste!

The cry for "freedom" rings loudly all around. But is it felt and known what a
donated or chartered freedom must mean? It is not recognized in the full
amplitude of the word that all freedom is essentially -- self-liberation --
*i.e.* that I can have only so much freedom as I procure for myself by my
ownness. Of what use is it to sheep that no one abridges their freedom of
speech? They stick to bleating. Give one who is inwardly a Mohammedan, a Jew,
or a Christian, permission to speak what he likes: he will yet utter only
narrow-minded stuff. If, on the contrary, certain others rob you of the
freedom of speaking and hearing, they know quite rightly wherein lies their
temporary advantage, as you would perhaps be able to say and hear something
whereby those "certain" persons would lose their credit.

If they nevertheless give you freedom, they are simply knaves who give more
than they have. For then they give you nothing of their own, but stolen wares:
they give you your own freedom, the freedom that you must take for yourselves;
and they *give* it to you only that you may not take it and call the thieves
and cheats to an account to boot. In their slyness they know well that given
(chartered) freedom is no freedom, since only the freedom one *takes* for
himself, therefore the egoist's freedom, rides with full sails. Donated
freedom strikes its sails as soon as there comes a storm -- or calm; it
requires always a -- gentle and moderate breeze.

Here lies the difference between self-liberation and emancipation
(manumission, setting free). Those who today "stand in the opposition" are
thirsting and screaming to be "set free." The princes are to "declare their
peoples of age," *i. e.*, emancipate them! Behave as if you were of age, and
you are so without any declaration of majority; if you do not behave
accordingly, you are not worthy of it, and would never be of age even by a
declaration of majority. When the Greeks were of age, they drove out their
tyrants, and, when the son is of age, he makes himself independent of his
father. If the Greeks had waited till their tyrants graciously allowed them
their majority, they might have waited long. A sensible father throws out a
son who will not come of age, and keeps the house to himself; it serves the
noodle right.

The man who is set free is nothing but a freed man, a *libertinus*, a dog
dragging a piece of chain with him: he is an unfree man in the garment of
freedom, like the ass in the lion's skin. Emancipated Jews are nothing
bettered in themselves, but only relieved as Jews, although he who relieves
their condition is certainly more than a churchly Christian, as the latter
cannot do this without inconsistency. But, emancipated or not emancipated, Jew
remains Jew; he who is not self-freed is merely an -- emancipated man. The
Protestant State can certainly set free (emancipate) the Catholics; but,
because they do not make themselves free, they remain simply -- Catholics.

Selfishness and unselfishness have already been spoken of. The friends of
freedom are exasperated against selfishness because in their religious
striving after freedom they cannot -- free themselves from that sublime thing,
"self-renunciation." The liberal's anger is directed against egoism, for the
egoist, you know, never takes trouble about a thing for the sake of the thing,
but for his sake: the thing must serve him. It is egoistic to ascribe to no
thing a value of its own, an "absolute" value, but to seek its value in me.
One often hears that pot-boiling study which is so common counted among the
most repulsive traits of egoistic behavior, because it manifests the most
shameful desecration of science; but what is science for but to be consumed?
If one does not know how to use it for anything better than to keep the pot
boiling, then his egoism is a petty one indeed, because this egoist's power is
a limited power; but the egoistic element in it, and the desecration of
science, only a possessed man can blame.

Because Christianity, incapable of letting the individual count as an ego,(8)
thought of him only as a dependent, and was properly nothing but a *social
theory --* a doctrine of living together, and that of man with God as well as
of man with man -- therefore in it everything "own" must fall into most woeful
disrepute: selfishness, self-will, ownness, self-love, etc. The Christian way
of looking at things has on all sides gradually re-stamped honourable words
into dishonorable; why should they not be brought into honor again? So
*Schimpf* (contumely) is in its old sense equivalent to jest, but for
Christian seriousness pastime became a dishonor,(9) for that seriousness
cannot take a joke; *frech* (impudent) formerly meant only bold, brave;
*Frevel* (wanton outrage) was only daring. It is well known how askance the
word "reason" was looked at for a long time.

Our language has settled itself pretty well to the Christian standpoint, and
the general consciousness is still too Christian not to shrink in terror from
everything un-Christian as from something incomplete or evil. Therefore
"selfishness" is in a bad way too.

Selfishness,(10) in the Christian sense, means something like this: I look
only to see whether anything is of use to me as a sensual man. But is
sensuality then the whole of my ownness? Am I in my own senses when I am given
up to sensuality? Do I follow myself, my own determination, when I follow
that? I am my *own* only when I am master of myself, instead of being mastered
either by sensuality or by anything else (God, man, authority, law, State,
Church, etc.); what is of use to me, this self-owned or self-appertaining one,
my selfishness pursues.

Besides, one sees himself every moment compelled to believe in that
constantly-blasphemed selfishness as an all-controlling power. In the session
of February 10, 1844, Welcker argues a motion on the dependence of the judges,
and sets forth in a detailed speech that removable, dismissable, transferable,
and pensionable judges -- in short, such members of a court of justice as can
by mere administrative process be damaged and endangered -- are wholly without
reliability, yes, lose all respect and all confidence among the people. The
whole bench, Welcker cries, is demoralized by this dependence! In blunt words
this means nothing else than that the judges find it more to their advantage
to give judgment as the ministers would have them than to give it as the law
would have them. How is that to be helped? Perhaps by bringing home to the
judges' hearts the ignominiousness of their venality, and then cherishing the
confidence that they will repent and henceforth prize justice more highly than
their selfishness? No, the people does not soar to this romantic confidence,
for it feels that selfishness is mightier than any other motive. Therefore the
same persons who have been judges hitherto may remain so, however thoroughly
one has convinced himself that they behaved as egoists; only they must not any
longer find their selfishness favored by the venality of justice, but must
stand so independent of the government that by a judgment in conformity with
the facts they do not throw into the shade their own cause, their
"well-understood interest," but rather secure a comfortable combination of a
good salary with respect among the citizens.

So Welcker and the commoners of Baden consider themselves secured only when
they can count on selfishness. What is one to think, then, of the countless
phrases of unselfishness with which their mouths overflow at other times?

To a cause which I am pushing selfishly I have another relation than to one
which I am serving unselfishly. The following criterion might be cited for it;
against the one I can *sin* or commit a *sin*, the other I can only *trifle
away*, push from me, deprive myself of -- *i.e.* commit an imprudence. Free
trade is looked at in both ways, being regarded partly as a freedom which may
*under certain circumstances* be granted or withdrawn, partly as one which is
to be held *sacred under all circumstances*.

If I am not concerned about a thing in and for itself, and do not desire it
for its own sake, then I desire it solely as a *means to an end*, for its
usefulness; for the sake of another end, *e. g.*, oysters for a pleasant
flavor. Now will not every thing whose final end he himself is, serve the
egoist as means? And is he to protect a thing that serves him for nothing --
*e. g.*, the proletarian to protect the State?

Ownness includes in itself everything own, and brings to honor again what
Christian language dishonored. But ownness has not any alien standard either,
as it is not in any sense an *idea* like freedom, morality, humanity, etc.: it
is only a description of the -- *owner*.




Footnotes:

(1) [This is a literal translation of the German word *Eigenheit*, which, with
its primitive eigen, "own," is used in this chapter in a way that the German
dictionaries do not quite recognize. The author's conception being new, he had
to make an innovation in the German language to express it. The translator is
under the like necessity. In most passages "self-ownership," or else
"personality," would translate the word, but there are some where the thought
is so *eigen*, *i. e.*, so peculiar or so thoroughly the author's own, that no
English word I can think of would express it. It will explain itself to one
who has read Part First intelligently.]

(2) [*Eigenheit*]

(3) Rom. 6, 18.

(4) 1 Pet. 2. 16.

(5) James 2. 12.

(6) [See note, p. 112]

(7) [Meaning "German". Written in this form because of the censorship.]

(8) [*"Einzige"*]

(9) [I take *Entbehrung*, "destitution," to be a misprint for *Entehrung*.]

(10) [*Eigennutz*, literally "own-use."]




II.
THE OWNER

I -- do I come to myself and mine through liberalism? Whom does the liberal
look upon as his equal? Man! Be only man -- and that you are anyway -- and the
liberal calls you his brother. He asks very little about your private opinions
and private follies, if only he can espy "Man" in you.

But, as he takes little heed of what you are *privatim --* nay, in a strict
following out of his principle sets no value at all on it -- he sees in you
only what you are *generatim*. In other words, he sees in you, not you, but
the *species;* not Tom or Jim, but Man; not the real or unique one,(1)but your
essence or your concept; not the bodily man, but the *spirit*.

As Tom you would not be his equal, because he is Jim, therefore not Tom; as
man you are the same that he is. And, since as Tom you virtually do not exist
at all for him (so far, to wit, as he is a liberal and not unconsciously an
egoist), he has really made "brother-love" very easy for himself: he loves in
you not Tom, of whom he knows nothing and wants to know nothing, but Man.

To see in you and me nothing further than "men," that is running the Christian
way of looking at things, according to which one is for the other nothing but
a *concept* (*e. g.* a man called to salvation, etc.), into the ground.

Christianity properly so called gathers us under a less utterly general
concept: there we are "sons of God" and "led by the Spirit of God."(2) Yet not
all can boast of being God's sons, but "the same Spirit which witnesses to our
spirit that we are sons of God reveals also who are the sons of the devil."(3)
Consequently, to be a son of God one must not be a son of the devil; the
sonship of God excluded certain men. To be *sons of men* -- *i. e.*, men -- on
the contrary, we need nothing but to belong to the human *species*, need only
to be specimens of the same species. What I am as this I is no concern of
yours as a good liberal, but is my *private affair* alone; enough that we are
both sons of one and the same mother, to wit, the human species: as "a son of
man" I am your equal.

What am I now to you? Perhaps this *bodily* I as I walk and stand? Anything
but that. This bodily I, with its thoughts, decisions, and passions, is in
your eyes a "private affair" which is no concern of yours: it is an "affair by
itself." As an "affair for you" there exists only my concept, my generic
concept, only *the Man*, who, as he is called Tom, could just as well be Joe
or Dick. You see in me not me, the bodily man, but an unreal thing, the spook,
*i.e.* a *Man*.

In the course of the Christian centuries we declared the most various persons
to be "our equals," but each time in the measure of that *spirit* which we
expected from them -- *e. g.* each one in whom the spirit of the need of
redemption may be assumed, then later each one who has the spirit of
integrity, finally each one who shows a human spirit and a human face. Thus
the fundamental principle of "equality" varied.

 Equality being now conceived as equality of the *human spirit*, there has
certainly been discovered an equality that includes *all* men; for who could
deny that we men have a human spirit, *i. e.*, no other than a human!

But are we on that account further on now than in the beginning of
Christianity? Then we were to have a *divine spirit*, now a *human;* but, if
the divine did not exhaust us, how should the human wholly express what *we*
are? Feuerbach *e. g.* thinks, that if he humanizes the divine, he has found
the truth. No, if God has given us pain, "Man" is capable of pinching us still
more torturingly. The long and the short of it is this: that we are men is the
slightest thing about us, and has significance only in so far as it is one of
our *qualities*,(4) *i. e.* our property.(5) I am indeed among other things a
man, as I am *e. g.* a living being, therefore an animal, or a European, a
Berliner, etc.; but he who chose to have regard for me only as a man, or as a
Berliner, would pay me a regard that would be very unimportant to me. And
wherefore? Because he would have regard only for one of my *qualities*, not
for *me*.

It is just so with the *spirit too*. A Christian spirit, an upright spirit,
etc. may well be my acquired quality, my property, but I am not this spirit:
it is mine, not I its.

Hence we have in liberalism only the continuation of the old Christian
depreciation of the I, the bodily Tom. Instead of taking me as I am, one looks
solely at my property, my qualities, and enters into marriage bonds with me
only for the sake of my -- possessions; one marries, as it were, what I have,
not what I am. The Christian takes hold of my spirit, the liberal of my
humanity.

But, if the spirit, which is not regarded as the *property* of the bodily ego
but as the proper ego itself, is a ghost, then the Man too, who is not
recognized as my quality but as the proper I, is nothing but a spook, a
thought, a concept.

Therefore the liberal too revolves in the same circle as the Christian.
Because the spirit of mankind, *i.e.* Man, dwells in you, you are a man, as
when the spirit of Christ dwells in you are a Christian; but, because it
dwells in you only as a second ego, even though it be as your proper or
"better" ego, it remains otherworldly to you, and you have to strive to become
wholly man. A striving just as fruitless as the Christian's to become wholly a
blessed spirit!

One can now, after liberalism has proclaimed Man, declare openly that herewith
was only completed the consistent carrying out of Christianity, and that in
truth Christianity set itself no other task from the start than to realize
"man," the "true man." Hence, then, the illusion that Christianity ascribes an
infinite value to the ego (as *e. g.* in the doctrine of immortality, in the
cure of souls, etc.) comes to light. No, it assigns this value to *Man* alone.
Only *Man* is immortal, and only because I am Man am I too immortal. In fact,
Christianity had to teach that no one is lost, just as liberalism too puts all
on an equality as men; but that eternity, like this equality, applied only to
the *Man* in me, not to me. Only as the bearer and harborer of Man do I not
die, as notoriously "the king never dies." Louis dies, but the king remains; I
die, but my spirit, Man, remains. To identify me now entirely with Man the
demand has been invented, and stated, that I must become a "real generic
being."(6)

The _human_ *religion* is only the last metamorphosis of the Christian
religion. For liberalism is a religion because it separates my essence from me
and sets it above me, because it exalts "Man" to the same extent as any other
religion does its God or idol, because it makes what is mine into something
otherworldly, because in general it makes out of what is mine, out of my
qualities and my property, something alien -- to wit, an "essence"; in short,
because it sets me beneath Man, and thereby creates for me a "vocation." But
liberalism declares itself a religion in form too when it demands for this
supreme being, Man, a zeal of faith, "a faith that some day will at last prove
its fiery zeal too, a zeal that will be invincible."(7) But, as liberalism is
a human religion, its professor takes a *tolerant* attitude toward the
professor of any other (Catholic, Jewish, etc.), as Frederick the Great did
toward every one who performed his duties as a subject, whatever fashion of
becoming blest he might be inclined toward. This religion is now to be raised
to the rank of the generally customary one, and separated from the others as
mere "private follies," toward which, besides, one takes a highly *liberal*
attitude on account of their unessentialness.

One may call it the *State-religion*, the religion of the "free State," not in
the sense hitherto current that it is the one favored or privileged by the
State, but as that religion which the "free State" not only has the right, but
is compelled, to demand from each of those who belong to it, let him be
*privatim* a Jew, a Christian, or anything else. For it does the same service
to the State as filial piety to the family. If the family is to be recognized
and maintained, in its existing condition, by each one of those who belong to
it, then to him the tie of blood must be sacred, and his feeling for it must
be that of piety, of respect for the ties of blood, by which every
blood-relation becomes to him a consecrated person. So also to every member of
the State-community this community must be sacred, and the concept which is
the highest to the State must likewise be the highest to him.

But what concept is the highest to the State? Doubtless that of being a really
human society, a society in which every one who is really a man, *i. e.*,*not
an un-man*, can obtain admission as a member. Let a State's tolerance go ever
so far, toward an un-man and toward what is inhuman it ceases. And yet this
"un-man" is a man, yet the "inhuman" itself is something human, yes, possible
only to a man, not to any beast; it is, in fact, something "possible to man."
But, although every un-man is a man, yet the State excludes him; *i.e.* it
locks him up, or transforms him from a fellow of the State into a fellow of
the prison (fellow of the lunatic asylum or hospital, according to Communism).

To say in blunt words what an un-man is not particularly hard: it is a man who
does not correspond to the *concept* man, as the inhuman is something human
which is not conformed to the concept of the human. Logic calls this a
"self-contradictory judgment." Would it be permissible for one to pronounce
this judgment, that one can be a man without being a man, if he did not admit
the hypothesis that the concept of man can be separated from the existence,
the essence from the appearance? They say, he *appears* indeed as a man, but
*is* not a man.

Men have passed this "self-contradictory judgment" through a long line of
centuries! Nay, what is still more, in this long time there were only --
*un-men*. What individual can have corresponded to his concept? Christianity
knows only one Man, and this one -- Christ -- is at once an un-man again in
the reverse sense, to wit, a superhuman man, a "God." Only the -- un-man is a
*real* man.

Men that are not men, what should they be but *ghosts?* Every real man,
because he does not correspond to the concept "man," or because he is not a
"generic man," is a spook. But do I still remain an un-man even if I bring Man
(who towered above me and remained otherworldly to me only as my ideal, my
task, my essence or concept) down to be my *quality*, my own and inherent in
me; so that Man is nothing else than my humanity, my human existence, and
everything that I do is human precisely because *I* do it, but not because it
corresponds to the *concept* "man"? *I* am really Man and the un-man in one;
for I am a man and at the same time more than a man; *i.e.* I am the ego of
this my mere quality.

It had to come to this at last, that it was no longer merely demanded of us to
be Christians, but to become men; for, though we could never really become
even Christians, but always remained "poor sinners" (for the Christian was an
unattainable ideal too), yet in this the contradictoriness did not come before
our consciousness so, and the illusion was easier than now when of us, who are
men act humanly (yes, cannot do otherwise than be such and act so), the demand
is made that we are to be men, "real men."

Our States of today, because they still have all sorts of things sticking to
them, left from their churchly mother, do indeed load those who belong to them
with various obligations (*e. g.* churchly religiousness) which properly do
not a bit concern them, the States; yet on the whole they do not deny their
significance, since they want to be looked upon as *human societies*, in which
man as man can be a member, even if he is less privileged than other members;
most of them admit adherence of every religious sect, and receive people
without distinction of race or nation: Jews, Turks, Moors, etc., can become
French citizens. In the act of reception, therefore, the State looks only to
see whether one is a *man*. The Church, as a society of believers, could not
receive every man into her bosom; the State, as a society of men, can. But,
when the State has carried its principle clear through, of presupposing in its
constituents nothing but that they are men (even the North Americans still
presuppose in theirs that they have religion, at least the religion of
integrity, of responsibility), then it has dug its grave. While it will fancy
that those whom it possesses are without exception men, these have meanwhile
become without exception *egoists*, each of whom utilizes it according to his
egoistic powers and ends. Against the egoists "human society" is wrecked; for
they no longer have to do with each other as *men*, but appear egoistically as
an *I* against a *You* altogether different from me and in opposition to me.

If the State must count on our humanity, it is the same if one says it must
count on our *morality*. Seeing Man in each other, and acting as men toward
each other, is called moral behavior. This is every whit the "spiritual love"
of Christianity. For, if I see Man in you, as in myself I see Man and nothing
but Man, then I care for you as I would care for myself; for we represent, you
see, nothing but the mathematical proposition: A = C and B = C, consequently A
= B -- *i.e.* I nothing but man and you nothing but man, consequently I and
you the same. Morality is incompatible with egoism, because the former does
not allow validity to *me*, but only to the Man in me. But, if the State is a
*society of men*, not a union of egos each of whom has only himself before his
eyes, then it cannot last without morality, and must insist on morality.

Therefore we two, the State and I, are enemies. I, the egoist, have not at
heart the welfare of this "human society," I sacrifice nothing to it, I only
utilize it; but to be able to utilize it completely I transform it rather into
my property and my creature; *i. e.*, I annihilate it, and form in its place
the *Union of Egoists*.

So the State betrays its enmity to me by demanding that I be a man, which
presupposes that I may also not be a man, but rank for it as an "un- man"; it
imposes being a man upon me as a *duty*. Further, it desires me to do nothing
along with which *it* cannot last; so *its permanence* is to be sacred for me.
Then I am not to be an egoist, but a "respectable, upright," *i.e.* moral,
man. Enough: before it and its permanence I am to be impotent and respectful.

This State, not a present one indeed, but still in need of being first
created, is the ideal of advancing liberalism. There is to come into existence
a true "society of men," in which every "man" finds room. Liberalism means to
realize "Man," *i.e.* create a world for him; and this should be the *human*
world or the general (Communistic) society of men. It was said, "The Church
could regard only the spirit, the State is to regard the whole man."(8) But is
not "Man" "spirit"? The kernel of the State is simply "Man," this unreality,
and it itself is only a "society of men." The world which the believer
(believing spirit) creates is called Church, the world which the man (human or
humane spirit) creates is called State. But that is not *my* world. I never
execute anything *human* in the abstract, but always my *own* things; *my*
human act is diverse from every other human act, and only by this diversity is
it a real act belonging to me. The human in it is an abstraction, and, as
such, spirit, *i.e.* abstracted essence.

Bruno Bauer states (*e. g. Judenfrage*, p. 84) that the truth of criticism is
the final truth, and in fact the truth sought for by Christianity itself --to
wit, "Man." He says, "The history of the Christian world is the history of the
supreme fight for truth, for in it -- and in it only! -- the thing at issue is
the discovery of the final or the primal truth -- man and freedom."

All right, let us accept this gain, and let us take *man* as the ultimately
found result of Christian history and of the religious or ideal efforts of man
in general. Now, who is Man? *I* am! *Man*, the end and outcome of
Christianity, is, as *I*, the beginning and raw material of the new history, a
history of enjoyment after the history of sacrifices, a history not of man or
humanity, but of -- *me. Man* ranks as the general. Now then, I and the
egoistic are the really general, since every one is an egoist and of paramount
importance to himself. The Jewish is not the purely egoistic, because the Jew
still devotes *himself* to Jehovah; the Christian is not, because the
Christian lives on the grace of God and subjects *himself* to him. As Jew and
as Christian alike a man satisfies only certain of his wants, only a certain
need, not *himself:* a half-egoism, because the egoism of a half-man, who is
half he, half Jew, or half his own proprietor, half a slave. Therefore, too,
Jew and Christian always half-way exclude each other; *i.e.* as men they
recognize each other, as slaves they exclude each other, because they are
servants of two different masters. If they could be complete egoists, they
would exclude each other *wholly* and hold together so much the more firmly.
Their ignominy is not that they exclude each other, but that this is done only
*half-way*. Bruno Bauer, on the contrary, thinks Jews and Christians cannot
regard and treat each other as "men" till they give up the separate essence
which parts them and obligates them to eternal separation, recognize the
general essence of "Man," and regard this as their "true essence."

According to his representation the defect of the Jews and the Christians
alike lies in their wanting to be and have something "particular" instead of
only being men and endeavoring after what is human -- to wit, the "general
rights of man." He thinks their fundamental error consists in the belief that
they are "privileged," possess "prerogatives"; in general, in the belief in
*prerogative*.(9)In opposition to this he holds up to them the general rights
of man. The rights of man! --

*Man is man in general*, and in so far every one who is a man. Now every one
is to have the eternal rights of man, and, according to the opinion of
Communism, enjoy them in the complete "democracy," or, as it ought more
correctly to be called -- anthropocracy. But it is I alone who have everything
that I -- procure for myself; as man I have nothing. People would like to give
every man an affluence of all good, merely because he has the title "man." But
I put the accent on *me*, not on my being *man*.

Man is something only as *my* quality(10) (property(11)), like masculinity or
femininity. The ancients found the ideal in one's being *male* in the full
sense; their virtue is *virtus* and *arete* -- *i.e.* manliness. What is one
to think of a woman who should want only to be perfectly "woman?" That is not
given to all, and many a one would therein be fixing for herself an
unattainable goal. *Feminine*, on the other hand, she is anyhow, by nature;
femininity is her quality, and she does not need "true femininity." I am a man
just as the earth is a star. As ridiculous as it would be to set the earth the
task of being a "thorough star," so ridiculous it is to burden me with the
call to be a "thorough man."

When Fichte says, "The ego is all," this seems to harmonize perfectly with my
thesis. But it is not that the ego *is* all, but the ego *destroys* all, and
only the self-dissolving ego, the never-being ego, the -- *finite* ego is
really I. Fichte speaks of the "absolute" ego, but I speak of me, the
transitory ego.

How natural is the supposition that *man* and *ego* mean the same! And yet one
sees, *e. g.*, by Feuerbach, that the expression "man" is to designate the
absolute ego, the *species*, not the transitory, individual ego. Egoism and
humanity (humaneness) ought to mean the same, but according to Feuerbach the
individual can "only lift himself above the limits of his individuality, but
not above the laws, the positive ordinances, of his species."(12) But the
species is nothing, and, if the individual lifts himself above the limits of
his individuality, this is rather his very self as an individual; he exists
only in raising himself, he exists only in not remaining what he is; otherwise
he would be done, dead. Man with the great M is only an ideal, the species
only something thought of. To be a man is not to realize the ideal of *Man*,
but to present *oneself*, the individual. It is not how I realize the
*generally human* that needs to be my task, but how I satisfy myself. I am my
species, am without norm, without law, without model, etc. It is possible that
I can make very little out of myself; but this little is everything, and is
better than what I allow to be made out of me by the might of others, by the
training of custom, religion, the laws, the State. Better -- if the talk is to
be of better at all -- better an unmannerly child than an old head on young
shoulders, better a mulish man than a man compliant in everything. The
unmannerly and mulish fellow is still on the way to form himself according to
his own will; the prematurely knowing and compliant one is determined by the
"species," the general demands -- the species is law to him. He is
*determined*(13) by it; for what else is the species to him but his
"destiny,"(14) his "calling"? Whether I look to "humanity," the species, in
order to strive toward this ideal, or to God and Christ with like endeavor,
where is the essential dissimilarity? At most the former is more washed-out
than the latter. As the individual is the whole of nature, so he is the whole
of the species too.

Everything that I do, think -- in short, my expression or manifestation -- is
indeed *conditioned* by what I am. The Jew *e. g.* can will only thus or thus,
can "present himself" only thus; the Christian can present and manifest
himself only Christianly, etc. If it were possible that you could be a Jew or
Christian, you would indeed bring out only what was Jewish or Christian; but
it is not possible; in the most rigorous conduct you yet remain an *egoist*, a
sinner against that concept -- *i.e.*, *you* are not the precise equivalent of
Jew. Now, because the egoistic always keeps peeping through, people have
inquired for a more perfect concept which should really wholly express what
you are, and which, because it is your true nature, should contain all the
laws of your activity. The most perfect thing of the kind has been attained in
"Man." As a Jew you are too little, and the Jewish is not your task; to be a
Greek, a German, does not suffice. But be a -- man, then you have everything;
look upon the human as your calling.

Now I know what is expected of me, and the new catechism can be written. The
subject is again subjected to the predicate, the individual to something
general; the dominion is again secured to an *idea*, and the foundation laid
for a new *religion*. This is a *step forward* in the domain of religion, and
in particular of Christianity; not a step out beyond it.

To step out beyond it leads into the *unspeakable*. For me paltry language has
no word, and "the Word," the Logos, is to me a "mere word."

My *essence* is sought for. If not the Jew, the German, etc., then at any rate
it is -- the man. "Man is my essence."

I am repulsive or repugnant to myself; I have a horror and loathing of myself,
I am a horror to myself, or, I am never enough for myself and never do enough
to satisfy myself. From such feelings springs self-dissolution or
self-criticism. Religiousness begins with self-renunciation, ends with
completed criticism.

I am possessed, and want to get rid of the "evil spirit." How do I set about
it? I fearlessly commit the sin that seems to the Christian the most dire, the
sin and blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. "He who blasphemes the Holy Spirit
has no forgiveness forever, but is liable to the eternal judgment!"(15) I want
no forgiveness, and am not afraid of the judgment.

*Man* is the last evil *spirit* or spook, the most deceptive or most intimate,
the craftiest liar with honest mien, the father of lies.

The egoist, turning against the demands and concepts of the present, executes
pitilessly the most measureless -- *desecration*. Nothing is holy to him!

It would be foolish to assert that there is no power above mine. Only the
attitude that I take toward it will be quite another than that of the
religious age: I shall be the *enemy* of -- every higher power, while religion
teaches us to make it our friend and be humble toward it.

The *desecrator* puts forth his strength against every *fear of God*, for fear
of God would determine him in everything that he left standing as sacred.
Whether it is the God or the Man that exercises the hallowing power in the
God-man -- whether, therefore, anything is held sacred for God's sake or for
Man's (Humanity's) -- this does not change the fear of God, since Man is
revered as "supreme essence," as much as on the specifically religious
standpoint God as "supreme essence" calls for our fear and reverence; both
overawe us.

The fear of God in the proper sense was shaken long ago, and a more or less
conscious "atheism," externally recognizable by a wide-spread
"unchurchliness," has involuntarily become the mode. But what was taken from
God has been superadded to Man, and the power of humanity grew greater in just
the degree that of piety lost weight: "Man" is the God of today, and fear of
Man has taken the place of the old fear of God.

But, because Man represents only another Supreme Being, nothing in fact has
taken place but a metamorphosis in the Supreme Being, and the fear of Man is
merely an altered form of the fear of God.

Our atheists are pious people.

If in the so-called feudal times we held everything as a fief from God, in the
liberal period the same feudal relation exists with Man. God was the Lord, now
Man is the Lord; God was the Mediator, now Man is; God was the Spirit, now Man
is. In this three fold regard the feudal relation has experienced a
transformation. For now, firstly, we hold as a fief from all-powerful Man our
*power*, which, because it comes from a higher, is not called power or might,
but "right" -- the "rights of man"; we further hold as a fief from him our
position in the world, for he, the mediator, mediates our *intercourse* with
others, which therefore may not be otherwise than "human"; finally, we hold as
a fief from him ourselves -- to wit, our own value, or all that we are worth
- -- inasmuch as we are worth nothing when *he* does not dwell in us, and when
or where we are not "human." The power is Man's, the world is Man's, I am
Man's.

But am I not still unrestrained from declaring *myself* the entitler, the
mediator, and the own self? Then it runs thus:

My power is *my* property.

My power *gives* me property.

My power *am* I myself, and through it am I my property.

1. My Power

Right(16) is the *spirit of society*. If society has a *will* this will is
simply right: society exists only through right. But, as it endures only
exercising a *sovereignty* over individuals, right is its SOVEREIGN WILL.
Aristotle says justice is the advantage of *society*.

All existing right is -- *foreign law;* some one makes me out to be in the
right, "does right by me." But should I therefore be in the right if all the
world made me out so? And yet what else is the right that I obtain in the
State, in society, but a right of those *foreign* to me? When a blockhead
makes me out in the right, I grow distrustful of my rightness; I don't like to
receive it from him. But, even when a wise man makes me out in the right, I
nevertheless am not in the right on that account. Whether I am in the right is
completely independent of the fool's making out and of the wise man's.

All the same, we have coveted this right till now. We seek for right, and turn
to the court for that purpose. To what? To a royal, a papal, a popular court,
etc. Can a sultanic court declare another right than that which the sultan has
ordained to be right? Can it make me out in the right if I seek for a right
that does not agree with the sultan's law? Can it, *e. g.*, concede to me high
treason as a right, since it is assuredly not a right according to the
sultan's mind? Can it as a court of censorship allow me the free utterance of
opinion as a right, since the sultan will hear nothing of this *my* right?
What am I seeking for in this court, then? I am seeking for sultanic right,
not my right; I am seeking for -- *foreign* right. As long as this foreign
right harmonizes with mine, to be sure, I shall find in it the latter too.

The State does not permit pitching into each other man to man; it opposes the
*duel*. Even every ordinary appeal to blows, notwithstanding that neither of
the fighters calls the police to it, is punished; except when it is not an I
whacking away at a you, but, say, the *head of a family* at the child. The
*family* is entitled to this, and in its name the father; I as Ego am not. The
*Vossische Zeitung* presents to us the "commonwealth of right." There
everything is to be decided by the judge and a *court*. It ranks the supreme
court of censorship as a "court" where "right is declared." What sort of a
right? The right of the censorship. To recognize the sentences of that court
as right one must regard the censorship as right. But it is thought
nevertheless that this court offers a protection. Yes, protection against an
individual censor's error: it protects only the censorship-legislator against
false interpretation of his will, at the same time making his statute, by the
"sacred power of right," all the firmer against writers.

Whether I am in the right or not there is no judge but myself. Others can
judge only whether they endorse my right, and whether it exists as right for
them too.

In the meantime let us take the matter yet another way. I am to reverence
sultanic law in the sultanate, popular law in republics, canon law in Catholic
communities. To these laws I am to subordinate myself; I am to regard them as
sacred. A "sense of right" and "law-abiding mind" of such a sort is so firmly
planted in people's heads that the most revolutionary persons of our days want
to subject us to a new "sacred law," the "law of society," the law of mankind,
the "right of all," and the like. The right of "all" is to go before *my*
right. As a right of all it would indeed be my right among the rest, since I,
with the rest, am included in all; but that it is at the same time a right of
others, or even of all others, does not move me to its upholding. Not as a
right *of all* will I defend it, but as *my* right; and then every other may
see to it how he shall likewise maintain it for himself. The right of all (*e.
g.,* to eat) is a right of every individual. Let each keep this right
unabridged for *himself*, then all exercise it spontaneously; let him not take
care for all though -- let him not grow zealous for it as for a right of all.

But the social reformers preach to us a *"law of society"*. There the
individual becomes society's slave, and is in the right only when society
*makes him out* in the right, *i.e.* when he lives according to society's
*statutes* and so is -- *loyal*. Whether I am loyal under a despotism or in a
"society" *àla* Weitling, it is the same absence of right in so far as in both
cases I have not *my* right but *foreign* right.

In consideration of right the question is always asked, "What or who gives me
the right to it?" Answer: God, love, reason, nature, humanity, etc. No, only
*your might, your* power gives you the right (your reason, *e. g.,*, may give
it to you).

Communism, which assumes that men "have equal rights by nature," contradicts
its own proposition till it comes to this, that men have no right at all by
nature. For it is not willing to recognize, *e. g.*, that parents have "by
nature" rights as against their children, or the children as against the
parents: it abolishes the family. Nature gives parents, brothers, etc., no
right at all. Altogether, this entire revolutionary or Babouvist principle(17)
rests on a religious, *i. e.*, false, view of things. Who can ask after
"right" if he does not occupy the religious standpoint himself? Is not "right"
a religious concept, *i.e.* something sacred? Why, *"equality of rights"*, as
the Revolution propounded it, is only another name for "Christian equality,"
the "equality of the brethren," "of God's children," "of Christians"; in
short, *fraternité*. Each and every inquiry after right deserves to be lashed
with Schiller's words:

      Many a year I've used my nose
     To smell the onion and the rose;
     Is there any proof which shows
     That I've a right to that same nose?

When the Revolution stamped equality as a "right," it took flight into the
religious domain, into the region of the sacred, of the ideal. Hence, since
then, the fight for the "sacred, inalienable rights of man." Against the
"eternal rights of man" the "well-earned rights of the established order" are
quite naturally, and with equal right, brought to bear: right against right,
where of course one is decried by the other as "wrong." This has been the
*contest of rights*(18) since the Revolution.

You want to be "in the right" as against the rest. That you cannot; as against
them you remain forever "in the wrong"; for they surely would not be your
opponents if they were not in "their right" too; they will always make you out
"in the wrong." But, as against the right of the rest, yours is a higher,
greater, *more powerful* right, is it not? No such thing! Your right is not
more powerful if you are not more powerful. Have Chinese subjects a right to
freedom? Just bestow it on them, and then look how far you have gone wrong in
your attempt: because they do not know how to use freedom they have no right
to it, or, in clearer terms, because they have not freedom they have not the
right to it. Children have no right to the condition of majority because they
are not of age, *i.e.* because they are children. Peoples that let themselves
be kept in nonage have no rights to the condition of majority; if they ceased
to be in nonage, then only would they have the right to be of age. This means
nothing else than "What you have the *power* to be you have the *right* to." I
derive all right and all warrant from *me ;* I am *entitled* to everything
that I have in my power. I am entitled to overthrow Zeus, Jehovah, God, etc.,
if I *can ;* if I cannot, then these gods will always remain in the right and
in power as against me, and what I do will be to fear their right and their
power in impotent "god-fearingness," to keep their commandments and believe
that I do right in everything that I do according to *their* right, about as
the Russian boundary-sentinels think themselves rightfully entitled to shoot
dead the suspicious persons who are escaping, since they murder "by superior
authority," *i.e.* "with right." But I am entitled by myself to murder if I
myself do not forbid it to myself, if I myself do not fear murder as a
"wrong." This view of things lies at the foundation of Chamisso's poem, "The
Valley of Murder," where the gray-haired Indian murderer compels reverence
from the white man whose brethren he has murdered. The only thing I am not
entitled to is what I do not do with a free cheer, *i. e.* what I do not
entitle myself to.

I decide whether it is the *right thing* in me; there is no right *outside*
me. If it is right for *me*,(19) it is right. Possibly this may not suffice to
make it right for the rest; *i. e.*, their care, not mine: let them defend
themselves. And if for the whole world something were not right, but it were
right for me, *i. e.*, I wanted it, then I would ask nothing about the whole
world. So every one does who knows how to value *himself*, every one in the
degree that he is an egoist; for might goes before right, and that -- with
perfect right.

Because I am "by nature" a man I have an equal right to the enjoyment of all
goods, says Babeuf. Must he not also say: because I am "by nature" a
first-born prince I have a right to the throne? The rights of man and the
"well-earned rights" come to the same thing in the end, *i.e.* to *nature*,
which *gives* me a right, *i. e.* to *birth* (and, further, inheritance,
etc.). "I am born as a man" is equal to "I am born as a king's son." The
natural man has only a natural right (because he has only a natural power) and
natural claims: he has right of birth and claims of birth. But *nature* cannot
entitle me, *i.e.* give me capacity or might, to that to which only my act
entitles me. That the king's child sets himself above other children, even
this is his act, which secures to him the precedence; and that the other
children approve and recognize this act is their act, which makes them worthy
to be -- subjects.

Whether nature gives me a right, or whether God, the people's choice, etc.,
does so, all of *i. e.*, the same *foreign* right, a right that I do not give
or take to myself.

Thus the Communists say, equal labor entitles man to equal enjoyment. Formerly
the question was raised whether the "virtuous" man must not be "happy" on
earth. The Jews actually drew this inference: "That it may go well with thee
on earth." No, equal labor does not entitle you to it, but equal enjoyment
alone entitles you to equal enjoyment. Enjoy, then you are entitled to
enjoyment. But, if you have labored and let the enjoyment be taken from you,
then -- "it serves you right."

If you *take* the enjoyment, it is your right; if, on the contrary, you only
pine for it without laying hands on it, it remains as before, a, "well-earned
right" of those who are privileged for enjoyment. It is *their* right, as by
laying hands on it would become your right.

The conflict over the "right of property" wavers in vehement commotion. The
Communists affirm(20) that "the earth belongs rightfully to him who tills it,
and its products to those who bring them out." I think it belongs to him who
knows how to take it, or who does not let it be taken from him, does not let
himself be deprived of it. If he appropriates it, then not only the earth, but
the right to it too, belongs to him. This is *egoistic right*: *i.e.* it is
right for *me*, therefore it is right.

Aside from this, right does have "a wax nose." The tiger that assails me is in
the right, and I who strike him down am also in the right. I defend against
him not my *right*, but *myself.*

As human right is always something given, it always in reality reduces to the
right which men give, *i.e.* "concede," to each other. If the right to
existence is conceded to new-born children, then they have the right; if it is
not conceded to them, as was the case among the Spartans and ancient Romans,
then they do not have it. For only society can give or concede it to them;
they themselves cannot take it, or give it to themselves. It will be objected,
the children had nevertheless "by nature" the right to exist; only the
Spartans refused *recognition* to this right. But then they simply had no
right to this recognition -- no more than they had to recognition of their
life by the wild beasts to which they were thrown.

People talk so much about *birthright* and complain:

      There is alas! -- no mention of the rights
     That were born with us.(21)

What sort of right, then, is there that was born with me? The right to receive
an entailed estate, to inherit a throne, to enjoy a princely or noble
education; or, again, because poor parents begot me, to -- get free schooling,
be clothed out of contributions of alms, and at last earn my bread and my
herring in the coal-mines or at the loom? Are these not birthrights, rights
that have come down to me from my parents through *birth?* You think -- no;
you think these are only rights improperly so called, it is just these rights
that you aim to abolish through the *real birthright*. To give a basis for
this you go back to the simplest thing and affirm that every one is by birth
*equal* to another -- to wit, a *man*. I will grant you that every one is born
as man, hence the new-born are therein *equal* to each other. Why are they?
Only because they do not yet show and exert themselves as anything but bare --
*children of men*, naked little human beings. But thereby they are at once
different from those who have already made something out of themselves, who
thus are no longer bare "children of man," but -- children of their own
creation. The latter possesses more than bare birthrights: they have *earned*
rights. What an antithesis, what a field of combat! The old combat of the
birthrights of man and well-earned rights. Go right on appealing to your
birthrights; people will not fail to oppose to you the well-earned. Both stand
on the "ground of right"; for each of the two has a "right" against the other,
the one the birthright of natural right, the other the earned or "well-earned"
right.

If you remain on the ground of right, you remain in -- *Rechthaberei*.(22) The
other cannot give you your right; he cannot "mete out right" to you. He who
has might has -- right; if you have not the former, neither have you the
latter. Is this wisdom so hard to attain? Just look at the mighty and their
doings! We are talking here only of China and Japan, of course. Just try it
once, you Chinese and Japanese, to make them out in the wrong, and learn by
experience how they throw you into jail. (Only do not confuse with this the
"well-meaning counsels" which -- in China and Japan -- are permitted, because
they do not hinder the mighty one, but possibly *help him on*.) For him who
should want to make them out in the wrong there would stand open only one way
thereto, that of might. If he deprives them of their *might*, then he has
*really* made them out in the wrong, deprived them of their right; in any
other case he can do nothing but clench his little fist in his pocket, or fall
a victim as an obtrusive fool.

In short, if you Chinese or Japanese did not ask after right, and in
particular if you did not ask after the rights "that were born with you," then
you would not need to ask at all after the well-earned rights either.

You start back in fright before others, because you think you see beside them
the *ghost of right*, which, as in the Homeric combats, seems to fight as a
goddess at their side, helping them. What do you do? Do you throw the spear?
No, you creep around to gain the spook over to yourselves, that it may fight
on your side: you woo for the ghost's favor. Another would simply ask thus: Do
I will what my opponent wills? "No!" Now then, there may fight for him a
thousand devils or gods, I go at him all the same!

The "commonwealth of right," as the *Vossische Zeitung* among others stands
for it, asks that office-holders be removable only by the *judge*, not by the
*administration*. Vain illusion! If it were settled by law that an
office-holder who is once seen drunken shall lose his office, then the judges
would have to condemn him on the word of the witnesses. In short, the
law-giver would only have to state precisely all the possible grounds which
entail the loss of office, however laughable they might be (*e. g.* he who
laughs in his superiors' faces, who does not go to church every Sunday, who
does not take the communion every four weeks, who runs in debt, who has
disreputable associates, who shows no determination, etc., shall be removed.
These things the law-giver might take it into his head to prescribe, *e. g.*,
for a court of honor); then the judge would solely have to investigate whether
the accused had "become guilty" of those "offenses," and, on presentation of
the proof, pronounce sentence of removal against him "in the name of the law."

The judge is lost when he ceases to be *mechanical*, when he "is forsaken by
the rules of evidence." Then he no longer has anything but an opinion like
everybody else; and, if he decides according to this *opinion*, his action is
*no longer an official action*. As judge he must decide only according to the
law. Commend me rather to the old French parliaments, which wanted to examine
for themselves what was to be matters of right, and to register it only after
their own approval. They at least judged according to a right of their own,
and were not willing to give themselves up to be machines of the law-giver,
although as judges they must, to be sure, become their own machines.

It is said that punishment is the criminal's right. But impunity is just as
much his right. If his undertaking succeeds, it serves him right, and, if it
does not succeed, it likewise serves him right. You make your bed and lie in
it. If some one goes foolhardily into dangers and perishes in them, we are apt
to say, "It serves him right; he would have it so." But, if he conquered the
dangers, *i.e.* if his *might* was victorious, then he would be in the *right*
too. If a child plays with the knife and gets cut, it is served right; but, if
it doesn't get cut, it is served right too. Hence right befalls the criminal,
doubtless, when he suffers what he risked; why, what did he risk it for, since
he knew the possible consequences? But the punishment that we decree against
him is only our right, not his. Our right reacts against his, and he is -- "in
the wrong at last" because -- we get the upper hand.

- --------

But what is right, what is matter of right in a society, is voiced too -- in
the law.(23)

Whatever the law may be, it must be respected by the -- loyal citizen. Thus
the law-abiding mind of Old England is eulogized. To this that Euripidean
sentiment (Orestes, 418) entirely corresponds: "We serve the gods, whatever
the gods are." *Law as such, God as such*, thus far we are today.

People are at pains to distinguish*law* from arbitrary *orders*, from an
ordinance: the former comes from a duly entitled authority. But a law over
human action (ethical law, State law, etc.) is always a *declaration of will*,
and so an order. Yes, even if I myself gave myself the law, it would yet be
only my order, to which in the next moment I can refuse obedience. One may
well enough declare what he will put up with, and so deprecate the opposite of
the law, making known that in the contrary case he will treat the transgressor
as his enemy; but no one has any business to command *my* actions, to say what
course I shall pursue and set up a code to govern it. I must put up with it
that he treats me as his *enemy*, but never that he makes free with me as his
*creature*, and that he makes *his* reason, or even unreason, my plumbline.

States last only so long as there is *a ruling will* and this ruling will is
looked upon as tantamount to the own will. The lord's will is -- law. What do
your laws amount to if no one obeys them? What your orders, if nobody lets
himself be ordered? The State cannot forbear the claim to determine the
individual's will, to speculate and count on this. For the State it is
indispensable that nobody have an *own will ;* if one had, the State would
have to exclude (lock up, banish, etc.) this one; if all had, they would do
away with the State. The State is not thinkable without lordship and servitude
(subjection); for the State must will to be the lord of all that it embraces,
and this will is called the "will of the State."

He who, to hold his own, must count on the absence of will in others is a
thing made by these others, as the master is a thing made by the servant. If
submissiveness ceased, it would be over with all lordship.

The *own will* of Me is the State's destroyer; it is therefore branded by the
State as "self-will." Own will and the State are powers in deadly hostility,
between which no "eternal peace" is possible. As long as the State asserts
itself, it represents own will, its ever-hostile opponent, as unreasonable,
evil; and the latter lets itself be talked into believing this -- nay, it
really is such, for no more reason than this, that it still lets itself be
talked into such belief: it has not yet come to itself and to the
consciousness of its dignity; hence it is still incomplete, still amenable to
fine words, etc.

Every State is a *despotism*, be the despot one or many, or (as one is likely
to imagine about a republic) if all be lords, *i. e.* despotize one over
another. For this is the case when the law given at any time, the expressed
volition of (it may be) a popular assembly, is thenceforth to be *law* for the
individual, to which *obedience is due* from him or toward which he has the
*duty* of obedience. If one were even to conceive the case that every
individual in the people had expressed the same will, and hereby a complete
"collective will" had come into being, the matter would still remain the same.
Would I not be bound today and henceforth to my will of yesterday? My will
would in this case be *frozen*. Wretched *stability!* My creature -- to wit, a
particular expression of will -- would have become my commander. But I in my
will, I the creator, should be hindered in my flow and my dissolution. Because
I was a fool yesterday I must remain such my life long. So in the State-life I
am at best -- I might just as well say, at worst -- a bondman of myself.
Because I was a willer yesterday, I am today without will: yesterday
voluntary, today involuntary.

How change it? Only be recognizing no *duty*, not *binding* myself nor letting
myself be bound. If I have no duty, then I know no law either.

"But they will bind me!" My will nobody can bind, and my disinclination
remains free.

"Why, everything must go topsy-turvy if every one could do what he would!"
Well, who says that every one can do everything? What are you there for, pray,
you who do not need to put up with everything? Defend yourself, and no one
will do anything to you! He who would break your will has to do with you, and
is your *enemy*. Deal with him as such. If there stand behind you for your
protection some millions more, then you are an imposing power and will have an
easy victory. But, even if as a power you overawe your opponent, still you are
not on that account a hallowed authority to him, unless he be a simpleton. He
does not owe you respect and regard, even though he will have to consider your
might.

We are accustomed to classify States according to the different ways in which
"the supreme might" is distributed. If an individual has it -- monarchy; if
all have it -- democracy; etc. Supreme might then! Might against whom? Against
the individual and his "self-will." The State practices "violence," the
individual must not do so. The State's behavior is violence, and it calls its
violence "law"; that of the individual, "crime." Crime, then(24) -- so the
individual's violence is called; and only by crime does he overcome(25) the
State's violence when he thinks that the State is not above him, but he is
above the State.

Now, if I wanted to act ridiculously, I might, as a well-meaning person,
admonish you not to make laws which impair my self-development, self-activity,
self-creation. I do not give this advice. For, if you should follow it, you
would be unwise, and I should have been cheated of my entire profit. I request
nothing at all from you; for, whatever I might demand, you would still be
dictatorial law-givers, and must be so, because a raven cannot sing, nor a
robber live without robbery. Rather do I ask those who would be egoists what
they think the more egoistic -- to let laws be given them by you, and to
respect those that are given, or to practice *refractoriness*, yes, complete
disobedience. Good-hearted people think the laws ought to prescribe only what
is accepted in the people's feeling as right and proper. But what concern is
it of mine what is accepted in the nation and by the nation? The nation will
perhaps be against the blasphemer; therefore a law against blasphemy. Am I not
to blaspheme on that account? Is this law to be more than an "order" to me? I
put the question.

Solely from the principle that all *right* and all *authority* belong to the
*collectivity of the people* do all forms of government arise. For none of
them lacks this appeal to the collectivity, and the despot, as well as the
president or any aristocracy, acts and commands "in the name of the State."
They are in possession of the "authority of the State," and it is perfectly
indifferent whether, were this possible, the people as a *collectivity* (all
individuals) exercise this State -- *authority*, or whether it is only the
representatives of this collectivity, be there many of them as in
aristocracies or one as in monarchies. Always the collectivity is above the
individual, and has a power which is called *legitimate*, *i.e.* which is
*law*.

Over against the sacredness of the State, the individual is only a vessel of
dishonor, in which "exuberance, malevolence, mania for ridicule and slander,
frivolity," etc., are left as soon as he does not deem that object of
veneration, the State, to be worthy of recognition. The spiritual
*haughtiness* of the servants and subjects of the State has fine penalties
against unspiritual "exuberance."

When the government designates as punishable all play of mind *against* the
State, the moderate liberals come and opine that fun, satire, wit, humor, must
have free play anyhow, and *genius* must enjoy freedom. So not the *individual
man* indeed, but still *genius*, is to be free. Here the State, or in its name
the government, says with perfect right: He who is not for me is against me.
Fun, wit, etc. -- in short, the turning of State affairs into a comedy -- have
undermined States from of old: they are not "innocent." And, further, what
boundaries are to be drawn between guilty and innocent wit, etc.? At this
question the moderates fall into great perplexity, and everything reduces
itself to the prayer that the State (government) would please not be so
*sensitive*, so *ticklish ;* that it would not immediately scent malevolence
in "harmless' things, and would in general be a little "more tolerant."
Exaggerated sensitiveness is certainly a weakness, its avoidance may be
praiseworthy virtue; but in time of war one cannot be sparing, and what may be
allowed under peaceable circumstances ceases to be permitted as soon as a
state of siege is declared. Because the well-meaning liberals feel this
plainly, they hasten to declare that, considering "the devotion of the
people," there is assuredly no danger to be feared. But the government will be
wiser, and not let itself be talked into believing anything of that sort. It
knows too well how people stuff one with fine words, and will not let itself
be satisfied with the Barmecide dish.

But they are bound to have their play-ground, for they are children, you know,
and cannot be so staid as old folks; boys will be boys. Only for this
playground, only for a few hours of jolly running about, they bargain. They
ask only that the State should not, like a splenetic papa, be too cross. It
should permit some Processions of the Ass and plays of fools, as the church
allowed them in the Middle Ages. But the times when it could grant this
without danger are past. Children that now once come *into the open*, and live
through an hour without the rod of discipline, are no longer willing to go
into the *cell*. For the open is now no longer a *supplement* to the cell, no
longer a refreshing *recreation*, but its *opposite*, an *aut-aut*. In short,
the State must either no longer put up with anything, or put up with
everything and perish; it must be either sensitive through and through, or,
like a dead man, insensitive. Tolerance is done with. If the State but gives a
finger, they take the whole hand at once. There can be no more "jesting," and
all jest, such as fun, wit, humor, becomes bitter earnest.

The clamor of the Liberals for freedom of the press runs counter to their own
principle, their proper *will*. They will what they *do not will*, *i.e.* they
wish, they would like. Hence it is too that they fall away so easily when once
so-called freedom of the press appears; then they would like censorship. Quite
naturally. The State is sacred even to them; likewise morals. They behave
toward it only as ill-bred brats, as tricky children who seek to utilize the
weaknesses of their parents. Papa State is to permit them to say many things
that do not please him, but papa has the right, by a stern look, to
blue-pencil their impertinent gabble. If they recognize in him their papa,
they must in his presence put up with the censorship of speech, like every
child.

- --------

If you let yourself be made out in the right by another, you must no less let
yourself be made out in the wrong by him; if justification and reward come to
you from him, expect also his arraignment and punishment. Alongside right goes
wrong, alongside legality *crime*. What are you? -- You are a -- *criminal!*

"The criminal is in the utmost degree the State's own crime!" says
Bettina.(26) One may let this sentiment pass, even if Bettina herself does not
understand it exactly so. For in the State the unbridled I -- I, as I belong
to myself alone -- cannot come to my fulfillment and realization. Every ego is
from birth a criminal to begin with against the people, the State. Hence it is
that it does really keep watch over all; it sees in each one an -- egoist, and
it is afraid of the egoist. It presumes the worst about each one, and takes
care, police-care, that "no harm happens to the State," *ne quid respublica
detrimenti capiat*. The unbridled ego -- and this we originally are, and in
our secret inward parts we remain so always -- is the never-ceasing criminal
in the State. The man whom his boldness, his will, his inconsiderateness and
fearlessness lead is surrounded with spies by the State, by the people. I say,
by the people! The people (think it something wonderful, you good-hearted
folks, what you have in the people) -- the people is full of police sentiments
through and through. -- Only he who renounces his ego, who practices
"self-renunciation," is acceptable to the people.

In the book cited Bettina is throughout good-natured enough to regard the
State as only sick, and to hope for its recovery, a recovery which she would
bring about through the "demagogues";(27) but it is not sick; rather is it in
its full strength, when it puts from it the demagogues who want to acquire
something for the individuals, for "all." In its believers it is provided with
the best demagogues (leaders of the people). According to Bettina, the State
is to(28) "develop mankind's germ of freedom; otherwise it is a
raven-mother(29) and caring for raven-fodder!" It cannot do otherwise, for in
its very caring for "mankind" (which, besides, would have to be the "humane"
or " free" State to begin with) the "individual" is raven-fodder for it. How
rightly speaks the burgomaster, on the other hand:(30) "What? the State has no
other duty than to be merely the attendant of incurable invalids? -- that
isn't to the point. From of old the healthy State has relieved itself of the
diseased matter, and not mixed itself with it. It does not need to be so
economical with its juices. Cut off the robber-branches without hesitation,
that the others may bloom. -- Do not shiver at the State's harshness; its
morality, its policy and religion, point it to that. Accuse it of no want of
feeling; its sympathy revolts against this, but its experience finds safety
only in this severity! There are diseases in which only drastic remedies will
help. The physician who recognizes the disease as such, but timidly turns to
palliatives, will never remove the disease, but may well cause the patient to
succumb after a shorter or longer sickness." Frau Rat's question, "If you
apply death as a drastic remedy, how is the cure to be wrought then?" isn't to
the point. Why, the State does not apply death against itself, but against an
offensive member; it tears out an eye that offends it, etc.

"For the invalid State the only way of salvation is to make man flourish in
it."(31) If one here, like Bettina, understand by man the concept "Man," she
is right; the "invalid" State will recover by the flourishing of "Man," for,
the more infatuated the individuals are with "Man," the better it serves the
State's turn. But, if one referred it to the individuals, to "all" (and the
authoress half-does this too, because about "Man" she is still involved in
vagueness), then it would sound somewhat like the following: For an invalid
band of robbers the only way of salvation is to make the loyal citizen nourish
in it! Why, thereby the band of robbers would simply go to ruin as a band of
robbers; and, because it perceives this, it prefers to shoot every one who has
a leaning toward becoming a "steady man."

In this book Bettina is a patriot, or, what is little more, a philanthropist,
a worker for human happiness. She is discontented with the existing order in
quite the same way as is the title-ghost of her book, along with all who would
like to bring back the good old faith and what goes with it. Only she thinks,
contrariwise, that the politicians, place-holders, and diplomats ruined the
State, while those lay it at the door of the malevolent, the "seducers of the
people."

What is the ordinary criminal but one who has committed the fatal mistake of
endeavoring after what is the people's instead of seeking for what is his? He
has sought despicable *alien* goods, has done what believers do who seek after
what is God's. What does the priest who admonishes the criminal do? He sets
before him the great wrong of having desecrated by his act what was hallowed
by the State, its property (in which, of course, must be included even the
life of those who belong to the State); instead of this, he might rather hold
up to him the fact that he has befouled *himself* in not despising the alien
thing, but thinking it worth stealing; he could, if he were not a parson. Talk
with the so-called criminal as with an egoist, and he will be ashamed, not
that he transgressed against your laws and goods, but that he considered your
laws worth evading, your goods worth desiring; he will be ashamed that he did
not -- despise you and yours together, that he was too little an egoist. But
you cannot talk egoistically with him, for you are not so great as a criminal,
you -- commit no crime! You do not know that an ego who is his own cannot
desist from being a criminal, that crime is his life. And yet you should know
it, since you believe that "we are all miserable sinners"; but you think
surreptitiously to get beyond sin, you do not comprehend -- for you are
devil-fearing -- that guilt is the value of a man. Oh, if you were guilty! But
now you are "righteous."(32) Well -- just put every thing nicely to rights(33)
for your master!

When the Christian consciousness, or the Christian man, draws up a criminal
code, what can the concept of *crime* be there but simply -- *heartlessness?*
Each severing and wounding of a *heart relation*, each *heartless behavior*
toward a sacred being, is crime. The more heartfelt the relation is supposed
to be, the more scandalous is the deriding of it, and the more worthy of
punishment the crime. Everyone who is subject to the lord should love him; to
deny this love is a high treason worthy of death. Adultery is a heartlessness
worthy of punishment; one has no heart, no enthusiasm, no pathetic feeling for
the sacredness of marriage. So long as the heart or soul dictates laws, only
the heartful or soulful man enjoys the protection of the laws. That the man of
soul makes laws means properly that the *moral* man makes them: what
contradicts these men's "moral feeling," this they penalize. How, *e. g.*,
should disloyalty, secession, breach of oaths -- in short, all *radical
breaking off*, all tearing asunder of venerable *ties --* not be flagitious
and criminal in their eyes? He who breaks with these demands of the soul has
for enemies all the moral, all the men of soul. Only Krummacher and his mates
are the right people to set up consistently a penal code of the heart, as a
certain bill sufficiently proves. The consistent legislation of the Christian
State must be placed wholly in the hands of the -- *parsons*, and will not
become pure and coherent so long as it is worked out only by -- the
*parson-ridden*, who are always only *half-parsons*. Only then will every lack
of soulfulness, every heartlessness, be certified as an unpardonable crime,
only then will every agitation of the soul become condemnable, every objection
of criticism and doubt be anathematized; only then is the own man, before the
Christian consciousness, a convicted -- *criminal* to begin with.

The men of the Revolution often talked of the people's "just revenge" as its
"right." Revenge and right coincide here. Is this an attitude of an ego to an
ego? The people cries that the opposite party has committed "crimes" against
it. Can I assume that one commits a crime against me, without assuming that he
has to act as I see fit? And this action I call the right, the good, etc.; the
divergent action, a crime. So I think that the others must aim at the *same*
goal with me; *i.e.*, I do not treat them as unique beings(34) who bear their
law in themselves and live according to it, but as beings who are to obey some
"rational" law. I set up what "Man" is and what acting in a "truly human" way
is, and I demand of every one that this law become norm and ideal to him;
otherwise he will expose himself as a "sinner and criminal." But upon the
"guilty" falls the "penalty of the law"!

One sees here how it is "Man" again who sets on foot even the concept of
crime, of sin, and therewith that of right. A man in whom I do not recognize
"man" is "sinner, a guilty one."

Only against a sacred thing are there criminals; you against me can never be a
criminal, but only an opponent. But not to hate him who injures a sacred thing
is in itself a crime, as St. Just cries out against Danton: "Are you not a
criminal and responsible for not having hated the enemies of the fatherland?"
- --

If, as in the Revolution, what "Man" is apprehended as "good citizen," then
from this concept of "Man" we have the well-known "political offenses and
crimes."

In all this the individual, the individual man, is regarded as refuse, and on
the other hand the general man, "Man," is honored. Now, according to how this
ghost is named -- as Christian, Jew, Mussulman, good citizen, loyal subject,
freeman, patriot, etc. -- just so do those who would like to carry through a
divergent concept of man, as well as those who want to put *themselves*
through, fall before victorious "Man."

And with what unction the butchery goes on here in the name of the law, of the
sovereign people, of God, etc.!

Now, if the persecuted trickily conceal and protect themselves from the stern
parsonical judges, people stigmatize them as St. Just, *e. g.*, does those
whom he accuses in the speech against Danton.(35) One is to be a fool, and
deliver himself up to their Moloch.

Crimes spring from *fixed ideas*. The sacredness of marriage is a fixed idea.
From the sacredness it follows that infidelity is a *crime*, and therefore a
certain marriage law imposes upon it a shorter or longer *penalty*. But by
those who proclaim "freedom as sacred" this penalty must be regarded as a
crime against freedom, and only in this sense has public opinion in fact
branded the marriage law.

Society would have *every one* come to his right indeed, but yet only to that
which is sanctioned by society, to the society-right, not really to *his*
right. But I give or take to myself the right out of my own plenitude of
power, and against every superior power I am the most impenitent criminal.
Owner and creator of my right, I recognize no other source of right than --
me, neither God nor the State nor nature nor even man himself with his
"eternal rights of man," neither divine nor human right.

Right "in and for itself." Without relation to me, therefore! "Absolute
right." Separated from me, therefore! A thing that exists in and for itself!
An absolute! An eternal right, like an eternal truth!

According to the liberal way of thinking, right is to be obligatory for me
because it is thus established by *human reason*, against which *my reason* is
"unreason." Formerly people inveighed in the name of divine reason against
weak human reason; now, in the name of strong human reason, against egoistic
reason, which is rejected as "unreason." And yet none is real but this very
"unreason." Neither divine nor human reason, but only your and my reason
existing at any given time, is real, as and because you and I are real.

The thought of right is originally my thought; or, it has its origin in me.
But, when it has sprung from me, when the "Word" is out, then it has "become
flesh," it is a *fixed idea*. Now I no longer get rid of the thought; however
I turn, it stands before me. Thus men have not become masters again of the
thought "right," which they themselves created; their creature is running away
with them. This is absolute right, that which is absolved or unfastened from
me. We, revering it as absolute, cannot devour it again, and it takes from us
the creative power: the creature is more than the creator, it is "in and for
itself."

Once you no longer let right run around free, once you draw it back into its
origin, into you, it is *your* right; and that is right which suits you.

- --------

Right has had to suffer an attack within itself, *i.e.* from the standpoint of
right; war being declared on the part of liberalism against "privilege."(36)

*Privileged* and *endowed with equal rights --* on these two concepts turns a
stubborn fight. Excluded or admitted -- would mean the same. But where should
there be a power -- be it an imaginary one like God, law, or a real one like
I, you -- of which it should not be true that before it all are "endowed with
equal rights," *i. e.*, no respect of persons holds? Every one is equally dear
to God if he adores him, equally agreeable to the law *if* only he is a law-
abiding person; whether the lover of God and the law is humpbacked and lame,
whether poor or rich, etc., that amounts to nothing for God and the law; just
so, when you are at the point of drowning, you like a Negro as rescuer as well
as the most excellent Caucasian -- yes, in this situation you esteem a dog not
less than a man. But to whom will not every one be also, contrariwise, a
preferred or disregarded person? God punishes the wicked with his wrath, the
law chastises the lawless, you let one visit you every moment and show the
other the door.

The "equality of right" is a phantom just because right is nothing more and
nothing less than admission, *a matter of grace*, which, be it said, one may
also acquire by his desert; for desert and grace are not contradictory, since
even grace wishes to be "deserved" and our gracious smile falls only to him
who knows how to force it from us.

So people dream of "all citizens of the State having to stand side by side,
with equal rights." As citizens of the State they are certainly all equal for
the State. But it will divide them, and advance them or put them in the rear,
according to its special ends, if on no other account; and still more must it
distinguish them from one another as good and bad citizens.

Bruno Bauer disposes of the Jew question from the standpoint that "privilege"
is not justified. Because Jew and Christian have each some point of advantage
over the other, and in having this point of advantage are exclusive, therefore
before the critic's gaze they crumble into nothingness. With them the State
lies under the like blame, since it justifies their having advantages and
stamps it as a "privilege." or prerogative, but thereby derogates from its
calling to become a "free State."

But now every one has something of advantage over another -- *viz*., himself
or his individuality; in this everybody remains exclusive.

And, again, before a third party every one makes his peculiarity count for as
much as possible, and (if he wants to win him at all) tries to make it appear
attractive before him.

Now, is the third party to be insensible to the difference of the one from the
other? Do they ask that of the free State or of humanity? Then these would
have to be absolutely without self-interest, and incapable of taking an
interest in any one whatever. Neither God (who divides his own from the
wicked) nor the State (which knows how to separate good citizens from bad) was
thought of as so indifferent. But they are looking for this very third party
that bestows no more "privilege." Then it is called perhaps the free State, or
humanity, or whatever else it may be.

As Christian and Jew are ranked low by Bruno Bauer on account of their
asserting privileges, it must be that they could and should free themselves
from their narrow standpoint by self-renunciation or unselfishness. If they
threw off their "egoism," the mutual wrong would cease, and with it Christian
and Jewish religiousness in general; it would be necessary only that neither
of them should any longer want to be anything peculiar.

But, if they gave up this exclusiveness, with that the ground on which their
hostilities were waged would in truth not yet be forsaken. In case of need
they would indeed find a third thing on which they could unite, a "general
religion," a "religion of humanity," etc.; in short, an equalization, which
need not be better than that which would result if all Jews became Christians,
by this likewise the "privilege" of one over the other would have an end. The
*tension*(37) would indeed be done away, but in this consisted not the essence
of the two, but only their neighborhood. As being distinguished from each
other they must necessarily be mutually resistant,(38) and the disparity will
always remain. Truly it is not a failing in you that you stiffen(39) yourself
against me and assert your distinctness or peculiarity: you need not give way
or renounce yourself.

People conceive the significance of the opposition too *formally* and weakly
when they want only to "dissolve" it in order to make room for a third thing
that shall "unite." The opposition deserves rather to be *sharpened*. As Jew
and Christian you are in too slight an opposition, and are contending only
about religion, as it were about the emperor's beard, about a fiddlestick's
end. Enemies in religion indeed, *in the rest* you still remain good friends,
and equal to each other, *e. g.* as men. Nevertheless the rest too is unlike
in each; and the time when you no longer merely *dissemble* your opposition
will be only when you entirely recognize it, and everybody asserts himself
from top to toe as *unique*.(40) Then the former opposition will assuredly be
dissolved, but only because a stronger has taken it up into itself.

Our weakness consists not in this, that we are in opposition to others, but in
this, that we are not completely so; that we are not entirely *severed* from
them, or that we seek a "communion," a "bond," that in communion we have an
ideal. One faith, one God, one idea, one hat, for all! If all were brought
under one hat, certainly no one would any longer need to take off his hat
before another.

The last and most decided opposition, that of unique against unique, is at
bottom beyond what is called opposition, but without having sunk back into
"unity" and unison. As unique you have nothing in common with the other any
longer, and therefore nothing divisive or hostile either; you are not seeking
to be in the right against him before a *third* party, and are standing with
him neither "on the ground of right" nor on any other common ground. The
opposition vanishes in complete -- *severance* or singleness.(41) This might
indeed be regarded as the new point in common or a new parity, but here the
parity consists precisely in the disparity, and is itself nothing but
disparity, a par of disparity, and that only for him who institutes a
"comparison."

The polemic against privilege forms a characteristic feature of liberalism,
which fumes against "privilege" because it itself appeals to "right." Further
than to fuming it cannot carry this; for privileges do not fall before right
falls, as they are only forms of right. But right falls apart into its
nothingness when it is swallowed up by might, *i.e.* when one understands what
is meant by "Might goes before right." All right explains itself then as
privilege, and privilege itself as power, as -- *superior power*.

But must not the mighty combat against superior power show quite another face
than the modest combat against privilege, which is to be fought out before a
first judge, "Right," according to the judge's mind?

- --------

Now, in conclusion, I have still to take back the half-way form of expression
of which I was willing to make use only so long as I was still rooting among
the entrails of right, and letting the word at least stand. But, in fact, with
the concept the word too loses its meaning. What I called "my right" is no
longer "right" at all, because right can be bestowed only by a spirit, be it
the spirit of nature or that of the species, of mankind, the Spirit of God or
that of His Holiness or His Highness, etc. What I have without an entitling
spirit I have without right; I have it solely and alone through my power.

I do not demand any right, therefore I need not recognize any either. What I
can get by force I get by force, and what I do not get by force I have no
right to, nor do I give myself airs, or consolation, with my imprescriptible
right.

With absolute right, right itself passes away; the dominion of the "concept of
right" is canceled at the same time. For it is not to be forgotten that
hitherto concepts, ideas, or principles ruled us, and that among these rulers
the concept of right, or of justice, played one of the most important parts.

Entitled or unentitled -- that does not concern me, if I am only *powerful*, I
am of myself *empowered*, and need no other empowering or entitling.

Right -- is a wheel in the head, put there by a spook; power -- that am I
myself, I am the powerful one and owner of power. Right is above me, is
absolute, and exists in one higher, as whose grace it flows to me: right is a
gift of grace from the judge; power and might exist only in me the powerful
and mighty.

2. My Intercourse

In society the human demand at most can be satisfied, while the egoistic must
always come short. Because it can hardly escape anybody that the present shows
no such living interest in any question as in the "social," one has to direct
his gaze especially to society. Nay, if the interest felt in it were less
passionate and dazzled, people would not so much, in looking at society, lose
sight of the individuals in it, and would recognize that a society cannot
become new so long as those who form and constitute it remain the old ones.
If, *e. g.*, there was to arise in the Jewish people a society which should
spread a new faith over the earth, these apostles could in no case remain
Pharisees.

As you are, so you present yourself, so you behave toward men: a hypocrite as
a hypocrite, a Christian as a Christian. Therefore the character of a society
is determined by the character of its members: they are its creators. So much
at least one must perceive even if one were not willing to put to the test the
concept "society" itself.

Ever far from letting *themselves* come to their full development and
consequence, men have hitherto not been able to found their societies on
*themselves;* or rather, they have been able only to found "societies" and to
live in societies. The societies were always persons, powerful persons,
so-called "moral persons," *i.e.* ghosts, before which the individual had the
appropriate wheel in his head, the fear of ghosts. As such ghosts they may
most suitably be designated by the respective names "people" and "peoplet":
the people of the patriarchs, the people of the Hellenes, etc., at last the --
people of men, Mankind (Anacharsis Clootz was enthusiastic for the "nation" of
mankind); then every subdivision of this "people," which could and must have
its special societies, the Spanish, French people, etc.; within it again
classes, cities, in short all kinds of corporations; lastly, tapering to the
finest point, the little peoplet of the --family. Hence, instead of saying
that the person that walked as ghost in all societies hitherto has been the
people, there might also have been named the two extremes -- to wit, either
"mankind" or the "family," both the most "natural-born units." We choose the
word "people"(42) because its derivation has been brought into connection with
the Greek *polloi*, the "many" or "the masses," but still more because
"national efforts" are at present the order of the day, and because even the
newest mutineers have not yet shaken off this deceptive person, although on
the other hand the latter consideration must give the preference to the
expression "mankind," since on all sides they are going in for enthusiasm over
"mankind."

The people, then -- mankind or the family -- have hitherto, as it seems,
played history: no *egoistic* interest was to come up in these societies, but
solely general ones, national or popular interests, class interests, family
interests, and "general human interests." But who has brought to their fall
the peoples whose decline history relates? Who but the egoist, who was seeking
*his* satisfaction! If once an egoistic interest crept in, the society was
"corrupted" and moved toward its dissolution, as Rome, *e. g.* proves with its
highly developed system of private rights, or Christianity with the
incessantly-breaking-in "rational self-determination," "self-consciousness,"
the "autonomy of the spirit," etc.

The Christian people has produced two societies whose duration will keep equal
measure with the permanence of that people: these are the societies *State*
and *Church*. Can they be called a union of egoists? Do we in them pursue an
egoistic, personal, own interest, or do we pursue a popular (*i.e.* an
interest of the Christian *people*), to wit, a State, and Church interest? Can
I and may I be myself in them? May I think and act as I will, may I reveal
myself, live myself out, busy myself? Must I not leave untouched the majesty
of the State, the sanctity of the Church?

Well, I may not do so as I will. But shall I find in any society such an
unmeasured freedom of maying? Certainly no! Accordingly we might be content?
Not a bit! It is a different thing whether I rebound from an ego or from a
people, a generalization. There I am my opponent's opponent, born his equal;
here I am a despised opponent, bound and under a guardian: there I stand man
to man; here I am a schoolboy who can accomplish nothing against his comrade
because the latter has called father and mother to aid and has crept under the
apron, while I am well scolded as an ill-bred brat, and I must not "argue":
there I fight against a bodily enemy; here against mankind, against a
generalization, against a "majesty," against a spook. But to me no majesty,
nothing sacred, is a limit; nothing that I know how to overpower. Only that
which I cannot overpower still limits my might; and I of limited might am
temporarily a limited I, not limited by the might *outside* me, but limited by
my *own* still deficient might, by my *own impotence*. However, "the Guard
dies, but does not surrender!" Above all, only a bodily opponent!

      I dare meet every foeman
     Whom I can see and measure with my eye,
     mettle fires my mettle for the fight -- etc.

Many privileges have indeed been cancelled with time, but solely for the sake
of the common weal, of the State and the State's weal, by no means for the
strengthening of me. Vassalage, *e. g.*, was abrogated only that a single
liege lord, the lord of the people, the monarchical power, might be
strengthened: vassalage under the one became yet more rigorous thereby. Only
in favor of the monarch, be he called "prince" or "law," have privileges
fallen. In France the citizens are not, indeed, vassals of the king, but are
instead vassals of the "law" (the Charter). *Subordination* was retained, only
the Christian State recognized that man cannot serve two masters (the lord of
the manor and the prince); therefore one obtained all the prerogatives; now he
can again *place* one above another, he can make "men in high place."

But of what concern to me is the common weal? The common weal as such is not
*my weal*, but only the furthest extremity of *self- renunciation*. The common
weal may cheer aloud while I must "down";(43) the State may shine while I
starve. In what lies the folly of the political liberals but in their opposing
the people to the government and talking of people's rights? So there is the
people going to be of age, etc. As if one who has no mouth could be
*mündig*!(44) Only the individual is able to be *mündig*. Thus the whole
question of the liberty of the press is turned upside down when it is laid
claim to as a "right of the people." It is only a right, or better the might,
of the *individual*. If a people has liberty of the press, then I, although in
the midst of this people, have it not; a liberty of the people is not *my*
liberty, and the liberty of the press as a liberty of the people must have at
its side a press law directed against *me*.

This must be insisted on all around against the present-day efforts for
liberty:

Liberty of the *people* is not *my* liberty!

Let us admit these categories, liberty of the people and right of the people:
*e. g.*, the right of the people that everybody may bear arms. Does one not
forfeit such a right? One cannot forfeit his own right, but may well forfeit a
right that belongs not to me but to the people. I may be locked up for the
sake of the liberty of the people; I may, under sentence, incur the loss of
the right to bear arms.

Liberalism appears as the last attempt at a creation of the liberty of the
people, a liberty of the commune, of "society," of the general, of mankind;
the dream of a humanity, a people, a commune, a "society," that shall be of
age.

A people cannot be free otherwise than at the individual's expense; for it is
not the individual that is the main point in this liberty, but the people. The
freer the people, the more bound the individual; the Athenian people,
precisely at its freest time, created ostracism, banished the atheists,
poisoned the most honest thinker.

How they do praise Socrates for his conscientiousness, which makes him resist
the advice to get away from the dungeon! He is a fool that he concedes to the
Athenians a right to condemn him. Therefore it certainly serves him right; why
then does he remain standing on an equal footing with the Athenians? Why does
he not break with them? Had he known, and been able to know, what he was, he
would have conceded to such judges no claim, no right. That *he did not
escape* was just his weakness, his delusion of still having something in
common with the Athenians, or the opinion that he was a member, a mere member
of this people. But he was rather this people itself in person, and could only
be his own judge. There was no *judge over him*, as he himself had really
pronounced a public sentence on himself and rated himself worthy of the
Prytaneum. He should have stuck to that, and, as he had uttered no sentence of
death against himself, should have despised that of the Athenians too and
escaped. But he subordinated himself and recognized in the *people* his
*judge;* he seemed little to himself before the majesty of the people. That he
subjected himself to *might* (to which alone he could succumb) as to a "right"
was treason against himself: it was *virtue*. To Christ, who, it is alleged,
refrained from using the power over his heavenly legions, the same
scrupulousness is thereby ascribed by the narrators. Luther did very well and
wisely to have the safety of his journey to Worms warranted to him in black
and white, and Socrates should have known that the Athenians were his
*enemies*, he alone his judge. The self-deception of a "reign of law," etc.,
should have given way to the perception that the relation was a relation of
*might*.

It was with pettifoggery and intrigues that Greek liberty ended. Why? Because
the ordinary Greeks could still less attain that logical conclusion which not
even their hero of thought, Socrates, was able to draw. What then is
pettifoggery but a way of utilizing something established without doing away
with it? I might add "for one's own advantage," but, you see, that lies in
"utilizing." Such pettifoggers are the theologians who "wrest" and "force"
God's word; what would they have to wrest if it were not for the "established"
Word of God? So those liberals who only shake and wrest the "established
order." They are all perverters, like those perverters of the law. Socrates
recognized law, right; the Greeks constantly retained the authority of right
and law. If with this recognition they wanted nevertheless to assert their
advantage, every one his own, then they had to seek it in perversion of the
law, or intrigue. Alcibiades, an intriguer of genius, introduces the period of
Athenian "decay"; the Spartan Lysander and others show that intrigue had
become universally Greek. Greek *law*, on which the Greek *States* rested, had
to be perverted and undermined by the egoists within these States, and the
*States* went down that the *individuals* might become free, the Greek people
fell because the individuals cared less for this people than for themselves.
In general, all States, constitutions, churches, have sunk by the *secession*
of individuals; for the individual is the irreconcilable enemy of every
*generality*, every *tie*, *i.e.* every fetter. Yet people fancy to this day
that man needs "sacred ties": he, the deadly enemy of every "tie." The history
of the world shows that no tie has yet remained unrent, shows that man
tirelessly defends himself against ties of every sort; and yet, blinded,
people think up new ties again and again, and think, *e.g.*, that they have
arrived at the right one if one puts upon them the tie of a so-called free
constitution, a beautiful, constitutional tie; decoration ribbons, the ties of
confidence between

"-- -- --," do seem gradually to have become somewhat infirm, but people have
made no further progress than from apron-strings to garters and collars.

*Everything sacred is a tie, a fetter*.

Everything sacred is and must be perverted by perverters of the law; therefore
our present time has multitudes of such perverters in all spheres. They are
preparing the way for the break-up of law, for lawlessness.

Poor Athenians who are accused of pettifoggery and sophistry! poor Alcibiades,
of intrigue! Why, that was just your best point, your first step in freedom.
Your Æeschylus, Herodotus, etc., only wanted to have a free Greek *people;*
you were the first to surmise something of *your* freedom.

A people represses those who tower above *its majesty*, by ostracism against
too-powerful citizens, by the Inquisition against the heretics of the Church,
by the -- Inquisition against traitors in the State.

For the people is concerned only with its self-assertion; it demands
"patriotic self-sacrifice" from everybody. To it, accordingly, every one *in
himself* is indifferent, a nothing, and it cannot do, not even suffer, what
the individual and he alone must do -- to wit, *turn him to account*. Every
people, every State, is unjust toward the *egoist*.

As long as there still exists even one institution which the individual may
not dissolve, the ownness and self-appurtenance of Me is still very remote.
How can I, *e.g.* be free when I must bind myself by oath to a constitution, a
charter, a law, "vow body and soul" to my people? How can I be my own when my
faculties may develop only so far as they "do not disturb the harmony of
society" (Weitling)?

The fall of peoples and mankind will invite *me* to my rise.

Listen, even as I am writing this, the bells begin to sound, that they may
jingle in for tomorrow the festival of the thousand years' existence of our
dear Germany. Sound, sound its knell! You do sound solemn enough, as if your
tongue was moved by the presentiment that it is giving convoy to a corpse. The
German people and German peoples have behind them a history of a thousand
years: what a long life! O, go to rest, never to rise again -- that all may
become free whom you so long have held in fetters. -- The *people* is dead. --
Up with *me*!

O thou my much-tormented German people -- what was thy torment? It was the
torment of a thought that cannot create itself a body, the torment of a
walking spirit that dissolves into nothing at every cock-crow and yet pines
for deliverance and fulfillment. In me too thou hast lived long, thou dear --
thought, thou dear -- spook. Already I almost fancied I had found the word of
thy deliverance, discovered flesh and bones for the wandering spirit; then I
hear them sound, the bells that usher thee into eternal rest; then the last
hope fades out, then the notes of the last love die away, then I depart from
the desolate house of those who now are dead and enter at the door of the --
living one:

     For only he who is alive is in the right.

Farewell, thou dream of so many millions; farewell, thou who hast tyrannized
over thy children for a thousand years!

Tomorrow they carry thee to the grave; soon thy sisters, the peoples, will
follow thee. But, when they have all followed, then -- -- mankind is buried,
and I am my own, I am the laughing heir!

- --------

The word *Gesellschaft* (society) has its origin in the word *Sal* (hall). If
one hall encloses many persons, then the hall causes these persons to be in
society. They *are* in society, and at most constitute a parlor-society by
talking in the traditional forms of parlor speech. When it comes to real
*intercourse*, this is to be regarded as independent of society: it may occur
or be lacking, without altering the nature of what is named society. Those who
are in the hall are a society even as mute persons, or when they put each
other off solely with empty phrases of courtesy. Intercourse is mutuality, it
is the action, the *commercium*, of individuals; society is only community of
the hall, and even the statues of a museum-hall are in society, they are
"grouped." People are accustomed to say "they *haben inne*(45) this hall in
common," but the case is rather that the hall has us *inne* or in it. So far
the natural signification of the word society. In this it comes out that
society is not generated by me and you, but by a third factor which makes
associates out of us two, and that it is just this third factor that is the
creative one, that which creates society.

Just so a prison society or prison companionship (those who enjoy(46) the same
prison). Here we already hit upon a third factor fuller of significance than
was that merely local one, the hall. Prison no longer means a space only, but
a space with express reference to its inhabitants: for it is a prison only
through being destined for prisoners, without whom it would be a mere
building. What gives a common stamp to those who are gathered in it? Evidently
the prison, since it is only by means of the prison that they are prisoners.
What, then, determines the *manner* of life of the prison society? The prison!
What determines their intercourse? The prison too, perhaps? Certainly they can
enter upon intercourse only as prisoners, *i.e.* only so far as the prison
laws allow it; but that *they themselves* hold intercourse, I with you, this
the prison cannot bring to pass; on the contrary, it must have an eye to
guarding against such egoistic, purely personal intercourse (and only as such
is it really intercourse between me and you). That we *jointly* execute a job,
run a machine, effectuate anything in general -- for this a prison will indeed
provide; but that I forget that I am a prisoner, and engage in intercourse
with you who likewise disregard it, brings danger to the prison, and not only
cannot be caused by it, but must not even be permitted. For this reason the
saintly and moral-minded French chamber decides to introduce solitary
confinement, and other saints will do the like in order to cut off
"demoralizing intercourse." Imprisonment is the established and -- sacred
condition, to injure which no attempt must be made. The slightest push of that
kind is punishable, as is every uprising against a sacred thing by which man
is to be charmed and chained.

Like the hall, the prison does form a society, a companionship, a communion
(*e. g.* communion of labor), but no *intercourse*, no reciprocity, no
*union*. On the contrary, every union in the prison bears within it the
dangerous seed of a "plot," which under favorable circumstances might spring
up and bear fruit.

Yet one does not usually enter the prison voluntarily, and seldom remains in
it voluntarily either, but cherishes the egoistic desire for liberty. Here,
therefore, it sooner becomes manifest that personal intercourse is in hostile
relations to the prison society and tends to the dissolution of this very
society, this joint incarceration.

Let us therefore look about for such communions as, it seems, we remain in
gladly and voluntarily, without wanting to endanger them by our egoistic
impulses.

As a communion of the required sort the *family* offers itself in the first
place. Parents, husbands and wife, children, brothers and sisters, represent a
whole or form a family, for the further widening of which the collateral
relatives also may be made to serve if taken into account. The family is a
true communion only when the law of the family, piety(47) or family love, is
observed by its members. A son to whom parents, brothers, and sisters have
become indifferent *has been* a son; for, as the sonship no longer shows
itself efficacious, it has no greater significance than the long-past
connection of mother and child by the navel-string. That one has once lived in
this bodily juncture cannot as a fact be undone; and so far one remains
irrevocably this mother's son and the brother of the rest of her children; but
it would come to a lasting connection only by lasting piety, this spirit of
the family. Individuals are members of a family in the full sense only when
they make the *persistence* of the family their task; only as *conservative*
do they keep aloof from doubting their basis, the family. To every member of
the family one thing must be fixed and sacred -- *viz*., the family itself,
or, more expressively, piety. That the family is to *persist* remains to its
member, so long as he keeps himself free from that egoism which is hostile to
the family, an unassailable truth. In a word: -- If the family is sacred, then
nobody who belongs to it may secede from it; else he becomes a "criminal"
against the family: he may never pursue an interest hostile to the family, *e.
g.* form a misalliance. He who does this has "dishonored the family," "put it
to shame," etc.

Now, if in an individual the egoistic impulse has not force enough, he
complies and makes a marriage which suits the claims of the family, takes a
rank which harmonizes with its position, etc.; in short, he "does honor to the
family."

If, on the contrary, the egoistic blood flows fierily enough in his veins, he
prefers to become a "criminal" against the family and to throw off its laws.

Which of the two lies nearer my heart, the good of the family or my good? In
innumerable cases both go peacefully together; the advantage of the family is
at the same time mine, and *vice versa*. Then it is hard to decide whether I
am thinking *selfishly* or *for the common benefit*, and perhaps I
complacently flatter myself with my unselfishness. But there comes the day
when a necessity of choice makes me tremble, when I have it in mind to
dishonor my family tree, to affront parents, brothers, and kindred. What then?
Now it will appear how I am disposed at the bottom of my heart; now it will be
revealed whether piety ever stood above egoism for me, now the selfish one can
no longer skulk behind the semblance of unselfishness. A wish rises in my
soul, and, growing from hour to hour, becomes a passion. To whom does it occur
at first blush that the slightest thought which may result adversely to the
spirit of the family (piety) bears within it a transgression against this?
Nay, who at once, in the first moment, becomes completely conscious of the
matter? It happens so with Juliet in "Romeo and Juliet." The unruly passion
can at last no longer be tamed, and undermines the building of piety. You will
say, indeed, it is from self-will that the family casts out of its bosom those
wilful ones that grant more of a hearing to their passion than to piety; the
good Protestants used the same excuse with much success against the Catholics,
and believed in it themselves. But it is just a subterfuge to roll the fault
off oneself, nothing more. The Catholics had regard for the common bond of the
church, and thrust those heretics from them only because these did not have so
much regard for the bond of the church as to sacrifice their convictions to
it; the former, therefore, held the bond fast, because the bond, the Catholic
(*i.e.* common and united) church, was sacred to them; the latter, on the
contrary, disregarded the bond. Just so those who lack piety. They are not
thrust out, but thrust themselves out, prizing their passion, their
wilfulness, higher than the bond of the family.

But now sometimes a wish glimmers in a less passionate and wilful heart than
Juliet's. The pliable girl brings herself as a *sacrifice* to the peace of the
family. One might say that here too selfishness prevailed, for the decision
came from the feeling that the pliable girl felt herself more satisfied by the
unity of the family than by the fulfillment of her wish. That might be; but
what if there remained a sure sign that egoism had been sacrificed to piety?
What if, even after the wish that had been directed against the peace of the
family was sacrificed, it remained at least as a recollection of a "sacrifice"
brought to a sacred tie? What if the pliable girl were conscious of having
left her self-will unsatisfied and humbly subjected herself to a higher power?
Subjected and sacrificed, because the superstition of piety exercised its
dominion over her!

There egoism won, here piety wins and the egoistic heart bleeds; there egoism
was strong, here it was -- weak. But the weak, as we have long known, are the
- -- unselfish. For them, for these its weak members, the family cares, because
they *belong* to the family, do not belong to themselves and care for
themselves. This weakness Hegel, *e. g.* praises when he wants to have match-
making left to the choice of the parents.

As a sacred communion to which, among the rest, the individual owes obedience,
the family has the judicial function too vested in it; such a "family court"
is described *e. g.* in the *Cabanis* **of Wilibald Alexis. There the father,
in the name of the "family council," puts the intractable son among the
soldiers and thrusts him out of the family, in order to cleanse the smirched
family again by means of this act of punishment. -- The most consistent
development of family responsibility is contained in Chinese law, according to
which the whole family has to expiate the individual's fault.

Today, however, the arm of family power seldom reaches far enough to take
seriously in hand the punishment of apostates (in most cases the State
protects even against disinheritance). The criminal against the family
(family-criminal) flees into the domain of the State and is free, as the
State-criminal who gets away to America is no longer reached by the
punishments of his State. He who has shamed his family, the graceless son, is
protected against the family's punishment because the State, this protecting
lord, takes away from family punishment its "sacredness" and profanes it,
decreeing that it is only --"revenge": it restrains punishment, this sacred
family right, because before its, the State's, "sacredness" the subordinate
sacredness of the family always pales and loses its sanctity as soon as it
comes in conflict with this higher sacredness. Without the conflict, the State
lets pass the lesser sacredness of the family; but in the opposite case it
even commands crime against the family, charging, *e. g.*, the son to refuse
obedience to his parents as soon as they want to beguile him to a crime
against the State.

Well, the egoist has broken the ties of the family and found in the State a
lord to shelter him against the grievously affronted spirit of the family. But
where has he run now? Straight into a new *society*, in which his egoism is
awaited by the same snares and nets that it has just escaped. For the State is
likewise a society, not a union; it is the broadened *family* ("Father of the
Country -- Mother of the Country -- children of the country").

- --------

What is called a State is a tissue and plexus of dependence and adherence; it
is a *belonging together*, a holding together, in which those who are placed
together fit themselves to each other, or, in short, mutually depend on each
other: it is the *order* of this *dependence*. Suppose the king, whose
authority lends authority to all down to the beadle, should vanish: still all
in whom the will for order was awake would keep order erect against the
disorders of bestiality. If disorder were victorious, the State would be at an
end.

But is this thought of love, to fit ourselves to each other, to adhere to each
other and depend on each other, really capable of winning us? According to
this the State should be *love* realized, the being for each other and living
for each other of all. Is not self-will being lost while we attend to the will
for order? Will people not be satisfied when order is cared for by authority,
*i.e.* when authority sees to it that no one "gets in the way of" another;
when, then, the *herd* is judiciously distributed or ordered? Why, then
everything is in "the best order," and it is this best order that is called --
State!

Our societies and States *are* without our *making* them, are united without
our uniting, are predestined and established, or have an independent
standing(48) of their own, are the indissolubly established against us
egoists. The fight of the world today is, as it is said, directed against the
"established." Yet people are wont to misunderstand this as if it were only
that what is now established was to be exchanged for another, a better,
established system. But war might rather be declared against establishment
itself, the *State*, not a particular State, not any such thing as the mere
condition of the State at the time; it is not another State (*e. g.* a
"people's State") that men aim at, but their *union*, uniting, this ever-fluid
uniting of everything standing. -- A State exists even without my
co-operation: I am born in it, brought up in it, under obligations to it, and
must "do it homage."(49) It takes me up into its "favor,"(50) and I live by
its "grace." Thus the independent establishment of the State founds my lack of
independence; its condition as a "natural growth," its organism, demands that
my nature do not grow freely, but be cut to fit it. That *it* may be able to
unfold in natural growth, it applies to me the shears of "civilization"; it
gives me an education and culture adapted to it, not to me, and teaches me *e.
g.* to respect the laws, to refrain from injury to State property (*i.e.*
private property), to reverence divine and earthly highness, etc.; in short,
it teaches me to be -- *unpunishable*, "sacrificing" my ownness to
"sacredness" (everything possible is sacred; *e. g.* property, others' life,
etc.). In this consists the sort of civilization and culture that the State is
able to give me: it brings me up to be a "serviceable instrument," a
"serviceable member of society."

This every State must do, the people's State as well as the absolute or
constitutional one. It must do so as long as we rest in the error that it is
an *I*, as which it then applies to itself the name of a "moral, mystical, or
political person." I, who really am I, must pull off this lion-skin of the I
from the stalking thistle-eater. What manifold robbery have I not put up with
in the history of the world! There I let sun, moon, and stars, cats and
crocodiles, receive the honor of ranking as I; there Jehovah, Allah, and Our
Father came and were invested with the I; there families, tribes, peoples, and
at last actually mankind, came and were honored as I's; there the Church, the
State, came with the pretension to be I -- and I gazed calmly on all. What
wonder if then there was always a real I too that joined the company and
affirmed in my face that it was not my *you* but my real *I*. Why, *the* Son
of Man *par excellence* had done the like; why should not *a* son of man do it
too? So I saw my I always above me and outside me, and could never really come
to myself.

I never believed in myself; I never believed in my present, I saw myself only
in the future. The boy believes he will be a proper I, a proper fellow, only
when he has become a man; the man thinks, only in the other world will he be
something proper. And, to enter more closely upon reality at once, even the
best are today still persuading each other that one must have received into
himself the State, his people, mankind, and what not, in order to be a real I,
a "free burgher," a "citizen," a "free or true man"; they too see the truth
and reality of me in the reception of an alien I and devotion to it. And what
sort of an I? An I that is neither an I nor a you, a *fancied* I, a spook.

While in the Middle Ages the church could well brook many States living united
in it, the States learned after the Reformation, especially after the Thirty
Years' War, to tolerate many churches (confessions) gathering under one crown.
But all States are religious and, as the case may be, "Christian States," and
make it their task to force the intractable, the "egoists," under the bond of
the unnatural, *e. g.*, Christianize them. All arrangements of the Christian
State have the object of *Christianizing the people*. Thus the court has the
object of forcing people to justice, the school that of forcing them to mental
culture -- in short, the object of protecting those who act Christianly
against those who act un-Christianly, of bringing Christian action to
*dominion*, of making it *powerful*. Among these means of force the State
counted the *Church* too, it demanded a -- particular religion from everybody.
Dupin said lately against the clergy, "Instruction and education belong to the
State."

Certainly everything that regards the principle of morality is a State affair.
Hence it is that the Chinese State meddles so much in family concerns, and one
is nothing there if one is not first of all a good child to his parents.
Family concerns are altogether State concerns with us too, only that our State
- -- puts confidence in the families without painful oversight; it holds the
family bound by the marriage tie, and this tie cannot be broken without it.

But that the State makes me responsible for my principles, and demands certain
ones from me, might make me ask, what concern has it with the "wheel in my
head" (principle)? Very much, for the State is the -- *ruling principle*. It
is supposed that in divorce matters, in marriage law in general, the question
is of the proportion of rights between Church and States. Rather, the question
is of whether anything sacred is to rule over man, be it called faith or
ethical law (morality). The State behaves as the same ruler that the Church
was. The latter rests on godliness, the former on morality.

People talk of the tolerance, the leaving opposite tendencies free, etc., by
which civilized States are distinguished. Certainly some are strong enough to
look with complacency on even the most unrestrained meetings, while others
charge their catchpolls to go hunting for tobacco-pipes. Yet for one State as
for another the play of individuals among themselves, their buzzing to and
fro, their daily life, is an *incident* which it must be content to leave to
themselves because it can do nothing with this. Many, indeed, still strain out
gnats and swallow camels, while others are shrewder. Individuals are "freer"
in the latter, because less pestered. But *I* am free in *no* State. The
lauded tolerance of States is simply a tolerating of the "harmless," the "not
dangerous"; it is only elevation above pettymindedness, only a more estimable,
grander, prouder -- despotism. A certain State seemed for a while to mean to
be pretty well elevated above *literary* combats, which might be carried on
with all heat; England is elevated above *popular turmoil* and --
tobacco-smoking. But woe to the literature that deals blows at the State
itself, woe to the mobs that "endanger" the State. In that certain State they
dream of a "free science," in England of a "free popular life."

The State does let individuals *play* as freely as possible, only they must
not be in *earnest*, must not forget *it*. Man must not carry on intercourse
with man *unconcernedly*, not without "superior oversight and mediation." I
must not execute all that I am able to, but only so much as the State allows;
I must not turn to account *my* thoughts, nor *my* work, nor, in general,
anything of mine.

The State always has the sole purpose to limit, tame, subordinate, the
individual -- to make him subject to some *generality* or other; it lasts only
so long as the individual is not all in all, and it is only the clearly-marked
*restriction of me*, my limitation, my slavery. Never does a State aim to
bring in the free activity of individuals, but always that which is bound to
the *purpose of the State*. Through the State nothing *in common* comes to
pass either, as little as one can call a piece of cloth the common work of all
the individual parts of a machine; it is rather the work of the whole machine
as a unit, *machine work*. In the same style everything is done by the *State
machine* too; for it moves the clockwork of the individual minds, none of
which follow their own impulse. The State seeks to hinder every free activity
by its censorship, its supervision, its police, and holds this hindering to be
its duty, because it is in truth a duty of self-preservation. The State wants
to make something out of man, therefore there live in it only *made* men;
every one who wants to be his own self is its opponent and is nothing. "He is
nothing" means as much as, the State does not make use of him, grants him no
position, no office, no trade, etc.

Edgar Bauer,(51) in the *Liberale Bestrebungen* (vol. II, p.50), is still
dreaming of a "government which, proceeding out of the people, can never stand
in opposition to it." He does indeed (p.69) himself take back the word
"government": "In the republic no government at all obtains, but only an
executive authority. An authority which proceeds purely and alone out of the
people; which has not an independent power, independent principles,
independent officers, over against the people; but which has its foundation,
the fountain of its power and of its principles, in the sole, supreme
authority of the State, in the people. The concept government, therefore, is
not at all suitable in the people's State." But the thing remains the same.
That which has "proceeded, been founded, sprung from the fountain" becomes
something "independent" and, like a child delivered from the womb, enters upon
opposition at once. The government, if it were nothing independent and
opposing, would be nothing at all.

"In the free State there is no government," etc. (p.94). This surely means
that the people, when it is the *sovereign*, does not let itself be conducted
by a superior authority. Is it perchance different in absolute monarchy? Is
there *there* for the *sovereign*, perchance, a government standing over him?
*Over* the sovereign, be he called prince or people, there never stands a
government: that is understood of itself. But over *me* there will stand a
government in every "State," in the absolute as well as in the republican or
"free." I am as badly off in one as in the other.

The republic is nothing whatever but -- absolute monarchy; for it makes no
difference whether the monarch is called prince or people, both being a
"majesty." Constitutionalism itself proves that nobody is able and willing to
be only an instrument. The ministers domineer over their master the prince,
the deputies over their master the people. Here, then, the *parties* at least
are already free -- *videlicet*, the office-holders' party (so-called people's
party). The prince must conform to the will of the ministers, the people dance
to the pipe of the chambers. Constitutionalism is further than the republic,
because it is the *State* in incipient *dissolution*.

Edgar Bauer denies (p.56) that the people is a "personality" in the
constitutional State; *per contra*, then, in the republic? Well, in the
constitutional State the people is -- a *party*, and a party is surely a
"personality" if one is once resolved to talk of a "political" (p.76) moral
person anyhow. The fact is that a moral person, be it called people's party or
people or even "the Lord," is in no wise a person, but a spook.

Further, Edgar Bauer goes on (p.69): "guardianship is the characteristic of a
government." Truly, still more that of a people and "people's State"; it is
the characteristic of all *dominion*. A people's State, which "unites in
itself all completeness of power," the "absolute master," cannot let me become
powerful. And what a chimera, to be no longer willing to call the "people's
officials" "servants, instruments," because they "execute the free, rational
law-will of the people!" (p.73). He thinks (p.74): "Only by all official
circles subordinating themselves to the government's views can unity be
brought into the State"; but his "people's State" is to have "unity" too; how
will a lack of subordination be allowed there? subordination to the --
people's will.

"In the constitutional State it is the regent and his *disposition* that the
whole structure of government rests on in the end." (p. 130.) How would that
be otherwise in the "people's State"? Shall *I* not there be governed by the
people's *disposition* too, and does it make a difference *for me* whether I
see myself kept in dependence by the prince's disposition or by the people's
disposition, so-called "public opinion"? If dependence means as much as
"religious relation," as Edgar Bauer rightly alleges, then in the people's
State the people remains *for me* the superior power, the "majesty" (for God
and prince have their proper essence in "majesty") to which I stand in
religious relations. -- Like the sovereign regent, the sovereign people too
would be reached by no *law*. Edgar Bauer's whole attempt comes to a *change
of masters*. Instead of wanting to make the *people* free, he should have had
his mind on the sole realizable freedom, his own.

In the constitutional State *absolutism* itself has at last come in conflict
with itself, as it has been shattered into a duality; the government wants to
be absolute, and the people wants to be absolute. These two absolutes will
wear out against each other.

Edgar Bauer inveighs against the determination of the regent *by birth*, by
*chance*. But, when "the people" have become "the sole power in the State" (p.
132), have *we* not then in it a master from *chance?* Why, what is the
people? The people has always been only the *body* of the government: it is
many under one hat (a prince's hat) or many under one constitution. And the
constitution is the -- prince. Princes and peoples will persist so long as
both do not *col*lapse, *i. e.*, fall *together*. If under one constitution
there are many "peoples" -- as in the ancient Persian monarchy and today
- --then these "peoples" rank only as "provinces." For me the people is in any
case an --accidental power, a force of nature, an enemy that I must overcome.

What is one to think of under the name of an "organized" people (p. 132)? A
people "that no longer has a government," that governs itself. In which,
therefore, no ego stands out prominently; a people organized by ostracism. The
banishment of egos, ostracism, makes the people autocrat.

If you speak of the people, you must speak of the prince; for the people, if
it is to be a subject(52) and make history, must, like everything that acts,
have a *head*, its "supreme head." Weitling sets this forth in [*Die
Europäische*] Triarchie, and Proudhon declares, *"une société, pour ainsi dire
acéphale, ne peut vivre*."(53)

The *vox populi* is now always held up to us, and "public opinion" is to rule
our princes. Certainly the *vox populi* is at the same time *vox dei;* but is
either of any use, and is not the *vox principis* also *vox dei*?

At this point the "Nationals" may be brought to mind. To demand of the
thirty-eight States of Germany that they shall act as *one nation* can only be
put alongside the senseless desire that thirty-eight swarms of bees, led by
thirty-eight queen-bees, shall unite themselves into one swarm. *Bees* they
all remain; but it is not the bees as bees that belong together and can join
themselves together, it is only that the *subject* bees are connected with the
*ruling* queens. Bees and peoples are destitute of will, and the *instinct* of
their queens leads them.

If one were to point the bees to their beehood, in which at any rate they are
all equal to each other, one would be doing the same thing that they are now
doing so stormily in pointing the Germans to their Germanhood. Why, Germanhood
is just like beehood in this very thing, that it bears in itself the necessity
of cleavages and separations, yet without pushing on to the last separation,
where, with the complete carrying through of the process of separating, its
end appears: I mean, to the separation of man from man. Germanhood does indeed
divide itself into different peoples and tribes, *i.e.* beehives; but the
individual who has the quality of being a German is still as powerless as the
isolated bee. And yet only individuals can enter into union with each other,
and all alliances and leagues of peoples are and remain mechanical
compoundings, because those who come together, at least so far as the
"peoples" are regarded as the ones that have come together, are *destitute of
will*. Only with the last separation does separation itself end and change to
unification.

Now the Nationals are exerting themselves to set up the abstract, lifeless
unity of beehood; but the self-owned are going to fight for the unity willed
by their own will, for union. This is the token of all reactionary wishes,
that they want to set up something *general*, abstract, an empty, lifeless
*concept*, in distinction from which the self-owned aspire to relieve the
robust, lively *particular* from the trashy burden of generalities. The
reactionaries would be glad to smite a *people, a nation*, forth from the
earth; the self-owned have before their eyes only themselves. In essentials
the two efforts that are just now the order of the day - to wit, the
restoration of provincial rights and of the old tribal divisions (Franks,
Bavarians, Lusatia, etc.), and the restoration of the entire nationality --
coincide in one. But the Germans will come into unison, *i.e.* unite
*themselves*, only when they knock over their beehood as well as all the
beehives; in other words, when they are more than -- Germans: only then can
they form a "German Union." They must not want to turn back into their
nationality, into the womb, in order to be born again, but let every one turn
in to *himself*. How ridiculously sentimental when one German grasps another's
hand and presses it with sacred awe because "he too is a German!" With that he
is something great! But this will certainly still be thought touching as long
as people are enthusiastic for "brotherliness," *i.e.* as long as they have a
*"family disposition"*. From the superstition of "piety," from "brotherliness"
or "childlikeness" or however else the soft-hearted piety-phrases run -- from
the *family spirit* -- the Nationals, who want to have a great *family of
Germans*, cannot liberate themselves.

Aside from this, the so-called Nationals would only have to understand
themselves rightly in order to lift themselves out of their juncture with the
good-natured Teutomaniacs. For the uniting for material ends and interests,
which they demand of the Germans, comes to nothing else than a voluntary
union. Carrière, inspired, cries out,(54) "Railroads are to the more
penetrating eye the way to a *life of the people* *e. g.* has not yet anywhere
appeared in such significance." Quite right, it will be a life of the people
that has nowhere appeared, because it is not a -- life of the people. -- So
Carrière then combats himself (p. 10): "Pure humanity or manhood cannot be
better represented than by a people fulfilling its mission." Why, by this
nationality only is represented. "Washed-out generality is lower than the form
complete in itself, which is itself a whole, and lives as a living member of
the truly general, the organized." Why, the people is this very "washed-out
generality," and it is only a man that is the "form complete in itself."

The impersonality of what they call "people, nation," is clear also from this:
that a people which wants to bring its I into view to the best of its power
puts at its head the ruler *without will*. It finds itself in the alternative
either to be subjected to a prince who realizes only *himself, his individual
pleasure --* then it does not recognize in the "absolute master" its own will,
the so-called will of the people -- or to seat on the throne a prince who
gives effect to no will of his own -- then it has a prince *without will*,
whose place some ingenious clockwork would perhaps fill just as well. --
Therefore insight need go only a step farther; then it becomes clear of itself
that the I of the people is an impersonal, "spiritual" power, the -- law. The
people's I, therefore, is a -- spook, not an I. I am I only by this, that I
make myself; *i.e.* that it is not another who makes me, but I must be my own
work. But how is it with this I of the people? *Chance* plays it into the
people's hand, chance gives it this or that born lord, accidents procure it
the chosen one; he is not its (the *"sovereign"* people's) product, as I am
*my* product. Conceive of one wanting to talk you into believing that you were
not your I, but Tom or Jack was your I! But so it is with the people, and
rightly. For the people has an I as little as the eleven planets counted
together have an I, though they revolve around a common *center*.

Bailly's utterance is representative of the slave-disposition that folks
manifest before the sovereign people, as before the prince. "I have," says he,
"no longer any extra reason when the general reason has pronounced itself. My
first law was the nation's will; as soon as it had assembled I knew nothing
beyond its sovereign will." He would have no "extra reason," and yet this
extra reason alone accomplishes everything. Just so Mirabeau inveighs in the
words, "No power on earth has the *right* to say to the nation's
representatives, It is my will!"

As with the Greeks, there is now a wish to make man a *zoon politicon*, a
citizen of the State or political man. So he ranked for a long time as a
"citizen of heaven." But the Greek fell into ignominy along with his *State*,
the citizen of heaven likewise falls with heaven; we, on the other hand, are
not willing to go down along with the *people*, the nation and nationality,
not willing to be merely *political* men or politicians. Since the Revolution
they have striven to "make the people happy," and in making the people happy,
great, etc., they make us unhappy: the people's good hap is -- my mishap.

What empty talk the political liberals utter with emphatic decorum is well
seen again in Nauwerck's "On Taking Part in the State". There complaint is
made of those who are indifferent and do not take part, who are not in the
full sense citizens, and the author speaks as if one could not be man at all
if one did not take a lively part in State affairs, *i.e.* if one were not a
politician. In this he is right; for, if the State ranks as the warder of
everything "human," we can have nothing human without taking part in it. But
what does this make out against the egoist? Nothing at all, because the egoist
is to himself the warder of the human, and has nothing to say to the State
except "Get out of my sunshine." Only when the State comes in contact with his
ownness does the egoist take an active interest in it. If the condition of the
State does not bear hard on the closet-philosopher, is he to occupy himself
with it because it is his "most sacred duty?" So long as the State does
according to his wish, what need has he to look up from his studies? Let those
who from an interest of their own want to have conditions otherwise busy
themselves with them. Not now, nor evermore, will "sacred duty" bring folks to
reflect about the State -- as little as they become disciples of science,
artists, etc., from "sacred duty." Egoism alone can impel them to it, and will
as soon as things have become much worse. If you showed folks that their
egoism demanded that they busy themselves with State affairs, you would not
have to call on them long; if, on the other hand, you appeal to their love of
fatherland etc., you will long preach to deaf hearts in behalf of this
"service of love." Certainly, in your sense the egoists will not participate
in State affairs at all.

Nauwerck utters a genuine liberal phrase on p. 16: "Man completely fulfills
his calling only in feeling and knowing himself as a member of humanity, and
being active as such. The individual cannot realize the idea of *manhood* if
he does not stay himself upon all humanity, if he does not draw his powers
from it like Antaeus."

In the same place it is said: "Man's relation to the *res publica* is degraded
to a purely private matter by the theological view; is, accordingly, made away
with by denial." As if the political view did otherwise with religion! There
religion is a "private matter."

If, instead of "sacred duty," "man's destiny," the "calling to full manhood,"
and similar commandments, it were held up to people that their *self-interest*
was infringed on when they let everything in the State go as it goes, then,
without declamations, they would be addressed as one will have to address them
at the decisive moment if he wants to attain his end. Instead of this, the
theology-hating author says, "If there has ever been a time when the *State*
laid claim to all that are hers, such a time is ours. -- The thinking man sees
in participation in the theory and practice of the State a *duty*, one of the
most sacred duties that rest upon him" -- and then takes under closer
consideration the "unconditional necessity that everybody participate in the
State."

He in whose head or heart or both the *State* is seated, he who is possessed
by the State, or the *believer in the State*, is a politician, and remains
such to all eternity.

"The State is the most necessary means for the complete development of
mankind." It assuredly has been so as long as we wanted to develop mankind;
but, if we want to develop ourselves, it can be to us only a means of
hindrance.

Can State and people still be reformed and bettered now? As little as the
nobility, the clergy, the church, etc.: they can be abrogated, annihilated,
done away with, not reformed. Can I change a piece of nonsense into sense by
reforming it, or must I drop it outright?

Henceforth what is to be done is no longer about the *State* (the form of the
State, etc.), but about me. With this all questions about the prince's power,
the constitution, etc., sink into their true abyss and their true nothingness.
I, this nothing, shall put forth my *creations* from myself.

- --------

To the chapter of society belongs also "the party," whose praise has of late
been sung.

In the State the *party* is current. "Party, party, who should not join one!"
But the individual is *unique*,(55) not a member of the party. He unites
freely, and separates freely again. The party is nothing but a State in the
State, and in this smaller bee- State "peace" is also to rule just as in the
greater. The very people who cry loudest that there must be an *opposition* in
the State inveigh against every discord in the party. A proof that they too
want only a --State. All parties are shattered not against the State, but
against the ego.(56)

One hears nothing oftener now than the admonition to remain true to his party;
party men despise nothing so much as a mugwump. One must run with his party
through thick and thin, and unconditionally approve and represent its chief
principles. It does not indeed go quite so badly here as with closed
societies, because these bind their members to fixed laws or statutes (*e. g.*
the orders, the Society of Jesus, etc.). But yet the party ceases to be a
union at the same moment at which it makes certain principles *binding* and
wants to have them assured against attacks; but this moment is the very
birth-act of the party. As party it is already a *born society*, a dead union,
an idea that has become fixed. As party of absolutism it cannot will that its
members should doubt the irrefragable truth of this principle; they could
cherish this doubt only if they were egoistic enough to want still to be
something outside their party, *i.e.* non-partisans. Non-partisans they cannot
be as party-men, but only as egoists. If you are a Protestant and belong to
that party, you must only justify Protestantism, at most "purge" it, not
reject it; if you are a Christian and belong among men to the Christian party,
you cannot be beyond this as a member of this party, but only when your
egoism, *i.e.* non-partisanship, impels you to it. What exertions the
Christians, down to Hegel and the Communists, have put forth to make their
party strong! They stuck to it that Christianity must contain the eternal
truth, and that one needs only to get at it, make sure of it, and justify it.

In short, the party cannot bear non-partisanship, and it is in this that
egoism appears. What matters the party to me? I shall find enough anyhow who
*unite* with me without swearing allegiance to my flag.

He who passes over from one party to another is at once abused as a
"turncoat." Certainly *morality* demands that one stand by his party, and to
become apostate from it is to spot oneself with the stain of "faithlessness";
but ownness knows no commandment of "faithlessness"; adhesion, etc., ownness
permits everything, even apostasy, defection. Unconsciously even the moral
themselves let themselves be led by this principle when they have to judge one
who passes over to *their* party -- nay, they are likely to be making
proselytes; they should only at the same time acquire a consciousness of the
fact that one must commit *immoral* actions in order to commit his own --
*i.e.* here, that one must break faith, yes, even his oath, in order to
determine himself instead of being determined by moral considerations. In the
eyes of people of strict moral judgment an apostate always shimmers in
equivocal colors, and will not easily obtain their confidence; for there
sticks to him the taint of "faithlessness," *i.e.* of an immorality. In the
lower man this view is found almost generally; advanced thinkers fall here
too, as always, into an uncertainty and bewilderment, and the contradiction
necessarily founded in the principle of morality does not, on account of the
confusion of their concepts, come clearly to their consciousness. They do not
venture to call the apostate downright immoral, because they themselves entice
to apostasy, to defection from one religion to another, etc.; still, they
cannot give up the standpoint of morality either. And yet here the occasion
was to be seized to step outside of morality.

Are the Own or Unique(57) perchance a party? How could they be *own* if they
were *e. g.* *belonged* to a party?

Or is one to hold with no party? In the very act of joining them and entering
their circle one forms a union with them that lasts as long as party and I
pursue one and the same goal. But today I still share the party's tendency, as
by tomorrow I can do so no longer and I become "untrue" to it. The party has
nothing binding (obligatory) for me, and I do not have respect for it; if it
no longer pleases me, I become its foe.

In every party that cares for itself and its persistence, the members are
unfree (or better, unown) in that degree, they lack egoism in that degree, in
which they serve this desire of the party. The independence of the party
conditions the lack of independence in the party- members.

A party, of whatever kind it may be, can never do without a *confession of
faith*. For those who belong to the party must *believe* in its principle, it
must not be brought in doubt or put in question by them, it must be the
certain, indubitable thing for the party-member. That is: One must belong to a
party body and soul, else one is not truly a party-man, but more or less -- an
egoist. Harbor a doubt of Christianity, and you are already no longer a true
Christian, you have lifted yourself to the "effrontery" of putting a question
beyond it and haling Christianity before your egoistic judgment-seat. You have
- -- *sinned* against Christianity, this party cause (for it is surely not *e.
g.* a cause for the Jews, another party.) But well for you if you do not let
yourself be affrighted: your effrontery helps you to ownness.

So then an egoist could never embrace a party or take up with a party? Oh,
yes, only he cannot let himself be embraced and taken up by the party. For him
the party remains all the time nothing but a gathering: he is one of the
party, he takes part.

- --------

The best State will clearly be that which has the most loyal citizens, and the
more the devoted mind for *legality* is lost, so much the more will the State,
this system of morality, this moral life itself, be diminished in force and
quality. With the "good citizens" the good State too perishes and dissolves
into anarchy and lawlessness. "Respect for the law!" By this cement the total
of the State is held together. "The law is *sacred*, and he who affronts it a
*criminal"*. Without crime no State: the moral world -- and this the State is
- -- is crammed full of scamps, cheats, liars, thieves, etc. Since the State is
the "lordship of law," its hierarchy, it follows that the egoist, in all cases
where *his* advantage runs against the State's, can satisfy himself only by
crime.

The State cannot give up the claim that its *laws* and ordinances are
*sacred*.(58) At this the individual ranks as the *unholy*(59) (barbarian,
natural man, "egoist") over against the State, exactly as he was once regarded
by the Church; before the individual the State takes on the nimbus of a
saint.(60) Thus it issues a law against dueling. Two men who are both at one
in this, that they are willing to stake their life for a cause (no matter
what), are not to be allowed this, because the State will not have it: it
imposes a penalty on it. Where is the liberty of self-determination then? It
is at once quite another situation if, as *e. g.* in North America, society
determines to let the duelists bear certain evil *consequences* of their act,
*e. g.* withdrawal of the credit hitherto enjoyed. To refuse credit is
everybody's affair, and, if a society wants to withdraw it for this or that
reason, the man who is hit cannot therefore complain of encroachment on his
liberty: the society is simply availing itself of its own liberty. That is no
penalty for sin, no penalty for a *crime*. The duel is no crime there, but
only an act against which the society adopts counter-measures, resolves on a
*defense*. The State, on the contrary, stamps the duel as a crime, *i.e.* as
an injury to its sacred law: it makes it a *criminal case*. The society leaves
it to the individual's decision whether he will draw upon himself evil
consequences and inconveniences by his mode of action, and hereby recognizes
his free decision; the State behaves in exactly the reverse way, denying all
right to the individual's decision and, instead, ascribing the sole right to
its own decision, the law of the State, so that he who transgresses the
State's commandment is looked upon as if he were acting against God's
commandment -- a view which likewise was once maintained by the Church. Here
God is the Holy in and of himself, and the commandments of the Church, as of
the State, are the commandments of this Holy One, which he transmits to the
world through his anointed and Lords-by-the-Grace-of-God. If the Church had
*deadly sins*, the State has *capital crimes;* if the one had *heretics*, the
other has *traitors;* the one *ecclesiastical penalties*, the other *criminal
penalties;* the one *inquisitorial* processes, the other *fiscal;* in short,
there sins, here crimes, there inquisition and here -- inquisition. Will the
sanctity of the State not fall like the Church's? The awe of its laws, the
reverence for its highness, the humility of its "subjects," will this remain?
Will the "saint's" face not be stripped of its adornment?

What a folly, to ask of the State's authority that it should enter into an
honourable fight with the individual, and, as they express themselves in the
matter of freedom of the press, share sun and wind equally! If the State, this
thought, is to be a *de facto* power, it simply must be a superior power
against the individual. The State is "sacred" and must not expose itself to
the "impudent attacks" of individuals. If the State is *sacred*, there must be
censorship. The political liberals admit the former and dispute the inference.
But in any case they concede repressive measures to it, for -- they stick to
this, that State is *more* than the individual and exercises a justified
revenge, called punishment.

*Punishment* has a meaning only when it is to afford expiation for the
injuring of a*sacred* thing. If something is sacred to any one, he certainly
deserves punishment when he acts as its enemy. A man who lets a man's life
continue in existence *because* to him it is sacred and he has a *dread* of
touching it is simply a -- *religious* man.

Weitling lays crime at the door of "social disorder," and lives in the
expectation that under Communistic arrangements crimes will become impossible,
because the temptations to them, *e. g.* money, fall away. As, however, his
organized society is also exalted into a sacred and inviolable one, he
miscalculates in that good-hearted opinion. *e. g.* with their mouth professed
allegiance to the Communistic society, but worked underhand for its ruin,
would not be lacking. Besides, Weitling has to keep on with "curative means
against the natural remainder of human diseases and weaknesses," and "curative
means" always announce to begin with that individuals will be looked upon as
"called" to a particular "salvation" and hence treated according to the
requirements of this "human calling." *Curative means* or *healing* is only
the reverse side of *punishment*, the *theory of cure* runs parallel with the
*theory of punishment;* if the latter sees in an action a sin against right,
the former takes it for a sin of the man *against himself*, as a decadence
from his health. But the correct thing is that I regard it either as an action
that *suits me* or as one that *does not suit me*, as hostile or friendly to
*me*, *i.e.* that I treat it as my *property*, which I cherish or demolish.
"Crime" or "disease" are not either of them an *egoistic* view of the matter,
*i.e.* a judgment *starting from me*, but starting from *another --* to wit,
whether it injures *right*, general right, or the *health* partly of the
individual (the sick one), partly of the generality (*society*). "Crime" is
treated inexorably, "disease" with "loving gentleness, compassion," etc.

Punishment follows crime. If crime falls because the sacred vanishes,
punishment must not less be drawn into its fall; for it too has significance
only over against something sacred. Ecclesiastical punishments have been
abolished. Why? Because how one behaves toward the "holy God" is his own
affair. But, as this one punishment, *ecclesiastical punishment*, has fallen,
so all *punishments* must fall. As sin against the so-called God is a man's
own affair, so is that against every kind of the so-called sacred. According
to our theories of penal law, with whose "improvement in conformity to the
times" people are tormenting themselves in vain, they want to *punish* men for
this or that "inhumanity"; and therein they make the silliness of these
theories especially plain by their consistency, hanging the little thieves and
letting the big ones run. For injury to property they have the house of
correction, and for "violence to thought," suppression of "natural rights of
man," only --representations and petitions.

The criminal code has continued existence only through the sacred, and
perishes of itself if punishment is given up. Now they want to create
everywhere a new penal law, without indulging in a misgiving about punishment
itself. But it is exactly punishment that must make room for satisfaction,
which, again, cannot aim at satisfying right or justice, but at procuring *us*
a satisfactory outcome. If one does to us what we *will not put up with*, we
break his power and bring our own to bear: we satisfy *ourselves* on him, and
do not fall into the folly of wanting to satisfy right (the spook). It is not
the *sacred* that is to defend itself against man, but man against man; as
*God* too, you know, no longer defends himself against man, God to whom
formerly (and in part, indeed, even now) all the "servants of God" offered
their hands to punish the blasphemer, as they still at this very day lend
their hands to the sacred. This devotion to the sacred brings it to pass also
that, without lively participation of one's own, one only delivers misdoers
into the hands of the police and courts: a non-participating making over to
the authorities, "who, of course, will best administer sacred matters." The
people is quite crazy for hounding the police on against everything that seems
to it to be immoral, often only unseemly, and this popular rage for the moral
protects the police institution more than the government could in any way
protect it.

In crime the egoist has hitherto asserted himself and mocked at the sacred;
the break with the sacred, or rather of the sacred, may become general. A
revolution never returns, but a mighty, reckless, shameless, conscienceless.
proud --*crime*, does it not rumble in distant thunders, and do you not see
how the sky grows presciently silent and gloomy?

- --------

He who refuses to spend his powers for such limited societies as family,
party, nation, is still always longing for a worthier society, and thinks he
has found the true object of love, perhaps, in "human society" or "mankind,"
to sacrifice himself to which constitutes his honor; from now on he "lives for
and serves *mankind*."

*People* is the name of the body, *State* of the spirit, of that *ruling
person* that has hitherto suppressed me. Some have wanted to transfigure
peoples and States by broadening them out to "mankind" and "general reason";
but servitude would only become still more intense with this widening, and
philanthropists and humanitarians are as absolute masters as politicians and
diplomats.

Modern critics inveigh against religion because it sets God, the divine,
moral, etc., *outside* of man, or makes them something objective, in
opposition to which the critics rather transfer these very subjects *into*
man. But those critics none the less fall into the proper error of religion,
to give man a "destiny," in that they too want to have him divine, human, and
the like: morality, freedom and humanity, etc., are his essence. And, like
religion politics too wanted to *"educate"* man, to bring him to the
realization of his "essence," his "destiny," to *make* something out of him --
to wit, a "true man," the one in the form of the "true believer," the other in
that of the "true citizen or subject." In fact, it comes to the same whether
one calls the destiny the divine or human.

Under religion and politics man finds himself at the standpoint of *should: he
should* become this and that, should be so and so. With this postulate, this
commandment, every one steps not only in front of another but also in front of
himself. Those critics say: You should be a whole, free man. Thus they too
stand in the temptation to proclaim a new *religion*, to set up a new
absolute, an ideal -- to wit, freedom. Men *should* be free. Then there might
even arise *missionaries* of freedom, as Christianity, in the conviction that
all were properly destined to become Christians, sent out missionaries of the
faith. Freedom would then (as have hitherto faith as Church, morality as
State) constitute itself as a new *community* and carry on a like "propaganda"
therefrom. Certainly no objection can be raised against a getting together;
but so much the more must one oppose every renewal of the old *care* for us,
of culture directed toward an end -- in short, the principle of *making
something* out of us, no matter whether Christians, subjects, or freemen and
men.

One may well say with Feuerbach and others that religion has displaced the
human from man, and has transferred it so into another world that,
unattainable, it went on with its own existence there as something personal in
itself, as a "God": but the error of religion is by no means exhausted with
this. One might very well let fall the personality of the displaced human,
might transform God into the divine, and still remain religious. For the
religious consists in discontent with the *present* men, in the setting up of
a "perfection" to be striven for, in "man wrestling for his completion."(61)
("Ye therefore *should* be perfect as your father in heaven is perfect." Matt.
5, 48): it consists in the fixation of an ideal, an absolute. Perfection is
the "supreme good," the *finis bonorum;* every one's ideal is the perfect man,
the true, the free man, etc.

The efforts of modern times aim to set up the ideal of the "free man." If one
could find it, there would be a new -- religion, because a new ideal; there
would be a new longing, a new torment, a new devotion, a new deity, a new
contrition.

With the ideal of "absolute liberty," the same turmoil is made as with
everything absolute, and according to Hess, *e. g.*, it is said to "be
realizable in absolute human society."(62) Nay, this realization is
immediately afterward styled a "vocation"; just so he then defines liberty as
"morality": the kingdom of "justice" (equality) and "morality" (*i.e.*
liberty) is to begin, etc.

Ridiculous is he who, while fellows of his tribe, family, nation, rank high,
is -- nothing but "puffed up" over the merit of his fellows; but blinded too
is he who wants only to be "man." Neither of them puts his worth in
*exclusiveness*, but in *connectedness*, or in the "tie" that conjoins him
with others, in the ties of blood, of nationality, of humanity.

Through the "Nationals" of today the conflict has again been stirred up
between those who think themselves to have merely human blood and human ties
of blood, and the others who brag of their special blood and the special ties
of blood.

If we disregard the fact that pride may mean conceit, and take it for
consciousness alone, there is found to be a vast difference between pride in
"belonging to" a nation and therefore being its property, and that in calling
a nationality one's property. Nationality is my quality, but the nation my
owner and mistress. If you have bodily strength, you can apply it at a
suitable place and have a self-consciousness or pride of it; if, on the
contrary, your strong body has you, then it pricks you everywhere, and at the
most unsuitable place, to show its strength: you can give nobody your hand
without squeezing his.

The perception that one is more than a member of the family, more than a
fellow of the tribe, more than an individual of the people, has finally led to
saying, one is more than all this because one is man, or, the man is more than
the Jew, German, etc. "Therefore be every one wholly and solely -- man." Could
one not rather say: Because we are more than what has been stated, therefore
we will be this, as well as that "more" also? Man and Germans, then, man and
Guelph, etc.? The Nationals are in the right; one cannot deny his nationality:
and the humanitarians are in the right; one must not remain in the narrowness
of the national. In *uniqueness*(63) the contradiction is solved; the national
is my quality. But I am not swallowed up in my quality -- as the human too is
my quality, but I give to man his existence first through my uniqueness.

History seeks for Man: but he is I, you, we. Sought as a mysterious *essence*,
as the divine, first as *God*, then as Man (humanity, humaneness, and
mankind), he is found as the individual, the finite, the unique one.

I am owner of humanity, am humanity, and do nothing for the good of another
humanity. Fool, you who are a unique humanity, that you make a merit of
wanting to live for another than you are.

The hitherto-considered relation of me to the *world of men* offers such a
wealth of phenomena that it will have to be taken up again and again on other
occasions, but here, where it was only to have its chief outlines made clear
to the eye, it must be broken off to make place for an apprehension of two
other sides toward which it radiates. For, as I find myself in relation not
merely to men so far as they present in themselves the concept "man" or are
children of men (children of *Man*, as children of God are spoken of), but
also to that which they have of man and call their own, and as therefore I
relate myself not only to that which they *are* through man, but also to their
human *possessions:* so, besides the world of men, the world of the senses and
of ideas will have to be included in our survey, and somewhat said of what men
call their own of sensuous goods, and of spiritual as well.

According as one had developed and clearly grasped the concept of man, he gave
it to us to respect as this or that *person of respect*, and from the broadest
understanding of this concept there proceeded at last the command "to respect
Man in every one." But if I respect Man, my respect must likewise extend to
the human, or what is Man's.

Men have somewhat of their *own*, and *I* am to recognize this own and hold it
sacred. Their own consists partly in outward, partly in inward *possessions*.
The former are things, the latter spiritualities, thoughts, convictions, noble
feelings, etc. But I am always to respect only *rightful* or *human*
possessions: the wrongful and unhuman I need not spare, for only *Man's* own
is men's real own. An inward possession of this sort is, *e. g.*, religion;
because *religion* is free, *i. e.* is Man's, *I* must not strike at it. Just
so *honor* is an inward possession; it is free and must not be struck at my
me. (Action for insult, caricatures, etc.) Religion and honor are "spiritual
property." In tangible property the person stands foremost: my person is my
first property. Hence freedom of the person; but only the *rightful* or human
person is free, the other is locked up. Your life is your property; but it is
sacred for men only if it is not that of an inhuman monster.

What a man as such cannot defend of bodily goods, we may take from him: this
is the meaning of competition, of freedom of occupation. What he cannot defend
of spiritual goods falls a prey to us likewise: so far goes the liberty of
discussion, of science, of criticism.

But *consecrated* goods are inviolable. Consecrated and guarantied by whom?
Proximately by the State, society, but properly by man or the "concept," the
"concept of the thing"; for the concept of consecrated goods is this, that
they are truly human, or rather that the holder possesses them as man and not
as un-man.(64)

On the spiritual side man's faith is such goods, his honor, his moral feeling
- -- yes, his feeling of decency, modesty, etc. Actions (speeches, writings)
that touch honor are punishable; attacks on "the foundations of all religion";
attacks on political faith; in short, attacks on everything that a man
"rightly" has.

How far critical liberalism would extend the sanctity of goods -- on this
point it has not yet made any pronouncement, and doubtless fancies itself to
be ill-disposed toward all sanctity; but, as it combats egoism, it must set
limits to it, and must not let the un-man pounce on the human. To its
theoretical contempt for the "masses" there must correspond a practical snub
if it should get into power.

What extension the concept "man" receives, and what comes to the individual
man through it -- what, therefore, man and the human are -- on this point the
various grades of liberalism differ, and the political, the social, the humane
man are each always claiming more than the other for "man." He who has best
grasped this concept knows best what is "man's." The State still grasps this
concept in political restriction, society in social; mankind, so it is said,
is the first to comprehend it entirely, or "the history of mankind develops
it." But, if "man is discovered," then we know also what pertains to man as
his own, man's property, the human.

But let the individual man lay claim to ever so many rights because Man or the
concept man "entitles" him to them, because his being man does it: what do I
care for his right and his claim? If he has his right only from Man and does
not have it from *me*, then for *me* he has no right. His life, *e. g.*,
counts to *me* only for what it is *worth* to *me*. I respect neither a
so-called right of property (or his claim to tangible goods) nor yet his right
to the "sanctuary of his inner nature" (or his right to have the spiritual
goods and divinities, his gods, remain un-aggrieved). His goods, the sensuous
as well as the spiritual, are *mine*, and I dispose of them as proprietor, in
the measure of my -- might.

In the *property question* lies a broader meaning than the limited statement
of the question allows to be brought out. Referred solely to what men call our
possessions, it is capable of no solution; the decision is to be found in him
"from whom we have everything." Property depends on the *owner*.

The Revolution directed its weapons against everything which came "from the
grace of God," *e. g.*, against divine right, in whose place the human was
confirmed. To that which is granted by the grace of God, there is opposed that
which is derived "from the essence of man."

Now, as men's relation to each other, in opposition to the religious dogma
which commands a "Love one another for God's sake," had to receive its human
position by a "Love each other for man's sake," so the revolutionary teaching
could not do otherwise than, first, as to what concerns the relation of men to
the things of this world, settle it that the world, which hitherto was
arranged according to God's ordinance, henceforth belongs to "Man."

The world belongs to "Man," and is to be respected by me as his property.

Property is what is mine!

Property in the civic sense means *sacred* property, such that I must
*respect* your property. "Respect for property!" Hence the politicians would
like to have every one possess his little bit of property, and they have in
part brought about an incredible parcellation by this effort. Each must have
his bone on which he may find something to bite.

The position of affairs is different in the egoistic sense. I do not step
shyly back from your property, but look upon it always as my property, in
which I need to "respect" nothing. Pray do the like with what you call my
property!

With this view we shall most easily come to an understanding with each other.

The political liberals are anxious that, if possible, all servitudes be
dissolved, and every one be free lord on his ground, even if this ground has
only so much area as can have its requirements adequately filled by the manure
of one person. (The farmer in the story married even in his old age "that he
might profit by his wife's dung.") Be it ever so little, if one only has
somewhat of his own -- to wit, a *respected* property! The more such owners,
such cotters,(65) the more "free people and good patriots" has the State.

Political liberalism, like everything religious, counts on *respect*,
humaneness, the virtues of love. Therefore does it live in incessant vexation.
For in practice people respect nothing, and every day the small possessions
are bought up again by greater proprietors, and the "free people" change into
day- laborers.

If, on the contrary, the "small proprietors" had reflected that the great
property was also theirs, they would not have respectfully shut themselves out
from it, and would not have been shut out.

Property as the civic liberals understand it deserves the attacks of the
Communists and Proudhon: it is untenable, because the civic proprietor is in
truth nothing but a property-less man, one who is everywhere *shut out*.
Instead of owning the world, as he might, he does not own even the paltry
point on which he turns around.

Proudhon wants not the *propriétaire* but the *possesseur* or
*usufruitier*.(66) What does that mean? He wants no one to own the land; but
the benefit of it -- even though one were allowed only the hundredth part of
this benefit, this fruit -- is at any rate one's property, which he can
dispose of at will. He who has only the benefit of a field is assuredly not
the proprietor of it; still less he who, as Proudhon would have it, must give
up so much of this benefit as is not required for his wants; but he is the
proprietor of the share that is left him. Proudhon, therefore, denies only
such and such property, not *property* itself. If we want no longer to leave
the land to the landed proprietors, but to appropriate it to *ourselves*, we
unite ourselves to this end, form a union, a *société*, that makes *itself*
proprietor; if we have good luck in this, then those persons cease to be
landed proprietors. And, as from the land, so we can drive them out of many
another property yet, in order to make it *our* property, the property of the
- -- *conquerors*. The conquerors form a society which one may imagine so great
that it by degrees embraces all humanity; but so-called humanity too is as
such only a thought (spook); the individuals are its reality. And these
individuals as a collective (mass will treat land and earth not less
arbitrarily than an isolated individual or so-called *propriétaire*. Even so,
therefore, *property* remains standing, and that as exclusive" too, in that
*humanity*, this great society, excludes the *individual* from its property
(perhaps only leases to him, gives his as a fief, a piece of it) as it besides
excludes everything that is not humanity, *e. g.* does not allow animals to
have property. -- So too it will remain, and will grow to be. That in which
*all* want to have a *share* will be withdrawn from that individual who wants
to have it for himself alone: it is made a *common estate*. As a *common
estate* every one has his *share* in it, and this share is his *property*.
Why, so in our old relations a house which belongs to five heirs is their
common estate; but the fifth part of the revenue is, each one's property.
Proudhon might spare his prolix pathos if he said: "There are some things that
belong only to a few, and to which we others will from now on lay claim or --
siege. Let us take them, because one comes to property by taking, and the
property of which for the present we are still deprived came to the
proprietors likewise only by taking. It can be utilized better if it is in the
hands of us *all* than if the few control it. Let us therefore associate
ourselves for the purpose of this robbery (*vol*)." -- Instead of this, he
tries to get us to believe that society is the original possessor and the sole
proprietor, of imprescriptible right; against it the so-called proprietors
have become thieves (*La propriété c'est le vol*); if it now deprives of his
property the present proprietor, it robs him of nothing, as it is only
availing itself of its imprescriptible right. -- So far one comes with the
spook of society as a *moral person*. On the contrary, what man can obtain
belongs to him: the world belongs to *me*. Do you say anything else by your
opposite proposition? "The world belongs to *all"*? All are I and again I,
etc. But you make out of the "all" a spook, and make it sacred, so that then
the "all" become the individual's fearful *master*. Then the ghost of "right"
places itself on their side.

Proudhon, like the Communists, fights against *egoism*. Therefore they are
continuations and consistent carryings-out of the Christian principle, the
principle of love, of sacrifice for something general, something alien. They
complete in property, *e. g.,* only what has long been extant as a matter of
fact -- to wit, the propertylessness of the individual. When the laws says,
*Ad reges potestas omnium pertinet, ad singulos proprietas; omnia rex imperio
possidet, singuli dominio*, this means: The king is proprietor, for he alone
can control and dispose of "everything," he has *potestas* and *imperium* over
it. The Communists make this clearer, transferring that *imperium* to the
"society of all." Therefore: Because enemies of egoism, they are on that
account -- Christians, or, more generally speaking, religious men, believers
in ghosts, dependents, servants of some generality (God, society, etc.). In
this too Proudhon is like the Christians, that he ascribes to God that which
he denies to men. He names him (*e. g.* page 90) the Propriétaire of the
earth. Herewith he proves that he cannot think away the *proprietor as such;*
he comes to a proprietor at last, but removes him to the other world.

Neither God nor Man ("human society") is proprietor, but the individual.

- --------

Proudhon (Weitling too) thinks he is telling the worst about property when he
calls it theft (*vol*). Passing quite over the embarrassing question, what
well-founded objection could be made against theft, we only ask: Is the
concept "theft" at all possible unless one allows validity to the concept
"property"? How can one steal if property is not already extant? What belongs
to no one cannot be *stolen;* the water that one draws out of the sea he does
*not steal*. Accordingly property is not theft, but a theft becomes possible
only through property. Weitling has to come to this too, as he does regard
everything as the *property of all:* if something is "the property of all,"
then indeed the individual who appropriates it to himself steals.

Private property lives by grace of the *law*. Only in the law has it its
warrant -- for possession is not yet property, it becomes "mine" only by
assent of the law; it is not a fact, not *un fait* as Proudhon thinks, but a
fiction, a thought. This is legal property, legitimate property, guarantied
property. It is mine not through *me* but through the -- *law*.

Nevertheless, property is the expression for *unlimited dominion* over
somewhat (thing, beast, man) which "I can judge and dispose of as seems good
to me." According to Roman law, indeed, *jus utendi et abutendi re sua,
quatenus juris ratio patitur*, an *exclusive* and *unlimited right;* but
property is conditioned by might. What I have in my power, that is my own. So
long as I assert myself as holder, I am the proprietor of the thing; if it
gets away from me again, no matter by what power, *e. g.* through my
recognition of a title of others to the thing -- then the property is extinct.
Thus property and possession coincide. It is not a right lying outside my
might that legitimizes me, but solely my might: if I no longer have this, the
thing vanishes away from me. When the Romans no longer had any might against
the Germans, the world-empire of Rome *belonged* to the latter, and it would
sound ridiculous to insist that the Romans had nevertheless remained properly
the proprietors. Whoever knows how to take and to defend the thing, to him it
belongs till it is again taken from him, as liberty belongs to him who *takes*
it.--

Only might decides about property, and, as the State (no matter whether State
or well-to-do citizens or of ragamuffins or of men in the absolute) is the
sole mighty one, it alone is proprietor; I, the unique,(67) have nothing, and
am only enfeoffed, am vassal and as such, servitor. Under the dominion of the
State there is no property of *mine*.

I want to raise the value of myself, the value of ownness, and should I
cheapen property? No, as I was not respected hitherto because people, mankind,
and a thousand other generalities were put higher, so property too has to this
day not yet been recognized in its full value. Property too was only the
property of a ghost, *e. g.* the people's property; my whole existence
"belonged to the fatherland"; *I* belonged to the fatherland, the people, the
State, and therefore also everything that I called *my own*. It is demanded of
States that they make away with pauperism. It seems to me this is asking that
the State should cut off its own head and lay it at its feet; for so long as
the State is the ego the individual ego must remain a poor devil, a non-ego.
The State has an interest only in being itself rich; whether Michael is rich
and Peter poor is alike to it; Peter might also be rich and Michael poor. It
looks on indifferently as one grows poor and the other rich, unruffled by this
alternation. As *individuals* they are really equal before its face; in this
it is just: before it both of them are -- nothing, as we "are altogether
sinners before God"; on the other hand, it has a very great interest in this,
that those individuals who make it their ego should have a part in *its*
wealth; it makes them partakers in *its property*. Through property, with
which it rewards the individuals, it tames them; but this remains *its*
property, and every one has the usufruct of it only so long as he bears in
himself the ego of the State, or is a "loyal member of society"; in the
opposite case the property is confiscated, or made to melt away by vexatious
lawsuits. The property, then, is and remains *State property*, not property of
the ego. That the State does not arbitrarily deprive the individual of what he
has from the State means simply that the State does not rob itself. He who is
State-ego, *i.e.* a good citizen or subject, holds his fief undisturbed as
*such an ego*, not as being an ego of his own. According to the code, property
is what I call mine "by virtue of God and law." But it is mine by virtue of
God and law only so long as -- the State has nothing against it.

In expropriations, disarmaments, etc. (as, when the exchequer confiscates
inheritances if the heirs do not put in an appearance early enough) how
plainly the else-veiled principle that only the *people*, "the State," is
proprietor, while the individual is feoffee, strikes the eye!

The State, I mean to say, cannot intend that anybody should *for his own sake*
have property or actually be rich, nay, even well-to-do; it can acknowledge
nothing, yield nothing, grant nothing to me as me. The State cannot check
pauperism, because the poverty of possession is a poverty of me. He who *is*
nothing but what chance or another -- to wit, the State -- makes out of him
also *has* quite rightly nothing but what another gives him. And this other
will *give* him only what he *deserves*, *i.e.* what he is worth by *service*.
It is not he that realizes a value from himself; the State realizes a value
from him.

National economy busies itself much with this subject. It lies far out beyond
the "national," however, and goes beyond the concepts and horizon of the
State, which knows only State property and can distribute nothing else. For
this reason it binds the possessions of property to *conditions --* as it
binds everything to them, *e. g.* marriage, allowing validity only to the
marriage sanctioned by it, and wresting this out of my power. But property is
my property only when I hold it *unconditionally* : only I, an *unconditional*
ego, have property, enter a relation of love, carry on free trade.

The State has no anxiety about me and mine, but about itself and its: I count
for something to it only as its *child*, as "a son of the country"; as *ego* I
am nothing at all for it. For the State's understanding, what befalls me as
ego is something accidental, my wealth as well as my impoverishment. But, if I
with all that is mine am an accident in the State's eyes, this proves that it
cannot comprehend *me: I* go beyond its concepts, or, its understanding is too
limited to comprehend me. Therefore it cannot do anything for me either.

Pauperism is the *valuelessness of me*, the phenomenon that I cannot realize
value from myself. For this reason State and pauperism are one and the same.
The State does not let me come to my value, and continues in existence only
through my valuelessness: it is forever intent on *getting benefit* from me,
*i.e.* exploiting me, turning me to account, using me up, even if the use it
gets from me consists only in my supplying a *proles* (proletariat); it wants
me to be "its creature."

Pauperism can be removed only when I as ego *realize value* from myself, when
I give my own self value, and make my price myself. I must rise in revolt to
rise in the world.

What I produce, flour, linen, or iron and coal, which I toilsomely win from
the earth, is my work that I want to realize value from. But then I may long
complain that I am not paid for my work according to its value: the payer will
not listen to me, and the State likewise will maintain an apathetic attitude
so long as it does not think it must "appease" me that *I* may not break out
with my dreaded might. But this "appeasing" will be all, and, if it comes into
my head to ask for more, the State turns against me with all the force of its
lion-paws and eagle-claws: for it is the king of beasts, it is lion and eagle.
If I refuse to be content with the price that it fixes for my ware and labor,
if I rather aspire to determine the price of my ware myself, *e. g.*, "to pay
myself," in the first place I come into a conflict with the buyers of the
ware. If this were stilled by a mutual understanding, the State would not
readily make objections; for how individuals get along with each other
troubles it little, so long as therein they do not get in its way. Its damage
and its danger begin only when they do not agree, but, in the absence of a
settlement, take each other by the hair. The State cannot endure that man
stand in a direct relation to man; it must step between as --*mediator*, must
*-- intervene*. What Christ was, what the saints, the Church were, the State
has become -- to wit, "mediator." It tears man from man to put itself between
them as "spirit." The laborers who ask for higher pay are treated as criminals
as soon as they want to *compel* it. What are they to do? Without compulsion
they don't get it, and in compulsion the State sees a self-help, a
determination of price by the ego, a genuine, free realization of value from
his property, which it cannot admit of. What then are the laborers to do? Look
to themselves and ask nothing about the State? -- --

But, as is the situation with regard to my material work, so it is with my
intellectual too. The State allows me to realize value from all my thoughts
and to find customers for them (I do realize value from them, *e. g.* in the
very fact that they bring me honor from the listeners, etc.); but only so long
as *my* thoughts are --*its* thoughts. If, on the other hand, I harbor
thoughts that it cannot approve (*i.e.* make its own), then it does not allow
me at all to realize value from them, to bring them into *exchange* into
*commerce. My* thoughts are free only if they are granted to me by the State's
*grace*, *i.e.* if they are the State's thoughts. It lets me philosophize
freely only so far as I approve myself a "philosopher of State"; *against* the
State I must not philosophize, gladly as it tolerates my helping it out of its
"deficiencies," "furthering" it. -- Therefore, as I may behave only as an ego
most graciously permitted by the State, provided with its testimonial of
legitimacy and police pass, so too it is not granted me to realize value from
what is mine, unless this proves to be its, which I hold as fief from it. My
ways must be its ways, else it distrains me; my thoughts its thoughts, else it
stops my mouth.

The State has nothing to be more afraid of than the value of me, and nothing
must it more carefully guard against than every occasion that offers itself to
me for *realizing value* from myself. *I* am the deadly enemy of the State,
which always hovers between the alternatives, it or I. Therefore it strictly
insists not only on not letting *me* have a standing, but also on keeping down
what is *mine*. In the State there is no property, *i.e.* no property of the
individual, but only State property. Only through the State have I what I
have, as I am only through it what I am. My private property is only that
which the State leaves to me of *its, cutting off* others from it (depriving
them, making it private); it is State property.

But, in opposition to the State, I feel more and more clearly that there is
still left me a great might, the might over myself, *i.e.* over everything
that pertains only to me and that *exists* only in being my own.

What do I do if my ways are no longer its ways, my thoughts no longer its
thoughts? I look to myself, and ask nothing about it! In *my* thoughts, which
I get sanctioned by no assent, grant, or grace, I have my real property, a
property with which I can trade. For as mine they are my *creatures*, and I am
in a position to give them away in return for *other* thoughts: I give them up
and take in exchange for them others, which then are my new purchased
property.

What then is *my* property? Nothing but what is in my *power!* To what
property am I entitled? To every property to which I -- *empower* myself.(68)
I give myself the right of property in taking property to myself, or giving
myself the proprietor's *power*, full power, empowerment.

Everything over which I have might that cannot be torn from me remains my
property; well, then let might decide about property, and I will expect
everything from my might! Alien might, might that I leave to another, makes me
an owned slave: then let my own might make me an owner. Let me then withdraw
the might that I have conceded to others out of ignorance regarding the
strength of my *own* might! Let me say to myself, what my might reaches to is
my property; and let me claim as property everything that I feel myself strong
enough to attain, and let me extend my actual property as far as *I* entitle,
*i. e.* -- empower, myself to take.

Here egoism, selfishness, must decide; not the principle of *love*, not
love-motives like mercy, gentleness, good-nature, or even justice and equity
(for *justitia* too is a phenomenon of -- love, a product of love): love knows
only *sacrifices* and demands "self-sacrifice."

Egoism does not think of sacrificing anything, giving away anything that it
wants; it simply decides, what I want I must have and will procure.

All attempts to enact rational laws about property have put out from the bay
of *love* into a desolate sea of regulations. Even Socialism and Communism
cannot be excepted from this. Every one is to be provided with adequate means,
for which it is little to the point whether one socialistically finds them
still in a personal property, or communistically draws them from the community
of goods. The individual's mind in this remains the same; it remains a mind of
dependence. The distributing *board of equity* lets me have only what the
sense of equity, its *loving* care for all, prescribes. For me, the
individual, there lies no less of a check in *collective wealth* than in that
of *individual others;* neither that is mine, nor this: whether the wealth
belongs to the collectivity, which confers part of it on me, or to individual
possessors, is for me the same constraint, as I cannot decide about either of
the two. On the contrary, Communism, by the abolition of all personal
property, only presses me back still more into dependence on another, *viz*.,
on the generality or collectivity; and, loudly as it always attacks the
"State," what it intends is itself again a State, a *status*, a condition
hindering my free movement, a sovereign power over me. Communism rightly
revolts against the pressure that I experience from individual proprietors;
but still more horrible is the might that it puts in the hands of the
collectivity.

Egoism takes another way to root out the non-possessing rabble. It does not
say: Wait for what the board of equity will -- bestow on you in the name of
the collectivity (for such bestowal took place in "States" from the most
ancient times, each receiving "according to his desert," and therefore
according to the measure in which each was able to *deserve* it, to acquire it
by *service*), but: Take hold, and take what you require! With this the war of
all against all is declared. I alone decide what I will have.

"Now, that is truly no new wisdom, for self-seekers have acted so at all
times!" Not at all necessary either that the thing be new, if only
*consciousness* of it is present. But this latter will not be able to claim
great age, unless perhaps one counts in the Egyptian and Spartan law; for how
little current it is appears even from the stricture above, which speaks with
contempt of "self-seekers." One is to know just this, that the procedure of
taking hold is not contemptible, but manifests the pure deed of the egoist at
one with himself.

Only when I expect neither from individuals nor from a collectivity what I can
give to myself, only then do I slip out of the snares of --love; the rabble
ceases to be rabble only when it *takes hold*. Only the dread of taking hold,
and the corresponding punishment thereof, makes it a rabble. Only that taking
hold is *sin*, crime -- only this dogma creates a rabble. For the fact that
the rabble remains what it is, it (because it allows validity to that dogma)
is to blame as well as, more especially, those who "self-seekingly" (to give
them back their favorite word) demand that the dogma be respected. In short,
the lack of *consciousness* of that "new wisdom," the old consciousness of
sin, alone bears the blame.

If men reach the point of losing respect for property, every one will have
property, as all slaves become free men as soon as they no longer respect the
master as master. *Unions* will then, in this matter too, multiply the
individual's means and secure his assailed property.

According to the Communists' opinion the commune should be proprietor. On the
contrary, *I* am proprietor, and I only come to an understanding with others
about my property. If the commune does not do what suits me, I rise against it
and defend my property. I am proprietor, but property is *not sacred*. I
should be merely possessor? No, hitherto one was only possessor, secured in
the possession of a parcel by leaving others also in possession of a parcel;
but now *everything* belongs to me, I am proprietor of *everything that I
require* and can get possession of. If it is said socialistically, society
gives me what I require -- then the egoist says, I take what I require. If the
Communists conduct themselves as ragamuffins, the egoist behaves as
proprietor.

All swan-fraternities,(69) and attempts at making the rabble happy, that
spring from the principle of love, must miscarry. Only from egoism can the
rabble get help, and this help it must give to itself and -- will give to
itself. If it does not let itself be coerced into fear, it is a power. "People
would lose all respect if one did not coerce them into fear," says bugbear Law
in *Der gestiefelte Kater*.

Property, therefore, should not and cannot be abolished; it must rather be
torn from ghostly hands and become *my* property; then the erroneous
consciousness, that I cannot entitle myself to as much as I require, will
vanish. --

"But what cannot man require!" Well, whoever requires much, and understands
how to get it, has at all times helped himself to it, as Napoleon did with the
Continent and France with Algiers. Hence the exact point is that the
respectful "rabble" should learn at last to help itself to what it requires.
If it reaches out too far for you, why, then defend yourselves. You have no
need at all to good-heartedly -- bestow anything on it; and, when it learns to
know itself, it -- or rather: whoever of the rabble learns to know himself, he
- -- casts off the rabble-quality in refusing your alms with thanks. But it
remains ridiculous that you declare the rabble "sinful and criminal" if it is
not pleased to live from your favors because it can do something in its own
favor. Your bestowals cheat it and put it off. Defend your property, then you
will be strong; if, on the other hand, you want to retain your ability to
bestow, and perhaps actually have the more political rights the more alms
(poor-rates) you can give, this will work just as long as the recipients let
you work it.(70)

In short, the property question cannot be solved so amicably as the
Socialists, yes, even the Communists, dream. It is solved only by the war of
all against all. The poor become free and proprietors only when they --
*rise*. Bestow ever so much on them, they will still always want more; for
they want nothing less than that at last -- nothing more be bestowed.

It will be asked, but how then will it be when the have- nots take heart? Of
what sort is the settlement to be? One might as well ask that I cast a child's
nativity. What a slave will do as soon as he has broken his fetters, one must
- --await.

In Kaiser's pamphlet, worthless for lack of form as well as substance (*"Die
Persönlichkeit des Eigentümers in Bezug auf den Socialismus und Communismus*,"
etc.), he hopes from the *State* that it will bring about a leveling of
property. Always the State! Herr Papa! As the Church was proclaimed and looked
upon as the "mother" of believers, so the State has altogether the face of the
provident father.

- --------

*Competition* shows itself most strictly connected with the principle of
civism. Is it anything else than *equality* (*égalité*)? And is not equality a
product of that same Revolution which was brought on by the commonalty, the
middle classes? As no one is barred from competing with all in the State
(except the prince, because he represents the State itself) and working
himself up to their height, yes, overthrowing or exploiting them for his own
advantage, soaring above them and by stronger exertion depriving them of their
favorable circumstances -- this serves as a clear proof that before the
State's judgment-seat every one has only the value of a "simple individual"
and may not count on any favoritism. Outrun and outbid each other as much as
you like and can; that shall not trouble me, the State! Among yourselves you
are free in competing, you are competitors; that is your *social* position.
But before me, the State, you are nothing but "simple individuals"!(71)

What in the form of principle or theory was propounded as the equality of all
has found here in competition its realization and practical carrying out; for
*égalité* is -- free competition. All are, before the State --simple
individuals; in society, or in relation to each other -- competitors.

I need be nothing further than a simple individual to be able to compete with
all others aside from the prince and his family: a freedom which formerly was
made impossible by the fact that only by means of one's corporation, and
within it, did one enjoy any freedom of effort.

In the guild and feudality the State is in an intolerant and fastidious
attitude, granting *privileges;* in competition and liberalism it is in a
tolerant and indulgent attitude, granting only *patents* (letters assuring the
applicant that the business stands open (patent) to him) or "concessions."
Now, as the State has thus left everything to the *applicants*, it must come
in conflict with all, because each and all are entitled to make application.
It will be "stormed," and will go down in this storm.

Is "free competition" then really "free?" nay, is it really a "competition" --
to wit, one of *persons --* as it gives itself out to be because on this title
it bases its right? It originated, you know, in persons becoming free of all
personal rule. Is a competition "free" which the State, this ruler in the
civic principle, hems in by a thousand barriers? There is a rich manufacturer
doing a brilliant business, and I should like to compete with him. "Go ahead,"
says the State, "I have no objection to make to your *person* as competitor."
Yes, I reply, but for that I need a space for buildings, I need money! "That's
bad; but, if you have no money, you cannot compete. You must not take anything
from anybody, for I protect property and grant it privileges." Free
competition is not "free," because I lack the THINGS for competition. Against
my *person* no objection can be made, but because I have not the things my
person too must step to the rear. And who has the necessary things? Perhaps
that manufacturer? Why, from him I could take them away! No, the State has
them as property, the manufacturer only as fief, as possession.

But, since it is no use trying it with the manufacturer, I will compete with
that professor of jurisprudence; the man is a booby, and I, who know a hundred
times more than he, shall make his class-room empty. "Have you studied and
graduated, friend?" No, but what of that? I understand abundantly what is
necessary for instruction in that department. "Sorry, but competition is not
'free' here. Against your person there is nothing to be said, but the *thing*,
the doctor's diploma, is lacking. And this diploma I, the State, demand. Ask
me for it respectfully first; then we will see what is to be done."

This, therefore, is the "freedom" of competition. The State, *my lord*, first
qualifies me to compete.

But do *persons* really compete? No, again *things* only! Moneys in the first
place, etc.

In the rivalry one will always be left behind another (*e. g.* a poetaster
behind a poet). But it makes a difference whether the means that the unlucky
competitor lacks are personal or material, and likewise whether the material
means can be won by *personal energy* or are to be obtained only by *grace*,
only as a present; as when *e. g.* the poorer man must leave, *i. e.* present,
to the rich man his riches. But, if I must all along wait for the State's
*approval* to obtain or to use (*e. g.* in the case of graduation) the means,
I have the means by the *grace of the State*.(72)

Free competition, therefore, has only the following meaning: To the State all
rank as its equal children, and every one can scud and run to earn the
*State's goods and largesse*. Therefore all do chase after havings, holdings,
possessions (be it of money or offices, titles of honor, etc.), after the
*things*.

In the mind of the commonalty every one is possessor or "owner." Now, whence
comes it that the most have in fact next to nothing? From this, that the most
are already joyful over being possessors at all, even though it be of some
rags, as children are joyful in their first trousers or even the first penny
that is presented to them. More precisely, however, the matter is to be taken
as follows. Liberalism came forward at once with the declaration that it
belonged to man's essence not to be property, but proprietor. As the
consideration here was about "man," not about the individual, the how-much
(which formed exactly the point of the individual's special interest) was left
to him. Hence the individual's egoism retained room for the freest play in
this how- much, and carried on an indefatigable competition.

However, the lucky egoism had to become a snag in the way of the less
fortunate, and the latter, still keeping its feet planted on the principle of
humanity, put forward the question as to how-much of possession, and answered
it to the effect that "man must have as much as he requires."

Will it be possible for *my* egoism to let itself be satisfied with that? What
"man" requires furnishes by no means a scale for measuring me and my needs;
for I may have use for less or more. I must rather have so much as I am
competent to appropriate.

Competition suffers from the unfavorable circumstance that the *means* for
competing are not at every one's command, because they are not taken from
personality, but from accident. Most are *without means*, and for this reason
*without goods*.

Hence the Socialists demand the *means* for all, and aim at a society that
shall offer means. Your money value, say they, we no longer recognize as your
"competence"; you must show another competence -- to wit, your *working
force*. In the possession of a property, or as "possessor," man does certainly
show himself as man; it was for this reason that we let the possessor, whom we
called "proprietor," keep his standing so long. Yet you possess the things
only so long as you are not "put out of this property."

The possessor is competent, but only so far as the others are incompetent.
Since your ware forms your competence only so long as you are competent to
defend it (*i.e.* as *we* are not competent to do anything with it), look
about you for another competence; for we now, by our might, surpass your
alleged competence.

It was an extraordinarily large gain made, when the point of being regarded as
possessors was put through. Therein bondservice was abolished, and every one
who till then had been bound to the lord's service, and more or less had been
his property, now became a "lord." But henceforth your having, and what you
have, are no longer adequate and no longer recognized; *per contra*, your
working and your work rise in value. We now respect your *subduing* things, as
we formerly did your possessing them. Your work is your competence! You are
lord or possessor only of what comes by *work*, not by *inheritance*. But as
at the time everything has come by inheritance, and every copper that you
possess bears not a labor-stamp but an inheritance-stamp, everything must be
melted over.

But is my work then really, as the Communists suppose, my sole competence? or
does not this consist rather in everything that I am competent for? And does
not the workers' society itself have to concede this, *e. g.,* in supporting
also the sick, children, old men -- in short, those who are incapable of work?
These are still competent for a good deal, *e. g.* for instance, to preserve
their life instead of taking it. If they are competent to cause you to desire
their continued existence, they have a power over you. To him who exercised
utterly no power over you, you would vouchsafe nothing; he might perish.

Therefore, what you are *competent* for is your *competence!* If you are
competent to furnish pleasure to thousands, then thousands will pay you an
honorarium for it; for it would stand in your power to forbear doing it, hence
they must purchase your deed. If you are not competent to *captivate* any one,
you may simply starve.

Now am I, who am competent for much, perchance to have no advantage over the
less competent?

We are all in the midst of abundance; now shall I not help myself as well as I
can, but only wait and see how much is left me in an equal division?

Against competition there rises up the principle of ragamuffin society --
*partition*.

To be looked upon as a mere *part*, part of society, the individual cannot
bear -- because he is *more;* his uniqueness puts from it this limited
conception.

Hence he does not await his competence from the sharing of others, and even in
the workers' society there arises the misgiving that in an equal partition the
strong will be exploited by the weak; he awaits his competence rather from
himself, and says now, what I am competent to have, that is my competence.

What competence does not the child possess in its smiling, its playing, its
screaming! in short, in its mere existence! Are you capable of resisting its
desire? Or do you not hold out to it, as mother, your breast; as father, as
much of your possessions as it needs? It compels you, therefore it possesses
what you call yours.

If your person is of consequence to me, you pay me with your very existence;
if I am concerned only with one of your qualities, then your compliance,
perhaps, or your aid, has a value (a money value) for me, and I *purchase* it.

If you do not know how to give yourself any other than a money value in my
estimation, there may arise the case of which history tells us, that Germans,
sons of the fatherland, were sold to America. Should those who let themselves
to be traded in be worth more to the seller? He preferred the cash to this
living ware that did not understand how to make itself precious to him. That
he discovered nothing more valuable in it was assuredly a defect of his
competence; but it takes a rogue to give more than he has. How should he show
respect when he did not have it, nay, hardly could have it for such a pack!

You behave egoistically when you respect each other neither as possessors nor
as ragamuffins or workers, but as a part of your competence, as *"useful
bodies"*. Then you will neither give anything to the possessor ("proprietor")
for his possessions, nor to him who works, but only to him whom you *require*.
The North Americans ask themselves, Do we require a king? and answer, Not a
farthing are he and his work worth to us.

If it is said that competition throws every thing open to all, the expression
is not accurate, and it is better put thus: competition makes everything
purchasable. In *abandoning*(73) it to them, competition leaves it to their
appraisal(74) or their estimation, and demands a price(75) for it.

But the would-be buyers mostly lack the means to make themselves buyers: they
have no money. For money, then, the purchasable things are indeed to be had
("For money everything is to be had!"), but it is exactly money that is
lacking. Where is one to get money, this current or circulating property? Know
then, you have as much money(76) as you have -- might; for you count(77) for
as much as you make yourself count for.

One pays not with money, of which there may come a lack, but with his
competence, by which alone we are "competent";(78) for one is proprietor only
so far as the arm of our power reaches.

Weitling has thought out a new means of payment -- work. But the true means of
payment remains, as always, *competence*. With what you have "within your
competence" you pay. Therefore think on the enlargement of your competence.

This being admitted, they are nevertheless right on hand again with the motto,
"To each according to his competence!" Who is to *give* to me according to my
competence? Society? Then I should have to put up with its estimation. Rather,
I shall *take* according to my competence.

"All belongs to all!" This proposition springs from the same unsubstantial
theory. To each belongs only what he is competent for. If I say, The world
belongs to me, properly that too is empty talk, which has a meaning only in so
far as I respect no alien property. But to me belongs only as much as I am
competent for, or have within my competence.

One is not worthy to have what one, through weakness, lets be taken from him;
one is not worthy of it because one is not capable of it.

They raise a mighty uproar over the "wrong of a thousand years" which is being
committed by the rich against the poor. As if the rich were to blame for
poverty, and the poor were not in like manner responsible for riches! Is there
another difference between the two than that of competence and incompetence,
of the competent and incompetent? Wherein, pray, does the crime of the rich
consist? "In their hardheartedness." But who then have maintained the poor?
Who have cared for their nourishment? Who have given alms, those alms that
have even their name from mercy (*eleemosyne*)? Have not the rich been
"merciful" at all times? Are they not to this day "tender-hearted," as
poor-taxes, hospitals, foundations of all sorts, etc., prove?

But all this does not satisfy you! Doubtless, then, they are to *share* with
the poor? Now you are demanding that they shall abolish poverty. Aside from
the point that there might be hardly one among you who would act so, and that
this one would be a fool for it, do ask yourselves: why should the rich let go
their fleeces and give up *themselves*, thereby pursuing the advantage of the
poor rather than their own? You, who have your thaler daily, are rich above
thousands who live on four groschen. Is it for your interest to share with the
thousands, or is it not rather for theirs? --

With competition is connected less the intention to do the thing *best* than
the intention to make it as *profitable*, as productive, as possible. Hence
people study to get into the civil service (pot-boiling study), study cringing
and flattery, routine and "acquaintance with business," work "for appearance."
Hence, while it is apparently a matter of doing "good service," in truth only
a "good business" and earning of money are looked out for. The job is done
only ostensibly for the job's sake, but in fact on account of the gain that it
yields. One would indeed prefer not to be censor, but one wants to be --
advanced; one would like to judge, administer, etc., according to his best
convictions, but one is afraid of transference or even dismissal; one must,
above all things -- live.

Thus these goings-on are a fight for *dear life*, and, in gradation upward,
for more or less of a "good living."

And yet, withal, their whole round of toil and care brings in for most only
"bitter life" and "bitter poverty." All the bitter painstaking for this!

Restless acquisition does not let us take breath, take a calm *enjoyment:* we
do not get the comfort of our possessions.

But the organization of labor touches only such labors as others can do for
us, slaughtering, tillage, etc.; the rest remain egoistic, because no one can
in your stead elaborate your musical compositions, carry out your projects of
painting, etc.; nobody can replace Raphael's labors. The latter are labors of
a unique person,(79) which only he is competent to achieve, while the former
deserved to be called "human," since what is anybody's *own* in them is of
slight account, and almost "any man" can be trained to it.

Now, as society can regard only labors for the common benefit, *human* labors,
he who does anything *unique* remains without its care; nay, he may find
himself disturbed by its intervention. The unique person will work himself
forth out of society all right, but society brings forth no unique person.

Hence it is at any rate helpful that we come to an agreement about *human*
labors, that they may not, as under competition, claim all our time and toil.
So far Communism will bear its fruits. For before the dominion of the
commonalty even that for which all men are qualified, or can be qualified, was
tied up to a few and withheld from the rest: it was a privilege. To the
commonalty it looked equitable to leave free all that seemed to exist for
every "man." But, because left(80) free, it was yet given to no one, but
rather left to each to be got hold of by his *human* power. By this the mind
was turned to the acquisition of the human, which henceforth beckoned to every
one; and there arose a movement which one hears so loudly bemoaned under the
name of "materialism."

Communism seeks to check its course, spreading the belief that the human is
not worth so much discomfort, and, with sensible arrangements, could be gained
without the great expense of time and powers which has hitherto seemed
requisite.

But for whom is time to be gained? For what does man require more time than is
necessary to refresh his wearied powers of labor? Here Communism is silent.

For what? To take comfort in himself as the unique, after he has done his part
as man!

In the first joy over being allowed to stretch out their hands toward
everything human, people forgot to want anything else; and they competed away
vigorously, as if the possession of the human were the goal of all our wishes.

But they have run themselves tired, and are gradually noticing that
"possession does not give happiness." Therefore they are thinking of obtaining
the necessary by an easier bargain, and spending on it only so much time and
toil as its indispensableness exacts. Riches fall in price, and contented
poverty, the care-free ragamuffin, becomes the seductive ideal.

Should such human activities, that every one is confident of his capacity for,
be highly salaried, and sought for with toil and expenditure of all
life-forces? Even in the everyday form of speech, "If I were minister, or even
the., then it should go quite otherwise," that confidence expresses itself --
that one holds himself capable of playing the part of such a dignitary; one
does get a perception that to things of this sort there belongs not
uniqueness, but only a culture which is attainable, even if not exactly by
all, at any rate by many; *i.e.* that for such a thing one need only be an
ordinary man.

If we assume that, as *order* belongs to the essence of the State, so
*subordination* too is founded in its nature, then we see that the
subordinates, or those who have received preferment, disproportionately
*overcharge* and *overreach* those who are put in the lower ranks. But the
latter take heart (first from the Socialist standpoint, but certainly with
egoistic consciousness later, of which we will therefore at once give their
speech some coloring) for the question, By what then is your property secure,
you creatures of preferment? -- and give themselves the answer, By our
refraining from interference! And so by *our* protection! And what do you give
us for it? Kicks and disdain you give to the "common people"; police
supervision, and a catechism with the chief sentence "Respect what is *not
yours*, what belongs to *others!* respect others, and especially your
superiors!" But we reply, "If you want our respect, *buy* it for a price
agreeable to us. We will leave you your property, if you give a due equivalent
for this leaving." Really, what equivalent does the general in time of peace
give for the many thousands of his yearly income.? -- another for the sheer
hundred-thousands and millions yearly? What equivalent do you give for our
chewing potatoes and looking calmly on while you swallow oysters? Only buy the
oysters of us as dear as we have to buy the potatoes of you, then you may go
on eating them. Or do you suppose the oysters do not belong to us as much as
to you? You will make an outcry over *violence* if we reach out our hands and
help consume them, and you are right. Without violence we do not get them, as
you no less have them by doing violence to us.

But take the oysters and have done with it, and let us consider our nearer
property, labor; for the other is only possession. We distress ourselves
twelve hours in the sweat of our face, and you offer us a few groschen for it.
Then take the like for your labor too. Are you not willing? You fancy that our
labor is richly repaid with that wage, while yours on the other hands is worth
a wage of many thousands. But, if you did not rate yours so high, and gave us
a better chance to realize value from ours, then we might well, if the case
demanded it, bring to pass still more important things than you do for the
many thousand thalers; and, if you got only such wages as we, you would soon
grow more industrious in order to receive more. But, if you render any service
that seems to us worth ten and a hundred times more than our own labor, why,
then you shall get a hundred times more for it too; we, on the other hand,
think also to produce for you things for which you will requite us more highly
than with the ordinary day's wages. We shall be willing to get along with each
other all right, if only we have first agreed on this -- that neither any
longer needs to -- *present* anything to the other. Then we may perhaps
actually go so far as to pay even the cripples and sick and old an appropriate
price for not parting from us by hunger and want; for, if we want them to
live, it is fitting also that we -- purchase the fulfillment of our will. I
say "purchase," and therefore do not mean a wretched "alms." For their life is
the property even of those who cannot work; if we (no matter for what reason)
want them not to withdraw this life from us, we can mean to bring this to pass
only by purchase; nay, we shall perhaps (maybe because we like to have
friendly faces about us) even want a life of comfort for them. In short, we
want nothing presented by you, but neither will we present you with anything.
For centuries we have handed alms to you from goodhearted -- stupidity, have
doled out the mite of the poor and given to the masters the things that are --
not the masters'; now just open your wallet, for henceforth our ware rises in
price quite enormously. We do not want to take from you anything, anything at
all, only you are to pay better for what you want to have. What then have you?
"I have an estate of a thousand acres." And I am your plowman, and will
henceforth attend to your fields only for one thaler a day wages. "Then I'll
take another." You won't find any, for we plowmen are no longer doing
otherwise, and, if one puts in an appearance who takes less, then let him
beware of us. There is the housemaid, she too is now demanding as much, and
you will no longer find one below this price. "Why, then it is all over with
me." Not so fast! You will doubtless take in as much as we; and, if it should
not be so, we will take off so much that you shall have wherewith to live like
us. "But I am accustomed to live better." We have nothing against that, but it
is not our look-out; if you can clear more, go ahead. Are we to hire out under
rates, that you may have a good living?

The rich man always puts off the poor with the words, "What does your want
concern me? See to it how you make your way through the world; that is *your
affair*, not mine." Well, let us let it be our affair, then, and let us not
let the means that we have to realize value from ourselves be pilfered from us
by the rich. "But you uncultured people really do not need so much." Well, we
are taking somewhat more in order that for it we may procure the culture that
we perhaps need. "But, if you thus bring down the rich, who is then to support
the arts and sciences hereafter?" Oh, well, we must make it up by numbers; we
club together, that gives a nice little sum -- besides, you rich men now buy
only the most tasteless books and the most lamentable Madonnas or a pair of
lively dancer's legs. "O ill-starred equality!" No, my good old sir, nothing
of equality. We only want to count for what we are worth, and, if you are
worth more, you shall count for more right along. We only want to be *worth
our price*, and think to show ourselves worth the price that you will pay.

Is the State likely to be able to awaken so secure a temper and so forceful a
self-consciousness in the menial? Can it make man feel himself? Nay, may it
even do so much as set this goal for itself? Can it want the individual to
recognize his value and realize this value from himself? Let us keep the parts
of the double question separate, and see first whether the State can bring
about such a thing. As the unanimity of the plowmen is required, only this
unanimity can bring it to pass, and a State law would be evaded in a thousand
ways by competition and in secret.

But can the State bear with it? The State cannot possibly bear with people's
suffering coercion from another than it; it could not, therefore, admit the
self-help of the unanimous plowmen against those who want to engage for lower
wages. Suppose, however, that the State made the law, and all the plowmen were
in accord with it: could the State bear with it then?

In the isolated case -- yes; but the isolated case is more than that, it is a
case of *principle*. The question therein is of the whole range of the *ego's
self-realization of value from himself*, and therefore also of his
self-consciousness *against* the State. So far the Communists keep company;
but, as self-realization of value from self necessarily directs itself against
the State, so it does against *society* too, and therewith reaches out beyond
the commune and the communistic -- out of egoism.

Communism makes the maxim of the commonalty, that every one is a possessor
("proprietor"), into an irrefragable truth, into a reality, since the anxiety
about *obtaining* now ceases and every one *has* from the start what he
requires. In his labor-force he *has* his competence, and, if he makes no use
of it, that is his fault. The grasping and hounding is at an end, and no
competition is left (as so often now) without fruit, because with every stroke
of labor an adequate supply of the needful is brought into the house. Now for
the first time one is a *real possessor*, because what one has in his
labor-force can no longer escape from him as it was continually threatening to
do under the system of competition. One is a *care-free* and assured
possessor. And one is this precisely by seeking his competence no longer in a
ware, but in his own labor, his competence for labor; and therefore by being a
*ragamuffin*, a man of only ideal wealth. *I*, however, cannot content myself
with the little that I scrape up by my competence for labor, because my
competence does not consist merely in my labor.

By labor I can perform the official functions of a president, a minister,
etc.; these offices demand only a general culture -- to wit, such a culture as
is generally attainable (for general culture is not merely that which every
one has attained, but broadly that which every one can attain, and therefore
every special culture, *e. g.* medical, military, philological, of which no
"cultivated man" believes that they surpass his powers), or, broadly, only a
skill possible to all.

But, even if these offices may vest in every one, yet it is only the
individual's unique force, peculiar to him alone. that gives them, so to
speak, life and significance. That he does not manage his office like an
"ordinary man." but puts in the competence of his uniqueness, this he is not
yet paid for when he is paid only in general as an official or a minister. If
he has done it so as to earn your thanks, and you wish to retain this
thank-worthy force of the unique one, you must not pay him like a mere man who
performed only what was human, but as one who accomplishes what is unique. Do
the like with your labor, do!

There cannot be a general schedule-price fixed for my uniqueness as there can
for what I do as man. Only for the latter can a schedule-price be set.

Go right on, then, setting up a general appraisal for human labors, but do not
deprive your uniqueness of its desert.

*Human* or *general* needs can be satisfied through society; for satisfaction
of *unique* needs you must do some seeking. A friend and a friendly service,
or even an individual's service, society cannot procure you. And yet you will
every moment be in need of such a service, and on the slightest occasions
require somebody who is helpful to you. Therefore do not rely on society, but
see to it that you have the wherewithal to -- purchase the fulfillment of your
wishes.

Whether money is to be retained among egoists? To the old stamp an inherited
possession adheres. If you no longer let yourselves be paid with it, it is
ruined: if you do nothing for this money, it loses all power. Cancel the
*inheritance*, and you have broken off the executor's court-seal. For now
everything is an inheritance, whether it be already inherited or await its
heir. If it is yours, wherefore do you let it be sealed up from you? Why do
you respect the seal?

But why should you not create a new money? Do you then annihilate the ware in
taking from it the hereditary stamp? Now, money is a ware, and an essential
*means* or competence. For it protects against the ossification of resources,
keeps them in flux and brings to pass their exchange. If you know a better
medium of exchange, go ahead; yet it will be a "money" again. It is not the
money that does you damage, but your incompetence to take it. Let your
competence take effect, collect yourselves, and there will be no lack of money
- -- of your money, the money of *your* stamp. But working I do not call
"letting your competence take effect." Those who are only "looking for work"
and "willing to work hard" are preparing for their own selves the infallible
upshot -- to be out of work.

Good and bad luck depend on money. It is a power in the *bourgeois* period for
this reason, that it is only wooed on all hands like a girl, indissolubly
wedded by nobody. All the romance and chivalry of *wooing* for a dear object
come to life again in competition. Money, an object of longing, is carried off
by the bold "knights of industry."(81)

He who has luck takes home the bride. The ragamuffin has luck; he takes her
into his household, "society," and destroys the virgin. In his house she is no
longer bride, but wife; and with her virginity her family name is also lost.
As housewife the maiden Money is called "Labor," for "Labor" is her husband's
name. She is a possession of her husband's.

To bring this figure to an end, the child of Labor and Money is again a girl,
an unwedded one and therefore Money but with the certain descent from Labor,
her father. The form of the face, the "effigy," bears another stamp.

Finally, as regards competition once more, it has a continued existence by
this very means, that all do not attend to *their affair* and come to an
*understanding* with each other about it. Bread *e. g.* is a need of all the
inhabitants of a city; therefore they might easily agree on setting up a
public bakery. Instead of this, they leave the furnishing of the needful to
the competing bakers. Just so meat to the butchers, wine to wine-dealers, etc.

Abolishing competition is not equivalent to favoring the guild. The difference
is this: In the *guild* baking, etc., is the affair of the guild-brothers; in
*competition*, the affair of chance competitors; in the *union*, of those who
require baked goods, and therefore my affair, yours, the affair of neither the
guildic nor the concessionary baker, but the affair of the *united*.

If *I* do not trouble myself about my affair, I must be *content* with what it
pleases others to vouchsafe me. To have bread is my affair, my wish and
desire, and yet people leave that to the bakers and hope at most to obtain
through their wrangling, their getting ahead of each other, their rivalry --in
short, their competition -- an advantage which one could not count on in the
case of the guild-brothers who were lodged *entirely* and *alone* in the
proprietorship of the baking franchise. -- What every one requires, every one
should also take a hand in procuring and producing; it is *his* affair, his
property, not the property of the guildic or concessionary master.

Let us look back once more. The world belongs to the children of this world,
the children of men; it is no longer God's world, but man's. As much as every
man can procure of it, let him call his; only the true man, the State, human
society or mankind, will look to it that each shall make nothing else his own
than what he appropriates as man, *i.e.* in human fashion. Unhuman
appropriation is that which is not consented to by man, *i.e.*, it is a
"criminal" appropriation, as the human, *vice versa*, is a "rightful" one, one
acquired in the "way of law."

So they talk since the Revolution.

But my property is not a thing, since this has an existence independent of me;
only my might is my own. Not this tree, but my might or control over it, is
what is mine.

Now, how is this might perversely expressed? They say I have a *right* to this
tree, or it is my *rightful* property. So I have *earned* it by might. That
the might must last in order that the tree may also be *held --* or better,
that the might is not a thing existing of itself, but has existence solely in
the *mighty ego*, in me the mighty -- is forgotten. Might, like other of my
*qualities* (*e. g.* humanity, majesty, etc.), is exalted to something
existing of itself, so that it still exists long after it has ceased to be
*my* might. Thus transformed into a ghost, might is -- *right*. This
*eternalized* might is not extinguished even with my death, but is transferred
to "bequeathed."

Things now really belong not to me, but to right.

On the other side, this is nothing but a hallucination of vision. For the
individual's might becomes permanent and a right only by others joining their
might with his. The delusion consists in their believing that they cannot
withdraw their might. The same phenomenon over again; might is separated from
me. I cannot take back the might that I gave to the possessor. One has
"granted power of attorney," has given away his power, has renounced coming to
a better mind.

The proprietor can give up his might and his right to a thing by giving the
thing away, squandering it, etc. And *we* should not be able likewise to let
go the might that we lend to him?

The rightful man, the *just*, desires to call nothing his own that he does not
have "rightly" or have the right to, and therefore only *legitimate property*.

Now, who is to be judge, and adjudge his right to him? At last, surely, Man,
who imparts to him the rights of man: then he can say, in an infinitely
broader sense than Terence, *humani nihil a me alienum puto*, *e. g.*, *the
human is my property*. However he may go about it, so long as he occupies this
standpoint he cannot get clear of a judge; and in our time the multifarious
judges that had been selected have set themselves against each other in two
persons at deadly enmity -- to wit, in God and Man. The one party appeal to
divine right, the other to human right or the rights of man.

So much is clear, that in neither case does the individual do the entitling
himself.

Just pick me out an action today that would not be a violation of right! Every
moment the rights of man are trampled under foot by one side, while their
opponents cannot open their mouth without uttering a blasphemy against divine
right. Give an alms, you mock at a right of man, because the relation of
beggar and benefactor is an inhuman relation; utter a doubt, you sin against a
divine right. Eat dry bread with contentment, you violate the right of man by
your equanimity; eat it with discontent, you revile divine right by your
repining. There is not one among you who does not commit a crime at every
moment; your speeches are crimes, and every hindrance to your freedom of
speech is no less a crime. Ye are criminals altogether!

Yet you are so only in that you all stand on the *ground of right*, *i.e.* in
that you do not even know, and understand how to value, the fact that you are
criminals.

Inviolable or *sacred* property has grown on this very ground: it is a
*juridical concept*.

A dog sees the bone in another's power, -- and stands off only if it feels
itself too weak. But man respects the other's *right* to his bone. The latter
action, therefore, ranks as *human*, the former as *brutal* or "egoistic."

And as here, so in general, it is called *"human"* when one sees in everything
something *spiritual* (here right), *i.e.* makes everything a ghost and takes
his attitude toward it as toward a ghost, which one can indeed scare away at
its appearance, but cannot kill. It is human to look at what is individual not
as individual, but as a generality.

In nature as such I no longer respect anything, but know myself to be entitled
to everything against it; in the tree in that garden, on the other hand, I
must respect *alienness* (they say in one-sided fashion "property"), I must
keep my hand off it. This comes to an end only when I can indeed leave that
tree to another as I leave my stick. etc., to another, but do not in advance
regard it as alien to me, *i.e.* sacred. Rather, I make to myself no *crime*
of felling it if I will, and it remains my property, however long as I resign
it to others: it is and remains *mine*. In the banker's fortune I as little
see anything alien as Napoleon did in the territories of kings: we have no
*dread* of *"conquering"* it, and we look about us also for the means thereto.
We strip off from it, therefore, the *spirit* of *alienness*, of which we had
been afraid.

Therefore it is necessary that I do not lay claim to, anything more *as man*,
but to everything as I, this I; and accordingly to nothing human, but to mine;
*i. e.*, nothing that pertains to me as man, but -- what I will and because I
will it.

Rightful, or legitimate, property of another will be only that which *you* are
content to recognize as such. If your content ceases, then this property has
lost legitimacy for you, and you will laugh at absolute right to it.

Besides the hitherto discussed property in the limited sense, there is held up
to our reverent heart another property against which we are far less "to sin."
This property consists in spiritual goods, in the "sanctuary of the inner
nature." What a man holds sacred, no other is to gibe at; because, untrue as
it may be, and zealously as one may "in loving and modest wise" seek to
convince of a true sanctity the man who adheres to it and believes in it, yet
*the sacred* itself is always to be honored in it: the mistaken man does
believe in the sacred, even though in an incorrect essence of it, and so his
belief in the sacred must at least be respected.

In ruder times than ours it was customary to demand a particular faith, and
devotion to a particular sacred essence, and they did not take the gentlest
way with those who believed otherwise; since, however, "freedom of belief"
spread itself more and more abroad, the "jealous God and sole Lord" gradually
melted into a pretty general "supreme being," and it satisfied humane
tolerance if only every one revered "something sacred."

Reduced to the most human expression, this sacred essence is "man himself" and
"the human." With the deceptive semblance as if the human were altogether our
own, and free from all the otherworldliness with which the divine is tainted
- -- yes, as if Man were as much as I or you -- there may arise even the proud
fancy that the talk is no longer of a "sacred essence" and that we now feel
ourselves everywhere at home and no longer in the uncanny,(82) *i.e.* in the
sacred and in sacred awe: in the ecstasy over "Man discovered at last" the
egoistic cry of pain passes unheard, and the spook that has become so intimate
is taken for our true ego.

But "Humanus is the saint's name" (see Goethe), and the humane is only the
most clarified sanctity.

The egoist makes the reverse declaration. For this precise reason, because you
hold something sacred, I gibe at you; and, even if I respected everything in
you, your sanctuary is precisely what I should not respect.

With these opposed views there must also be assumed a contradictory relation
to spiritual goods: the egoist insults them, the religious man (*i.e.* every
one who puts his "essence" above himself) must consistently -- protect them.
But what kind of spiritual goods are to be protected, and what left
unprotected, depends entirely on the concept that one forms of the "supreme
being"; and he who fears God, *e. g.*, has more to shelter than he (the
liberal) who fears Man.

In spiritual goods we are (in distinction from the sensuous) injured in a
spiritual way, and the sin against them consists in a direct *desecration*,
while against the sensuous a purloining or alienation takes place; the goods
themselves are robbed of value and of consecration, not merely taken away; the
sacred is immediately compromised. With the word "irreverence" or "flippancy"
is designated everything that can be committed as *crime* against spiritual
goods, *i.e.* against everything that is sacred for us; and scoffing,
reviling, contempt, doubt, etc., are only different shades of *criminal
flippancy*.

That desecration can be practiced in the most manifold way is here to be
passed over, and only that desecration is to be preferentially mentioned which
threatens the sacred with danger through an *unrestricted press*.

As long as respect is demanded even for one spiritual essence, speech and the
press must be enthralled in the name of this essence; for just so long the
egoist might "trespass" against it by his *utterances*, from which thing he
must be hindered by "due punishment" at least, if one does not prefer to take
up the more correct means against it, the preventive use of police authority,
*e. g.* censorship.

What a sighing for liberty of the press! What then is the press to be
liberated from? Surely from a dependence, a belonging, and a liability to
service!

But to liberate himself from that is every one's affair, and it may with
safety be assumed that, when you have delivered yourself from liability to
service, that which you compose and write will also belong to you as your
*own* instead of having been thought and indicted *in* the service of some
power. What can a believer in Christ say and have printed, that should be
freer from that belief in Christ than he himself is? If I cannot or may not
write something, perhaps the primary fault lies with *me*. Little as this
seems to hit the point, so near is the application nevertheless to be found.
By a press-law I draw a boundary for my publications, or let one be drawn,
beyond which wrong and its *punishment* follows. I myself *limit* myself.

If the press was to be free, nothing would be so important as precisely its
liberation from every coercion that could be put on it in the *name of a law*.
And, that it might come to that, I my own self should have to have absolved
myself from obedience to the law.

Certainly, the absolute liberty of the press is like every absolute liberty, a
nonentity. The press can become free from full many a thing, but always only
from what I too am free from. If we make ourselves free from the sacred, if we
have become *graceless* and *lawless*, our words too will become so.

As little as *we* can be declared clear of every coercion in the world, so
little can our writing be withdrawn from it. But as free as we are, so free we
can make it too.

It must therefore become our *own*, instead of, as hitherto, serving a spook.

People do not yet know what they mean by their cry for liberty of the press.
What they ostensibly ask is that the State shall set the press free; but what
they are really after, without knowing it themselves, is that the press become
free from the State, or clear of the State. The former is a *petition to* the
State, the latter an *insurrection against* the State. As a "petition for
right," even as a serious demanding of the right of liberty of the press, it
presupposes the State as the giver, and can hope only for a *present*, a
permission, a chartering. Possible, no doubt, that a State acts so senselessly
as to grant the demanded present; but you may bet everything that those who
receive the present will not know how to use it so long as they regard the
State as a truth: they will not trespass against this "sacred thing," and will
call for a penal press-law against every one who would be willing to dare
this.

In a word, the press does not become free from what I am not free from.

Do I perhaps hereby show myself an opponent of the liberty of the press? On
the contrary, I only assert that one will never get it if one wants only it,
the liberty of the press, *i.e.* if one sets out only for an unrestricted
permission. Only beg right along for this permission: you may wait forever for
it, for there is no one in the world who could give it to you. As long as you
want to have yourselves "entitled" to the use of the press by a permission,
*i.e.* liberty of the press, you live in vain hope and complaint.

"Nonsense! Why, you yourself, who harbor such thoughts as stand in your book,
can unfortunately bring them to publicity only through a lucky chance or by
stealth; nevertheless you will inveigh against one's pressing and importuning
his own State till it gives the refused permission to print?" But an author
thus addressed would perhaps -- for the impudence of such people goes far --
give the following reply: "Consider well what you say! What then do I do to
procure myself liberty of the press for my book? Do I ask for permission, or
do I not rather, without any question of legality, seek a favorable occasion
and grasp it in complete recklessness of the State and its wishes? I -- the
terrifying word must be uttered -- I cheat the State. You unconsciously do the
same. From your tribunes you talk it into the idea that it must give up its
sanctity and inviolability, it must lay itself bare to the attacks of writers,
without needing on that account to fear danger. But you are imposing on it;
for its existence is done for as soon as it loses its unapproachableness. To
*you* indeed it might well accord liberty of writing, as England has done; you
are *believers in the State* and incapable of writing against the State,
however much you would like to reform it and 'remedy its defects.' But what if
opponents of the State availed themselves of free utterance, and stormed out
against Church, State, morals, and everything 'sacred' with inexorable
reasons? You would then be the first, in terrible agonies, to call into life
the *September laws*. Too late would you then rue the stupidity that earlier
made you so ready to fool and palaver into compliance the State, or the
government of the State. -- But, I prove by my act only two things. This for
one, that the liberty of the press is always bound to 'favorable
opportunities,' and accordingly will never be an absolute liberty; but
secondly this, that he who would enjoy it must seek out and, if possible,
create the favorable opportunity, availing himself of his *own advantage*
against the State; and counting himself and his will more than the State and
every 'superior' power. Not in the State, but only against it, can the liberty
of the press be carried through; if it is to be established, it is to be
obtained not as the consequence of a *petition* but as the work of an
*insurrection*. Every petition and every motion for liberty of the press is
already an insurrection, be it conscious or unconscious: a thing which
Philistine halfness alone will not and cannot confess to itself until, with a
shrinking shudder, it shall see it clearly and irrefutably by the outcome. For
the requested liberty of the press has indeed a friendly and well-meaning face
at the beginning, as it is not in the least minded ever to let the 'insolence
of the press' come into vogue; but little by little its heart grows more
hardened, and the inference flatters its way in that really a liberty is not a
liberty if it stands in the *service* of the State, of morals, or of the law.
A liberty indeed from the coercion of censorship, it is yet not a liberty from
the coercion of law. The press, once seized by the lust for liberty, always
wants to grow freer, till at last the writer says to himself, really I am not
wholly free till I ask about nothing; and writing is free only when it is my
*own*, dictated to me by no power or authority, by no faith, no dread; the
press must not be free -- that is too little -- it must be *mine: -- ownness
of the press* or *property in the press*, that is what I will take.

"Why, liberty of the press is only *permission of the press*, and the State
never will or can voluntarily permit me to grind it to nothingness by the
press."

Let us now, in conclusion, bettering the above language, which is still vague,
owing to the phrase 'liberty of the press,' rather put it thus: *"liberty of
the press*, the liberals' loud demand, is assuredly possible in the State;
yes, it is possible only *in* the State, because it is a *permission*, and
consequently the permitter (the State) must not be lacking. But as permission
it has its limit in this very State, which surely should not in reason permit
more than is compatible with itself and its welfare: the State fixes for it
this limit as the *law* of its existence and of its extension. That one State
brooks more than another is only a quantitative distinction, which alone,
nevertheless, lies at the heart of the political liberals: they want in
Germany, *i. e.*, only a '*more extended, broader* accordance of free
utterance.' The liberty of the press which is sought for is an affair of the
*people's*, and before the people (the State) possesses it I may make no use
of it. From the standpoint of property in the press, the situation is
different. Let my people, if they will, go without liberty of free press, I
will manage to print by force or ruse; I get my permission to print only from
- -- *myself* and my strength.

If the press is *my own*, I as little need a permission of the State for
employing it as I seek that permission in order to blow my nose. The press is
my *property* from the moment when nothing is more to me than myself; for from
this moment State, Church, people, society, etc., cease, because they have to
thank for their existence only the disrespect that I have for myself, and with
the vanishing of this undervaluation they themselves are extinguished: they
exist only when they exist *above me*, exist only as *powers* and
*power-holders*. Or can you imagine a State whose citizens one and all think
nothing of it? It would be as certainly a dream, an existence in seeming, as
'united Germany.'

The press is my own as soon as I myself am my own, a self- owned man: to the
egoist belongs the world, because he belongs to no power of the world.

With this my press might still be very *unfree*, as *e. g.* at this moment.
But the world is large, and one helps himself as well as he can. If I were
willing to abate from the *property* of my press, I could easily attain the
point where I might everywhere have as much printed as my fingers produced.
But, as I want to assert my property, I must necessarily swindle my enemies.
'Would you not accept their permission if it were given you?' Certainly, with
joy; for their permission would be to me a proof that I had fooled them and
started them on the road to ruin. I am not concerned for their permission, but
so much the more for their folly and their overthrow. I do not sue for their
permission as if I flattered myself (like the political liberals) that we
both, they and I, could make out peaceably alongside and with each other, yes,
probably raise and prop each other; but I sue for it in order to make them
bleed to death by it, that the permitters themselves may cease at last. I act
as a conscious enemy, overreaching them and *utilizing* their heedlessness.

The press is *mine* when I recognize outside myself no *judge* whatever over
its utilization, *i.e.* when my writing is no longer determined by morality or
religion or respect for the State laws or the like, but by me and my egoism!"

Now, what have you to reply to him who gives you so impudent an answer? -- We
shall perhaps put the question most strikingly by phrasing it as follows:
Whose is the press, the people's (State's) or mine? The politicals on their
side intend nothing further than to liberate the press from personal and
arbitrary interferences of the possessors of power, without thinking of the
point that to be really open for everybody it would also have to be free from
the laws, from the people's (State's) will. They want to make a "people's
affair" of it.

But, having become the people's property, it is still far from being mine;
rather, it retains for me the subordinate significance of a *permission*. The
people plays judge over my thoughts; it has the right of calling me to account
for them, or, I am responsible to it for them. Jurors, when their fixed ideas
are attacked, have just as hard heads as the stiffest despots and their
servile officials.

In the *"Liberale Bestrebungen*"(83) Edgar Bauer asserts that liberty of the
press is impossible in the absolutist and the constitutional State, whereas in
the "free State" it finds its place. "Here," the statement is, "it is
recognized that the individual, because he is no longer an individual but a
member of a true and rational generality, has the right to utter his mind." So
not the individual, but the "member," has liberty of the press. But, if for
the purpose of liberty of the press the individual must first give proof of
himself regarding his belief in the generality, the people; if he does not
have this liberty *through might of his own --* then it is a *people's
liberty*, a liberty that he is invested with for the sake of his faith, his
"membership." The reverse is the case: it is precisely as an individual that
every one has open to him the liberty to utter his mind. But he has not the
"right": that liberty is assuredly not his "sacred right." He has only the
*might;* but the might alone makes him owner. I need no concession for the
liberty of the press, do not need the people's consent to it, do not need the
"right" to it, nor any "justification." The liberty of the press too, like
every liberty, I must "take"; the people, "as being the sole judge," cannot
*give* it to me. It can put up with me the liberty that I take, or defend
itself against it; give, bestow, grant it cannot. I exercise it *despite* the
people, purely as an individual; *i.e.* I get it by fighting the people, my --
enemy, and obtain it only when I really get it by such fighting, *i. e. take*
it. But I take it because it is my property.

Sander, against whom E. Bauer writes, lays claim (page 99) to the liberty of
the press "as the right and the liberty of the *citizens in the State"*. What
else does Edgar Bauer do? To him also it is only a right of the free
*citizen*.

The liberty of the press is also demanded under the name of a "general human
right." Against this the objection was well-founded that not every man knew
how to use it rightly, for not every individual was truly man. Never did a
government refuse it to *Man* as such; but *Man* writes nothing, for the
reason that he is a ghost. It always refused it to *individuals* only, and
gave it to others, *e. g.* its organs. If then one would have it for all, one
must assert outright that it is due to the individual, me, not to man or to
the individual so far as he is man. Besides, another than a man (a beast) can
make no use of it. The French government, *e. g.*, does not dispute the
liberty of the press as a right of man, but demands from the individual a
security for his really being man; for it assigns liberty of the press not to
the individual, but to man.

Under the exact pretense that it was *not human*, what was mine was taken from
me! What was human was left to me undiminished.

Liberty of the press can bring about only a *responsible* press; the
*irresponsible* proceeds solely from property in the press.

- --------

For intercourse with men an express law (conformity to which one may venture
at times sinfully to forget, but the absolute value of which one at no time
ventures to deny) is placed foremost among all who live religiously: this is
the law -- of *love*, to which not even those who seem to fight against its
principle, and who hate its name, have as yet become untrue; for they also
still have love, yes, they love with a deeper and more sublimated love, they
love "man and mankind."

If we formulate the sense of this law, it will be about as follows: Every man
must have a something that is more to him than himself. You are to put your
"private interest" in the background when it is a question of the welfare of
others, the weal of the fatherland, of society, the common weal, the weal of
mankind, the good cause, etc.! Fatherland, society, mankind, must be more to
you than yourself, and as against their interest your "private interest" must
stand back; for you must not be an --egoist.

Love is a far-reaching religious demand, which is not, as might be supposed,
limited to love to God and man, but stands foremost in every regard. Whatever
we do, think, will, the ground of it is always to be love. Thus we may indeed
judge, but only "with love." The Bible may assuredly be criticized, and that
very thoroughly, but the critic must before all things *love* it and see in it
the sacred book. Is this anything else than to say he must not criticize it to
death, he must leave it standing, and that as a sacred thing that cannot be
upset? -- In our criticism on men too, love must remain the unchanged
key-note. Certainly judgments that hatred inspires are not at all our *own*
judgments, but judgments of the hatred that rules us, "rancorous judgments."
But are judgments that love inspires in us any more our *own*? They are
judgments of the love that rules us, they are "loving, lenient" judgments,
they are not our *own*, and accordingly not real judgments at all. He who
burns with love for justice cries out, *fiat justitia, pereat mundus!* He can
doubtless ask and investigate what justice properly is or demands, and *in
what* it consists, but not *whether* it is anything.

It is very true, "He who abides in love abides in God, and God in him." (1
John 4. 16.) God abides in him, he does not get rid of God, does not become
godless; and he abides in God, does not come to himself and into his own home,
abides in love to God and does not become loveless.

"God is love! All times and all races recognize in this word the central point
of Christianity." God, who is love, is an officious God: he cannot leave the
world in peace, but wants to make it *blest*. "God became man to make men
divine."(84) He has his hand in the game everywhere, and nothing happens
without it; everywhere he has his "best purposes," his "incomprehensible plans
and decrees." Reason, which he himself is, is to be forwarded and realized in
the whole world. His fatherly care deprives us of all independence. We can do
nothing sensible without its being said, God did that, and can bring upon
ourselves no misfortune without hearing, God ordained that; we have nothing
that we have not from him, he "gave" everything. But, as God does, so does
Man. God wants perforce to make the world *blest*, and Man wants to make it
*happy*, to make all men happy. Hence every "man" wants to awaken in all men
the reason which he supposes his own self to have: everything is to be
rational throughout. God torments himself with the devil, and the philosopher
does it with unreason and the accidental. God lets no being go *its own* gait,
and Man likewise wants to make us walk only in human wise.

But whoso is full of sacred (religious, moral, humane) love loves only the
spook, the "true man," and persecutes with dull mercilessness the individual,
the real man, under the phlegmatic legal title of measures against the "un-
man." He finds it praiseworthy and indispensable to exercise pitilessness in
the harshest measure; for love to the spook or generality commands him to hate
him who is not ghostly, *i.e.* the egoist or individual; such is the meaning
of the renowned love-phenomenon that is called "justice."

The criminally arraigned man can expect no forbearance, and no one spreads a
friendly veil over his unhappy nakedness. Without emotion the stern judge
tears the last rags of excuse from the body of the poor accused; without
compassion the jailer drags him into his damp abode; without placability, when
the time of punishment has expired, he thrusts the branded man again among
men, his good, Christian, loyal brethren, who contemptuously spit on him. Yes,
without grace a criminal "deserving of death" is led to the scaffold, and
before the eyes of a jubilating crowd the appeased moral law celebrates its
sublime -- revenge. For only one can live, the moral law or the criminal.
Where criminals live unpunished, the moral law has fallen; and, where this
prevails, those must go down. Their enmity is indestructible.

The Christian age is precisely that of *mercy, love*, solicitude to have men
receive what is due them, yes, to bring them to fulfil their human (divine)
calling. Therefore the principle has been put foremost for intercourse, that
this and that is man's essence and consequently his calling, to which either
God has called him or (according to the concepts of today) his being man (the
species) calls him. Hence the zeal for conversion. That the Communists and the
humane expect from man more than the Christians do does not change the
standpoint in the least. Man shall get what is human! If it was enough for the
pious that what was divine became his part, the humane demand that he be not
curtailed of what is human. Both set themselves against what is egoistic. Of
course; for what is egoistic cannot be accorded to him or vested in him (a
fief); he must procure it for himself. Love imparts the former, the latter can
be given to me by myself alone.

Intercourse hitherto has rested on love, *regardful* behavior, doing for each
other. As one owed it to himself to make himself blessed, or owed himself the
bliss of taking up into himself the supreme essence and bringing it to a
*vérité* (a truth and reality), so one owed it to *others* to help them
realize their essence and their calling: in both cases one owed it to the
essence of man to contribute to its realization.

But one owes it neither to himself to make anything out of himself, nor to
others to make anything out of them; for one owes nothing to his essence and
that of others. Intercourse resting on essence is an intercourse with the
spook, not with anything real. If I hold intercourse with the supreme essence,
I am not holding intercourse with myself, and, if I hold intercourse with the
essence of man, I am not holding intercourse with men.

The natural man's love becomes through culture a *commandment*. But as
commandment it belongs to *Man* as such. not to me; it is my *essence*,(85)
about which much ado(86) is made. not my property. *Man*, *i.e.* humanity,
presents that demand to me; love *is demanded*, it is my *duty*. Instead,
therefore, of being really won for *me*, it has been won for the generality,
*Man*, as his property or peculiarity: "it becomes man, every man, to love;
love is the duty and calling of man," etc.

Consequently I must again vindicate love for *myself*, and deliver it out of
the power of Man with the great M.

What was originally *mine*, but *accidentally* mine, instinctively mine, I was
invested with as the property of Man; I became feoffee in loving, I became the
retainer of mankind, only a specimen of this species, and acted, loving, not
as *I*, but as *man*, as a specimen of man, the humanly. The whole condition
of civilization is the *feudal system*, the property being Man's or mankind's,
not *mine*. A monstrous feudal State was founded, the individual robbed of
everything, everything left to "man." The individual had to appear at last as
a "sinner through and through."

Am I perchance to have no lively interest in the person of another, are *his*
joy and *his* weal not to lie at my heart, is the enjoyment that I furnish him
not to be more to me than other enjoyments of my own? On the contrary, I can
with joy sacrifice to him numberless enjoyments, I can deny myself numberless
things for the enhancement of *his* pleasure, and I can hazard for him what
without him was the dearest to me, my life, my welfare, my freedom. Why, it
constitutes my pleasure and my happiness to refresh myself with his happiness
and his pleasure. But *myself, my own self*, I do not sacrifice to him, but
remain an egoist and -- enjoy him. If I sacrifice to him everything that but
for my love to him I should keep, that is very simple, and even more usual in
life than it seems to be; but it proves nothing further than that this one
passion is more powerful in me than all the rest. Christianity too teaches us
to sacrifice all other passions to this. But, if to one passion I sacrifice
others, I do not on that account go so far as to sacrifice *myself*, nor
sacrifice anything of that whereby I truly am myself; I do not sacrifice my
peculiar value, my *ownness*. Where this bad case occurs, love cuts no better
figure than any other passion that I obey blindly. The ambitious man, who is
carried away by ambition and remains deaf to every warning that a calm moment
begets in him, has let this passion grow up into a despot against whom he
abandons all power of dissolution: he has given up himself, because he cannot
*dissolve* himself, and consequently cannot absolve himself from the passion:
he is possessed.

I love men too -- not merely individuals, but every one. But I love them with
the consciousness of egoism; I love them because love makes *me* happy, I love
because loving is natural to me, because it pleases me. I know no "commandment
of love." I have a *fellow-feeling* with every feeling being, and their
torment torments, their refreshment refreshes me too; I can kill them, not
torture them. *Per contra*, the high-souled, virtuous Philistine prince
Rudolph in *The Mysteries of Paris*, because the wicked provoke his
"indignation," plans their torture. That fellow-feeling proves only that the
feeling of those who feel is mine too, my property; in opposition to which the
pitiless dealing of the "righteous" man (*e. g.* against notary Ferrand) is
like the unfeelingness of that robber [Procrustes] who cut *off* or stretched
his prisoners' legs to the measure of his bedstead: Rudolph's bedstead, which
he cuts men to fit, is the concept of the "good." The for right, virtue, etc.,
makes people hard-hearted and intolerant. Rudolph does not feel like the
notary, but the reverse; he feels that "it serves the rascal right"; that is
no fellow-feeling.

You love man, therefore you torture the individual man, the egoist; your
philanthropy (love of men) is the tormenting of men.

If I see the loved one suffer, I suffer with him, and I know no rest till I
have tried everything to comfort and cheer him; if I see him glad, I too
become glad over his joy. From this it does not follow that suffering or joy
is caused in me by the same thing that brings out this effect in him, as is
sufficiently proved by every bodily pain which I do not feel as he does; his
tooth pains him, but his pain pains me.

But, because I cannot bear the troubled crease on the beloved forehead, for
that reason, and therefore for my sake, I kiss it away. If I did not love this
person, he might go right on making creases, they would not trouble me; I am
only driving away *my* trouble.

How now, has anybody or anything, whom and which I do not love, a *right* to
be loved by me? Is my love first, or is his right first? Parents, kinsfolk,
fatherland, nation, native town, etc., finally fellowmen in general
("brothers, fraternity"), assert that they have a right to my love, and lay
claim to it without further ceremony. They look upon it as *their property*,
and upon me, if I do not respect this, as a robber who takes from them what
pertains to them and is theirs. I *should* love. If love is a commandment and
law, then I must be educated into it, cultivated up to it, and, if I trespass
against it, punished. Hence people will exercise as strong a "moral influence"
as possible on me to bring me to love. And there is no doubt that one can work
up and seduce men to love as one can to other passions -- if you like, to
hate. Hate runs through whole races merely because the ancestors of the one
belonged to the Guelphs, those of the other to the Ghibellines.

But love is not a commandment, but, like each of my feelings, *my property.
Acquire*, *i.e.* purchase, my property, and then I will make it over to you. A
church, a nation, a fatherland, a family, etc., that does not know how to
acquire my love, I need not love; and I fix the purchase price of my love
quite at my pleasure.

Selfish love is far distant from unselfish, mystical, or romantic love. One
can love everything possible, not merely men, but an "object" in general
(wine, one's fatherland, etc.). Love becomes blind and crazy by a *must*
taking it out of my power (infatuation), romantic by a *should* entering into
it, *i.e.* by the "objects" becoming sacred for me, or my becoming bound to it
by duty, conscience, oath. Now the object no longer exists for me, but I for
it.

Love is a possessedness, not as my feeling -- as such I rather keep it in my
possession as property -- but through the alienness of the object. For
religious love consists in the commandment to love in the beloved a "holy
one," or to adhere to a holy one; for unselfish love there are objects
*absolutely lovable* for which my heart is to beat, *e. g.* fellow-men, or my
wedded mate, kinsfolk, etc. Holy Love loves the holy in the beloved, and
therefore exerts itself also to make of the beloved more and more a holy one
(a "man").

The beloved is an object that *should* be loved by me. He is not an object of
my love on account of, because of, or by, my loving him, but is an object of
love in and of himself. Not I make him an object of love, but he is such to
begin with; for it is here irrelevant that he has become so by my choice, if
so it be (as with a *fiancée*, a spouse, etc.), since even so he has in any
case, as the person once chosen, obtained a "right of his own to my love," and
I, because I have loved him, am under obligation to love him forever. He is
therefore not an object of *my* love, but of love in general: an object that
*should* be loved. Love appertains to him, is due to him, or is his *right*,
while I am under *obligation* to love him. My love, *i.e.* the toll of love
that I pay him, is in truth *his* love, which he only collects from me as
toll.

Every love to which there clings but the smallest speck of obligation is an
unselfish love, and, so far as this speck reaches, a possessedness. He who
believes that he *owes* the object of his love anything loves romantically or
religiously.

Family love, *e. g.* as it is usually understood as "piety," is a religious
love; love of fatherland, preached as "patriotism," likewise. All our romantic
loves move in the same pattern: everywhere the hypocrisy, or rather
self-deception, of an "unselfish love," an interest in the object for the
object's sake, not for my sake and mine alone.

Religious or romantic love is distinguished from sensual love by the
difference of the object indeed, but not by the dependence of the relation to
it. In the latter regard both are possessedness; but in the former the one
object is profane, the other sacred. The dominion of the object over me is the
same in both cases, only that it is one time a sensuous one, the other time a
spiritual (ghostly) one. My love is my own only when it consists altogether in
a selfish and egoistic interest, and when consequently the object of my love
is really *my* object or my property. I owe my property nothing, and have no
duty to it, as little as I might have a duty to my eye; if nevertheless I
guard it with the greatest care, I do so on my account.

Antiquity lacked love as little as do Christian times; the god of love is
older than the God of Love. But the mystical possessedness belongs to the
moderns.

The possessedness of love lies in the alienation of the object, or in my
powerlessness as against its alienness and superior power. To the egoist
nothing is high enough for him to humble himself before it, nothing so
independent that he would live for love of it, nothing so sacred that he would
sacrifice himself to it. The egoist's love rises in selfishness, flows in the
bed of selfishness, and empties into selfishness again.

Whether this can still be called love? If you know another word for it, go
ahead and choose it; then the sweet word love may wither with the departed
world; for the present I at least find none in our *Christian* language, and
hence stick to the old sound and "love" *my* object, my -- property.

Only as one of my feelings do I harbor love; but as a power above me, as a
divine power, as Feuerbach says, as a passion that I am not to cast off, as a
religious and moral duty, I -- scorn it. As my feeling it is *mine;* as a
principle to which I consecrate and "vow" my soul it is a dominator and
*divine*, just as hatred as a principle *is diabolical;* one not better than
the other. In short, egoistic love, *i.e.* my love, is neither holy nor
unholy, neither divine nor diabolical.

"A love that is limited by faith is an untrue love. The sole limitation that
does not contradict the essence of love is the self-limitation of love by
reason, intelligence. Love that scorns the rigor, the law, of intelligence, is
theoretically a false love, practically a ruinous one."(87) So love is in its
essence *rational!* So thinks Feuerbach; the believer, on the contrary,
thinks, Love is in its essence *believing*. The one inveighs against
*irrational*, the other against *unbelieving*, love. To both it can at most
rank as a *splendidum vitium*. Do not both leave love standing, even in the
form of unreason and unbelief? They do not dare to say, irrational or
unbelieving love is nonsense, is not love; as little as they are willing to
say, irrational or unbelieving tears are not tears. But, if even irrational
love, etc., must count as love, and if they are nevertheless to be unworthy of
man, there follows simply this: love is not the highest thing, but reason or
faith; even the unreasonable and the unbelieving can love; but love has value
only when it is that of a rational or believing person. It is an illusion when
Feuerbach calls the rationality of love its "self-limitation"; the believer
might with the same right call belief its "self-limitation." Irrational love
is neither "false" nor "ruinous"; its does its service as love.

Toward the world, especially toward men, I am to *assume a particular
feeling*, and "meet them with love," with the feeling of love, from the
beginning. Certainly, in this there is revealed far more free-will and
self-determination than when I let myself be stormed, by way of the world, by
all possible feelings, and remain exposed to the most checkered, most
accidental impressions. I go to the world rather with a preconceived feeling,
as if it were a prejudice and a preconceived opinion; I have prescribed to
myself in advance my behavior toward it, and, despite all its temptations,
feel and think about it only as I have once determined to. Against the
dominion of the world I secure myself by the principle of love; for, whatever
may come, I -- love. The ugly -- *e. g.* --makes a repulsive impression on me;
but, determined to love, I master this impression as I do every antipathy.

But the feeling to which I have determined and -- condemned myself from the
start is a *narrow* feeling, because it is a predestined one, of which I
myself am not able to get clear or to declare myself clear. Because
preconceived, it is a *prejudice. I* no longer show myself in face of the
world, but my love shows itself. The *world* indeed does not rule me, but so
much the more inevitably does the spirit of *love* rule this spirit.

If I first said, I love the world, I now add likewise: I do not love it, for I
*annihilate* it as I annihilate myself; I *dissolve it*. I do not limit myself
to one feeling for men, but give free play to all that I am capable of. Why
should I not dare speak it out in all its glaringness? Yes, I *utilize* the
world and men! With this I can keep myself open to every impression without
being torn away from myself by one of them. I can love, love with a full
heart, and let the most consuming glow of passion burn in my heart, without
taking the beloved one for anything else than the *nourishment* of my passion,
on which it ever refreshes itself anew. All my care for him applies only to
the *object of my love*, only to him whom my love *requires*, only to him, the
"warmly loved." How indifferent would he be to me without this -- my love! I
feed only my love with him, I *utilize* him for this only: I *enjoy* him.

Let us choose another convenient example. I see how men are fretted in dark
superstition by a swarm of ghosts. If to the extent of my powers I let a bit
of daylight fall in on the nocturnal spookery, is it perchance because love to
you inspires this in me? Do I write out of love to men? No, I write because I
want to procure for *my* thoughts an existence in the world; and, even if I
foresaw that these thoughts would deprive you of your rest and your peace,
even if I saw the bloodiest wars and the fall of many generations springing up
from this seed of thought -- I would nevertheless scatter it. Do with it what
you will and can, that is your affair and does not trouble me. You will
perhaps have only trouble, combat, and death from it, very few will draw joy
from it. If your weal lay at my heart, I should act as the church did in
withholding the Bible from the laity, or Christian governments, which make it
a sacred duty for themselves to "protect the common people from bad books."

But not only not for your sake, not even for truth's sake either do I speak
out what I think. No --

     I sing as the bird sings
     That on the bough alights;
     The song that from me springs
     Is pay that well requites.

I sing because -- I am a singer. But I *use*(88) you for it because I --
need(89) ears.

Where the world comes in my way -- and it comes in my way everywhere -- I
consume it to quiet the hunger of my egoism. For me you are nothing but --my
food, even as I too am fed upon and turned to use by you. We have only one
relation to each other, that of *usableness*, of utility, of use. We owe *each
other* nothing, for what I seem to owe you I owe at most to myself. If I show
you a cheery air in order to cheer you likewise, then your cheeriness is of
consequence to *me*, and my air serves *my* wish; to a thousand others, whom I
do not aim to cheer, I do not show it.

- --------

One has to be educated up to that love which founds itself on the "essence of
man" or, in the ecclesiastical and moral period, lies upon us as a
"commandment." In what fashion moral influence, the chief ingredient of our
education, seeks to regulate the intercourse of men shall here be looked at
with egoistic eyes in one example at least.

Those who educate us make it their concern early to break us of lying and to
inculcate the principle that one must always tell the truth. If selfishness
were made the basis for this rule, every one would easily understand how by
lying he fools away that confidence in him which he hopes to awaken in others,
and how correct the maxim proves, Nobody believes a liar even when he tells
the truth. Yet, at the same time, he would also feel that he had to meet with
truth only him whom *he* authorized to hear the truth. If a spy walks in
disguise through the hostile camp, and is asked who he is, the askers are
assuredly entitled to inquire after his name, but the disguised man does not
give them the right to learn the truth from him; he tells them what he likes,
only not the fact. And yet morality demands, "Thou shalt not lie!" By morality
those persons are vested with the right to expect the truth; but by me they
are not vested with that right, and I recognize only the right that *I*
impart. In a gathering of revolutionists the police force their way in and ask
the orator for his name; everybody knows that the police have the right to do
so, but they do not have it from the *revolutionist*, since he is their enemy;
he tells them a false name and --cheats them with a lie. The police do not act
so foolishly either as to count on their enemies' love of truth; on the
contrary, they do not believe without further ceremony, but have the
questioned individual "identified" if they can. Nay, the State -- everywhere
proceeds incredulously with individuals, because in their egoism it recognizes
its natural enemy; it invariably demands a "voucher," and he who cannot show
vouchers falls a prey to its investigating inquisition. The State does not
believe nor trust the individual, and so of itself places itself with him in
the *convention of lying*; it trusts me only when it has *convinced* itself of
the truth of my statement, for which there often remains to it no other means
than the oath. How clearly, too, this (the oath) proves that the State does
not count on our credibility and love of truth, but on our *interest*, our
selfishness: it relies on our not wanting to fall foul of God by a perjury.

Now, let one imagine a French revolutionist in the year 1788, who among
friends let fall the now well-known phrase, "the world will have no rest till
the last king is hanged with the guts of the last priest." The king then still
had all power, and, when the utterance is betrayed by an accident, yet without
its being possible to produce witnesses, confession is demanded from the
accused. Is he to confess or not?

If he denies, he lies and -- remains unpunished; if he confesses, he is candid
and -- is beheaded. If truth is more than everything else to him, all right,
let him die. Only a paltry poet could try to make a tragedy out of the end of
his life; for what interest is there in seeing how a man succumbs from
cowardice? But, if he had the courage not to be a slave of truth and
sincerity, he would ask somewhat thus: Why need the judges know what I have
spoken among friends? If I had *wished* them to know, I should have said it to
them as I said it to my friends. I will not have them know it. They force
themselves into my confidence without my having called them to it and made
them my confidants; they *will* learn what I *will* keep secret. Come on then,
you who wish to break my will by your will, and try your arts. You can torture
me by the rack, you can threaten me with hell and eternal damnation, you can
make me so nerveless that I swear a false oath, but the truth you shall not
press out of me, for I *will* lie to you because I have given you no claim and
no right to my sincerity. Let God, "who is truth," look down ever so
threateningly on me, let lying come ever so hard to me, I have nevertheless
the courage of a lie; and, even if I were weary of my life, even if nothing
appeared to me more welcome than your executioner's sword, you nevertheless
should not have the joy of finding in me a slave of truth, whom by your
priestly arts you make a traitor to his *will*. When I spoke those treasonable
words, I would not have had you know anything of them; I now retain the same
will, and do not let myself be frightened by the curse of the lie.

Sigismund is not a miserable caitiff because he broke his princely word, but
he broke the word because he was a caitiff; he might have kept his word and
would still have been a caitiff, a priest-ridden man. Luther, driven by a
higher power, became unfaithful to his monastic vow: he became so for God's
sake. Both broke their oath as possessed persons: Sigismund, because he wanted
to appear as a *sincere* professor of the divine *truth*, *i. e.*, of the
true, genuinely Catholic faith; Luther, in order to give testimony for the
gospel *sincerely* and with entire truth. with body and soul; both became
perjured in order to be sincere toward the "higher truth." Only, the priests
absolved the one, the other absolved himself. What else did both observe than
what is contained in those apostolic words, "Thou hast not lied to men, but to
God?" They lied to men, broke their oath before the world's eyes, in order not
to lie to God, but to serve him. Thus they show us a way to deal with truth
before men. For God's glory, and for God's sake, a -- breach of oath, a lie, a
prince's word broken!

How would it be, now, if we changed the thing a little and wrote, A perjury
and lie for -- *my sake?* Would not that be pleading for every baseness? It
seems so, assuredly, only in this it is altogether like the "for God's sake."
For was not every baseness committed for God's sake, were not all the
scaffolds filled for his sake and all the *autos-da-fé* held for his sake, was
not all stupefaction introduced for his sake? And do they not today still for
God's sake fetter the mind in tender children by religious education? Were not
sacred vows broken for his sake, and do not missionaries and priests still go
around every day to bring Jews, heathen, Protestants or Catholics, to treason
against the faith of their fathers -- for his sake? And that should be worse
with the *for my sake?* What then does *on my account* mean? There people
immediately think of *"filthy lucre"*. But he who acts from love of filthy
lucre does it on his own account indeed, as there is nothing anyhow that one
does not do for his own sake -- among other things, everything that is done
for God's glory; yet he, for whom he seeks the lucre, is a slave of lucre, not
raised above lucre; he is one who belongs to lucre, the money-bag, not to
himself; he is not his own. Must not a man whom the passion of avarice rules
follow the commands of this *master?* And, if a weak goodnaturedness once
beguiles him, does this not appear as simply an exceptional case of precisely
the same sort as when pious believers are sometimes forsaken by their Lord's
guidance and ensnared by the arts of the "devil?" So an avaricious man is not
a self-owned man, but a servant; and he can do nothing for his own sake
without at the same time doing it for his lord's sake -- precisely like the
godly man.

Famous is the breach of oath which Francis I committed against Emperor Charles
V. Not later, when he ripely weighed his promise, but at once, when he swore
the oath, King Francis took it back in thought as well as by a secret
protestation documentarily subscribed before his councillors; he uttered a
perjury aforethought. Francis did not show himself disinclined to buy his
release, but the price that Charles put on it seemed to him too high and
unreasonable. Even though Charles behaved himself in a sordid fashion when he
sought to extort as much as possible, it was yet shabby of Francis to want to
purchase his freedom for a lower ransom; and his later dealings, among which
there occurs yet a second breach of his word, prove sufficiently how the
huckster spirit held him enthralled and made him a shabby swindler. However,
what shall we say to the reproach of perjury against him? In the first place,
surely, this again: that not the perjury, but his sordidness, shamed him; that
he did not deserve contempt for his perjury, but made himself guilty of
perjury because he was a contemptible man. But Francis's perjury, regarded in
itself, demands another judgment. One might say Francis did not respond to the
confidence that Charles put in him in setting him free. But, if Charles had
really favored him with confidence, he would have named to him the price that
he considered the release worth, and would then have set him at liberty and
expected Francis to pay the redemption-sum. Charles harbored no such trust,
but only believed in Francis's impotence and credulity, which would not allow
him to act against his oath; but Francis deceived only this -- credulous
calculation. When Charles believed he was assuring himself of his enemy by an
oath, right there he was freeing him from every obligation. Charles had given
the king credit for a piece of stupidity, a narrow conscience, and, without
confidence in Francis, counted only on Francis's stupidity, *e. g.*,
conscientiousness: he let him go from the Madrid prison only to hold him the
more securely in the prison of conscientiousness, the great jail built about
the mind of man by religion: he sent him back to France locked fast in
invisible chains, what wonder if Francis sought to escape and sawed the chains
apart? No man would have taken it amiss of him if he had secretly fled from
Madrid, for he was in an enemy's power; but every good Christian cries out
upon him, that he wanted to loose himself from God's bonds too. (It was only
later that the pope absolved him from his oath.)

It is despicable to deceive a confidence that we voluntarily call forth; but
it is no shame to egoism to let every one who wants to get us into his power
by an oath bleed to death by the failure of his untrustful craft. If you have
wanted to bind me, then learn that I know how to burst your bonds.

The point is whether I give the confider the right to confidence. If the
pursuer of my friend asks me where he has fled to, I shall surely put him on a
false trail. Why does he ask precisely me, the pursued man's friend? In order
not to be a false, traitorous friend, I prefer to be false to the enemy. I
might certainly in courageous conscientiousness, answer, "I will not tell" (so
Fichte decides the case); by that I should salve my love of truth and do for
my friend as much as -- nothing, for, if I do not mislead the enemy, he may
accidentally take the right street, and my love of truth would have given up
my friend as a prey, because it hindered me from the --courage for a lie. He
who has in the truth an idol, a sacred thing, must *humble* himself before it,
must not defy its demands, not resist courageously; in short, he must renounce
the *heroism of the lie*. For to the lie belongs not less courage than to the
truth: a courage that young men are most apt to be defective in, who would
rather confess the truth and mount the scaffold for it than confound the
enemy's power by the impudence of a lie. To them the truth is "sacred," and
the sacred at all times demands blind reverence, submission, and
self-sacrifice. If you are not impudent, not mockers of the sacred, you are
tame and its servants. Let one but lay a grain of truth in the trap for you,
you peck at it to a certainty, and the fool is caught. You will not lie? Well,
then, fall as sacrifices to the truth and become -- martyrs! Martyrs! -- for
what? For yourselves, for self-ownership? No, for your goddess -- the truth.
You know only two *services*, only two kinds of servants: servants of the
truth and servants of the lie. Then in God's name serve the truth!

Others, again, serve the truth also; but they serve it "in moderation," and
make, *e. g.* a great distinction between a simple lie and a lie sworn to. And
yet the whole chapter of the oath coincides with that of the lie, since an
oath, everybody knows, is only a strongly assured statement. You consider
yourselves entitled to lie, if only you do not swear to it besides? One who is
particular about it must judge and condemn a lie as sharply as a false oath.
But now there has been kept up in morality an ancient point of controversy,
which is customarily treated of under the name of the "lie of necessity." No
one who dares plead for this can consistently put from him an "oath of
necessity." If I justify my lie as a lie of necessity, I should not be so
pusillanimous as to rob the justified lie of the strongest corroboration.
Whatever I do, why should I not do it entirely and without reservations
(*reservatio mentalis*)? If I once lie, why then not lie completely, with
entire consciousness and all my might? As a spy I should have to swear to each
of my false statements at the enemy's demand; determined to lie to him, should
I suddenly become cowardly and undecided in face of an oath? Then I should
have been ruined in advance for a liar and spy; for, you see, I should be
voluntarily putting into the enemy's hands a means to catch me. -- The State
too fears the oath of necessity, and for this reason does not give the accused
a chance to swear. But you do not justify the State's fear; you lie, but do
not swear falsely. If, *e. g.* you show some one a kindness, and he is not to
know it, but he guesses it and tells you so to your face, you deny; if he
insists, you say, "honestly, no!" If it came to swearing, then you would
refuse; for, from fear of the sacred, you always stop half way. *Against* the
sacred you have no *will of your own*. You lie in -- moderation, as you are
free "in moderation," religious "in moderation" (the clergy are not to
"encroach"; over this point the most rapid of controversies is now being
carried on, on the part of the university against the church), monarchically
disposed "in moderation" (you want a monarch limited by the constitution, by a
fundamental law of the State), everything nicely *tempered*, lukewarm, half
God's, half the devil's.

There was a university where the usage was that every word of honor that must
be given to the university judge was looked upon by the students as null and
void. For the students saw in the demanding of it nothing but a snare, which
they could not escape otherwise than by taking away all its significance. He
who at that same university broke his word of honor to one of the fellows was
infamous; he who gave it to the university judge derided, in union with these
very fellows, the dupe who fancied that a word had the same value among
friends and among foes. It was less a correct theory than the constraint of
practice that had there taught the students to act so, as, without that means
of getting out, they would have been pitilessly driven to treachery against
their comrades. But, as the means approved itself in practice, so it has its
theoretical probation too. A word of honor, an oath, is one only for him whom
I entitle to receive it; he who forces me to it obtains only a forced, *i.e.*
a *hostile* word, the word of a foe, whom one has no right to trust; for the
foe does not give us the right.

Aside from this, the courts of the State do not even recognize the
inviolability of an oath. For, if I had sworn to one who comes under
examination that I would not declare anything against him, the court would
demand my declaration in spite of the fact that an oath binds me, and, in case
of refusal, would lock me up till I decided to become -- an oath-breaker. The
court "absolves me from my oath"; -- how magnanimous! If any power can absolve
me from the oath, I myself am surely the very first power that has a claim to.

As a curiosity, and to remind us of customary oaths of all sorts, let place be
given here to that which Emperor Paul commanded the captured Poles
(Kosciuszko, Potocki, Niemcewicz, and others) to take when he released them:
"We not merely swear fidelity and obedience to the emperor, but also further
promise to pour out our blood for his glory; we obligate ourselves to discover
everything threatening to his person or his empire that we ever learn; we
declare finally that, in whatever part of the earth we may be, a single word
of the emperor shall suffice to make us leave everything and repair to him at
once."

- --------

In one domain the principle of love seems to have been long outsoared by
egoism, and to be still in need only of sure consciousness, as it were of
victory with a good conscience. This domain is speculation, in its double
manifestation as thinking and as trade. One thinks with a will, whatever may
come of it; one speculates, however many may suffer under our speculative
undertakings. But, when it finally becomes serious, when even the last remnant
of religiousness, romance, or "humanity" is to be done away, then the pulse of
religious conscience beats, and one at least *professes* humanity. The
avaricious speculator throws some coppers into the poor-box and "does good,"
the bold thinker consoles himself with the fact that he is working for the
advancement of the human race and that his devastation "turns to the good" of
mankind, or, in another case, that he is "serving the idea"; mankind, the
idea, is to him that something of which he must say, It is more to me than
myself.

To this day thinking and trading have been done for -- God's sake. Those who
for six days were trampling down everything by their selfish aims sacrificed
on the seventh to the Lord; and those who destroyed a hundred "good causes" by
their reckless thinking still did this in the service of another "good cause,"
and had yet to think of another -- besides themselves -- to whose good their
self-indulgence should turn; of the people, mankind, etc. But this other thing
is a being above them, a higher or supreme being; and therefore I say, they
are toiling for God's sake.

Hence I can also say that the ultimate basis of their actions is -- love. Not
a voluntary love however, not their own, but a tributary love, or the higher
being's own (God's, who himself is love); in short, not the egoistic, but the
religious; a love that springs from their fancy that they *must* discharge a
tribute of love, *i.e.* that they must not be "egoists."

If *we* want to deliver the world from many kinds of unfreedom, we want this
not on its account but on ours; for, as we are not world-liberators by
profession and out of "love," we only want to win it away from others. We want
to make it *our* own; it is not to be any longer *owned as serf* by God (the
church) nor by the law (State), but to be *our own*; therefore we seek to
"win" it, to "captivate" it, and, by meeting it halfway and "devoting"
ourselves to it as to ourselves as soon as it belongs to us, to complete and
make superfluous the force that it turns against us. If the world is ours, it
no longer attempts any force *against* us, but only *with us*. My selfishness
has an interest in the liberation of the world, that it may become -- my
property.

Not isolation or being alone, but society, is man's original state. Our
existence begins with the most intimate conjunction, as we are already living
with our mother before we breathe; when we see the light of the world, we at
once lie on a human being's breast again, her love cradles us in the lap,
leads us in the go-cart, and chains us to her person with a thousand ties.
Society is our *state of nature*. And this is why, the more we learn to feel
ourselves, the connection that was formerly most intimate becomes ever looser
and the dissolution of the original society more unmistakable. To have once
again for herself the child that once lay under her heart, the mother must
fetch it from the street and from the midst of its playmates. The child
prefers the *intercourse* that it enters into with *its fellows* to the
*society* that it has not entered into, but only been born in.

But the dissolution of *society* is *intercourse* or *union*. A society does
assuredly arise by union too, but only as a fixed idea arises by a thought --
to wit, by the vanishing of the energy of the thought (the thinking itself,
this restless taking back all thoughts that make themselves fast) from the
thought. If a union(90) has crystallized into a society, it has ceased to be a
coalition;(91) for coalition is an incessant self-uniting; it has become a
unitedness, come to a standstill, degenerated into a fixity; it is -- *dead*
as a union, it is the corpse of the union or the coalition, *i.e.* it is
- --society, community. A striking example of this kind is furnished by the
*party*.

That a society (*e. g.* the society of the State) diminishes my *liberty*
offends me little. Why, I have to let my liberty be limited by all sorts of
powers and by every one who is stronger; nay, by every fellow-man; and, were I
the autocrat of all the R......, I yet should not enjoy absolute liberty. But
*ownness* I will not have taken from me. And ownness is precisely what every
society has designs on, precisely what is to succumb to its power.

A society which I join does indeed take from me many liberties, but in return
it affords me other liberties; neither does it matter if I myself deprive
myself of this and that liberty (*e. g.* by any contract). On the other hand,
I want to hold jealously to my ownness. Every community has the propensity,
stronger or weaker according to the fullness of its power, to become an
*authority* to its members and to set *limits* for them: it asks, and must
ask, for a "subject's limited understanding"; it asks that those who belong to
it be subjected to it, be its "subjects"; it exists only by *subjection*. In
this a certain tolerance need by no means be excluded; on the contrary, the
society will welcome improvements, corrections, and blame, so far as such are
calculated for its gain: but the blame must be "well-meaning," it may not be
"insolent and disrespectful" -- in other words, one must leave uninjured, and
hold sacred, the substance of the society. The society demands that those who
belong to it shall not *go beyond it* and exalt themselves, but remain "within
the bounds of legality," *e. g.*, allow themselves only so much as the society
and its law allow them.

There is a difference whether my liberty or my ownness is limited by a
society. If the former only is the case, it is a coalition, an agreement, a
union; but, if ruin is threatened to ownness, it is *a power of itself*, a
power *above me*, a thing unattainable by me, which I can indeed admire,
adore, reverence, respect, but cannot subdue and consume, and that for the
reason that I *am resigned*. It exists by my *resignation*, my
*self-renunciation*, my spiritlessness,(92) called --

HUMILITY.(93) My humility makes its courage,(94) my submissiveness gives it
its dominion.

 But in reference to *liberty*, State and union are subject to no essential
difference. The latter can just as little come into existence, or continue in
existence, without liberty's being limited in all sorts of ways, as the State
is compatible with unmeasured liberty. Limitation of liberty is inevitable
everywhere, for one cannot get *rid* of everything; one cannot fly like a bird
merely because one would like to fly so, for one does not get free from his
own weight; one cannot live under water as long as he likes, like a fish,
because one cannot do without air and cannot get free from this indispensable
necessity; etc. As religion, and most decidedly Christianity, tormented man
with the demand to realize the unnatural and self- contradictory, so it is to
be looked upon only as the true logical outcome of that religious
over-straining and overwroughtness that finally *liberty itself, absolute
liberty*, was exalted into an ideal, and thus the nonsense of the impossible
to come glaringly to the light. -- The union will assuredly offer a greater
measure of liberty, as well as (and especially because by it one escapes all
the coercion peculiar to State and society life) admit of being considered as
"a new liberty"; but nevertheless it will still contain enough of unfreedom
and involuntariness. For its object is not this -- liberty (which on the
contrary it sacrifices to ownness), but only *ownness*. Referred to this, the
difference between State and union is great enough. The former is an enemy and
murderer of *ownness*, the latter a son and co-worker of it; the former a
spirit that would be adored in spirit and in truth, the latter my work, my
product ; the State is the lord of my spirit, who demands faith and prescribes
to me articles of faith, the creed of legality; it exerts moral influence,
dominates my spirit, drives away my ego to put itself in its place as "my true
ego" -- in short, the State is sacred, and as against me, the individual man,
it is the true man, the spirit, the ghost; but the union is my own creation,
my creature, not sacred, not a spiritual power above my spirit, as little as
any association of whatever sort. As I am not willing to be a slave of my
maxims, but lay them bare to my continual criticism without *any warrant*, and
admit no bail at all for their persistence, so still less do I obligate myself
to the union for my future and pledge my soul to it, as is said to be done
with the devil, and is really the case with the State and all spiritual
authority; but I am and remain *more* to myself than State, Church, God, etc.;
consequently infinitely more than the union too.

That society which Communism wants to found seems to stand nearest to
*coalition*. For it is to aim at the "welfare of all," oh, yes, of all, cries
Weitling innumerable times, of all! That does really look as if in it no one
needed to take a back seat. But what then will this welfare be? Have all one
and the same welfare, are all equally well off with one and the same thing? If
that be so, the question is of the "true welfare." Do we not with this come
right to the point where religion begins its dominion of violence?
Christianity says, Look not on earthly toys, but seek your true welfare,
become -- pious Christians; being Christians is the true welfare. It is the
true welfare of "all," because it is the welfare of Man as such (this spook).
Now, the welfare of all is surely to be *your* and *my* welfare too? But, if
you and I do not look upon that welfare as *our* welfare, will care then be
taken for that in which *we* feel well? On the contrary, society has decreed a
welfare as the "true welfare," if this welfare were called *e. g.* "enjoyment
honestly worked for"; but if you preferred enjoyable laziness, enjoyment
without work, then society, which cares for the "welfare of all," would wisely
avoid caring for that in which you are well off. Communism, in proclaiming the
welfare of all, annuls outright the well-being of those who hitherto lived on
their income from investments and apparently felt better in that than in the
prospect of Weitling's strict hours of labor. Hence the latter asserts that
with the welfare of thousands the welfare of millions cannot exist, and the
former must give up *their* special welfare "for the sake of the general
welfare." No, let people not be summoned to sacrifice their special welfare
for the general, for this Christian admonition will not carry you through;
they will better understand the opposite admonition, not to let their *own*
welfare be snatched from them by anybody, but to put it on a permanent
foundation. Then they are of themselves led to the point that they care best
for their welfare if they *unite* with others for this purpose, *e. g.*,
"sacrifice a part of their liberty," yet not to the welfare of others, but to
their own. An appeal to men's self-sacrificing disposition end self-
renouncing love ought at least to have lost its seductive plausibility when,
after an activity of thousands of years, it has left nothing behind but the --
*misère* of today. Why then still fruitlessly expect self-sacrifice to bring
us better time? Why not rather hope for them from *usurpation?* Salvation
comes no longer from the giver, the bestower, the loving one, but from the
*taker*, the appropriator (usurper), the owner. Communism, and, consciously,
egoism-reviling humanism, still count on *love*.

If community is once a need of man, and he finds himself furthered by it in
his aims, then very soon, because it has become his principle, it prescribes
to him its laws too, the laws of -- society. The principle of men exalts
itself into a sovereign power over them, becomes their supreme essence, their
God, and, as such -- law-giver. Communism gives this principle the strictest
effect, and Christianity is the religion of society, for, as Feuerbach rightly
says, although he does not mean it rightly, love is the essence of man; *e.
g.*, the essence of society or of societary (Communistic) man. All religion is
a cult of society, this principle by which societary (cultivated) man is
dominated; neither is any god an ego's exclusive god, but always a society's
or community's, be it of the society, "family" (Lar, Penates) or of a "people"
("national god") or of "all men" ("he is a Father of all men").

Consequently one has a prospect of extirpating religion down to the ground
only when one antiquates *society* and everything that flows from this
principle. But it is precisely in Communism that this principle seeks to
culminate, as in it everything is to become *common* for the establishment of
- -- "equality." If this "equality" is won, "liberty" too is not lacking. But
whose liberty? *Society's*! Society is then all in all, and men are only "for
each other." It would be the glory of the -- love-State.

But I would rather be referred to men's selfishness than to their
"kindnesses,"(95) their mercy, pity, etc. The former demands *reciprocity* (as
thou to me, so I to thee), does nothing "gratis," and may be won and --
*bought*. But with what shall I obtain the kindness? It is a matter of chance
whether I am at the time having to do with a "loving" person. The affectionate
one's service can be had only by -- *begging*, be it by my lamentable
appearance, by my need of help, my misery, my -- *suffering*. What can I offer
him for his assistance? Nothing! I must accept it as a --present. Love is
*unpayable*, or rather, love can assuredly be paid for, but only by
counter-love ("One good turn deserves another"). What paltriness and
beggarliness does it not take to accept gifts year in and year out without
service in return, as they are regularly collected *e. g.* from the poor
day-laborer? What can the receiver do for him and his donated pennies, in
which his wealth consists? The day- laborer would really have more enjoyment
if the receiver with his laws, his institutions, etc., all of which the
day-laborer has to pay for though, did not exist at all. And yet, with it all,
the poor wight *loves* his master.

No, community, as the "goal" of history hitherto, is impossible. Let us rather
renounce every hypocrisy of community, and recognize that, if we are equal as
men, we are not equal for the very reason that we are not men. We are equal
*only in thoughts*, only when "we" are *thought*, not as we really and bodily
are. I am ego, and you are ego: but I am not this thought-of ego; this ego in
which we are all equal is only my *thought*. I am man, and you are man: but
"man" is only a thought, a generality; neither I nor you are speakable, we are
*unutterable*, because only *thoughts* are speakable and consist in speaking.

Let us therefore not aspire to community, but to *one-sidedness*. Let us not
seek the most comprehensive commune, "human society," but let us seek in
others only means and organs which we may use as our property! As we do not
see our equals in the tree, the beast, so the presupposition that others are
*our equals* springs from a hypocrisy. No one is *my equal*, but I regard him,
equally with all other beings, as my property. In opposition to this I am told
that I should be a man among "fellow-men" (*Judenfrage*, p. 60); I should
"respect" the fellow-man in them. For me no one is a person to be respected,
not even the fellow-man, but solely, like other beings, an *object* in which I
take an interest or else do not, an interesting or uninteresting object, a
usable or unusable person.

And, if I can use him, I doubtless come to an understanding and make myself at
one with him, in order, by the agreement, to strengthen *my power*, and by
combined force to accomplish more than individual force could effect. In this
combination I see nothing whatever but a multiplication of my force, and I
retain it only so long as it is my multiplied force. But thus it is a --
union.

Neither a natural ligature nor a spiritual one holds the union together, and
it is not a natural, not a spiritual league. It is not brought about by one
*blood*, not by one *faith* (spirit). In a natural league -- like a family, a
tribe, a nation, yes, mankind -- the individuals have only the value of
*specimens* of the same species or genus; in a spiritual league -- like a
commune, a church -- the individual signifies only a *member* of the same
spirit; what you are in both cases as a unique person must be -- suppressed.
Only in the union can you assert yourself as unique, because the union does
not possess you, but you possess it or make it of use to you.

Property is recognized in the union, and only in the union, because one no
longer holds what is his as a fief from any being. The Communists are only
consistently carrying further what had already been long present during
religious evolution, and especially in the State; to wit, propertylessness,
the feudal system.

The State exerts itself to tame the desirous man; in other words, it seeks to
direct his desire to it alone, and to *content* that desire with what it
offers. To sate the desire for the desirous man's sake does not come into the
mind: on the contrary, it stigmatizes as an "egoistic man" the man who
breathes out unbridled desire, and the "egoistic man" is its enemy. He is this
for it because the capacity to agree with him is wanting to the State; the
egoist is precisely what it cannot "comprehend." Since the State (as nothing
else is possible) has to do only for itself, it does not take care for my
needs, but takes care only of how it make away with me, *i.e.* make out of me
another ego, a good citizen. It takes measures for the "improvement of
morals." -- And with what does it win individuals for itself? With itself,
*i.e.* with what is the State's, with *State property*. It will be
unremittingly active in making all participants in its "goods," providing all
with the "good things of culture"; it presents them its education, opens to
them the access to its institutions of culture, capacitates them to come to
property (*i.e.* to a fief) in the way of industry, etc. For all these *fiefs*
it demands only the just rent of continual *thanks*. But the "unthankful"
forget to pay these thanks. -- Now, neither can "society" do essentially
otherwise than the State.

You bring into a union your whole power, your competence, and *make yourself
count*; in a society you are *employed*, with your working power; in the
former you live egoistically, in the latter humanly, *i.e.* religiously, as a
"member in the body of this Lord"; to a society you owe what you have, and are
in duty bound to it, are -- possessed by "social duties"; a union you utilize,
and give it up undutifully and unfaithfully when you see no way to use it
further. If a society is more than you, then it is more to you than yourself;
a union is only your instrument, or the sword with which you sharpen and
increase your natural force; the union exists for you and through you, the
society conversely lays claim to you for itself and exists even without you,
in short, the society is *sacred*, the union your *own*; consumes *you, you*
consume the union.

Nevertheless people will not be backward with the objection that the agreement
which has been concluded may again become burdensome to us and limit our
freedom; they will say, we too would at last come to this, that "every one
must sacrifice a part of his freedom for the sake of the generality." But the
sacrifice would not be made for the "generality's" sake a bit, as little as I
concluded the agreement for the "generality's" or even for any other man's
sake; rather I came into it only for the sake of my own benefit, from
*selfishness*.(96) But, as regards the sacrificing, surely I "sacrifice" only
that which does not stand in my power, *i.e.*, I "sacrifice" nothing at all.

To come back to property, the lord is proprietor. Choose then whether you want
to be lord, or whether society shall be! On this depends whether you are to be
an *owner* or a *ragamuffin*! The egoist is owner, the Socialist a ragamuffin.
But ragamuffinism or propertylessness is the sense of feudalism, of the feudal
system which since the last century has only changed its overlord, putting
"Man" in the place of God, and accepting as a fief from Man what had before
been a fief from the grace of God. That the ragamuffinism of Communism is
carried out by the humane principle into the absolute or most ragamuffinly
ragamuffinism has been shown above; but at the same time also, how
ragamuffinism can only thus swing around into ownness. The *old* feudal system
was so thoroughly trampled into the ground in the Revolution that since then
all reactionary craft has remained fruitless, and will always remain
fruitless, because the dead is -- dead; but the resurrection too had to prove
itself a truth in Christian history, and has so proved itself: for in another
world feudalism is risen again with a glorified body, the *new* feudalism
under the suzerainty of "Man."

Christianity is not annihilated, but the faithful are right in having hitherto
trustfully assumed of every combat against it that this could serve only for
the purgation and confirmation of Christianity; for it has really only been
glorified, and "Christianity exposed" is the -- *human Christianity*. We are
still living entirely in the Christian age, and the very ones who feel worst
about it are the most zealously contributing to "complete" it. The more human,
the dearer has feudalism become to us; for we the less believe that it still
is feudalism, we take it the more confidently for ownness and think we have
found what is "most absolutely our own" when we discover "the human."

Liberalism wants to give me what is mine, but it thinks to procure it for me
not under the title of mine, but under that of the "human." As if it were
attainable under this mask! The rights of man, the precious work of the
Revolution, have the meaning that the Man in me *entitles*(97) me to this and
that; I as individual, *i.e.* as this man, am not entitled, but Man has the
right and entitles me. Hence as man I may well be entitled; but, as I am more
than man, to wit, a *special* man, it may be refused to this very me, the
special one. If on the other hand you insist on the *value* of your gifts,
keep up their price, do not let yourselves be forced to sell out below price,
do not let yourselves be talked into the idea that your ware is not worth its
price. do not make yourself ridiculous by a "ridiculous price," but imitate
the brave man who says, I will *sell* my life (property) dear, the enemy shall
not have it at a cheap *bargain*; then you have recognized the reverse of
Communism as the correct thing, and the word then is not "Give up your
property!" but *"Get the value out of* your property!"

Over the portal of our time stands not that "Know thyself" of Apollo, but a
*"Get the value out of thyself!"*

Proudhon calls property "robbery" (*le vol*). But alien property -- and he is
talking of this alone -- is not less existent by renunciation, cession, and
humility; it is a *present*. Why so sentimentally call for compassion as a
poor victim of robbery, when one is just a foolish, cowardly giver of
presents? Why here again put the fault on others as if they were robbing us,
while we ourselves do bear the fault in leaving the others unrobbed? The poor
are to blame for there being rich men.

Universally, no one grows indignant at *his*, but at *alien* property. They do
not in truth attack property, but the alienation of property. They want to be
able to call *more*, not less, *theirs*; they want to call everything
*theirs*. They are fighting, therefore, against *alienness*, or, to form a
word similar to property, against alienty. And how do they help themselves
therein? Instead of transforming the alien into own, they play impartial and
ask only that all property be left to a third party, *e. g.* human society.
They revindicate the alien not in their own name but in a third party's. Now
the "egoistic" coloring is wiped off, and everything is so clean and -- human!

Propertylessness or ragamuffinism, this then is the "essence of Christianity,"
as it is essence of all religiousness (*i.e.* godliness, morality, humanity),
and only announced itself most clearly, and, as glad tidings, became a gospel
capable of development, in the "absolute religion." We have before us the most
striking development in the present fight against property, a fight which is
to bring "Man" to victory and make propertylessness complete: victorious
humanity is the victory of --Christianity. But the "Christianity exposed" thus
is feudalism completed. the most all-embracing feudal system, *i.e.* perfect
ragamuffinism.

Once more then, doubtless, a "revolution" against the feudal system? --

Revolution and insurrection must not be looked upon as synonymous. The former
consists in an overturning of conditions, of the established condition or
status, the State or society, and is accordingly a *political* or *social*
act; the latter has indeed for its unavoidable consequence a transformation of
circumstances, yet does not start from it but from men's discontent with
themselves, is not an armed rising, but a rising of individuals, a getting up,
without regard to the arrangements that spring from it. The Revolution aimed
at new *arrangements*; insurrection leads us no longer to *let* ourselves be
arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and sets no glittering hopes on
"institutions." It is not a fight against the established, since, if it
prospers, the established collapses of itself; it is only a working forth of
me out of the established. If I leave the established, it is dead and passes
into decay. Now, as my object is not the overthrow of an established order but
my elevation above it, my purpose and deed are not a political or social but
(as directed toward myself and my ownness alone) an *egoistic* purpose and
deed.

The revolution commands one to make *arrangements*, the insurrection(98)
demands that he *rise or exalt himself*.(99) What *constitution* was to be
chosen, this question busied the revolutionary heads, and the whole political
period foams with constitutional fights and constitutional questions, as the
social talents too were uncommonly inventive in societary arrangements
(phalansteries etc.). The insurgent(100) strives to become constitutionless.

While, to get greater clearness, I am thinking up a comparison, the founding
of Christianity comes unexpectedly into my mind. On the liberal side it is
noted as a bad point in the first Christians that they preached obedience to
the established heathen civil order, enjoined recognition of the heathen
authorities, and confidently delivered a command, "Give to the emperor that
which is the emperor's." Yet how much disturbance arose at the same time
against the Roman supremacy, how mutinous did the Jews and even the Romans
show themselves against their own temporal government! In short, how popular
was "political discontent!" Those Christians would hear nothing of it; would
not side with the "liberal tendencies." The time was politically so agitated
that, as is said in the gospels, people thought they could not accuse the
founder of Christianity more successfully than if they arraigned him for
"political intrigue," and yet the same gospels report that he was precisely
the one who took least part in these political doings. But why was he not a
revolutionist, not a demagogue, as the Jews would gladly have seen him? Why
was he not a liberal? Because he expected no salvation from a change of
*conditions*, and this whole business was indifferent to him. He was not a
revolutionist, like *e. g.* Caesar, but an insurgent; not a State-overturner,
but one who straightened *himself* up. That was why it was for him only a
matter of "Be ye wise as serpents," which expresses the same sense as, in the
special case, that "Give to the emperor that which is the emperor's"; for he
was not carrying on any liberal or political fight against the established
authorities, but wanted to walk his *own* way, untroubled about, and
undisturbed by, these authorities. Not less indifferent to him than the
government were its enemies, for neither understood what he wanted, and he had
only to keep them off from him with the wisdom of the serpent. But, even
though not a ringleader of popular mutiny, not a demagogue or revolutionist,
he (and every one of the ancient Christians) was so much the more an
*insurgent*, who lifted himself above everything that seemed sublime to the
government and its opponents, and absolved himself from everything that they
remained bound to, and who at the same time cut off the sources of life of the
whole heathen world, with which the established State must wither away as a
matter of course; precisely because he put from him the upsetting of the
established, he was its deadly enemy and real annihilator; for he walled it
in, confidently and recklessly carrying up the building of *his* temple over
it, without heeding the pains of the immured.

Now, as it happened to the heathen order of the world, will the Christian
order fare likewise? A revolution certainly does not bring on the end if an
insurrection is not consummated first!

My intercourse with the world, what does it aim at? I want to have the
enjoyment of it, therefore it must be my property, and therefore I want to win
it. I do not want the liberty of men, nor their equality; I want only *my*
power over them, I want to make them my property, *i.e. material for
enjoyment*. And, if I do not succeed in that, well, then I call even the power
over life and death, which Church and State reserved to themselves -- mine.
Brand that officer's widow who, in the flight in Russia, after her leg has
been shot away, takes the garter from it, strangles her child therewith, and
then bleeds to death alongside the corpse -- brand the memory of the --
infanticide. Who knows, if this child had remained alive, how much it might
have "been of use to the world!" The mother murdered it because she wanted to
die *satisfied* and at rest. Perhaps this case still appeals to your
sentimentality, and you do not know how to read out of it anything further. Be
it so; I on my part use it as an example for this, that *my* satisfaction
decides about my relation to men, and that I do not renounce, from any access
of humility, even the power over life and death.

As regards "social duties" in general, another does not give me my position
toward others, therefore neither God nor humanity prescribes to me my relation
to men, but I give myself this position. This is more strikingly said thus: I
have no *duty* to others, as I have a duty even to myself (*e. g.* that of
self-preservation, and therefore not suicide) only so long as I distinguish
myself from myself (my immortal soul from my earthly existence, etc.).

I no longer *humble* myself before any power, and I recognize that all powers
are only my power, which I have to subject at once when they threaten to
become a power *against* or *above* me; each of them must be only one of *my
means* to carry my point, as a hound is our power against game, but is killed
by us if it should fall upon us ourselves. All powers that dominate me I then
reduce to serving me. The idols exist through me; I need only refrain from
creating them anew, then they exist no longer: "higher powers" exist only
through my exalting them and abasing myself.

Consequently my relation to the world is this: I no longer do anything for it
"for God's sake," I do nothing "for man's sake," but what I do I do "for my
sake." Thus alone does the world satisfy me, while it is characteristic of the
religious standpoint, in which I include the moral and humane also, that from
it everything remains a pious wish (*pium desiderium*), *i.e.* an other-world
matter, something unattained. Thus the general salvation of men, the moral
world of a general love, eternal peace, the cessation of egoism, etc. "Nothing
in this world is perfect." With this miserable phrase the good part from it,
and take flight into their closet to God, or into their proud
"self-consciousness." But we remain in this "imperfect" world, because even so
we can use it for our -- self-enjoyment.

My intercourse with the world consists in my enjoying it, and so consuming it
for my self-enjoyment. *Intercourse* is the *enjoyment of the world*, and
belongs to my -- self-enjoyment.

3. My Self-Enjoyment

We stand at the boundary of a period. The world hitherto took thought for
nothing but the gain of life, took care for -- *life*. For whether all
activity is put on the stretch for the life of this world or of the other, for
the temporal or for the eternal, whether one hankers for "daily bread" ("Give
us our daily bread") or for "holy bread" ("the true bread from heaven" "the
bread of God, that comes from heaven and *gives life* to the world"; "the
bread of life," John 6), whether one takes care for "dear life" or for "life
to eternity" -- this does not change the object of the strain and care, which
in the one case as in the other shows itself to be *life*. Do the modern
tendencies announce themselves otherwise? People now want nobody to be
embarrassed for the most indispensable necessaries of life, but want every one
to feel secure as to these; and on the other hand they teach that man has this
life to attend to and the real world to adapt himself to, without vain care
for another.

Let us take up the same thing from another side. When one is anxious only to
live, he easily, in this solicitude, forgets the enjoyment of life. If his
only concern is for life, and he thinks "if I only have my dear life," he does
not apply his full strength to using, *i. e.*, enjoying, life. But how does
one use life? In using it up, like the candle, which one uses in burning it
up. One uses life, and consequently himself the living one, in *consuming* it
and himself. *Enjoyment of life* is using life up.

Now -- we are in search of the *enjoyment* of life! And what did the religious
world do? It went in search of life. Wherein consists the true life, the
blessed life; etc.? How is it to be attained? What must man do and become in
order to become a truly living man? How does he fulfil this calling? These and
similar questions indicate that the askers were still seeking for *themselves
- --* to wit, themselves in the true sense, in the sense of true living. "What I
am is foam and shadow; what I shall be is my true self." To chase after this
self, to produce it, to realize it, constitutes the hard task of mortals, who
die only to *rise again*, live only to die, live only to find the true life.

Not till I am certain of myself, and no longer seeking for myself, am I really
my property; I have myself, therefore I use and enjoy myself. On the other
hand, I can never take comfort in myself as long as I think that I have still
to find my true self and that it must come to this, that not I but Christ or
some other spiritual, *i.e.* ghostly, self (*e. g.* the true man, the essence
of man, etc.) lives in me.

A vast interval separates the two views. In the old I go toward myself, in the
new I start from myself; in the former I long for myself, in the latter I have
myself and do with myself as one does with any other property -- I enjoy
myself at my pleasure. I am no longer afraid for my life, but "squander" it.

Henceforth, the question runs, not how one can acquire life, but how one can
squander, enjoy it; or, not how one is to produce the true self in himself,
but how one is to dissolve himself, to live himself out.

What else should the ideal be but the sought-for ever-distant self? One seeks
for himself, consequently one doth not yet have himself; one aspires toward
what one *ought* to be, consequently one *is* not it. One lives in *longing*
and has lived thousands of years in it, in *hope*. Living is quite another
thing in -- *enjoyment!*

Does this perchance apply only to the so-called pious? No, it applies to all
who belong to the departing period of history, even to its men of pleasure.
For them too the work-days were followed by a Sunday, and the rush of the
world by the dream of a better world, of a general happiness of humanity; in
short by an ideal. But philosophers especially are contrasted with the pious.
Now, have they been thinking of anything else than the ideal, been planning
for anything else than the absolute self? Longing and hope everywhere, and
nothing but these. For me, call it romanticism.

If the *enjoyment of life* is to triumph over the *longing for life* or hope
of life, it must vanquish this in its double significance which Schiller
introduces in his "Ideal and Life"; it must crush spiritual and secular
poverty, exterminate the ideal and -- the want of daily bread. He who must
expend his life to prolong life cannot enjoy it, and he who is still seeking
for his life does not have it and can as little enjoy it: both are poor, but
"blessed are the poor."

Those who are hungering for the true life have no power over their present
life, but must apply it for the purpose of thereby gaining that true life, and
must sacrifice it entirely to this aspiration and this task. If in the case of
those devotees who hope for a life in the other world, and look upon that in
this world as merely a preparation for it, the tributariness of their earthly
existence, which they put solely into the service of the hoped-for heavenly
existence, is pretty distinctly apparent; one would yet go far wrong if one
wanted to consider the most rationalistic and enlightened as less
self-sacrificing. Oh, there is to be found in the "true life" a much more
comprehensive significance than the "heavenly" is competent to express. Now,
is not -- to introduce the liberal concept of it at once -- the "human" and
"truly human" life the true one? And is every one already leading this truly
human life from the start, or must he first raise himself to it with hard
toil? Does he already have it as his present life, or must he struggle for it
as his future life, which will become his part only when he "is no longer
tainted with any egoism"? In this view life exists only to gain life, and one
lives only to make the essence of man alive in oneself, one lives for the sake
of this essence. One has his life only in order to procure by means of it the
"true" life cleansed of all egoism. Hence one is afraid to make any use he
likes of his life: it is to serve only for the "right use."

In short, one has a *calling in life*, a task in life; one has something to
realize and produce by his life, a something for which our life is only means
and implement, a something that is worth more than this life, a something to
which one *owes* his life. One has a God who asks a *living sacrifice*. Only
the rudeness of human sacrifice has been lost with time; human sacrifice
itself has remained unabated, and criminals hourly fall sacrifices to justice,
and we "poor sinners" slay our own selves as sacrifices for "the human
essence," the "idea of mankind," "humanity," and whatever the idols or gods
are called besides.

But, because we owe our life to that something, therefore --this is the next
point -- we have no right to take it from us.

The conservative tendency of Christianity does not permit thinking of death
otherwise than with the purpose to take its sting from it and -- live on and
preserve oneself nicely. The Christian lets everything happen and come upon
him if he -- the arch-Jew -- can only haggle and smuggle himself into heaven;
he must not kill himself, he must only -- preserve himself and work at the
"preparation of a future abode." Conservatism or "conquest of death" lies at
his heart; "the last enemy that is abolished is death."(101) "Christ has taken
the power from death and brought life and *imperishable* being to light by the
gospel."(102) "Imperishableness," stability.

The moral man wants the good, the right; and, if he takes to the means that
lead to this goal, really lead to it, then these means are not *his* means,
but those of the good, right, etc., itself. These means are never immoral,
because the good end itself mediates itself through them: the end sanctifies
the means. They call this maxim jesuitical, but it is "moral" through and
through. The moral man acts *in the service* of an end or an idea: he makes
himself the *tool* of the idea of the good, as the pious man counts it his
glory to be a tool or instrument of God. To await death is what the moral
commandment postulates as the good; to give it to oneself is immoral and bad:
*suicide* finds no excuse before the judgment-seat of morality. If the
religious man forbids it because "you have not given yourself life, but God,
who alone can also take it from you again" (as if, even taking in this
conception, God did not take it from me just as much when I kill myself as
when a tile from the roof, or a hostile bullet, fells me; for he would have
aroused the resolution of death in me too!), the moral man forbids it because
I owe my life to the fatherland, etc., "because I do not know whether I may
not yet accomplish good by my life." Of course, for in me good loses a tool,
as God does an instrument. If I am immoral, the good is served in my
*amendment*; if I am "ungodly," God has joy in my *penitence*. Suicide,
therefore, is ungodly as well as nefarious. If one whose standpoint is
religiousness takes his own life, he acts in forgetfulness of God; but, if the
suicide's standpoint is morality, he acts in forgetfulness of duty, immorally.
People worried themselves much with the question whether Emilia Galotti's
death can be justified before morality (they take it as if it were suicide,
which it is too in substance). That she is so infatuated with chastity, this
moral good, as to yield up even her life for it is certainly moral; but,
again, that she fears the weakness of her flesh is immoral.(103)

Such contradictions form the tragic conflict universally in the moral drama;
and one must think and feel morally to be able to take an interest in it.

What holds good of piety and morality will necessarily apply to humanity also,
because one owes his life likewise to man, mankind or the species. Only when I
am under obligation to no being is the maintaining of life -- my affair. "A
leap from this bridge makes me free!"

But, if we owe the maintaining of our life to that being that we are to make
alive in ourselves, it is not less our duty not to lead this life according to
*our* pleasure, but to shape it in conformity to that being. All my feeling,
thinking, and willing, all my doing and designing, belongs to -- him.

What is in conformity to that being is to be inferred from his concept; and
how differently has this concept been conceived! or how differently has that
being been imagined! What demands the Supreme Being makes on the Mohammedan;
what different ones the Christian, again, thinks he hears from him; how
divergent, therefore, must the shaping of the lives of the two turn out! Only
this do all hold fast, that the Supreme Being is to *judge*(104) our life.

But the pious who have their judge in God, and in his word a book of
directions for their life, I everywhere pass by only reminiscently, because
they belong to a period of development that has been lived through, and as
petrifactions they may remain in their fixed place right along; in our time it
is no longer the pious, but the liberals, who have the floor, and piety itself
cannot keep from reddening its pale face with liberal coloring. But the
liberals do not adore their judge in God, and do not unfold their life by the
directions of the divine word, but regulate(105) themselves by man: they want
to be not "divine" but "human," and to live so.

Man is the liberal's supreme being, man the *judge* of his life, humanity his
*directions*, or catechism. God is spirit, but man is the "most perfect
spirit," the final result of the long chase after the spirit or of the
"searching in the depths of the Godhead," *i.e.* in the depths of the spirit.

Every one of your traits is to be human; you yourself are to be so from top to
toe, in the inward as in the outward; for humanity is your calling.

Calling -- destiny -- task! --

What one can become he does become. A born poet may well be hindered by the
disfavor of circumstances from standing on the high level of his time, and,
after the great studies that are indispensable for this, producing
*consummate* works of art; but he will make poetry, be he a plowman or so
lucky as to live at the court of Weimar. A born musician will make music, no
matter whether on all instruments or only on an oaten pipe. A born
philosophical head can give proof of itself as university philosopher or as
village philosopher. Finally, a born dolt, who, as is very well compatible
with this, may at the same time be a sly-boots, will (as probably every one
who has visited schools is in a position to exemplify to himself by many
instances of fellow-scholars) always remain a blockhead, let him have been
drilled and trained into the chief of a bureau, or let him serve that same
chief as bootblack. Nay, the born shallow-pates indisputably form the most
numerous class of men. And why. indeed, should not the same distinctions show
themselves in the human species that are unmistakable in every species of
beasts? The more gifted and the less gifted are to be found everywhere.

Only a few, however, are so imbecile that one could not get ideas into them.
Hence, people usually consider all men capable of having religion. In a
certain degree they may be trained to other ideas too, *e. g.* to some musical
intelligence, even some philosophy. At this point then the priesthood of
religion, of morality, of culture, of science, etc., takes its start, and the
Communists, *e. g.* want to make everything accessible to all by their "public
school." There is heard a common assertion that this "great mass" cannot get
along without religion; the Communists broaden it into the proposition that
not only the "great mass," but absolutely all, are called to everything.

Not enough that the great mass has been trained to religion, now it is
actually to have to occupy itself with "everything human." Training is growing
ever more general and more comprehensive.

You poor beings who could live so happily if you might skip according to your
mind, you are to dance to the pipe of schoolmasters and bear-leaders, in order
to perform tricks that you yourselves would never use yourselves for. And you
do not even kick out of the traces at last against being always taken
otherwise than you want to give yourselves. No, you mechanically recite to
yourselves the question that is recited to you: "What am I called to? What
*ought* I to do?" You need only ask thus, to have yourselves *told* what you
ought to do and *ordered* to do it, to have your *calling* marked out for you,
or else to order yourselves and impose it on yourselves according to the
spirit's prescription. Then in reference to the will the word is, I will to do
what I *ought*.

A man is "called" to nothing, and has no "calling," no "destiny," as little as
a plant or a beast has a "calling." The flower does not follow the calling to
complete itself, but it spends all its forces to enjoy and consume the world
as well as it can -- *i.e.* it sucks in as much of the juices of the earth, as
much air of the ether, as much light of the sun, as it can get and lodge. The
bird lives up to no calling, but it uses its forces as much as is practicable;
it catches beetles and sings to its heart's delight. But the forces of the
flower and the bird are slight in comparison to those of a man, and a man who
applies his forces will affect the world much more powerfully than flower and
beast. A calling he has not, but he has forces that manifest themselves where
they are because their being consists solely in their manifestation, and are
as little able to abide inactive as life, which, if it "stood still" only a
second, would no longer be life. Now, one might call out to the man, "use your
force." Yet to this imperative would be given the meaning that it was man's
task to use his force. It is not so. Rather, each one really uses his force
without first looking upon this as his calling: at all times every one uses as
much force as he possesses. One does say of a beaten man that he ought to have
exerted his force more; but one forgets that, if in the moment of succumbing
he had the force to exert his forces (*e. g.* bodily forces), he would not
have failed to do it: even if it was only the discouragement of a minute, this
was yet a --destitution of force, a minute long. Forces may assuredly be
sharpened and redoubled, especially by hostile resistance or friendly
assistance; but where one misses their application one may be sure of their
absence too. One can strike fire out of a stone, but without the blow none
comes out; in like manner a man too needs "impact."

Now, for this reason that forces always of themselves show themselves
operative, the command to use them would be superfluous and senseless. To use
his forces is not man's *calling* and task, but is his *act*, real and extant
at all times. Force is only a simpler word for manifestation of force.

Now, as this rose is a true rose to begin with, this nightingale always a true
nightingale, so I am not for the first time a true man when I fulfil my
calling, live up to my destiny, but I am a "true man" from the start. My first
babble is the token of the life of a "true man," the struggles of my life are
the outpourings of his force, my last breath is the last exhalation of the
force of the "man."

The true man does not lie in the future, an object of longing, but lies,
existent and real, in the present. Whatever and whoever I may be, joyous and
suffering, a child or a graybeard, in confidence or doubt, in sleep or in
waking, I am it, I am the true man.

But, if I am Man, and have really found in myself him whom religious humanity
designated as the distant goal, then everything "truly human" is also *my*
own. What was ascribed to the idea of humanity belongs to me. That freedom of
trade,

*e. g.*, which humanity has yet to attain -- and which, like an enchanting
dream, people remove to humanity's golden future -- I take by anticipation as
my property, and carry it on for the time in the form of smuggling. There may
indeed be but few smugglers who have sufficient understanding to thus account
to themselves for their doings, but the instinct of egoism replaces their
consciousness. Above I have shown the same thing about freedom of the press.

Everything is my own, therefore I bring back to myself what wants to withdraw
from me; but above all I always bring myself back when I have slipped away
from myself to any tributariness. But this too is not my calling, but my
natural act.

Enough, there is a mighty difference whether I make myself the starting-point
or the goal. As the latter I do not have myself, am consequently still alien
to myself, am my *essence*, my "true essence," and this "true essence," alien
to me, will mock me as a spook of a thousand different names. Because I am not
yet I, another (like God, the true man, the truly pious man, the rational man,
the freeman, etc.) is I, my ego.

Still far from myself, I separate myself into two halves, of which one, the
one unattained and to be fulfilled, is the true one. The one, the untrue, must
be brought as a sacrifice; to wit, the unspiritual one. The other, the true,
is to be the whole man; to wit, the spirit. Then it is said, "The spirit is
man's proper essence," or, "man exists as man only spiritually." Now, there is
a greedy rush to catch the spirit, as if one would then have bagged *himself*;
and so, in chasing after himself, one loses sight of himself, whom he is.

And, as one stormily pursues his own self, the never-attained, so one also
despises shrewd people's rule to take men as they are, and prefers to take
them as they should be; and, for this reason, hounds every one on after his
should-be self and "endeavors to make all into equally entitled, equally
respectable, equally moral or rational men."(106)

Yes, "if men were what they *should* be, *could* be, if all men were rational,
all loved each other as brothers," then it would be a paradisiacal life.(107)
- -- All right, men are as they should be, can be. What should they be? Surely
not more than they can be! And what can they be? Not more, again, than they --
can, than they have the competence, the force, to be. But this they really
are, because what they are not they are *incapable* of being; for to be
capable means -- really to be. One is not capable for anything that one really
is not; one is not capable of anything that one does not really do. Could a
man blinded by cataracts see? Oh, yes, if he had his cataracts successfully
removed. But now he cannot see because he does not see. Possibility and
reality always coincide. One can do nothing that one does not, as one does
nothing that one cannot.

The singularity of this assertion vanishes when one reflects that the words
"it is possible that." almost never contain another meaning than "I can
imagine that. . .," *e. g.*, It is possible for all men to live rationally;
*e. g.*, I can imagine that all, etc. Now -- since my thinking cannot, and
accordingly does not, cause all men to live rationally, but this must still be
left to the men themselves -- general reason is for me only thinkable, a
thinkableness, but as such in fact a *reality* that is called a possibility
only in reference to what I *can* not bring to pass, to wit, the rationality
of others. So far as depends on you, all men might be rational, for you have
nothing against it; nay, so far as your thinking reaches, you perhaps cannot
discover any hindrance either, and accordingly nothing does stand in the way
of the thing in your thinking; it is thinkable to you.

As men are not all rational, though, it is probable that they -- cannot be so.

If something which one imagines to be easily possible is not, or does not
happen, then one may be assured that something stands in the way of the thing,
and that it is -- impossible. Our time has its art, science, etc.; the art may
be bad in all conscience; but may one say that we deserved to have a better,
and "could" have it if we only would? We have just as much art as we can have.
Our art of today is the *only art possible*, and therefore real, at the time.

Even in the sense to which one might at last still reduce the word "possible,"
that it should mean "future," it retains the full force of the "real." If one
says, *e. g.*, "It is possible that the sun will rise tomorrow" -- this means
only, "for today tomorrow is the real future"; for I suppose there is hardly
need of the suggestion that a future is real "future" only when it has not yet
appeared.

Yet wherefore this dignifying of a word? If the most prolific misunderstanding
of thousands of years were not in ambush behind it, if this single concept of
the little word "possible" were not haunted by all the spooks of possessed
men, its contemplation should trouble us little here.

The thought, it was just now shown, rules the possessed world. Well, then,
possibility is nothing but thinkableness, and innumerable sacrifices have
hitherto been made to hideous *thinkableness*. It was *thinkable* that men
might become rational; thinkable, that they might know Christ; thinkable, that
they might become moral and enthusiastic for the good; thinkable, that they
might all take refuge in the Church's lap; thinkable, that they might
meditate, speak, and do, nothing dangerous to the State; thinkable, that they
*might* be obedient subjects; but, because it was thinkable, it was -- so ran
the inference -- possible, and further, because it was possible to men (right
here lies the deceptive point; because it is thinkable to me, it is possible
to *men*), therefore they ought to be so, it was their *calling*; and finally
- -- one is to take men only according to this calling, only as *called* men,
"not as they are, but as they ought to be."

And the further inference? Man is not the individual, but man is a *thought*,
an *ideal*, to which the individual is related not even as the child to the
man, but as a chalk point to a point thought of, or as a -- finite creature to
the eternal Creator, or, according to modern views, as the specimen to the
species. Here then comes to light the glorification of "humanity," the
"eternal, immortal," for whose glory (*in majorem humanitatis gloriam*) the
individual must devote himself and find his "immortal renown" in having done
something for the "spirit of humanity."

Thus the *thinkers* rule in the world as long as the age of priests or of
schoolmasters lasts, and what they think of is possible, but what is possible
must be realized. They *think* an ideal of man, which for the time is real
only in their thoughts; but they also think the possibility of carrying it
out, and there is no chance for dispute, the carrying out is really --
thinkable, it is an -- idea.

But you and I, we may indeed be people of whom a Krummacher can *think* that
we might yet become good Christians; if, however, he wanted to "labor with"
us, we should soon make it palpable to him that our Christianity is only
*thinkable*, but in other respects *impossible*; if he grinned on and on at us
with his obtrusive *thoughts*, his "good belief," he would have to learn that
we do not at all *need* to become what we do not like to become.

And so it goes on, far beyond the most pious of the pious. "If all men were
rational, if all did right, if all were guided by philanthropy, etc."! Reason,
right, philanthropy, are put before the eyes of men as their calling, as the
goal of their aspiration. And what does being rational mean? Giving oneself a
hearing?(108) No, reason is a book full of laws, which are all enacted against
egoism.

History hitherto is the history of the *intellectual* man. After the period of
sensuality, history proper begins; *i.e.* the period of intellectuality,(109)
spirituality,(110) non-sensuality, supersensuality, nonsensicality. Man now
begins to want to be and become *something*. What? Good, beautiful, true; more
precisely, moral, pious, agreeable, etc. He wants to make of himself a "proper
man," "something proper." *Man* is his goal, his ought, his destiny, calling,
task, his -- *ideal*; he is to himself a future, otherworldly he. And *what*
makes a "proper fellow" of him? Being true, being good, being moral, etc. Now
he looks askance at every one who does not recognize the same "what," seek the
same morality, have the same faith, he chases out "separatists, heretics,
sects," etc.

No sheep, no dog, exerts itself to become a "proper sheep, a proper dog"; no
beast has its essence appear to it as a task, *i.e.* as a concept that it has
to realize. It realizes itself in living itself out, in dissolving itself,
passing away. It does not ask to be or to become anything *other* than it is.

Do I mean to advise you to be like the beasts? That you ought to become beasts
is an exhortation which I certainly cannot give you, as that would again be a
task, an ideal ("How doth the little busy bee improve each shining hour. In
works of labor or of skill I would be busy too, for Satan finds some mischief
still for idle hands to do"). It would be the same, too, as if one wished for
the beasts that they should become human beings. Your nature is, once for all,
a human one; you are human natures, human beings. But, just because you
already are so, you do not still need to become so. Beasts too are "trained,"
and a trained beast executes many unnatural things. But a trained dog is no
better for itself than a natural one, and has no profit from it, even if it is
more companionable for us.

Exertions to "form" all men into moral, rational, pious, human, "beings"
(*i.e.* training) were in vogue from of yore. They are wrecked against the
indomitable quality of I, against own nature, against egoism. Those who are
trained never attain their ideal, and only profess with their *mouth* the
sublime principles, or make a *profession*, a profession of faith. In face of
this profession they must in *life* "acknowledge themselves sinners
altogether," and they fall short of their ideal, are "weak men," and bear with
them the consciousness of "human weakness."

It is different if you do not chase after an *ideal* as your "destiny," but
dissolve yourself as time dissolves everything. The dissolution is not your
"destiny," because it is present time.

Yet the *culture*, the religiousness, of men has assuredly made them free, but
only free from one lord, to lead them to another. I have learned by religion
to tame my appetite, I break the world's resistance by the cunning that is put
in my hand by *science*; I even serve no man; "I am no man's lackey." But then
it comes. You must obey God more than man. Just so I am indeed free from
irrational determination by my impulses. but obedient to the master *Reason*.
I have gained "spiritual freedom," "freedom of the spirit." But with that I
have then become subject to that very *spirit*. The spirit gives me orders,
reason guides me, they are my leaders and commanders. The "rational," the
"servants of the spirit," rule. But, if *I* am not flesh, I am in truth not
spirit either. Freedom of the spirit is servitude of me, because I am more
than spirit or flesh.

Without doubt culture has made me *powerful*. It has given me power over all
*motives*, over the impulses of my nature as well as over the exactions and
violences of the world. I know, and have gained the force for it by culture,
that I need not let myself be coerced by any of my appetites, pleasures,
emotions, etc.; I am their -- *master*; in like manner I become, through the
sciences and arts, the *master* of the refractory world, whom sea and earth
obey, and to whom even the stars must give an account of themselves. The
spirit has made me *master. --* But I have no power over the spirit itself.
From religion (culture) I do learn the means for the "vanquishing of the
world," but not how I am to subdue *God* too and become master of him; for God
"is the spirit." And this same spirit, of which I am unable to become master,
may have the most manifold shapes; he may be called God or National Spirit,
State, Family, Reason, also -- Liberty, Humanity, Man.

*I* receive with thanks what the centuries of culture have acquired for me; I
am not willing to throw away and give up anything of it: I have not lived in
vain. The experience that I have *power* over my nature, and need not be the
slave of my appetites, shall not be lost to me; the experience that I can
subdue the world by culture's means is too dear- bought for me to be able to
forget it. But I want still more.

People ask, what can man do? What can he accomplish? What goods procure, and
put down the highest of everything as a calling. As if everything were
possible to *me!*

If one sees somebody going to ruin in a mania, a passion, etc. (*e. g.* in the
huckster-spirit, in jealousy), the desire is stirred to deliver him out of
this possession and to help him to "self-conquest." "We want to make a man of
him!" That would be very fine if another possession were not immediately put
in the place of the earlier one. But one frees from the love of money him who
is a thrall to it, only to deliver him over to piety, humanity, or some
principle else, and to transfer him to a *fixed standpoint* anew.

This transference from a narrow standpoint to a sublime one is declared in the
words that the sense must not be directed to the perishable, but to the
imperishable alone: not to the temporal, but to the eternal, absolute, divine,
purely human, etc. -- to the spiritual.

People very soon discerned that it was not indifferent what one set his
affections on, or what one occupied himself with; they recognized the
importance of the *object*. An object exalted above the individuality of
things is the *essence* of things; yes, the essence is alone the thinkable in
them. it is for the *thinking* man. Therefore direct no longer your *sense* to
the *things*, but your *thoughts* to the *essence*. "Blessed are they who see
not, and yet believe"; *i. e.*, blessed are the *thinkers*, for they have to
do with the invisible and believe in it. Yet even an object of thought, that
constituted an essential point of contention centuries long, comes at last to
the point of being "No longer worth speaking of." This was discerned, but
nevertheless people always kept before their eyes again a self-valid
importance of the object, an absolute value of it, as if the doll were not the
most important thing to the child, the Koran to the Turk. As long as I am not
the sole important thing to myself, it is indifferent of what object I "make
much," and only my greater or lesser *delinquency* against it is of value. The
degree of my attachment and devotion marks the standpoint of my liability to
service, the degree of my sinning shows the measure of my ownness.

But finally, and in general, one must know how to "put everything out of his
mind," if only so as to be able to -- go to sleep. Nothing may occupy us with
which *we* do not occupy ourselves: the victim of ambition cannot run away
from his ambitious plans, nor the God-fearing man from the thought of God;
infatuation and possessedness coincide.

To want to realize his essence or live comfortably to his concept (which with
believers in God signifies as much as to be "pious," and with believers in
humanity means living "humanly") is what only the sensual and sinful man can
propose to himself, the man so long as he has the anxious choice between
happiness of sense and peace of soul, so long as he is a "poor sinner." The
Christian is nothing but a sensual man who, knowing of the sacred and being
conscious that he violates it, sees in himself a poor sinner: sensualness,
recognized as "sinfulness," is Christian consciousness, is the Christian
himself. And if "sin" and "sinfulness" are now no longer taken into the mouths
of moderns, but, instead of that, "egoism," "self-seeking," "selfishness,"
etc., engage them; if the devil has been translated into the "un-man" or
"egoistic man" -- is the Christian less present then than before? Is not the
old discord between good and evil -- is not a judge over us, man -- is not a
calling, the calling to make oneself man -- left? If they no longer name it
calling, but "task" or, very likely, "duty," the change of name is quite
correct, because "man" is not, like God, a personal being that can "call"; but
outside the name the thing remains as of old.

- --------

Every one has a relation to objects, and more, every one is differently
related to them. Let us choose as an example that book to which millions of
men had a relation for two thousand years, the Bible. What is it, what was it,
to each? Absolutely, only what he *made out of it!* For him who makes to
himself nothing at all out of it, it is nothing at all; for him who uses it as
an amulet, it has solely the value, the significance, of a means of sorcery;
for him who, like children, plays with it, it is nothing but a plaything, etc.

Now, Christianity asks that it shall *be the same for all*: say the sacred
book or the "sacred Scriptures." This means as much as that the Christian's
view shall also be that of other men, and that no one may be otherwise related
to that object. And with this the ownness of the relation is destroyed, and
one mind, one disposition, is fixed as the "true", the "only true" one. In the
limitation of the freedom to make of the Bible what I will, the freedom of
making in general is limited; and the coercion of a view or a judgment is put
in its place. He who should pass the judgment that the Bible was a long error
of mankind would judge -- *criminally*.

In fact, the child who tears it to pieces or plays with it, the Inca Atahualpa
who lays his ear to it and throws it away contemptuously when it remains dumb,
judges just as correctly about the Bible as the priest who praises in it the
"Word of God," or the critic who calls it a job of men's hands. For how we
toss things about is the affair of our *option*, our *free will*: we use them
according to our *heart's pleasure*, or, more clearly, we use them just as we
*can*. Why, what do the parsons scream about when they see how Hegel and the
speculative theologians make speculative thoughts out of the contents of the
Bible? Precisely this, that they deal with it according to their heart's
pleasure, or "proceed arbitrarily with it."

But, because we all show ourselves arbitrary in the handling of objects,
*i.e.* do with them as we *like* best, at our *liking* (the philosopher likes
nothing so well as when he can trace out an "idea" in everything, as the
God-fearing man likes to make God his friend by everything, and so, *e. g.*,
by keeping the Bible sacred), therefore we nowhere meet such grievous
arbitrariness, such a frightful tendency to violence, such stupid coercion, as
in this very domain of our -- *own free will*. If *we* proceed arbitrarily in
taking the sacred objects thus or so, how is it then that we want to take it
ill of the parson-spirits if they take us just as arbitrarily, *in their
fashion*, and esteem us worthy of the heretic's fire or of another punishment,
perhaps of the -- censorship?

What a man is, he makes out of things; "as you look at the world, so it looks
at you again." Then the wise advice makes itself heard again at once, You must
only look at it "rightly, unbiasedly," etc. As if the child did not look at
the Bible "rightly and unbiasedly" when it makes it a plaything. That shrewd
precept is given us, *e. g.* by Feuerbach. One does look at things rightly
when one makes of them what one *will* (by things objects in general are here
understood, *e. g.* God, our fellowmen, a sweetheart, a book, a beast, etc.).
And therefore the things and the looking at them are not first, but I am, my
will is. One *will* brings thoughts out of the things, *will* discover reason
in the world, *will* have sacredness in it: therefore one shall find them.
"Seek and ye shall find." *What* I will seek, I determine: I want, *e. g.*, to
get edification from the Bible; it is to be found; I want to read and test the
Bible thoroughly; my outcome will be a thorough instruction and criticism --
to the extent of my powers. I elect for myself what I have a fancy for, and in
electing I show myself -- arbitrary.

Connected with this is the discernment that every judgment which I pass upon
an object is the *creature* of my will; and that discernment again leads me to
not losing myself in the *creature*, the judgment, but remaining the
*creator*, the judge, who is ever creating anew. All predicates of objects are
my statements, my judgments, my -- creatures. If they want to tear themselves
loose from me and be something for themselves, or actually overawe me, then I
have nothing more pressing to do than to take them back into their nothing,
into me the creator. God, Christ, Trinity, morality, the good, etc., are such
creatures, of which I must not merely allow myself to say that they are
truths, but also that they are deceptions. As I once willed and decreed their
existence, so I want to have license to will their non- existence too; I must
not let them grow over my head, must not have the weakness to let them become
something "absolute," whereby they would be eternalized and withdrawn from my
power and decision. With that I should fall a prey to the *principle of
stability*, the proper life-principle of religion, which concerns itself with
creating "sanctuaries that must not be touched," "eternal truths" -- in short,
that which shall be "sacred" -- and depriving you of what is *yours*.

The object makes us into possessed men in its sacred form just as in its
profane, as a supersensuous object, just as it does as a sensuous one. The
appetite or mania refers to both, and avarice and longing for heaven stand on
a level. When the rationalists wanted to win people for the sensuous world,
Lavater preached the longing for the invisible. The one party wanted to call
forth *emotion*, the other *motion*, activity.

 The conception of objects is altogether diverse, even 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"(111)) 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 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
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,(112) -- "opinion."(113) "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 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(114) 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 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 robbery, 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 yourselves 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 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 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 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."(115) 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.(116) 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,"(117)does not bring us to the goal; we require an
*egoistic* freedom of teaching rather, a freedom of teaching for all ownness,
wherein *I* become audible and can announce myself unchecked. That I make
myself *"audible"*,(118) this alone is "reason,"(119) 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 have thoughts only as *man*;
as I, I am at the same time *thoughtless.*(120) 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 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 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 aiming 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 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,(121) no so-called "highest
interest of mankind," no "sacred cause,"(122) 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; 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 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."*(123) "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 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 -- *property*, *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 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 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 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*.

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."

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 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";(124) 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!(125)

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.(126)

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;(127) *i.e.* you are *appropriate*(128) 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*.




Footnotes:

(1) [*Einzigen*]

(2) Rom 8. 14.

(3) Cf. John 3. 10. with Rom. 8. 16.

(4) [*Eigenschaften*]

(5) [*Eigentum*]

(6) Karl Marx, in the *"Deutsch-französische Jahrbucher*," p. 197.

(7) Br. Bauer, *"Judenfrage*", p. 61.

(8) Hess, *"Triarchie*," p. 76.

(9) [*Vorrecht*, literally "precedent right."]

(10) [*Eigenschaft*]

(11) [*Eigentum*]

(12) "Essence of Christianity," 2nd ed., p. 401

(13) [*bestimmt*]

(14) [*Bestimmung*]

(15) Mark 3. 29.

(16) [This word has also, in German, the meaning of "common law," and will
sometimes be translated "law" in the following paragraphs.]

(17) Cf. *"Die Kommunisten in der Schweiz*," committee report, p. 3.

(18) [*Rechtsstreit*, a word which usually means "lawsuit."]

(19) [A common German phrase for "it suits me."]

(20) A. Becker, *"Volksphilosophie*", p. 22f.

(21) [Mephistopheles in "Faust."]

(22) "I beg you, spare my lungs! He who insists on proving himself right, if
he but has one of those things called tongues, can hold his own in all the
world's despite!" [Faust's words to Mephistopheles, slightly misquoted. -- For
*Rechthaberei*see note on p. 185.]

(23) [*Gesetz*, statute; no longer the same German word as "right"]

(24) [*Verbrechen*]

(25) [*brechen*]

(26) "This Book Belongs to the King,", p. 376.

(27) P. 376.

(28) P. 374.

(29) [An unnatural mother]

(30) P. 381.

(31) P. 385.

(32) [*Gerechte*]

(33) [*macht Alles hübsch gerecht*]

(34) [*Einzige*]

(35) See "Political Speeches," 10, p. 153

(36) [Literally, "precedent right."]

(37) [*Spannung*]

(38) [*gespannt*]

(39) [*spannen*]

(40) [*Einzig*]

(41) [*Einzigkeit*]

(42) [*Volk*; but the etymological remark following applies equally to the
English word "people." See Liddell & Scott's Greek lexicon, under *pimplemi*.]

(43) [*Kuschen*, a word whose only use is in ordering dogs to keep quiet.]

(44) This is the word for "of age"; but it is derived from *Mund*, "mouth,"
and refers properly to the right of speaking through one's own mouth, not by a
guardian.]

(45) ["Occupy"; literally, "have within".]

(46) [The word *Genosse*, "companion," signifies originally a companion in
enjoyment.]

(47) [This word in German does not mean religion, but, as in Latin,
faithfulness to family ties -- as we speak of "filial piety." But the word
elsewhere translated "pious" [*fromm*] means "religious," as usually in
English.]

(48) [It should be remembered that the words "establish" and "State" are both
derived from the root "stand."]

(49) [*huldigen*]

(50) [*Huld*]

(51) What was said in the concluding remarks after Humane Liberalism holds
good of the following -- to wit, that it was likewise written immediately
after the appearance of the book cited.

(52) [In the philosophical sense [a thinking and acting being] not in the
political sense.]

(53) [*Création de l'Ordre*," p.485.]

(54) [*"Kölner Dom*," p. 4.]

(55) [*einzig*]

(56) [*am Einzigen*]

(57) [*Einzigen*]

(58) [*heilig*]

(59) [*unheilig*]

(60) [*Heiliger*]

(61) B. Bauer, *"Lit. Ztg*." 8,22.

(62) *"E. u. Z. B.*," p. 89ff.

(63) [*Einzigkeit*]

(64) [See note on p. 184.]

(65) [The words "cot" and "dung" are alike in German.]

(66) *e. g.*, *"Qu'est-ce que la Propriété?*" p. 83

(67) [*Einzige*]

(68) [A German idiom for "take upon myself," "assume."]

(69) [Apparently some benevolent scheme of the day; compare note on p. 343.]

(70) In a registration bill for Ireland the government made the proposal to
let those be electors who pay £5 sterling of poor-rates. He who gives alms,
therefore, acquires political rights, or elsewhere becomes a swan-knight. [See
p. 342.]

(71) Minister Stein used this expression about Count von Reisach, when he
cold-bloodedly left the latter at the mercy of the Bavarian government because
to him, as he said, "a government like Bavaria must be worth more than a
simple individual." Reisach had written against Montgelas at Stein's bidding,
and Stein later agreed to the giving up of Reisach, which was demanded by
Montgelas on account of this very book. See Hinrichs, *"Politische
Vorlesungen*," I, 280.

(72) In colleges and universities poor men compete with rich. But they are
able to do in most eases only through scholarships, which -- a significant
point -- almost all come down to us from a time when free competition was
still far from being a controlling principle. The principle of competition
founds no scholarship, but says, Help yourself; provide yourself the means.
What the State gives for such purposes it pays out from interested motives, to
educate "servants" for itself.

(73) [*preisgeben*]

(74) [*Preis*]

(75) [*Preis*]

(76) [*Geld*]

(77) [*gelten*]

(78) [Equivalent in ordinary German use to our "possessed of a competence."]

(79) [*Einzige*]

(80) [Literally, "given."]

(81) [A German phrase for sharpers.]

(82) [Literally, "unhomely."]

(83) II, p. 91ff. (See my note above.)

(84) Athanasius.

(85) [*Wesen*]

(86) [*Wesen*]

(87) Feuerbach, "Essence of Chr.," 394.

(88) [*gebrauche*]

(89) [*brauche*]

(90) [*Verein*]

(91) [*Vereinigung*]

(92) [*Muthlösigkeit*]

(93) [*Demuth*]

(94) [*Muth*]

(95) [Literally, "love-services."]

(96) [Literally, "own-benefit."]

(97) [Literally, furnishes me with a *right*.]

(98) [*Empörung*]

(99) [*sich auf-oder empörzurichten*]

(100) To secure myself against a criminal charge I superfluously make the
express remark that I choose the word "insurrection" on account of its
etymological sense, and therefore am not using it in the limited sense which
is disallowed by the penal code.

(101) 1 Cor. 15. 26.

(102) 2 Tim. 1. 10.

(103) [See the next to the last scene of the tragedy:

ODOARDO: Under the pretext of a judicial investigation he tears you out of our
arms and takes you to Grimaldi. ...

EMILIA: Give me that dagger, father, me! ...

ODOARDO: No, no! Reflect -- You too have only one life to lose.

EMILIA: And only one innocence!

ODOARDO: Which is above the reach of any violence. --

EMILIA: But not above the reach of any seduction. -- Violence! violence! Who
cannot defy violence? What is called violence is nothing; seduction is the
true violence. -- I have blood, father; blood as youthful and warm as
anybody's. My senses are senses. -- I can warrant nothing. I am sure of
nothing. I know Grimaldi's house. It is the house of pleasure. An hour there,
under my mother's eyes -- and there arose in my soul so much tumult as the
strictest exercises of religion could hardly quiet in weeks. -- Religion! And
what religion? -- To escape nothing worse, thousands sprang into the water and
are saints. -- Give me that dagger, father, give it to me. ...

EMILIA: Once indeed there was a father who. to save his daughter from shame,
drove into her heart whatever steel he could quickest find -- gave life to her
for the second time. But all such deeds are of the past! Of such fathers there
are no more.

ODOARDO: Yes, daughter, yes! (*Stabs her*.)]

(104) [Or, "regulate" (*richten*)]

(105) [*richten*]

(106) *"Der Kommunismus in der Schweiz*", p. 24.

(107) *Ibid*, p. 63

(108) [Cf. note p. 81]

(109) [*Geistigkeit*]

(110) [*Geistlichkeit*]

(111) Rom. 1. 25.

(112) [*das Meinige*]

(113) [*die --"Meinung*]

(114) P. 47ff.

(115) Chamber of peers, Apr. 25, 1844.

(116) *"Anekdota*," 1, 120.

(117) *"Anekdota*," 1, 127.

(118) [*vernehmbar*]

(119) [*Vernunft*]

(120) [Literally, "thought-rid."]

(121) [*Sache*]

(122) [*Sache*]

(123) 1 Thess. 5. 21.

(124) [*Andacht*, a compound form of the word "thought"."]

(125) [See note on p. 112.]

(126) [*Einzige*]

(127) [*Eigen*]

(128) [*geeignet*]




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." Hence the 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,(1) 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.(2)

THE END




Footnotes:

(1) [*Stell' Ich auf Mich meine Sache.* Literally, "if I set my affair on
myself."]

(2) [*"Ich hab' Mein' Sach' auf Nichts gestellt*." Literally, "I have set my
affair on nothing." See note on p. 8.]
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