Part 6 (2/2)
with the rod of discipline. Thus stuffed with _imparted feelings_, we appear before the bar of majority and are ”p.r.o.nounced 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 G.o.d 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.”
To-day 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 c.o.c.ks' 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 owner of the world of things, and I am 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 G.o.d 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_ ent.i.ty, _i. e._ 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 a.s.siduity 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 a.s.siduity was only the activity of ants and the hopping of fleas, jugglers' tricks on the immovable tight-rope of the objective, _corvee_-service under the lords.h.i.+p 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 (_morem_) of one's country--is to be moral there. Therefore pure moral action, clear, unadulterated morality, is most straightforwardly practised 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, _i. e._ 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 circ.u.mstances; 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_[43] 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, etc.,--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 setting 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 on 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,[44] 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,” ”const.i.tutional 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 a.s.sumes 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 a.s.sured.
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_ att.i.tude 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,” etc.; 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 att.i.tude 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, etc.) 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, _i. e._ unfamiliar or _not your own_.
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