Part 7 (2/2)
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 citizens.h.i.+p, 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 pa.s.sed when he thought he had freed himself from one.
In the pa.s.sage quoted above all ideality, etc., is denied to the middle cla.s.s. 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 G.o.d and Mammon.
I do not blame the middle cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s. However, will not they likewise sooner or later learn to understand what is to their advantage?
August Becker says:[50] ”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 succ.u.mbing 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-owners.h.i.+p_? 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 G.o.d and every other idea. I can be a philosopher, a lover of wisdom, as I love G.o.d. 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[51] down to _humility_.[52] 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, etc., for this belongs to man and is man's calling,” or even ”this is G.o.d'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-abas.e.m.e.nt. ”He that abaseth himself shall be exalted.” Yes, yes, children must early be _made_ to practise piety, G.o.dliness, 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, _i. e._ they will not be willing to _inherit_ your stupidities as you inherited them from your fathers; they destroy _inherited sin_.[53] 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 longer 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 G.o.d, yet they demand the _fear of Man_ all the more strictly, and awaken ”enthusiasm for the truly human calling” by discipline.
A long time pa.s.sed 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, viz., 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.”[54]
Because Protestantism broke the mediaeval 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 mediaeval 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:[55] ”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 is a G.o.d” 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 in Zeus, Astarte, Jehovah, Allah, etc., 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 appet.i.tes or pains. I am not my flesh, but _I_ am _mind_, only mind.
This thought runs through the history of the Reformation till to-day.
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 perversest 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,”
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