Part 21 (1/2)
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 ”lords.h.i.+p 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_.[171] At this the individual ranks as the _unholy_[172]
(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.[173] 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. .h.i.t 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 _defence_. 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 G.o.d's commandment,--a view which likewise was once maintained by the Church. Here G.o.d 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-G.o.d. 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 sinners, here criminals, there inquisition and here--inquisition. Will the sanct.i.ty 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 honorable 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 censors.h.i.+p. 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. Such as 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, compa.s.sion,” and the like.
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 G.o.d” is his own affair. But, as this one punishment, _ecclesiastical punishment_, has fallen, so all _punishments_ must fall.
As sin against the so-called G.o.d is a man's own affair, so 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 pet.i.tions.
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 _G.o.d_ too, you know, no longer defends himself against man, G.o.d to whom formerly (and in part, indeed, even now) all the ”servants of G.o.d” 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 pa.s.s also that, without lively partic.i.p.ation of one's own, one only delivers misdoers into the hands of the police and courts: a non-partic.i.p.ating 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 inst.i.tution more than the government could in any way protect it.
In crime the egoist has. .h.i.therto a.s.serted 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 const.i.tutes 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. .h.i.therto 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 G.o.d, 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) const.i.tute 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 ”G.o.d”: 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 G.o.d into the divine, and still remain religious. For the religious consists in discontent with the _present_ man, _i. e._ in the setting up of a ”perfection” to be striven for, in ”man wrestling for his completion.”[174] (”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.”[175] Nay, this realization is immediately afterward styled a ”vocation”; just so he then defines liberty as ”morality”: the kingdom of ”justice” (_i. e._ equality) and ”morality” (_i. e._ liberty) is to begin, etc.
Ridiculous is he who, while fellows of his tribe, family, nation, etc., 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 to-day 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 p.r.i.c.ks you everywhere, and at the most unsuitable place, to show its strength: you can give n.o.body 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, etc., 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 German, 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_[176] 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 _G.o.d_, 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.