Part 25 (2/2)
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 _verite_ (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_,[198] about which much ado[199] 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, _i. e._ 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, _i. e._ 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 const.i.tutes 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 pa.s.sion is more powerful in me than all the rest. Christianity too teaches us to sacrifice all other pa.s.sions to this. But, if to one pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion: 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 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 feeling 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 fellow-men in general (”brothers, fraternity”), a.s.sert 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 trespa.s.s 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 pa.s.sions,--_e. g._, 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._ the ”object's” 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 (_e. g._ 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 _fiancee_, a spouse, and the like), 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 love moves 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 G.o.d of love is older than the G.o.d of Love. But the mystical possessedness belongs to the moderns.
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