The Ego and His Own Part 2

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--ataraxy, _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!_[6]

Through a considerable time we are spared a fight that is so exhausting later--the fight against _reason_. The fairest part of childhood pa.s.ses 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, and the like are hard for us to resist.

This stern life-and-death combat with _reason_ enter 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 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._ "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 G.o.d rather than men.

From this high standpoint everything "_earthly_" recedes into contemptible remoteness; for the standby point is--the _heavenly_.

The att.i.tude is now altogether reversed; the youth takes up an _intellectual_ position, while the boy, who did not yet feel himself as mind, grew up in 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," and the like, cries conscience to us, and--frightens us away from it. Not the might of the avenging Eumenides, not Poseidon's wrath, not G.o.d, 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 "G.o.d made the world that we see there," but we did not think of ("search") the "depths of the G.o.dhead itself"; we may have thought "that is the truth about the matter," but we did not think of Truth itself, nor unite into one sentence "G.o.d is truth." The "depths of the G.o.dhead, 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 "G.o.d." "G.o.d is spirit." And this supernal "Father in heaven gives it to those that pray to him."[7]

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, for instance, 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 centre than does the youth, who is infatuated about other things, _e. g._ G.o.d, fatherland, and so on.

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, such as G.o.d, 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.

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 transformations his views have experienced, what perturbations his principles,--in short, how he has to-day 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 fore-fathers busied themselves with.

I.--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 sanct.i.ty 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 to-day 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 unshakeable 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";[8] the sanct.i.ty 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;[9] 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, p.r.o.nounce the rea.s.suring 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 pleasantest _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_.

To-day 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 uncriticised _avidity_, altogether in the power of things, _i. e._ nothing but a vessel of the most various _appet.i.tes_,--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 coa.r.s.e 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 coa.r.s.e 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, and the like, are given up for the sake of the heart, _i. e._ of _blessedness_, the heart's blessedness.