The Ego and His Own Part 3

Daily experience confirms the truth that the understanding may have renounced a thing many years before the heart has ceased to beat for it.

So the Sophistic understanding too had so far become master over the dominant, ancient powers that they now needed only to be driven out of the heart, in which they dwelt unmolested, to have at last no part at all left in man.

This war is opened by Socrates, and not till the dying day of the old world does it end in peace.

The examination of the heart takes its start with Socrates, and all the contents of the heart are sifted. In their last and extremest struggles the ancients threw all contents out of the heart and let it no longer beat for anything; this was the deed of the Skeptics. The same purgation of the heart was now achieved in the Skeptical age, as the understanding had succeeded in establis.h.i.+ng in the Sophistic age.

The Sophistic culture has brought it to pa.s.s that one's understanding no longer _stands still_ before anything, and the Skeptical, that his heart is no longer _moved_ by anything.

So long as man is entangled in the movements of the world and embarra.s.sed by relations to the world,--and he is so till the end of antiquity, because his heart still has to struggle for independence from the worldly,--so long he is not yet spirit; for spirit is without body, and has no relations to the world and corporality; for it the world does not exist, nor natural bonds, but only the spiritual, and spiritual bonds. Therefore man must first become so completely unconcerned and reckless, so altogether without relations, as the Skeptical culture presents him,--so altogether indifferent to the world that even its falling in ruins would not move him,--before he could feel himself as worldless, _i. e._ as spirit. And this is the result of the gigantic work of the ancients: that man knows himself as a being without relations and without a world, as _spirit_.

Only now, after all worldly care has left him, is he all in all to himself, is he only for himself, i. e. he is spirit for the spirit, or, in plainer language, he cares only for the spiritual.

In the Christian wisdom of serpents and innocence of doves the two sides--understanding and heart--of the ancient liberation of mind are so completed that they appear young and new again, and neither the one nor the other lets itself be bluffed any longer by the worldly and natural.

Thus the ancients mounted to _spirit_, and strove to become _spiritual_.

But a man who wishes to be active as spirit is drawn to quite other tasks than he was able to set himself formerly: to tasks which really give something to do to the spirit and not to mere sense or acuteness,[10] which exerts itself only to become master of _things_.

The spirit busies itself solely about the spiritual, and seeks out the "traces of mind" in everything; to the _believing_ spirit "everything comes from G.o.d," and interests him only to the extent that it reveals this origin; to the _philosophic_ spirit everything appears with the stamp of reason, and interests him only so far as he is able to discover in it reason, _i. e._ spiritual content.

Not the spirit, then, which has to do with absolutely nothing unspiritual, with no _thing_, but only with the essence which exists behind and above things, with _thoughts_,--not that did the ancients exert, for they did not yet have it; no, they had only reached the point of struggling and longing for it, and therefore sharpened it against their too-powerful foe, the world of sense (but what would not have been sensuous for them, since Jehovah or the G.o.ds of the heathen were yet far removed from the conception "G.o.d is _spirit_," since the "heavenly fatherland" had not yet stepped into the place of the sensuous, etc?)--they sharpened against the world of sense their _sense_, their acuteness. To this day the Jews, those precocious children of antiquity, have got no farther; and with all the subtlety and strength of their prudence and understanding, which easily becomes master of things and forces them to obey it, they cannot discover _spirit_, which _takes no account whatever of things_.

The Christian has spiritual interests, because he allows himself to be a _spiritual_ man; the Jew does not even understand these interests in their purity, because he does not allow himself to a.s.sign _no value_ to things. He does not arrive at pure _spirituality_, a spirituality such as is religiously expressed, _e. g._, in the _faith_, of Christians, which alone (_i. e._ without works) justifies. Their _unspirituality_ sets Jews forever apart from Christians; for the spiritual man is incomprehensible to the unspiritual, as the unspiritual is contemptible to the spiritual. But the Jews have only "the spirit of this world."

The ancient acuteness and profundity lies as far from the spirit and the spirituality of the Christian world as earth from heaven.

He who feels himself as free spirit is not oppressed and made anxious by the things of this world, because he does not care for them; if one is still to feel their burden, he must be narrow enough to attach _weight_ to them,--as is evidently the case, for instance, when one is still concerned for his "dear life." He to whom everything centres in knowing and conducting himself as a free spirit gives little heed to how scantily he is supplied meanwhile, and does not reflect at all on how he must make his arrangements to have a thoroughly free or enjoyable _life_. He is not disturbed by the inconveniences of the life that depends on things, because he lives only spiritually and on spiritual food, while aside from this he only gulps things down like a beast, hardly knowing it, and dies bodily, to be sure, when his fodder gives out, but knows himself immortal as spirit, and closes his eyes with an adoration or a thought. His life is occupation with the spiritual, is--_thinking_; the rest does not bother him; let him busy himself with the spiritual in any way that he can and chooses,--in devotion, in contemplation, or in philosophic cognition,--his doing is always thinking; and therefore Descartes, to whom this had at last become quite clear, could lay down the proposition: "I think, that is--I am." This means, my thinking is my being or my life; only when I live spiritually do I live; only as spirit am I really, or--I am spirit through and through and nothing but spirit. Unlucky Peter Schlemihl, who has lost his shadow, is the portrait of this man become a spirit; for the spirit's body is shadowless.--Over against this, how different among the ancients! Stoutly and manfully as they might bear themselves against the might of things, they must yet acknowledge the might itself, and got no farther than to protect their _life_ against it as well as possible.

Only at a late hour did they recognize that their "true life" was not that which they led in the fight against the things of the world, but the "spiritual life," "turned away" from these things; and, when they saw this, they became--Christians, _i. e._ the moderns, and innovators upon the ancients. But the life turned away from things, the spiritual life, no longer draws any nourishment from nature, but "lives only on thoughts," and therefore is no longer "life," but--_thinking_.

Yet it must not be supposed now that the ancients were _without thoughts_, just as the most spiritual man is not to be conceived of as if he could be without life. Rather, they had their thoughts about everything, about the world, man, the G.o.ds, etc., and showed themselves keenly active in bringing all this to their consciousness. But they did not know _thought_, even though they thought of all sorts of things and "worried themselves with their thoughts." Compare with their position the Christian saying, "My thoughts are not your thoughts; as the heaven is higher than the earth, so are my thoughts higher than your thoughts,"

and remember what was said above about our child-thoughts.

What is antiquity seeking, then? The true _enjoyment of life_! You will find that at bottom it is all the same as "the true life."

The Greek poet Simonides sings: "Health is the n.o.blest good for mortal man, the next to this is beauty, the third riches acquired without guile, the fourth the enjoyment of social pleasures in the company of young friends." These are all _good things of life_, pleasures of life.

What else was Diogenes of Sinope seeking for than the true enjoyment of life, which he discovered in having the least possible wants? What else Aristippus, who found it in a cheery temper under all circ.u.mstances?

They are seeking for cheery, unclouded _life-courage_, for _cheeriness_; they are seeking to "be of good _cheer_."

The Stoics want to realize the _wise man_, the man with _practical philosophy_, the man who _knows how to live_,--a wise life, therefore; they find him in contempt for the world, in a life without development, without spreading out, without friendly relations with the world, _i. e._ in the _isolated life_, in life as life, not in life with others; only the Stoic _lives_, all else is dead for him. The Epicureans, on the contrary, demand a moving life.

The ancients, as they want to be of good cheer, desire _good living_ (the Jews especially a long life, blessed with children and goods), _eudaemonia_, well-being in the most various forms. Democritus, _e. g._, praises as such the calm of the soul in which one "_lives_ smoothly, without fear and without excitement."

So what he thinks is that with this he gets on best, provides for himself the best lot, and gets through the world best. But as he cannot get rid of the world,--and in fact cannot for the very reason that his whole activity is taken up in the effort to get rid of it, that is, in _repelling the world_ (for which it is yet necessary that what can be and is repelled should remain existing, otherwise there would no longer be anything to repel),--he reaches at most an extreme degree of liberation, and is distinguishable only in degree from the less liberated. If he even got as far as the deadening of the earthly sense, which at last admits only the monotonous whisper of the word "Brahm," he nevertheless would not be essentially distinguishable from the _sensual_ man.

Even the Stoic att.i.tude and manly virtue amounts only to this,--that one must maintain and a.s.sert himself against the world; and the ethics of the Stoics (their only science, since they could tell nothing about the spirit but how it should behave toward the world, and of nature [physics] only this, that the wise man must a.s.sert himself against it) is not a doctrine of the spirit, but only a doctrine of the repelling of the world and of self-a.s.sertion against the world. And this consists in "imperturbability and equanimity of life," and so in the most explicit Roman virtue.

The Romans too (Horace, Cicero, etc.) went no further than this _practical philosophy_.

The _comfort (hedone)_ of the Epicureans is the same _practical philosophy_ the Stoics teach, only trickier, more deceitful. They teach only another _behavior_ toward the world, exhort us only to take a shrewd att.i.tude toward the world; the world must be deceived, for it is my enemy.

The break with the world is completely carried through by the Skeptics.

My entire relation to the world is "worthless and truthless." Timon says, "The feelings and thoughts which we draw from the world contain no truth." "What is truth?" cries Pilate. According to Pyrrho's doctrine the world is neither good nor bad, neither beautiful nor ugly, etc., but these are _predicates_ which I give it. Timon says that "in itself nothing is either good or bad, but man only _thinks_ of it thus or thus"; to face the world only _ataraxia_ (unmovedness) and _aphasia_ (speechlessness--or, in other words, isolated _inwardness_) are left.

There is "no longer any truth to be recognized" in the world; things contradict themselves; thoughts about things are without distinction (good and bad are all the same, so that what one calls good another finds bad); here the recognition of "truth" is at an end, and only the _man without power of recognition_, the _man_ who finds in the world nothing to recognize, is left, and this man just leaves the truth-vacant world where it is and takes no account of it.

So antiquity gets trough with the _world of things_, the order of the world, the world as a whole; but to the order of the world, or the things of this world, belong not only nature, but all relations in which man sees himself placed by nature, _e. g._ the family, the community,--in short, the so-called "natural bonds." With the _world of the spirit_ Christianity then begins. The man who still faces the world _armed_ is the ancient, the--_heathen_ (to which cla.s.s the Jew, too, as non-Christian, belongs); the man who has come to be led by nothing but his "heart's pleasure," the interest he takes, his fellow-feeling, his--_spirit_, is the modern, the--Christian.

As the ancients worked toward the _conquest of the world_ and strove to release man from the heavy trammels of connection with _other things_, at last they came also to the dissolution of the State and giving preference to everything private. Of course community, family, etc., as _natural_ relations, are burdensome hindrances which diminish my _spiritual freedom_.

II.--THE MODERNS

"If any man be in Christ, he is a _new creature_; the old is pa.s.sed away, behold, all is become _new_."[11]

As it was said above, "To the ancients the world was a truth," we must say here, "To the moderns the spirit was a truth"; but here, as there, we must not omit the supplement, "a truth whose untruth they tried to get back of, and at last they really do."

A course similar to that which antiquity took may be demonstrated in Christianity also, in that the _understanding_ was held a prisoner under the dominion of the Christian dogmas up to the time preparatory to the Reformation, but in the pre-Reformation century a.s.serted itself _sophistically_ and played heretical pranks with all tenets of the faith. And the talk then was, especially in Italy and at the Roman court, "If only the heart remains Christian-minded, the understanding may go right on taking its pleasure."

Long before the Reformation people were so thoroughly accustomed to fine-spun "wranglings" that the pope, and most others, looked on Luther's appearance too as a mere "wrangling of monks" at first.

Humanism corresponds to Sophisticism, and, as in the time of the Sophists Greek life stood in its fullest bloom (the Periclean age), so the most brilliant things happened in the time of Humanism, or, as one might perhaps also say, of Machiavellianism (printing, the New World, etc.). At this time the heart was still far from wanting to relieve itself of its Christian contents.

But finally the Reformation, like Socrates, took hold seriously of the _heart_ itself, and since then hearts have kept growing visibly--more unchristian. As with Luther people began to take the matter to heart, the outcome of this step of the Reformation must be that the heart also gets lightened of the heavy burden of Christian faith. The heart, from day to day more unchristian, loses the contents with which it had busied itself, till at last nothing but empty _warm-heartedness_ is left it, the quite general love of men, the love of Man, the consciousness of freedom, "self-consciousness."

Only so is Christianity complete, because it has become bald, withered, and void of contents. There are now no contents whatever against which the heart does not mutiny, unless indeed the heart unconsciously or without "self-consciousness" lets them slip in. The heart _criticises_ to death with _hard-hearted_ mercilessness everything that wants to make its way in, and is capable (except, as before, unconsciously or taken by surprise) of no friends.h.i.+p, no love. What could there be in men to love, since they are all alike "egoists," none of them _man_ as such, _i. e._ none _spirit_ only? The Christian loves only the spirit; but where could one be found who should be really nothing but spirit?

To have a liking for the corporeal man with hide and hair,--why, that would no longer be a "spiritual" warm-heartedness, it would be treason against "pure" warm-heartedness, the "theoretical regard." For pure warm-heartedness is by no means to be conceived as like that kindliness that gives everybody a friendly hand-shake; on the contrary, pure warm-heartedness is warm-hearted toward n.o.body, it is only a theoretical interest, concern for man as man, not as a person. The person is repulsive to it because of being "egoistic," because of not being that abstraction, Man. But it is only for the abstraction that one can have a theoretical regard. To pure warm-heartedness or pure theory men exist only to be criticised, scoffed at, and thoroughly despised; to it, no less than to the fanatical parson, they are only "filth" and other such nice things.

Pushed to this extremity of disinterested warm-heartedness, we must finally become conscious that the spirit, which alone the Christian loves, is nothing; in other words, that the spirit is--a lie.

What has here been set down roughly, summarily, and doubtless as yet incomprehensibly, will, it is to be hoped, become clear as we go on.

Let us take up the inheritance left by the ancients, and, as active workmen, do with it as much as--can be done with it! The world lies despised at our feet, far beneath us and our heaven, into which its mighty arms are no longer thrust and its stupefying breath does not come. Seductively as it may pose, it can delude nothing but our _sense_; it cannot lead astray the spirit--and spirit alone, after all, we really are. Having once got _back_ of things, the spirit has also got _above_ them, and become free from their bonds, emanc.i.p.ated supernal, free. So speaks "spiritual freedom."

To the spirit which, after long toil, has got rid of the world, the worldless spirit, nothing is left after the loss of the world and the worldly but--the spirit and the spiritual.

Yet, as it has only moved away from the world and made of itself a being _free from the world_, without being able really to annihilate the world, this remains to it a stumbling-block that cannot be cleared away, a discredited existence; and, as, on the other hand, it knows and recognizes nothing but the spirit and the spiritual, it must perpetually carry about with it the longing to spiritualize the world, _i. e._ to redeem it from the "black list." Therefore, like a youth, it goes about with plans for the redemption or improvement of the world.

The ancients, we saw, served the natural, the worldly, the natural order of the world, but they incessantly asked themselves whether they could not, then, relieve themselves of this service; and, when they had tired themselves to death in ever-renewed attempts at revolt, then, among their last sighs, was born to them the _G.o.d_, the "conqueror of the world." All their doing had been nothing but _wisdom of the world_, an effort to get back of the world and above it. And what is the wisdom of the many following centuries? What did the moderns try to get back of?

No longer to get back of the world, for the ancients had accomplished that; but back of the G.o.d whom the ancients bequeathed to them, back of the G.o.d who "is spirit," back of everything that is the spirit's, the spiritual. But the activity of the spirit, which "searches even the depths of the G.o.dhead," is _theology_. If the ancients have nothing to show but wisdom of the world, the moderns never did nor do make their way further than to theology. We shall see later that even the newest revolts against G.o.d are nothing but the extremest efforts of "theology,"

_i. e._ theological insurrections.

-- 1.--THE SPIRIT

The realm of spirits is monstrously great, there is an infinite deal of the spiritual; yet let us look and see what the spirit, this bequest of the ancients, properly is.

Out of their birth-pangs it came forth, but they themselves could not utter themselves as spirit; they could give birth to it, it itself must speak. The "born G.o.d, the Son of Man," is the first to utter the word that the spirit, _i. e._ he, G.o.d, has to do with nothing earthly and no earthly relations.h.i.+p, but solely with the spirit and spiritual relations.h.i.+ps.

Is my courage, indestructible under all the world's blows, my inflexibility and my obduracy, perchance already spirit in the full sense, because the world cannot touch it? Why, then it would not yet be at enmity with the world, and all its action would consist merely in not succ.u.mbing to the world! No, so long as it does not busy itself with itself alone, so long as it does not have to do with _its_ world, the spiritual, alone, it is not _free_ spirit, but only the "spirit of this world," the spirit fettered to it. The spirit is free spirit, _i. e._ really spirit, only in a world of _its own_; in "this," the world, it is a stranger. Only through a spiritual world is the spirit really spirit, for "this" world does not understand it and does not know how to keep "the maiden from a foreign land"[12] from departing.

But where is it to get this spiritual world? Where but out of itself? It must reveal itself; and the words that it speaks, the revelations in which it unveils itself, these are _its_ world. As a visionary lives and has _his_ world only in the visionary pictures that he himself creates, as a crazy man generates for himself his own dream-world, without which he could not be crazy, so the spirit must create for itself its spirit world, and is not spirit till it creates it.