Part 9
I do not blame the middle class 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 class. 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 succumbing 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-ownership_? 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 God and every other idea. I can be a philosopher, a lover of wisdom, as I love God. 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 God'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-abasement. "He that abaseth himself shall be exalted." Yes, yes, children must early be _made_ to practise piety, godliness, 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 God, yet they demand the _fear of Man_ all the more strictly, and awaken "enthusiasm for the truly human calling" by discipline.
* * * * *
A long time passed 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 mediæval 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 mediæval 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 God" 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 appetites 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," against "fancies, fortuities, arbitrariness," etc. What it wants is that the _divine_ should become visible in everything, and all consciousness become a knowing of the divine, and man behold God everywhere; but God never is, without the _devil_.
For this very reason the name of philosopher is not to be given to him who has indeed open eyes for the things of the world, a clear and undazzled gaze, a correct judgment about the world, but who sees in the world just the world, in objects only objects, and, in short, everything prosaically as it is; but he alone is a philosopher who sees, and points out or demonstrates, heaven in the world, the supernal in the earthly, the--_divine_ in the mundane. The former may be ever so wise, there is no getting away from this:
What wise men see not by their wisdom's art Is practised simply by a childlike heart.[56]
It takes this childlike heart, this eye for the divine, to make a philosopher. The first-named man has only a "common" consciousness, but he who knows the divine, and knows how to tell it, has a "scientific" one. On this ground Bacon was turned out of the realm of philosophers. And certainly what is called English philosophy seems to have got no further than to the discoveries of so-called "clear heads", such as Bacon and Hume. The English did not know how to exalt the simplicity of the childlike heart to philosophic significance, did not know how to make--philosophers out of childlike hearts. This is as much as to say, their philosophy was not able to become _theological_ or _theology_, and yet it is only as theology that it can really _live itself out_, complete itself. The field of its battle to the death is in theology. Bacon did not trouble himself about theological questions and cardinal points.
Cognition has its object in life. German thought seeks, more than that of others, to reach the beginnings and fountain-heads of life, and sees no life till it sees it in cognition itself. Descartes's _cogito, ergo sum_ has the meaning "One lives only when one thinks." Thinking life is called "intellectual life"! Only mind lives, its life is the true life. Then, just so in nature only the "eternal laws," the mind or the reason of nature, are its true life. In man, as in nature, only the thought lives; everything else is dead! To this abstraction, to the life of generalities or of that which is _lifeless_, the history of mind had to come. God, who is spirit, alone lives. Nothing lives but the ghost.
How can one try to assert of modern philosophy or modern times that they have reached freedom, since they have not freed us from the power of objectivity? Or am I perhaps free from a despot when I am not afraid of the personal potentate, to be sure, but of every infraction of the loving reverence which I fancy I owe him? The case is the same with modern times. They only changed the _existing_ objects, the real ruler, etc., into _conceived_ objects, _i. e._ into _ideas_, before which the old respect not only was not lost, but increased in intensity. Even if people snapped their fingers at God and the devil in their former crass reality, people devoted only the greater attention to their ideas. "They are rid of the Evil One; evil is left."[57] The decision having once been made not to let oneself be imposed on any longer by the extant and palpable, little scruple was felt about revolting against the existing State or overturning the existing laws; but to sin against the _idea_ of the State, not to submit to the _idea_ of law, who would have dared that? So one remained a "citizen" and a "law-respecting," loyal man; yes, one seemed to himself to be only so much more law-respecting, the more rationalistically one abrogated the former defective law in order to do homage to the "spirit of the law." In all this the objects had only suffered a change of form; they had remained in their prepollence and pre-eminence; in short, one was still involved in obedience and possessedness, lived in _refection_, and had an object on which one reflected, which one respected, and before which one felt reverence and fear. One had done nothing but transform the _things_ into _conceptions_ of the things, into thoughts and ideas, whereby one's _dependence_ became all the more intimate and indissoluble. So, _e. g._, it is not hard to emancipate oneself from the commands of parents, or to set aside the admonitions of uncle and aunt, the entreaties of brother and sister; but the renounced obedience easily gets into one's conscience, and the less one does give way to the individual demands, because he rationalistically, by his own reason, recognizes them to be unreasonable, so much the more conscientiously does he hold fast to filial piety and family love, and so much the harder is it for him to forgive himself a trespass against the _conception_ which he has formed of family love and of filial duty. Released from dependence as regards the existing family, one falls into the more binding dependence on the idea of the family; one is ruled by the spirit of the family. The family consisting of John, Maggie, etc., whose dominion has become powerless, is only internalized, being left as "family" in general, to which one just applies the old saying, "We must obey God rather than man," whose significance here is this: "I cannot, to be sure, accommodate myself to your senseless requirements, but, as my 'family,' you still remain the object of my love and care"; for "the family" is a sacred idea, which the individual must never offend against.--And this family internalized and desensualized into a thought, a conception, now ranks as the "sacred," whose despotism is tenfold more grievous because it makes a racket in my conscience. This despotism is broken only when the conception, family, also becomes a _nothing_ to me. The Christian dicta, "Woman, what have I to do with thee?"[58] "I am come to stir up a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother,"[59] and others, are accompanied by something that refers us to the heavenly or true family, and mean no more than the State's demand, in case of a collision between it and the family, that we obey _its_ commands.
The case of morality is like that of the family. Many a man renounces morals, but with great difficulty the conception, "morality." Morality is the "idea" of morals, their intellectual power, their power over the conscience; on the other hand, morals are too material to rule the mind, and do not fetter an "intellectual" man, a so-called independent, a "freethinker."
The Protestant may put it as he will, the "holy[60] Scripture," the "Word of God," still remains sacred[61] for him. He for whom this is no longer "holy" has ceased to--be a Protestant. But herewith what is "ordained" in it, the public authorities appointed by God, etc., also remain sacred for him. For him these things remain indissoluble, unapproachable, "raised above all doubt"; and, as _doubt_, which in practice becomes a _buffeting_, is what is most man's own, these things remain "raised" above himself. He who cannot _get away_ from them will--_believe_; for to believe in them is to be _bound_ to them. Through the fact that in Protestantism the _faith_ became a more inward faith, the _servitude_ has also become a more inward servitude; one has taken those sanctities up into himself, entwined them with all his thoughts and endeavors, made them a "_matter of conscience_," constructed out of them a "_sacred duty_" for himself. Therefore what the Protestant's conscience cannot get away from is sacred to him, and _conscientiousness_ most clearly designates his character.
Protestantism has actually put a man in the position of a country governed by secret police. The spy and eavesdropper, "conscience," watches over every motion of the mind, and all thought and action is for it a "matter of conscience," _i. e._ police business. This tearing apart of man into "natural impulse" and "conscience" (inner populace and inner police) is what constitutes the Protestant. The reason of the Bible (in place of the Catholic "reason of the church") ranks as sacred, and this feeling and consciousness that the word of the Bible is sacred is called--conscience. With this, then, sacredness is "laid upon one's conscience." If one does not free himself from conscience, the consciousness of the sacred, he may act unconscientiously indeed, but never consciencelessly.
The Catholic finds himself satisfied when he fulfils the _command_; the Protestant acts according to his "best judgment and conscience." For the Catholic is only a _layman_; the Protestant is himself a _clergyman_.[62] Just this is the progress of the Reformation period beyond the Middle Ages, and at the same time its curse,--that _the spiritual_ became complete.
What else was the Jesuit moral philosophy than a continuation of the sale of indulgences? only that the man who was relieved of his burden of sin now gained also an _insight_ into the remission of sins, and convinced himself how really his sin was taken from him, since in this or that particular case (Casuists) it was so clearly no sin at all that he committed. The sale of indulgences had made all sins and transgressions permissible, and silenced every movement of conscience. All sensuality might hold sway, if it was only purchased from the church. This favoring of sensuality was continued by the Jesuits, while the strictly moral, dark, fanatical, repentant, contrite, praying Protestants (as the true completers of Christianity, to be sure) acknowledged only the intellectual and spiritual man. Catholicism, especially the Jesuits, gave aid to egoism in this way, found involuntary and unconscious adherents within Protestantism itself, and saved us from the subversion and extinction of _sensuality_. Nevertheless the Protestant spirit spreads its dominion farther and farther; and, as, beside it the "divine," the Jesuit spirit represents only the "diabolic" which is inseparable from everything divine, the latter can never assert itself alone, but must look on and see how in France, _e. g._, the Philistinism of Protestantism wins at last, and mind is on top.