Part 27
But, having become the people's property, it is still far from being mine; rather, it retains for me the subordinate significance of a _permission_. The people plays judge over my thoughts; it has the right of calling me to account for them, or, I am responsible to it for them. Jurors, when their fixed ideas are attacked, have just as hard heads and hearts as the stiffest despots and their servile officials.
In the "_Liberale Bestrebungen_"[196] E. Bauer asserts that liberty of the press is impossible in the absolutist and the constitutional State, whereas in the "free State" it finds its place. "Here," the statement is, "it is recognized that the individual, because he is no longer an individual but a member of a true and rational generality, has the right to utter his mind." So not the individual, but the "member," has liberty of the press. But, if for the purpose of liberty of the press the individual must first give proof of himself regarding his belief in the generality, the people; if he does not have this liberty _through might of his own_,--then it is a _people's liberty_, a liberty that he is invested with for the sake of his faith, his "membership." The reverse is the case: it is precisely as an individual that every one has open to him the liberty to utter his mind. But he has not the "right": that liberty is assuredly not his "sacred right." He has only the _might_; but the might alone makes him owner. I need no concession for the liberty of the press, do not need the people's consent to it, do not need the "right" to it, nor any "justification." The liberty of the press too, like every liberty, I must "take"; the people, "as being the sole judge," cannot _give_ it to me. It can put up with the liberty that I take, or defend itself against it; give, bestow, grant it it cannot. I exercise it _despite_ the people, purely as an individual; _i. e._ I get it by fighting the people, my--enemy, and obtain it only when I really get it by such fighting, _i. e. take_ it. But I take it because it is my property.
Sander, against whom E. Bauer writes, lays claim (page 99) to the liberty of the press "as the right and the liberty of the _citizen in the State_." What else does E. Bauer do? To him also it is only a right of the free _citizen_.
The liberty of the press is also demanded under the name of a "general human right." Against this the objection was well-founded that not every man knew how to use it rightly, for not every individual was truly man. Never did a government refuse it to _Man_ as such; but _Man_ writes nothing, for the reason that he is a ghost. It always refused it to _individuals_ only, and gave it to others, _e. g._ its organs. If then one would have it for all, one must assert outright that it is due to the individual, me, not to man or to the individual so far as he is man. Besides, another than a man (_e. g._ a beast) can make no use of it. The French government, _e. g._, does not dispute the liberty of the press as a right of man, but demands from the individual a security for his really being man; for it assigns liberty of the press not to the individual, but to man.
Under the exact pretence that it was _not human_, what was mine was taken from me! what was human was left to me undiminished.
Liberty of the press can bring about only a _responsible_ press; the _irresponsible_ proceeds solely from property in the press.
* * * * *
For intercourse with men an express law (conformity to which one may venture at times sinfully to forget, but the absolute value of which one at no time ventures to deny) is placed foremost among all who live religiously: this is the law--of _love_, to which not even those who seem to fight against its principle, and who hate its name, have as yet become untrue; for they also still have love, yes, they love with a deeper and more sublimated love, they love "man and mankind."
If we formulate the sense of this law, it will be about as follows: Every man must have a something that is more to him than himself. You are to put your "private interest" in the background when it is a question of the welfare of others, the weal of the fatherland, of society, the common weal, the weal of mankind, the good cause, and the like! Fatherland, society, mankind, etc., must be more to you than yourself, and as against their interest your "private interest" must stand back; for you must not be an--egoist.
Love is a far-reaching religious demand, which is not, as might be supposed, limited to love to God and man, but stands foremost in every regard. Whatever we do, think, will, the ground of it is always to be love. Thus we may indeed judge, but only "with love." The Bible may assuredly be criticised, and that very thoroughly, but the critic must before all things _love_ it and see in it the sacred book. Is this anything else than to say he must not criticise it to death, he must leave it standing, and that as a sacred thing that cannot be upset?--In our criticism on men too, love must remain the unchanged key-note. Certainly judgments that hatred inspires are not at all our _own_ judgments, but judgments of the hatred that rules us, "rancorous judgments." But are judgments that love inspires in us any more our _own_? They are judgments of the love that rules us, they are "loving, lenient" judgments, they are not our _own_, and accordingly not real judgments at all. He who burns with love for justice cries out, _fiat justitia, pereat mundus_! He can doubtless ask and investigate what justice properly is or demands, and _in what_ it consists, but not _whether_ it is anything.
It is very true, "He who abides in love abides in God, and God in him." (I John 4. 16.) God abides in him, he does not get rid of God, does not become godless; and he abides in God, does not come to himself and into his own home, abides in love to God and does not become loveless.
"God is love! All times and all races recognize in this word the central point of Christianity." God, who is love, is an officious God: he cannot leave the world in peace, but wants to make it _blest_. "God became man to make men divine."[197] He has his hand in the game everywhere, and nothing happens without it; everywhere he has his "best purposes," his "incomprehensible plans and decrees." Reason, which he himself is, is to be forwarded and realized in the whole world. His fatherly care deprives us of all independence. We can do nothing sensible without its being said, God did that! and can bring upon ourselves no misfortune without hearing, God ordained that; we have nothing that we have not from him, he "gave" everything. But, as God does, so does Man. God wants perforce to make the world _blest_, and Man wants to make it _happy_, to make all men happy. Hence every "man" wants to awaken in all men the reason which he supposes his own self to have: everything is to be rational throughout. God torments himself with the devil, and the philosopher does it with unreason and the accidental. God lets no being go _its own_ gait, and Man likewise wants to make us walk only in human wise.
But whoso is full of sacred (religious, moral, humane) love loves only the spook, the "true man," and persecutes with dull mercilessness the individual, the real man, under the phlegmatic legal title of measures against the "un-man." He finds it praiseworthy and indispensable to exercise pitilessness in the harshest measure; for love to the spook or generality commands him to hate him who is not ghostly, _i. e._ the egoist or individual; such is the meaning of the renowned love-phenomenon that is called "justice."
The criminally arraigned man can expect no forbearance, and no one spreads a friendly veil over his unhappy nakedness. Without emotion the stern judge tears the last rags of excuse from the body of the poor accused; without compassion the jailer drags him into his damp abode; without placability, when the time of punishment has expired, he thrusts the branded man again among men, his good, Christian, loyal brethren! who contemptuously spit on him. Yes, without grace a criminal "deserving of death" is led to the scaffold, and before the eyes of a jubilating crowd the appeased moral law celebrates its sublime--revenge. For only one can live, the moral law or the criminal. Where criminals live unpunished, the moral law has fallen; and, where this prevails, those must go down. Their enmity is indestructible.
The Christian age is precisely that of _mercy, love_, solicitude to have men receive what is due them, yes, to bring them to fulfil their human (divine) calling. Therefore the principle has been put foremost for intercourse, that this and that is man's essence and consequently his calling, to which either God has called him or (according to the concepts of to-day) his being man (the species) calls him. Hence the zeal for conversion. That the Communists and the humane expect from man more than the Christians do does not change the standpoint in the least. 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 _vérité_ (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 constitutes 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 passion is more powerful in me than all the rest. Christianity too teaches us to sacrifice all other passions to this. But, if to one passion 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 passion 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 passion 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 passion: 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"), assert 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 trespass 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 passions,--_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 _fiancée_, 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 god of love is older than the God of Love. But the mystical possessedness belongs to the moderns.
The possessedness of love lies in the alienation of the object, or in my powerlessness as against its alienness and superior power. To the egoist nothing is high enough for him to humble himself before it, nothing so independent that he would live for love of it, nothing so sacred that he would sacrifice himself to it. The egoist's love rises in selfishness, flows in the bed of selfishness, and empties into selfishness again.
Whether this can still be called love? If you know another word for it, go ahead and choose it; then the sweet word love may wither with the departed world; for the present I at least find none in our _Christian_ language, and hence stick to the old sound and "love" _my_ object, my--property.
Only as one of my feelings do I harbor love; but as a power above me, as a divine power (Feuerbach), as a passion that I am not to cast off, as a religious and moral duty, I--scorn it. As my feeling it is _mine_; as a principle to which I consecrate and "vow" my soul it is a dominator and _divine_, just as hatred as a principle is _diabolical_; one not better than the other. In short, egoistic love, _i. e._, my love, is neither holy nor unholy, neither divine nor diabolical.
"A love that is limited by faith is an untrue love. The sole limitation that does not contradict the essence of love is the self-limitation of love by reason, intelligence. Love that scorns the rigor, the law, of intelligence, is theoretically a false love, practically a ruinous one."[200] So love is in its essence _rational_! So thinks Feuerbach; the believer, on the contrary, thinks, Love is in its essence _believing_. The one inveighs against _irrational_, the other against _unbelieving_, love. To both it can at most rank as a _splen__didum vitium_. Do not both leave love standing, even in the form of unreason and unbelief? They do not dare to say, irrational or unbelieving love is nonsense, is not love; as little as they are willing to say, irrational or unbelieving tears are not tears. But, if even irrational love, etc., must count as love, and if they are nevertheless to be unworthy of man, there follows simply this: love is not the highest thing, but reason or faith; even the unreasonable and the unbelieving can love; but love has value only when it is that of a rational or believing person. It is an illusion when Feuerbach calls the rationality of love its "self-limitation"; the believer might with the same right call belief its "self-limitation." Irrational love is neither "false" nor "ruinous"; it does its service as love.
Toward the world, especially toward men, I am to _assume a particular feeling_, and "meet them with love," with the feeling of love, from the beginning. Certainly, in this there is revealed far more free-will and self-determination than when I let myself be stormed, by way of the world, by all possible feelings, and remain exposed to the most checkered, most accidental impressions. I go to the world rather with a preconceived feeling, as if it were a prejudice and a preconceived opinion: I have prescribed to myself in advance my behavior toward it, and, despite all its temptations, feel and think about it only as I have once determined to. Against the dominion of the world I secure myself by the principle of love; for, whatever may come, I--love. The ugly--_e. g._--makes a repulsive impression on me; but, determined to love, I master this impression as I do every antipathy.
But the feeling to which I have determined and--condemned myself from the start is a _narrow_ feeling, because it is a predestined one, of which I myself am not able to get clear or to declare myself clear. Because preconceived, it is a _prejudice_. _I_ no longer show myself in face of the world, but my love shows itself. The _world_ indeed does not rule me, but so much the more inevitably does the spirit of _love_ rule me. I have overcome the world to become a slave of this spirit.