Accordingly three different moments or stages of development can be
distinguished, which the individual man, as well as the whole race, must
of necessity traverse in a determinate order if they are to fulfil the
circle of their determination. No doubt, the separate periods can be
lengthened or shortened, through accidental causes which are inherent
either in the influence of external things or under the free caprice of
men: but neither of them can be overstepped, and the order of their
sequence cannot be inverted either by nature or by the will. Man, in his
_physical_ condition, suffers only the power of nature; he gets rid of
this power in the æsthetical condition, and he rules them in the moral
state.
What is man before beauty liberates him from free pleasure, and the
serenity of form tames down the savageness of life? Eternally uniform in
his aims, eternally changing in his judgments, self-seeking without
being himself, unfettered without being free, a slave without serving
any rule. At this period, the world is to him only destiny, not yet an
object; all has existence for him only in as far as it procures
existence to him; a thing that neither seeks from nor gives to him is
non-existent. Every phenomenon stands out before him separate and cut
off, as he finds himself in the series of beings. All that is, is to him
through the bias of the moment; every change is to him an entirely fresh
creation, because with the necessary _in him_, the necessary _out of
him_ is wanting, which binds together all the changing forms in the
universe, and which holds fast the law on the theatre of his action,
while the individual departs. It is in vain that nature lets the rich
variety of her forms pass before him; he sees in her glorious fulness
nothing but his prey, in her power and greatness nothing but his enemy.
Either he encounters objects, and wishes to draw them to himself in
desire, or the objects press in a destructive manner upon him, and he
thrusts them away in dismay and terror. In both cases his relation to
the world of sense is immediate _contact_; and perpetually anxious
through its pressure, restless and plagued by imperious wants, he
nowhere finds rest except in enervation, and nowhere limits save in
exhausted desire.
“True, his is the powerful breast, and the mighty hand of the Titans....
A certain inheritance; yet the god welded
Round his forehead a brazen band;
Advice, moderation, wisdom, and patience,—
Hid it from his shy, sinister look.
Every desire is with him a rage,
And his rage prowls around limitless.”—_Iphigenia in Tauris._
Ignorant of his own human dignity, he is far removed from honoring it in
others, and conscious of his own savage greed, he fears it in every
creature that he sees like himself. He never sees others in himself,
only himself in others, and human society, instead of enlarging him to
the race, only shuts him up continually closer in his individuality.
Thus limited, he wanders through his sunless life, till favoring nature
rolls away the load of matter from his darkened senses, reflection
separates him from things, and objects show themselves at length in the
afterglow of the consciousness.
It is true we cannot point out this state of rude nature as we have here
portrayed it in any definite people and age. It is only an idea, but an
idea with which experience agrees most closely in special features. It
may be said that man was never in this animal condition, but he has not,
on the other hand, ever entirely escaped from it. Even in the rudest
subjects, unmistakable traces of rational freedom can be found, and even
in the most cultivated, features are not wanting that remind us of that
dismal natural condition. It is possible for man, at one and the same
time, to unite the highest and the lowest in his nature; and if his
_dignity_ depends on a strict separation of one from the other, his
_happiness_ depends on a skilful removal of this separation. The culture
which is to bring his dignity into agreement with his happiness will
therefore have to provide for the greatest purity of these two
principles in their most intimate combination.
Consequently the first appearance of reason in man is not the
beginning of humanity. This is first decided by his freedom, and
reason begins first by making his sensuous dependence boundless; a
phenomenon that does not appear to me to have been sufficiently
elucidated, considering its importance and universality. We know that
the reason makes itself known to man by the demand for the
absolute—the self-dependent and necessary. But as this want of the
reason cannot be satisfied in any separate or single state of his
physical life, he is obliged to leave the physical entirely and to
rise from a limited reality to ideas. But although the true meaning of
that demand of the reason is to withdraw him from the limits of time
and to lead him from the world of sense to an ideal world, yet this
same demand of reason, by misapplication—scarcely to be avoided in
this life, prone to sensuousness—can direct him to physical life, and,
instead of making man free, plunge him in the most terrible slavery.
Facts verify this supposition. Man raised on the wings of imagination
leaves the narrow limits of the present, in which mere animality is
enclosed, in order to strive on to an unlimited future. But while the
limitless is unfolded to his dazed _imagination_, his heart has not
ceased to live in the separate, and to serve the moment. The impulse
towards the absolute seizes him suddenly in the midst of his animality,
and as in this cloddish condition all his efforts aim only at the
material and temporal, and are limited by his individuality, he is only
led by that demand of the reason to extend his individuality into the
infinite, instead of to abstract from it. He will be led to seek instead
of form an inexhaustible matter, instead of the unchangeable an
everlasting change and an absolute securing of his temporal existence.
The same impulse which, directed to his thought and action, ought to
lead to truth and morality, now directed to his passion and emotional
state, produces nothing but an unlimited desire and an absolute want.
The first fruits, therefore, that he reaps in the world of spirits are
cares and fear—both operations of the reason; not of sensuousness, but
of a reason that mistakes its object and applies its categorical
imperative to matter. All unconditional systems of happiness are fruits
of this tree, whether they have for their object the present day or the
whole of life, or what does not make them any more respectable, the
whole of eternity, for their object. An unlimited duration of existence
and of well-being is only an ideal of the desires; hence a demand which
can only be put forth by an animality striving up to the absolute. Man,
therefore, without gaining anything for his humanity by a rational
expression of this sort, loses the happy limitation of the animal, over
which he now only possesses the unenviable superiority of losing the
present for an endeavor after what is remote, yet without seeking in the
limitless future anything but the present.
But even if the reason does not go astray in its object, or err in the
question, sensuousness will continue to falsify the answer for a long
time. As soon as man has begun to use his understanding and to knit
together phenomena in cause and effect, the reason, according to its
conception, presses on to an absolute knitting together and to an
unconditional basis. In order, merely, to be able to put forward this
demand, man must already have stepped beyond the sensuous, but the
sensuous uses this very demand to bring back the fugitive.
In fact, it is now that he ought to abandon entirely the world of sense
in order to take his flight into the realm of ideas; for the
intelligence remains eternally shut up in the finite and in the
contingent, and does not cease putting questions without reaching the
last link of the chain. But as the man with whom we are engaged is not
yet capable of such an abstraction, and does not find it in the sphere
of sensuous knowledge, and because he does not look for it in pure
reason, he will seek for it below in the region of sentiment, and will
appear to find it. No doubt the sensuous shows him nothing that has its
foundation in itself, and that legislates for itself, but it shows him
something that does not care for foundation or law; therefore, thus not
being able to quiet the intelligence by showing it a final cause, he
reduces it to silence by the conception which desires no cause; and
being incapable of understanding the sublime necessity of reason, he
keeps to the blind constraint of matter. As sensuousness knows no other
end than its interest, and is determined by nothing except blind chance,
it makes the former the motive of its actions, and the latter the master
of the world.
Even the divine part in man, the moral law, in its first manifestation
in the sensuous cannot avoid this perversion. As this moral law is only
prohibited, and combats in man the interest of sensuous egotism, it must
appear to him as something strange until he has come to consider this
self-love as the stranger, and the voice of reason as his true self.
Therefore he confines himself to feeling the fetters which the latter
imposes on him, without having the consciousness of the infinite
emancipation which it procures for him. Without suspecting in himself
the dignity of lawgiver, he only experiences the constraint and the
impotent revolt of a subject fretting under the yoke, because in this
experience the sensuous impulsion precedes the moral impulsion, he gives
to the law of necessity a beginning in him, a positive origin, and by
the most unfortunate of all mistakes he converts the immutable and the
eternal in himself into a transitory accident. He makes up his mind to
consider the notions of the just and the unjust as statutes which have
been introduced by a will, and not as having in themselves an eternal
value. Just as in the explanation of certain natural phenomena he goes
beyond nature and seeks out of her what can only be found in her, in her
own laws; so also in the explanation of moral phenomena he goes beyond
reason and makes light of his humanity, seeking a god in this way. It is
not wonderful that a religion which he has purchased at the cost of his
humanity shows itself worthy of this origin, and that he only considers
as absolute and eternally binding laws that have never been binding from
all eternity. He has placed himself in relation with, not a holy being,
but a powerful. Therefore the spirit of his religion, of the homage that
he gives to God, is a fear that abases him, and not a veneration that
elevates him in his own esteem.
Though these different aberrations by which man departs from the ideal
of his destination cannot all take place at the same time, because
several degrees have to be passed over in the transition from the
obscure of thought to error, and from the obscure of will to the
corruption of the will; these degrees are all, without exception, the
consequence of his physical state, because in all the vital impulsion
sways the formal impulsion. Now, two cases may happen: either reason may
not yet have spoken in man, and the physical may reign over him with a
blind necessity, or reason may not be sufficiently purified from
sensuous impressions, and the moral may still be subject to the
physical; in both cases the only principle that has a real power over
him is a material principle, and man, at least as regards his ultimate
tendency, is a sensuous being. The only difference is, that in the
former case he is an animal without reason, and in the second case a
rational animal. But he ought to be neither one nor the other: he ought
to be a man. Nature ought not to rule him exclusively; nor reason
conditionally. The two legislations ought to be completely independent,
and yet mutually complementary.