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
aesthetical 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 honouring
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 favouring nature rolls away the load of matter from his
darkened senses, reflection separates him from things, and objects
show themselves at length in the after-glow 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 up from the world of sense to an ideal world,
yet this same demand of reason, by a misapplication--scarcely to be
avoided in this age, 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
endeavour 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 temains 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.