Custom having once given the name of "the ancients" to our pre-Christian
ancestors, we will not throw it up against them that, in comparison with
us experienced people, they ought properly to be called children, but
will rather continue to honor them as our good old fathers. But how have
they come to be antiquated, and who could displace them through his
pretended newness?
We know, of course, the revolutionary innovator and disrespectful heir,
who even took away the sanctity of the fathers' sabbath to hallow his
Sunday, and interrupted the course of time to begin at himself with a
new chronology; we know him, and know that it is--the Christian. But
does he remain forever young, and is he to-day still the new man, or
will he too be superseded, as he has superseded the "ancients"?
The fathers must doubtless have themselves begotten the young one who
entombed them. Let us then peep at this act of generation.
"To the ancients the world was a truth," says Feuerbach, but he forgets
to make the important addition, "a truth whose untruth they tried to get
back of, and at last really did." What is meant by those words of
Feuerbach will be easily recognized if they are put alongside the
Christian thesis of the "vanity and transitoriness of the world." For,
as the Christian can never convince himself of the vanity of the divine
word, but believes in its eternal and unshakeable truth, which, the more
its depths are searched, must all the more brilliantly come to light and
triumph, so the ancients on their side lived in the feeling that the
world and mundane relations (_e. g_. the natural ties of blood) were the
truth before which their powerless "I" must bow. The very thing on which
the ancients set the highest value is spurned by Christians as the
valueless, and what they recognized as truth these brand as idle lies;
the high significance of the fatherland disappears, and the Christian
must regard himself as "a stranger on earth";[8] the sanctity of
funeral rites, from which sprang a work of art like the Antigone of
Sophocles, is designated as a paltry thing ("Let the dead bury their
dead"); the infrangible truth of family ties is represented as an
untruth which one cannot promptly enough get clear of;[9] and so in
everything.
If we now see that to the two sides opposite things appear as truth, to
one the natural, to the other the intellectual, to one earthly things
and relations, to the other heavenly (the heavenly fatherland,
"Jerusalem that is above," etc.), it still remains to be considered how
the new time and that undeniable reversal could come out of antiquity.
But the ancients themselves worked toward making their truth a lie.
Let us plunge at once into the midst of the most brilliant years of the
ancients, into the Periclean century. Then the Sophistic culture was
spreading, and Greece made a pastime of what had hitherto been to her a
monstrously serious matter.
The fathers had been enslaved by the undisturbed power of existing
things too long for the posterity not to have to learn by bitter
experience to _feel themselves_. Therefore the Sophists, with courageous
sauciness, pronounce the reassuring words, "Don't be bluffed!" and
diffuse the rationalistic doctrine, "Use your understanding, your wit,
your mind, against everything; it is by having a good and well-drilled
understanding that one gets through the world best, provides for himself
the best lot, the pleasantest _life_." Thus they recognize in _mind_
man's true weapon against the world. This is why they lay such stress
on dialectic skill, command of language, the art of disputation, etc.
They announce that mind is to be used against everything; but they are
still far removed from the holiness of the Spirit, for to them it is a
_means_, a weapon, as trickery and defiance serve children for the same
purpose; their mind is the unbribable _understanding_.
To-day we should call that a one-sided culture of the understanding, and
add the warning, "Cultivate not only your understanding, but also, and
especially, your heart." Socrates did the same. For, if the heart did
not become free from its natural impulses, but remained filled with the
most fortuitous contents and, as an uncriticised _avidity_, altogether
in the power of things, _i. e._ nothing but a vessel of the most various
_appetites_,--then it was unavoidable that the free understanding must
serve the "bad heart" and was ready to justify everything that the
wicked heart desired.
Therefore Socrates says that it is not enough for one to use his
understanding in all things, but it is a question of what _cause_ one
exerts it for. We should now say, one must serve the "good cause." But
serving the good cause is--being moral. Hence Socrates is the founder of
ethics.
Certainly the principle of the Sophistic doctrine must lead to the
possibility that the blindest and most dependent slave of his desires
might yet be an excellent sophist, and, with keen understanding, trim
and expound everything in favor of his coarse heart. What could there be
for which a "good reason" might not be found, or which might not be
defended through thick and thin?
Therefore Socrates says: "You must be 'pure-hearted' if your shrewdness
is to be valued." At this point begins the second period of Greek
liberation of the mind, the period of _purity of heart_. For the first
was brought to a close by the Sophists in their proclaiming the
omnipotence of the understanding. But the heart remained
_worldly-minded_, remained a servant of the world, always affected by
worldly wishes. This coarse heart was to be cultivated from now on--the
era of _culture of the heart_. But how is the heart to be cultivated?
What the understanding, this one side of the mind, has reached,--to wit,
the capability of playing freely with and over every concern,--awaits
the heart also; everything _worldly_ must come to grief before it, so
that at last family, commonwealth, fatherland, and the like, are given
up for the sake of the heart, _i. e._ of _blessedness_, the heart's
blessedness.
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 establishing in the Sophistic age.
The Sophistic culture has brought it to pass 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
embarrassed 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 God," 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 gods of the heathen were yet far
removed from the conception "God 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 assign _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 gods, 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 noblest 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 circumstances?
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 attitude and manly virtue amounts only to this,--that
one must maintain and assert 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 assert himself against it)
is not a doctrine of the spirit, but only a doctrine of the repelling of
the world and of self-assertion 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 attitude 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 class 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_.