The Ego and His Own Part 4

Thus its creations make it spirit, and by its creatures we know it, the creator; in them it lives, they are its world.

Now, what is the spirit? It is the creator of a spiritual world! Even in you and me people do not recognize spirit till they see that we have appropriated to ourselves something spiritual,--_i. e._, though thoughts may have been set before us, we have at least brought them to life in ourselves; for, as long as we were children, the most edifying thoughts might have been laid before us without our wishing, or being able to reproduce them in ourselves. So the spirit also exists only when it creates something spiritual; it is real only together with the spiritual, its creature.

As, then, we know it by its works, the question is what these works are.

But the works or children of the spirit are nothing else but--spirits:

If I had before me Jews, Jews of the true metal, I should have to stop here and leave them standing before this mystery as for almost two thousand years they have remained standing before it, unbelieving and without knowledge. But, as you, my dear reader, are at least not a full-blooded Jew,--for such a one will not go astray as far as this,--we will still go along a bit of road together, till perhaps you too turn your back on me because I laugh in your face.

If somebody told you you were altogether spirit, you would take hold of your body and not believe him, but answer: "I _have_ a spirit, no doubt, but do not exist only as spirit, but am a man with a body." You would still distinguish _yourself_ from "your spirit." "But," replies he, "it is your destiny, even though now you are yet going about in the fetters of the body, to be one day a 'blessed spirit,' and, however you may conceive of the future aspect of your spirit, so much is yet certain, that in death you will put off this body and yet keep yourself, _i. e._ your spirit, for all eternity; accordingly your spirit is the eternal and true in you, the body only a dwelling here below, which you may leave and perhaps exchange for another."

Now you believe him! For the present, indeed, _you_ are not spirit only; but, when you emigrate from the mortal body, as one day you must, then you will have to help yourself without the body, and therefore it is needful that you be prudent and care in time for your proper self. "What should it profit a man if he gained the whole world and yet suffered damage in his soul?"

But, even granted that doubts, raised in the course of time against the tenets of the Christian faith, have long since robbed you of faith in the immortality of your spirit, you have nevertheless left one tenet undisturbed, and still ingenuously adhere to the one truth, that the spirit is your better part, and that the spiritual has greater claims on you than anything else. Despite all your atheism, in zeal against _egoism_ you concur with the believers in immortality.

But whom do you think of under the name of egoist? A man who, instead of living to an idea,--_i. e._ a spiritual thing--and sacrificing to it his personal advantage, serves the latter. A good patriot, _e. g._, brings his sacrifice to the altar of the fatherland; but it cannot be disputed that the fatherland is an idea, since for beasts incapable of mind,[13]

or children as yet without mind, there is no fatherland and no patriotism. Now, if any one does not approve himself as a good patriot, he betrays his egoism with reference to the fatherland. And so the matter stands in innumerable other cases: he who in human society takes the benefit of a prerogative sins egoistically against the idea of equality; he who exercises dominion is blamed as an egoist against the idea of liberty,--etc.

You despise the egoist because he puts the spiritual in the background as compared with the personal, and has his eyes on himself where you would like to see him act to favor an idea. The distinction between you is that he makes himself the central point, but you the spirit; or that you cut your ident.i.ty in two and exalt your "proper self," the spirit, to be ruler of the paltrier remainder, while he will hear nothing of this cutting in two, and pursues spiritual and material interests just _as he pleases_. You think, to be sure, that you are falling foul of those only who enter into no spiritual interest at all, but in fact you curse at everybody who does not look on the spiritual interest as his "true and highest" interest. You carry your knightly service for this beauty so far that you affirm her to be the only beauty of the world.

You live not to _yourself_, but to your _spirit_ and to what is the spirit's--_i. e._ ideas.

As the spirit exists only in its creating of the spiritual, let us take a look about us for its first creation. If only it has accomplished this, there follows thenceforth a natural propagation of creations, as according to the myth only the first human beings needed to be created, the rest of the race propagating of itself. The first creation, on the other hand, must come forth "out of nothing,"--_i. e._, the spirit has toward its realization nothing but itself, or rather it has not yet even itself, but must create itself; hence its first creation is itself, _the spirit_. Mystical as this sounds, we yet go through it as an every-day experience. Are you a thinking being before you think? In creating the first thought you create yourself, the thinking one; for you do not think before you think a thought, _i. e._ have a thought. Is it not your singing that first makes you a singer, your talking that makes you a talker? Now, so too it is the production of the spiritual that first makes you a spirit.

Meantime, as you distinguish _yourself_ from the thinker, singer, and talker, so you no less distinguish yourself from the spirit, and feel very clearly that you are something beside spirit. But, as in the thinking ego hearing and sight easily vanish in the enthusiasm of thought, so you also have been seized by the spirit-enthusiasm, and you now long with all your might to become wholly spirit and to be dissolved in spirit. The spirit is your _ideal_, the unattained, the otherworldly; spirit is the name of your--G.o.d, "G.o.d is spirit."

Against all that is not spirit you are a zealot, and therefore you play the zealot against _yourself_ who cannot get rid of a remainder of the non-spiritual. Instead of saying, "I am _more_ than spirit," you say with contrition, "I am less than spirit; and spirit, pure spirit, or the spirit that is nothing but spirit, I can only think of, but am not; and, since I am not it, it is another, exists as another, whom I call 'G.o.d'."

It lies in the nature of the case that the spirit that is to exist as pure spirit must be an otherworldly one, for, since I am not it, it follows that it can only be _outside_ me; since in any case a human being is not fully comprehended in the concept "spirit," it follows that the pure spirit, the spirit as such, can only be outside of men, beyond the human world,--not earthly, but heavenly.

Only from this disunion in which I and the spirit lie; only because "I"

and "spirit" are not names for one and the same thing, but different names for completely different things; only because I am not spirit and spirit not I,--only from this do we get a quite tautological explanation of the necessity that the spirit dwells in the other world, _i. e._ is G.o.d.

But from this it also appears how thoroughly theological is the liberation that Feuerbach[14] is laboring to give us. What he says is that we had only mistaken our own essence, and therefore looked for it in the other world, but that now, when we see that G.o.d was only our human essence, we must recognize it again as ours and move it back out of the other world into this. To G.o.d, who is spirit, Feuerbach gives the name "Our Essence." Can we put up with this, that "Our Essence" is brought into opposition to _us_,--that we are split into an essential and an unessential self? Do we not therewith go back into the dreary misery of seeing ourselves banished out of ourselves?

What have we gained, then, when for a variation we have transferred into ourselves the divine outside us? _Are we_ that which is in us? As little as we are that which is outside us. I am as little my heart as I am my sweetheart, this "other self" of mine. Just because we are not the spirit that dwells in us, just for that reason we had to take it and set it outside us; it was not we, did not coincide with us, and therefore we could not think of it as existing otherwise than outside us, on the other side from us, in the other world.

With the strength of _despair_ Feuerbach clutches at the total substance of Christianity, not to throw it away, no, to drag it to himself, to draw it, the long-yearned-for, ever-distant, out of its heaven with a last effort, and keep it by him forever. Is not that a clutch of the uttermost despair, a clutch for life or death, and is it not at the same time the Christian yearning and hungering for the other world? The hero wants not to go into the other world, but to draw the other world to him, and compel it to become this world! And since then has not all the world, with more or less consciousness, been crying that "this world" is the vital point, and heaven must come down on earth and be experienced even here?

Let us, in brief, set Feuerbach's theological view and our contradiction over against each other!

"The essence of man is man's supreme being;[15] now by religion, to be sure, the _supreme being_ is called _G.o.d_ and regarded as an _objective_ essence, but in truth it is only man's own essence; and therefore the turning point of the world's history is that henceforth no longer _G.o.d_, but man, is to appear to man as G.o.d."[16]

To this we reply: The supreme being is indeed the essence of man, but, just because it is his _essence_ and not he himself, it remains quite immaterial whether we see it outside him and view it as "G.o.d," or find it in him and call it "Essence of Man" or "Man." _I_ am neither G.o.d nor _Man_,[17] neither the supreme essence nor my essence, and therefore it is all one in the main whether I think of the essence as in me or outside me. Nay, we really do always think of the supreme being as in both kinds of otherworldliness, the inward and outward, at once; for the "Spirit of G.o.d" is, according to the Christian view, also "our spirit," and "dwells in us."[18] It dwells in heaven and dwells in us; we poor things are just its "dwelling," and, if Feuerbach goes on to destroy its heavenly dwelling and force it to move to us bag and baggage, then we, its earthly apartments, will be badly overcrowded.

But after this digression (which, if we were at all proposing to work by line and level, we should have had to save for later pages in order to avoid repet.i.tion) we return to the spirit's first creation, the spirit itself.

The spirit is something other than myself. But this other, what is it?

-- 2.--THE POSSESSED.

Have you ever seen a spirit? "No, not I, but my grandmother." Now, you see, it's just so with me too; I myself haven't seen any, but my grandmother had them running between her feet all sorts of ways, and out of confidence in our grandmothers' honesty we believe in the existence of spirits.

But had we no grandfathers then, and did they not shrug their shoulders every time our grandmothers told about their ghosts? Yes, those were unbelieving men who have harmed our good religion much, those rationalists! We shall feel that! What else lies at the bottom of this warm faith in ghosts, if not the faith in "the existence of spiritual beings in general," and is not this latter itself disastrously unsettled if saucy men of the understanding may disturb the former? The Romanticists were quite conscious what a blow the very belief in G.o.d suffered by the laying aside of the belief in spirits or ghosts, and they tried to help us out of the baleful consequences not only by their reawakened fairy world, but at last, and especially, by the "intrusion of a higher world," by their somnambulists, prophetesses of Prevorst, etc. The good believers and fathers of the church did not suspect that with the belief in ghosts the foundation of religion was withdrawn, and that since then it had been floating in the air. He who no longer believes in any ghost needs only to travel on consistently in his unbelief to see that there is no separate being at all concealed behind things, no ghost or--what is naively reckoned as synonymous even in our use of words--no "_spirit_."

"Spirits exist!" Look about in the world, and say for yourself whether a spirit does not gaze upon you out of everything. Out of the lovely little flower there speaks to you the spirit of the Creator, who has shaped it so wonderfully; the stars proclaim the spirit that established their order; from the mountain-tops a spirit of sublimity breathes down; out of the waters a spirit of yearning murmurs up; and--out of men millions of spirits speak. The mountains may sink, the flowers fade, the world of stars fall in ruins, the men die--what matters the wreck of these visible bodies? The spirit, the "invisible spirit," abides eternally!

Yes, the whole world is haunted! Only _is_ haunted? Nay, it itself "walks," it is uncanny through and through, it is the wandering seeming-body of a spirit, it is a spook. What else should a ghost be, then, than an apparent body, but real spirit? Well, the world is "empty," is "naught," is only glamorous "semblance"; its truth is the spirit alone; it is the seeming-body of a spirit.

Look out near or far, a _ghostly_ world surrounds you everywhere; you are always having "apparitions" or visions. Everything that appears to you is only the phantasm of an indwelling spirit, is a ghostly "apparition"; the world is to you only a "world of appearances," behind which the spirit walks. You "see spirits."

Are you perchance thinking of comparing yourself with the ancients, who saw G.o.ds everywhere? G.o.ds, my dear modern, are not spirits; G.o.ds do not degrade the world to a semblance, and do not spiritualize it.

But to you the whole world is spiritualized, and has become an enigmatical ghost; therefore do not wonder if you likewise find in yourself nothing but a spook. Is not your body haunted by your spirit, and is not the latter alone the true and real, the former only the "transitory, naught" or a "semblance"? Are we not all ghosts, uncanny beings that wait for "deliverance,"--to wit, "spirits"?

Since the spirit appeared in the world, since "the Word became flesh,"

since then the world has been spiritualized, enchanted, a spook.

You have spirit, for you have thoughts. What are your thoughts?

"Spiritual ent.i.ties." Not things, then? "No, but the spirit of things, the main point in all things, the inmost in them, their--idea."

Consequently what you think is not only your thought? "On the contrary, it is that in the world which is most real, that which is properly to be called true; it is the truth itself; if I only think truly, I think the truth. I may, to be sure, err with regard to the truth, and _fail to recognize_ it; but, if I _recognize_ truly, the object of my cognition is the truth." So, I suppose, you strive at all times to recognize the truth? "To me the truth is sacred. It may well happen that I find a truth incomplete and replace it with a better, but _the_ truth I cannot abrogate. I _believe_ in the truth, therefore I search in it; nothing transcends it, it is eternal."

Sacred, eternal is the truth; it is the Sacred, the Eternal. But you, who let yourself be filled and led by this sacred thing, are yourself hallowed. Further, the sacred is not for your senses,--and you never as a sensual man discover its trace,--but for your faith, or, more definitely still, for your _spirit_; for it itself, you know, is a spiritual thing, a spirit,--is spirit for the spirit.

The sacred is by no means so easily to be set aside as many at present affirm, who no longer take this "unsuitable" word into their mouths. If even in a single respect I am still _upbraided_ as an "egoist," there is left the thought of something else which I should serve more than myself, and which must be to me more important than everything; in short, somewhat in which I should have to seek my true welfare,[19]

something--"sacred."[20] However human this sacred thing may look, though it be the Human itself, that does not take away its sacredness, but at most changes it from an unearthly to an earthly sacred thing, from a divine one to a human.

Sacred things exist only for the egoist who does not acknowledge himself, the _involuntary egoist_, for him who is always looking after his own and yet does not count himself as the highest being, who serves only himself and at the same time always thinks he is serving a higher being, who knows nothing higher than himself and yet is infatuated about something higher; in short, for the egoist who would like not to be an egoist, and abases himself (_i. e._ combats his egoism), but at the same time abases himself only for the sake of "being exalted," and therefore of gratifying his egoism. Because he would like to cease to be an egoist, he looks about in heaven and earth for higher beings to serve and sacrifice himself to; but, however much he shakes and disciplines himself, in the end he does all for his own sake, and the disreputable egoism will not come off him. On this account I call him the involuntary egoist.

His toil and care to get away from himself is nothing but the misunderstood impulse to self-dissolution. If you are bound to your past hour, if you must babble to-day because you babbled yesterday,[21] if you can not transform yourself each instant, you feel yourself fettered in slavery and benumbed. Therefore over each minute of your existence a fresh minute of the future beckons to you, and, developing yourself, you get away "from yourself,"--_i. e._ from the self that was at that moment. As you are at each instant, you are your own creature, and in this very "creature" you do not wish to lose yourself, the creator. You are yourself a higher being than you are, and surpa.s.s yourself. But that _you_ are the one who is higher than you,--_i. e._ that you are not only creature, but likewise your creator,--just this, as an involuntary egoist, you fail to recognize; and therefore the "higher essence" is to you--an alien[22] essence. Every higher essence, such as truth, mankind, etc., is an essence _over_ us.

Alienness is a criterion of the "sacred." In everything sacred there lies something "uncanny," _i. e._ strange,[23] such as we are not quite familiar and at home in. What is sacred to me is _not my own_; and if, _e. g._ the property of others was not sacred to me, I should look on it as _mine_, which I should take to myself when occasion offered. Or, on the other side, if I regard the face of the Chinese emperor as sacred, it remains strange to my eye, which I close at its appearance.

Why is an incontrovertible mathematical truth, which might even be called eternal according to the common understanding of words, not--sacred? Because it is not revealed, or not the revelation of a higher being. If by revealed we understand only the so-called religious truths, we go far astray, and entirely fail to recognize the breadth of the concept "higher being." Atheists keep up their scoffing at the higher being, which was also honored under the name of the "highest" or _etre supreme_, and trample in the dust one "proof of his existence"

after another without noticing that they themselves, out of need for a higher being, only annihilate the old to make room for a new. Is "Man"

perchance not a higher essence than an individual man, and must not the truths, rights, and ideas which result from the concept of him be honored and--counted sacred, as revelations of this very concept? For, even though we should abrogate again many a truth that seemed to be made manifest by this concept, yet this would only evince a misunderstanding on our part, without in the least degree harming the sacred concept itself or taking their sacredness from those truths that must rightly be looked upon as its revelations. _Man_ reaches beyond every individual man, and yet--though he be "his essence"--is not in fact _his_ essence (which rather would be as single[24] as he the individual himself), but a general and "higher," yes, for atheists "the highest essence."[25]

And, as the divine revelations were not written down by G.o.d with his own hand, but made public through "the Lord's instruments," so also the new highest essence does not write out its revelations itself, but lets them come to our knowledge through "true men." Only the new essence betrays, in fact, a more spiritual style of conception than the old G.o.d, because the latter was still represented in a sort of embodiedness or form, while the undimmed spirituality of the new is retained, and no special material body is fancied for it. And withal it does not lack corporeity, which even takes on a yet more seductive appearance because it looks more natural and mundane and consists in nothing less than in every bodily man,--yes, or outright in "humanity" or "all men." Thereby the spectralness of the spirit in a seeming-body has once again become really solid and popular.

Sacred, then, is the highest essence and everything in which this highest essence reveals or will reveal itself; but hallowed are they who recognize this highest essence together with its own, _i. e._ together with its revelations. The sacred hallows in turn its reverer, who by his worship becomes himself a saint, as likewise what he does is saintly, a saintly walk, saintly thoughts and actions, imaginations and aspirations, etc.

It is easily understood that the conflict over what is revered as the highest essence can be significant only so long as even the most embittered opponents concede to each other the main point,--that there is a highest essence to which worship or service is due. If one should smile compa.s.sionately at the whole struggle over a highest essence, as a Christian might at the war of words between a Shiite and a Sunnite or between a Brahman and a Buddhist, then the hypothesis of a highest essence would be null in his eyes, and the conflict on this basis an idle play. Whether then the one G.o.d or the three in one, whether the Lutheran G.o.d or the _etre supreme_ or not G.o.d at all, but "Man," may represent the highest essence, that makes no difference at all for him who denies the highest essence itself, for in his eyes those servants of a highest essence are one and all--pious people, the most raging atheist not less than the most faith-filled Christian.

In the foremost place of the sacred,[26] then, stands the highest essence and the faith in this essence, our "holy[27] faith."

THE SPOOK

With ghosts we arrive in the spirit-realm, in the realm of _essences_.

What haunts the universe, and has its occult, "incomprehensible" being there, is precisely the mysterious spook that we call highest essence.