As liberalism is completed in self-criticising, "critical"[83]
liberalism, in which the critic remains a liberal and does not go beyond
the principle of liberalism, Man,--this may distinctively be named after
Man and called the "humane."
The laborer is counted as the most material and egoistical man. He does
nothing at all _for humanity_, does everything for _himself_, for his
welfare.
The commonalty, because it proclaimed the freedom of _Man_ only as to
his birth, had to leave him in the claws of the un-human man (the
egoist) for the rest of life. Hence under the _régime_ of political
liberalism egoism has an immense field for free utilization.
The laborer will _utilize_ society for his _egoistic_ ends as the
commoner does the State. You have only an egoistic end after all, your
welfare! is the humane liberal's reproach to the Socialist; take up a
_purely human interest_, then I will be your companion. "But to this
there belongs a consciousness stronger, more comprehensive, than a
_laborer-consciousness_." "The laborer makes nothing, therefore he has
nothing; but he makes nothing because his labor is always a labor that
remains individual, calculated strictly for his own want, a labor day
by day."[84] In opposition to this one might, for instance, consider the
fact that Gutenberg's labor did not remain individual, but begot
innumerable children, and still lives to-day; it was calculated for the
want of humanity, and was an eternal, imperishable labor.
The humane consciousness despises the commoner-consciousness as well as
the laborer-consciousness: for the commoner is "indignant" only at
vagabonds (at all who have "no definite occupation") and their
"immorality"; the laborer is "disgusted" by the _idler_ ("lazybones")
and his "immoral," because parasitic and unsocial, principles. To this
the humane liberal retorts: The unsettledness of many is only your
product, Philistine! But that you, proletarian, demand the _grind_ of
all, and want to make _drudgery_ general, is a part, still clinging to
you, of your pack-mule life up to this time. Certainly you want to
lighten drudgery itself by _all_ having to drudge equally hard, yet only
for this reason, that all may gain _leisure_ to an equal extent. But
what are they to do with their leisure? What does your "society" do,
that this leisure may be passed _humanly_? It must leave the gained
leisure to egoistic preference again, and the very _gain_ that your
society furthers falls to the egoist, as the gain of the commonalty, the
_masterlessness of man_, could not be filled with a human element by the
State, and therefore was left to arbitrary choice.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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