But does this mean more than "in the one work you see _me_ as completely
as possible, in the other only my skill"? Is it not _me_ again that the
act expresses? And is it not more egoistic to offer _oneself_ to the
world in a work, to work out and shape _oneself_, than to remain
concealed behind one's labor? You say, to be sure, that you are
revealing Man. But the Man that you reveal is you; you reveal only
yourself, yet with this distinction from the handicraftsman,--that he
does not understand how to compress himself into one labor, but, in
order to be known as himself, must be searched out in his other
relations of life, and that your want, through whose satisfaction that
work came into being, was a--theoretical want.
But you will reply that you reveal quite another man, a worthier,
higher, greater, a man that is more man than that other. I will assume
that you accomplish all that is possible to man, that you bring to pass
what no other succeeds in. Wherein, then, does your greatness consist?
Precisely in this, that you are more than other men (the "masses"), more
than _men_ ordinarily are, more than "ordinary men"; precisely in your
elevation above men. You are distinguished beyond other men not by being
man, but because you are a "unique"[91] man. Doubtless you show what a
man can do; but because you, a man, do it, this by no means shows that
others, also men, are able to do as much; you have executed it only as a
_unique_ man, and are unique therein.
It is not man that makes up your greatness, but you create it, because
you are more than man, and mightier than other--men.
It is believed that one cannot be more than man. Rather, one cannot be
less!
It is believed further that whatever one attains is good for Man. In so
far as I remain at all times a man--or, like Schiller, a Swabian; like
Kant, a Prussian; like Gustavus Adolphus, a near-sighted person--I
certainly become by my superior qualities a notable man, Swabian,
Prussian, or near-sighted person. But the case is not much better with
that than with Frederick the Great's cane, which became famous for
Frederick's sake.
To "Give God the glory" corresponds the modern "Give Man the glory." But
I mean to keep it for myself.
Criticism, issuing the summons to man to be "human," enunciates the
necessary condition of sociability; for only as a man among men is one
_companionable_. Herewith it makes known its _social_ object, the
establishment of "human society."
Among social theories criticism is indisputably the most complete,
because it removes and deprives of value everything that _separates_ man
from man: all prerogatives, down to the prerogative of faith. In it the
love-principle of Christianity, the true social principle, comes to the
purest fulfilment, and the last possible experiment is tried to take
away exclusiveness and repulsion from men: a fight against egoism in its
simplest and therefore hardest form, in the form of singleness,[92]
exclusiveness, itself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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