So, if criticism says: You are man only when you are restlessly
criticising and dissolving! then we say: Man I am without that, and I am
I likewise; therefore I want only to be careful to secure my property to
myself; and, in order to secure it, I continually take it back into
myself, annihilate in it every movement toward independence, and swallow
it before it can fix itself and become a "fixed idea" or a "mania."
But I do that not for the sake of my "human calling," but because I call
myself to it. I do not strut about dissolving everything that it is
possible for a man to dissolve, and, _e. g._, while not yet ten years
old I do not criticise the nonsense of the Commandments, but I am man
all the same, and act humanly in just this,--that I still leave them
uncriticised. In short, I have no calling, and follow none, not even
that to be a man.
Do I now reject what liberalism has won in its various exertions? Far be
the day that anything won should be lost! Only, after "Man" has become
free through liberalism, I turn my gaze back upon myself and confess to
myself openly: What Man seems to have gained, _I_ alone have gained.
Man is free when "Man is to man the supreme being." So it belongs to the
completion of liberalism that every other supreme being be annulled,
theology overturned by anthropology, God and his grace laughed down,
"atheism" universal.
The egoism of property has given up the last that it had to give when
even the "My God" has become senseless; for God exists only when he has
at heart the individual's welfare, as the latter seeks his welfare in
him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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