But the unsatisfied are still in great mistiness, and their discontent
utters itself only in a "boundless disgruntlement." This the likewise
unsatisfied critic now wants to master: he cannot want and attain more
than to bring that "spiritual being," the masses, out of its
disgruntlement, and to "uplift" those who were only disgruntled, _i. e._
to give them the right attitude toward those results of the Revolution
which are to be overcome;--he can become the head of the masses, their
decided spokesman. Therefore he wants also to "abolish the deep chasm
which parts him from the multitude." From those who want to "uplift the
lower classes of the people" he is distinguished by wanting to deliver
from "disgruntlement," not merely these, but himself too.
But assuredly his consciousness does not deceive him either, when he
takes the masses to be the "natural opponents of theory," and foresees
that, "the more this theory shall develop itself, so much the more will
it make the masses compact." For the critic cannot enlighten or satisfy
the masses with his _presupposition_, Man. If over against the
commonalty they are only the "lower classes of the people," politically
insignificant masses, over against "Man" they must still more be mere
"masses," humanly insignificant--yes, unhuman--masses, or a multitude of
un-men.
The critic clears away everything human; and, starting from the
presupposition that the human is the true, he works against himself,
denying it wherever it had been hitherto found. He proves only that the
human is to be found nowhere except in his head, but the unhuman
everywhere. The unhuman is the real, the extant on all hands, and by the
proof that it is "not human" the critic only enunciates plainly the
tautological sentence that it is the unhuman.
But what if the unhuman, turning its back on itself with resolute heart,
should at the same time turn away from the disturbing critic and leave
him standing, untouched and unstung by his remonstrance?
"You call me the unhuman," it might say to him, "and so I really am--for
you; but I am so only because you bring me into opposition to the human,
and I could despise myself only so long as I let myself be hypnotized
into this opposition. I was contemptible because I sought my 'better
self' outside me; I was the unhuman because I dreamed of the 'human'; I
resembled the pious who hunger for their 'true self' and always remain
'poor sinners'; I thought of myself only in comparison to another;
enough, I was not all in all, was not--_unique_.[102] But now I cease to
appear to myself as the unhuman, cease to measure myself and let myself
be measured by man, cease to recognize anything above me:
consequently--adieu, humane critic! I only have been the unhuman, am it
now no longer, but am the unique, yes, to your loathing, the egoistic;
yet not the egoistic as it lets itself be measured by the human,
humane, and unselfish, but the egoistic as the--unique."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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