Part 1 — II. MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW (continued 4)

"What clumsiness and frivolity, to want to solve the most difficult problems, acquit yourself of the most comprehensive tasks, by a breaking off!"

But have you tasks if you do not set them to yourself? So long as you set them, you will not give them up, and I certainly do not care if you think, and, thinking, create a thousand thoughts. But you who have set the tasks, are you not to be able to upset them again? Must you be bound to these tasks, and must they become absolute tasks?

To cite only one thing, the government has been disparaged on account of its resorting to forcible means against thoughts, interfering against the press by means of the police power of the censorship, and making a personal fight out of a literary one. As if it were solely a matter of thoughts, and as if one's attitude toward thoughts must be unselfish, self-denying, and self-sacrificing! Do not those thoughts attack the governing parties themselves, and so call out egoism? And do the thinkers not set before the attacked ones the religious demand to reverence the power of thought, of ideas? They are to succumb voluntarily and resignedly, because the divine power of thought, Minerva, fights on their enemies' side. Why, that would be an act of possession, a religious sacrifice. To be sure, the governing parties are themselves held fast in a religious bias, and follow the leading power of an idea or a faith; but they are at the same time unconfessed egoists, and right here, against the enemy, their pent-up egoism breaks loose: possessed in their faith, they are at the same time unpossessed by their opponents' faith, i. e. they are egoists toward this. If one wants to make them a reproach, it could only be the converse,—to wit, that they are possessed by their ideas.

Against thoughts no egoistic power is to appear, no police power and the like. So the believers in thinking believe. But thinking and its thoughts are not sacred to me, and I defend my skin against them as against other things. That may be an unreasonable defence; but, if I am in duty bound to reason, then I, like Abraham, must sacrifice my dearest to it!

In the kingdom of thought, which, like that of faith, is the kingdom of heaven, every one is assuredly wrong who uses unthinking force, just as every one is wrong who in the kingdom of love behaves unlovingly, or, although he is a Christian and therefore lives in the kingdom of love, yet acts unchristianly; in these kingdoms, to which he supposes himself to belong though he nevertheless throws off their laws, he is a "sinner" or "egoist." But it is only when he becomes a criminal against these kingdoms that he can throw off their dominion.

Here too the result is this, that the fight of the thinkers against the government is indeed in the right, viz., in might,—so far as it is carried on against the government's thoughts (the government is dumb, and does not succeed in making any literary rejoinder to speak of), but is, on the other hand, in the wrong, viz., in impotence, so far as it does not succeed in bringing into the field anything but thoughts against a personal power (the egoistic power stops the mouths of the thinkers). The theoretical fight cannot complete the victory, and the sacred power of thought succumbs to the might of egoism. Only the egoistic fight, the fight of egoists on both sides, clears up everything.

This last now, to make thinking an affair of egoistic option, an affair of the single person,[103] a mere pastime or hobby as it were, and to take from it the importance of "being the last decisive power"; this degradation and desecration of thinking; this equalization of the unthinking and thoughtful ego; this clumsy but real "equality,"—criticism is not able to produce, because it itself is only the priest of thinking, and sees nothing beyond thinking but—the deluge.

Criticism does indeed affirm, e. g., that free criticism may overcome the State, but at the same time it defends itself against the reproach which is laid upon it by the State government, that it is "self-will and impudence"; it thinks, then, that "self-will and impudence" may not overcome, it alone may. The truth is rather the reverse: the State can be really overcome only by impudent self-will.

It may now, to conclude with this, be clear that in the critic's new change of front he has not transformed himself, but only "made good an oversight," "disentangled a subject," and is saying too much when he speaks of "criticism criticising itself": it, or rather he, has only criticised its "oversight" and cleared it of its "inconsistencies." If he wanted to criticise criticism, he would have to look and see if there was anything in its presupposition.

I on my part start from a presupposition in presupposing myself; but my presupposition does not struggle for its perfection like "Man struggling for his perfection," but only serves me to enjoy it and consume it. I consume my presupposition, and nothing else, and exist only in consuming it. But that presupposition is therefore not a presupposition at all: for, as I am the Unique, I know nothing of the duality of a presupposing and a presupposed ego (an "incomplete" and a "complete" ego or man); but this, that I consume myself, means only that I am. I do not presuppose myself, because I am every moment just positing or creating myself, and am I only by being not presupposed but posited, and, again, posited only in the moment when I posit myself; i. e., I am creator and creature in one.

If the presuppositions that have hitherto been current are to melt away in a full dissolution, they must not be dissolved into a higher presupposition again,—i. e. a thought, or thinking itself, criticism. For that dissolution is to be for my good; otherwise it would belong only in the series of the innumerable dissolutions which, in favor of others, (e. g. this very Man, God, the State, pure morality, etc.), declared old truths to be untruths and did away with long-fostered presuppositions.