To us, “enlightenment” is the beginning of despotism. For it means that the people are to be deprived of their religious history. The people must be won back, not only to the ancient faith in human intelligence, in the ideals afforded to us in the history of philosophy, religion, and Western ethics, but even to a belief in “the nation” as such! The two will not run together like oil and water, the life of the mind and the life of the political animal, or more properly, at least at present, the politicizing animal for whom they certainly do: they will flow and flow together, and from this union one day, perhaps soon, there will be born a child that will be of the blood of each and have a double heart! It is just as important for a writer to understand himself, as it is for a physician to understand the needs of his own body, if he is to understand in turn the ailments he treats in others. And I see no lack of physicians to treat this malady, if we only could call them to task! The greatest of all—perhaps I mean: THE WISEST OF ALL—in this respect is the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau; he who, by misunderstanding man as properly “man” so completely, understood, without parallel, just this: man as a political animal!
Our own distressful tension of the soul is one of the gladdest tidings for a country; just as the most valuable possession of a man is his life, which is the price he has paid for his soul; that for which he hath made the purchase of his character, the cost demanded him for himself. It is just that which he has not lost which he keeps and protects and which is the most necessary part of his whole estate,- and it is just that which he has not lost, which is himself, his own soul, for which defense he will answer the call to defend the nation. But if he has lost that selfhood, of what use is it to call him to the defense of the nation? In order to understand his fellow man, man must understand himself; he is not permitted to demand from them any price greater than that he exacts upon himself. What care do I have, for the poet who appraises the worth of deeds he hath not the will to undertake, or regard for the philosopher, who has his feverish thoughts, thoughts he dares not confess to himself, though he plays the Cynic to the multitudes, and confesses them wantonly to us, and to every man, to the whole world and the highest heavens, and makes a protest before the angels? Yet, contemn not the poet who comes to us in that wise – Durch welch wunderliches Unheilen, Soll uns das Herz unerliegt kommen!-- [Love, in pain, is moved toward the source of its distress; an inversion of nature, which pulls away from that would harm us.] nor such a philosopher as hath an greater respect for his “unspeakable” wisdom, that he is even willing to endure all sorts of disrepute for the sake of this wisdom, that could not bear to succeed in the eyes of the world and the angels, if he should fall below himself.
The spirit of our age is a spirit of progress, a spirit of freedom. The spirit of progress, freedom, and independence, however, presupposes the unity of opposites—the unity of two opposed forces; a reconciliation by which the individual has become a part of the whole, and the whole, a great community of individuals. But what is so pernicious, even perverted in this spirit, is that, in its political, as in all other, forms, the bent toward greater freedom, the subsuming of greater and vaster boundaries, leads to greater and vaster separation. The more the political aeon strives to achieve the universal, the more it becomes exclusive; the more fearsomely it tries to defend the individual, at the margins especially, or those most alienated and oppressed, following Marx, the more it abuses and subverts his individuality and conforms him to the collective.
As we have seen, this progress- which goes further and further, which gives us more and more, in proportion as the mind is cultivated- is only a progression with a certain direction, towards a certain end, while man as a collective being has no other end than man; while man, as a natural being, has no other goal than nature; while the polis has no other end than its own perfection. [ARETE.] So it is necessary for the purpose of educating and ennobling man as a political animal that man should be capable of going to the source of the great law of all Nature, to that law which is Nature itself, to understand how to govern himself in such a way that the very things which make life possible are also the things which lead life to its goal, which lead man to his ends. True freedom does not demand, in other words, “freedom from”; it demands “freedom to” – the capacity of all to develop their full human potential, in harmony with the full richness of nature and the true nature of human relationships. The more we develop and apply our own powers, the more we shall come to understand that these powers were created only for their special purpose, to be applied to the ends for which they were designed.
But how can it be so if man is continually led to the other goal, to the fulfillment of external things within the collective of his race, the polis, to this external goal which, though it may have a certain charm, is in every way foreign to him, which is in every way opposed to him? And so it is that I say that our world, a world which has given birth to this other, this ‘other of nature’, the world of politics, is like a mother whose two children fight over her breast; the one child, the dream of a collective socius, and the other, a polis; the one, the individual, the other, the collective or ‘species’. We must pursue a more complete form of government,- a form of government which more completely develops man, which more completely expresses the ends of human nature, which is to say, that more completely reconciles the inner and the outer, the individual and the species.
All our solid measurements are made only in relation to that continuum and that Infinity for which nothing of our senses can prove sufficient. There is no end to Wisdom: the mysteries that lie along the paths of the pure intelligence will, when all external mysteria have been exhausted in the march of science, be to us as has been the earth and the stars to our ancients— a pastureful where ignorance can be pure and the soul contented in guiltless innocence, that does not disquiet itself with idle curiosities, itself at once the center and circumference of its orbit. It was indeed the sign of a happy disposition, to be able to give one’s self up entirely to the development of one’s own inner resources. The first condition of all true civilization, was the capacity of the inner life for growth. Our knowledge must lose its power, and the sense of our dependence, though it may remain, must be softened by that sense of perfect sovereignty and of perfect security which will come when we have acquired knowledge that does not rest on any external base, which the ancients spoke of: gnothi seu auton. All the forms of knowledge, moral and otherwise, that prevailed among our ancestors, and which we have inherited, were the products of the unity of being that we now call spirit. No man could create out of his own thoughts unless he had a being in him which was the eternal object of his thoughts. We may still create, we may still invent: we may even have acquired considerable knowledge. But our knowledge is only knowledge, and of no avail, unless it has power to elevate the intellect, to expand the mind, to lead the spirit toward perfection, to give it means of growth and enlargement. Spirit was the basis of their thought, and it now seems to us the highest conception of which we have the remotest idea. It is the unformulable, the uncrossable; the knowledge of it is the knowledge of God:—it is the idea that God is with man and man with God; the idea of a union that we recognize not and can not explain; the idea of which the fact of consciousness itself is the realization and evidence.
The first step toward the realization of this ideal is the recognition of the unity and indivisibility of our own natures. We do not, as secular, post-Enlightenment modernity does, regard the self, the inner man or soul, as an assemblage of conflicting faculties and desires, each with a separate interest, each one to be governed by its own laws and tendencies. If the soul be so many individuals, each with its own history, its own powers, its own interests, we should have nothing to say of one another; and if it be divisible, a mere agglomeration of parts and a mere product of the evolution of matter, it will never prove the whole thing; we cannot even have any hope of the realisation of the whole thing, as long as the human mind, which is a creation of that very unity, is not realised in its own unity. Knowledge is a product of the union of intelligence with matter. With the development of the spiritual element in man, with the emancipation of the spirit from the mechanical laws which inform matter, there comes a corresponding development of the faculties of the mind, and a corresponding widening of our field of knowledge.