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166
THE EGO AND HIS OWN
thought for the coming day either, and take no serious
care for the individual's wants anyhow, not for your
own comfort nor for that of the rest; but you make
nothing of all this, because you are a--dreamer.
Do you suppose the humane liberal will be so lib-
eral as to aver that everything possible to man is hu-
man? On the contrary! He does not, indeed, share
the Philistine's moral prejudice about the strumpet,
but "that this woman turns her body into a money-
getting machine "* makes her despicable to him as
"human being." His judgment is, The strumpet is not
a human being; or, So far as a woman is a strumpet,
so far is she unhuman, dehumanized. Further: The
Jew, the Christian, the privileged person, the theolo-
gian, etc., is not a human being; so far as you are a
Jew, etc., you are not a human being. Again the im-
perious postulate: Cast from you everything peculiar,
criticise it away! Be not a Jew, not a Christian, etc.,
but be a human being, nothing but a human being.
Assert your humanity against every restrictive specifi-
cation; make yourself, by means of it, a human being,
and free from those limits; make yourself a " free
man," i. e. recognize humanity as your all-determining
essence.
I say: You are indeed more than a Jew, more than
a Christian, etc., but you are also more than a human
being. Those are all ideas, but you are corporeal. Do
you suppose, then, that you can ever become " a hu-
man being as such"? Do you suppose our posterity
will find no prejudices and limits to clear away, for
* "Lit Ztg " V, 26.
MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 167
which our powers were not sufficient ? Or do you per-
haps think that in your fortieth or fiftieth year you
have come so far that the following days have nothing
more to dissipate in you, and that you are a human
being? The men of the future will yet fight their
way to many a liberty that we do not even miss.
What do you need that later liberty for? If you
meant to esteem yourself as nothing before you had be-
come a human being, you would have to wait till the
"last judgment," till the day when man, or humanity,
shall have attained perfection. But, as you will surely
die before that, what becomes of your prize of victory?
Rather, therefore, invert the case, and say to your-
self, I am a human being! I do not need to begin by
producing the human being in myself, for he belongs
to me already, like all my qualities.
But, asks the critic, how can one be a Jew and a
man at once? In the first place, I answer, one cannot
be either a Jew or a man at all, if " one " and Jew
or man are to mean the same; "one " always reaches
beyond those specifications, and,--let Isaacs be ever so
Jewish,--a Jew, nothing but a Jew, he cannot be, just
because he is this Jew. In the second place, as a Jew
one assuredly cannot be a man, if being a man means
being nothing special. But in the third place--and
this is the point--I can, as a Jew, be entirely what I
--can be. From Samuel or Moses, and others, you
hardly expect that they should have raised themselves
above Judaism, although you must say that they were
not yet " men." They simply were what they could
be. Is it otherwise with the Jews of to-day? Because
you have discovered the idea of humanity, does it fol-