_Man is man in general_, and in so far every one who is a man. Now every one is to have the eternal rights of man, and, according to the opinion of Communism, enjoy them in the complete "democracy," or, as it ought more correctly to be called,--anthropocracy. But it is I alone who have everything that I--procure for myself; as man I have nothing. People would like to give every man an affluence of all good, merely because he has the title "man." But I put the accent on me, not on my being _man_.
Man is something only as _my quality_[123] (property[124]), like masculinity or femininity. The ancients found the ideal in one's being _male_ in the full sense; their virtue is _virtus_ and _arete_,--_i. e._ manliness. What is one to think of a woman who should want only to be perfectly "woman"? That is not given to all, and many a one would therein be fixing for herself an unattainable goal. _Feminine_, on the other hand, she is anyhow, by nature; femininity is her quality, and she does not need "true femininity." I am a man just as the earth is a star. As ridiculous as it would be to set the earth the task of being a "thorough star," so ridiculous it is to burden me with the call to be a "thorough man."
When Fichte says, "The ego is all," this seems to harmonize perfectly with my theses. But it is not that the ego _is_ all, but the ego _destroys_ all, and only the self-dissolving ego, the never-being ego, the--_finite_ ego is really I. Fichte speaks of the "absolute" ego, but I speak of me, the transitory ego.
How natural is the supposition that _man_ and _ego_ mean the same! and yet one sees, _e. g._, by Feuerbach, that the expression "man" is to designate the absolute ego, the _species_, not the transitory, individual ego. Egoism and humanity (humaneness) ought to mean the same, but according to Feuerbach the individual can "only lift himself above the limits of his individuality, but not above the laws, the positive ordinances, of his species."[125] But the species is nothing, and, if the individual lifts himself above the limits of his individuality, this is rather his very self as an individual; he exists only in raising himself, he exists only in not remaining what he is; otherwise he would be done, dead. Man with the great M is only an ideal, the species only something thought of. To be _a_ man is not to realize the ideal of _Man_, but to present _oneself_, the individual. It is not how I realize the _generally human_ that needs to be my task, but how I satisfy myself. _I_ am my species, am without norm, without law, without model, and the like. It is possible that I can make very little out of myself; but this little is everything, and is better than what I allow to be made out of me by the might of others, by the training of custom, religion, the laws, the State, etc. Better--if the talk is to be of better at all--better an unmannerly child than an old head on young shoulders, better a mulish man than a man compliant in everything. The unmannerly and mulish fellow is still on the way to form himself according to his own will; the prematurely knowing and compliant one is determined by the "species," the general demands, etc.,--the species is law to him. He is _determined_[126] by it; for what else is the species to him but his "destiny,"[127] his "calling"? Whether I look to "humanity," the species, in order to strive toward this ideal, or to God and Christ with like endeavor, where is the essential dissimilarity? At most the former is more washed-out than the latter. As the individual is the whole of nature, so he is the whole of the species too.