II - The owner

Summary

I – do I come to myself and mine through liberalism?

Whom does the liberal look upon as his equal? Man! Be only man – and that you are anyway – and the liberal calls you his brother. He asks very little about your private opinions and private follies, if only he can espy ‘man’ in you.

But, as he takes little heed of what you are privatim – indeed, in a strict following out of his principle sets no value at all on it – he sees in you only what you are genemtim. In other words, he sees in you, not you, but the species; not Hans or Thomas, but man; not the real or unique one, but your essence or your concept; not the bodily man, but the spirit.

As Hans you would not be his equal, because he is Thomas, therefore not Hans; as man you are the same that he is. And, since as Hans you virtually do not exist at all for him (so far, namely, as he is a liberal and not unconsciously an egoist), he has really made ‘brother-love’ very easy for himself: he loves in you not Hans, of whom he knows nothing and wants to know nothing, but man.

To see in you and me nothing further than ‘men’, that is running the Christian way of looking at things, according to which one is for the other nothing but a concept (a man called to salvation, for instance), into the ground.