[p. 258]
|258| therefore divide into four kinds: 1. into duties toward oneself, 2. toward the family, 3. toward the state and 4. toward other human beings in general.
I. Duties toward oneself
§ 41
The human being as individual relates himself to himself. He has the double side of his individuality and of his universal essence. His duty toward himself is in this respect partly his physical preservation, partly [this], to raise his individual being to his universal nature, to cultivate himself.
Explanation. The human being is on the one hand a natural being. As such he behaves according to arbitrary will and chance, as an unsteady, subjective being. He does not distinguish the essential from the inessential. – Secondly, he is a spiritual, rational being. According to this side he is not by nature what he ought to be. The animal needs no culture, for it is by nature what it ought to be. It is only a natural being. The human being, however, must bring his double side into agreement, make his individuality conform to his rational side or make the latter the ruling one. It is, e.g., uncultured when the human being gives himself over to his anger and acts blindly according to this affect, because in it he regards an insult or injury as an infinite injury and seeks to balance it by an injury to the offender or to other objects without measure or limit. – It is uncultured when someone asserts an interest which does not concern him or in which he can effect nothing through his activity, because with understanding one can make one’s interest only that in which one brings something about through one’s activity. – Further, when the human being becomes impatient at the vicissitudes of fate, he makes his particular interest into a matter of the highest importance, as something according to which human beings and circumstances ought to have conformed.
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