[p. 262]
|262| or of business. This stance, of not sinking oneself completely into one’s state, is required in general for drives and purposes that are indeed necessary but not essential. By contrast, with a true purpose or business spirit must be present with its whole seriousness and not be at the same time outside it. Circumspection here consists in having all the circumstances and sides of the work before one’s eyes.
§ 44
As regards the determinate calling, which appears as a fate, the form of an external necessity is altogether to be sublated in it. It is to be taken up with freedom and, with such freedom, to be endured and carried out.
Explanation. Man, with regard to the external circumstances of fate and everything that he immediately is, must conduct himself so that he makes it his own, so that he deprives it of the form of an external existence. It does not matter in what external condition man finds himself through fate, if he is properly what he is, i.e. if he fills out all sides of his calling. The calling to an estate is a many-sided substance. It is, as it were, a stuff or material which he must work through in every direction, so that it may have nothing alien, brittle and resistant in it. Insofar as I have made it completely my own for myself, I am free in it. Man is above all dissatisfied when he does not fulfil his calling. He gives himself a relation which he does not truly have as his own. At the same time he belongs to this estate. He cannot detach himself from it. He thus lives and acts in a repugnant relation with himself.
§ 45
Fidelity and obedience in one’s calling, as well as obedience to fate and self-forgetfulness in one’s acting,
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