[p. 457]
2.
[Introduction]9)
9) Editors: Ms. vol. 13, leaves 1-4 – Schüler no. 91 (Frankfurt 1799/1800) – Lasson pp. 138-141
(1799/1800)
The ever-growing contradiction between the unknown which men unconsciously seek and the life that is offered and permitted to them and that they made their own, the longing of those for life who have worked nature up into the Idea within themselves, contain the striving toward mutual approach. The need of the former to gain a consciousness of what holds them captive and of the unknown which they demand meets the need of the latter to pass over out of their Idea into life. The latter cannot live alone, and man is always alone, even if he has presented his nature to himself, has made this presentation his companion and enjoys himself in it; he must also find what is presented as something living. The estate of man, whom the time has driven into an inner world, can, if he wants to maintain himself in this, be only a perpetual death or, if nature drives him to life, only a striving to sublate the negative of the existing world, in order to find and enjoy himself in it, in order to be able to live. His suffering is bound up with consciousness of the limits on account of which he scorns life as it would be permitted him, he wills his suffering; whereas the suffering of man without reflection on his fate is without will, because he honours the negative, takes the limits only in the form of their rightful and power-holding existence as unconquerable and his determinacies and their contradictions as absolute, and sacrifices himself and others to them, even when they injure his drives.
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