[p. 458]
The sublation of what is negative with regard to nature, positive with regard to the will, is not effected by force, neither by that which one does to one’s fate oneself, nor by that which it experiences from outside; in both cases fate remains what it is, the determinacy, – the limit is not separated from life by force; alien force is particular against particular, the robbery of a property, a new suffering; the enthusiasm of one who is bound is a moment fearful to himself, in which he loses himself, finds his consciousness again only in the forgotten, not dead, determinacies.
The feeling of the contradiction of nature with the existing life is the need that it be removed; and it will be removed when the existing life has lost its power and all its dignity, when it has become pure negative.
All phenomena of this time show that satisfaction is no longer found in the old life; it was a confinement to an orderly dominion over one’s property, a contemplating and enjoying of one’s wholly subservient small world and then also a self-annihilation and elevation in the thought of heaven reconciling this confinement. In part the distress of the time has attacked that property, in part its gifts in luxury have sublated the confinement, and in both cases have made man the master and his power over actuality the highest. Under this arid life of the understanding there has grown, on one side, the bad conscience of making his property, things, into the absolute, and with that, on the other, the suffering of men; and no better life has this time breathed. Its urge nourishes itself on the deeds of great characters of individual men, on the movements of whole peoples, on the presentation of nature and of fate by poets; through metaphysics the limitations receive their limits and their necessity in the context of the whole. The limited life as power
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