[412W-{6-8/49} Art and Revolution: PW Vol. I, p. 59-60]
[P. 59] {FEUER} “If history shows an actual Utopia, a truly unattainable ideal, it is that of Christendom; for it has clearly and plainly shown … that its dogmas are not realisable. How could those dogmas become really living, and pass over into actual life: when they were directed against life itself, and denied and cursed the principle of living? Christianity is of purely spiritual, and super-spiritual contents; it preaches humility, [P. 60] renunciation, contempt of every earthly thing; and amid this contempt – Brotherly Love! (…) {FEUER} Whence comes this shocking contradiction between the ideal and its fulfilment? Even hence: that the ideal was morbid, engendered of the momentary relaxing and enfeeblement of human nature, and sinned against its inbred robust qualities. Yet how strong this nature is, how unquenchable its ever fresh, productive fulness – it has shown all the more plainly under the universal incubus of that ideal; which, if its logical consequences had been fulfilled, would have completely swept the human race from off the earth; since even abstinence from sexual love was included in it as the height of virtue.” [412W-{6-8/49} Art and Revolution: PW Vol. I, p. 59-60]
[413W-{9-12/49} The Artwork of the Future: PW Vol. I, p. 69]
[P. 69] {FEUER} “As Man stands to Nature, so stands Art to Man. When Nature had developed in herself those attributes which included the conditions for the existence of Man, then Man spontaneously evolved. In like manner, as soon as human life had engendered from itself the conditions for the manifestment of Art-work, this too stepped self-begotten into life.
{FEUER} Nature engenders her myriad forms without caprice or arbitrary aim (‘absichtlos und unwillkuerlich’), according to her need (‘Beduerfniss’), and therefore of Necessity (‘Nothwendigkeit’). This same Necessity is the generative and formative force of human life. [413W-{9-12/49} The Artwork of the Future: PW Vol. I, p. 69]
[414W-{9-12/49} The Artwork of the Future: PW Vol. I, p. 70-71]
[P. 70] {FEUER} From the moment when Man perceived the difference between himself and Nature, and thus commenced his own development as man, by breaking loose from the unconsciousness of natural animal life and passing over into conscious life, -- when he thus looked Nature in the face and from the first feelings of his dependence on her, thereby aroused, evolved the faculty of Thought, --- from that moment did Error begin, as the earliest utterance of consciousness. But Error is the mother of Knowledge, and the history of the birth of Knowledge out of Error is the history of the human race, from the myths of primal ages down to the present day.
{FEUER} Man erred, from the time when he set the cause of Nature’s workings outside the bounds of Nature’s self, and for the physical phenomena subsumed a super-physical, anthropomorphic, and arbitrary cause; when he took the endless harmony of her unconscious, instinctive energy for the arbitrary demeanour of disconnected finite forces. Knowledge consists in the laying of this error, in fathoming the Necessity of phenomena whose underlying basis had appeared to us Caprice.
{FEUER} Through this knowledge does Nature grow conscious of herself; and verily by Man himself, who only through discriminating between himself and Nature has attained that point where he can apprehend her, by making her his ‘object.’ But this distinction is merged once more
