—But how if a man’s mission require him to know nothing but connexion with his particular Cause, that is, no longer to know any real relation with or present realisation of a Thou—to have everything about him become an It, serving his particular Cause? What of Napoleon’s saying of the I? Is it not legitimate? Is this phenomenon of experiencing and using not a person?
—Indeed the lord of the age manifestly did not know the dimension of the Thou. It has been justly expressed in the words that all being was for him valore. He who indulgently compared with Peter the followers who denied him after his fall had no one whom he himself could have denied; for he had no one whom he recognised as a being. He was for millions the demonic Thou, the Thou that does not respond, that responds to Thou with It, that does not respond genuinely in the personal sphere but responds only in his own sphere, his particular Cause, with his own deeds. This demonic Thou, to which no one can become Thou, is the elementary barrier of history, where the basic word of connexion loses its reality, its character of mutual action. In addition to (not between) person and individual, free and self-willed man, there is this third, towering in times of destiny, fraught with destiny. Towards him everything flames, but his fire is cold. To him a thousand several relations lead, but from him none. He shares in no reality, but in him immeasurable share is taken as though in a reality.
He sees the beings around him, indeed, as machines, capable of various achievements, which must be taken into account and utilised for the Cause. In this way, too, he sees himself—except that he must continually ascertain anew by experiment his power of achievement (whose limits he does not experience): he treats himself, too, as an It.
Thus, then, his saying of I is not a lively impressive, not a full one; but it is all the less a saying (like that of the modern individual) that deceives about these things. He does not speak of himself, but only “with himself as starting-point”. The I that he utters and writes is the necessary subject for the sentences of his determinations and arrangements—no more and no less. It has no subjectivity, but it has also no self-consciousness concerned with its defined being, and thus all the more no illusion of the apparent self. “I am the clock, which exists, and does not know itself”—30 he himself expressed his destined being, the reality of this phenomenon and the unreality of this I, at the time when he was hurled from his Cause, and for the first time had, and dared, to speak and think of himself, and to take thought for his I—which now appeared for the first time. The I that appears is not a mere subject, but neither does it move towards subjectivity; freed from its enchantment, but not saved, it expresses itself in the fearful word that is as legitimate as it is illegitimate: “The universe beholds us!” In the end it sinks back in mystery.
Who would dare to assert, after such a course and such a fall, that this man understood his tremendous, prodigious mission—or that he misunderstood it? It is certain that the age, for which the demoniacal, without present, has become master and model, misunderstands him. It does not know that what rule here are not lust for power and enjoyment of power, but destiny and consummation. It grows enthusiastic over this despotic brow, and has no suspicion of what signs are written across it, like the figures on the face of the clock. It industriously imitates this way of looking on living beings, without understanding its need and its necessity, and exchanges the rigorous attention of this I to the particular business for excited self-consciousness. The word “I” remains the shibboleth of mankind. Napoleon spoke it without power to enter into relation, but he spoke it as the I of a consummation. He who strives to say it as he said it only betrays the desperateness of his own self-contradiction.