Page 97 [97]
misanthrope. Of Nietzsche or Kierkegaard, this is definitely true.
The average person (according to Kierkegaard: the philistine), on
the other hand, falls into the second category.
At the same time, both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, or even
2oth-century existentialists, have an opinion on this “species
of animal”. They see, they feel, that the welfare of the emerging
bourgeois world offers everyone an infinitely stupid, boring, and
monotonous alternative, one that is lacking in humanity. They
are proud that they create so-called equality of opportunity, but
in the meantime say nothing about the fact that this is nothing
more than a general call for total (self-)exploitation, in which
after the establishment of welfare one also becomes acquainted
with concepts such as alienation, loneliness, and anxiety through
their own experience. This is what Marx writes around 1844 about
alienation (Estranged Labour). He saw what Hegel highly respected
as human teleological activity as nothing but forced labor. (PoS.
pp-108., PdG pp.145.)* He wrote that, "its alien character emerges
clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion
exists, labour is shunned like the plague (Pest).” (Marx 2012. p.44.
Marx 1981. p. 515.) And he is not alone in this. Oswald Spengler
describes similar beliefs when he writes that “born of and grown
on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid
masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter¬
of-fact, religionless.” (Spengler 1927.p.32.)
The relationship between humans often develops at the border
of values, perceived or real. When the measure of all values becomes
quantity, the world becomes one of total stupidity and insensitivity,
where human beings are permanently distanced by self-exploitation
and then alienated from labor, from their relation to labor, from
human relations, and finally from themselves, and thus cease to
be what they were: sovereignly thinking and acting, sentient and
emotional human beings. In this world, the misanthrope and the
46 See Herrschaft und Knechtschaft (Self-Sufficiency and Non-Self-Sufficiency
of Self-Consciousness; Mastery and Servitude).