1710. Right from the start, man's creativity . . .

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Right from the start, man's creativity in and through culture is of the order of a response. It is as much evoked from man as produced by man. This is evident from the fact that his cultural creations—of knowledge, art, morality, etc.—make themselves autonomous in relation to him, so that what in one sense he himself is the creator of becomes in another sense that of which he is the creature. "Objective spirit," which is, perhaps, the simplest definition of culture, is precisely that, objective spirit. Therefore, there is a one-sidedness in the views of Feuerbach, Nietzsche, and others, who tend to see man in a subjectivistic way, holding that "man himself is to be conceived as the creator of these forms that appear to rest in a detached ideality. He it was 'who created what he admired' [Nietzsche], only he does not know that these forms are related to him as their creator" (O. F. Bollnow, Die Lebensphilosophie, p. 79). Indeed, even Nietzsche's view is more dialectical, as appears from such statements as the following: "We must free ourselves from the moral in order to be able to live morally" (XIII, 124); or "I had to destroy what is moral in order to realize my moral will" (XIII, 176) (O. F. Bollnow, op. cit., p. 86).