The Ego and his Own by Max Stirner (most read books txt) 📕

>halfness, catches only miserable,

stupid flies. If one has once dared to make a "free" motion, immediately one

waters it again with assurances of love, and -- shams resignation; if, on

the other side, they have had the face to reject the free motion with moral

appeals to confidence, immediately the moral courage also sinks, and they

assure one how they hear the free words with special pleasure, etc.; they --

sham approval. In short, people would like to have the one, but not go

without the other; they would like to have a free will, but not for their

lives lack the moral will. Just come in contact with a servile loyalist, you

Liberals. You will sweeten every word of freedom with a look of the most loyal

confidence, and he will clothe his servilism in the most flattering phrases of

freedom. Then you go apart, and he, like you, thinks "I know you, fox!" He

scents the devil in you as much as you do the dark old Lord God in him.

A Nero is a "bad" man only in the eyes of the "good"; in mine he is nothing

but a possessed man, as are the good too. The good see in him an

arch-villain, and relegate him to hell. Why did nothing hinder him in his

arbitrary course? Why did people put up with so much? Do you suppose the tame

Romans, who let all their will be bound by such a tyrant, were a hair the

better? In old Rome they would have put him to death instantly, would never

have been his slaves. But the contemporary "good" among the Romans opposed to

him only moral demands, not their will; they sighed that their emperor did

not do homage to morality, like them; they themselves remained "moral

subjects," till at last one found courage to give up "moral, obedient

subjection." And then the same "good Romans" who, as "obedient subjects," had

borne all the ignominy of having no will, hurrahed over the nefarious, immoral

act of the rebel. Where then in the "good" was the courage for the

revolution, that courage which they now praised, after another had mustered

it up? The good could not have this courage, for a revolution, and an

insurrection into the bargain, is always something "immoral," which one can

resolve upon only when one ceases to be "good" and becomes either "bad" or --

neither of the two. Nero was no viler than his time, in which one could only

be one of the two, good or bad. The judgment of his time on him had to be that

he was bad, and this in the highest degree: not a milksop, but an

arch-scoundrel. All moral people can pronounce only this judgment on him.

Rascals e. g. he was are still living here and there today (see e. g. the

Memoirs of Ritter von Lang) in the midst of the moral. It is not convenient

to live among them certainly, as one is not sure of his life for a moment; but

can you say that it is more convenient to live among the moral? One is just as

little sure of his life there, only that one is hanged "in the way of

justice," but least of all is one sure of his honor, and the national cockade

is gone before you can say Jack Robinson. The hard fist of morality treats the

noble nature of egoism altogether without compassion.

"But surely one cannot put a rascal and an honest man on the same level!" Now,

no human being does that oftener than you judges of morals; yes, still more

than that, you imprison as a criminal an honest man who speaks openly against

the existing constitution, against the hallowed institutions, and you entrust

portfolios and still more important things to a crafty rascal. So in praxi

you have nothing to reproach me with. "But in theory!" Now there I do put both

on the same level, as two opposite poles -- to wit, both on the level of the

moral law. Both have meaning only in the "moral world, just as in the

pre-Christian time a Jew who kept the law and one who broke it had meaning and

significance only in respect to the Jewish law; before Jesus Christ, on the

contrary, the Pharisee was no more than the "sinner and publican." So before

self-ownership the moral Pharisee amounts to as much as the immoral sinner.

Nero became very inconvenient by his possessedness. But a self-owning man

would not sillily oppose to him the "sacred," and whine if the tyrant does not

regard the sacred; he would oppose to him his will. How often the sacredness

of the inalienable rights of man has been held up to their foes, and some

liberty or other shown and demonstrated to be a "sacred right of man!" Those

who do that deserve to be laughed out of court -- as they actually are -- were

it not that in truth they do, even though unconsciously, take the road that

leads to the goal. They have a presentiment that, if only the majority is once

won for that liberty, it will also will the liberty, and will then take what

it will have. The sacredness of the liberty, and all possible proofs of this

sacredness, will never procure it; lamenting and petitioning only shows

beggars.

The moral man is necessarily narrow in that he knows no other enemy than the

"immoral" man. "He who is not moral is immoral!" and accordingly reprobate,

despicable, etc. Therefore the moral man can never comprehend the egoist. Is

not unwedded cohabitation an immorality? The moral man may turn as he pleases,

he will have to stand by this verdict; Emilia Galotti gave up her life for

this moral truth. And it is true, it is an immorality. A virtuous girl may

become an old maid; a virtuous man may pass the time in fighting his natural

impulses till he has perhaps dulled them, he may castrate himself for the sake

of virtue as St. Origen did for the sake of heaven: he thereby honors sacred

wedlock, sacred chastity, as inviolable; he is -- moral. Unchastity can never

become a moral act. However indulgently the moral man may judge and excuse him

who committed it, it remains a transgression, a sin against a moral

commandment; there clings to it an indelible stain. As chastity once belonged

to the monastic vow, so it does to moral conduct. Chastity is a -- good. --

For the egoist, on the contrary, even chastity is not a good without which he

could not get along; he cares nothing at all about it. What now follows from

this for the judgment of the moral man? This: that he throws the egoist into

the only class of men that he knows besides moral men, into that of the --

immoral. He cannot do otherwise; he must find the egoist immoral in everything

in which the egoist disregards morality. If he did not find him so, then he

would already have become an apostate from morality without confessing it to

himself, he would already no longer be a truly moral man. One should not let

himself be led astray by such phenomena, which at the present day are

certainly no longer to be classed as rare, but should reflect that he who

yields any point of morality can as little be counted among the truly moral as

Lessing was a pious Christian when, in the well-known parable, he compared the

Christian religion, as well as the Mohammedan and Jewish, to a "counterfeit

ring." Often people are already further than they venture to confess to

themselves. For Socrates, because in culture he stood on the level of

morality, it would have been an immorality if he had been willing to follow

Crito's seductive incitement and escape from the dungeon; to remain was the

only moral thing. But it was solely because Socrates was -- a moral man. The

"unprincipled, sacrilegious" men of the Revolution, on the contrary, had sworn

fidelity to Louis XVI, and decreed his deposition, yes, his death; but the act

was an immoral one, at which moral persons will be horrified to all eternity.

Yet all this applies, more or less, only to "civic morality," on which the

freer look down with contempt. For it (like civism, its native ground, in

general) is still too little removed and free from the religious heaven not to

transplant the latter's laws without criticism or further consideration to its

domain instead of producing independent doctrines of its own. Morality cuts a

quite different figure when it arrives at the consciousness of its dignity,

and raises its principle, the essence of man, or "Man," to be the only

regulative power. Those who have worked their way through to such a decided

consciousness break entirely with religion, whose God no longer finds any

place alongside their "Man," and, as they (see below) themselves scuttle the

ship of State, so too they crumble away that "morality" which flourishes only

in the State, and logically have no right to use even its name any further.

For what this "critical" party calls morality is very positively distinguished

from the so-called "civic or political morality," and must appear to the

citizen like an "insensate and unbridled liberty." But at bottom it has only

the advantage of the "purity of the principle," which, freed from its

defilement with the religious, has now reached universal power in its

clarified definiteness as "humanity."

Therefore one should not wonder that the name "morality" is retained along

with others, like freedom, benevolence, self-consciousness, and is only

garnished now and then with the addition, a "free" morality -- just as, though

the civic State is abused, yet the State is to arise again as a "free State,"

or, if not even so, yet as a "free society."

Because this morality completed into humanity has fully settled its accounts

with the religion out of which it historically came forth, nothing hinders it

from becoming a religion on its own account. For a distinction prevails

between religion and morality only so long as our dealings with the world of

men are regulated and hallowed by our relation to a superhuman being, or so

long as our doing is a doing "for God's sake." If, on the other hand, it comes

to the point that "man is to man the supreme being," then that distinction

vanishes, and morality, being removed from its subordinate position, is

completed into -- religion. For then the higher being who had hitherto been

subordinated to the highest, Man, has ascended to absolute height, and we are

related to him as one is related to the highest being, i.e. religiously.

Morality and piety are now as synonymous as in the beginning of Christianity,

and it is only because the supreme being has come to be a different one that a

holy walk is no longer called a "holy" one, but a "human" one. If morality has

conquered, then a complete