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

us; could we not ask that neither should mind, or the conception,

the idea, be allowed to determine us, to become fixed and inviolable or

"sacred"? Then it would end in the dissolution of mind, the dissolution of

all thoughts, of all conceptions. As we there had to say, "We are indeed to

have appetites, but the appetites are not to have us," so we should now say,

"We are indeed to have mind, but mind is not to have us." If the latter

seems lacking in sense, think e. g. of the fact that with so many a man a

thought becomes a "maxim," whereby he himself is made prisoner to it, so that

it is not he that has the maxim, but rather it that has him. And with the

maxim he has a "permanent standpoint" again. The doctrines of the catechism

become our principles before we find it out, and no longer brook rejection.

Their thought, or -- mind, has the sole power, and no protest of the "flesh"

is further listened to. Nevertheless it is only through the "flesh" that I can

break tyranny of mind; for it is only when a man hears his flesh along with

the rest of him that he hears himself wholly, and it is only when he wholly

hears himself that he is a hearing or rational(35) being. The Christian does

not hear the agony of his enthralled nature, but lives in "humility";

therefore he does not grumble at the wrong which befalls his person; he

thinks himself satisfied with the "freedom of the spirit." But, if the flesh

once takes the floor, and its tone is "passionate," "indecorous," "not

well-disposed," "spiteful" (as it cannot be otherwise), then he thinks he

hears voices of devils, voices against the spirit (for decorum,

passionlessness, kindly disposition, and the like, is -- spirit), and is

justly zealous against them. He could not be a Christian if he were willing to

endure them. He listens only to morality, and slaps unmorality in the mouth;

he listens only to legality, and gags the lawless word. The spirit of

morality and legality holds him a prisoner; a rigid, unbending master. They

call that the "mastery of the spirit" -- it is at the same time the

standpoint of the spirit.

And now whom do the ordinary liberal gentlemen mean to make free? Whose

freedom is it that they cry out and thirst for? The spirit's! That of the

spirit of morality, legality, piety, the fear of God. That is what the

anti-liberal gentlemen also want, and the whole contention between the two

turns on a matter of advantage -- whether the latter are to be the only

speakers, or the former are to receive a "share in the enjoyment of the same

advantage." The spirit remains the absolute lord for both, and their only

quarrel is over who shall occupy the hierarchical throne that pertains to the

"Viceregent of the Lord." The best of it is that one can calmly look upon the

stir with the certainty that the wild beasts of history will tear each other

to pieces just like those of nature; their putrefying corpses fertilize the

ground for -- our crops.

We shall come back later to many another wheel in the head -- e. g., those

of vocation, truthfulness, love, etc.

When one's own is contrasted with what is imparted to him, there is no use

in objecting that we cannot have anything isolated, but receive everything as

a part of the universal order, and therefore through the impression of what is

around us, and that consequently we have it as something "imparted"; for there

is a great difference between the feelings and thoughts which are aroused in

me by other things and those which are given to me. God, immortality,

freedom, humanity, etc. are drilled into us from childhood as thoughts and

feelings which move our inner being more or less strongly, either ruling us

without our knowing it, or sometimes in richer natures manifesting themselves

in systems and works of art; but are always not aroused, but imparted,

feelings, because we must believe in them and cling to them. That an Absolute

existed, and that it must be taken in, felt, and thought by us, was settled as

a faith in the minds of those who spent all the strength of their mind on

recognizing it and setting it forth. The feeling for the Absolute exists

there as an imparted one, and thenceforth results only in the most manifold

revelations of its own self. So in Klopstock the religious feeling was an

imparted one, which in the Messiad simply found artistic expression. If, on

the other hand, the religion with which he was confronted had been for him

only an incitation to feeling and thought, and if he had known how to take an

attitude completely his own toward it, then there would have resulted,

instead of religious inspiration, a dissolution and consumption of the

religion itself. Instead of that, he only continued in mature years his

childish feelings received in childhood, and squandered the powers of his

manhood in decking out his childish trifles.

The difference is, then, whether feelings are imparted to me or only aroused.

Those which are aroused are my own, egoistic, because they are not *as

feelings* drilled into me, dictated to me, and pressed upon me; but those

which are imparted to me I receive, with open arms -- I cherish them in me as

a heritage, cultivate them, and am possessed by them. Who is there that has

never, more or less consciously, noticed that our whole education is

calculated to produce feelings in us, i.e. impart them to us, instead of

leaving their production to ourselves however they may turn out? If we hear

the name of God, we are to feel veneration; if we hear that of the prince's

majesty, it is to be received with reverence, deference, submission; if we

hear that of morality, we are to think that we hear something inviolable; if

we hear of the Evil One or evil ones, we are to shudder. The intention is

directed to these feelings, and he who e. g. should hear with pleasure the

deeds of the "bad" would have to be "taught what's what" with the rod of

discipline. Thus stuffed with imparted feelings, we appear before the bar of

majority and are "pronounced of age." Our equipment consists of "elevating

feelings, lofty thoughts, inspiring maxims, eternal principles," etc. The

young are of age when they twitter like the old; they are driven through

school to learn the old song, and, when they have this by heart, they are

declared of age.

We must not feel at every thing and every name that comes before us what we

could and would like to feel thereat; e. g. at the name of God we must think

of nothing laughable, feel nothing disrespectful, it being prescribed and

imparted to us what and how we are to feel and think at mention of that name.

That is the meaning of the care of souls -- that my soul or my mind be tuned

as others think right, not as I myself would like it. How much trouble does it

not cost one, finally to secure to oneself a feeling of one's own at the

mention of at least this or that name, and to laugh in the face of many who

expect from us a holy face and a composed expression at their speeches. What

is imparted is alien to us, is not our own, and therefore is "sacred," and

it is hard work to lay aside the "sacred dread of it."

Today one again hears "seriousness" praised, "seriousness in the presence of

highly important subjects and discussions," "German seriousness," etc. This

sort of seriousness proclaims clearly how old and grave lunacy and possession

have already become. For there is nothing more serious than a lunatic when he

comes to the central point of his lunacy; then his great earnestness

incapacitates him for taking a joke. (See madhouses.)

---- * ----

§3. The Hierarchy

The historical reflections on our Mongolism which I propose to insert

episodically at this place are not given with the claim of thoroughness, or

even of approved soundness, but solely because it seems to me that they may

contribute toward making the rest clear.

The history of the world, whose shaping properly belongs altogether to the

Caucasian race, seems till now to have run through two Caucasian ages, in the

first of which we had to work out and work off our innate negroidity; this

was followed in the second by Mongoloidity (Chineseness), which must

likewise be terribly made an end of. Negroidity represents antiquity, the

time of dependence on things (on cocks' eating, birds' flight, on sneezing,

on thunder and lightning, on the rustling of sacred trees, etc.); Mongoloidity

the time of dependence on thoughts, the Christian time. Reserved for the

future are the words, "I am the owner of the world of things, I am the owner

of the world of mind."

In the negroid age fall the campaigns of Sesostris and the importance of Egypt

and of northern Africa in general. To the Mongoloid age belong the invasions

of the Huns and Mongols, up to the Russians.

The value of me cannot possibly be rated high so long as the hard diamond of

the not-me bears so enormous a price as was the case both with God and with

the world. The not-me is still too stony and indomitable to be consumed and

absorbed by me; rather, men only creep about with extraordinary bustle on

this immovable entity, on this substance, like parasitic animals on a body

from whose juices they draw nourishment, yet without consuming it. It is the

bustle of vermin, the assiduity of Mongolians. Among the Chinese, we know,

everything remains as it used to be, and nothing "essential" or "substantial"

suffers a change; all the more actively do they work away at that which

remains, which bears the name of the "old," "ancestors," etc.

Accordingly, in our Mongolian age all change has been only reformatory or

ameliorative, not destructive or consuming and annihilating. The substance,

the object, remains. All our assiduity was only the activity of ants and the

hopping of fleas, jugglers' tricks on the immovable tight-rope of the

objective, corvée -service under the leadership of the unchangeable or

"eternal." The Chinese are doubtless the most positive nation, because

totally buried in precepts; but neither has the Christian age come out from

the positive, i.e. from "limited freedom," freedom "within certain

limits." In the most advanced stage of civilization this activity earns the

name of scientific activity, of working on a motionless presupposition, a

hypothesis that is not to be upset.

In its first and most unintelligible form morality shows itself