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

and year out in dancing, and hoped that in

this way they would finally learn to play the flute. Luther, with whom the

so-called Middle Ages end, was the first who understood that the man himself

must become other than he was if he wanted to comprehend truth -- must become

as true as truth itself. Only he who already has truth in his belief, only he

who believes in it, can become a partaker of it; i.e. only the believer

finds it accessible and sounds its depths. Only that organ of man which is

able to blow can attain the further capacity of flute-playing, and only that

man can become a partaker of truth who has the right organ for it. He who is

capable of thinking only what is sensuous, objective, pertaining to things,

figures to himself in truth only what pertains to things. But truth is spirit,

stuff altogether inappreciable by the senses, and therefore only for the

"higher consciousness," not for that which is "earthly-minded."

With Luther, accordingly, dawns the perception that truth, because it is a

thought, is only for the thinking man. And this is to say that man must

henceforth take an utterly different standpoint, to wit, the heavenly,

believing, scientific standpoint, or that of thought in relation to its

object, the -- thought -- that of mind in relation to mind. Consequently:

only the like apprehend the like. "You are like the spirit that you

understand."(47)

Because Protestantism broke the medieval hierarchy, the opinion could take

root that hierarchy in general had been shattered by it, and it could be

wholly overlooked that it was precisely a "reformation," and so a

reinvigoration of the antiquated hierarchy. That medieval hierarchy had been

only a weakly one, as it had to let all possible barbarism of unsanctified

things run on uncoerced beside it, and it was the Reformation that first

steeled the power of hierarchy. If Bruno Bauer thinks:(48) "As the Reformation

was mainly the abstract rending of the religious principle from art, State,

and science, and so its liberation from those powers with which it had joined

itself in the antiquity of the church and in the hierarchy of the Middle Ages,

so too the theological and ecclesiastical movements which proceeded from the

Reformation are only the consistent carrying out of this abstraction of the

religious principle from the other powers of humanity," I regard precisely the

opposite as correct, and think that the dominion of spirits, or freedom of

mind (which comes to the same thing), was never before so all-embracing and

all-powerful, because the present one, instead of rending the religious

principle from art, State, and science, lifted the latter altogether out of

secularity into the "realm of spirit" and made them religious.

Luther and Descartes have been appropriately put side by side in their "He who

believes in God" and "I think, therefore I am" (cogito, ergo sum). Man's

heaven is thought -- mind. Everything can be wrested from him, except thought,

except faith. Particular faith, like faith of Zeus, Astarte, Jehovah, Allah,

may be destroyed, but faith itself is indestructible. In thought is freedom.

What I need and what I hunger for is no longer granted to me by any grace,

by the Virgin Mary. by intercession of the saints, or by the binding and

loosing church, but I procure it for myself. In short, my being (the sum) is

a living in the heaven of thought, of mind, a cogitare. But I myself am

nothing else than mind, thinking mind (according to Descartes), believing mind

(according to Luther). My body I am not; my flesh may suffer from appetites

or pains. I am not my flesh, but I am mind, only mind.

This thought runs through the history of the Reformation till today.

Only by the more modern philosophy since Descartes has a serious effort been

made to bring Christianity to complete efficacy, by exalting the "scientific

consciousness." to be the only true and valid one. Hence it begins with

absolute doubt, dubitare, with grinding common consciousness to atoms, with

turning away from everything that "mind," "thought," does not legitimate. To

it Nature counts for nothing; the opinion of men, their "human precepts,"

for nothing: and it does not rest till it has brought reason into everything,

and can say "The real is the rational, and only the rational is the real."

Thus it has at last brought mind, reason, to victory; and everything is mind,

because everything is rational, because all nature, as well as even the most

perverse opinions of men, contains reason; for "all must serve for the best,"

i. e., lead to the victory of reason.

Descartes's dubitare contains the decided statement that only cogitare,

thought, mind -- is. A complete break with "common" consciousness, which

ascribes reality to irrational things! Only the rational is, only mind is!

This is the principle of modern philosophy, the genuine Christian principle.

Descartes in his own time discriminated the body sharply from the mind, and

"the spirit 'tis that builds itself the body," says Goethe.

But this philosophy itself, Christian philosophy, still does not get rid of

the rational, and therefore inveighs against the "merely subjective," against

"fancies, fortuities, arbitrariness," etc. What it wants is that the divine

should become visible in everything, and all consciousness become a knowing of

the divine, and man behold God everywhere; but God never is, without the

devil. For this very reason the name of philosopher is not to be given to

him who has indeed open eyes for the things of the world, a clear and

undazzled gaze, a correct judgment about the world, but who sees in the world

just the world, in objects only objects, and, in short, everything prosaically

as it is; but he alone is a philosopher who sees, and points out or

demonstrates, heaven in the world, the supernal in the earthly, the --

divine in the mundane. The former may be ever so wise, there is no getting

away from this:

What wise men see not by their wisdom's art Is practiced simply by a childlike heart.(49)

It takes this childlike heart, this eye for the divine, to make a philosopher.

The first-named man has only a "common" consciousness, but he who knows the

divine, and knows how to tell it, has a "scientific" one. On this ground Bacon

was turned out of the realm of philosophers. And certainly what is called

English philosophy seems to have got no further than to the discoveries of

so-called "clear heads," e. g. Bacon and Hume. The English did not know how

to exalt the simplicity of the childlike heart to philosophic significance,

did not know how to make -- philosophers out of childlike hearts. This is as

much as to say, their philosophy was not able to become theological or

theology, and yet it is only as theology that it can really live itself

out, complete itself. The field of its battle to the death is in theology.

Bacon did not trouble himself about theological questions and cardinal points.

Cognition has its object in life. German thought seeks, more than that of

others, to reach the beginnings and fountain-heads of life, and sees no life

till it sees it in cognition itself. Descartes's cogito, ergo sum has the

meaning "One lives only when one thinks." Thinking life is called

"intellectual life"! Only mind lives, its life is the true life. Then, just so

in nature only the "eternal laws," the mind or the reason of nature, are its

true life. In man, as in nature, only the thought lives; everything else is

dead! To this abstraction, to the life of generalities or of that which is

lifeless, the history of mind had to come. God, who is spirit, alone lives.

Nothing lives but the ghost.

How can one try to assert of modern philosophy or modern times that they have

reached freedom, since they have not freed us from the power of objectivity?

Or am I perhaps free from a despot when I am not afraid of the personal

potentate, to be sure, but of every infraction of the loving reverence which I

fancy I owe him? The case is the same with modern times. They only changed the

existing objects, the real ruler, into conceived objects, i.e. into

ideas, before which the old respect not only was not lost, but increased in

intensity. Even if people snapped their fingers at God and the devil in their

former crass reality, people devoted only the greater attention to their

ideas. "They are rid of the Evil One; evil is left."(50) The decision having

once been made not to let oneself be imposed on any longer by the extant and

palpable, little scruple was felt about revolting against the existing State

or overturning the existing laws; but to sin against the idea of the State,

not to submit to the idea of law, who would have dared that? So one remained

a "citizen" and a "law-respecting," loyal man; yes, one seemed to himself to

be only so much more law-respecting, the more rationalistically one abrogated

the former defective law in order to do homage to the "spirit of the law." In

all this the objects had only suffered a change of form; they had remained in

their preponderance and pre-eminence; in short, one was still involved in

obedience and possessedness, lived in reflection, and had an object on which

one reflected, which one respected, and before which one felt reverence and

fear. One had done nothing but transform the things into conceptions of

the things, into thoughts and ideas, whereby one's dependence became all the

more intimate and indissoluble. So, e. g., it is not hard to emancipate

oneself from the commands of parents, or to set aside the admonitions of uncle

and aunt, the entreaties of brother and sister; but the renounced obedience

easily gets into one's conscience, and the less one does give way to the

individual demands, because he rationalistically, by his own reason,

recognizes them to be unreasonable, so much the more conscientiously does he

hold fast to filial piety and family love, and so much the harder is it for

him to forgive himself a trespass against the conception which he has formed

of family love and of filial duty. Released from dependence as regards the

existing family, one falls into the more binding dependence on the idea of the

family; one is ruled by the spirit of the family. The family consisting of

John, Maggie, etc., whose dominion has become powerless, is only internalized,

being left as "family" in general, to which one just applies the old saying,

"We must obey God rather than man," whose significance here is this: "I

cannot, to be sure, accommodate myself to your senseless requirements, but, as

my 'family,' you still remain the object of my love and care"; for "the