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

liberalism, I turn my gaze back upon myself and confess to myself

openly: What Man seems to have gained, I alone have gained.

Man is free when "Man is to man the supreme being." So it belongs to the

completion of liberalism that every other supreme being be annulled, theology

overturned by anthropology, God and his grace laughed down, "atheism"

universal.

The egoism of property has given up the last that it had to give when even the

"My God" has become senseless; for God exists only when he has at heart the

individual's welfare, as the latter seeks his welfare in him.

Political liberalism abolished the inequality of masters and servants: it made

people masterless, anarchic. The master was now removed from the individual,

the "egoist," to become a ghost -- the law or the State. Social liberalism

abolishes the inequality of possession, of the poor and rich, and makes people

possessionless or propertyless. Property is withdrawn from the individual

and surrendered to ghostly society. Humane liberalism makes people godless,

atheistic. Therefore the individual's God, "My God," must be put an end to.

Now masterlessness is indeed at the same time freedom from service,

possessionlessness at the same time freedom from care, and godlessness at the

same time freedom from prejudice: for with the master the servant falls away;

with possession, the care about it; with the firmly-rooted God, prejudice.

But, since the master rises again as State, the servants appears again as

subject; since possession becomes the property of society, care is begotten

anew as labor; and, since God as Man becomes a prejudice, there arises a new

faith, faith in humanity or liberty. For the individual's God the God of all,

viz., "Man," is now exalted; "for it is the highest thing in us all to be

man." But, as nobody can become entirely what the idea "man" imports, Man

remains to the individual a lofty other world, an unattained supreme being, a

God. But at the same time this is the "true God," because he is fully adequate

to us -- to wit, our own "self"; we ourselves, but separated from us and

lifted above us.

Postscript

The foregoing review of "free human criticism" was written by bits immediately

after the appearance of the books in question, as was also that which

elsewhere refers to writings of this tendency, and I did little more than

bring together the fragments. But criticism is restlessly pressing forward,

and thereby makes it necessary for me to come back to it once more, now that

my book is finished, and insert this concluding note.

I have before me the latest (eighth) number of the *Allgemeine

Literatur-Zeitung* of Bruno Bauer.

There again "the general interests of society" stand at the top. But criticism

has reflected, and given this "society" a specification by which it is

discriminated from a form which previously had still been confused with it:

the "State," in former passages still celebrated as "free State," is quite

given up because it can in no wise fulfil the task of "human society."

Criticism only "saw itself compelled to identify for a moment human and

political affairs" in 1842; but now it has found that the State, even as "free

State," is not human society, or, as it could likewise say, that the people is

not "man." We saw how it got through with theology and showed clearly that God

sinks into dust before Man; we see it now come to a clearance with politics in

the same way, and show that before Man peoples and nationalities fall: so we

see how it has its explanation with Church and State, declaring them both

unhuman, and we shall see -- for it betrays this to us already -- how it can

also give proof that before Man the "masses," which it even calls a "spiritual

being," appear worthless. And how should the lesser "spiritual beings" be able

to maintain themselves before the supreme spirit? "Man" casts down the false

idols.

So what the critic has in view for the present is the scrutiny of the

"masses," which he will place before "Man" in order to combat them from the

standpoint of Man. "What is now the object of criticism?" "The masses, a

spiritual being!" These the critic will "learn to know," and will find that

they are in contradiction with Man; he will demonstrate that they are unhuman,

and will succeed just as well in this demonstration as in the former ones,

that the divine and the national, or the concerns of Church and of State, were

the unhuman.

The masses are defined as "the most significant product of the Revolution, as

the deceived multitude which the illusions of political Illumination, and in

general the entire Illumination movement of the eighteenth century, have given

over to boundless disgruntlement." The Revolution satisfied some by its

result, and left others unsatisfied; the satisfied part is the commonalty

(bourgeoisie, etc.), the unsatisfied is the -- masses. Does not the critic,

so placed, himself belong to the "masses"?

But the unsatisfied are still in great mistiness, and their discontent utters

itself only in a "boundless disgruntlement." This the likewise unsatisfied

critic now wants to master: he cannot want and attain more than to bring that

"spiritual being," the masses, out of its disgruntlement, and to "uplift"

those who were only disgruntled, i.e. to give them the right attitude toward

those results of the Revolution which are to be overcome; -- he can become the

head of the masses, their decided spokesman. Therefore he wants also to

"abolish the deep chasm which parts him from the multitude." From those who

want to "uplift the lower classes of the people" he is distinguished by

wanting to deliver from "disgruntlement," not merely these, but himself too.

But assuredly his consciousness does not deceive him either, when he takes the

masses to be the "natural opponents of theory," and foresees that, "the more

this theory shall develop itself, so much the more will it make the masses

compact." For the critic cannot enlighten or satisfy the masses with his

presupposition, Man. If over against the commonalty they are only the "lower

classes of the people," politically insignificant masses, over against "Man"

they must still more be mere "masses," humanly insignificant -- yes, unhuman

-- masses, or a multitude of un-men.

The critic clears away everything human; and, starting from the presupposition

that the human is the true, he works against himself, denying it wherever it

had been hitherto found. He proves only that the human is to be found nowhere

except in his head, but the unhuman everywhere. The unhuman is the real, the

extant on all hands, and by the proof that it is "not human" the critic only

enunciates plainly the tautological sentence that it is the unhuman.

But what if the unhuman, turning its back on itself with resolute heart,

should at the same time turn away from the disturbing critic and leave him

standing, untouched and unstung by his remonstrance? "You call me the

unhuman," it might say to him, "and so I really am -- for you; but I am so

only because you bring me into opposition to the human, and I could despise

myself only so long as I let myself be hypnotized into this opposition. I was

contemptible because I sought my 'better self' outside me; I was the unhuman

because I dreamed of the 'human'; I resembled the pious who hunger for their

'true self' and always remain 'poor sinners'; I thought of myself only in

comparison to another; enough, I was not all in all, was not -- unique.(95)

But now I cease to appear to myself as the unhuman, cease to measure myself

and let myself be measured by man, cease to recognize anything above me:

consequently -- adieu, humane critic! I only have been the unhuman, am it now

no longer, but am the unique, yes, to your loathing, the egoistic; yet not the

egoistic as it lets itself be measured by the human, humane, and unselfish,

but the egoistic as the -- unique."

We have to pay attention to still another sentence of the same number.

"Criticism sets up no dogmas, and wants to learn to know nothing but things.

"

The critic is afraid of becoming "dogmatic" or setting up dogmas. Of course:

why, thereby he would become the opposite of the critic -- the dogmatist; he

would now become bad, as he is good as critic, or would become from an

unselfish man an egoist, etc. "Of all things, no dogma!" This is his -- dogma.

For the critic remains on one and the same ground with the dogmatist -- that

of thoughts. Like the latter he always starts from a thought, but varies in

this, that he never ceases to keep the principle-thought in the *process of

thinking*, and so does not let it become stable. He only asserts the

thought-process against the thought-faith, the progress of thinking against

stationariness in it. From criticism no thought is safe, since criticism is

thought or the thinking mind itself.

Therefore I repeat that the religious world -- and this is the world of

thought -- reaches its completion in criticism, where thinking extends its

encroachments over every thought, no one of which may "egoistically" establish

itself. Where would the "purity of criticism," the purity of thinking, be left

if even one thought escaped the process of thinking? This explains the fact

that the critic has even begun already to gibe gently here and there at the

thought of Man, of humanity and humaneness, because he suspects that here a

thought is approaching dogmatic fixity. But yet he cannot decompose this

thought till he has found a -- "higher" in which it dissolves; for he moves

only -- in thoughts. This higher thought might be enunciated as that of the

movement or process of thinking itself, i.e. as the thought of thinking or

of criticism, for example.

Freedom of thinking has in fact become complete hereby, freedom of mind

celebrates its triumph: for the individual, "egoistic" thoughts have lost

their dogmatic truculence. There is nothing left but the -- dogma of free

thinking or of criticism.

Against everything that belongs to the world of thought, criticism is in the

right, i. e., in might: it is the victor. Criticism, and criticism alone, is

"up to date." From the standpoint of thought there is no power capable of

being an overmatch for criticism's, and it is a pleasure to see how easily and

sportively this dragon swallows all other serpents of thought. Each serpent

twists, to be sure, but criticism crushes it in all its "turns."

I am no opponent of criticism, i.e. I am no dogmatist, and do not feel

myself touched by the critic's tooth with which he tears the dogmatist to

pieces. If I were a "dogmatist," I should place at the head a dogma, i.e. a

thought, an idea, a principle, and should complete this as a "systematist,"

spinning it out to a system, a structure