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

a slave may yet be inwardly free, he says in fact only the

most indisputable and trivial thing. For who is going to assert that any man

is wholly without freedom? If I am an eye-servant, can I therefore not be

free from innumerable things, e. g. from faith in Zeus, from the desire for

fame, etc.? Why then should not a whipped slave also be able to be inwardly

free from un-Christian sentiments, from hatred of his enemy, etc.? He then has

"Christian freedom," is rid of the un-Christian; but has he absolute freedom,

freedom from everything, e. g. from the Christian delusion, or from bodily

pain?

In the meantime, all this seems to be said more against names than against the

thing. But is the name indifferent, and has not a word, a shibboleth, always

inspired and -- fooled men? Yet between freedom and ownness there lies still a

deeper chasm than the mere difference of the words.

All the world desires freedom, all long for its reign to come. Oh,

enchantingly beautiful dream of a blooming "reign of freedom," a "free human

race"! -- who has not dreamed it? So men shall become free, entirely free,

free from all constraint! From all constraint, really from all? Are they never

to put constraint on themselves any more? "Oh yes, that, of course; don't you

see, that is no constraint at all?" Well, then at any rate they -- are to

become free from religious faith, from the strict duties of morality, from the

inexorability of the law, from -- "What a fearful misunderstanding!" Well,

what are they to be free from then, and what not?

The lovely dream is dissipated; awakened, one rubs his half-opened eyes and

stares at the prosaic questioner. "What men are to be free from?" -- From

blind credulity, cries one. What's that? exclaims another, all faith is blind

credulity; they must become free from all faith. No, no, for God's sake --

inveighs the first again -- do not cast all faith from you, else the power of

brutality breaks in. We must have the republic -- a third makes himself heard,

-- and become -- free from all commanding lords. There is no help in that,

says a fourth: we only get a new lord then, a "dominant majority"; let us

rather free ourselves from this dreadful inequality. -- O, hapless equality,

already I hear your plebeian roar again! How I had dreamed so beautifully just

now of a paradise of freedom, and what -- impudence and licentiousness now

raises its wild clamor! Thus the first laments, and gets on his feet to grasp

the sword against "unmeasured freedom." Soon we no longer hear anything but

the clashing of the swords of the disagreeing dreamers of freedom.

What the craving for freedom has always come to has been the desire for a

particular freedom, e. g. freedom of faith; i.e. the believing man

wanted to be free and independent; of what? of faith perhaps? no! but of the

inquisitors of faith. So now "political or civil" freedom. The citizen wants

to become free not from citizenhood, but from bureaucracy, the arbitrariness

of princes, etc. Prince Metternich once said he had "found a way that was

adapted to guide men in the path of genuine freedom for all the future." The

Count of Provence ran away from France precisely at the time when he was

preparing the "reign of freedom," and said: "My imprisonment had become

intolerable to me; I had only one passion, the desire for freedom; I thought

only of it."

The craving for a particular freedom always includes the purpose of a new

dominion, as it was with the Revolution, which indeed "could give its

defenders the uplifting feeling that they were fighting for freedom," but in

truth only because they were after a particular freedom, therefore a new

dominion, the "dominion of the law."

Freedom you all want, you want freedom. Why then do you haggle over a more

or less? Freedom can only be the whole of freedom; a piece of freedom is not

freedom. You despair of the possibility of obtaining the whole of freedom,

freedom from everything -- yes, you consider it insanity even to wish this? --

Well, then leave off chasing after the phantom, and spend your pains on

something better than the -- unattainable.

"Ah, but there is nothing better than freedom!"

What have you then when you have freedom, viz., -- for I will not speak here

of your piecemeal bits of freedom -- complete freedom? Then you are rid of

everything that embarrasses you, everything, and there is probably nothing

that does not once in your life embarrass you and cause you inconvenience. And

for whose sake, then, did you want to be rid of it? Doubtless for your sake,

because it is in your way! But, if something were not inconvenient to you;

if, on the contrary, it were quite to your mind (e. g. the gently but

irresistibly commanding look of your loved one) -- then you would not want

to be rid of it and free from it. Why not? For your sake again! So you take

yourselves as measure and judge over all. You gladly let freedom go when

unfreedom, the "sweet service of love," suits you; and you take up your

freedom again on occasion when it begins to suit you better -- i. e.,

supposing, which is not the point here, that you are not afraid of such a

Repeal of the Union for other (perhaps religious) reasons.

Why will you not take courage now to really make yourselves the central

point and the main thing altogether? Why grasp in the air at freedom, your

dream? Are you your dream? Do not begin by inquiring of your dreams, your

notions, your thoughts, for that is all "hollow theory." Ask yourselves and

ask after yourselves -- that is practical, and you know you want very much

to be "practical." But there the one hearkens what his God (of course what he

thinks of at the name God is his God) may be going to say to it, and another

what his moral feelings, his conscience, his feeling of duty, may determine

about it, and a third calculates what folks will think of it -- and, when each

has thus asked his Lord God (folks are a Lord God just as good as, nay, even

more compact than, the other-worldly and imaginary one: *vox populi, vox

dei)*, then he accommodates himself to his Lord's will and listens no more at

all for what he himself would like to say and decide.

Therefore turn to yourselves rather than to your gods or idols. Bring out from

yourselves what is in you, bring it to the light, bring yourselves to

revelation.

How one acts only from himself, and asks after nothing further, the Christians

have realized in the notion "God." He acts "as it pleases him." And foolish

man, who could do just so, is to act as it "pleases God" instead. -- If it is

said that even God proceeds according to eternal laws, that too fits me, since

I too cannot get out of my skin, but have my law in my whole nature, i.e. in

myself.

But one needs only admonish you of yourselves to bring you to despair at once.

"What am I?" each of you asks himself. An abyss of lawless and unregulated

impulses, desires, wishes, passions, a chaos without light or guiding star!

How am I to obtain a correct answer, if, without regard to God's commandments

or to the duties which morality prescribes, without regard to the voice of

reason, which in the course of history, after bitter experiences, has exalted

the best and most reasonable thing into law, I simply appeal to myself? My

passion would advise me to do the most senseless thing possible. -- Thus each

deems himself the -- devil; for, if, so far as he is unconcerned about

religion, etc., he only deemed himself a beast, he would easily find that the

beast, which does follow only its impulse (as it were, its advice), does not

advise and impel itself to do the "most senseless" things, but takes very

correct steps. But the habit of the religious way of thinking has biased our

mind so grievously that we are -- terrified at ourselves in our nakedness

and naturalness; it has degraded us so that we deem ourselves depraved by

nature, born devils. Of course it comes into your head at once that your

calling requires you to do the "good," the moral, the right. Now, if you ask

yourselves what is to be done, how can the right voice sound forth from you,

the voice which points the way of the good, the right, the true, etc.? What

concord have God and Belial?

But what would you think if one answered you by saying: "That one is to listen

to God, conscience, duties, laws, and so forth, is flim-flam with which people

have stuffed your head and heart and made you crazy"? And if he asked you how

it is that you know so surely that the voice of nature is a seducer? And if he

even demanded of you to turn the thing about and actually to deem the voice of

God and conscience to be the devil's work? There are such graceless men; how

will you settle them? You cannot appeal to your parsons, parents, and good

men, for precisely these are designated by them as your seducers, as the

true seducers and corrupters of youth, who busily sow broadcast the tares of

self-contempt and reverence to God, who fill young hearts with mud and young

heads with stupidity.

But now those people go on and ask: For whose sake do you care about God's and

the other commandments? You surely do not suppose that this is done merely out

of complaisance toward God? No, you are doing it -- for your sake again. --

Here too, therefore, you are the main thing, and each must say to himself,

I am everything to myself and I do everything on my account. If it ever

became clear to you that God, the commandments, etc., only harm you, that they

reduce and ruin you, to a certainty you would throw them from you just as

the Christians once condemned Apollo or Minerva or heathen morality. They did

indeed put in the place of these Christ and afterward Mary, as well as a

Christian morality; but they did this for the sake of their souls' welfare

too, therefore out of egoism or ownness.

And it was by this egoism, this ownness, that they got rid of the old world

of gods and became free from it. Ownness created a new freedom; for

ownness is the creator of everything, as genius (a definite ownness), which is

always originality, has