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

as much as I or you -- there may arise even the proud

fancy that the talk is no longer of a "sacred essence" and that we now feel

ourselves everywhere at home and no longer in the uncanny,(82) i.e. in the

sacred and in sacred awe: in the ecstasy over "Man discovered at last" the

egoistic cry of pain passes unheard, and the spook that has become so intimate

is taken for our true ego.

But "Humanus is the saint's name" (see Goethe), and the humane is only the

most clarified sanctity.

The egoist makes the reverse declaration. For this precise reason, because you

hold something sacred, I gibe at you; and, even if I respected everything in

you, your sanctuary is precisely what I should not respect.

With these opposed views there must also be assumed a contradictory relation

to spiritual goods: the egoist insults them, the religious man (i.e. every

one who puts his "essence" above himself) must consistently -- protect them.

But what kind of spiritual goods are to be protected, and what left

unprotected, depends entirely on the concept that one forms of the "supreme

being"; and he who fears God, e. g., has more to shelter than he (the

liberal) who fears Man.

In spiritual goods we are (in distinction from the sensuous) injured in a

spiritual way, and the sin against them consists in a direct desecration,

while against the sensuous a purloining or alienation takes place; the goods

themselves are robbed of value and of consecration, not merely taken away; the

sacred is immediately compromised. With the word "irreverence" or "flippancy"

is designated everything that can be committed as crime against spiritual

goods, i.e. against everything that is sacred for us; and scoffing,

reviling, contempt, doubt, etc., are only different shades of *criminal

flippancy*.

That desecration can be practiced in the most manifold way is here to be

passed over, and only that desecration is to be preferentially mentioned which

threatens the sacred with danger through an unrestricted press.

As long as respect is demanded even for one spiritual essence, speech and the

press must be enthralled in the name of this essence; for just so long the

egoist might "trespass" against it by his utterances, from which thing he

must be hindered by "due punishment" at least, if one does not prefer to take

up the more correct means against it, the preventive use of police authority,

e. g. censorship.

What a sighing for liberty of the press! What then is the press to be

liberated from? Surely from a dependence, a belonging, and a liability to

service!

But to liberate himself from that is every one's affair, and it may with

safety be assumed that, when you have delivered yourself from liability to

service, that which you compose and write will also belong to you as your

own instead of having been thought and indicted in the service of some

power. What can a believer in Christ say and have printed, that should be

freer from that belief in Christ than he himself is? If I cannot or may not

write something, perhaps the primary fault lies with me. Little as this

seems to hit the point, so near is the application nevertheless to be found.

By a press-law I draw a boundary for my publications, or let one be drawn,

beyond which wrong and its punishment follows. I myself limit myself.

If the press was to be free, nothing would be so important as precisely its

liberation from every coercion that could be put on it in the name of a law.

And, that it might come to that, I my own self should have to have absolved

myself from obedience to the law.

Certainly, the absolute liberty of the press is like every absolute liberty, a

nonentity. The press can become free from full many a thing, but always only

from what I too am free from. If we make ourselves free from the sacred, if we

have become graceless and lawless, our words too will become so.

As little as we can be declared clear of every coercion in the world, so

little can our writing be withdrawn from it. But as free as we are, so free we

can make it too.

It must therefore become our own, instead of, as hitherto, serving a spook.

People do not yet know what they mean by their cry for liberty of the press.

What they ostensibly ask is that the State shall set the press free; but what

they are really after, without knowing it themselves, is that the press become

free from the State, or clear of the State. The former is a petition to the

State, the latter an insurrection against the State. As a "petition for

right," even as a serious demanding of the right of liberty of the press, it

presupposes the State as the giver, and can hope only for a present, a

permission, a chartering. Possible, no doubt, that a State acts so senselessly

as to grant the demanded present; but you may bet everything that those who

receive the present will not know how to use it so long as they regard the

State as a truth: they will not trespass against this "sacred thing," and will

call for a penal press-law against every one who would be willing to dare

this.

In a word, the press does not become free from what I am not free from.

Do I perhaps hereby show myself an opponent of the liberty of the press? On

the contrary, I only assert that one will never get it if one wants only it,

the liberty of the press, i.e. if one sets out only for an unrestricted

permission. Only beg right along for this permission: you may wait forever for

it, for there is no one in the world who could give it to you. As long as you

want to have yourselves "entitled" to the use of the press by a permission,

i.e. liberty of the press, you live in vain hope and complaint.

"Nonsense! Why, you yourself, who harbor such thoughts as stand in your book,

can unfortunately bring them to publicity only through a lucky chance or by

stealth; nevertheless you will inveigh against one's pressing and importuning

his own State till it gives the refused permission to print?" But an author

thus addressed would perhaps -- for the impudence of such people goes far --

give the following reply: "Consider well what you say! What then do I do to

procure myself liberty of the press for my book? Do I ask for permission, or

do I not rather, without any question of legality, seek a favorable occasion

and grasp it in complete recklessness of the State and its wishes? I -- the

terrifying word must be uttered -- I cheat the State. You unconsciously do the

same. From your tribunes you talk it into the idea that it must give up its

sanctity and inviolability, it must lay itself bare to the attacks of writers,

without needing on that account to fear danger. But you are imposing on it;

for its existence is done for as soon as it loses its unapproachableness. To

you indeed it might well accord liberty of writing, as England has done; you

are believers in the State and incapable of writing against the State,

however much you would like to reform it and 'remedy its defects.' But what if

opponents of the State availed themselves of free utterance, and stormed out

against Church, State, morals, and everything 'sacred' with inexorable

reasons? You would then be the first, in terrible agonies, to call into life

the September laws. Too late would you then rue the stupidity that earlier

made you so ready to fool and palaver into compliance the State, or the

government of the State. -- But, I prove by my act only two things. This for

one, that the liberty of the press is always bound to 'favorable

opportunities,' and accordingly will never be an absolute liberty; but

secondly this, that he who would enjoy it must seek out and, if possible,

create the favorable opportunity, availing himself of his own advantage

against the State; and counting himself and his will more than the State and

every 'superior' power. Not in the State, but only against it, can the liberty

of the press be carried through; if it is to be established, it is to be

obtained not as the consequence of a petition but as the work of an

insurrection. Every petition and every motion for liberty of the press is

already an insurrection, be it conscious or unconscious: a thing which

Philistine halfness alone will not and cannot confess to itself until, with a

shrinking shudder, it shall see it clearly and irrefutably by the outcome. For

the requested liberty of the press has indeed a friendly and well-meaning face

at the beginning, as it is not in the least minded ever to let the 'insolence

of the press' come into vogue; but little by little its heart grows more

hardened, and the inference flatters its way in that really a liberty is not a

liberty if it stands in the service of the State, of morals, or of the law.

A liberty indeed from the coercion of censorship, it is yet not a liberty from

the coercion of law. The press, once seized by the lust for liberty, always

wants to grow freer, till at last the writer says to himself, really I am not

wholly free till I ask about nothing; and writing is free only when it is my

own, dictated to me by no power or authority, by no faith, no dread; the

press must not be free -- that is too little -- it must be *mine: -- ownness

of the press or property in the press*, that is what I will take.

"Why, liberty of the press is only permission of the press, and the State

never will or can voluntarily permit me to grind it to nothingness by the

press."

Let us now, in conclusion, bettering the above language, which is still vague,

owing to the phrase 'liberty of the press,' rather put it thus: *"liberty of

the press*, the liberals' loud demand, is assuredly possible in the State;

yes, it is possible only in the State, because it is a permission, and

consequently the permitter (the State) must not be lacking. But as permission

it has its limit in this very State, which surely should not in reason permit

more than is compatible with itself and its welfare: the State fixes for it

this limit as the law of its existence and of its extension. That one State

brooks more than another is only a quantitative distinction, which alone,

nevertheless, lies at the heart of the political liberals: they want in

Germany, i. e., only a 'more extended, broader accordance of