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

how is the heart to be cultivated?

What the understanding; this one side of the mind, has reached -- to wit, the

capability of playing freely with and over every concern -- awaits the heart

also; everything worldly must come to grief before it, so that at last

family, commonwealth, fatherland, etc., are given up for the sake of the

heart, i. e., of blessedness, the heart's blessedness.

Daily experience confirms the truth that the understanding may have renounced

a thing many years before the heart has ceased to beat for it. So the

Sophistic understanding too had so far become master over the dominant,

ancient powers that they now needed only to be driven out of the heart, in

which they dwelt unmolested, to have at last no part at all left in man. This

war is opened by Socrates, and not till the dying day of the old world does it

end in peace.

The examination of the heart takes its start with Socrates, and all the

contents of the heart are sifted. In their last and extremest struggles the

ancients threw all contents out of the heart and let it no longer beat for

anything; this was the deed of the Skeptics. The same purgation of the heart

was now achieved in the Skeptical age, as the understanding had succeeded in

establishing in the Sophistic age.

The Sophistic culture has brought it to pass that one's understanding no

longer stands still before anything, and the Skeptical, that his heart is no

longer moved by anything.

So long as man is entangled in the movements of the world and embarrassed by

relations to the world -- and he is so till the end of antiquity, because his

heart still has to struggle for independence from the worldly -- so long he is

not yet spirit; for spirit is without body, and has no relations to the world

and corporeality; for it the world does not exist, nor natural bonds, but only

the spiritual, and spiritual bonds. Therefore man must first become so

completely unconcerned and reckless, so altogether without relations, as the

Skeptical culture presents him -- so altogether indifferent to the world that

even its falling in ruins would not move him -- before he could feel himself

as worldless; i. e., as spirit. And this is the result of the gigantic work

of the ancients: that man knows himself as a being without relations and

without a world, as spirit.

Only now, after all worldly care has left him, is he all in all to himself, is

he only for himself, i.e. he is he spirit for the spirit, or, in plainer

language, he cares only for the spiritual.

In the Christian wisdom of serpents and innocence of doves the two sides --

understanding and heart -- of the ancient liberation of mind are so completed

that they appear young and new again, and neither the one nor the other lets

itself be bluffed any longer by the worldly and natural.

Thus the ancients mounted to spirit, and strove to become spiritual. But a

man who wishes to be active as spirit is drawn to quite other tasks than he

was able to set himself formerly: to tasks which really give something to do

to the spirit and not to mere sense or acuteness,(3) which exerts itself only

to become master of things. The spirit busies itself solely about the

spiritual, and seeks out the "traces of mind" in everything; to the

believing spirit "everything comes from God," and interests him only to the

extent that it reveals this origin; to the philosophic spirit everything

appears with the stamp of reason, and interests him only so far as he is able

to discover in it reason, i. e., spiritual content.

Not the spirit, then, which has to do with absolutely nothing unspiritual,

with no thing, but only with the essence which exists behind and above

things, with thoughts -- not that did the ancients exert, for they did not

yet have it; no, they had only reached the point of struggling and longing for

it, and therefore sharpened it against their too-powerful foe, the world of

sense (but what would not have been sensuous for them, since Jehovah or the

gods of the heathen were yet far removed from the conception "God is

spirit," since the "heavenly fatherland" had not yet stepped into the place

of the sensuous, etc.?) -- they sharpened against the world of sense their

sense, their acuteness. To this day the Jews, those precocious children of

antiquity, have got no farther; and with all the subtlety and strength of

their prudence and understanding, which easily becomes master of things and

forces them to obey it, they cannot discover spirit, which *takes no account

whatever of things*.

The Christian has spiritual interests, because he allows himself to be a

spiritual man; the Jew does not even understand these interests in their

purity, because he does not allow himself to assign no value to things. He

does not arrive at pure spirituality, a spirituality e. g. is religiously

expressed, e. g., in the faith of Christians, which alone (i.e. without

works) justifies. Their unspirituality sets Jews forever apart from

Christians; for the spiritual man is incomprehensible to the unspiritual, as

the unspiritual is contemptible to the spiritual. But the Jews have only "the

spirit of this world."

The ancient acuteness and profundity lies as far from the spirit and the

spirituality of the Christian world as earth from heaven.

He who feels himself as free spirit is not oppressed and made anxious by the

things of this world, because he does not care for them; if one is still to

feel their burden, he must be narrow enough to attach weight to them -- as

is evidently the case, e. g., when one is still concerned for his "dear

life." He to whom everything centers in knowing and conducting himself as a

free spirit gives little heed to how scantily he is supplied meanwhile, and

does not reflect at all on how he must make his arrangements to have a

thoroughly inconveniences of the life that depends on things, because he lives

only spiritually and on spiritual food, while aside from this he only gulps

things down like a beast, hardly knowing it, and dies bodily, to be sure, when

his fodder gives out, but knows himself immortal as spirit, and closes his

eyes with an adoration or a thought. His life is occupation with the

spiritual, is -- thinking; the rest does not bother him; let him busy himself

with the spiritual in any way that he can and chooses -- in devotion, in

contemplation, or in philosophic cognition -- his doing is always thinking;

and therefore Descartes, to whom this had at last become quite clear, could

lay down the proposition: "I think, that is -- I am." This means, my thinking

is my being or my life; only when I live spiritually do I live; only as spirit

am I really, or -- I am spirit through and through and nothing but spirit.

Unlucky Peter Schlemihl, who has lost his shadow, is the portrait of this man

become a spirit; for the spirit's body is shadowless. -- Over against this,

how different among the ancients! Stoutly and manfully as they might bear

themselves against the might of things, they must yet acknowledge the might

itself, and got no farther than to protect their life against it as well as

possible. Only at a late hour did they recognize that their "true life" was

not that which they led in the fight against the things of the world, but the

"spiritual life," "turned away" from these things; and, when they saw this,

they became Christians, i.e. the moderns, and innovators upon the ancients.

But the life turned away from things, the spiritual life, no longer draws any

nourishment from nature, but "lives only on thoughts," and therefore is no

longer "life," but -- thinking.

Yet it must not be supposed now that the ancients were without thoughts,

just as the most spiritual man is not to be conceived of as if he could be

without life. Rather, they had their thoughts about everything, about the

world, man, the gods, etc., and showed themselves keenly active in bringing

all this to their consciousness. But they did not know thought, even though

they thought of all sorts of things and "worried themselves with their

thoughts." Compare with their position the Christian saying, "My thoughts are

not your thoughts; as the heaven is higher than the earth, so are my thoughts

higher than your thoughts," and remember what was said above about our

child-thoughts.

What is antiquity seeking, then? The true enjoyment of life! You will find

that at bottom it is all the same as "the true life."

The Greek poet Simonides sings: "Health is the noblest good for mortal man,

the next to this is beauty, the third riches acquired without guile, the

fourth the enjoyment of social pleasures in the company of young friends."

These are all good things of life, pleasures of life. What else was Diogenes

of Sinope seeking for than the true enjoyment of life, which he discovered in

having the least possible wants? What else Aristippus, who found it in a

cheery temper under all circumstances? They are seeking for cheery, unclouded

life-courage, for cheeriness; they are seeking to "be of good cheer."

The Stoics want to realize the wise man, the man with *practical

philosophy, the man who knows how to live --* a wise life, therefore; they

find him in contempt for the world, in a life without development, without

spreading out, without friendly relations with the world, thus in the

isolated life, in life as life, not in life with others; only the Stoic

lives, all else is dead for him. The Epicureans, on the contrary, demand a

moving life.

The ancients, as they want to be of good cheer, desire good living (the Jews

especially a long life, blessed with children and goods), eudaemonia,

well-being in the most various forms. Democritus, e. g., praises as such the

"calm of the soul" in which one "lives smoothly, without fear and without

excitement."

So what he thinks is that with this he gets on best, provides for himself the

best lot, and gets through the world best. But as he cannot get rid of the

world -- and in fact cannot for the very reason that his whole activity is

taken up in the effort to get rid of it, i. e., in repelling the world

(for which it is yet necessary that what can be and is repelled should remain

existing, otherwise there would be no longer anything to repel) -- he reaches

at most an extreme degree of liberation, and is distinguishable only in degree

from