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

is to be

rational throughout. God torments himself with the devil, and the philosopher

does it with unreason and the accidental. God lets no being go its own gait,

and Man likewise wants to make us walk only in human wise.

But whoso is full of sacred (religious, moral, humane) love loves only the

spook, the "true man," and persecutes with dull mercilessness the individual,

the real man, under the phlegmatic legal title of measures against the "un-

man." He finds it praiseworthy and indispensable to exercise pitilessness in

the harshest measure; for love to the spook or generality commands him to hate

him who is not ghostly, i.e. the egoist or individual; such is the meaning

of the renowned love-phenomenon that is called "justice."

The criminally arraigned man can expect no forbearance, and no one spreads a

friendly veil over his unhappy nakedness. Without emotion the stern judge

tears the last rags of excuse from the body of the poor accused; without

compassion the jailer drags him into his damp abode; without placability, when

the time of punishment has expired, he thrusts the branded man again among

men, his good, Christian, loyal brethren, who contemptuously spit on him. Yes,

without grace a criminal "deserving of death" is led to the scaffold, and

before the eyes of a jubilating crowd the appeased moral law celebrates its

sublime -- revenge. For only one can live, the moral law or the criminal.

Where criminals live unpunished, the moral law has fallen; and, where this

prevails, those must go down. Their enmity is indestructible.

The Christian age is precisely that of mercy, love, solicitude to have men

receive what is due them, yes, to bring them to fulfil their human (divine)

calling. Therefore the principle has been put foremost for intercourse, that

this and that is man's essence and consequently his calling, to which either

God has called him or (according to the concepts of today) his being man (the

species) calls him. Hence the zeal for conversion. That the Communists and the

humane expect from man more than the Christians do does not change the

standpoint in the least. Man shall get what is human! If it was enough for the

pious that what was divine became his part, the humane demand that he be not

curtailed of what is human. Both set themselves against what is egoistic. Of

course; for what is egoistic cannot be accorded to him or vested in him (a

fief); he must procure it for himself. Love imparts the former, the latter can

be given to me by myself alone.

Intercourse hitherto has rested on love, regardful behavior, doing for each

other. As one owed it to himself to make himself blessed, or owed himself the

bliss of taking up into himself the supreme essence and bringing it to a

vérité (a truth and reality), so one owed it to others to help them

realize their essence and their calling: in both cases one owed it to the

essence of man to contribute to its realization.

But one owes it neither to himself to make anything out of himself, nor to

others to make anything out of them; for one owes nothing to his essence and

that of others. Intercourse resting on essence is an intercourse with the

spook, not with anything real. If I hold intercourse with the supreme essence,

I am not holding intercourse with myself, and, if I hold intercourse with the

essence of man, I am not holding intercourse with men.

The natural man's love becomes through culture a commandment. But as

commandment it belongs to Man as such. not to me; it is my essence,(85)

about which much ado(86) is made. not my property. Man, i.e. humanity,

presents that demand to me; love is demanded, it is my duty. Instead,

therefore, of being really won for me, it has been won for the generality,

Man, as his property or peculiarity: "it becomes man, every man, to love;

love is the duty and calling of man," etc.

Consequently I must again vindicate love for myself, and deliver it out of

the power of Man with the great M.

What was originally mine, but accidentally mine, instinctively mine, I was

invested with as the property of Man; I became feoffee in loving, I became the

retainer of mankind, only a specimen of this species, and acted, loving, not

as I, but as man, as a specimen of man, the humanly. The whole condition

of civilization is the feudal system, the property being Man's or mankind's,

not mine. A monstrous feudal State was founded, the individual robbed of

everything, everything left to "man." The individual had to appear at last as

a "sinner through and through."

Am I perchance to have no lively interest in the person of another, are his

joy and his weal not to lie at my heart, is the enjoyment that I furnish him

not to be more to me than other enjoyments of my own? On the contrary, I can

with joy sacrifice to him numberless enjoyments, I can deny myself numberless

things for the enhancement of his pleasure, and I can hazard for him what

without him was the dearest to me, my life, my welfare, my freedom. Why, it

constitutes my pleasure and my happiness to refresh myself with his happiness

and his pleasure. But myself, my own self, I do not sacrifice to him, but

remain an egoist and -- enjoy him. If I sacrifice to him everything that but

for my love to him I should keep, that is very simple, and even more usual in

life than it seems to be; but it proves nothing further than that this one

passion is more powerful in me than all the rest. Christianity too teaches us

to sacrifice all other passions to this. But, if to one passion I sacrifice

others, I do not on that account go so far as to sacrifice myself, nor

sacrifice anything of that whereby I truly am myself; I do not sacrifice my

peculiar value, my ownness. Where this bad case occurs, love cuts no better

figure than any other passion that I obey blindly. The ambitious man, who is

carried away by ambition and remains deaf to every warning that a calm moment

begets in him, has let this passion grow up into a despot against whom he

abandons all power of dissolution: he has given up himself, because he cannot

dissolve himself, and consequently cannot absolve himself from the passion:

he is possessed.

I love men too -- not merely individuals, but every one. But I love them with

the consciousness of egoism; I love them because love makes me happy, I love

because loving is natural to me, because it pleases me. I know no "commandment

of love." I have a fellow-feeling with every feeling being, and their

torment torments, their refreshment refreshes me too; I can kill them, not

torture them. Per contra, the high-souled, virtuous Philistine prince

Rudolph in The Mysteries of Paris, because the wicked provoke his

"indignation," plans their torture. That fellow-feeling proves only that the

feeling of those who feel is mine too, my property; in opposition to which the

pitiless dealing of the "righteous" man (e. g. against notary Ferrand) is

like the unfeelingness of that robber [Procrustes] who cut off or stretched

his prisoners' legs to the measure of his bedstead: Rudolph's bedstead, which

he cuts men to fit, is the concept of the "good." The for right, virtue, etc.,

makes people hard-hearted and intolerant. Rudolph does not feel like the

notary, but the reverse; he feels that "it serves the rascal right"; that is

no fellow-feeling.

You love man, therefore you torture the individual man, the egoist; your

philanthropy (love of men) is the tormenting of men.

If I see the loved one suffer, I suffer with him, and I know no rest till I

have tried everything to comfort and cheer him; if I see him glad, I too

become glad over his joy. From this it does not follow that suffering or joy

is caused in me by the same thing that brings out this effect in him, as is

sufficiently proved by every bodily pain which I do not feel as he does; his

tooth pains him, but his pain pains me.

But, because I cannot bear the troubled crease on the beloved forehead, for

that reason, and therefore for my sake, I kiss it away. If I did not love this

person, he might go right on making creases, they would not trouble me; I am

only driving away my trouble.

How now, has anybody or anything, whom and which I do not love, a right to

be loved by me? Is my love first, or is his right first? Parents, kinsfolk,

fatherland, nation, native town, etc., finally fellowmen in general

("brothers, fraternity"), assert that they have a right to my love, and lay

claim to it without further ceremony. They look upon it as their property,

and upon me, if I do not respect this, as a robber who takes from them what

pertains to them and is theirs. I should love. If love is a commandment and

law, then I must be educated into it, cultivated up to it, and, if I trespass

against it, punished. Hence people will exercise as strong a "moral influence"

as possible on me to bring me to love. And there is no doubt that one can work

up and seduce men to love as one can to other passions -- if you like, to

hate. Hate runs through whole races merely because the ancestors of the one

belonged to the Guelphs, those of the other to the Ghibellines.

But love is not a commandment, but, like each of my feelings, *my property.

Acquire, i.e.* purchase, my property, and then I will make it over to you. A

church, a nation, a fatherland, a family, etc., that does not know how to

acquire my love, I need not love; and I fix the purchase price of my love

quite at my pleasure.

Selfish love is far distant from unselfish, mystical, or romantic love. One

can love everything possible, not merely men, but an "object" in general

(wine, one's fatherland, etc.). Love becomes blind and crazy by a must

taking it out of my power (infatuation), romantic by a should entering into

it, i.e. by the "objects" becoming sacred for me, or my becoming bound to it

by duty, conscience, oath. Now the object no longer exists for me, but I for

it.

Love is a possessedness, not as my feeling -- as such I rather keep it in my

possession as property -- but through the alienness of the object. For

religious love consists in the commandment to love in the beloved a "holy

one," or to adhere to a holy one; for unselfish love there are objects

absolutely