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

the less liberated. If he even got as far as the deadening of the earthly

sense, which at last admits only the monotonous whisper of the word "Brahm,"

he nevertheless would not be essentially distinguishable from the sensual

man.

Even the stoic attitude and manly virtue amounts only to this -- that one must

maintain and assert himself against the world; and the ethics of the Stoics

(their only science, since they could tell nothing about the spirit but how it

should behave toward the world, and of nature (physics) only this, that the

wise man must assert himself against it) is not a doctrine of the spirit, but

only a doctrine of the repelling of the world and of self-assertion against

the world. And this consists in "imperturbability and equanimity of life," and

so in the most explicit Roman virtue.

The Romans too (Horace, Cicero, etc.) went no further than this *practical

philosophy*.

The comfort (hedone) of the Epicureans is the same practical philosophy

the Stoics teach, only trickier, more deceitful. They teach only another

behavior toward the world, exhort us only to take a shrewd attitude toward

the world; the world must be deceived, for it is my enemy.

The break with the world is completely carried through by the Skeptics. My

entire relation to the world is "worthless and truthless." Timon says, "The

feelings and thoughts which we draw from the world contain no truth." "What is

truth?" cries Pilate. According to Pyrrho's doctrine the world is neither good

nor bad, neither beautiful nor ugly, etc., but these are predicates which I

give it. Timon says that "in itself nothing is either good or bad, but man

only thinks of it thus or thus"; to face the world only ataraxia

(unmovedness) and aphasia (speechlessness -- or, in other words, isolated

inwardness) are left. There is "no longer any truth to be recognized" in the

world; things contradict themselves; thoughts about things are without

distinction (good and bad are all the same, so that what one calls good

another finds bad); here the recognition of "truth" is at an end, and only the

man without power of recognition, the man who finds in the world nothing

to recognize, is left, and this man just leaves the truth-vacant world where

it is and takes no account of it.

So antiquity gets through with the world of things, the order of the world,

the world as a whole; but to the order of the world, or the things of this

world, belong not only nature, but all relations in which man sees himself

placed by nature, e. g. the family, the community -- in short, the so-called

"natural bonds." With the world of the spirit Christianity then begins. The

man who still faces the world armed is the ancient, the -- heathen (to

which class the Jew, too, as non-Christian, belongs); the man who has come to

be led by nothing but his "heart's pleasure," the interest he takes, his

fellow-feeling, his --spirit, is the modern, the -- Christian.

As the ancients worked toward the conquest of the world and strove to

release man from the heavy trammels of connection with other things, at last

they came also to the dissolution of the State and giving preference to

everything private. Of course community, family, etc., as natural relations,

are burdensome hindrances which diminish my spiritual freedom.

---- * ----

THE MODERNS

"If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature; the old is passed away,

behold, all is become new."(4)

As it was said above, "To the ancients the world was a truth," we must say

here, "To the moderns the spirit was a truth"; but here, as there, we must not

omit the supplement, "a truth whose untruth they tried to get back of, and at

last they really do."

A course similar to that which antiquity took may be demonstrated in

Christianity also, in that the understanding was held a prisoner under the

dominion of the Christian dogmas up to the time preparatory to the

Reformation, but in the pre-Reformation century asserted itself

sophistically and played heretical pranks with all tenets of the faith. And

the talk then was, especially in Italy and at the Roman court, "If only the

heart remains Christian-minded, the understanding may go right on taking its

pleasure."

Long before the Reformation, people were so thoroughly accustomed to fine-spun

"wranglings" that the pope, and most others, looked on Luther's appearance too

as a mere "wrangling of monks" at first. Humanism corresponds to Sophisticism,

and, as in the time of the Sophists Greek life stood in its fullest bloom (the

Periclean age), so the most brilliant things happened in the time of Humanism,

or, as one might perhaps also say, of Machiavellianism (printing, the New

World, etc.). At this time the heart was still far from wanting to relieve

itself of its Christian contents.

But finally the Reformation, like Socrates, took hold seriously of the heart

itself, and since then hearts have kept growing visibly -- more unchristian.

As with Luther people began to take the matter to heart, the outcome of this

step of the Reformation must be that the heart also gets lightened of the

heavy burden of Christian faith. The heart, from day to day more unchristian,

loses the contents with which it had busied itself, till at last nothing but

empty warmheartedness is left it, the quite general love of men, the love of

Man, the consciousness of freedom, "self-consciousness."

Only so is Christianity complete, because it has become bald, withered, and

void of contents. There are now no contents whatever against which the heart

does not mutiny, unless indeed the heart unconsciously or without "self-

consciousness" lets them slip in. The heart criticises to death with

hard-hearted mercilessness everything that wants to make its way in, and is

capable (except, as before, unconsciously or taken by surprise) of no

friendship, no love. What could there be in men to love, since they are all

alike "egoists," none of them man as such, i.e. none spirit only? The

Christian loves only the spirit; but where could one be found who should be

really nothing but spirit?

To have a liking for the corporeal man with hide and hair -- why, that would

no longer be a "spiritual" warmheartedness, it would be treason against "pure"

warmheartedness, the "theoretical regard." For pure warmheartedness is by no

means to be conceived as like that kindliness that gives everybody a friendly

hand-shake; on the contrary, pure warmheartedness is warm-hearted toward

nobody, it is only a theoretical interest, concern for man as man, not as a

person. The person is repulsive to it because of being "egoistic," because of

not being that abstraction, Man. But it is only for the abstraction that one

can have a theoretical regard. To pure warmheartedness or pure theory men

exist only to be criticized, scoffed at, and thoroughly despised; to it, no

less than to the fanatical parson, they are only "filth" and other such nice

things.

Pushed to this extremity of disinterested warmheartedness, we must finally

become conscious that the spirit, which alone the Christian loves, is nothing;

in other words, that the spirit is -- a lie.

What has here been set down roughly, summarily, and doubtless as yet

incomprehensibly, will, it is to be hoped, become clear as we go on.

Let us take up the inheritance left by the ancients, and, as active workmen,

do with it as much as -- can be done with it! The world lies despised at our

feet, far beneath us and our heaven, into which its mighty arms are no longer

thrust and its stupefying breath does not come. Seductively as it may pose, it

can delude nothing but our sense; it cannot lead astray the spirit -- and

spirit alone, after all, we really are. Having once got back of things, the

spirit has also got above them, and become free from their bonds,

emancipated, supernal, free. So speaks "spiritual freedom."

To the spirit which, after long toil, has got rid of the world, the worldless

spirit, nothing is left after the loss of the world and the worldly but -- the

spirit and the spiritual.

Yet, as it has only moved away from the world and made of itself a being *free

from the world*, without being able really to annihilate the world, this

remains to it a stumbling-block that cannot be cleared away, a discredited

existence; and, as, on the other hand, it knows and recognizes nothing but the

spirit and the spiritual, it must perpetually carry about with it the longing

to spiritualize the world, i.e. to redeem it from the "black list."

Therefore, like a youth, it goes about with plans for the redemption or

improvement of the world.

The ancients, we saw, served the natural, the worldly, the natural order of

the world, but they incessantly asked themselves of this service; and, when

they had tired themselves to death in ever-renewed attempts at revolt, then,

among their last sighs, was born to them the God, the "conqueror of the

world." All their doing had been nothing but wisdom of the world, an effort

to get back of the world and above it. And what is the wisdom of the many

following centuries? What did the moderns try to get back of? No longer to get

back of the world, for the ancients had accomplished that; but back of the God

whom the ancients bequeathed to them, back of the God who "is spirit," back of

everything that is the spirit's, the spiritual. But the activity of the

spirit, which "searches even the depths of the Godhead," is theology. If the

ancients have nothing to show but wisdom of the world, the moderns never did

nor do make their way further than to theology. We shall see later that even

the newest revolts against God are nothing but the extremest efforts of

"theology," i. e., theological insurrections.

§1. The Spirit

The realm of spirits is monstrously great, there is an infinite deal of the

spiritual; yet let us look and see what the spirit, this bequest of the

ancients, properly is.

Out of their birth-pangs it came forth, but they themselves could not utter

themselves as spirit; they could give birth to it, it itself must speak. The

"born God, the Son of Man," is the first to utter the word that the spirit,

i.e. he, God, has to do with nothing earthly and no earthly relationship,

but solely, with the spirit and spiritual relationships.

Is my courage, indestructible under all the world's blows, my inflexibility

and my obduracy, perchance already spirit in the full sense, because the world

cannot touch it? Why, then it would not yet be at enmity with the world, and

all its action would consist merely in not succumbing to the world! No, so

long as it does not