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

were seeking the truth, what did your heart then long for? For your master!

You did not aspire to your might, but to a Mighty One, and wanted to exalt a

Mighty One ("Exalt ye the Lord our God!"). The truth, my dear Pilate, is --

the Lord, and all who seek the truth are seeking and praising the Lord. Where

does the Lord exist? Where else but in your head? He is only spirit, and,

wherever you believe you really see him, there he is a -- ghost; for the Lord

is merely something that is thought of, and it was only the Christian pains

and agony to make the invisible visible, the spiritual corporeal, that

generated the ghost and was the frightful misery of the belief in ghosts.

As long as you believe in the truth, you do not believe in yourself, and you

are a -- servant, a -- religious man. You alone are the truth, or rather,

you are more than the truth, which is nothing at all before you. You too do

assuredly ask about the truth, you too do assuredly "criticize," but you do

not ask about a "higher truth" -- to wit, one that should be higher than you

-- nor criticize according to the criterion of such a truth. You address

yourself to thoughts and notions, as you do to the appearances of things, only

for the purpose of making them palatable to you, enjoyable to you, and your

own: you want only to subdue them and become their owner, you want to orient

yourself and feel at home in them, and you find them true, or see them in

their true light, when they can no longer slip away from you, no longer have

any unseized or uncomprehended place, or when they are right for you, when

they are your property. If afterward they become heavier again, if they

wriggle themselves out of your power again, then that is just their untruth --

to wit, your impotence. Your impotence is their power, your humility their

exaltation. Their truth, therefore, is you, or is the nothing which you are

for them and in which they dissolve: their truth is their nothingness.

Only as the property of me do the spirits, the truths, get to rest; and they

then for the first time really are, when they have been deprived of their

sorry existence and made a property of mine, when it is no longer said "the

truth develops itself, rules, asserts itself; history (also a concept) wins

the victory," etc. The truth never has won a victory, but was always my

means to the victory, like the sword ("the sword of truth"). The truth is

dead, a letter, a word, a material that I can use up. All truth by itself is

dead, a corpse; it is alive only in the same way as my lungs are alive -- to

wit, in the measure of my own vitality. Truths are material, like vegetables

and weeds; as to whether vegetable or weed, the decision lies in me.

Objects are to me only material that I use up. Wherever I put my hand I grasp

a truth, which I trim for myself. The truth is certain to me, and I do not

need to long after it. To do the truth a service is in no case my intent; it

is to me only a nourishment for my thinking head, as potatoes are for my

digesting stomach, or as a friend is for my social heart. As long as I have

the humor and force for thinking, every truth serves me only for me to work it

up according to my powers. As reality or worldliness is "vain and a thing of

naught" for Christians, so is the truth for me. It exists, exactly as much as

the things of this world go on existing although the Christian has proved

their nothingness; but it is vain, because it has its value not in itself

but in me. Of itself it is valueless. The truth is a -- creature.

As you produce innumerable things by your activity, yes, shape the earth's

surface anew and set up works of men everywhere, so too you may still

ascertain numberless truths by your thinking, and we will gladly take delight

in them. Nevertheless, as I do not please to hand myself over to serve your

newly discovered machines mechanically, but only help to set them running for

my benefit, so too I will only use your truths, without letting myself be used

for their demands.

All truths beneath me are to my liking; a truth above me, a truth that I

should have to direct myself by, I am not acquainted with. For me there is

no truth, for nothing is more than I! Not even my essence, not even the

essence of man, is more than I! than I, this "drop in the bucket," this

"insignificant man"!

You believe that you have done the utmost when you boldly assert that, because

every time has its own truth, there is no "absolute truth." Why, with this you

nevertheless still leave to each time its truth, and thus you quite genuinely

create an "absolute truth," a truth that no time lacks, because every time,

however its truth may be, still has a "truth."

Is it meant only that people have been thinking in every time, and so have had

thoughts or truths, and that in the subsequent time these were other than they

were in the earlier? No, the word is to be that every time had its "truth of

faith"; and in fact none has yet appeared in which a "higher truth" has not

been recognized, a truth that people believed they must subject themselves to

as "highness and majesty."

Every truth of a time is its fixed idea, and, if people later found another

truth, this always happened only because they sought for another; they only

reformed the folly and put a modern dress on it. For they did want -- who

would dare doubt their justification for this? -- they wanted to be "inspired

by an idea." They wanted to be dominated -- possessed, by a thought! The

most modern ruler of this kind is "our essence," or "man."

For all free criticism a thought was the criterion; for own criticism I am, I

the unspeakable, and so not the merely thought-of; for what is merely thought

of is always speakable, because word and thought coincide. That is true which

is mine, untrue that whose own I am; true, e. g. the union; untrue, the

State and society. "Free and true" criticism takes care for the consistent

dominion of a thought, an idea, a spirit; "own" criticism, for nothing but my

self-enjoyment. But in this the latter is in fact -- and we will not spare

it this "ignominy"! -- like the bestial criticism of instinct. I, like the

criticizing beast, am concerned only for myself, not "for the cause." I am

the criterion of truth, but I am not an idea, but more than idea, e. g.,

unutterable. My criticism is not a "free" criticism, not free from me, and

not "servile," not in the service of an idea, but an own criticism.

True or human criticism makes out only whether something is suitable to man,

to the true man; but by own criticism you ascertain whether it is suitable to

you.

Free criticism busies itself with ideas, and therefore is always

theoretical. However it may rage against ideas, it still does not get clear of

them. It pitches into the ghosts, but it can do this only as it holds them to

be ghosts. The ideas it has to do with do not fully disappear; the morning

breeze of a new day does not scare them away.

The critic may indeed come to ataraxia before ideas, but he never gets rid

of them; i.e. he will never comprehend that above the bodily man there

does not exist something higher -- to wit, liberty, his humanity, etc. He

always has a "calling" of man still left, "humanity." And this idea of

humanity remains unrealized, just because it is an "idea" and is to remain

such.

If, on the other hand, I grasp the idea as my idea, then it is already

realized, because I am its reality; its reality consists in the fact that I,

the bodily, have it.

They say, the idea of liberty realizes itself in the history of the world. The

reverse is the case; this idea is real as a man thinks it, and it is real in

the measure in which it is idea, i. e. in which I think it or have it. It

is not the idea of liberty that develops itself, but men develop themselves,

and, of course, in this self-development develop their thinking too.

In short, the critic is not yet owner, because he still fights with ideas as

with powerful aliens -- as the Christian is not owner of his "bad desires" so

long as he has to combat them; for him who contends against vice, vice

exists.

Criticism remains stuck fast in the "freedom of knowing," the freedom of the

spirit, and the spirit gains its proper freedom when it fills itself with the

pure, true idea; this is the freedom of thinking, which cannot be without

thoughts.

Criticism smites one idea only by another, e. g. that of privilege by that

of manhood, or that of egoism by that of unselfishness.

In general, the beginning of Christianity comes on the stage again in its

critical end, egoism being combated here as there. I am not to make myself

(the individual) count, but the idea, the general.

Why, warfare of the priesthood with egoism, of the spiritually minded with

the worldly-minded, constitutes the substance of all Christian history. In the

newest criticism this war only becomes all-embracing, fanaticism complete.

Indeed, neither can it pass away till it passes thus, after it has had its

life and its rage out.

Whether what I think and do is Christian, what do I care? Whether it is human,

liberal, humane, whether unhuman, illiberal, inhuman, what do I ask about

that? If only it accomplishes what I want, if only I satisfy myself in it,

then overlay it with predicates as you will; it is all alike to me.

Perhaps I too, in the very next moment, defend myself against my former

thoughts; I too am likely to change suddenly my mode of action; but not on

account of its not corresponding to Christianity, not on account of its

running counter to the eternal rights of man, not on account of its affronting

the idea of mankind, humanity, and humanitarianism, but -- because I am no

longer all in it, because it no longer furnishes me any full enjoyment,

because I doubt the earlier thought or no longer please myself in the mode of

action just now practiced. As the world as