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

busy itself with itself alone, so long as it does not have

to do with its world, the spiritual, alone, it is not free spirit, but

only the "spirit of this world," the spirit fettered to it. The spirit is free

spirit, i. e., really spirit, only in a world of its own; in "this," the

earthly world, it is a stranger. Only through a spiritual world is the spirit

really spirit, for "this" world does not understand it and does not know how

to keep "the maiden from a foreign land"(5) from departing.

But where is it to get this spiritual world? Where but out of itself? It must

reveal itself; and the words that it speaks, the revelations in which it

unveils itself, these are its world. As a visionary lives and has his world

only in the visionary pictures that he himself creates, as a crazy man

generates for himself his own dream-world, without which he could not be

crazy, so the spirit must create for itself its spirit world, and is not

spirit till it creates it.

Thus its creations make it spirit, and by its creatures we know it, the

creator; in them it lives, they are its world.

Now, what is the spirit? It is the creator of a spiritual world! Even in you

and me people do not recognize spirit till they see that we have appropriated

to ourselves something spiritual, -- i.e. though thoughts may have been set

before us, we have at least brought them to live in ourselves; for, as long as

we were children, the most edifying thoughts might have been laid before us

without our wishing, or being able, to reproduce them in ourselves. So the

spirit also exists only when it creates something spiritual; it is real only

together with the spiritual, its creature.

As, then, we know it by its works, the question is what these works are. But

the works or children of the spirit are nothing else but -- spirits.

If I had before me Jews, Jews of the true metal, I should have to stop here

and leave them standing before this mystery as for almost two thousand years

they have remained standing before it, unbelieving and without knowledge. But,

as you, my dear reader, are at least not a full-blooded Jew -- for such a one

will not go astray as far as this -- we will still go along a bit of road

together, till perhaps you too turn your back on me because I laugh in your

face.

If somebody told you were altogether spirit, you would take hold of your body

and not believe him, but answer: "I have a spirit, no doubt, but do not

exist only as spirit, but as a man with a body." You would still distinguish

yourself from "your spirit." "But," replies he, "it is your destiny, even

though now you are yet going about in the fetters of the body, to be one day a

'blessed spirit,' and, however you may conceive of the future aspect of your

spirit, so much is yet certain, that in death you will put off this body and

yet keep yourself, i.e. your spirit, for all eternity; accordingly your

spirit is the eternal and true in you, the body only a dwelling here below,

which you may leave and perhaps exchange for another."

Now you believe him! For the present, indeed, you are not spirit only; but,

when you emigrate from the mortal body, as one day you must, then you will

have to help yourself without the body, and therefore it is needful that you

be prudent and care in time for your proper self. "What should it profit a man

if he gained the whole world and yet suffered damage in his soul?"

But, even granted that doubts, raised in the course of time against the tenets

of the Christian faith, have long since robbed you of faith in the immortality

of your spirit, you have nevertheless left one tenet undisturbed, and still

ingenuously adhere to the one truth, that the spirit is your better part, and

that the spiritual has greater claims on you than anything else. Despite all

your atheism, in zeal against egoism you concur with the believers in

immortality.

But whom do you think of under the name of egoist? A man who, instead of

living to an idea, i. e., a spiritual thing, and sacrificing to it his

personal advantage, serves the latter. A good patriot brings his sacrifice to

the altar of the fatherland; but it cannot be disputed that the fatherland is

an idea, since for beasts incapable of mind,(6) or children as yet without

mind, there is no fatherland and no patriotism. Now, if any one does not

approve himself as a good patriot, he betrays his egoism with reference to the

fatherland. And so the matter stands in innumerable other cases: he who in

human society takes the benefit of a prerogative sins egoistically against the

idea of equality; he who exercises dominion is blamed as an egoist against the

idea of liberty, -- etc.

You despise the egoist because he puts the spiritual in the background as

compared with the personal, and has his eyes on himself where you would like

to see him act to favor an idea. The distinction between you is that he makes

himself the central point, but you the spirit; or that you cut your identity

in two and exalt your "proper self," the spirit, to be ruler of the paltrier

remainder, while he will hear nothing of this cutting in two, and pursues

spiritual and material interests just as he pleases. You think, to be sure,

that you are falling foul of those only who enter into no spiritual interest

at all, but in fact you curse at everybody who does not look on the spiritual

interest as his "true and highest" interest. You carry your knightly service

for this beauty so far that you affirm her to be the only beauty of the world.

You live not to yourself, but to your spirit and to what is the spirit's,

i. e. ideas.

As the spirit exists only in its creating of the spiritual, let us take a look

about us for its first creation. If only it has accomplished this, there

follows thenceforth a natural propagation of creations, as according to the

myth only the first human beings needed to be created, the rest of the race

propagating of itself. The first creation, on the other hand, must come forth

"out of nothing" -- i.e. the spirit has toward its realization nothing but

itself, or rather it has not yet even itself, but must create itself; hence

its first creation is itself, the spirit. Mystical as this sounds, we yet go

through it as an every-day experience. Are you a thinking being before you

think? In creating the first thought you create yourself, the thinking one;

for you do not think before you think a thought, i.e. have a thought. Is it

not your singing that first makes you a singer, your talking that makes you a

talker? Now, so too it is the production of the spiritual that first makes you

a spirit.

Meantime, as you distinguish yourself from the thinker, singer, and talker,

so you no less distinguish yourself from the spirit, and feel very clearly

that you are something beside spirit. But, as in the thinking ego hearing and

sight easily vanish in the enthusiasm of thought, so you also have been seized

by the spirit-enthusiasm, and you now long with all your might to become

wholly spirit and to be dissolved in spirit. The spirit is your ideal, the

unattained, the other-worldly; spirit is the name of your -- god, "God is

spirit."

Against all that is not spirit you are a zealot, and therefore you play the

zealot against yourself who cannot get rid of a remainder of the

non-spiritual. Instead of saying, "I am more than spirit," you say with

contrition, "I am less than spirit; and spirit, pure spirit, or the spirit

that is nothing but spirit, I can only think of, but am not; and, since I am

not it, it is another, exists as another, whom I call 'God'."

It lies in the nature of the case that the spirit that is to exist as pure

spirit must be an otherworldly one, for, since I am not it, it follows that it

can only be outside me; since in any case a human being is not fully

comprehended in the concept "spirit," it follows that the pure spirit, the

spirit as such, can only be outside of men, beyond the human world -- not

earthly, but heavenly.

Only from this disunion in which I and the spirit lie; only because "I" and

"spirit" are not names for one and the same thing, but different names for

completely different things; only because I am not spirit and spirit not I --

only from this do we get a quite tautological explanation of the necessity

that the spirit dwells in the other world, i. e. is God.

But from this it also appears how thoroughly theological is the liberation

that Feuerbach(7) is laboring to give us. What he says is that we had only

mistaken our own essence, and therefore looked for it in the other world, but

that now, when we see that God was only our human essence, we must recognize

it again as ours and move it back out of the other world into this. To God,

who is spirit, Feuerbach gives the name "Our Essence." Can we put up with

this, that "Our Essence" is brought into opposition to us -- that we are

split into an essential and an unessential self? Do we not therewith go back

into the dreary misery of seeing ourselves banished out of ourselves?

What have we gained, then, when for a variation we have transferred into

ourselves the divine outside us? Are we that which is in us? As little as we

are that which is outside us. I am as little my heart as I am my sweetheart,

this "other self" of mine. Just because we are not the spirit that dwells in

us, just for that reason we had to take it and set it outside us; it was not

we, did not coincide with us, and therefore we could, not think of it as

existing otherwise than outside us, on the other side from us, in the other

world.

With the strength of despair Feuerbach clutches at the total substance of

Christianity, not to throw it away, no, to drag it to himself, to draw it, the

long-yearned-for, ever-distant, out of its heaven with a last effort, and keep

it by him forever. Is not that a clutch of the uttermost despair, a clutch for

life or death, and is it not at the same time the Christian yearning and

hungering for the other world? The hero wants not