The Ego and his Own, Max Stirner [ebook reader for surface pro .txt] 📗
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one, it is "God." "God is spirit." And this supernal "Father in heaven gives
it to those that pray to him."(2)
The man is distinguished from the youth by the fact that he takes the world as
it is, instead of everywhere fancying it amiss and wanting to improve it,
i.e. model it after his ideal; in him the view that one must deal with the
world according to his interest, not according to his ideals, becomes
confirmed.
So long as one knows himself only as spirit, and feels that all the value of
his existence consists in being spirit (it becomes easy for the youth to give
his life, the "bodily life," for a nothing, for the silliest point of honor),
so long it is only thoughts that one has, ideas that he hopes to be able to
realize some day when he has found a sphere of action; thus one has meanwhile
only ideals, unexecuted ideas or thoughts.
Not till one has fallen in love with his corporeal self, and takes a
pleasure in himself as a living flesh-and-blood person -- but it is in mature
years, in the man, that we find it so -- not till then has one a personal or
egoistic interest, i.e. an interest not only of our spirit, e. g., but
of total satisfaction, satisfaction of the whole chap, a selfish interest.
Just compare a man with a youth, and see if he will not appear to you harder,
less magnanimous, more selfish. Is he therefore worse? No, you say; he has
only become more definite, or, as you also call it, more "practical." But the
main point is this, that he makes himself more the center than does the
youth, who is infatuated about other things, e.g. God, fatherland, etc.
Therefore the man shows a second self-discovery. The youth found himself as
spirit and lost himself again in the general spirit, the complete, holy
spirit, Man, mankind -- in short, all ideals; the man finds himself as
embodied spirit.
Boys had only unintellectual interests (i.e. interests devoid of thoughts
and ideas), youths only intellectual ones; the man has bodily, personal,
egoistic interests.
If the child has not an object that it can occupy itself with, it feels
ennui; for it does not yet know how to occupy itself with itself. The
youth, on the contrary, throws the object aside, because for him thoughts
arose out of the object; he occupies himself with his thoughts, his dreams,
occupies himself intellectually, or "his mind is occupied."
The young man includes everything not intellectual under the contemptuous name
of "externalities." If he nevertheless sticks to the most trivial
externalities (e.g. the customs of students' clubs and other formalities),
it is because, and when, he discovers mind in them, i.e. when they are
symbols to him.
As I find myself back of things, and that as mind, so I must later find
myself also back of thoughts -- to wit, as their creator and owner. In the
time of spirits thoughts grew till they overtopped my head, whose offspring
they yet were; they hovered about me and convulsed me like fever-phantasies --
an awful power. The thoughts had become corporeal on their own account, were
ghosts, e. g. God, Emperor, Pope, Fatherland, etc. If I destroy their
corporeity, then I take them back into mine, and say: "I alone am corporeal."
And now I take the world as what it is to me, as mine, as my property; I
refer all to myself.
If as spirit I had thrust away the world in the deepest contempt, so as owner
I thrust spirits or ideas away into their "vanity." They have no longer any
power over me, as no "earthly might" has power over the spirit.
The child was realistic, taken up with the things of this world, till little
by little he succeeded in getting at what was back of these very things; the
youth was idealistic, inspired by thoughts, till he worked his way up to where
he became the man, the egoistic man, who deals with things and thoughts
according to his heart's pleasure, and sets his personal interest above
everything. Finally, the old man? When I become one, there will still be time
enough to speak of that.
Footnotes:
(1) Geist. This word will be translated sometimes "mind" and sometimes
"spirit" in the following pages.
(2) Luke 11, 13.
II.
MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW
---- * ----
How each of us developed himself, what he strove for, attained, or missed,
what objects he formerly pursued and what plans and wishes his heart is now
set on, what transformation his views have experienced, what perturbations his
principles -- in short, how he has today become what yesterday or years ago he
was not -- this he brings out again from his memory with more or less ease,
and he feels with especial vividness what changes have taken place in himself
when he has before his eyes the unrolling of another's life.
Let us therefore look into the activities our forefathers busied themselves
with.
---- * ----
THE ANCIENTSCustom having once given the name of "the ancients" to our pre-Christian
ancestors, we will not throw it up against them that, in comparison with us
experienced people, they ought properly to be called children, but will rather
continue to honor them as our good old fathers. But how have they come to be
antiquated, and who could displace them through his pretended newness?
We know, of course, the revolutionary innovator and disrespectful heir, who
even took away the sanctity of the fathers' sabbath to hallow his Sunday, and
interrupted the course of time to begin at himself with a new chronology; we
know him, and know that it is -- the Christian. But does he remain forever
young, and is he today still the new man, or will he too be superseded, as he
has superseded the "ancients"?
The fathers must doubtless have themselves begotten the young one who entombed
them. Let us then peep at this act of generation.
"To the ancients the world was a truth," says Feuerbach, but he forgets to
make the important addition, "a truth whose untruth they tried to get back of,
and at last really did." What is meant by those words of Feuerbach will be
easily recognized if they are put alongside the Christian thesis of the
"vanity and transitoriness of the world." For, as the Christian can never
convince himself of the vanity of the divine word, but believes in its eternal
and unshakable truth, which, the more its depths are searched, must all the
more brilliantly come to light and triumph, so the ancients on their side
lived in the feeling that the world and mundane relations (e.g. the natural
ties of blood) were the truth before which their powerless "I" must bow. The
very thing on which the ancients set the highest value is spurned by
Christians as the valueless, and what they recognized as truth these brand as
idle lies; the high significance of the fatherland disappears, and the
Christian must regard himself as "a stranger on earth";(1) the sanctity of
funeral rites, from which sprang a work of art like the Antigone of Sophocles,
is designated as a paltry thing ("Let the dead bury their dead"); the
infrangible truth of family ties is represented as an untruth which one cannot
promptly enough get clear of;(2) and so in everything.
If we now see that to the two sides opposite things appear as truth, to one
the natural, to the other the intellectual, to one earthly things and
relations, to the other heavenly (the heavenly fatherland, "Jerusalem that is
above," etc.), it still remains to be considered how the new time and that
undeniable reversal could come out of antiquity. But the ancients themselves
worked toward making their truth a lie.
Let us plunge at once into the midst of the most brilliant years of the
ancients, into the Periclean century. Then the Sophistic culture was
spreading, and Greece made a pastime of what had hitherto been to her a
monstrously serious matter.
The fathers had been enslaved by the undisturbed power of existing things too
long for the posterity not to have to learn by bitter experience to *feel
themselves*. Therefore the Sophists, with courageous sauciness, pronounce the
reassuring words, "Don't be bluffed!" and diffuse the rationalistic doctrine,
"Use your understanding, your wit, your mind, against everything; it is by
having a good and well-drilled understanding that one gets through the world
best, provides for himself the best lot, the most pleasant life." Thus they
recognize in mind man's true weapon against the world. This is why they lay
such stress on dialectic skill, command of language, the art of disputation,
etc. They announce that mind is to be used against everything; but they are
still far removed from the holiness of the Spirit, for to them it is a
means, a weapon, as trickery and defiance serve children for the same
purpose; their mind is the unbribable understanding.
Today we should call that a one-sided culture of the understanding, and add
the warning, "Cultivate not only your understanding, but also, and especially,
your heart." Socrates did the same. For, if the heart did not become free from
its natural impulses, but remained filled with the most fortuitous contents
and, as an uncriticized avidity, altogether in the power of things, i.e.
nothing but a vessel of the most various appetites -- then it was
unavoidable that the free understanding must serve the "bad heart" and was
ready to justify everything that the wicked heart desired.
Therefore Socrates says that it is not enough for one to use his understanding
in all things, but it is a question of what cause one exerts it for. We
should now say, one must serve the "good cause." But serving the good cause is
-- being moral. Hence Socrates is the founder of ethics.
Certainly the principle of the Sophistic doctrine must lead to the possibility
that the blindest and most dependent slave of his desires might yet be an
excellent sophist, and, with keen understanding, trim and expound everything
in favor of his coarse heart. What could there be for which a "good reason"
might not be found, or which might not be defended through thick and thin?
Therefore Socrates says: "You must be 'pure-hearted' if your shrewdness is to
be valued." At this point begins the second period of Greek liberation of the
mind, the period of purity of heart. For the first was brought to a close by
the Sophists in their proclaiming the omnipotence of the understanding. But
the heart remained worldly-minded, remained a servant of the world, always
affected by worldly wishes. This coarse heart was to be cultivated from now on
-- the era of culture of the heart. But
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