The Ego and his Own, Max Stirner [ebook reader for surface pro .txt] 📗
- Author: Max Stirner
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intramundane should really become the mundane itself: there is enough left
that does and must maintain itself unpenetrated as the "bad," irrational,
accidental, "egoistic," the "mundane" in the bad sense. Christianity begins
with God's becoming man, and carries on its work of conversion and redemption
through all time in order to prepare for God a reception in all men and in
everything human, and to penetrate everything with the spirit: it sticks to
preparing a place for the "spirit."
When the accent was at last laid on Man or mankind, it was again the idea that
they "pronounced eternal. " "Man does not die!" They thought they had now
found the reality of the idea: Man is the I of history, of the world's
history; it is he, this ideal, that really develops, i.e. realizes,
himself. He is the really real and corporeal one, for history is his body, in
which individuals are only members. Christ is the I of the world's history,
even of the pre-Christian; in modern apprehension it is man, the figure of
Christ has developed into the figure of man: man as such, man absolutely, is
the "central point" of history. In "man" the imaginary beginning returns
again; for "man" is as imaginary as Christ is. "Man," as the I of the world's
history, closes the cycle of Christian apprehensions.
Christianity's magic circle would be broken if the strained relation between
existence and calling, e. g., between me as I am and me as I should be,
ceased; it persists only as the longing of the idea for its bodiliness, and
vanishes with the relaxing separation of the two: only when the idea remains
-- idea, as man or mankind is indeed a bodiless idea, is Christianity still
extant. The corporeal idea, the corporeal or "completed" spirit, floats before
the Christian as "the end of the days" or as the "goal of history"; it is not
present time to him.
The individual can only have a part in the founding of the Kingdom of God, or,
according to the modern notion of the same thing, in the development and
history of humanity; and only so far as he has a part in it does a Christian,
or according to the modern expression human, value pertain to him; for the
rest he is dust and a worm-bag. That the individual is of himself a world's
history, and possesses his property in the rest of the world's history, goes
beyond what is Christian. To the Christian the world's history is the higher
thing, because it is the history of Christ or "man"; to the egoist only his
history has value, because he wants to develop only himself not the
mankind-idea, not God's plan, not the purposes of Providence, not liberty,
etc. He does not look upon himself as a tool of the idea or a vessel of God,
he recognizes no calling, he does not fancy that he exists for the further
development of mankind and that he must contribute his mite to it, but he
lives himself out, careless of how well or ill humanity may fare thereby. If
it were not open to confusion with the idea that a state of nature is to be
praised, one might recall Lenau's "Three Gypsies."- What, am I in the world
to realize ideas? To do my part by my citizenship, say, toward the realization
of the idea "State," or by marriage, as husband and father, to bring the idea
of the family into an existence? What does such a calling concern me! I live
after a calling as little as the flower grows and gives fragrance after a
calling.
The ideal "Man" is realized when the Christian apprehension turns about and
becomes the proposition, "I, this unique one, am man." The conceptual
question, "what is man?" -- has then changed into the personal question, "who
is man?" With "what" the concept was sought for, in order to realize it; with
"who" it is no longer any question at all, but the answer is personally on
hand at once in the asker: the question answers itself.
They say of God, "Names name thee not." That holds good of me: no concept
expresses me, nothing that is designated as my essence exhausts me; they are
only names. Likewise they say of God that he is perfect and has no calling to
strive after perfection. That too holds good of me alone.
I am owner of my might, and I am so when I know myself as unique. In the
unique one the owner himself returns into his creative nothing, of which he
is born. Every higher essence above me, be it God, be it man, weakens the
feeling of my uniqueness, and pales only before the sun of this consciousness.
If I concern myself for myself,(1) the unique one, then my concern rests on
its transitory, mortal creator, who consumes himself, and I may say:
All things are nothing to me.(2)
THE END
Footnotes:
(1) [Stell' Ich auf Mich meine Sache. Literally, "if I set my affair on
myself."]
(2) ["Ich hab' Mein' Sach' auf Nichts gestellt." Literally, "I have set my
affair on nothing." See note on p. 8.]
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