The Ego and his Own, Max Stirner [ebook reader for surface pro .txt] 📗
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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
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