The Ego and his Own - Max Stirner (ebook reader screen .TXT) 📗
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sense, which at last admits only the monotonous whisper of the word "Brahm,"
he nevertheless would not be essentially distinguishable from the sensual
man.
Even the stoic attitude and manly virtue amounts only to this -- that one must
maintain and assert himself against the world; and the ethics of the Stoics
(their only science, since they could tell nothing about the spirit but how it
should behave toward the world, and of nature (physics) only this, that the
wise man must assert himself against it) is not a doctrine of the spirit, but
only a doctrine of the repelling of the world and of self-assertion against
the world. And this consists in "imperturbability and equanimity of life," and
so in the most explicit Roman virtue.
The Romans too (Horace, Cicero, etc.) went no further than this *practical
philosophy*.
The comfort (hedone) of the Epicureans is the same practical philosophy
the Stoics teach, only trickier, more deceitful. They teach only another
behavior toward the world, exhort us only to take a shrewd attitude toward
the world; the world must be deceived, for it is my enemy.
The break with the world is completely carried through by the Skeptics. My
entire relation to the world is "worthless and truthless." Timon says, "The
feelings and thoughts which we draw from the world contain no truth." "What is
truth?" cries Pilate. According to Pyrrho's doctrine the world is neither good
nor bad, neither beautiful nor ugly, etc., but these are predicates which I
give it. Timon says that "in itself nothing is either good or bad, but man
only thinks of it thus or thus"; to face the world only ataraxia
(unmovedness) and aphasia (speechlessness -- or, in other words, isolated
inwardness) are left. There is "no longer any truth to be recognized" in the
world; things contradict themselves; thoughts about things are without
distinction (good and bad are all the same, so that what one calls good
another finds bad); here the recognition of "truth" is at an end, and only the
man without power of recognition, the man who finds in the world nothing
to recognize, is left, and this man just leaves the truth-vacant world where
it is and takes no account of it.
So antiquity gets through with the world of things, the order of the world,
the world as a whole; but to the order of the world, or the things of this
world, belong not only nature, but all relations in which man sees himself
placed by nature, e. g. the family, the community -- in short, the so-called
"natural bonds." With the world of the spirit Christianity then begins. The
man who still faces the world armed is the ancient, the -- heathen (to
which class the Jew, too, as non-Christian, belongs); the man who has come to
be led by nothing but his "heart's pleasure," the interest he takes, his
fellow-feeling, his --spirit, is the modern, the -- Christian.
As the ancients worked toward the conquest of the world and strove to
release man from the heavy trammels of connection with other things, at last
they came also to the dissolution of the State and giving preference to
everything private. Of course community, family, etc., as natural relations,
are burdensome hindrances which diminish my spiritual freedom.
---- * ----
THE MODERNS"If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature; the old is passed away,
behold, all is become new."(4)
As it was said above, "To the ancients the world was a truth," we must say
here, "To the moderns the spirit was a truth"; but here, as there, we must not
omit the supplement, "a truth whose untruth they tried to get back of, and at
last they really do."
A course similar to that which antiquity took may be demonstrated in
Christianity also, in that the understanding was held a prisoner under the
dominion of the Christian dogmas up to the time preparatory to the
Reformation, but in the pre-Reformation century asserted itself
sophistically and played heretical pranks with all tenets of the faith. And
the talk then was, especially in Italy and at the Roman court, "If only the
heart remains Christian-minded, the understanding may go right on taking its
pleasure."
Long before the Reformation, people were so thoroughly accustomed to fine-spun
"wranglings" that the pope, and most others, looked on Luther's appearance too
as a mere "wrangling of monks" at first. Humanism corresponds to Sophisticism,
and, as in the time of the Sophists Greek life stood in its fullest bloom (the
Periclean age), so the most brilliant things happened in the time of Humanism,
or, as one might perhaps also say, of Machiavellianism (printing, the New
World, etc.). At this time the heart was still far from wanting to relieve
itself of its Christian contents.
But finally the Reformation, like Socrates, took hold seriously of the heart
itself, and since then hearts have kept growing visibly -- more unchristian.
As with Luther people began to take the matter to heart, the outcome of this
step of the Reformation must be that the heart also gets lightened of the
heavy burden of Christian faith. The heart, from day to day more unchristian,
loses the contents with which it had busied itself, till at last nothing but
empty warmheartedness is left it, the quite general love of men, the love of
Man, the consciousness of freedom, "self-consciousness."
Only so is Christianity complete, because it has become bald, withered, and
void of contents. There are now no contents whatever against which the heart
does not mutiny, unless indeed the heart unconsciously or without "self-
consciousness" lets them slip in. The heart criticises to death with
hard-hearted mercilessness everything that wants to make its way in, and is
capable (except, as before, unconsciously or taken by surprise) of no
friendship, no love. What could there be in men to love, since they are all
alike "egoists," none of them man as such, i.e. none spirit only? The
Christian loves only the spirit; but where could one be found who should be
really nothing but spirit?
To have a liking for the corporeal man with hide and hair -- why, that would
no longer be a "spiritual" warmheartedness, it would be treason against "pure"
warmheartedness, the "theoretical regard." For pure warmheartedness is by no
means to be conceived as like that kindliness that gives everybody a friendly
hand-shake; on the contrary, pure warmheartedness is warm-hearted toward
nobody, it is only a theoretical interest, concern for man as man, not as a
person. The person is repulsive to it because of being "egoistic," because of
not being that abstraction, Man. But it is only for the abstraction that one
can have a theoretical regard. To pure warmheartedness or pure theory men
exist only to be criticized, scoffed at, and thoroughly despised; to it, no
less than to the fanatical parson, they are only "filth" and other such nice
things.
Pushed to this extremity of disinterested warmheartedness, we must finally
become conscious that the spirit, which alone the Christian loves, is nothing;
in other words, that the spirit is -- a lie.
What has here been set down roughly, summarily, and doubtless as yet
incomprehensibly, will, it is to be hoped, become clear as we go on.
Let us take up the inheritance left by the ancients, and, as active workmen,
do with it as much as -- can be done with it! The world lies despised at our
feet, far beneath us and our heaven, into which its mighty arms are no longer
thrust and its stupefying breath does not come. Seductively as it may pose, it
can delude nothing but our sense; it cannot lead astray the spirit -- and
spirit alone, after all, we really are. Having once got back of things, the
spirit has also got above them, and become free from their bonds,
emancipated, supernal, free. So speaks "spiritual freedom."
To the spirit which, after long toil, has got rid of the world, the worldless
spirit, nothing is left after the loss of the world and the worldly but -- the
spirit and the spiritual.
Yet, as it has only moved away from the world and made of itself a being *free
from the world*, without being able really to annihilate the world, this
remains to it a stumbling-block that cannot be cleared away, a discredited
existence; and, as, on the other hand, it knows and recognizes nothing but the
spirit and the spiritual, it must perpetually carry about with it the longing
to spiritualize the world, i.e. to redeem it from the "black list."
Therefore, like a youth, it goes about with plans for the redemption or
improvement of the world.
The ancients, we saw, served the natural, the worldly, the natural order of
the world, but they incessantly asked themselves of this service; and, when
they had tired themselves to death in ever-renewed attempts at revolt, then,
among their last sighs, was born to them the God, the "conqueror of the
world." All their doing had been nothing but wisdom of the world, an effort
to get back of the world and above it. And what is the wisdom of the many
following centuries? What did the moderns try to get back of? No longer to get
back of the world, for the ancients had accomplished that; but back of the God
whom the ancients bequeathed to them, back of the God who "is spirit," back of
everything that is the spirit's, the spiritual. But the activity of the
spirit, which "searches even the depths of the Godhead," is theology. If the
ancients have nothing to show but wisdom of the world, the moderns never did
nor do make their way further than to theology. We shall see later that even
the newest revolts against God are nothing but the extremest efforts of
"theology," i. e., theological insurrections.
§1. The Spirit
The realm of spirits is monstrously great, there is an infinite deal of the
spiritual; yet let us look and see what the spirit, this bequest of the
ancients, properly is.
Out of their birth-pangs it came forth, but they themselves could not utter
themselves as spirit; they could give birth to it, it itself must speak. The
"born God, the Son of Man," is the first to utter the word that the spirit,
i.e. he, God, has to do with nothing earthly and no earthly relationship,
but solely, with the spirit and spiritual relationships.
Is my courage, indestructible under all the world's blows, my inflexibility
and my obduracy, perchance already spirit in the full sense, because the world
cannot touch it? Why, then it would not yet be at enmity with the world, and
all its action would consist merely in not succumbing to the world! No, so
long as it does not
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