The Ego and his Own by Max Stirner (best memoirs of all time TXT) 📖

us at once to our attitude toward them.

Sacred above all, e. g., is the "holy Spirit," sacred the truth, sacred are

right, law, a good cause, majesty, marriage, the common good, order, the

fatherland, etc.

Wheels in the Head

Man, your head is haunted; you have wheels in your head! You imagine great

things, and depict to yourself a whole world of gods that has an existence for

you, a spirit-realm to which you suppose yourself to be called, an ideal that

beckons to you. You have a fixed idea!

Do not think that I am jesting or speaking figuratively when I regard those

persons who cling to the Higher, and (because the vast majority belongs under

this head) almost the whole world of men, as veritable fools, fools in a

madhouse. What is it, then, that is called a "fixed idea"? An idea that has

subjected the man to itself. When you recognize, with regard to such a fixed

idea, that it is a folly, you shut its slave up in an asylum. And is the truth

of the faith, say, which we are not to doubt; the majesty of (e. g.) the

people, which we are not to strike at (he who does is guilty of --

lese-majesty); virtue, against which the censor is not to let a word pass,

that morality may be kept pure; -- are these not "fixed ideas"? Is not all the

stupid chatter of (e. g.) most of our newspapers the babble of fools who

suffer from the fixed idea of morality, legality, Christianity, etc., and only

seem to go about free because the madhouse in which they walk takes in so

broad a space? Touch the fixed idea of such a fool, and you will at once have

to guard your back against the lunatic's stealthy malice. For these great

lunatics are like the little so-called lunatics in this point too -- that they

assail by stealth him who touches their fixed idea. They first steal his

weapon, steal free speech from him, and then they fall upon him with their

nails. Every day now lays bare the cowardice and vindictiveness of these

maniacs, and the stupid populace hurrahs for their crazy measures. One must

read the journals of this period, and must hear the Philistines talk, to get

the horrible conviction that one is shut up in a house with fools. "Thou shalt

not call thy brother a fool; if thou dost -- etc." But I do not fear the

curse, and I say, my brothers are arch-fools. Whether a poor fool of the

insane asylum is possessed by the fancy that he is God the Father, Emperor of

Japan, the Holy Spirit, etc., or whether a citizen in comfortable

circumstances conceives that it is his mission to be a good Christian, a

faithful Protestant, a loyal citizen, a virtuous man -- both these are one and

the same "fixed idea." He who has never tried and dared not to be a good

Christian, a faithful Protestant, a virtuous man, etc., is possessed and

prepossessed(22) by faith, virtuousness, etc. Just as the schoolmen

philosophized only inside the belief of the church; as Pope Benedict XIV

wrote fat books inside the papist superstition, without ever throwing a

doubt upon this belief; as authors fill whole folios on the State without

calling in question the fixed idea of the State itself; as our newspapers are

crammed with politics because they are conjured into the fancy that man was

created to be a zoon politicon -- so also subjects vegetate in subjection,

virtuous people in virtue, liberals in humanity, without ever putting to these

fixed ideas of theirs the searching knife of criticism. Undislodgeable, like a

madman's delusion, those thoughts stand on a firm footing, and he who doubts

them -- lays hands on the sacred! Yes, the "fixed idea," that is the truly

sacred!

Is it perchance only people possessed by the devil that meet us, or do we as

often come upon people possessed in the contrary way -- possessed by "the

good," by virtue, morality, the law, or some "principle" or other? Possessions

of the devil are not the only ones. God works on us, and the devil does; the

former "workings of grace," the latter "workings of the devil." Possessed(23)

people are set(24) in their opinions.

If the word "possession" displeases you, then call it prepossession; yes,

since the spirit possesses you, and all "inspirations" come from it, call it

-- inspiration and enthusiasm. I add that complete enthusiasm -- for we cannot

stop with the sluggish, half- way kind -- is called fanaticism.

It is precisely among cultured people that fanaticism is at home; for man is

cultured so far as he takes an interest in spiritual things, and interest in

spiritual things, when it is alive, is and must be fanaticism; it is a

fanatical interest in the sacred (fanum). Observe our liberals, look into

the Sächsischen Vaterlandsblätter, hear what Schlosser says:(25) "Holbach's

company constituted a regular plot against the traditional doctrine and the

existing system, and its members were as fanatical on behalf of their unbelief

as monks and priests, Jesuits and Pietists, Methodists, missionary and Bible

societies, commonly are for mechanical worship and orthodoxy."

Take notice how a "moral man" behaves, who today often thinks he is through

with God and throws off Christianity as a bygone thing. If you ask him whether

he has ever doubted that the copulation of brother and sister is incest, that

monogamy is the truth of marriage, that filial piety is a sacred duty, then a

moral shudder will come over him at the conception of one's being allowed to

touch his sister as wife also, etc. And whence this shudder? Because he

believes in those moral commandments. This moral faith is deeply rooted in

his breast. Much as he rages against the pious Christians, he himself has

nevertheless as thoroughly remained a Christian -- to wit, a moral

Christian. In the form of morality Christianity holds him a prisoner, and a

prisoner under faith. Monogamy is to be something sacred, and he who may

live in bigamy is punished as a criminal; he who commits incest suffers as a

criminal. Those who are always crying that religion is not to be regarded in

the State, and the Jew is to be a citizen equally with the Christian, show

themselves in accord with this. Is not this of incest and monogamy a *dogma of

faith?* Touch it, and you will learn by experience how this moral man is a

hero of faith too, not less than Krummacher, not less than Philip II. These

fight for the faith of the Church, he for the faith of the State, or the moral

laws of the State; for articles of faith, both condemn him who acts otherwise

than their faith will allow. The brand of "crime" is stamped upon him, and

he may languish in reformatories, in jails. Moral faith is as fanatical as

religious faith! They call that "liberty of faith" then, when brother and

sister, on account of a relation that they should have settled with their

"conscience," are thrown into prison. "But they set a pernicious example."

Yes, indeed: others might have taken the notion that the State had no business

to meddle with their relation, and thereupon "purity of morals" would go to

ruin. So then the religious heroes of faith are zealous for the "sacred God,"

the moral ones for the "sacred good."

Those who are zealous for something sacred often look very little like each

other. How the strictly orthodox or old-style believers differ from the

fighters for "truth, light, and justice," from the Philalethes, the Friends of

Light, the Rationalists, and others. And yet, how utterly unessential is this

difference! If one buffets single traditional truths (i.e. miracles,

unlimited power of princes), then the Rationalists buffet them too, and only

the old-style believers wail. But, if one buffets truth itself, he immediately

has both, as believers, for opponents. So with moralities; the strict

believers are relentless, the clearer heads are more tolerant. But he who

attacks morality itself gets both to deal with. "Truth, morality, justice,

light, etc.," are to be and remain "sacred." What any one finds to censure in

Christianity is simply supposed to be "unchristian" according to the view of

these rationalists, but Christianity must remain a "fixture," to buffet it is

outrageous, "an outrage." To be sure, the heretic against pure faith no longer

exposes himself to the earlier fury of persecution, but so much the more does

it now fall upon the heretic against pure morals.

Piety has for a century received so many blows, and had to hear its superhuman

essence reviled as an "inhuman" one so often, that one cannot feel tempted to

draw the sword against it again. And yet it has almost always been only moral

opponents that have appeared in the arena, to assail the supreme essence in

favor of -- another supreme essence. So Proudhon, unabashed, says:(26) "Man is

destined to live without religion, but the moral law is eternal and absolute.

Who would dare today to attack morality?" Moral people skimmed off the best

fat from religion, ate it themselves, and are now having a tough job to get

rid of the resulting scrofula. If, therefore, we point out that religion has

not by any means been hurt in its inmost part so long as people reproach it

only with its superhuman essence, and that it takes its final appeal to the

"spirit" alone (for God is spirit), then we have sufficiently indicated its

final accord with morality, and can leave its stubborn conflict with the

latter lying behind us. It is a question of a supreme essence with both, and

whether this is a superhuman or a human one can make (since it is in any case

an essence over me, a super-mine one, so to speak) but little difference to

me. In the end the relation to the human essence, or to "Man," as soon as ever

it has shed the snake-skin of the old religion, will yet wear a religious

snake-skin again.

So Feuerbach instructs us that, "if one only inverts speculative philosophy,

i.e. always makes the predicate the subject, and so makes the subject the

object and principle, one has the undraped truth, pure and clean."(27)

Herewith, to be sure, we lose the narrow religious standpoint, lost the God,

who from this standpoint is subject; but we take in exchange for it the other

side of the religious standpoint, the moral standpoint. Thus we no longer

say "God is love," but "Love is divine." If we further put in place of the

predicate "divine" the equivalent "sacred," then, as far as concerns the

sense, all the old comes back-again. According to this, love is to be the

good in man, his divineness, that which does him honor, his true humanity

(it "makes him Man for