The Ego and his Own by Max Stirner (best memoirs of all time TXT) 📖
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him). So then it would be more accurately worded thus: Love is what is human
in man, and what is inhuman is the loveless egoist. But precisely all that
which Christianity and with it speculative philosophy (i.e., theology)
offers as the good, the absolute, is to self-ownership simply not the good
(or, what means the same, it is only the good). Consequently, by the
transformation of the predicate into the subject, the Christian essence (and
it is the predicate that contains the essence, you know) would only be fixed
yet more oppressively. God and the divine would entwine themselves all the
more inextricably with me. To expel God from his heaven and to rob him of his
"transcendence" cannot yet support a claim of complete victory, if therein
he is only chased into the human breast and gifted with indelible immanence.
Now they say, "The divine is the truly human!"
The same people who oppose Christianity as the basis of the State, i.e.
oppose the so-called Christian State, do not tire of repeating that morality
is "the fundamental pillar of social life and of the State." As if the
dominion of morality were not a complete dominion of the sacred, a
"hierarchy."
So we may here mention by the way that rationalist movement which, after
theologians had long insisted that only faith was capable of grasping
religious truths, that only to believers did God reveal himself, and that
therefore only the heart, the feelings, the believing fancy was religious,
broke out with the assertion that the "natural understanding," human reason,
was also capable of discerning God. What does that mean but that the reason
laid claim to be the same visionary as the fancy?(28) In this sense Reimarus
wrote his Most Notable Truths of Natural Religion. It had to come to this --
that the whole man with all his faculties was found to be religious; heart
and affections, understanding and reason, feeling, knowledge, and will -- in
short, everything in man -- appeared religious. Hegel has shown that even
philosophy is religious. And what is not called religion today? The "religion
of love," the "religion of freedom," "political religion" -- in short, every
enthusiasm. So it is, too, in fact.
To this day we use the Romance word "religion," which expresses the concept of
a condition of being bound. To be sure, we remain bound, so far as
religion takes possession of our inward parts; but is the mind also bound? On
the contrary, that is free, is sole lord, is not our mind, but absolute.
Therefore the correct affirmative translation of the word religion would be
"freedom of mind"! In whomsoever the mind is free, he is religious in just
the same way as he in whom the senses have free course is called a sensual
man. The mind binds the former, the desires the latter. Religion, therefore,
is boundness or religion with reference to me -- I am bound; it is freedom
with reference to the mind -- the mind is free, or has freedom of mind. Many
know from experience how hard it is on us when the desires run away with us,
free and unbridled; but that the free mind, splendid intellectuality,
enthusiasm for intellectual interests, or however this jewel may in the most
various phrase be named, brings us into yet more grievous straits than even
the wildest impropriety, people will not perceive; nor can they perceive it
without being consciously egoists.
Reimarus, and all who have shown that our reason, our heart, etc., also lead
to God, have therewithal shown that we are possessed through and through. To
be sure, they vexed the theologians, from whom they took away the prerogative
of religious exaltation; but for religion, for freedom of mind, they thereby
conquered yet more ground. For, when the mind is no longer limited to feeling
or faith, but also, as understanding, reason, and thought in general, belongs
to itself the mind -- when therefore, it may take part in the spiritual(29)
and heavenly truths in the form of understanding, as well as in its other
forms -- then the whole mind is occupied only with spiritual things, i. e.,
with itself, and is therefore free. Now we are so through-and-through
religious that "jurors," i.e. "sworn men," condemn us to death, and every
policeman, as a good Christian, takes us to the lock-up by virtue of an "oath
of office."
Morality could not come into opposition with piety till after the time when in
general the boisterous hate of everything that looked like an "order"
(decrees, commandments, etc.) spoke out in revolt, and the personal "absolute
lord" was scoffed at and persecuted; consequently it could arrive at
independence only through liberalism, whose first form acquired significance
in the world's history as "citizenship," and weakened the specifically
religious powers (see "Liberalism" below). For, when morality not merely goes
alongside of piety, but stands on feet of its own, then its principle lies no
longer in the divine commandments, but in the law of reason, from which the
commandments, so far as they are still to remain valid, must first await
justification for their validity. In the law of reason man determines himself
out of himself, for "Man" is rational, and out of the "essence of Man" those
laws follow of necessity. Piety and morality part company in this -- that the
former makes God the law-giver, the latter Man.
From a certain standpoint of morality people reason about as follows: Either
man is led by his sensuality, and is, following it, immoral, or he is led by
the good, which, taken up into the will, is called moral sentiment (sentiment
and prepossession in favor of the good); then he shows himself moral. From
this point of view how, e. g., can Sand's act against Kotzebue be called
immoral? What is commonly understood by unselfish it certainly was, in the
same measure as (among other things) St. Crispin's thieveries in favor of the
poor. "He should not have murdered, for it stands written, Thou shalt not
murder!" Then to serve the good, the welfare of the people, as Sand at least
intended, or the welfare of the poor, like Crispin -- is moral; but murder and
theft are immoral; the purpose moral, the means immoral. Why? "Because murder,
assassination, is something absolutely bad." When the Guerrillas enticed the
enemies of the country into ravines and shot them down unseen from the bushes,
do you suppose that was assassination? According to the principle of morality,
which commands us to serve the good, you could really ask only whether murder
could never in any case be a realization of the good, and would have to
endorse that murder which realized the good. You cannot condemn Sand's deed at
all; it was moral, because in the service of the good, because unselfish; it
was an act of punishment, which the individual inflicted, an -- execution
inflicted at the risk of the executioner's life. What else had his scheme
been, after all, but that he wanted to suppress writings by brute force? Are
you not acquainted with the same procedure as a "legal" and sanctioned one?
And what can be objected against it from your principle of morality? -- "But
it was an illegal execution." So the immoral thing in it was the illegality,
the disobedience to law? Then you admit that the good is nothing else than --
law, morality nothing else than loyalty. And to this externality of
"loyalty" your morality must sink, to this righteousness of works in the
fulfillment of the law, only that the latter is at once more tyrannical and
more revolting than the old-time righteousness of works. For in the latter
only the act is needed, but you require the disposition too; one must
carry in himself the law, the statute; and he who is most legally disposed
is the most moral. Even the last vestige of cheerfulness in Catholic life must
perish in this Protestant legality. Here at last the domination of the law is
for the first time complete. "Not I live, but the law lives in me." Thus I
have really come so far to be only the "vessel of its glory." "Every Prussian
carries his gendarme in his breast," says a high Prussian officer.
Why do certain opposition parties fail to flourish? Solely for the reason
that they refuse to forsake the path of morality or legality. Hence the
measureless hypocrisy of devotion, love, etc., from whose repulsiveness one
may daily get the most thorough nausea at this rotten and hypocritical
relation of a "lawful opposition." -- In the moral relation of love and
fidelity a divided or opposed will cannot have place; the beautiful relation
is disturbed if the one wills this and the other the reverse. But now,
according to the practice hitherto and the old prejudice of the opposition,
the moral relation is to be preserved above all. What is then left to the
opposition? Perhaps the will to have a liberty, if the beloved one sees fit to
deny it? Not a bit! It may not will to have the freedom, it can only wish
for it, "petition" for it, lisp a "Please, please!" What would come of it, if
the opposition really willed, willed with the full energy of the will? No,
it must renounce will in order to live to love, renounce liberty -- for love
of morality. It may never "claim as a right" what it is permitted only to "beg
as a favor." Love, devotion. etc., demand with undeviating definiteness that
there be only one will to which the others devote themselves, which they
serve, follow, love. Whether this will is regarded as reasonable or as
unreasonable, in both cases one acts morally when one follows it, and
immorally when one breaks away from it. The will that commands the censorship
seems to many unreasonable; but he who in a land of censorship evades the
censoring of his book acts immorally, and he who submits it to the censorship
acts morally. If some one let his moral judgment go, and set up e. g. a
secret press, one would have to call him immoral, and imprudent in the bargain
if he let himself be caught; but will such a man lay claim to a value in the
eyes of the "moral"? Perhaps! -- That is, if he fancied he was serving a
"higher morality."
The web of the hypocrisy of today hangs on the frontiers of two domains,
between which our time swings back and forth, attaching its fine threads of
deception and self-deception. No longer vigorous enough to serve morality
without doubt or weakening, not yet reckless enough to live wholly to egoism,
it trembles now toward the one and now toward the other in the spider-web of
hypocrisy, and, crippled by the curse of
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