The Ego and his Own by Max Stirner (best memoirs of all time TXT) 📖
- Author: Max Stirner
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stupid flies. If one has once dared to make a "free" motion, immediately one
waters it again with assurances of love, and -- shams resignation; if, on
the other side, they have had the face to reject the free motion with moral
appeals to confidence, immediately the moral courage also sinks, and they
assure one how they hear the free words with special pleasure, etc.; they --
sham approval. In short, people would like to have the one, but not go
without the other; they would like to have a free will, but not for their
lives lack the moral will. Just come in contact with a servile loyalist, you
Liberals. You will sweeten every word of freedom with a look of the most loyal
confidence, and he will clothe his servilism in the most flattering phrases of
freedom. Then you go apart, and he, like you, thinks "I know you, fox!" He
scents the devil in you as much as you do the dark old Lord God in him.
A Nero is a "bad" man only in the eyes of the "good"; in mine he is nothing
but a possessed man, as are the good too. The good see in him an
arch-villain, and relegate him to hell. Why did nothing hinder him in his
arbitrary course? Why did people put up with so much? Do you suppose the tame
Romans, who let all their will be bound by such a tyrant, were a hair the
better? In old Rome they would have put him to death instantly, would never
have been his slaves. But the contemporary "good" among the Romans opposed to
him only moral demands, not their will; they sighed that their emperor did
not do homage to morality, like them; they themselves remained "moral
subjects," till at last one found courage to give up "moral, obedient
subjection." And then the same "good Romans" who, as "obedient subjects," had
borne all the ignominy of having no will, hurrahed over the nefarious, immoral
act of the rebel. Where then in the "good" was the courage for the
revolution, that courage which they now praised, after another had mustered
it up? The good could not have this courage, for a revolution, and an
insurrection into the bargain, is always something "immoral," which one can
resolve upon only when one ceases to be "good" and becomes either "bad" or --
neither of the two. Nero was no viler than his time, in which one could only
be one of the two, good or bad. The judgment of his time on him had to be that
he was bad, and this in the highest degree: not a milksop, but an
arch-scoundrel. All moral people can pronounce only this judgment on him.
Rascals e. g. he was are still living here and there today (see e. g. the
Memoirs of Ritter von Lang) in the midst of the moral. It is not convenient
to live among them certainly, as one is not sure of his life for a moment; but
can you say that it is more convenient to live among the moral? One is just as
little sure of his life there, only that one is hanged "in the way of
justice," but least of all is one sure of his honor, and the national cockade
is gone before you can say Jack Robinson. The hard fist of morality treats the
noble nature of egoism altogether without compassion.
"But surely one cannot put a rascal and an honest man on the same level!" Now,
no human being does that oftener than you judges of morals; yes, still more
than that, you imprison as a criminal an honest man who speaks openly against
the existing constitution, against the hallowed institutions, and you entrust
portfolios and still more important things to a crafty rascal. So in praxi
you have nothing to reproach me with. "But in theory!" Now there I do put both
on the same level, as two opposite poles -- to wit, both on the level of the
moral law. Both have meaning only in the "moral world, just as in the
pre-Christian time a Jew who kept the law and one who broke it had meaning and
significance only in respect to the Jewish law; before Jesus Christ, on the
contrary, the Pharisee was no more than the "sinner and publican." So before
self-ownership the moral Pharisee amounts to as much as the immoral sinner.
Nero became very inconvenient by his possessedness. But a self-owning man
would not sillily oppose to him the "sacred," and whine if the tyrant does not
regard the sacred; he would oppose to him his will. How often the sacredness
of the inalienable rights of man has been held up to their foes, and some
liberty or other shown and demonstrated to be a "sacred right of man!" Those
who do that deserve to be laughed out of court -- as they actually are -- were
it not that in truth they do, even though unconsciously, take the road that
leads to the goal. They have a presentiment that, if only the majority is once
won for that liberty, it will also will the liberty, and will then take what
it will have. The sacredness of the liberty, and all possible proofs of this
sacredness, will never procure it; lamenting and petitioning only shows
beggars.
The moral man is necessarily narrow in that he knows no other enemy than the
"immoral" man. "He who is not moral is immoral!" and accordingly reprobate,
despicable, etc. Therefore the moral man can never comprehend the egoist. Is
not unwedded cohabitation an immorality? The moral man may turn as he pleases,
he will have to stand by this verdict; Emilia Galotti gave up her life for
this moral truth. And it is true, it is an immorality. A virtuous girl may
become an old maid; a virtuous man may pass the time in fighting his natural
impulses till he has perhaps dulled them, he may castrate himself for the sake
of virtue as St. Origen did for the sake of heaven: he thereby honors sacred
wedlock, sacred chastity, as inviolable; he is -- moral. Unchastity can never
become a moral act. However indulgently the moral man may judge and excuse him
who committed it, it remains a transgression, a sin against a moral
commandment; there clings to it an indelible stain. As chastity once belonged
to the monastic vow, so it does to moral conduct. Chastity is a -- good. --
For the egoist, on the contrary, even chastity is not a good without which he
could not get along; he cares nothing at all about it. What now follows from
this for the judgment of the moral man? This: that he throws the egoist into
the only class of men that he knows besides moral men, into that of the --
immoral. He cannot do otherwise; he must find the egoist immoral in everything
in which the egoist disregards morality. If he did not find him so, then he
would already have become an apostate from morality without confessing it to
himself, he would already no longer be a truly moral man. One should not let
himself be led astray by such phenomena, which at the present day are
certainly no longer to be classed as rare, but should reflect that he who
yields any point of morality can as little be counted among the truly moral as
Lessing was a pious Christian when, in the well-known parable, he compared the
Christian religion, as well as the Mohammedan and Jewish, to a "counterfeit
ring." Often people are already further than they venture to confess to
themselves. For Socrates, because in culture he stood on the level of
morality, it would have been an immorality if he had been willing to follow
Crito's seductive incitement and escape from the dungeon; to remain was the
only moral thing. But it was solely because Socrates was -- a moral man. The
"unprincipled, sacrilegious" men of the Revolution, on the contrary, had sworn
fidelity to Louis XVI, and decreed his deposition, yes, his death; but the act
was an immoral one, at which moral persons will be horrified to all eternity.
Yet all this applies, more or less, only to "civic morality," on which the
freer look down with contempt. For it (like civism, its native ground, in
general) is still too little removed and free from the religious heaven not to
transplant the latter's laws without criticism or further consideration to its
domain instead of producing independent doctrines of its own. Morality cuts a
quite different figure when it arrives at the consciousness of its dignity,
and raises its principle, the essence of man, or "Man," to be the only
regulative power. Those who have worked their way through to such a decided
consciousness break entirely with religion, whose God no longer finds any
place alongside their "Man," and, as they (see below) themselves scuttle the
ship of State, so too they crumble away that "morality" which flourishes only
in the State, and logically have no right to use even its name any further.
For what this "critical" party calls morality is very positively distinguished
from the so-called "civic or political morality," and must appear to the
citizen like an "insensate and unbridled liberty." But at bottom it has only
the advantage of the "purity of the principle," which, freed from its
defilement with the religious, has now reached universal power in its
clarified definiteness as "humanity."
Therefore one should not wonder that the name "morality" is retained along
with others, like freedom, benevolence, self-consciousness, and is only
garnished now and then with the addition, a "free" morality -- just as, though
the civic State is abused, yet the State is to arise again as a "free State,"
or, if not even so, yet as a "free society."
Because this morality completed into humanity has fully settled its accounts
with the religion out of which it historically came forth, nothing hinders it
from becoming a religion on its own account. For a distinction prevails
between religion and morality only so long as our dealings with the world of
men are regulated and hallowed by our relation to a superhuman being, or so
long as our doing is a doing "for God's sake." If, on the other hand, it comes
to the point that "man is to man the supreme being," then that distinction
vanishes, and morality, being removed from its subordinate position, is
completed into -- religion. For then the higher being who had hitherto been
subordinated to the highest, Man, has ascended to absolute height, and we are
related to him as one is related to the highest being, i.e. religiously.
Morality and piety are now as synonymous as in the beginning of Christianity,
and it is only because the supreme being has come to be a different one that a
holy walk is no longer called a "holy" one, but a "human" one. If morality has
conquered, then a complete
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