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

an ideal, supernal

one, it is "God." "God is spirit." And this supernal "Father in heaven gives

it to those that pray to him."(2)

The man is distinguished from the youth by the fact that he takes the world as

it is, instead of everywhere fancying it amiss and wanting to improve it,

i.e. model it after his ideal; in him the view that one must deal with the

world according to his interest, not according to his ideals, becomes

confirmed.

So long as one knows himself only as spirit, and feels that all the value of

his existence consists in being spirit (it becomes easy for the youth to give

his life, the "bodily life," for a nothing, for the silliest point of honor),

so long it is only thoughts that one has, ideas that he hopes to be able to

realize some day when he has found a sphere of action; thus one has meanwhile

only ideals, unexecuted ideas or thoughts.

Not till one has fallen in love with his corporeal self, and takes a

pleasure in himself as a living flesh-and-blood person -- but it is in mature

years, in the man, that we find it so -- not till then has one a personal or

egoistic interest, i.e. an interest not only of our spirit, e. g., but

of total satisfaction, satisfaction of the whole chap, a selfish interest.

Just compare a man with a youth, and see if he will not appear to you harder,

less magnanimous, more selfish. Is he therefore worse? No, you say; he has

only become more definite, or, as you also call it, more "practical." But the

main point is this, that he makes himself more the center than does the

youth, who is infatuated about other things, e.g. God, fatherland, etc.

Therefore the man shows a second self-discovery. The youth found himself as

spirit and lost himself again in the general spirit, the complete, holy

spirit, Man, mankind -- in short, all ideals; the man finds himself as

embodied spirit.

Boys had only unintellectual interests (i.e. interests devoid of thoughts

and ideas), youths only intellectual ones; the man has bodily, personal,

egoistic interests.

If the child has not an object that it can occupy itself with, it feels

ennui; for it does not yet know how to occupy itself with itself. The

youth, on the contrary, throws the object aside, because for him thoughts

arose out of the object; he occupies himself with his thoughts, his dreams,

occupies himself intellectually, or "his mind is occupied."

The young man includes everything not intellectual under the contemptuous name

of "externalities." If he nevertheless sticks to the most trivial

externalities (e.g. the customs of students' clubs and other formalities),

it is because, and when, he discovers mind in them, i.e. when they are

symbols to him.

As I find myself back of things, and that as mind, so I must later find

myself also back of thoughts -- to wit, as their creator and owner. In the

time of spirits thoughts grew till they overtopped my head, whose offspring

they yet were; they hovered about me and convulsed me like fever-phantasies --

an awful power. The thoughts had become corporeal on their own account, were

ghosts, e. g. God, Emperor, Pope, Fatherland, etc. If I destroy their

corporeity, then I take them back into mine, and say: "I alone am corporeal."

And now I take the world as what it is to me, as mine, as my property; I

refer all to myself.

If as spirit I had thrust away the world in the deepest contempt, so as owner

I thrust spirits or ideas away into their "vanity." They have no longer any

power over me, as no "earthly might" has power over the spirit.

The child was realistic, taken up with the things of this world, till little

by little he succeeded in getting at what was back of these very things; the

youth was idealistic, inspired by thoughts, till he worked his way up to where

he became the man, the egoistic man, who deals with things and thoughts

according to his heart's pleasure, and sets his personal interest above

everything. Finally, the old man? When I become one, there will still be time

enough to speak of that.

Footnotes:

(1) Geist. This word will be translated sometimes "mind" and sometimes

"spirit" in the following pages.

(2) Luke 11, 13.

II.

MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW

---- * ----

How each of us developed himself, what he strove for, attained, or missed,

what objects he formerly pursued and what plans and wishes his heart is now

set on, what transformation his views have experienced, what perturbations his

principles -- in short, how he has today become what yesterday or years ago he

was not -- this he brings out again from his memory with more or less ease,

and he feels with especial vividness what changes have taken place in himself

when he has before his eyes the unrolling of another's life.

Let us therefore look into the activities our forefathers busied themselves

with.

---- * ----

THE ANCIENTS

Custom having once given the name of "the ancients" to our pre-Christian

ancestors, we will not throw it up against them that, in comparison with us

experienced people, they ought properly to be called children, but will rather

continue to honor them as our good old fathers. But how have they come to be

antiquated, and who could displace them through his pretended newness?

We know, of course, the revolutionary innovator and disrespectful heir, who

even took away the sanctity of the fathers' sabbath to hallow his Sunday, and

interrupted the course of time to begin at himself with a new chronology; we

know him, and know that it is -- the Christian. But does he remain forever

young, and is he today still the new man, or will he too be superseded, as he

has superseded the "ancients"?

The fathers must doubtless have themselves begotten the young one who entombed

them. Let us then peep at this act of generation.

"To the ancients the world was a truth," says Feuerbach, but he forgets to

make the important addition, "a truth whose untruth they tried to get back of,

and at last really did." What is meant by those words of Feuerbach will be

easily recognized if they are put alongside the Christian thesis of the

"vanity and transitoriness of the world." For, as the Christian can never

convince himself of the vanity of the divine word, but believes in its eternal

and unshakable truth, which, the more its depths are searched, must all the

more brilliantly come to light and triumph, so the ancients on their side

lived in the feeling that the world and mundane relations (e.g. the natural

ties of blood) were the truth before which their powerless "I" must bow. The

very thing on which the ancients set the highest value is spurned by

Christians as the valueless, and what they recognized as truth these brand as

idle lies; the high significance of the fatherland disappears, and the

Christian must regard himself as "a stranger on earth";(1) the sanctity of

funeral rites, from which sprang a work of art like the Antigone of Sophocles,

is designated as a paltry thing ("Let the dead bury their dead"); the

infrangible truth of family ties is represented as an untruth which one cannot

promptly enough get clear of;(2) and so in everything.

If we now see that to the two sides opposite things appear as truth, to one

the natural, to the other the intellectual, to one earthly things and

relations, to the other heavenly (the heavenly fatherland, "Jerusalem that is

above," etc.), it still remains to be considered how the new time and that

undeniable reversal could come out of antiquity. But the ancients themselves

worked toward making their truth a lie.

Let us plunge at once into the midst of the most brilliant years of the

ancients, into the Periclean century. Then the Sophistic culture was

spreading, and Greece made a pastime of what had hitherto been to her a

monstrously serious matter.

The fathers had been enslaved by the undisturbed power of existing things too

long for the posterity not to have to learn by bitter experience to *feel

themselves*. Therefore the Sophists, with courageous sauciness, pronounce the

reassuring words, "Don't be bluffed!" and diffuse the rationalistic doctrine,

"Use your understanding, your wit, your mind, against everything; it is by

having a good and well-drilled understanding that one gets through the world

best, provides for himself the best lot, the most pleasant life." Thus they

recognize in mind man's true weapon against the world. This is why they lay

such stress on dialectic skill, command of language, the art of disputation,

etc. They announce that mind is to be used against everything; but they are

still far removed from the holiness of the Spirit, for to them it is a

means, a weapon, as trickery and defiance serve children for the same

purpose; their mind is the unbribable understanding.

Today we should call that a one-sided culture of the understanding, and add

the warning, "Cultivate not only your understanding, but also, and especially,

your heart." Socrates did the same. For, if the heart did not become free from

its natural impulses, but remained filled with the most fortuitous contents

and, as an uncriticized avidity, altogether in the power of things, i.e.

nothing but a vessel of the most various appetites -- then it was

unavoidable that the free understanding must serve the "bad heart" and was

ready to justify everything that the wicked heart desired.

Therefore Socrates says that it is not enough for one to use his understanding

in all things, but it is a question of what cause one exerts it for. We

should now say, one must serve the "good cause." But serving the good cause is

-- being moral. Hence Socrates is the founder of ethics.

Certainly the principle of the Sophistic doctrine must lead to the possibility

that the blindest and most dependent slave of his desires might yet be an

excellent sophist, and, with keen understanding, trim and expound everything

in favor of his coarse heart. What could there be for which a "good reason"

might not be found, or which might not be defended through thick and thin?

Therefore Socrates says: "You must be 'pure-hearted' if your shrewdness is to

be valued." At this point begins the second period of Greek liberation of the

mind, the period of purity of heart. For the first was brought to a close by

the Sophists in their proclaiming the omnipotence of the understanding. But

the heart remained worldly-minded, remained a servant of the world, always

affected by worldly wishes. This coarse heart was to be cultivated from now on

-- the era of culture of the heart. But