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

to go into the other world,

but to draw the other world to him, and compel it to become this world! And

since then has not all the world, with more or less consciousness, been crying

that "this world" is the vital point, and heaven must come down on earth and

be experienced even here?

Let us, in brief, set Feuerbach's theological view and our contradiction over

against each other! "The essence of man is man's supreme being;(8) now by

religion, to be sure, the supreme being is called God and regarded as an

objective essence, but in truth it is only man's own essence; and therefore

the turning point of the world's history is that henceforth no longer God,

but man, is to appear to man as God."(9)

To this we reply: The supreme being is indeed the essence of man, but, just

because it is his essence and not he himself, it remains quite immaterial

whether we see it outside him and view it as "God," or find it in him and call

it "Essence of Man" or "Man." I am neither God nor Man,(10) neither the

supreme essence nor my essence, and therefore it is all one in the main

whether I think of the essence as in me or outside me. Nay, we really do

always think of the supreme being as in both kinds of otherworldliness, the

inward and outward, at once; for the "Spirit of God" is, according to the

Christian view, also "our spirit," and "dwells in us."(11) It dwells in heaven

and dwells in us; we poor things are just its "dwelling," and, if Feuerbach

goes on to destroy its heavenly dwelling and force it to move to us bag and

baggage, then we, its earthly apartments, will be badly overcrowded.

But after this digression (which, if we were at all proposing to work by line

and level, we should have had to save for later pages in order to avoid

repetition) we return to the spirit's first creation, the spirit itself.

The spirit is something other than myself. But this other, what is it?

---- * ----

§2. The Possessed.

Have you ever seen a spirit? "No, not I, but my grandmother." Now, you see,

it's just so with me too; I myself haven't seen any, but my grandmother had

them running between her feet all sorts of ways, and out of confidence in our

grandmothers' honesty we believe in the existence of spirits.

But had we no grandfathers then, and did they not shrug their shoulders every

time our grandmothers told about their ghosts? Yes, those were unbelieving men

who have harmed our good religion much, those rationalists! We shall feel

that! What else lies at the bottom of this warm faith in ghosts, if not the

faith in "the existence of spiritual beings in general," and is not this

latter itself disastrously unsettled if saucy men of the understanding may

disturb the former? The Romanticists were quite conscious what a blow the very

belief in God suffered by the laying aside of the belief in spirits or ghosts,

and they tried to help us out of the baleful consequences not only by their

reawakened fairy world, but at last, and especially, by the "intrusion of a

higher world," by their somnambulists of Prevorst, etc. The good believers and

fathers of the church did not suspect that with the belief in ghosts the

foundation of religion was withdrawn, and that since then it had been floating

in the air. He who no longer believes in any ghost needs only to travel on

consistently in his unbelief to see that there is no separate being at all

concealed behind things, no ghost or -- what is naively reckoned as synonymous

even in our use of words -- no "spirit."

"Spirits exist!" Look about in the world, and say for yourself whether a

spirit does not gaze upon you out of everything. Out of the lovely little

flower there speaks to you the spirit of the Creator, who has shaped it so

wonderfully; the stars proclaim the spirit that established their order; from

the mountain-tops a spirit of sublimity breathes down; out of the waters a

spirit of yearning murmurs up; and -- out of men millions of spirits speak.

The mountains may sink, the flowers fade, the world of stars fall in ruins,

the men die -- what matters the wreck of these visible bodies? The spirit, the

"invisible spirit," abides eternally!

Yes, the whole world is haunted! Only is haunted? Nay, it itself "walks," it

is uncanny through and through, it is the wandering seeming-body of a spirit,

it is a spook. What else should a ghost be, then, than an apparent body, but

real spirit? Well, the world is "empty," is "naught," is only glamorous

"semblance"; its truth is the spirit alone; it is the seeming-body of a

spirit.

Look out near or far, a ghostly world surrounds you everywhere; you are

always having "apparitions" or visions. Everything that appears to you is only

the phantasm of an indwelling spirit, is a ghostly "apparition"; the world is

to you only a "world of appearances," behind which the spirit walks. You "see

spirits."

Are you perchance thinking of comparing yourself with the ancients, who saw

gods everywhere? Gods, my dear modern, are not spirits; gods do not degrade

the world to a semblance, and do not spiritualize it.

But to you the whole world is spiritualized, and has become an enigmatical

ghost; therefore do not wonder if you likewise find in yourself nothing but a

spook. Is not your body haunted by your spirit, and is not the latter alone

the true and real, the former only the "transitory, naught" or a "semblance"?

Are we not all ghosts, uncanny beings that wait for "deliverance" -- to wit,

"spirits"?

Since the spirit appeared in the world, since "the Word became flesh," since

then the world has been spiritualized, enchanted, a spook.

You have spirit, for you have thoughts. What are your thoughts? "Spiritual

entities." Not things, then? "No, but the spirit of things, the main point in

all things, the inmost in them, their -- idea." Consequently what you think is

not only your thought?

"On the contrary, it is that in the world which is most real, that which is

properly to be called true; it is the truth itself; if I only think truly, I

think the truth. I may, to be sure, err with regard to the truth, and *fail to

recognize it; but, if I recognize* truly, the object of my cognition is the

truth." So, I suppose, you strive at all times to recognize the truth? "To me

the truth is sacred. It may well happen that I find a truth incomplete and

replace it with a better, but the truth I cannot abrogate. I believe in

the truth, therefore I search in it; nothing transcends it, it is eternal."

Sacred, eternal is the truth; it is the Sacred, the Eternal. But you, who let

yourself be filled and led by this sacred thing, are yourself hallowed.

Further, the sacred is not for your senses -- and you never as a sensual man

discover its trace -- but for your faith, or, more definitely still, for your

spirit; for it itself, you know, is a spiritual thing, a spirit -- is spirit

for the spirit.

The sacred is by no means so easily to be set aside as many at present affirm,

who no longer take this "unsuitable" word into their mouths. If even in a

single respect I am still upbraided as an "egoist," there is left the

thought of something else which I should serve more than myself, and which

must be to me more important than everything; in short, somewhat in which I

should have to seek my true welfare,(12) something -- "sacred."(13) However

human this sacred thing may look, though it be the Human itself, that does not

take away its sacredness, but at most changes it from an unearthly to an

earthly sacred thing, from a divine one to a human.

Sacred things exist only for the egoist who does not acknowledge himself, the

involuntary egoist, for him who is always looking after his own and yet does

not count himself as the highest being, who serves only himself and at the

same time always thinks he is serving a higher being, who knows nothing higher

than himself and yet is infatuated about something higher; in short, for the

egoist who would like not to be an egoist, and abases himself (i.e. combats

his egoism), but at the same time abases himself only for the sake of "being

exalted," and therefore of gratifying his egoism. Because he would like to

cease to be an egoist, he looks about in heaven and earth for higher beings to

serve and sacrifice himself to; but, however much he shakes and disciplines

himself, in the end he does all for his own sake, and the disreputable egoism

will not come off him. On this account I call him the involuntary egoist.

His toil and care to get away from himself is nothing but the misunderstood

impulse to self-dissolution. If you are bound to your past hour, if you must

babble today because you babbled yesterday,(14) if you cannot transform

yourself each instant, you feel yourself fettered in slavery and benumbed.

Therefore over each minute of your existence a fresh minute of the future

beckons to you, and, developing yourself, you get away "from yourself," *i.

e.*, from the self that was at that moment. As you are at each instant, you

are your own creature, and in this very "creature" you do not wish to lose

yourself, the creator. You are yourself a higher being than you are, and

surpass yourself. But that you are the one who is higher than you, i. e.,

that you are not only creature, but likewise your creator -- just this, as an

involuntary egoist, you fail to recognize; and therefore the "higher essence"

is to you -- an alien(15) essence. Every higher essence, e. g. truth,

mankind, etc., is an essence over us.

Alienness is a criterion of the "sacred." In everything sacred there lies

something "uncanny," i.e. strange,(16) e. g. we are not quite familiar and

at home in. What is sacred to me is not my own; and if, e. g.,, the

property of others was not sacred to me, I should look on it as mine, which

I should take to myself when occasion offered. Or, on the other side, if I

regard the face of the Chinese emperor as sacred, it remains strange to my

eye, which I close at its appearance.

Why is an incontrovertible mathematical truth, which might even be called

eternal according to the common understanding of words, not -- sacred? Because

it is not revealed, or not the revelation of, a higher being. If by revealed

we understand only the so-called religious truths, we go far astray, and

entirely fail to recognize the breadth of the