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35 - My Self-Enjoyment - part 1 - The Ego and His Own - Max Stirner · Logic Library

• My self enjoyment Part one. We stand at the boundary of a period. The world hitherto took fought for nothing, but the gain of life took care for life. For whether all activity is put on the stretch for the life of this world or of the other, for the temple or for the eternal. Whether one hankers for daily bread, give us our daily bread, or for holy bread, the true bread from heaven, the bread of God that comes from Heaven and gives life to the world, the bread of life. John six. Whether one takes care for dear life or for life to eternity, this does not change the object of the strain and care, which in the one case as in the other, shows itself to be life. Do the modern tendencies and themselves otherwise? People now want nobody to be embarrassed for the most indispensable necessaries of life, but want everyone to feel secure as to these. And on the other hand they teach that man has this life to attend to, and the real world to adapt himself to, without vain care for another. Let us take up the same thing from another side. When one is anxious only to live, he easily, in this solicitude forgets the enjoyment of life. If his only concern is for life, and he thinks, if I only have my dear life, he does not apply his full strength to using I e enjoying life. But how does one use life? In using it up? Like the candle which one uses in burning it up, one uses life and consequently himself the living one in consuming it and himself enjoyment of life is using life up. Now we are in search of the enjoyment of life. And what did the religious world do? It won't in search of life wherein consists the true life, the blessed life, et cetera. How is it to be attained? What must man do and become in order to become a truly living man? How does he fulfill this calling? These and similar questions indicate that the askers were still seeking for themselves to wit themselves in the true sense, in the sense of true living. What I am is foam and shadow. What I shall be is my true self. To chase after this self, to produce it, to realize it constitutes the hard task of mortal, who die only to rise again, live only to die, live only to find the true life. Not I am certain of myself and no longer seeking for myself. Am I really my property? I have myself. Therefore I use and enjoy myself. On the other hand, I can never take comfort in myself as long as I think that I have still to find my true self, and that it must come to this, that not I but Christ or some other spiritual I e. Ghost yourself e g. The true man, the essence of Man et cetera, lives in me. A vast interval separates the two views. In the old, I go toward myself. In the new, I start from myself. In the former, I long for myself. In the latter, I have my self and do with myself as one does with any other property. I enjoy myself at my pleasure. I am no longer afraid for my life, but squander it. Henceforth, the question one's not how one can acquire life, but how one can squander enjoy it. Or not how one is to produce the true self in himself, but how one is to dissolve himself to live himself out. What else should the ideal be but the sought for ever distant self one seeks for himself. Consequently, one does not yet have himself. One aspires toward what one ought to be. Consequently, one is not it. One lives in longing, and has lived thousands of years in it. In hope, living is quite another thing in enjoyment. Does this, perchance apply only to the so called pious, No, it applies to all who belong to the departing period of history, even to its men of pleasure. For them too, the work days were followed by a Sunday, and the rush of the world, by the dream of a better world, of a general happiness of humanity, in short, by an ideal. But philosophers especially are contrasted with the pious. Now have they been thinking of anything else than the ideal, been planning for anything else than the absolute self? Longing and hope? Everywhere? And nothing but these for me call it romanticism. If the enjoyment of life is to triumph over the longing for life or hope of life, it must vanquish this in its double significance, which Schiller introduces in his Ideal and Life. It must crush spiritual and secular poverty, exterminate the ideal and the want of daily bread. He who must expend his life to prolonged life cannot enjoy it, and he who is still seeking for his life does not have it, and can as little enjoy it. Both are poor, But blessed are the poor. Those who are hungering for the true life have no power over their present life, but must apply it for the purpose of thereby gaining that true life, and must sacrifice it entirely to this aspiration and this task. If in the case of those devotees who hope for a life in the other world and look upon that in this world as merely a preparation for it, the tributenness of their earthly existence, which they put solely into the service of the hoped for heavenly existence, is pretty distinctly apparent. One would yet go far wrong if one wanted to consider the most rationalistic and enlightened as less self sacrificing. Oh, there is to be found in the true life, and much more comprehensive significance than that heavenly is contempt to express now is not to introduce the liberal concept of it at once, the human and truly human life the true one. And is everyone already needing this truly human life from the start, or must he first raise himself to it with hard toil. Does he already have it as his present life, or must he struggle for it as his future life, which will become his part only when he is no longer tainted with any egoism. In this view, life exists only to gain life, and one lives only to make the essence of man alive in one cell. One lives for the sake of this essence. One has his life only in order to procure, by means of it, the true life cleans of all egoism. Hence one is afraid to make any use he likes of his life. It is to serve only for the right use. In short, one has according in life, a task. In life. One has something to realize and produce by his life, as something for which our life is only means an implement, as something that is worth more than this life, as something to which one owes his life. One has a god who asks a living sacrifice. Only the rudeness of human sacrifice has been lost with time. Human sacrifice itself has remained unabated, and criminals ourly form sacrifices to justice, and we poor sinners slay our own selves as sacrifice for the human essence. The idea of mankind, humanity, and whatever the idols or gods are called. Besides, but because we owe our life to that somethink, therefore this is the next point, we have no right to take it from us. The conservative tendency of Christianity does not permit thinking of death otherwise than with the purpose to take its sting from it and live on preserve oneself. My sling the question lets everything happen and come upon him. If he, the ark Jew, can only haggle and smuggle himself into heaven, he must not kill himself. He must only preserve himself and work at the preparation of the future. Abode conservatism or conquest of death lies at his heart. The last enemy that is abolished is death. Christ has taken the power from death and brought life and imperishable being to light by the Gospel, imperishableness, stability. The moral man wants the good, the right, and if he takes to the means that lead to this goal really lead to it, then these means are not his means, but those of the good right, et cetera itself. These means are never immoral, because the good end itself mediates itself. Through them, the end sanctifies the means. They call this maxim jesuitical, but it is moral. Through and through. The moral man acts in the surface of an end or an idea. He makes himself the tall of the idea of the good, as the pious man counts it his glory to be a tall or instrument of God. To await death is what the moral commandment postulates as the good. To give it to oneself is immoral and bad. Suicide finds no excuse before the judgment seat of morality. If the religious man forbids it because you have not given yourself life, but God, who alone can also take it from you again, as if even taking in this conception, God did not take it from me, just as much when I kill myself as when a til from the roof or a hostile bullet fails me, for he would have arrived the resolution of death in me too. The moral man forbids it because I owe my life to the fatherland, etc. Because I do not know whether I may not yet accomplish good by my life. Of course, for in me good loses at all, as God does an instrument. If I am immoral, the good is served in my amendment. If I am ungodly, God has joy in my penitence. Suicide therefore is ungodly as well as netheus. If one whose standpoint is religiousness takes his own life, he acts in forgetfulness of God, But if the suicide's standpoint is morality, he acts in forgetfulness of duty immorality. People worried themselves much with the question whether Emma Galotti's death can be justified before morality. They take it as if it were suicide, which it is too, in substance that she is so infatuated with chastity, this moral good as to yield up even her life, for it is certainly moral. But again that she feels the weakness of her flesh is immoral. Footnote see the next to the last scene of the tragedy Orrado under the pretext of a judical investigation. He tears you out of your arms and takes you to a gomeraldi Amilia, give me that dagger father me Orardo, no, no, reflect You two have only one life to lose, Emilia, and only one innocence Orardo, which is above the reach of any violence Amelia, but not above the reach of any seduction, viilence violence. Who cannot defy violence, what is called violence is nothing. Seduction is the true violence. I have lard father, lured as youthfool and warm as anybody's. My senses, our senses. I can want nothing. I am sure of nothing. I know Grimaldi's house. It is the house of pleasure. An hour there under my mother's eyes, and there arose in my soul so much turmoil as the strictest exercise of religion could hardly quiet in weeks religion, and what religion to escape nothing worse? Thousands sprang into the water, And our saints give me that dagger, Father, give it to me Emilia. Once indeed, there was a father who, to save his daughter from shame, drove into her heart whatever still he could quick at find, gave life to her for the second time. But all such deeds are of the past of such fathers. There are no more Urado. Yes, daughter, yes, stabs her end of Footnote Such contradictions from the tragic conflict universally in the moral drama, and one must think and feel morally to be able to take an interest in it. What holds good or piety and morality will necessarily apply to humanity also, because one owes his life likewise to man, mankind or the species. Only when I am under obligation to no being is the maintaining of my life my affair. A leap from this bridge makes me free. But if we owe the maintaining of our life to that being that we are to make a life in ourselves, it is not less our duty not to lead the life according to our pleasure, but to shape it in conformity to that being. All my feeling, thinking and willing, all my doing and designing belongs to him. What is in conformity to that being is to be inferred from his concept? And how differently has this concept been conceived, or how differently has that been imagined? What demands the Supreme Being makes on the Mohammedan? What different ones the Christian? Again, since he hears from him? How divergent therefore has the shaping of the lives of the two turn out? Only this do all hold fast that the Supreme Being is to judge our life. But the pious, who have their judge in God and in his word a book of directions for their life, I everwhere pass by only the because they belong to a period of development that has been lived through, and as partifactions, they may remain in their fixed place right along in our time. It is no longer the pious, but the liberals, who have the floor and piety itself cannot keep from reddening it pelface with liberal coloring. But the liberals do not adore their judge in God, and do not unfold their life by the directions of the divine Word, but regulate themselves by Man. They want to be not divine, but human, and to live. So Man is the liberals supreme being, Man the judge of his life, humanity his directions or kidchisms. God is spirit, but man is the most perfect spirit, the final result of the long chase after the spirit, or of the searching in the depths of the Godhead. Are you in the depths of the spirit? Every one of your traits is to be human. You yourself, are to be so from top to toe, in the inward as in the outward. For humanity is your calling, calling, destiny task. What one can become he does become. A born poet may well be hindered by the disfavor of circumstances from standing on the high level of his time and after the great studies that are indispensable for this producing consummate works of art. But he will make poetry, be he a plone man or so lucky as to live at the court of Weimar. A born musician will make music, no matter whether on all instruments or only on an oaten pipe. A born philosophial head can give proof of it as university philosopher or as village philosopher. Finally, a born dolt, who, as is very well compatible with this, may at the same time be a slide boots will, as probably everyone who has visited schools in a position to amplify to himself by many instances of fellow scholars, always remain a blockhead. Let him have been drilled and trained into the chief of a bueau, or let him serve that same chief as boot black Nay, the born shallow pages indisputably from the most numerous class of men. And why indeed should not the same distinctions show themselves in the human species that are unmistakable in every species of beasts. The more gifted and the less gifted are to be found everywhere. Only a few, however, are so ill, so that one could not get ideas into them. Hence people usually consider all men capable of having religion in a certain degree. They may be changed to other ideas too, eg. To some musical intelligence, even some philosophy. At this point, then the priesthood of religion, of morality, of culture, of science, etc. Takes its start, and the Communists eg want to make everything accessible to all by their public school. There is heard a common asthetician that this great mass cannot get along without religion. The Communists broaden it into the proposition that not only the great mass, but absolutely all are called to everything. Not enough that the great mass has been changed to religion. Now it is actually to have to occupy itself with everything. Human training is growing ever more general and more comprehensive. Your poor beings, who could live so happily if you might skip according to your mind, you are to dance to the pile of schoolmasters and beer leaders in order to perform tricks that you yourselves would never use yourselves for. And you do not even keep out of the traces at last, against being always taken otherwise than you want to give yourselves. No, you mechanically recite to yourselves the question that is recited to you. What am I called to? What ought I to do? You need only ask us to have yourselves told what you ought to do and order to do it, to have your calling marked out for you, or else, to order yourselves and impose it on yourselves according to the spirit prescription. Then, in reference to the will, the word is I will too do what I ought. A man is called to nothing and has no calling, no destiny, as little as a plant or a beast has a calling. The flower does not follow the calling to complete itself, but it spends all its forces to enjoy and consume the world as well as it can i e. It sucks in as much of the juices of the earth, as much air of the ether, as much light of the sun as it can get and lodge. The bird lives up to no calling, but it uses its forces as much as it is peptible. It catches beetles and sings to its heart's delight. But the forces of the flower and the bird are slight in comparison to those of a man, and a man who applies his forces will affect the world much more powerfully than flower and beast. A calling he has not, but he has forces that manifest themselves where they are, because their being consists solely in their manifestation, and are as little able to abide inactive as life, which, if it stood still only a second, would no longer be life. Now one might call out of the man, use your force. Yet to this imperative would be given the meaning that it was man's task to use his force. It is not so. Rather, each one really uses his force without first looking upon this as his calling. At all times, everyone uses as much force as he possesses. One does say of a beaten man that he ought to have exerted his force more, but one forgets that if in the moment of succumbing he had the force to exert his forces e g. Bodily forces, he would not have failed to do it. Even if it was only the discouragement of a minute. This was yet a destitution of force. A minute long. Forces may assuredly be sharpened and redoubled, especially by hostile resistance or friendly assistance. But where one misses their application, one may be sure of their absence too. One can strike fire out of a stone, but without the blow none comes out. In like manner, a man too needs impact. Now, for this reason that forces always of themselves show themselves operative, the command to use them would be superficious and senseless. To use his forces is not man's calling and task, but is his act, real and extant at all times. Force is only a simpler word for manifestation of force. Now as this rose is a true rose to begin with, this nightingale always a true nighting girl. So I am not for the first time a true man when I fulfilled my calling, live up to my destiny. But I am a true man from the start. My first babble is the token of the life of a true man. The struggles of my life are the act pourings of his force. My last breath is the last exholation of the force of a man. The true man does not lie in the future an object of longing, but lies existent and real in the present. Whatever and whoever I may be joyous and suffering, a child or a gray beard, in confidence or doubt, in sleep or in waking, I am it. I am a true man. But if I am man, and have really find in myself of him who religiously humanity designated as the distant goal, then everything truly human is also my own. What was ascribed to the idea of humanity belongs to me. That freedom of trade e g. When humanity has yet to attain, and which like an enchanting dream people removed to humanity's golden future. I take by anticipation as my property and carry it on for the time in the form of smuggling. There may indeed be but few smugglers who have sufficient understanding to thus account to themselves for their doings, But the instinct of egoism replaces their consciousness. Above I have shown the same thing about freedom of the press. Everything is my own. Therefore I bring back to myself what wants to withdraw from me. But above all, I always bring myself back when I have slipped away from myself to any tributaries. But this too is not my calling, but my natural act. Enough, there is a mighty difference whether I make myself the starting point or the goal. As the latter, I do not have myself, and consequently still alien to myself and my essence, my true essence, and this true essence alien to me will mock me as a spook of a thousand different names, because I am not yet I another like God, the true man, the truly pious man, the rational man, the female, et cetera. Is I my ego still far from myself. I separate myself into two halves, of which one the one unattained and two be fulfilled, is the true one. The one, the untrue, must be brought as a sacrifice to wit the unspiritual one. The other, the true, is to be the whole man to wit the spirit. Then it is said, the spirit is man's proper essence, or man exists as man only spiritually. Now there is a greedy rush to catch the spirit, as if one would then have bogged himself. And so in chasing after himself, one loses sight of himself whom he is, And as one stormily pursues his own self the never attained. So one also despises true people's rules to take men as they are, and prefers to take them as they should be, And for this reason hands everyone on after his should be self, and endeavors to make all into equally entitled, equally respectable, equally moral or rational men. Yes, if men were what they should be could be, if all men were rational, all loved each other as brothers, then it would be a paradisical life. All right, men are as they should be can be. What should they be surely not more than they can be? And what can they be not more again than they can Then they have the competence the forced to be. But this they really are, because what they are not they are incapable of being. For to be capable means really to be. One is not capable for anything that one really is not. One is not capable of anything that one does not really do. Could a man blinded by cutteracts see, Oh, yes, if he had his cut that's successfully removed. But now he cannot see because he does not see. Possibility and reality always coincide. One can do nothing that one does not, as one does nothing that one cannot. The sing reality of this assertion vanishes when one reflects that the words it is possible that almost never contain another meaning than I can imagine that, eg. It is possible for all men to live rationally. Eg I can imagine that all et cetera. Now, since my thinking cannot and accordingly does not, cause all men to live rationally, but this must still be left to the men themselves. General reason is for me only thinkable. A thinkableness but as such, in fact a reality that is called a possibility only in reference to what I cannot bring to pass. To wit, the rationality of others, so far as depends on you, all men might be rational, for you have nothing against it. Nay, so far as you're thinking reaches you perhaps cannot discover any hindrance either. And accordingly nothing does stand in the way of the thing in your thinking, and it is thinkable to you, as men are not all rational, though it is probable that they cannot be so. If something which one imagines to be easily possible is not or does not happen, then one may be assured that something stands in the way of the thing, and that it is impossible. Our time has its art, sires, etc. The art may be bad in all conscience, but one may say that we deserved to have a better and could have it if we only we have just as much art as we can have. Our art of to day is the only art possible and therefore real at the time. End of Section thirty five