Latest / The Philosophy Insights Collection / 39 - The Unique One - The Ego and His Own - Max Stirner
Transcript
- Section thirty nine. The unique One. Pre Christian and Christian times pursue opposite goals. The former wants to idealize the real, the latter to realize the ideal. The former seeks the Holy Spirit, the latter the glorified body. Hence, the former closes with insensitivity to the real, with contempt for the world. The latter will end with the casting off of the ideal with contempt for the spirit. The opposition of the real and the ideal is an irreconcilable one, and the one can never become the other. If the ideal became the real, it would no longer be the ideal, And if the real became the ideal, the ideal alone would be, but not at all the real. The opposition of the two is not to be vanquished otherwise than if someone annihilates both. Only in this someone the third party, does the opposition find its end. Otherwise, idea and reality will ever fail to coincide. The idea cannot be so realized as to remain idea, but is realized only when it dies as idea, and it is the same with the real. But now we have before us and the ancients adherence of the idea and the moderns adherence of reality. Neither can get clear of the opposition, and both pine only the one party for the spirit. And when this craving of the ancient world seem to be satisfied in this spirit have come the others pined immediately for the secularization of this spirit again, which must forever remain a pious wish. The pious wish of the ancients was sanctity. The pious wish of the moderns is corporeity. But as antiquity had to go down as if its longing was to be satisfied, for it consisted only in the longing, so too, corporeity can never be attained within the ring of Christianness. As the trait of sanctification or purification goes through the old world, the washings, etc. So that of incorporation goes through the Christian world. God plunges down into this world, becomes flesh, and wants to redeem it ig fill it with himself. But since he is the idea or the spirit people e. G. Hegel in the end introduced the idea into everything, into the world and prove that the idea is that reason is in everything. Man corresponds in the culture of today to what the Heathen Stoics set up as the wise man, the latter like the former, a fleshless being, the unreal wise man, this bodyless holy one of the Stoics became a real person, a bodily holy one in God made flesh. The unreal man, the bodyless ego will become real, and the corporeal ego in me. There are wines through Christianity. The question about the existence of God, which taken up ever and ever again, gives testimony that the craving for existence, corporeity, personality, reality, was incessantly busying the heart because it never found a satisfying solution. At last, the question about the existence of God fell, but only to rise up again, and the proposition that the divine had existence Feuerbach. But this too has no existence, and neither will. The last refuge that the purely human is realizable affords shelter much longer. No idea has existence, for none is capable of corporeity. The scholastic contention of realism and nominalism has the same content. In short, this spins itself helf out through all Christian history and cannot end in it. The world of Christians is working at realizing ideas in the individual relations of life, the institutions and laws of the Church and the state, but they make resistance and always keep back something unembodied, unrealizable. Nevertheless, this embodiment is restlessly rushed after, no matter in what degree, corporeity constantly fails to result. For realities matter little to the realizer, but it matters everything that they be realizations of the idea. Hence he has ever examining a new whether the realized does in truth have the idea it's kernel dwelling in it. Testing the real He at the same time tests the idea, whether it is realizable as he thinks it, or is only thought by him incorrectly and for that reason unfeasibly. The Christian is no longer to care for family, state, etc. As existences. Christians are not to sacrifice themselves for these divine things, like the ancients, but these are only to be utilized to make the spirit alive in them. The real family has become indifferent, and there is to arise out of it an ideal one, which would then be truly real, a sacred family blessed by God. Or, according to the liberal way of thinking, a rational family with the ancient family state fatherland is divine as a thing extant. With the moderns that is still awaiting divinity as extant, it is only sinful, earthly and as still to be redeemed. I need to become truly real. This has the following meaning. The family, etc. Is not the extant and real, but the divine. The idea is extant and real. Whether this family will make itself real by taking up the truly real the idea is still unsettled. It is not the individual's task to serve the family as of the divine, but reversely, to serve the divine and to bring to it the still undivined family, to subject to everything in the idea's name, to set up the ideas banner everywhere, to bring the idea into real efficacy. But since the concern of Christianity as of antiquity is for the divine, they always come out at this again on their opposite ways. At the end of Heathenism, the divine becomes the extra mundane. At the end of Christianity, the intra mundane antiquity does not succeed in putting it entirely outside the world, and when Christianity accomplishes this task, the divine instantly longs to get back into the world and wants to redeem the world. But within Christianity it does not and cannot come to this that the divine as intra mundane, should really become the mundane itself. There is enough left that does and must maintain itself unpenetrated as the bad, irrational, accidental, egoistic, the mundane, and the bad sense. Christianity begins with God's becoming man and carries on its work of conversion and redemption through all time in order to prepare for God a reception in all men and in everything human, and to penetrate everything with the spirit. It sticks to preparing a place for the Spirit. When the accent was at last laid on man or mankind, it was again the idea that they pronounced eternal Man does not die. They thought that they had now found the reality of the idea. Man is the eye of history, of the world's history. It is he this ideal that really develops I e. Realizes himself. He is the really real and corporeal one, for history is his body, in which individuals are only members. Christ is the eye of the world's history, even of the pre Christian. In modern apprehension, it is Man. The figure of Christ has developed into the figure of man. Man as such, Man absolutely is the central point of history. In Man, the imaginary beginnings return again, for Man is as imaginary as Christ is Man as the eye of the world's history closes, the cycle of Christian apprehensions. Christianity's magic circle would be broken if the strained relation between existence and calling e g. Between me as I am and me as I should be ceased. It persists only as the longing of the idea for its bodiliness, and vanishes with the relaxing separation of the two. Only when the idea remains idea as man or mankind is an, indeed a bodyless idea, is Christianity still extant the corporeal idea. The corporeal or completed spirit floats before the Christians as the end of the days or as the goal of history. It is not present time to him. The individual can only have a part in the founding of the Kingdom of God, or, according to the modern notion of the same thing, and the development and history of humanity and only so far as he has a part in it, does a Christian, or according to the modern expression, human value pertain to him. For the rest he is dust and a worm bag. That the individual is of himself a world's history and possesses his property in the rest of the world's history goes by beyond what is Christian. To the Christian, the world's history is the higher thing, because it is the history of Christ or man. To the egoist, only his history has value, because he wants to develop only himself, not the mankind idea, not God's plan, not the purposes of providence, not liberty, etc. He does not look upon himself as a tool of the idea or a vessel of God. He recognizes no calling. He does not fancy that he exists for the further development of mankind, and then he must contribute his might to it. But he lives himself out, careless of how well or ill humanity may fare. Thereby, if it were not open to confuse usion with the idea that a state of nature is to be praised, one might recall Leno's three gypsies. What am I in the world to realize ideas? To do my part by my citizenship, say toward the realization of the idea state, or by marriage as husband and father, to bring the idea of the family into an existence. What does such a calling concern me? I live after a calling as little as the flower grows and gives fragrance after a calling. The ideal man is realized when the Christian apprehension turns about and becomes the proposition, I this unique one am man. The conceptual question what is man has then changed into the personal question who is man? With what the concept was sought for? In order to realize it? With who? It is no longer any question at all, but the answer is personally on hand at once in the asker, the question answers itself. They say of God names name the not that holds good of me. No concept expresses me. Nothing that is designated as my essence exhausts me. They are only names. Likewise, they say of God that he is perfect and has no calling to strive after perfection. That's who holds good of me alone. I am the only owner of my might, and I am so When I know myself as unique in the unique one, the owner himself returns into his creative nothing of which he is born every higher essence above me, be it God, be a man weakens the feeling of my uniqueness, and pales only before the sun of this consciousness. If I concern myself for myself, the unique one, then my concern rests on its transitory mortal creator, who consumes himself. And I may say all things are nothing to me. The end end of section thirty nine