Latest / The Philosophy Insights Collection / 23 - My Power - part 3 - The Ego and His Own - Max Stirner
Transcript
- My power heart free. What is the ordinary criminal but one who has committed the fatal mistake of endeavoring after what is the peoples instead of seeking for what is his. He has sought despicable alien goods, has done what believers do, who seek after what is God's. What does the priest who admonishes the criminal do? He sets before him the great wrong of having desecrated by his act what was hallowed by the state, its property, in which of course must be included even the life of those who belong to the state. Instead of this, he might rather hold up to him the fact that he has befound himself in not despising the alien thing, but thinking it worth stealing if he could, if he were not a parson. Talk with a so called criminal as well an egoist, and he will be ashamed, not that he transgressed against your laws and goods, but that he considered your laws worth evading, your goods worth desiring. He will be ashamed that he did not despise you and yours together, that he was too little an egoist. But you cannot talk egoistically with him, for you are not so great as a criminal. You commit no crime you do not know that an ego who is his own cannot desist from being a criminal. That crime is his life. And yet you should know it, since you believe that we are all miserable sinners. But you think surreperteously to get beyond sin. You do not comprehend, for you are devil fearing that guilt is the value of a man. Oh, if you are guilty, but now you are righteous, Well, just put everything nicely to rights for your master. When the Christian consciousness or the Christian man draws up a criminal code, what can the concept of crime be there but simply heartlessness. Each severing and wounding of a heart relation, each heartless behavior toward a sacred being is crime. The more heartfelt the relation is supposed to be, the more scandalous is the deriding of it, and the more worthy of punishment the crime. Everyone who is subject to the Lord should love him. To deny this love is a high treason worthy of death. Adultery is a heartlessness worthy of punishment. One has no heart, no enthusiasm feeling for the sakeredness of marriage. So long as the heart or soul detects laws, only be heartful or soulful man enjoys the protection of the laws. That the man of soul makes laws means probably that the moral man makes them what contradicts these men's moral feeling. This they penalize, how e g. Should disloyalty, secession, reach of oaths, in short or radical breaking off, or tearing asunder of venerable ties, not being fligitous and criminal. In their eyes, he who breaks with these demands of the soul has for enemies all the moral or the men of soul. Only criminature and his mates are the right people to set up consciously a penal code of the heart, as a certain bill sufficiently proves the consistent legislation of the Christian state must be placed wholly in the hands of the parsons, and will not become pure and coherent as long as it is worked out only by the parsion ridden, who are always only half parsons. Only then will every lack of soulfulness, every heartlessness, be certified as an unpardonable crime. Only then will every agitation of the soul become condemnable, every objection of criticism and doubt be alithematized. Only then is the only man before the Christian consciousness a convicted criminal. To begin with, the men of the revolution often spoked of the people's just revenge as its right. Revenge and right coincide. Here is this an attitude of an ego to an ego. The people cries that the opposite part has committed crimes against it. Can I assume that one commits a crime against me without assuming that he has to act as icy fit? And this action I call the right, the good, etc. The divergence action a crime. So I think that the others must aim at the same goal with me. I e. I do not treat them as unique beings who bear their law in themselves and live according to it, but as beings who are to obey some rational law as set up what man is and what acting in a truly human way is. And I demand of everyone that this law become normal and ideal to him, otherwise he will expose himself as a sinner and criminal. But upon the guilty fools the penalty of the law. One sees here how it is man against who sets on foot. Even the concept of crime of sin and therewith that of right. A man in whom I do not recognize man is a sinner, a guilty one only against a sacred thing? Are their criminals? You against me can be never a criminal, but only an opponent. But not to hate him who injures a sacred thing is in itself a crime, as Saint just cries out against Danton. Are you not a criminal and responsible for not having hated the enemies of the fatherland. If, as in the Revolution, what man is apprehended as good citizen, then from this concept of man we have the well known political offenses and crimes. In all of this the individual, the individual man is regarded as refuse, and on the other hand, general man is honored. Now according to how this ghost is named as Christian, Jew, Marsuliman, good citizen, lawyer, subject, freeman, patriarch, et cetera. Just so do those who would like to carry through the divigent concept of man, as well as those who want to put themselves through fall behind victorious man. And with what function the butchery goes on here in the name of the law of the sovereign people of God, etc. Now, if the persecuted tripoly concealed and protect themselves from the stern parsinical judges, people stigmatize them as Saint just E g does not those whom he accuses in a speech against Ganton, one is to be a fool and deliver himself up to their moloch. Crimes spring from fixed idea. The sacredness of marriage is a fixed idea. From the sacredness, it follows that infidelity is a crime, and therefore a certain marriage law imposes upon it a shorter or longer penalty. But by those who proclaim freedom as sacred, this penalty must be regarded as a crime against freedom, And only in this sense has public opinion in fact granted the marriage law. Society would have everyone come to his right. Indeed, but yet only to that which is sanctioned by society, to the society right, not really to his right. But I gave, or take to myself the right out of my own penitude of power, and against every superior power. I am the most impenitive, criminal, owner and creator of my right. I recognize no other source of right than me, neither God, nor the state, nor nature, nor even man himself with his eternal rights of man, neither divine nor human rights right in and for itself without relation to me. Therefore absolute right separated from me therefore a thing that exists in and for itself, an absolute, an eternal right, like an eternal truth. According to the liberal way of thinking, right is to be obligatory for me because it is thus established by human reason, against which my reason is unreason. Formerly people invade in the name of divine reason against weak human reasons. Now in the name of a strong human reason, against egoistic reason, which is rejected as unreason. And yet none is real because this very unreason, neither divine nor human reason. But only you and my reason, existing at my given time, is real as and because you and I are real. The thought of right is originally my thought, or it has its origin in me. But when it has sprung from me, when the word is out, then it has become flesh. It is a fixed idea. Now I no longer get rid of the thought. However I turn, it stands before me. Thus men have not become masters the gain of the thought right, which they themselves created. Their creature is running away with them. This is absolute right. That which is absorbed or unfastened from me, we revere it. It has absolute cannot devour it again, and it takes from us the creative power their creature is more than the creator. It is in and for itself. Once you no longer let write one around three, once you draw it back into its origin, into you, it is your right, and that is right which suits you. Right has had to suffer an attack within itself i e. From the standpoint of right or being declared on the part of liberalism against privilege. Privileged and endowed with equal rights. On these two concepts turns a stubborn fight. Excluded or admitted would mean the same. But where should there be a power, be it in an imaginary one like God, law, or real one like I you, of which it should not be true that before it all are endowed with equal rights i e. No respect of personal holes. Everyone is equally dear to God if he adores him, equally agreeable to the law if only he is a law abiding person. Whether the lover of God and the law is humpbacked and lame, whether poor or rich, et cetera. That amounts to nothing for God and the law. Just so, when you are at the point of drowning, you like a negro as rescuer as well as the most excellent occasion. Yes, in this situation you esteem a dog not less than a man, but to whom will not every one be also punctuise a preferred or disregarded person. God pledges the wicked with his wrath, the lordasises the lawless. You let one visit you every moment, and show the other the door. The equality of right is a phantom, just because right is nothing more and nothing less than admission, a matter of grace, which be it said one may also acquire by his dessert, For dessert and grace are not contradictory, since even grace wishes to be deserved, and our gracious smile falls only to him who knows how to force it from us. So people dream all of citizens of the state having to stand side by side with equal rights. As citizens of the state. They are certainly all equal for the state, But it will divide them and advance them or put them in the rear, according to its special ends, if on no other account, And still more, must it distinguish them from one another as good and bad citizens. Brunobierre disposes of the due question from the standpoint that privilege is not justified because jew and Christian have each some point of advantage over the other, and in having this point of a advantage are exclusive. Therefore, before the critics gaze, they crumble into lookingness with them. This state was under the like blame since it justifies their having advantages and stamps it as a privilege, all proberative, but thereby derogates from its calling to become a free state. But now everyone has something of advantage over another, this himself or his individuality. In this everybody remains exclusive. And again before a third party, everyone makes his pecuniarity count for as much as possible, and if he wants to win him at all, tries to make it appear attractive before him. Now is the third party to be insensible to the differences of the one from the other. Do they ask that of the free state or of human Then these would have to be absolutely without self interest and incapable of taking an interest in any one whatever. Neither God, who di guides his own from the wicked, nor the state, which knows how to separate good citizens from bad was bought of as so indifferent. But they are looking for this very third party that distows no more privilege. Then it is called perhaps the free state, or humanity, or whatever else it may be. As Christian and jew are ranked low by BRUNOBIAU on account of their certain privileges. It must be that they could and should free themselves from the narrowest standpoint by self renunciation or unselfishness. If they threw off their egoism, the mutual wrong would cease, and with it Christian and Jewish religiousness in general. It would be necessarily only that either of them should any longer want to be anything peculiar. But if they gave up this exclusiveness, with that the grant on which their hostilities were waged would in truth not yet be forsaken. In case of need, they would indeed find a third thing on which they could unite, a general religion, a religion of humanity, et cetera. In short, an equalization which need not be better than that which would result if all Jews became Christians. By this. Likewise, the privilege of one over the other would have an end. The tension would indeed be done away. But in this consisted not of the essence of the two, but only their neighborhood. As being distinguished from each other, they must necessarily be mutually resistant, and the disparity will always remain. Truly, it is not a failing in you that you stiffen yourselves against me and assert your distinctness or peculiarity. You need not give away or reunites yourself. People conceive the significance of the opposition too formally and weakly, when they want only to dissolve it in order to make room for a third thing that shall unite. The opposition deserves rather to be sharpened. As jew and Christian, you are into sight and opposition, and are contending only about religion, as it were about the Emperor's beard, about a fiddlestick's end enemies in religion. Indeed, in the rest you still remain good friends and equal to each other e g. As men. Nevertheless, the rest, too is unlike in each and the time when you no longer merely descend your opposition will be only when you entirely recognize it, and everybody asserts himself from top to toe as unique. Then the former opposition will assuredly be dissolved, but only because a stronger has taken it up into itself. Our weakness consists not in this that we are in opposition to others, but in this that we are not completely so that we are not entirely severed from them, or that we seek a communion, a bond, that in communion we have an ideal, one faith, one god, one idea, one hat for all. If all were brought under one hat, certainly no one would any longer need to take off his hat before another. The last and most decided opposition, that of unique against unique, is at bottom beyond what is called decision. But without having slunk back into the unity and unison as unique, you have nothing in common with the other any longer, and therefore nothing to visit or hostile either. You are not seeking to be in the right against him before a third party, and are standing with him neither on the ground of right, nor on any other common ground. The opposition vanishes incomplete severance or singleness. This might indeed be regarded as the new point in common or a new parity. But here the parity consists precisely in the disparity, and it's itself nothing but a disparity, a part of disparity, and that only for him who institutes a comparison. The polemic against privilege forms a characteristic feature of liberalism, which fumes again privilege, because it itself appeals to write further than perfuming. It cannot carry this, For privileges do not fall before right falls, as they are only forms of right. But right falls apart into its nuttingness when it is swallowed up by might, i e. When one understands what is meant I, might goes before right. All right explains itself then as privilege, and privilege itself as power, as superior power. But must not the mighty combat against superior power show quite another face than the modest combat against privilege, which is to be thought out before a first judge. Right according to the judge's mind. Now, in conclusion, I have still to take back the halfway form of expression of which I was willing to make use only so long as I was still routing among the entrails of right and letting the word at least stand. But in fact, with the concept the word too uses its meaning. What I call it my right is no longer right at all, because right can be bestowed only by a spirit, be it the spirit of nature or that of the species of mankind, the spirit of God, or that of His Holiness or His Highness, et cetera. What have I without an entitling spirit? I have without right. I have it solely and alone through my power. I do not demand any right. Therefore I need not recognize any either. What I can get by force I get by force, and what I do not get by force I have no right to. Nor do I give myself airs or consolation with my imperceptible right. With absolute right, right itself passes away. The dominion of the concept of right is canceled at the same time. For it is not to be forgotten that hitherto concepts, ideas, or principles ruled us, and that among these rulers the concept of right or of justice played one of the most important parts. Entitled or unentitled, that does not concern me. If I am only powerful, I am of myself empowered and need no other empowering or entitling. Right is a real in the head, put there by a spook power that am by myself. I am the powerful one and owner of power. Right is above me, is absolute and exists in one hire as whose grace it flows to me. Right is a gift of grace from the judge. Power and might exists only in me, the powerful and mighty. End of Section twenty three