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09 - The Hierarchy - part 1 - The Ego and His Own - Max Stirner · Logic Library

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Chapter two, Section A Subdivision three the hierarchy. The historical reflections on our
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Mongolism, which I propose to insert episodically at this place, are not given
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with the claim of thoroughness, or even of approved soundness, but solely because
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it seems to me that they may contribute toward making the rest clear. The
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history of the world, whose shaping properly belongs altogether to the Caucasian race,
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seems till now to have run through two Caucasian ages, and the first of
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which we had to work out and work off our innate negroidity. This was
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followed in the second by mongoloidity chineseness, which must likewise be terribly made an
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end of negroidity represents antiquity, the time of dependence on things, on cocks,
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eating, bird's flight, on sneezing, on thunder and lightning, on
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the rustling of sacred trees, and so forth. Mongoloidity the time of dependence
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on thoughts, the Christian time reserved for the future. Are the words,
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I am ownA of the world of things, and I am ownA of the
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world of mind. In the Negroid age fall the campaigns of Cisastrs and the
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importance of Egypt and of Northern Africa in general to the Mongoloid age belong the
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invasions of the Huns and Mongols up to the Russians. The value of me
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cannot possibly be rated high so long as the hard diamond of the not me
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bears so enormous a price, as was the case both with God and with
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the world. But not me is still too stony and indomitable to be consumed
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and absorbed by me. Rather, men only creep about with extraordinary bustle on
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this immovable entity, on this substance, like parasitic animals on a body from
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whose juices they draw nourishment, yet without consuming it. It is the bustle
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of vermin, the assiduity of Mongolians. Among the Chinese, we know everything
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remains as it used to be, and nothing essential or substantial suffers a change.
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All the more actively do they work away at that which remains, which
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bears the name of the old ancestors and the like. In our Mongolian age,
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all change has been only reformatory or ameliorative, not destructive or consuming and
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annihilating the substance. The object remains. All our assiduity was only the activity
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of ants and the hopping of fleas juggler's tricks on the immovable tightrope of the
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objective corvet service. Under the leadership of the unchangeable or eternal. The Chinese
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are doubtless the most positive nation because totally buried in precepts. But neither has
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the Christian age come out from the positive from limited freedom, freedom within certain
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limits. In the most advanced stage of civilization. This activity earns the name
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of scientific activity of working on motionless presupposition, a hypothesis that is not to
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be upset. In its first and most unintelligible form, morality shows itself as
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habit. To act according to the habit and usage more race of one's country
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is to be moral. There therefore, pure moral action, clear unadulterated morality
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is most straightforwardly practiced. In China. They keep to the old habit and
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usage, and hate each innovation as a crime worthy of death, for innovation
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is the deadly enemy of habit, of the old of permanence. In fact,
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too, it admits of no doubt that through habit mansecures himself against the
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obtrusiveness of things of the world and forms a world of his own, in
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which alone he is and feels at home, builds himself a heaven. Why
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heaven has no other meaning than that it is a man's proper home, in
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which nothing alien regulates and rules him any longer, no influence of the earthly
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any longer makes himself alien. In short, in which the dross of the
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earthly is thrown off, and the combat against the world has found an end,
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in which therefore nothing is any longer denied him. Heaven is the end
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of abnegation. It is free enjoyment. There man no longer denies himself anything,
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because nothing is any longer alien and hostile to him. But now habit
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is a second nature which detaches and frees man from his first and original natural
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condition, in securing him against every casual of it. The fully elaborated habit
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of the Chinese has provided for all emergencies that everything is looked out for whatever
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may come. The Chinaman always knows how he has to behave, and does
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not need to decide first according to the circumstances. No one foreseen case throws
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him down from the heaven of his rest. The morally habituated and inured Chinaman
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is not surprised and taken off his guard, he behaves with equanimity, that
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is, with equal spirit or temper toward everything, because his temper, protected
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by the precaution of his traditional usage, does not lose its balance. Hence,
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on the latter of culture or civilization, humanity mounts the first round through
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habit and as it conceives that in climbing to culture, it is at the
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same time climbing to heaven, the realm of culture or second nature, it
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really mounts the first round of the latter to heaven. If Mongoldom has settled
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the existence of spiritual beings, if it has created a world of spirits,
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a heaven, the Caucasians have wrestled for thousands of years with these spiritual beings
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to get to the bottom of them. What were they doing then, but
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building on Mongolian ground. They have not built on sand, but in the
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air. They have wrestled with Mongolism, stormed the Mongolian heaven tin. When
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will they at last annihilate this heaven? When will they at last become really
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Caucasians and find themselves? When will the immortality of the soul, which in
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these latter days thought it was giving itself still more security? If it presented
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itself as an immortality of mind, at last changed to the mortality of mind.
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It was when, in the industrious struggle of the Mongolian race men had
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built a heaven, that those of the Caucasian race, since in their Mongolian
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complexion they have to do with heaven, took upon themselves the opposite task,
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the task of storming that heaven of custom. Heaven storming activity to dig under
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all human ordinance in order to set up a new and better one on the
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cleared sight, to wreck all customs in order to put up new and better
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customs in their place. Their act is limited to this. But is it
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thus already purely and really what it aspires to be, and does it reach
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its final aim? No? In this creation of a better it is tainted
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with Mongolism. It storms heaven only to make a heaven again. It overthrows
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an old power only to legitimate a new power. It only improves. Nevertheless,
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the point aimed at, often as it may vanish from the eyes at
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every new attempt, is there real complete downfall of heaven customs in short of
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man secured only against the world of the isolation or inwardness of man through the
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heaven of culture. Man seeks to isolate himself from the world, to break
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its hostile power. But this isolation of heaven must likewise be broken, and
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the true end of heaven storming is the downfall of heaven, the annihilation of
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heaven. Improving and reforming is the Mongolism of the Caucasian, because thereby he
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is always getting up again what already existed to it, a precept, a
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generality, a heaven. He harbors the most irreconcilable enmity to heaven, and
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yet builds new heavens daily, Piling Heaven on heaven. He only crushes,
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one by another the Jews. Heaven destroys the Greeks, the Christians, the
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Jews, the Protestants, the Catholics. If the heaven storming men of Caucasian
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blood throw off their Mongolian skin, they will bury the emotional man under the
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ruins of the monstrous world of emotion, the isolated man under his isolated world,
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the paradisaical man under his heaven and Heaven is the realm of spirits,
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the realm of freedom of the spirit, the realm of heaven, The realm
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of spirits and ghosts has found its right standing in the speculative philosophy. Here
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it was stated as the realm of thoughts, concepts, and ideas. Heaven
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is peopled with thoughts and ideas, and this realm of spirits is then the
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true reality. To want to win. Freedom for the spirit is Mongolism.
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Freedom of the spirit is Mongolian freedom, freedom of feeling, moral freedom,
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and so forth we may find the word morality taken as synonymous with spontaneity self
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determined that is not involved in it. Rather, has the Caucasian shown himself
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spontaneous only in spite of his Mongolian morality. The Mongolian heaven or morals remained
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the strong castle. And only by storming incessantly at this castle did the Caucasians
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show himself moral. If he had not had to do with morals at all
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any longer, if he had not had therein his undomitable continual enemy, the
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relation to morals would cease, and consequently morality would cease. That his spontaneity
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is still a moral spontaneity, therefore, is just the mongoloidity of it is
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a sign that in it he has not arrived at himself moral spontaneity corresponds entirely
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with religious and orthodox philosophy, fee constitutional monarchy, the Christian state, freedom
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within certain limits, the limited freedom of the press, or in a figure
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to the hero fettered to a sick bed. Man has not really vanquished shamanism,
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and it spooks till he possesses the strength to lay aside not only the
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belief in ghosts or in spirits, but also the belief in the spirit.
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He who believes in a spook no more assumes the introduction of a higher world
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than he who believes in the spirit, and both seek behind the sensual world,
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a super sensual one. In short, they produce and believe another world,
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and this other world, the product of their mind, is a spiritual
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world. For their senses grasp and know nothing of another a nonsensual world,
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only their spirit lives in it. Going on from this, Mongolian belief in
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the existence of spiritual beings to the point that the proper being of man too
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is his spirit, and that all care must be directed to this alone.
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To the welfare of his soul. Is not hard influence on the spirit,
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so called moral influence is hereby assured. Hence it is manifest that Mongolism represents
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utter absence of any rights of the sensuous represents nonsensuousness and unnature. And that
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sin and the consciousness of sin, was our Mongolian torment that lasted thousands of
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years. But who then will dissolve the spirit into its nothing, He who,
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by means of the spirit, set forth nature as the null finite transitory.
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He alone can bring down the spirit too to like nullity. I can,
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each one among you can who does his will as an absolute eye.
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In a word, the egoist can before the sacred people lose all sense of
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power and all confidence. They occupy a powerless and humble attitude toward it.
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And yet no thing is sacred of itself, but by my declaring its sacred,
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by my declaration, my judgment, the knee, in short, by
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my conscience, sacred is everything which for the egoist is to be unapproachable,
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not to be touched outside his power above him. Sacred, in a word,
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is every matter of conscience. For this is a matter of conscience to
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me means simply I hold this sacred. For little children, as for animals,
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nothing sacred exists. Because in order to make room for this conception,
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one must already have progressed so far an understanding that he can make distinctions like
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good and bad, warranted and unwarranted. Only at such a level of reflection
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or intelligence. The proper standpoint of religion can unnatural that is brought into exist
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distance by thinking reverence sacred dread step into the place of natural fear. To
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this sacred dread belongs holding something outside oneself for mightier, greater, better,
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warranted, better. The attitude in which one acknowledges the might of something alien
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not merely feels it then, but expressly acknowledges it, admits it, yields,
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surrenders, lets himself be tiede devotion, humility, servility, submission.
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Here walks the whole ghostly troop of the Christian virtues. Everything towards which you
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cherish any respect or reverence deserves the name of sacred You yourself. Two say
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that you would feel a sacred dread of laying hands on it, and you
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give this tinge even to the unholy gallows, crime, et cetera. You
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have a horror of touching it. There lies in it something uncanny that is
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unfamiliar or not your own. If something or other did not rank as sacred
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in a man's mind, Why then all bars would be let down to self
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will, to unlimited subjectivity. Fear makes the beginning, and one can make
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himself fearful to the coarsest man already therefore a barrier against his insolence. But
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in fear there always remains the attempt to liberate one's self from what is feared,
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guile, deception, tricks, et cetera. In reverence, on the
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contrary, it is quite otherwise. Here something is not only feared but also
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honored. What is feared has become an inward power which I can no longer
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get clear of. I honor it, and captivated by it, and devoted
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to it, belong to it by the honor which I pay it. I
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am completely in its power, and do not even attempt liberation any longer.
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Now I am attached to it with all the strength of faith. I believe
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I and what I fear are one. Not I live, but the respected
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lives in me. Because the spirit the infinite does not allow of coming to
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any end. Therefore it is stationary. It fears dying, It cannot let
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go its dear Jesus. The greatness of finiteness is no longer recognized by its
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blinded eye. The object of fear, now raised to veneration, may no
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longer be handled. Reverence is made eternal, the respected is deified. The
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man is now no longer employed in creating, but in learning, knowing,
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investigating, occupied with a fixed object, losing himself in its depths without returning
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to himself. The relation to this object is that of knowing, fathoming,
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basing, not that of dissolution, abrogation. Man is to be religion that
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is settled. Therefore people busy themselves only with the question how this is to
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be attained? What is the right meaning of religiousness? Et cetera. Quite
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otherwise, when one makes the axiom itself doubtful and calls it in question,
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even though it should go to smash, morality too, is such a sacred
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conception. One must be moral, and must look only for the right how
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the right way to be. So one dares not go at morality itself with
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the question whether it is not itself an illusion. It remains exalted above all
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doubt, unchangeable. And so we go on with the sacred, grade after
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grade from the holy to the holiest of Polly's end of section