Latest / The Philosophy Insights Collection / 32 - My Intercourse - part 9 - The Ego and His Own - Max Stirner
Transcript
- My intercourse. Part nine. Intercourse hitherto has rested on love, the godful behavior doing for each other. As one owed it to himself to make himself blessed, or owed himself the bliss of taking up into himself the supreme essence and bringing it to a firmity of truth and reality, so one owed it to others to help them realize their essence and their calling. In both cases, one owed it to the essence of man to contribute to its realization. But one owes it neither to himself to make anything out of himself, nor to others to make anything out of them. For one owes nothing to his essence and that of others. Intercourse resting on essence is an intercourse with the spuke, not with anything real. If I hold intercourse with a supreme essence, I am not holding intercourse with myself. And if I hold intercourse with the essence of man, I am not holding intercourse with men. The natural man's love becomes through culture a commandment, But as commandment it belongs to man as such, not to me. It is my essence about which much ado is made, not my property. Man I e. Humanity presents that demand to me, love is demanded, it is my duty. Instead. Therefore, of being really one for me, it has been one for the generality man as his property or peculiarity. It becomes man every man to love. Love is the duty and calling of man, etc. Consequently, I muster, gain, vindicate love for myself, and deliver it out of the power of man with the great end. What was originally mine, but accidentally mine, instinctively mine, I was invested with as the property of man. I became the foth in loving. I became the retainer of mankind, only a specimen of this species, and acted loving not as I, but as man, as a specimen of man the humanly. The whole condition of civilization is the feudal system, the property being man's or mankind's, not mine. The monst just feudal state was founded the individual robbed of everything everything left to man. The individual had to appear at last as a sinner. Through and through, and I perchance to have no lively interest in the person of another. Are his joy and his will not to lie at my heart is the enjoyment that I furnish him, not to be more to me than other, enjoyment of my own on the contrary, I can, with joy sacrifice to him numberless enjoyments. I can deny myself numberless things for the enhancement of his pleasure. And I can hazard for him what without him was the dearest to me, my life, my welfare, my freedom. Why it constitutes my pleasure and my happiness to refresh myself with his happiness and his pleasure, but myself, my own self, I do not sacrifice to him, but remain and eat and enjoy him. If I sacrifice to him everything that but for my love to him, I should keep. That is very simple, and even more usual in life than it seems to be. But it proves nothing further than that this one passion is more powerful in me than all of the rest. Christianity, too teaches us to sacrifice all other passions to this. But if to one passion I sacrifice others, I do not, on that account, go so far as to sacrifice myself, or to sacrifice anything of that whereby I truly am myself, I do not sacrifice my peculiar value, my ownness. Where this bad case occurs, love cuts no better figure than any other passion that I obey blindly. The ambitious man who is carried away by ambition and remains death to every warning that the cal't moment begets him, has let this passion grow up into a deposit, against whom he abandons all power of dissolution. He has given up himself because he cannot dissolve himself, and consequently cannot absolve himself from the passion he is possessed. I love men too, not merely individuals, but everyone. But I love them with the consciousness of egoism. I love them because love makes me happy. I love because loving is natural to me, because it pleases me. I know no commandment of love. I have a fellow feeling with every feeling being, and their torment torments, their refreshments refreshes me too. I can kill them, not torture them. Per contra the high souled, virtuous philistine Prince Rudolph in the Mysteries of Paris. Because the wicked provoke his indignation plans their torture, that fellow feeling proves only that the feeling of those who feel is mine to my property, in opposition to which the pitiless feeling of the righteous man e. G. Against Notary Pherens is like the unfeelings of that robber Procrustes, who cut off or stretched his prisoner's legs to the measure of his bedstead. Rudolph's bedstead, which he cuts men to fit, is the concept of the good, the full right, virtue, etc. Makes people hardhearted and intolerant. Rudolph does not feel like the notary, but the reverse. He feels that it's serves the rascal right. That is no fellow feeling. You love man, therefore you torture the individual man, the egoist. Your philanthropy love of men is the tormenting of men. If I see the loved one suffer, I suffer with him, and I know no rest till I have tried everything to comfort and cheer him. If I see him glad, I too become glad over his joy. From this, it does not follow that suffering or joy is caused in me by the same thing that brings out this effect in him, as is sufficiently proved by every bodily pain, which I do not feel as he does. His pains him, but his pain pains me. But because I cannot bear the troubled priest and the beloved forehead for that reason, and therefore for my sake, I kiss it away. If I did not love this person, he might go right on make increases. They would not trouble me. I am only driving away my trouble. How now, has anybody or anything whom and which I do not love a right to be loved by me? Is my love first? Or is his right first? Parents? Kinsfolk, fatherland, nation, native town, etc. Finally, fellow men in general, brothers fraternity assert that they have a right to my love and lay claim to it without further ceremony. They look upon it as their property and upon me. If I do not respect this, as a robbert who takes from them what pertains to them and is theirs I should love. If love is a commandment and law, then I must be educated into it, cultivated up to it, and if I trespass against it, punished. Hence, people will exercise as strong a moral influence as possible on me to bring me to love. And there is no doubt that one can work up and seduce men to love, as one can to any other passion. If you like to hate, hate ones through whole races, merely because the ancestors of the one belong to the guilts those of the other to the guilt flings. But love is not a commandment, but like each of my feelings my property acquire I e. Purchase the property, and then I will make it over to you a church and nation, of fatherland, of family, etc. I does not know how to acquire my love. I need not love, and I fix the purchase price of my love quite at my pleasure. Selfish love is far distant from unselfish, mystical or romantic love. One can love everything possible, not merely men, but an object in general, wine, one's father land, etc. Love becomes blind and crazy by I must taking it out of my power infatuation, romantic I as should entering into it i e. By the object becoming sacred for me, or my becoming bound to it by duty, conscience, oath. May the object no longer exists for me, but I for it. Love is a possessiveness, not as my feeling. As such, I'd rather keep it in my possession as property, but through the alienness of the object. For religious love consists in a commandment to love in the beloved, a holy one, or to adhere to a holy one. For unselfish love, there are objects absolutely lovablen for which my heart is to beat e g. Fellow men, or my wedded mate, kinsfolk, et cetera. Holy love loves the holy in their beloved, and therefore exerts itself also to make of the beloved more and more a holy one. A man. The beloved is an object that should be loved by me. He is not an object of my love on account of because of or by my loving him, but is an object of love in and of himself. Not I make him an object of love, but he is such to begin with, for it is here in elevant. But he has become so by my choice. If so it be as with a fiancee, of spouse, etc. Since even so he has, in any case, as the person once chosen, obtained a right of his own to my love. And I, because I have loved him, am under obligation to love him forever. He is therefore not an object of my love, but of love in general. An object that should be loved. Love appertains to him, is due to him, or is his right while I am under obligation to love him. My love I e. The told of love that I pay him is in truth his love, which he only coy lets from me. As told, every love to which there killings but the smallest spect of obligation is an unselfish love. And so far as this spec reaches a possessiveness, he who believes that he owes the object of his love anything loves romantically or religiously. Family love e g. As it is usually understood as piety, is a religious love, love of fatherland preached as patriotism. Likewise, all our romantic loves move in the same pattern everywhere, the hypocrisy, or rather self deception of an unselfish love and interest in the object for the object's sake, not for my sake and mine alone. Religious or romantic love is distinguished from central love by the difference of the object, indeed, but not by the dependence of the relation to it. In the latter regard, both are possessiveness, but in the former the one object is profane, the other's sacred. The dominion of the object over me is the same in both cases, only fact it is one time essentials one, the other time a spiritual, ghostly one. My love is my own only when it consists altogether in a selfish and egoistic interest, and when Consequently, the object of my love is really my object or my property. I owe my property nothing and have no duty to it, as little as I might have a duty to my eye. If nevertheless, I guard it with the greatest care, I do so on my account. Antiquity lacked love as little as do Christian times. The god of love is older than the God of love, but the mystical possessiveness belongs to the moderns. The possessiveness of love lies in the alienation of the object, or in my powerlessness, as against its alienness and superior power. To the egoist, nothing is high enough for him to humble himself before it, nothing so independent that he would live for love of it, nothing so sacred that he would sacrifice himself to it. The egoist's love rises in selfishness, flows in the bed of selfishness, and empties into selfishness again. Whether this can still be called love? If you know another word for it, go ahead and choose it. Then the sweet wood love may wither the departed world. For the present, I at least find none in our Christian language, and hence stick to the old sound and love my object my property only as one of my feelings. Do I harbor love, but as a power above me, as a divine power, as few of art says, as a passion that I am not to cast off as a religious and moral duty, I scorn it, as by feeling it is mine, as a principle to which I consecrate and bow my soul. It is a dominator and divine, just as hatred as a principle is diabolical, one not better than the other. In short, egoistic love, I my love is neither holy or unholy, neither divine nor diabolic. Or love that is limited by faith is an untrue love. The sole limitation that does not contradict the essence of love is the self limitation of love by reason intelligence, Love that schools the vigor the law of intelligence is theoretically a false love, practically a ruineous one. So love is in its essence rational, so thanks Feuerbach. The believer, on the contrary, thinks love is in its essence believing. The one in vays against irrational, the other against unbelieving love. To both it can at most rank as a splendidium vitium. Do not both believe love standing even in the form of unreason and unbelief. They do not dare to say irrational or unbelieving love is nonsense, is not love? As little as they are willing to say irrational or unbelieving tears are not tears. But if even irrational love, etc. Must count as love, and if they are nevertheless to be unworthy of man, there follows simply this love is not the highest thing, but reason or faith, even the unreasonable and the unbelieving and love. But love has value only when it is that of a rational or believing person. It is an illusion. When Fubarch calls the rationality of love its self limitation, the believer in right with the same right core believes its self limitation. Irrational love is neither bars nor ruinous. It does its service as love toward the world, especially toward men. I am to assume a particular feeling and meet them with love, with the feeling of love from the beginning. Certainly, in this there is reveilled far more free will and self determination than when I let myself be stormed by way of the world, by all possible feelings, and remain exposed to the most sheephered, most accidental impressions. I go to the world rather with a preconceived feeling, as if it were a prejudice and a preconceived opinion. I have prescribed to myself in advance my behavior toward it, and despite all its temptations, fail and think about it. Only as I have once determined to against the dominion of the world. I secure myself by the principle of love, for whatever may come, I love. The ugly eg makes a repulsive impression on me, But determined to love, I master this impression, as I do every anthropy. But the feeling to which I have determined and condemned myself from the start is a narrow feeling, because it is a predestined one of which I myself am not able to get clear or to declare myself clear, because preconceived it is a prejudice. I no longer show myself in face of the world, but my love shows itself. The world indeed does not rule me, but so much the more inevitably does the spirit of love rule this spirit. If I first said I love the world, I now ad likewise I do not love it, for I annihilate it. As I annihilate myself, I dissolve it. I do not limit myself to one feeling for men, but give free play to all that I am capable of. Why should I not dare speak it out in all its clearingness. Yes, I utilize the world and men. With this, I can keep myself open to every impression without being torn away from myself by one of them. I can love love with a full heart, and let the most consuming glow of passion burn in my heart without taking the beloved one for anything else. And the nourishment of my passion on which it ever refreshes itself ane. All my care for him applies only to the object of my love, only to him whom my love requires only to him, the war loved. How indifferent would he be to me? Without this my love? I viewed only my love with him. I utilize him for this only I enjoy him. Let us choose another convenient example. I see how men are fettered in dark superstition by a swarm of ghosts. If, to the extent of my powers, I let a bit of daylight fall in on an eternal spookery, Is it perchance because I love to you to inspire this in me? Do I write out of love to men? No? I write because I want to procure for my thoughts as existence in the world. And even if I foresaw that these thoughts would deprive you of your rest and your peace, even if I saw the bloodiest wars and the fall of many generations springing up from this seed of thought, I would nevertheless scatter it. Do with it what you will and can. That is your affair and does not trouble me. You will perhaps have only trouble, combat and death from it, though if you will draw joy from it, if your will lay at my heart, I should act as the Church did in withholding the Bible from the laity, or Christian governments which make it a sacred duty for themselves to protect the common people from bad books. But not only for your sake, not even for truth's sake either. Do I speak out what I think? No, I sing as the bird sings that on the bow alights the song that from the springs is paid. That well requites I sing because I am a singer. But I use you, But it becomes I need ears where the world comes in my way, and it comes in my way everywhere. I consume it to quiet the hunger of my egoism. For me, you are nothing but my food, even as I too am fed upon and turned to use by you. We have only one relation to each other, that of a musableness of utility of use. We owe each other nothing. For what I seem to owe you, I owe at most to myself. If I show you a cherry air in order to cheer you, likewise, then your cheeriness is of consequence to me, and my heir serves my wish. Two a thousand others whom I do not aim to cheer, I do not show it. One has to be educated up to that love, which finds itself on the essence of man, or in the ecclesiastical and moral period lies upon us as a commandment. In what fashion moral influence, the chief ingredient of our education, seeks to regulate the intercourse of men, shall here be looked at with egoistic eyes. In one example, at least those who educate us make it their concern early to break us off lying, and to inoculate the principle that one must always tell the truth. If selfishness were made the basis for this ball, everyone would easily understand how by lying he falls away that confidence in him which he hopes to awaken in others, and how collect the maximum proves nobody believes a liar even when he tells the truth. Yet at the same time, he would also feel that he had to meet the truth only he whom he authories to hear the truth. If a spy walks in disguise through the hostile camp and is asked who he is, the askers are assuredly entitled to inquire after his name, But the disguised man does not give them the right to learn the truth from him. He tells them what he likes, what only the fact. And yet morality demands thou shalt not lie. By morality, those persons are vested with the right to expect the truth. But by me, they are not vested with that right. And I recognize only the right that I in part. In a gathering of revolutionists, the police force their way in and ask the orator for his name. Everybody knows that the police have the right to do so, but they do not have it from the revolutionists, since he is their enemy. He tells them a false name and cheats them with a lie. The police do not act so foolishly either as to count on their enemy's love of truth. On the contrary, they do not believe without further ceremony, but have the questioned individual identified if they can nay. The state everywhere proceeds incredulously give individuals, because in their egoism it recognizes its natural enemy. It invariably demands a voucher, and he who cannot show vouchers falls a prey to its investigating inquisition. The state does not believe nor trust the individual, and so of itself places itself within him in the convention of lying. It trusts me only when it has convinced itself of the truth of my statement, for which there often remains to it no other means than the oath. How clearly too this the oath proves that the state does not punt on our credibility and love of truth, but on our interest, our selfishness. It relies on our not wanting to fall foul of God by a peerergy. Now, let one imagine a French revolutionist in the year seventeen eighty eight, who, among friends let fall the now well known phrase the world will have no rest till the last king is hanged with the guts of the last priest. The king then still had all power, and when the utterance is betrayed by an accident, yet without its being possible to produce witnesses, confession is demanded from the accused. Is he to confess or not? If he denies, he lies and remains unpunished. If he confesses, he is candid and is beheaded. If truth is more than everything else to him or right, let him die only upon true poet could try to make a tragedy out of the end of his life, for what interest is there is seeing how a man succumbs from paradise. But if he had the courage not to be a slave of truth and sincerity, he would ask somewhat, Thus, why need the judges know what I have spoken among friends? If I had wished them to know, I should have said it to them as I said it to my friends. I would not have them know it. They force themselves into my confidence without my having called them to it and made them my confidence. They will learn what I will keep secret. Come on, then, you who wish to break my will, by your will and try your arts. You can talk to me by the wrack you confretted me with hell and eternal damnation. You can make me so nevertheless, as I swear a false oath, but the truth you shall not pass out of me. For I will lie to you, because I have given you no claim and no right to my sinciety. Let God, who is truth, look down ever so fretteringly on me, Let lie and come ever so hard to me. I have nevertheless the courage of a lie. And even if I were weary of my life, even if nothing appeared to me more welcome than your executioner sword, you nevertheless should not have the joy of finding in me a slave of truth, whom, by your priestly arts you make a traitor to his will. When I spoke those treasonable words, I would not have had you know anything of them. I now retain the same will, and do not let myself be frightened by the curse of the lie and of Section thirty two.