Latest / Logic Library / 05 - The Spirit - The Ego and His Own - Max Stirner
Transcript
- The spirit. The realm of spirits is monstrously great. There is an infinite deal of the spiritual. Yet let us look and see what the spirit does. Bequest of the ancients properly is out of their birth pangs. It came forth, but they themselves could not utter themselves as spirit. They could give birth to it. It itself must speak. The born God, the son of Man, is the first to utter the word the spirit. He God has to doeth nothing earthly and no earthly relationship, but solely with the spirit and spiritual relationships. Is my courage, indestructible under all the world's blows, my inflexibility, and my obduracy. Perchance already spirit in the full sense, because the world cannot touch it. Why then it would not yet be it entity with the world, and all its actions would consist merely in not succumbing to the world. No, as long as it does not busy itself with itself alone, as long as it does not have to do with its world, the spiritual alone, it is not free spirit, but only the spirit of this world, the spirit fettered to it. The spirit is free spirit, that is really spirit only in a world of its own. In this the earthly world, it is a stranger only through a spiritual world. Is the spirit really spirit? For this world does not understand it, and does not know how to keep the maiden from a foreign land from departing. But where is it to get this spiritual world? Where? But out of itself it must reveal itself, and the words that it speaks, the revelations in which it unveils itself, These are its world. As a visionary lives and has his world only in the visionary pictures that he himself creates, as a crazy man generates for himself his own dream world, without which he could not be crazy. So the spirit must create for itself its spirit world, and is not spirit till it creates it. Thus, its creations make its spirit, and by its creatures we know it the creator. In them it lives. They are its world. Now what is the spirit? It is the creator of a spiritual world, even in you and me. People do not recognize spirit until they see that we have appropriated to ourselves something spiritual. Though thoughts may have been set before us, we have at least brought them to live in ourselves for as long as we were children. Most edifying thoughts might have been laid before us without our wishing or being able to reproduce them in ourselves. So the spirit also exists only when it creates something spiritual. It is real only together with the spiritual, its creature, as then we know it by its works. The question is what these works are. But the works or children of the Spirit are nothing else but spirits. If I had before me Jews, Jews of the true metal, I should have to stop here and leave them standing before this mystery, as for almost two thousand years they have remained standing before it, unbelieving and without knowledge. But as you, my dear, or at least not a full blooded Jew, for such a one will not go astray as far as this, we will still go along a bit of road together, till perhaps you two turn your back on me, because I laugh in your face. If someone told you you are altogether spirit, you would take hold of your body and not believe him. But answer, I have a spirit, no doubt, but do not exist only as spirit. As a man with a body. You would still distinguish yourself from your spirit, but replies he, it is your destiny, even though you are yet going about in the fetters of the body. To be one day a blessed spirit. And however you may conceive of the future aspect of your spirit, so much is yet certain that in death you will put off this body and yet keep yourself your spirit for all eternity. Accordingly, your Spirit is the eternal and true in you, only a dwelling here below which you may leave and perhaps exchange for another. Now you believe him for the present. Indeed, you are not spirit only. But when you emigrate from the mortal body, as one day you must, then you will have to help yourself without this body. And therefore it is needful that you be prudent and care in time for your proper self. What should it profit a man if he gained the whole world and yet suffer damage in his soul. But even granted the doubts raised in the course of time against the tenets of the Christian faith have long since robbed you of faith in the immortality of your spirit, you have nevertheless left one tenant undisturbed, and yet ingenuously adhere to the one truth that the spirit is your better part, that the spiritual has greater claims on you than anything else. Despite all your atheism and zeal against egoism, you concur with the believers in immortality. But whom do you think of under the name of egoist? A man who, instead of living to an idea that is a spiritual thing, and sacrificing it to his personal advantage, serves the latter. A good patriot brings his sacrifice to the altar of the fatherland. But it cannot be disputed that the fatherland is an idea, since for beasts incapable of mind, or children as yet without mind, there is no fatherland and no patriotism. Now, if anyone does not approve himself as a good patriot, he betrays his egoism with reference to the fatherland. And so the matter stands in innumerable other cases. He who, in human society takes the benefit of a prerogative, since egoistically against the idea of equality, he who exercises dominion is blamed as an egoist against the idea of liberty, and so on. You despise the egoist because he puts the spiritual in the background as compared with the personal, and has his eyes on himself where you would like to see him act to favor an idea. The distinction between you is that he makes himself the central point, but you the spirit, or that you cut your identity into and exalt your proper self the spirit to be ruler of the paltry or remainder, while he will hear nothing of this cutting into and pursues spiritual and material interests just as he pleases. You think to be sure that you are falling foul only of those who enter into no spiritual interest at all. But in fact you curse at everybody who does not look on the spiritual interest as his true annie highest interest. You carry your nightly service for this beauty so far that you affirm her to be the only beauty of the world. You live not to yourself, but to your spirit and to what is the spirits. And that is ideas as the spirit exists only in its creating of the spiritual, let us take a look about us for its first creation. If only it has accomplished this, there follows thenceforth a natural propagation of creations, As according to the myth, only the first human beings needed to be created, the rest of the race propagating of itself. The first creation, on the other hand, must come forth out of nothing. The spirit has toward its realization nothing but itself, or rather, it has not yet even itself, but must create itself. Hence its first creation is itself, the spirit mystical is this sounds, we yet go through it as an everyday experience. Are you a thinking being before you think? In creating the first thought, you create yourself the thinking one? For you do not think before you think a thought or have a thought. Is it not your singing that first makes you a singer. You're talking that first makes you a talker? Now so too, it is the production of the spiritual that first makes you a spirit. Meantime, as you distinguish yourself from the thinker, singer and talker, so you know less distinguish yourself from the spirit, and feel very clearly that you are something besides spirit. But as in the thinking ego, hearing in sight easily vanish in the enthusiasm of thought. So you also have been seized by the spirit enthusiasm. And you no with all your might to become holy Spirit and to be dissolved in spirit. The Spirit is your ideal, the unattained the other worldly Spirit is the name of your God. God is spirit against all that is not Spirit. You are a zealot, and therefore you play the zealo against yourself, who cannot get rid of the remainder of the non spiritual. Instead of saying I am more than Spirit, you say with contrition, I am less than Spirit. And spirit pure spirit, or the spirit that is nothing but spirit, I can only think of, but am not. And since I am not it, it is another exists as another whom I call God. It exists in the nature of the case that the spirit that is to exist as pure spirit must be in other way worldly one. For since I am not it, it follows that it can only be outside me, Since in any case a human being is not fully comprehended in the concept spirit. It follows that the pure Spirit, the Spirit as such, can only be outside of men, beyond the human world, not earthly but heavenly. Only from this disunion in which I and the Spirit lie, only because I and Spirit are not names for one and the same thing, but different names for completely different things. Only because I am not Spirit, and Spirit not I. Only from this do we get a quite toutle logical explanation of the necessity that the Spirit dwells in the other world, that is is God. But from this it also appears how thoroughly illogical is the liberation that Feuerbach is laboring to give us. What he says is that we had only mistaken our own essence and therefore looked for it in the other world. But that now, when we see that God was only our human essence, we must recognize it again as ours and move it back out of the other world into this to God, who is spirit. Feuerbach gives the name our essence. Can we put up with this? That our essence is brought into opposition to us, that we are split into an essential and an unessential self. Do we not therewith go back into the dreary misery of seeing ourselves banished out of ourselves? What have we gained, then, when, for a variation we have transferred into ourselves the divine outside us? Are we that which is in us as little as we are that which is outside us. I am as little my heart as I am my sweetheart, This other self of mine, just because we are not the spirit that dwells in us, just for that reason we had to take it and set it outside us. It was not we did not coincide with us and therefore we could not think of it as existing otherwise than outside us, on the other side from us, in the other world. With the strength of despair, Feuerbach clutches at the total substance of Christianity, not to throw it away, no to drag it to himself, to draw it the long year and for ever distant, out of its heaven with a last effort, and keep it by him for ever. Is not that a clutch of the uttermost despair aluch for life or death? And is it not at the same time the Christian yearning and hungering for the other world. The hero wants not to go into the other world, but to draw the other world to him and compel it to become this world. And since then has not all the world, with more or less consciousness, been crying that this world is the vital point, and Heaven must come down on earth and be experienced even here. Let us, in brief set Feuerbach's theological view and our contradiction over against each other. The essence of man is man's supreme being. Now by religion, to be sure, the supreme being is called God and regarded as an objective essence, But in truth it is only man's own essence, and therefore the turning point of the world's history is that henceforth, no longer God but Man is to appear to man as God. To this we reply, the Supreme Being is indeed the essence of Man. But just because it is his essence and not he himself, it remains quite immaterial whether we see it outside him and view it as God, or find it in him and call it essence of Man or man. I am neither God nor Man, neither the Supreme Essence nor my essence, and therefore it is all one in the main. Whether I think of the Essence as in me or outside me, nay, we really do, always think of the Supreme Being as in both kinds of other worldliness, the inward and the outward at once. Who the Spirit of God is, according to the Christian view, also our spirit and dwells in us. It dwells in heaven and dwells in us. We poor things, are just its dwelling. And if Feuerbach goes on to destroy its heavenly dwelling and force it to move to us bag and baggage, then we its earthly apartments will be badly overcrowded. But after this digression, which, if we were at all proposing to work by line and level, we should have had to save for later pages in order to avoid repetition, we return to the Spirit's first creation, the Spirit itself. The Spirit is something other than myself. But this other, what is it? End of section