Latest / Logic Library / 10 - The Hierarchy - part 2 - The Ego and His Own - Max Stirner

Transcript

10 - The Hierarchy - part 2 - The Ego and His Own - Max Stirner · Logic Library

• Chapter two, section a continuation of subdivision three. The hierarchy. Men are sometimes divided into two classes, cultured and uncultured. The former, so far as they were worthy of their name, occupied themselves with thoughts, with mind, and because in the time since Christ, of which the very principle is thought, they were the ruling ones, demanded a servile respect for the thoughts recognized by them State, Emperor, Church, God, morality, order. Are such thoughts or spirits that exist only for the mind. A merely living being an animal chires as little for them as a child. But the young cultured are really nothing but children. And he who attends only to the necessities of his life is indifferent to those spirits. But because he is also weak before them, he succumbs to their power and is ruled by thoughts. This is the meaning of hierarchy. Hierarchy is dominion of thoughts, dominion of mind. We are hierarchic to this day, kept down by those who are supported by thoughts. Thoughts are the sacred. But the two are always clashing, now one and now the other giving the offense. And this clash occurs not only in the collision of two men, but in one In the same man. For no cultured man is so cultured as not to find enjoyment in things too, and so be uncultured. And no uncultured man is totally without thoughts. In Hegel, it comes to light at last what a longing for things even the most cultured man has, and what a horror of every hollow theory he harbors with him. Reality. The world of things is altogether to correspond to the thought, and no concept is to be without reality. This caused Hegel's system to be known as the most objective, as if in it thought and thing celebrated their union. But this was simply the extremest case of violence on the part of thought. Its highest pitch of despotism and sole dominion the triumph of mind, and with it the triumph of philosophy. Philosophy cannot hereafter achieve any thing higher, for its highest is the omnipotence of mind, the almightiness of mind Steerer's footnote. Rousseau. The philanthropists and others were hostile to culture and intelligence, but they overlooked the fact that this is present in all men of the Christian type, and assailed only learned and refined culture and footnote. Spiritual men have taken into their head something that is to be realized. They have concepts of love, goodness, and the like which they would like to see realized. Therefore, they want to set up a kingdom of love on earth, in which no one any longer acts from selfishness, but each one from love. Love is to rule. What have they taken into their head? What shall we call it but fixed idea? Why their head is haunted? The most oppressive spook is man. Think of the proverb the road to ruin is paved with good intentions, the intention to realize humanity altogether in oneself, to become altogether man is of such ruinous kind. Here belong the intentions to become good, noble, loving, and so forth. In the sixth part of the dank Furtichitan, page seven, Bruno Bauer says quote that middle class, which was to receive such a terrible importance for modern history, is capable of no self sacrificing action, no enthusiasm for an idea, no exaltation. It devotes itself to nothing but the interests of its mediocrity, i e. It remains always limited to itself and conquers at last only through its bulk, with which it has succeeded in tiring out the efforts of passion, enthusiasm, consistency, through its surface, into which it absorbs a part of the new ideas end quote and page six quote. It has turned the revolutionary ideas for which not it but unselfish or impassioned men sacrifice themselves solely to its own profit, has turned spirit into money. That is to be sure, after it has taken away from those idea is their point, their consistency, their destructive seriousness, fanatical against all egoism. These people, then, are not self sacrificing, not enthusiastic, not idealistic, not consistent, not zellots. They are egoists in the usual sense, selfish people looking out for their advantage. Sober calculating, who then is self sacrificing in the fullest sense. Surely he who ventures everything else for one thing, one object, one will, one passion, is not the lover self sacrificing who forsakes father and mother, endures all dangers and privations to reach his goal. Where the ambitious man who offers up all his desires, wishes, and satisfactions to the single passion or the avaricious man who denies himself everything to gather treasures, or the pleasure seeker. He is ruled by a passion to which he brings the rest as sacrifices. And are these self sacrificing people? Perchance? Not selfish, not egoist, as they have only one ruling passion, so they provide for only one satisfaction. But for this the more strenuously they are wholly absorbed in it. Their entire activity is egoistic, But it is a one sided, unopened, narrow egoism. It is possessedness. Why those are petty passions by which, on the contrary, man must not let himself be enthralled. Man must make sacrifices for a great idea, a great cause, a great idea, A good cause is it may be the honor of God, for which innumerable people have met death, Christianity, which has found its willing martyrs, the Holy Catholic Church, which has greedily demanded sacrifices of heretics, liberty, and equality, which were weighted on by bloody guillotines. He who lives for a great idea, a great cause, a doctrine, a system, a lofty calling, may not let any worldly luss, any self seeking interest spring up in him. Here we have the concept of clericalism, or, as it may be also called in its pedagogic activity, school masterliness, for the idealists play the schoolmaster over us. The clergyman is especially called to live to the idea and to work for the idea, the truly good cause. Therefore, the people feel how little it befits him to show worldly haughtiness, to desire good living, to join in such pleasures as dancing and gaming, in short, to have any other than a sacred interest. Hence, too, doubtless is derived the scanty salary of teachers, who are to feel themselves repaid by the sacredness of their calling alone, and to renounce other enjoyments, even a directory of the sacred ideas, one or more of which man is to look upon, as his calling is not lacking. Family, fatherland, science, etc. May find in me a faithful servant to his calling. Here we come upon the old old craze of the world, which has not yet learned to do without clericalism, that to live and work for an idea is man's calling, and according to the faithfulness of its fulfillment, his human worth is measured. This is the dominion of the idea. In other words, it is clericalism. Thus, Robespierre and Jean Just were priests through and through inspired by the idea, enthusiasts, consistent instruments of the idea, idealistic men. So Saint Just claims in a speech, there is something terrible in the sacred love of country. It is so exclusive that it sacrifices everything to the public interest, without mercy, without fear, without human consideration. It hurls mon Lias down the precipice. It sacrifices its private inclinations. It leads Regulus to Carthage, throws a Roman into the chasm, and sets Marat as a victim of his devotion in the pantheon. Now over these representatives of ideal or sacred interests stands a world of innumerable personal profane interests. No idea, no system, no sacred cause is so great as never to be outrivaled and modified by these personal interests. Even if they are silent momentarily and in times of rage and fanaticism. Yet they soon come uppermost again through the sound sense of the people. Those ideas do not completely conquer till they are no longer hostile to personal interests till they satisfy egoism. The man who is just now crying herrings in front of my window has a personal interest in good sales, and if his wife or anyone else wishes him the like, this remains a personal interest all the same. If, on the other hand, a thief deprived him of his basket, then there would at once arise an interest of the many, of the whole city, of the whole country, or in a way word, of all who abhor theft, an interest in which the herring seller's person would become indifferent, and in its place the category of the robbed man would come into the foreground. But even here all might yet resolve itself into a personal interest, each of the partakers reflecting that he must concur in the punishment of the thief, because unpunished stealing might otherwise become general and cause him too to lose his own. Such a calculation, however, can hardly be assumed on the part of many, and we shall rather hear the cry that the thief is a criminal. Here we have before us a judgment, the thief's action, receiving its expression in the concept crime. Now the matter stands. Thus, even if a crime did not cause the slightest damage, either to me or to any of those in whom I take an interest, I should nevertheless denounce it. Why because I am enthusiastic for morality, filled with the idea of morality. What is hostile to it? I everywhere a sale because in his mind theft ranks as abominable without any question. Prudence, for instance, thinks that with the sentence property is theft, he has at once put a brand on property. In the sense of the priestly, theft is always a crime, or at least a misdeed. Here the personal interest is at an end. This particular person who has stolen the basket is perfectly indifferent to my person. It is only the thief, this concept of which that person represents a specimen that I take an interest in. The thief and man are, in my mind irreconcilable opposites, For one is not truly man. When one is a thief, one degrades man or humanity in himself. When one steals, dropping out of personal concern, one gets into philanthropism friendliness to man, which is usually misunderstood as if it were a love to men, to each individual, while it is nothing but a love of man, the unreal concept, the spook. It is not TEUs anthropous man, but ton anthropon man that the philanthropist carries in his heart. To be sure, he cares for each individual, but only because he wants to see his beloved ideal realized everywhere. So there is nothing said here of care for me, you, us, That would be personal interest and belong to him, to the head of worldly love. Philanthropism is a heavenly spiritual, a priestly love. Man must be restored in us, even if thereby we poor devils, should come to grief. It is the same priestly principle as that famous fiat Justicia periat mundus. Man and justice are ideas ghosts for love, of which everything is sacrificed. Therefore the priestly spirits are the self sacrificing ones. He who is infatuated with man leaves persons out of account as far as that infatuation extends and floats in an ideal sacred interest. Man, you see, is not a person, but an ideal, a spook. Now, things as different as possible can belong to man and be so regarded If one finds man's chief requirement in piety, there arises religious clericalism. If one sees it in morality, then moral clericalism raises its head. On this account, the priestly spirits of our day want to make a religion of everything, a religion of liberty, religion of equality, et cetera. And for them every idea becomes a sacred cause, even citizenship, politics, publicity, freedom of the press, trial by jury. Now, what does unselfishness mean in this sense, having only an ideal interest before which no respect of persons avails. The stiff head of the worldly man opposes this, but for centuries has always been worsted, at least so far as to have to bend the unruly neck and honor the higher power. Clericalism pressed it down. When the worldly egoist had shaken off a higher power, such as the Old Testament law, the Roman pope, then at once a seven times greater one was over him again, such as faith in the place of the law, the transformation of all laymen into divines in place of the limited body of clergy, and so on. His experience was like that of the possessed man, into whom seven devils passed when he thought he had freed himself from one. When the passage quoted above, all ideality is denied to the middle class, it certainly schemed against the ideal consistency with which rose Pierre wanted the king carry out the principle. The instinct of its interests told it that this consistency harmonized too little with what its mind was set on, and that it would be acting against itself if it were willing to further the enthusiasm for principle. Was it to behave so unselfishly as to abandon all its aims in order to bring a harsh theory to its triumph. It suits the priests admirably to be sure when people listen to their summons, cast away everything and follow me, or sell all that thou hast and give it to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven and come follow me. Some decided idealists obey this call, but most act like Anonius and Saphira, maintaining a behavior half clerical or religious and half worldly, serving God and Mammon. I do not blame the middle class for not wanting to let its aims be frustrated by Ropes Pierre for inquiring of its egoism, how far it might give the revolutionary idea a chance. But one might blame if blame were in place here. Anyhow, those who let their own interests be frustrated by the interests of the middle class. However, will not they likewise sooner or later learn to understand what is to their advantage. August Becker says, to win the producers proletarians a negation of the traditional conception of right is by no means enough. Folks, unfortunately, care little for the theoretical victory of the idea. One must demonstrate to them at oculos how this victory can be practically utilized in life end quote, and quote. You must get hold of folks by their real interests if you want to work upon them end quote. Immediately after this, he shows how a fine looseness of morals is already spreading among our peasants, because they prefer to follow their real interests rather than the commands of morality. Because the revolutionary priests or schoolmasters served man, they cut off the heads of men. The revolutionary layman. Those outside the sacred circle did not feel any great horror of cutting off heads, but were less anxious about the rights of man than about the room. How comes it, though, that the egoism of those who affirm personal interest and always inquire of it, is nevertheless forever succumbing to a priestly or schoolmasterly, that is, an ideal interest. Their person seems to them too small, too insignificant, and is so in fact to lay claim to everything and be able to put itself completely in force. There is a sure sign of this in their dividing themselves into two persons, an eternal and a temporal, always caring either only for the one or only for the other. On Sunday for the eternal, on the work day for the temporal, in prayer for the former, in work for the latter. They have the priests in themselves. Therefore they do not get rid of him, but hear themselves lectured inwardly every Sunday. How men have struggled and calculated to get it a solution regarding these duelistic essences, Idea followed upon idea, principle upon principle, system upon system, and none knew how to keep down permanently the contradiction of the worldly man. The so called egoist does not this prove that all those ideas were too feeble to take up my whole will into themselves and satisfy it. They were and remained hostile to me, even if the hostility lay concealed for a considerable time. Will it be the same with self ownership? Is it too only an attempt at mediation? Whatever principle I turned to, it might be to that of reason I always had to turn away from it again? Or can I always be rational, arrange my life according to reason and everything? I can no doubt strive after rationality. I can love it, just as I can also love God and every other idea. I can be a philosopher, a lover of wisdom, as I love God. But what I love, what I strive for, is only in my idea, my conception, my thoughts. It is in my heart, my head. It is in me like the heart. But it is not I. I am not yet to the activity of priestly minds belongs especially what one often hears called moral influence. Moral influence takes a start where humiliation begins. Yes, it is nothing else than this humiliation itself, the breaking and bending of the temper down to humility. If I call to someone to run away when a rock is to be blasted. I exert no moral influence by this demand. If I say to a child, you will go hungry, if you will not eat what is put on the table, this is not moral influence. But if I say to it, you will pray, honor your parents, respect the crucifix, speak the truth, for this belongs to man and is man's calling, or even this is God's will. Then moral influence is complete. Then a man is to bend before the calling of man, be tractable, become humble, give up his will for an alien one which is set up as a rule and law. He is to abase himself before something higher self abasement. He that abaseth himself shall be exalted. Yes, yes, children must early be made to practice piety, godliness, and propriety. A person of good breeding is one into whom good maxims have been instilled and impressed, poured in through a funnel, thrashed in, and preached in. If one shrugs his shoulders at this at once, the good wring their hands despairingly and cry. But for Heaven's sake, if one is to give children no good instruction, why then they will run straight into the jaws of sin and become good for nothing hoodlums. Gently you prophets of evil good for nothing in your sense, they certainly will become. But your sense happens to be a very good for nothing sense. The impudent lads will no longer let anything be whined and chattered into them by you, and will have no sympathy for all the follies for which you have been raving and driveling since the memory of man began. They will abolish the law of inheritance. They will not be willing to inherit your stupidities as you inherited them from your father's. They destroy inherited sin. I will have been reading dearing his footnotes, But here is an important footnote from the translator and editor, footnote called an English theology original Sin and footnote. If you command them bend before the most High, they will answer. If he wants to bend us, let him come himself and do it. We at least will not bend of our own accord. And if you threaten them with his wrath and his punishment, they will take it like being threatened with the boogeyman. If you are no more successful in making them afraid of ghosts, than the dominion of ghosts is an end, and nurses tales find no faith. And is it not precisely the liberals again that press for good education and improvement of the educational system. For how could their liberalism, their liberty within the bounds of law, come about without discipline. Even if they do not exactly educate to the fear of God. Yet they demand the fear of man all the more strictly an awaken enthusiasm for the truly human calling by discipline. A long time passed away in which people were satisfied with the fancy that they had the truth, without thinking seriously whether perhaps they themselves must be true to possess the truth. This time was the Middle Ages, with the common consciousness, the consciousness which deals with things, that consciousness which has receptivity only four things, or for what is sensuous and sense moving. They thought to grasp what did not deal with things, and what was not perceptible by the senses. As one does, indeed, also exert his eye to see the remote, or laboriously exercise his hand till its fingers have become dexterous enough to press the keys correctly. So they chastened themselves in the most manifold ways in order to become capable of receiving the supersensual wholly into themselves. But what they chastened was, after all, only the sensual man, the common consciousness, so called finite or objective thought. Yet as this thought, this understanding which Luther decries under the name of reason, is incapable of comprehending the divine, its chastening contributed just as much to the understanding of the truth as if one exercised the feet year in and year out in dancing and hoped that in this way they would finally learn to play the flute. Luther, with whom the so called Middle Ages end, was the first who understood that the man himself must become other than he was if he wanted to comprehend truth, must become as true as truth itself. Only he who already has truth in his belief. Only he who believes in it can become a partaker of it. Only the believer finds it accessible and sounds its depths. Only that organ of man which is able to blow can attain the further capacity of flute playing. And only the man can become a partaker of truth who has the right organ for it. He who is capable of thinking only what is sensuous objective pertaining to things, figures to himself in truth only what pertains to things. But truth is spirit, stuff altogether inappreciable by the senses, and therefore only for the higher consciousness, not for that which is earthly minded. With Luther accordingly dawns the perception that truth, because it is a thought, is only for the thinking man. And this is to say that man must henceforth take an utterly different standpoint to it, the heavenly believing scientific standpoint, or that of thought in relation to its object, the thought that of mind in relation to mind. Consequently, only the like apprehend the like. You are like the spirit that you understand. Because Protestantism broke the mid medievil hierarchy, the opinion could take root that hierarchy in general had been shattered by it, and it could be wholly overlooked that it was precisely a reformation and so a reinvigoration of the antiquated hierarchy. That medieval hierarchy had been only a weekly one, as it had to let all possible barbarism of unsanctified things run on uncoerced beside it. And it was the Reformation that first stealed the power of hierarchy. If Bruno Bauer thinks as the Reformation was mainly the abstract rendering of the religious principle from art, state and science, and so its liberation from those powers with which it had joined itself in the antiquity of the Church and in the hierarchy of the Middle Ages, so too theological and ecclesiastical movements which proceeded from the Reformation are only the consistent carrying out of this abstraction of the religious principle from the other powers of humanity. I regard precisely the opposite is correct, and think that the dominion of spirits or freedom of mind, which comes to the same thing, was never before so all embracing and all powerful, because the present One, instead of rending the religious principle from art, state and science, lifted the latter altogether out of secularity into the realm of spirit and made them religious. Luther and Descartes have been appropriately put side by side. And there he who believes in God, and I think there I am cogito eriosum Man's heaven is thought mind. Everything can be wrested from him accept thought, except faith, particular faith like faith of Zeus Astarte jehovah Allah, may be destroyed, but faith itself is indestructible. In thought is freedom. What I need and what I hunger for, is no longer granted to me by any grace, by the Virgin Mary, by intercession of the saints, or by the binding and loosing Church. But I procure it for myself. In short, my being, the soom, is a living in the heaven of thought, of mine a cocitare. But I myself am nothing other than mind, thinking mind, according to Descartes, believing mind. According to Luther, my body I am not my flesh, may suffer from appetites or pains. I am not my flesh, but I am mind only mind. This thought runs through the history of the Reformation till to day, only by the more modern philosophy since Descartes has a serious effort been made to bring Christianity to complete efficacy by exalting the scientific consciousness to be the only true and valid one. Hence, it begins with absolute doubt, dubitare with grinding common consciousness to atoms, with turning away from everything that mind thought does not legitimate to it. Nature counts for nothing, and it does not rest till it has brought reason into everything, and can say the real is the rational, and only the rational is the real. Thus it has at last brought mind reason to victory. And everything is mind because everything is rational, because all nature, as well as even the perversest opinions of men, contains reason. For all must serve for the best that is lead to the victory of reason. Descartes stubitare contains the decided statement that only cogitare thought. Mind is a complete break with common consciousness, which ascribes reality to irrational things. Only the rational is only mind is. This is the principle of modern philosophy, the genuine Christian principle. Descartes in his own time discriminated the body sharply from the mind, and the spirit tis that builds itself the body, says Gerta. But this philosophy itself, Christian philosophy still does not get rid of the rational, and therefore inveighs against the merely subjective, against phantasies, fortuities, arbitrariness, et cetera. What it wants is that the divine should become visible in everything, and all consciousness become a knowing of the divine, and man behold God everywhere. But God never is without the devil. For this very reason, the name of philosopher is not to be given to him who has indeed open eyes for the things of the world, a clear and undazzled gaze, a correct judgment about the world. But who sees in the world just the world, and objects only objects, and in short, everything prosaically as it is. But he alone is a philosopher who sees and points out or demonstrates heaven and the world, the supernal in the earthly, the divine in the mundane. The former may be, ever so wise, there is no getting away from this quote. What wise men see not by their wisdom's art is practiced simply by a childlike heart. It takes this childlike heart, this eye for the divine, to make a philosopher. The first named man has only a common consciousness, but he who knows the divine and knows how to tell it as a scientific one. On this ground, Bacon was turned out of the realm of philosophers and certainly, what is called English philosophy seems to have got no further than to the discoveries of so called clear heads such as Bacon and Hume. The English did not know how to exalt the simplicity of the childlike heart to philosophic significance, did not know how to make philosophers out of childlike hearts. This is as much as to say the philosophy was not able to become theological or theology, and yet it is only as theology that it can really live itself out, complete itself. The field of its battle to the death is in theology. Bacon did not trouble himself about theological questions and cardinal points, and of this section