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08 - The Possessed - part 3 - The Ego and His Own - Max Stirner · Logic Library

• The possessed. The wheels in the head have a number of other formal aspects, some of which it may be useful to indicate here. Thus, self renunciation is common to the holy with the unholy, to the pure and the impure. The impure man renounces all better feelings, all shame, even natural timidity, and follows only the appetite that rules him. The pure man renounces his natural relation to the world, renounces the world, and follows only the desire which rules him. Driven by the thirst for money, the avaricious man renounces all admonitions of conscience, all feeling of honor, all gentleness, and all compassion. He puts all considerations out of sight. The appetite drags him along. The holy man behaves similarly. He makes himself the laughing stock of the world, is hard hearted and strictly just for the desire drags him along. As the unholy man renounces himself before Mammon, so the holy man renounces himself before God and the divine laws. We are now living in a time when the shamelessness of the Holy is every day more and more felt and uncovered, whereby it is at the same time compelled to unveil itself and lay itself bare. More and more every day. Have not the shamelessness and stupidity of the reasons with which men antagonize. The progress of the age long surpassed all measure and all expectation. But it must be so. The self renouncers must, as holy men, take the same course that they do as unholy men. As the latter, little by little sink to the fullest measure of self renouncing vulgarity and lowness, so the former must ascend to the most dishonorable exaltation. The Mammon of the Earth and the God of Heaven both demand exactly the same degree of self renunciation. The low man, like the exalted one, reaches out for a good, the former for the material good, the latter for the ideal, the so called supreme good, And at last both complete each other again too, as the material minded man sacrifices everything to an ideal phantasm is vanity, and the spiritually minded man to a material gratification, the life of enjoyment. Those who exhort men to unselfishness think they are saying an uncommon deal. What do they understand by it? Probably something like what they understand by self renunciation. But who is the self that is to be renounced and to have no benefit? It seems that you, yourself, are supposed to be it, and for whose benefit is unselfish self renunciation recommended to you again for your benefit, And behoof only that through unselfishness you are procuring your true benefit. You are to benefit yourself, and yet you are not to seek your benefit. People regard as unselfish the benefactor of men A Franke, who founded the orphan asylum, an O'Connell, who works tirelessly for his Irish people, but also the fanatic who likes Saint Boniface, hazards his life for the conversion of the heat, or like robes Pierre, sacrifices everything to virtue, like Kerna, dies for God, King and fatherland. Hence, among others, O'Connell's opponents try to trump up against him some selfishness or mercenariness, for which the O'Connell Fund seems to give them a foundation for. If they were successful in casting suspicion on his unselfishness, they would easily separate him from his adherents. Yet what could they show further than that O'Connell was working for another end than the ostensible one. But whether he may aim at making money or at liberating the people, it still remains certain, in one case as in the other, that he is striving for an end, and that his end selfishness here as there only that his national self interest would be beneficial to others too, and so would be for the common inn interest. Now do you suppose unselfishness is unreal and nowhere extant. On the contrary, nothing is more ordinary. One may even call it an article of fashion in the civilized world, which is considered so indispensable that if it costs too much in solid material, people at least adorn themselves with its tinsel, counterfeit and feign it. Where does unselfishness begin? Right where an end ceases to be our end and our property, which we as owners can dispose of it pleasure. Where it becomes a fixed end or a fixed idea. Where it begins to inspire, enthuse, fanaticize us. In short, where it passes into our stubbornness and becomes our master. One is not unselfish so long as he retains the end in his power. One becomes so only at that here I stand here, I cannot do otherwise the fundamental maxim of all the possessed one becomes so in the case of a sacred end, through the corresponding sacred zeal. I am not unselfish so long as the end remains my own, and I, instead of giving myself up to be the blind means of its fulfillment, leave it always an open question. My zeal need not, on that account be slacker than the most fanatical. But at the same time I remain toward it, frostily cold, unbelieving, and its most irreconcilable enemy. I remain its judge because I am its owner. Unselfishness grows rank as far as possessedness reaches as much on possessions of the devil as on those of a good spirit. There vice, folly and the like. Here humility, devotion, and so forth. Where could one look without meeting victims of self renunciation? There sits a girl opposite me, who perhaps has been making bloody sacrifices to her soul for ten years. Already over the buxom form droops a deathly tired head and pale cheeks betray the slow bleeding away of her youth, Poor child, how often the passions may have beaten at your heart, and the rich powers of youth have demanded their right. When your head rolled in the soft pillow, how awakening nature quivered through your limbs. The blood swelled your veins, and fiery fancies poured the gleam of voluptuousness into your eyes. Then appeared the ghost of the soul and its sex external bliss. You were terrified. Your hands folded themselves, Your tormented eyes turned its look upward. You prayed. The storms of nature were hushed. A calm glided over the ocean of your appetites. Slowly, the weary eyelids sank over the life extinguished under them. The tension crept out, unperceived from the rounded limbs. The boisterous waves dried up in the heart. The folded hands themselves rested a powerless weight on the unresisting bosom. One last faint, oh dear, moaned itself away, and the soul was at rest. You fell asleep to awaken the morning to a new combat and a new prayer. Now the habit of renunciation cools the heat of your desire and the roses of your youth are going pale in the cleorrosis of your heavenliness. The soul is saved, the body may perish, o leis own, and on how well you did to scorn this pale virtue, one free grisette against a thousand virgins grown gray in virtue. The fixed idea may also be perceived as maxim principle standpoint, and the like Archimedes to move the earth asked for a standpoint outside it. Men sought continually for this standpoint, and everyone seized upon it as well as he was able. This foreign standpoint is the world of mind, of ideas, thoughts, concepts, essences. It is heaven. Heaven is the s from which the earth is moved. Earthly doings surveyed and despised to assure to themselves heaven to occupy the heavenly standpoint firmly and forever, how painfully and tirelessly humanity struggled for this. Christianity has aimed to deliver us from a life determined by nature, from the appetites as actuating us, and has so meant that man should not let himself be determined by his appetites. This does not involve the idea that he was not to have appetites, but that the appetites were not to have him, that they were not to become fixed, uncontrollable, indissoluble. Now, could not what Christianity religion contrived against the appetites be applied to us to its own precept that mind, thought, conceptions, ideas faith must determine us. Could we not ask that neither should mind or the conception the idea be allowed to determine us to become fixed and inviolable or sacred. Then it would end in the dissolution of mind, the dissolution of all thoughts, of all conceptions. As we there had to say, we are indeed to have appetites, but the appetites are not to have us. So we should now say we are indeed to have mind, but mind is not to have us. If the latter seems lacking in sense, think of the fact that with so many a man, a thought becomes a maxim, whereby he him self is made prisoner to it, so that it is not he that has the maxim, but rather it that has him, And with the maxim he has a permanent standpoint. Again, the doctrines of the Catechism become our principles before we find it out, and no longer for rejection. Their thought or mind has the sole power, and no protest of the flesh is further listened to. Nevertheless, it is only through the flesh that I can break the tyranny of mind. For it is only when a man hears his flesh along with the rest of him, that he hears himself wholly, And that is only when he hears himself that he is a hearing or rational being. Christian does not hear the agony of his enthralled nature, but lives in humility. Therefore he does not grumble at the wrong which befalls his person. He thinks himself satisfied with the freedom of the spirit. But if the flesh once takes the floor, and its tone is passionate, indecorus, not well disposed, spiteful, as it cannot be otherwise, then he thinks he hears voices of devils, voices against the spirit. For decorum, passionlessness, kindly disposition, and the like is spirit, and is justly zealous against them. He could not be a Christian if he were willing to endure them. He listens only to more and slaps on morality in the mouth. He listens only to legality and gags the lawless word the spirit of morality, and legality holds him a prisoner, a rigid, unbending master. They call that the mastery of the spirit. It is, at the same time the standpoint of the Spirit. And now whom do the ordinary liberal gentleman mean to make free? Whose freedom is that they cry out and thirst for the spirits that of the spirit of morality, legality, piety, the fear of God. That is what the antiliberal gentleman also want. And the whole contention between the two turns on a matter of advantage, whether the the latter are to be the only speakers, or the former are to receive a share in the enjoyment of the same advantage. The Spirit remains the absolute lord for both, and their only quarrel is over who shall occupy the hierarchical throne that pertains to the vice regent of the Lord. The best of it is that one can calmly look upon the stir with the certainty that the wild beasts of history will tear each other to pieces, just like those of nature. Their putrefying corpses fertilized the ground for our crops. We shall come back later to many other wheels in the head, for instance those of vocation, truthfulness, love, and the like. When one's own is contrasted with what is imparted to him, there is no use in objecting that we cannot have any thing isolated, but receive everything as a part of the universal order, and therefore through the impression of what is around us, and that consequently we have it as something imparted. For there is a great difference between the feelings and thoughts which are aroused in me by other things and those which are given to me God, immortality, freedom, humanity. Are drilled into us from childhood as thoughts and feelings which move our inner being more or less strongly, either ruling us without our knowing it, or sometimes in richer natures, manifesting themselves in systems and works of art, but are always not aroused but imparted feelings, because we must believe in them and cling to them. That an absolute existed, and that it must be taken in felt and thought by us was settled as a faith in the minds of those who spent all the strength of their mind on recognizing it and setting it forth, the feeling for the absolute exists there as an imparted one, and thenceforth results only in the most manifold revelations of itself. So in Klopstruck the religious feeling was an imparted one, which in the Messiad simply found artistic expression. If, on the other hand, the religion with which he was confronted had been for him only an incitation to feeling and thought, and if he had known how to take an attitude completely his own toward it, then there would have resulted, instead of religious inspiration, a dissolution and consumption of the religion itself. Instead of that, he only continued in mature years his childish feelings received in childhood, and squandered the powers of his manhood in decking out his childish trifles. The difference is then, whether feelings are imparted to me or only aroused. Those feelings which are aroused are my own egoistic, because they are not as feelings drilled into me, dictated to me, and pressed upon me. But those which are imparted to me I receive with open arms. I cherish them in me as a heritage, cultivate them, and am possessed by them. Who is there that has never more or less consciously noticed that our whole education is calculated to produce feelings in us, impart them to us, instead of leaving their production to ourselves, however they may turn out. If we hear the name of God, we are to feel veneration. If we hear that of the Prince's Majesty, it is to be received with reverence, deference, submission. If we hear that of Mora, we are to think that we hear something inviolable. If we hear of the evil One or evil ones, we are to shudder. The intention is directed to these feelings, and he who should hear with pleasure the deeds of the bad would have to be taught, What's what with the rod of discipline. Thus, stuffed with imparted feelings, we appear before the bar of majority and are pronounced of age. Our equipment consists of elevated feelings, lofty thoughts, inspiring maxims, eternal principles. The young are of age when they twitter like the old. They are driven through school to learn the old song, and when they have this by heart, they are declared of age. We must not feel at everything and every name that comes before us what we could and would like to feel thereat the name of God. We must think of nothing laughable, feel nothing disrespectful. It being prescribed and imparted to us. What and how we are to feel and think at the mention of that name. That is the meaning of the care of souls, That my soul or my mind be tuned as others think, right, not as I myself would like. How much trouble does it not cost one, finally to secure to one's self a feeling of one's own at the mention of at least this or that name, and to laugh in the face of many who expect from us a holy face and a composed expression at their speeches. What is imparted is alien to us. It is not our own, and therefore is sacred, and it is hard work to lay aside the sacred dread of it. To day one again hears seriousness, praised seriousness, in the presence of highly important subjects and discussions, German seriousness and so on. This sort of seriousness proclaims clearly how old and grave lunacy and possession have already become. For there is nothing more serious than a lunatic when he comes to the central point of his lunacy. Then his great earnestness incapacitates him for taking a joke. Sea Man houses end of section.