Latest / The Philosophy Insights Collection / 36 - My Self-Enjoyment - part 2 - The Ego and His Own - Max Stirner
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- My self enjoyment Part two. Even in a sense to which one might at last still reduce the word possible, that it should mean future, it retains the full force of the real. If one says, e g. It is possible that the sun will rise to morrow, this means only for to day. To morrow is the real future. For I suppose there is hardly need of the suggestion that a future is real future only word it has not yet appeared yet. Wherefore is dignifying of a word? If the most prolific misunderstanding of thousands of years were not in ambush behind it, if this single concept of the little word possible were not haunted by all the spooks or possessed men, this contemplation should trouble us little. The thought it was just now shown, rules the possessed world. Well, then possibility is nothing but thinkableness, And innumerable sacrifices have hitherto been made to hideous thinkableness. It was thinkable that men might become rational, thinkable that they might know Christ, thinkable that they might become moral and enthusiastic for the good, Thinkable that they might all take refuge in the Church's lap, Thinkable that they might mediate speak and do nothing dangerous to the state, thinkable that they might be obedient subjects. But because it was thinkable, it was so rand the influence possible. And further, because it was possible to men. Right here lies the deceptic point. Because it is thinkable to me, it is possible to men. Therefore they ought to be, so it was their calling. And finally, one is to take men only according to this calling, only as called men, not as they are, but as they ought to be. And the further influence. Man is not the individual, but man is a thought and ideal to which the individual is related, not even as the child to the man, but as a chalk point to a point thought of, or as a finite creature to the internal creator, or according to model views, as the specimen to the species. Here then comes to light the glorification of humanity, the eternal immortal, for whose law in marjoram humanitatus glory m the individual must devote himself and find his immortal renown in having done something for the spirit of humanity. Thus, the thinker's rule in the world as long as the age of priests or of schoolmasters lasts, and what do they think of is possible, But what is possible must be realized. They think an ideal of man, which for the time is real only in their thoughts. But they also think the possibility of carrying it out, and there is no chance for dispute. The carrying out is really thinkable. It is an idea. But you and I we may indeed be people of whom a comacature can think that we might yet become good Christians. If, however, he wanted to labor with us, we should soon make it plaible to him that our Christianity is only thinkable, but in other respects impossible. If he grinned on and on at us with his obtrusive thoughts, his good belief, he would have to learn that we do not at all need to become what we do not like to become. And so it goes on far beyond the most pious of the pious. If all men were rational, if all did right, if all were guarded by philanthropy, etc. Reason right philanthropy are put before the eyes of men as their calling, as the goal of their aspiration. And what does being rational mean? Giving oneself a hearing? No reason? Is a book full of laws which are all inactive against egoism. History hitherto is the history of the intellectual man. After the period of sensuality, history proper begins i e. The period of intellectuality, spirituality, non sensuality, super sensuality, nonsensuality. Man now begins to want to be and becomes something what good, beautiful, true, more precisely, moral, pious, agreeable, etc. He wants to make of himself a proper man. Something proper man is his goal, his aught, his destiny, calling task, his ideal. He is to himself a future otherworldly he and what makes her fellow of him? Being true, being, good, being moral, et cetera. Now he looks askance at everyone who does not recognize the same what, seek the same morality, have the same faith. He chases out separatusis theoretics, sets, et cetera. No sheep, no dog exerts itself to become a proper sheep, a propper dog. No beast has its essence appeared to it as a task i e. As a concept that it has to realize. It realizes itself in living itself out, in dissolving itself, passing away. It does not ask to be or to become anything other than it is. Do I mean to advise you to be like the beasts, that you ought to become beasts is an exportation which I certainly cannot give you, as that would again be a task and ideal. How doth the little busy bee improve each shining hour it works of labor or of skill? I would be busy too, or Satan finds some mischievous still for idle hands to do. It would be the same too, as if one wished for the beasts that they should become human beings. Your nature is once for all a human one. You are human Nature's human beings. But just because you already are so, you do not still need to become so. Beasts too, are trained, and a trained beast executes many unnatural things. But a trained dog is no better for itself than a natural one, and has no profit from it, even if it is more companionable for us. Exertions to form all men into moral, rational, pious human beings I e. Training were in vogue form of your They are lept against the indominity quality of I, against own nature, against egoism. Those who are trained never attain their ideal, and only profess with their mouth the sublime principles, or make a profession, a profession of faith. In face of this profession, they must in life acknowledge themselves sinners altogether, and they fall short of their ideal, are weak men, and bear with them the consciousness of human weakness. It is different if you do not chase after an ideal as your destiny, but dissolve yourself as time dissolves everything. The dissolution is not your destiny, because it is present time. Yet the culture, their religiousness of men, has asjordedly, made them free, but only free from one lord to lead them to another. I have learned by religion to tame my appetite. I break the world's resistance by the cunning that is put in my hands by science. I even serve no man. I am no man's lucky. But then it comes you must obey God more than man. Just so I am indeed free from irrational determination by my impulses, but obedient to the master reason. I have gained spiritual freedom, freedom of the spirit. But with that I have then become subject to that very spirit. The spirit gives me orders, reason guides me. They are my leaders and commanders. The rational the servants of the spirit rule. But if I am not flesh. I am in truth not spirit. Either. Freedom of this spirit is servitude of me, because I am more than spirit or flesh. Without doubt, culture has made me powerful. It has given me power over all motives, over the impulses of my nature, as well as over the axations and violences of the world. I know and have gained the force for it by culture, that I need not let myself be coerced by any of my appetites, pleasures, emotions, et cetera. I am their master in like manner. I because through the sciences and ask the master of the refractory world, whom see and earth obey, and to whom even the stars must give an account of themselves. The Spirit has made me master, but I have no power over the Spirit itself. From religion culture, I do learn the means for the vanquishing of the world, but not how I am to subdue God too and become master of him. For God is the Spirit, and this same Spirit of which I am unable to become master, may have the most magnified shapes. He may be called God or national spirit, state, family, reason, also liberty, humanity, man. I received with banks what the centuries of culture have acquired for me, not willing to throw away and give up everything of it. I have not lived in vain. The experience that I have power over my nature and need not be the slave of my appetites shall not be lost to me. The experience that I can subdue the world like culture's means is too dear bought for me to be able to forget it. But I want still more. People ask what can man do? What can he accomplish? What goods procure? And put down the highest of everything as a calling, as if everything were possible to me. If one sees somebody going to ruin in a mania, a passion, et cetera e g. In the huckster spirit and jealousy, the desire is stirred to deliver him out of this possession and to help him to self conquer. We want to make a man of him. That would be very fine if another possession were not immediately put in a place of the earlier one. But one frees from the love of money him who is a throng to it, only to deliver him over to piety, humanity, or some principle else, and to transfer him to a fit standpoint anew This transferrence from a narrow standpoint to a sublime one is declared in the words that the sense must not be directed to the pervishable, but to the imperishable alone, not to the temple, but to the eternal, absolute, divine, purely human, etc. To the spiritual. People very soon discerned that it was not indifferent what one set his affections on or what one occupied himself with. They mechanized the importance of the object. An object exalted above the individuality of things is the essence of things. Yes, the essence is alone, but thinkable in them it is for the thinking man. Therefore, though that no longer your sense to the things, but your thoughts to the essence. Blessed are they who see not and yet believe? Are you? Blessed are the thinkers, for they have to do with the invisible and believe in it. Yet even an object of thought that constituted an essential point of connection centuries long, comes at last to the point of being no longer worth speaking of. This was discerned, but nevertheless people always kept before their eyes again a self valied importance of the object, absolute value of it, as if the doll were not the most important thing to the child, the Koran to the Turk. As long as I am not the sole important thing to myself, it is indifferent of what object I make much, and only my greater or lesser delinquency against it is of value. The degree of my attachment and devotion marks the standpoint of my liability to service. The degree of my sinning shows the measure of my ownness. But finally, and in general, one must know how to put everything out of his mind, if only so as to be able to go to sleep. Nothing may occupy us with which we do not occupy ourselves. The victim of ambition cannot run away from his ambitious plans, nor the god fearing man from the thought of God. Infatuation and possessiveness coincide to want to realize his essence or live comfortably to his concept, which with believers in God signifies as much as to be pious, and with believers in humanity means living humanly is what only the sensual and sinful man can propose to himself. The man, so long as he has the anxious choice between happiness of sense and peace of soul, so long as he is a poor sinner, the Christian is nothing but a sensual man, who, knowing of the sacred and being conscious that he violates it, sees in himself a poor sinner. Sensulessness recognized as sinfulness is Christian consciousness, is the Christian himself. And if sin and sinfulness are now no longer taken into the mouths of moderns, but instead of that egoism, self seeking, selfishness, et cetera, engage them. If the devil has been translated into the under man or egoistic man, is the Christian less pleasent than before? Is not the old discord between God and evil? Is not a judge over us? Man is not a calling, the calling to make oneself man left if they no longer named it calling, but task or very likely duty. The change of name is quite correct, because man is not like God, her personal being that can call. But outside the name of the thing remains as of old. Everyone has a relation to objects, and more everyone is differently related to them. Let us choose as an example that book to which millions of men had a relation for two thousand years, the Bible. What is it? What was it? To each? Absolutely only what he made out of it? For him who makes to himself nothing at all out of it. It is nothing at all for him who uses it as an amulet, it has solely the value the significance of a means of sorcery. For him who my children plays with it, it is nothing but a plaything, et cetera. Now Christianity asks that it shall be for the same for all, say the Sacred Book or the Sacred scriptures. This means as much as that the Christian's view shall also be that of other men, and that no one may be otherwise related to that object. And with this the onus of the relation is destroyed, and one mind, one disposition is fixed as the true, the only true one. In the limitation of the freedom to make of the Bible what I feel, the freedom of making in general is limited, and the coercion of a view or a judgment is put in its place. He you should pass the judgment that the Bible was a long error of mankind, would judge criminally. In fact, the child who tears it to pieces or plays with it. The inca actor hulapa who lays his ear to it and throws it away contemptuously when it remains dumb, judges just as correctly about the Bible as the priest who praises in it the word of God, or the critic who calls it a job of men's hands. For how we toss things about is the affair of our option, our free will. We use them according to our heart's pleasure, or more clearly, we use them just as we can. Why what do the persons stream about when they see how hegal and the speculative philologians may expect to live thoughts out of the contents of the Bible precisely this that they deal with it according to their heart's pleasure, all proceed a bitterary with it. But because we all show ourselves obituary in the handling of objects, i e. Do with them as we like best at our liking. Their philosopher likes nothing so well as when he can trace out an idea in everything, as the god fearing man likes to make God his friend by everything, and so e g by keeping the Bible sacred. Therefore we know where needs such grievous a bitterness, such a frightful tendency to violence, such stupid coersion, as in this very domain of our own free will. If we proceed obituary in taking the sacred objects. Thus or so, how is it then that we want to take it ill of the parson spirits if they take us just as our bituary in their fashion and esteem us worthy of the heretics, prior or of another's punishment, perhaps of the censorship. What a man is he makes out of things. As you look at the world, so it looks at you again. Then the wise advice makes itself heard again at once. You must only look at it rightly and biasly, et cetera. As if a child did not look at the Bible rightly and unbiasedly when it makes it a plaything, that shrewd persent is given us e g. By feul bark. One does look at things rightly when one makes of them what one will by things, objects in general are here understood e g. God, are fellow men, a sweetheart, a book, a beast, et cetera. And therefore the things and the looking at them are not first. But I am My will is one will brings thoughts out of the things, will discover reason in the world. Will has sacredness in it. Therefore one shall find them seek, and ye shall find what I will seek. I determine. I want eg to get edification from the Bible. It is to be found. I want to read and test the Bible folly. My outcome will be a thorough instruction and criticism to the extent of my powers. I elect for myself what I have a fancy for, and in elected I show myself obituary. Connected with this is the discernment that every judge which I pass upon an object is the creature of my will. And that discernment again leads me to not losing myself in the creature the judgment, but remaining the creator, the judge, who is ever creating anew All predicates of objects are my statements, my judgments, my creatures. If they want to tear themselves loose from me and be something for themselves or actually overall me, then I have nothing more pressing to do, and to take them back into their nothing, into me. The Creator, God, Christ, Trinity, Morality, the good, etc. Are such creatures of which I must not merely allow myself to say that they are truths, but also that they are deceptions. As I was willed and decreed their existence, so I want to have license to will their non existence too. I must not let them grow over my head, must not have the weakness to let them become something absolute, whereby they would be internalized and withdrawn from my power and decision. With that I should all a prey to the principle of stability, the proper life, principle of religion, which concerns itself with creating sanctuaries that must not be touched, eternal truths, in short, that which shall be said could, and depriving you of what is yours. The object makes us into possessed men in its sacred form, just as in its profane. As a supersensuous object, just as it does a sensuous one. The appetite or mania refers to both, and avarice and longing for heaven stand on a level. When the rationalists wanted to win people for their censorious world, Lavator preached the longing for the invisible. The one party wanted to call forth emolition, and the other motion activity. The conception of objects is altogether diverse, even as God, Christ the world were and are conceived of in the most manifold. Wise, in this everyone is a dissenter, and at the bloody combats, so much has at last been attained, and that opposite views about one and the same object are no longer condemned as heresies worthy of death. The dissenters reconcile themselves to each other. But why should I only descent think otherwise about a thing? Why not push the thinking otherwise to its last extremity, that of no longer having any regard at all for the thing, and therefore thinking it's nothingness, crushing it. Then the conception itself has an end, because there is no longer anything to conceive of. Why am I to say, let us suppose God is not Allah, not Brahma, not Jehovah, but God but not God, is nothing but a deception? Why do people ground me if I am an atheist? Because they put the creature above the creator. They honor and serve the creature more than the creator, and require a ruling object that the subject may be right submissive. I am to bend beneath the absolute I ought to by the realm of thoughts. Christianity has completed itself. The thought is that inwardness, in which all the world's light go out, all existence becomes existenceless. The inward man, the heart, the head, is all in all this realm of thoughts awaits its deliverance, awaits like the sphinx Odipus's key word to the riddle. But it may enter in at last to its death. I am the annihilator of its continuance, for in the Creator's realm it no longer forms a realm of its own, not a state in the state, but a creature of my creative thoughtlessness. Only together and at the same time with the benumbed thinking world, can the world of Christians, Christianity, and religion itself come to its downfall only when thoughts run out of their nobal believers. To the thinker, his thinking is a sublime labor, a sacred activity, and it rests on a firm faith, the faith in truth. At first, playing is a sacred activity. Then the sacred devotion passes over into a rational and reasoning thinking, which, however, likewise retains in the sacred truth its underangeable basis of faith, and is only a marvelous machine that the spirits of truth winds up for its service. Free thinking and free science busy me. For it is not that I am free, not I that busy myself. But thinking is free and busy as me with heaven and the heavenly or divine e g properly with the world and the worldly. Not this world, but another world. It is only the reversing and deranging of the world, and busying with the essence of the world, therefore a derangement. The thinker is blind to the immediateness of things, and incapable of mastering them. He does not eat, does not drink, does not enjoy. For the eater and drinker is never the thinker. Nay, the latter forgets eating and drinking his getting on in life, the cares of nourishment, et cetera. Over his thinking. He forgets it, as the praying man too forgets it. This is why he appears to the falseful son of Nature as a queer dick, a fool, even if he does look upon him as holy, just as lunatics appeared so to the ancients. Free thinking is lunacy because it is pure movement of the inwardness of the merely inward man, which guides and regulates the rest of the man. The charman and the speculative philosopher mark the bottom and top rounds on the ladder of the inward man. The mongol charman and philosopher fight with ghosts, demons, spirits, gods. Totally different from this free thinking is only thinking my thinking, a thinking which does not guide me, but is guided, continued, or broken off by me at my pleasure. The distinction of this own thinking from free thinking is similar to that of own sensuality, which I satisfy at pleasure, from the unruly sexuality to which I sub come. Fure bark In the principles of the philosophy of the future is always harping upon being. In this he too, with all his antigonoism to Hegel And the absolute philosophy is not fast in an abstraction, for being is abstraction, as is even the eye. Only I am not abstraction alone. I am all in all. Consequently, even abstraction or nothing, I am all and nothing. I am not a mere thought, but at the same time I am full of thoughts, a thought world. Hegal condemns the own mine opinion. Absolute thinking is that which forgets that it is my thinking that I think, and that it exists only through me. But I, as I swallow up again, what is mine? Am its master? It is only my opinion, which I can at any moment change, I annihilate, take back into myself, and consume. Fure Bark wants to smite Hegel's absolute thinking with unconquered being. But in me being is as much conquered as thinking is. It is my being as the other is my thinking. With this, of course, fure Bark does not get further than to the proof trivel in itself that I require their senses for everything, or that I cannot entirely do it with about these organs. Certainly I cannot think if I do not exist sensuously. But for thinking as well as for feeling, and so for the abstract as well as for the sensuous, I need above all things myself, this quite particular, myself is unique myself. If I were not this one e g. Egal, I should not look at the world as I do look at it. I should not pick out of it that philosophical system, which just as I Egal do et cetera. I should indeed have senses, as do other people too, but I should not utilize them as I do. Thus the reproach is brought up against Hegel by Viewibark that he misuses language understanding by many words, something else than what natural consciousness takes them for and yet he too commits the same fault when he gives that sensuous a sense of unusual eminence. Thus it is said, page sixty nine, the sensuous is not the profane, the destitute thought, the obvious, that which is understood of itself. But if it is the sacred, the fall of thought, the mecandite, that which can be understood only through mediation, well, then it is no longer what people call the sensuous. The sensuous is only that which exists for the senses. What, on the other hand, is enjoyable only to those who enjoy with more than the senses, who go beyond sense. Enjoyment or sense reception is at most mediated or introduced by the senses i e. The senses constitute a condition for obtaining it. But it is no longer anything sensuous is sensuous. Whatever it may be, when taken up into me, becomes something nonsensuous, which however, may again have sensuous effects e g. As by the stirring of my emotion and my blood. It is well that fuer BArch brings sensuous to honor, But the only thing he is able to do with it is to clothe the materialism of his new philosophy with what had hitherto been the poverty of idolism, the absolute philosophy. As little as people, that it be talked into them that one can live on the spiritual alone without bread, so little will they believe his words that as essensuous being, one is already everything, and so spiritual full of thoughts, et cetera. Nothing at all is justified by being. What is thought of is as well as what is not thought of. The stone in the street is and my notion of it is two. Both are only in different spaces, the former in airy space, the latter in my head in me. For I am space like a street. End of Section thirty six.