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35 - My Self-Enjoyment - part 1 - The Ego and His Own - Max Stirner · The Philosophy Insights Collection

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My self enjoyment Part one. We stand at the boundary of a period.
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The world hitherto took fought for nothing, but the gain of life took care
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for life. For whether all activity is put on the stretch for the life
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of this world or of the other, for the temple or for the eternal.
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Whether one hankers for daily bread, give us our daily bread, or
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for holy bread, the true bread from heaven, the bread of God that
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comes from Heaven and gives life to the world, the bread of life.
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John six. Whether one takes care for dear life or for life to eternity,
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this does not change the object of the strain and care, which in
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the one case as in the other, shows itself to be life. Do
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the modern tendencies and themselves otherwise? People now want nobody to be embarrassed for
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the most indispensable necessaries of life, but want everyone to feel secure as to
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these. And on the other hand they teach that man has this life to
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attend to, and the real world to adapt himself to, without vain care
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for another. Let us take up the same thing from another side. When
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one is anxious only to live, he easily, in this solicitude forgets the
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enjoyment of life. If his only concern is for life, and he thinks,
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if I only have my dear life, he does not apply his full
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strength to using I e enjoying life. But how does one use life?
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In using it up? Like the candle which one uses in burning it up,
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one uses life and consequently himself the living one in consuming it and himself
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enjoyment of life is using life up. Now we are in search of the
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enjoyment of life. And what did the religious world do? It won't in
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search of life wherein consists the true life, the blessed life, et cetera.
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How is it to be attained? What must man do and become in
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order to become a truly living man? How does he fulfill this calling?
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These and similar questions indicate that the askers were still seeking for themselves to wit
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themselves in the true sense, in the sense of true living. What I
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am is foam and shadow. What I shall be is my true self.
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To chase after this self, to produce it, to realize it constitutes the
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hard task of mortal, who die only to rise again, live only to
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die, live only to find the true life. Not I am certain of
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myself and no longer seeking for myself. Am I really my property? I
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have myself. Therefore I use and enjoy myself. On the other hand,
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I can never take comfort in myself as long as I think that I have
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still to find my true self, and that it must come to this,
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that not I but Christ or some other spiritual I e. Ghost yourself e
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g. The true man, the essence of Man et cetera, lives in
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me. A vast interval separates the two views. In the old, I
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go toward myself. In the new, I start from myself. In the
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former, I long for myself. In the latter, I have my self
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and do with myself as one does with any other property. I enjoy myself
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at my pleasure. I am no longer afraid for my life, but squander
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it. Henceforth, the question one's not how one can acquire life, but
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how one can squander enjoy it. Or not how one is to produce the
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true self in himself, but how one is to dissolve himself to live himself
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out. What else should the ideal be but the sought for ever distant self
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one seeks for himself. Consequently, one does not yet have himself. One
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aspires toward what one ought to be. Consequently, one is not it.
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One lives in longing, and has lived thousands of years in it. In
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hope, living is quite another thing in enjoyment. Does this, perchance apply
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only to the so called pious, No, it applies to all who belong
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to the departing period of history, even to its men of pleasure. For
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them too, the work days were followed by a Sunday, and the rush
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of the world, by the dream of a better world, of a general
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happiness of humanity, in short, by an ideal. But philosophers especially are
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contrasted with the pious. Now have they been thinking of anything else than the
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ideal, been planning for anything else than the absolute self? Longing and hope?
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Everywhere? And nothing but these for me call it romanticism. If the
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enjoyment of life is to triumph over the longing for life or hope of life,
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it must vanquish this in its double significance, which Schiller introduces in his
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Ideal and Life. It must crush spiritual and secular poverty, exterminate the ideal
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and the want of daily bread. He who must expend his life to prolonged
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life cannot enjoy it, and he who is still seeking for his life does
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not have it, and can as little enjoy it. Both are poor,
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But blessed are the poor. Those who are hungering for the true life have
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no power over their present life, but must apply it for the purpose of
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thereby gaining that true life, and must sacrifice it entirely to this aspiration and
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this task. If in the case of those devotees who hope for a life
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in the other world and look upon that in this world as merely a preparation
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for it, the tributenness of their earthly existence, which they put solely into
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the service of the hoped for heavenly existence, is pretty distinctly apparent. One
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would yet go far wrong if one wanted to consider the most rationalistic and enlightened
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as less self sacrificing. Oh, there is to be found in the true
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life, and much more comprehensive significance than that heavenly is contempt to express now
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is not to introduce the liberal concept of it at once, the human and
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truly human life the true one. And is everyone already needing this truly human
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life from the start, or must he first raise himself to it with hard
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toil. Does he already have it as his present life, or must he
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struggle for it as his future life, which will become his part only when
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he is no longer tainted with any egoism. In this view, life exists
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only to gain life, and one lives only to make the essence of man
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alive in one cell. One lives for the sake of this essence. One
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has his life only in order to procure, by means of it, the
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true life cleans of all egoism. Hence one is afraid to make any use
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he likes of his life. It is to serve only for the right use.
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In short, one has according in life, a task. In life.
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One has something to realize and produce by his life, as something for
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which our life is only means an implement, as something that is worth more
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than this life, as something to which one owes his life. One has
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a god who asks a living sacrifice. Only the rudeness of human sacrifice has
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been lost with time. Human sacrifice itself has remained unabated, and criminals ourly
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form sacrifices to justice, and we poor sinners slay our own selves as sacrifice
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for the human essence. The idea of mankind, humanity, and whatever the
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idols or gods are called. Besides, but because we owe our life to
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that somethink, therefore this is the next point, we have no right to
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take it from us. The conservative tendency of Christianity does not permit thinking of
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death otherwise than with the purpose to take its sting from it and live on
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preserve oneself. My sling the question lets everything happen and come upon him.
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If he, the ark Jew, can only haggle and smuggle himself into heaven,
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he must not kill himself. He must only preserve himself and work at
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the preparation of the future. Abode conservatism or conquest of death lies at his
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heart. The last enemy that is abolished is death. Christ has taken the
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power from death and brought life and imperishable being to light by the Gospel,
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imperishableness, stability. The moral man wants the good, the right, and
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if he takes to the means that lead to this goal really lead to it,
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then these means are not his means, but those of the good right,
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et cetera itself. These means are never immoral, because the good end
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itself mediates itself. Through them, the end sanctifies the means. They call
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this maxim jesuitical, but it is moral. Through and through. The moral
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man acts in the surface of an end or an idea. He makes himself
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the tall of the idea of the good, as the pious man counts it
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his glory to be a tall or instrument of God. To await death is
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what the moral commandment postulates as the good. To give it to oneself is
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immoral and bad. Suicide finds no excuse before the judgment seat of morality.
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If the religious man forbids it because you have not given yourself life, but
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God, who alone can also take it from you again, as if even
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taking in this conception, God did not take it from me, just as
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much when I kill myself as when a til from the roof or a hostile
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bullet fails me, for he would have arrived the resolution of death in me
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too. The moral man forbids it because I owe my life to the fatherland,
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etc. Because I do not know whether I may not yet accomplish good
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by my life. Of course, for in me good loses at all,
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as God does an instrument. If I am immoral, the good is served
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in my amendment. If I am ungodly, God has joy in my penitence.
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Suicide therefore is ungodly as well as netheus. If one whose standpoint is
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religiousness takes his own life, he acts in forgetfulness of God, But if
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the suicide's standpoint is morality, he acts in forgetfulness of duty immorality. People
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worried themselves much with the question whether Emma Galotti's death can be justified before morality.
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They take it as if it were suicide, which it is too,
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in substance that she is so infatuated with chastity, this moral good as to
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yield up even her life, for it is certainly moral. But again that
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she feels the weakness of her flesh is immoral. Footnote see the next to
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the last scene of the tragedy Orrado under the pretext of a judical investigation.
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He tears you out of your arms and takes you to a gomeraldi Amilia,
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give me that dagger father me Orardo, no, no, reflect You two
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have only one life to lose, Emilia, and only one innocence Orardo,
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which is above the reach of any violence Amelia, but not above the reach
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of any seduction, viilence violence. Who cannot defy violence, what is called
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violence is nothing. Seduction is the true violence. I have lard father,
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lured as youthfool and warm as anybody's. My senses, our senses. I
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can want nothing. I am sure of nothing. I know Grimaldi's house.
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It is the house of pleasure. An hour there under my mother's eyes,
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and there arose in my soul so much turmoil as the strictest exercise of religion
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could hardly quiet in weeks religion, and what religion to escape nothing worse?
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Thousands sprang into the water, And our saints give me that dagger, Father,
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give it to me Emilia. Once indeed, there was a father who,
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to save his daughter from shame, drove into her heart whatever still he
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could quick at find, gave life to her for the second time. But
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all such deeds are of the past of such fathers. There are no more
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Urado. Yes, daughter, yes, stabs her end of Footnote Such contradictions
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from the tragic conflict universally in the moral drama, and one must think and
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feel morally to be able to take an interest in it. What holds good
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or piety and morality will necessarily apply to humanity also, because one owes his
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life likewise to man, mankind or the species. Only when I am under
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obligation to no being is the maintaining of my life my affair. A leap
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from this bridge makes me free. But if we owe the maintaining of our
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life to that being that we are to make a life in ourselves, it
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is not less our duty not to lead the life according to our pleasure,
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but to shape it in conformity to that being. All my feeling, thinking
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and willing, all my doing and designing belongs to him. What is in
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conformity to that being is to be inferred from his concept? And how differently
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has this concept been conceived, or how differently has that been imagined? What
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demands the Supreme Being makes on the Mohammedan? What different ones the Christian?
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Again, since he hears from him? How divergent therefore has the shaping of
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the lives of the two turn out? Only this do all hold fast that
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the Supreme Being is to judge our life. But the pious, who have
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their judge in God and in his word a book of directions for their life,
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I everwhere pass by only the because they belong to a period of development
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that has been lived through, and as partifactions, they may remain in their
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fixed place right along in our time. It is no longer the pious,
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but the liberals, who have the floor and piety itself cannot keep from reddening
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it pelface with liberal coloring. But the liberals do not adore their judge in
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God, and do not unfold their life by the directions of the divine Word,
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but regulate themselves by Man. They want to be not divine, but
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human, and to live. So Man is the liberals supreme being, Man
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the judge of his life, humanity his directions or kidchisms. God is spirit,
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but man is the most perfect spirit, the final result of the long
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chase after the spirit, or of the searching in the depths of the Godhead.
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Are you in the depths of the spirit? Every one of your traits
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is to be human. You yourself, are to be so from top to
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toe, in the inward as in the outward. For humanity is your calling,
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calling, destiny task. What one can become he does become. A
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born poet may well be hindered by the disfavor of circumstances from standing on the
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high level of his time and after the great studies that are indispensable for this
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producing consummate works of art. But he will make poetry, be he a
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plone man or so lucky as to live at the court of Weimar. A
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born musician will make music, no matter whether on all instruments or only on
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an oaten pipe. A born philosophial head can give proof of it as university
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philosopher or as village philosopher. Finally, a born dolt, who, as
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is very well compatible with this, may at the same time be a slide
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boots will, as probably everyone who has visited schools in a position to amplify
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to himself by many instances of fellow scholars, always remain a blockhead. Let
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him have been drilled and trained into the chief of a bueau, or let
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him serve that same chief as boot black Nay, the born shallow pages indisputably
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from the most numerous class of men. And why indeed should not the same
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distinctions show themselves in the human species that are unmistakable in every species of beasts.
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The more gifted and the less gifted are to be found everywhere. Only
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a few, however, are so ill, so that one could not get
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ideas into them. Hence people usually consider all men capable of having religion in
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a certain degree. They may be changed to other ideas too, eg.
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To some musical intelligence, even some philosophy. At this point, then the
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priesthood of religion, of morality, of culture, of science, etc.
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Takes its start, and the Communists eg want to make everything accessible to all
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by their public school. There is heard a common asthetician that this great mass
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cannot get along without religion. The Communists broaden it into the proposition that not
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only the great mass, but absolutely all are called to everything. Not enough
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that the great mass has been changed to religion. Now it is actually to
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have to occupy itself with everything. Human training is growing ever more general and
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more comprehensive. Your poor beings, who could live so happily if you might
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skip according to your mind, you are to dance to the pile of schoolmasters
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and beer leaders in order to perform tricks that you yourselves would never use yourselves
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for. And you do not even keep out of the traces at last,
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against being always taken otherwise than you want to give yourselves. No, you
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mechanically recite to yourselves the question that is recited to you. What am I
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called to? What ought I to do? You need only ask us to
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have yourselves told what you ought to do and order to do it, to
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have your calling marked out for you, or else, to order yourselves and
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impose it on yourselves according to the spirit prescription. Then, in reference to
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the will, the word is I will too do what I ought. A
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man is called to nothing and has no calling, no destiny, as little
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as a plant or a beast has a calling. The flower does not follow
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the calling to complete itself, but it spends all its forces to enjoy and
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consume the world as well as it can i e. It sucks in as
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much of the juices of the earth, as much air of the ether,
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as much light of the sun as it can get and lodge. The bird
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lives up to no calling, but it uses its forces as much as it
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is peptible. It catches beetles and sings to its heart's delight. But the
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forces of the flower and the bird are slight in comparison to those of a
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man, and a man who applies his forces will affect the world much more
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powerfully than flower and beast. A calling he has not, but he has
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forces that manifest themselves where they are, because their being consists solely in their
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manifestation, and are as little able to abide inactive as life, which,
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if it stood still only a second, would no longer be life. Now
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one might call out of the man, use your force. Yet to this
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imperative would be given the meaning that it was man's task to use his force.
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It is not so. Rather, each one really uses his force without
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first looking upon this as his calling. At all times, everyone uses as
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much force as he possesses. One does say of a beaten man that he
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ought to have exerted his force more, but one forgets that if in the
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moment of succumbing he had the force to exert his forces e g. Bodily
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forces, he would not have failed to do it. Even if it was
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only the discouragement of a minute. This was yet a destitution of force.
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A minute long. Forces may assuredly be sharpened and redoubled, especially by hostile
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resistance or friendly assistance. But where one misses their application, one may be
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sure of their absence too. One can strike fire out of a stone,
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but without the blow none comes out. In like manner, a man too
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needs impact. Now, for this reason that forces always of themselves show themselves
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operative, the command to use them would be superficious and senseless. To use
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his forces is not man's calling and task, but is his act, real
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and extant at all times. Force is only a simpler word for manifestation of
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force. Now as this rose is a true rose to begin with, this
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nightingale always a true nighting girl. So I am not for the first time
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a true man when I fulfilled my calling, live up to my destiny.
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But I am a true man from the start. My first babble is the
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token of the life of a true man. The struggles of my life are
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the act pourings of his force. My last breath is the last exholation of
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the force of a man. The true man does not lie in the future
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an object of longing, but lies existent and real in the present. Whatever
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and whoever I may be joyous and suffering, a child or a gray beard,
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in confidence or doubt, in sleep or in waking, I am it.
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I am a true man. But if I am man, and have
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really find in myself of him who religiously humanity designated as the distant goal,
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then everything truly human is also my own. What was ascribed to the idea
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of humanity belongs to me. That freedom of trade e g. When humanity
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has yet to attain, and which like an enchanting dream people removed to humanity's
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golden future. I take by anticipation as my property and carry it on for
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the time in the form of smuggling. There may indeed be but few smugglers
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who have sufficient understanding to thus account to themselves for their doings, But the
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instinct of egoism replaces their consciousness. Above I have shown the same thing about
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freedom of the press. Everything is my own. Therefore I bring back to
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myself what wants to withdraw from me. But above all, I always bring
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myself back when I have slipped away from myself to any tributaries. But this
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too is not my calling, but my natural act. Enough, there is
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a mighty difference whether I make myself the starting point or the goal. As
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the latter, I do not have myself, and consequently still alien to myself
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and my essence, my true essence, and this true essence alien to me
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will mock me as a spook of a thousand different names, because I am
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not yet I another like God, the true man, the truly pious man,
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the rational man, the female, et cetera. Is I my ego
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still far from myself. I separate myself into two halves, of which one
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the one unattained and two be fulfilled, is the true one. The one,
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the untrue, must be brought as a sacrifice to wit the unspiritual one.
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The other, the true, is to be the whole man to wit
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the spirit. Then it is said, the spirit is man's proper essence,
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or man exists as man only spiritually. Now there is a greedy rush to
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catch the spirit, as if one would then have bogged himself. And so
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in chasing after himself, one loses sight of himself whom he is, And
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as one stormily pursues his own self the never attained. So one also despises
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true people's rules to take men as they are, and prefers to take them
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as they should be, And for this reason hands everyone on after his should
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be self, and endeavors to make all into equally entitled, equally respectable,
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equally moral or rational men. Yes, if men were what they should be
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could be, if all men were rational, all loved each other as brothers,
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then it would be a paradisical life. All right, men are as
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they should be can be. What should they be surely not more than they
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can be? And what can they be not more again than they can Then
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they have the competence the forced to be. But this they really are,
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because what they are not they are incapable of being. For to be capable
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means really to be. One is not capable for anything that one really is
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not. One is not capable of anything that one does not really do.
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Could a man blinded by cutteracts see, Oh, yes, if he had
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his cut that's successfully removed. But now he cannot see because he does not
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see. Possibility and reality always coincide. One can do nothing that one does
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not, as one does nothing that one cannot. The sing reality of this
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assertion vanishes when one reflects that the words it is possible that almost never contain
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another meaning than I can imagine that, eg. It is possible for all
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men to live rationally. Eg I can imagine that all et cetera. Now,
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since my thinking cannot and accordingly does not, cause all men to live
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rationally, but this must still be left to the men themselves. General reason
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is for me only thinkable. A thinkableness but as such, in fact a
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reality that is called a possibility only in reference to what I cannot bring to
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pass. To wit, the rationality of others, so far as depends on
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you, all men might be rational, for you have nothing against it.
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Nay, so far as you're thinking reaches you perhaps cannot discover any hindrance either.
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And accordingly nothing does stand in the way of the thing in your thinking,
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and it is thinkable to you, as men are not all rational,
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though it is probable that they cannot be so. If something which one imagines
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to be easily possible is not or does not happen, then one may be
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assured that something stands in the way of the thing, and that it is
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impossible. Our time has its art, sires, etc. The art may
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be bad in all conscience, but one may say that we deserved to have
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a better and could have it if we only we have just as much art
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as we can have. Our art of to day is the only art possible
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and therefore real at the time. End of Section thirty five