Latest / Logic Library / 07 - The Possessed - part 2 - The Ego and His Own - Max Stirner

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07 - The Possessed - part 2 - The Ego and His Own - Max Stirner · Logic Library

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The possessed piety has for a century received so many blows and had to hear
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its superhuman essence reviled as an inhuman one so often that one cannot feel tempted
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to draw the sword against it again. And yet it has almost always been
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only moral opponents that have appeared in the arena to assail the supreme essence in
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favor of another supreme essence. So Prudon, unabashed, says, man is
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destined to live without religion, but the moral law is eternal and absolute.
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Who would dare to day to attack morality? Moral people skimmed off the best
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fat from religion, ateeth themselves, and are now having a tough job to
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get rid of the resulting scrffola. If therefore we point out that religion has
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not by any means been hurt in its inmost part, so long as people
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reproach it only with its superhuman essence, and that it takes its final appeal
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to the spirit alone, for God is Spirit, then we have sufficiently indicated
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its final accord with morality and can leave its stubborn conflict with the latter lying
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behind us. It is a question of a supreme essence with both, and
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whether this is a superhuman or a human one can make, since it is
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any case an essence over me, a supermind one, so to speak,
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but little difference to me. In the end, the relation to the human
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essence or to man, as soon as ever it has shed the snake skin
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of the old religion, will yet wear a religious snake skin again. So
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Feuerbach construck us that if one only inverts speculative philosophy, always makes the predicate
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the subject, and so makes the subject the object and principle one has the
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undraped truth, pure and clean. Herewith, to be sure, we lost
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the narrow religious standpoint, lost the God, who, from this standpoint is
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subject. But we take in exchange for it the other side of the religious
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standpoint, the moral standpoint. Thus we no longer say God is love,
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but love is divine. If we further put in place of the predicate divine
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the equivalent sacred, then as far as concerns the sense, all the old
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comes back again. According to this, love is to be the good in
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man, his divineness, that which does him honor his true humanity. It
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makes him man for the first time, makes for the first time a man
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out of him, so then it would be more accurately worded. Thus love
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is what is human in man, and what is inhuman is the loveless egoist
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but precisely all that which Christianity and with its speculative philosophy i e. Theology,
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offers as the good the absolute is to self ownership simply not the good
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or what means the same. It is only the good. Consequently, by
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the transformation of the predicant into the subject, the Christian essence and with it
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the predicate that contains the essence you know, would only be fixed yet more
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oppressively. God on the Divine would entwine themselves all the more inextricably with me.
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To expel God from his heaven and to rob him of his transcendence cannot
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yet support a claim of complete victory if therein he is only chased into the
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human breast and gifted with indelible imminence. Now they say the divine is the
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truly human. The same people who oppose Christianity as the basis of the state,
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who oppose the so called Christian state, do not tire of repeating that
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morality is the fundamental pillar of social life and of the state, as if
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the dominion of morality were not a complete dominion of the sacred, a hierarchy.
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So we may here mentioned by the way that rationalist movement, which after
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Theologians, had long insisted that only faith was capable of grasping religious truths,
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that only to believers did God reveal himself, and that therefore only the heart,
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the feelings the believing fancy was religious, broke out with the assertion that
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the natural, understanding human reason was also capable of discerning God. What does
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that mean but that the reason laid claim to be the same visionary as the
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fancy. In this sense, Romarus wrote his most notable Truths of Natural Religion.
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It had to come to this that the whole man, with all his
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faculties, was found to be religious, heart and affections, understanding and reason,
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feeling, knowledge and will. Short, everything in man appeared religious.
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Hegel has shown that even philosophy is religious. And what is not called religion
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today the religion of love, the religion of freedom, political religion, in
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short, every enthusiasm, and so it is too. In fact, to
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this day we use the Romance word religion, which expresses the concept of a
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condition of being bound to be sure, we remain bound so far as religion
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takes possession of our inward parts. But is the mind also bound? On
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the contrary, that is free is sole Lord, is not our mind but
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absolute. Therefore, the correct affirmative translation of the word religion would be freedom
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of mind. In whomso the mind is free, he is religious in just
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the same way as he in whom the senses have free course is called a
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sensual man. The mind binds the former that desires the latter. Religion therefore
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is boundless or religio. With reference to me, I am bound. It
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is freedom. With reference to the mind, the mind is free or has
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freedom of mind. Many know from experience how hard it is on us when
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the desires run away with us free and unbridled. But that the free mind
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splendid intellectuality, enthusiasm for intellectual interests, or however this jewel may, in
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the most various phrase be named, brings us into yet more grievous straits than
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even the wildest impropriety. People will not perceive, nor can they perceive it
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without being consciously egoists, rumorous. And all who have shown that our reason,
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our heart, etc. Also lead to God have there withal shown that
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we are possessed through and through. To be sure, they've vexed the theologians,
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from whom they took away the prerogative of religious exaltation. But for religion,
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for freedom of mind, they thereby conquered yet more ground. For when
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the mind is no longer limited to feeling or faith, but also as understanding,
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reason and thought in general belongs to itself. The mind, when therefore
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it may take part in the spiritual and heavenly truths in the form of understanding,
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as well as in its other forms, then the whole mind is occupied
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only with spiritual things, that is with itself, and is therefore free.
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Now we are so through and through religious that jurors sworn men condemn us to
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death, and every policeman, as a good Christian, takes us to the
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lock up by virtue of an oath of office. Morality could not come into
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opposition with piety till after the time, when in general the boisterous hate of
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everything that looked like in order, decrees, commandments, etc. Spoke out
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in revolt, and the personal absolute Lord was scoffed at and persecuted. Consequently,
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it could arrive at independence only through liberalism, whose first form acquired significance
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in the world's history as citizenship and weakened the specifically religious powers. See liberalism
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below. For when morality not merely go go alongside of piety, but stands
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on feet of its own, then its principle lies no longer in the divine
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commandments, but in the law of reason, from which the commandments, so
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far as they are still to remain valid, must first await justification for their
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validity. In the law of reason, man determines himself out of himself,
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For man is rational and out of the essence of man. Those laws follow
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of necessity. Piety and morality part company in this that the former makes God
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the lawgiver the latter man. From a certain standpoint of morality, people reason
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about as follows. Either man is led by his sensuality and is following it
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immoral, or he is led by the good, which taken up into will
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is called more moral, sentiment, sentiment, and prepossession in favor of the
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good, Then he shows himself moral. From this point of view, how,
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for instance, can Sands act against Cottsibieu be called immoral? What is
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commonly understood by unselfish. It certainly was in the same measure as, among
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other things, Saint Crispin's thieveries in favor of the poor, He should not
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have murdered, for it stands written thou shalt not murder, then, to
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serve the good. The welfare of the people, as Sand at least intended,
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or the welfare of the poor like Crispin, is moral. But murder
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and theft are immoral. The purpose moral the means immoral. Why because murder
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assassination is something absolutely bad. When the guerrillas enticed the enemies of the country
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into ravines and shot them down unseen from the bushes, do you suppose that
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was assassination? According to the principle of morality, which commands us to serve
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the good? You could really ask only whether murder could never, in any
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case be a realization of the good, and would have to endorse that murder
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which realized the good. You cannot condemn Sands deed at all. It was
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moral because in the service of the good, because unselfish, it was an
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act of punishment which the individual inflicted on execution, inflicted at the risk of
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the executioner's life. What else had its scheme been, after all, but
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that he wanted to suppress writings by brute force. Are you not acquainted with
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the same procedure as a legal and sanctioned one, And what can be objected
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against it from your principle of morality? But it was an illegal execution,
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So the immoral thing in it was the illegality, the disobedience to law.
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Then you admit that the good is nothing else then law, morality nothing else
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than loyalty. And to this externality of loyalty, your morality must sink to
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this righteousness of works in the fulfillment of the law, only that the latter
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is at once more tyrannical and more revolting than the old time righteousness of works.
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For in the latter only to act is needed. But you require the
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disposition too. One must carry in himself the law the statute, and he
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who is most legally disposed is the most moral. Even the last vestige of
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cheerfulness in Catholic life must perish in this Protestant legality. Here, at last,
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the domination of the law is for the first time complete. Not I
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live, but the law lives in me. Thus I have really come so
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far to be only the vessel of its glory. Every Prussian carries his gendarme
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in his breast, says a high Prussian officer. Why do certain opposition parties
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fail to flourish solely for the reason that they refuse to forsake the path of
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morality or legality? Hence the measureless hypocrisy of devotion, love, et cetera,
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from whose repulsiveness one may daily get the most thoroughn worst at this rotten
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and hypocritical relation of a lawful opposition. In the moral relation of love and
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fidelity, a divided or opposed will cannot have place. The beautiful relation is
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disturbed if the one wills this and the other the reverse. But now,
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according to the practice hitherto and the old prejudice of the opposition, the moral
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relation is to be preserved above awe. What is then left to the opposition,
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perhaps the will to have a liberty? If the beloved one sees fit
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to deny it not a bit, it may not will to have the freedom.
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It can only wish for it, petition for it, lisp a please
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please? What would come of it? If the opposition really willed, willed
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with the full energy of the will. No, it must renounce will in
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order to live to love, renounce liberty for love of morality. It may
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never claim as a right what it is permitted only to beg as a favor,
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love, devotion, etc. Demand with undeviating definiteness, that there be
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only one will to which the others devote themselves, which they serve follow love.
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Whether this will is regarded as reasonable or as unreasonable. In both cases,
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one acts morally when one follows it, and immorally when one breaks away
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from it. The will that commands the censorship seems to many unreasonable. But
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he who, in a land of censorship evades the censoring of his book acts
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immorally, and he who submits it to the censorship acts morally. If someone
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let his moral judgment go and set up a secret press, one would have
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to call him immoral and imprudent in the bargain if he let himself be caught.
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But will such a man lay claim to a value in the eyes of
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the moral perhaps, that is, if he fancied he was serving a higher
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morality. The web of the hypocrisy of today hangs on the frontiers of two
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domains, between which our time swings back and forth, attaching its fine threads
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of deception and self deception. No longer vigorous enough to serve morality without doubt
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or weakening, not yet reckless enough to live wholly to egoism. It trembles
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now toward the one and now toward the other, in the spider web of
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hypocrisy, and crippled by the curse of halfness, catches only miserable stupid flies.
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If one has dared to make a free motion, immediately one waters it
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again with assurances of love and sham's resignation. If, on the other hand,
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they have had the face to reject the free motion with moral appeals to
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confidence, immediately the moral courage also sinks, and they assure one how they
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hear the free words with special pleasure, they sham approval. In short,
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people would like to have the one, but not go without the other.
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They would like to have a free will, but not for their lives lack
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the moral will. Just come into contact with a servile loyalist. You liberals,
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you will sweeten every word of freedom with a look of the most loyal
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confidence, and he will clothe his servileism in the most flattering phrases of freedom.
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Then you go apart, and he like you thinks I know you fox.
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He sends the devil in you as much as you do the dark old
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Lord God in him. A nero is a bad man only in the eyes
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of the good. In mind, he is nothing but a possessed man,
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as are the good too. The goods see in him an arch villain and
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relegate him to hell. Why did nothing hinder him in his arbitrary course?
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Why did people put up with so much? Do you suppose the tame Romans,
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who let all their will be bound by such a tyrant were a hare
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the better in old Rome, they would have put him to death instantly,
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never would have been his slaves. But the contemporary good of among the Romans
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opposed to him only moral demands, not their will. They sighed that their
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emperor did not do homage to morality like them, They themselves remained moral subjects
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till at last one found courage to give up moral obedient subjection. And then
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the same good Romans, who as obedient subjects, had borne all the ignominy
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of having no will, hurad over the nefarious, immoral act of the rebel.
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Where then, in the good was the courage for the revolution, That
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courage which they now praised after another had mustered it up. The good could
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not have this courage for a revolution and an insurrection into the bargain is always
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something immoral, which one can resolve upon only when one ceases to be good
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good and becomes either bad or neither of the two. Nero was no viler
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than his time, in which one could only be one of the two,
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good or bad. The judgment of his time on him had to be that
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he was bad, and this in the highest degree, not a milksop but
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an arch scoundrel. All moral people can pronounce only this judgment on him.
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Rascals such as he was, are still living here and there to day,
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see for example, the memoirs of Riche von Lank. In the midst of
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the moral. It is not convenient to live among them, certainly, as
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one is not sure of his life for a moment. But can you say
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that it is more convenient to live among the moral. One is just as
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little sure of his life. There only that one is hanged in the way
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of justice. But least of all is one sure of his honor. And
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the national tacade is gone before you can say Jack Robinson, the hard fist
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of morality treats the noble nature of egoism altogether without compassion. But surely one
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cannot put a rascal and an honest man on the same level. Now,
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no human being does that oftener than you, judges of morals. Yes,
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still more than that. You imprison as a criminal, an honest man who
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speaks openly against the existing constitution, against the hollowed institutions, and you entrust
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portfolios and still more important things to a crafty rascal. So in proxy you
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have nothing to reproach me with. But in theory, now there I do
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put both on the same level as two opposite polls. To wit, both
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on the level of the moral law. Both have meaning only in the moral
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world, just as in the pre Christian time, a Jew who kept the
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law and one who broke it had meaning and significance only in respect to the
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Jewish law. Before Jesus Christ, on the contrary, the pharisee was no
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more than the sinner and publican. So before self ownership, the moral pharisee
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amounts to as much as the immoral sinner. Nero became very inconvenient by his
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possessedness, But a self owning man would not sillily oppose to him the sacred,
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and whine if the tyrant does not regard the sacred, he would oppose
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to him his will. How often the sacredness of the inalienable rights of man
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has been held up to their foes, and some liberty or others shown and
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demonstrated to be a sacred right of man. Those who do that deserve to
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be laughed out of court, as they actually are, were it not that
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in truth they do, even though unconsciously take the road that leads to the
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goal, they have a presentiment that if only the majority is once won for
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that liberty, it will also will the liberty, and will then take what
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it will have the sacredness of the liberty, and all possible proofs of this
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sacredness will never procure it. Lamenting and petitioning only shows beggars. The moral
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man is necessarily narrow, and that he knows no other enemy than the immoral
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man. He who is not moral is immoral, and accordingly reprobate despicable exception.
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Therefore, the moral man can never comprehend the egoist is not unwedded cohabitation
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an immorality. The moral man may turn as he pleases, he will have
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to stand by this verdict. Emilia Gollatdi gave up her life for this moral
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truth, and it is true. It is an immorality. A virtuous girl
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may become an old maid. A virtuous man may pass the time in fighting
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his natural impulses until he has perhaps dulled them. He may castrate himself for
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the sake of virtue, as Saint Origin did for the sake of heaven.
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He thereby honors sacred wedlock, sacred chastity, as inviolable. He is moral
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Unchastity can never become a moral act, however indulgently the moral man may judge
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and excuse him who committed it. It remains a transgression, a sin against
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a moral commandment. There clings to it an indelible stain. As chastity once
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belonged to the monastic vow, so it does to moral conduct. Chastity is
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a good for the egoist. On the contrary, even chastity is not a
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good without which he could not get along. He cares nothing at all about
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it. What now follows from this for the judgment of the moral man,
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This that he throws the egoist into the only class of men that he knows
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besides moral men into that of the immoral. He cannot do otherwise, he
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must find the egoist immoral in everything in which the egoist disregards morality. If
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he did not find him so, then he would already have become an apostive
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from morality without confessing it to himself, he would already no longer be a
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truly moral man. One should not let himself be led astray by such phenomena,
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which at the present day are certainly no longer to be classed as rare,
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but should reflect that he who yields any point of morality can as little
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be counted among the truly moral. As Lessing was a pious Christian when in
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the well known parable he compared the Christian religion as well as the Mahommedan and
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Jewish to a counterfeit ring. Often people are already further than they venture to
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confess to themselves. For Socrates, because in culture he stood on the level
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of morality, it would have been an immorality if he had been willing to
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follow Credo's seductive indictment and escape from the dungeon. To remain was the only
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moral thing, but it was solely because Socrates was a moral man. The
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unprincipled, sacrilegious men of the Revolution, on the contrary, had sworn fidelity
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to Lewis the sixteenth and decreed his deposition yes his death. But the act
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was an immoral one at which moral persons will be horrified to all eternity.
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Yet all this applies more or less only to civic morality, on which the
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freer looked down with contempt, for it. Like civism, its native ground
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in general, is still too little removed and free from the religious heaven not
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to transplant the latter's laws without criticism or further consideration to its domain. Instead
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of producing independent doctrines of its own. Morality cuts quite a different and it
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arrives at the consciousness of its dignity and raises its principle the essence of man
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or man with a capital m to be the only regulative power. Those who
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have worked their way through to such a decided consciousness break entirely with religion,
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whose God no longer finds any place alongside their man. And as they see
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below themselves scuttle the ship of state, so too they crumble away that morality
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which flourishes only in the state, and logically have no right to use even
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its name any Further, for what this critical party calls morality is very positively
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distinguished from the so called civic or political morality, and must appear to the
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citizen like an incensate and unbridled liberty. But at bottom it has only the
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advantage of the of the principle, which, freed from its defilement with the
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religious has now reached universal power in its clarified definiteness as humanity. Therefore,
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one should not wonder that the name morality is retained along with others like freedom,
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benevolence, self consciousness, and has only garnered now and then with the
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addition a free morality. Just as though the civic state is abused, yet
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the state is to arise again as a free state, or if not even
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so yet as a free society. Because this morality, completed into humanity,
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has fully settled its accounts with the religion out of which it historically came forth,
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nothing hinders it from becoming a religion on its own. For a distinction
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prevails between religion and morality only so long as our dealings with the world of
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men are regulated and hollowed by our relation to a superhuman being, or so
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long as our doing is a doing for God's sake. If, on the
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other hand, it comes to the point that man is to man the supreme
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Being, then that distinction vanishes, and morality, being removed from its subordinate
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position, is completed into religion. For then the higher Being, who had
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hitherto been subordinated to the highest man, has ascended to absolute height, and
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we are related to him as one is related to the highest Being. Religiously,
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morality and piety are now as synonymous as in the beginning of Christianity.
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And it is only because the supreme Being has come to be a different one
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that a holy walk is no longer called a holy one, but a human
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one. If morality has conquered, then a complete change of masters has taken
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place. After the annihilation of faith, Feuerbach thinks to put into the supposedly
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safe harbor of love. The first and highest law must be the love of
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man to man Homo hominy deus est. This is the supreme practical maxim This
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is the turning point of the world's history. But properly speaking, only the
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God is changed. The deus love has remained there love to the superhuman god
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God. Here love to the human God to Homo as Daeus. Therefore man
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is to me sacred, and everything truly human is to me sacred. Marriage
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is sacred of itself, and so it is with all moral relations. Friendship
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is and must be sacred for you, and property and marriage and the good
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of every man, but sacred in and of itself. Haven't we the priest
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again there, who is his god man with a great m What is the
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divine the human? Then the predicate has indeed only been changed into the subject.
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And instead of the sentence God is love. They say love is divine
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instead of God has become man, Man has become God, etc. It
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is nothing more or less than a new religion. All moral relations are ethical,
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are cultivated with a moral mind only where of themselves, without religious consecration
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by the priest's blessing, they are counted religious. Feuerbach's proposition, theology is
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anthropology means only religion must be ethics. Ethics alone is religion Altogether. Feuerbach
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accomplishes only a transposition of subject and predicate, a giving of preference to the
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latter. But since he himself says love is not and has never been considered
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by men sacred through being a predicate of God. But it is a predicate
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of God because it is divine in and of itself. He might judge that
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the fight against the predicates themselves, against love and all sanctities must be commenced.
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How could he hope to turn men away from God when he left them
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the divine And if, as Feuerbach says, God himself has never been the
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main thing to them, but only his predicates, then he might have gone
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on leaving them the tinsel longer. Yet, since the doll, the real
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colonel, was left at any rate, he recognizes too that with him it
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is only a matter of annihilating an illusion. He thinks, however, that
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the effect of the illusion on men is downright ruinous, since even love in
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itself, the truest, most inward sentiment, becomes an obscure, illusory one
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through religiousness. Since religious love loves man only for God's sake, therefore loves
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man only apparently but in truth God only. Is this different with moral love?
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Does it love the man this man for this man's sake or for morality's
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sake? And so for Homo hominideus for God's sake. End of section