The Ego and His Own

by Max Stirner

Still far from myself, I separate myself into two halves, of which one, the one unattained and to be fulfilled, is the true one. The one, the untrue, must be brought as a sacrifice; to wit, the unspiritual one. The other, the true, is to be the whole man; to wit, the spirit. Then it is said, "The spirit is man's proper essence," or, "man exists as man only spiritually." Now there is a greedy rush to catch the spirit, as if one would then have bagged himself; and so, in chasing after himself, one loses sight of himself, whom he is.

And, as one stormily pursues his own self, the never-attained, so one also despises shrewd people's rule to take men as they are, and prefers to take them as they should be; and, for this reason, hounds every one on after his should-be self and "endeavors to make all into equally entitled, equally respectable, equally moral or rational men."[219]

Yes, "if men were what they should be, could be, if all men were rational, all loved each other as brothers," then it would be a paradisiacal life.[220]—All right, men are as they should be, can be. What should they be? Surely not more than they can be! And what can they be? Not more, again, than they—can, i. e. than they have the competence, the force, to be. But this they really are, because what they are not they are incapable of being; for to be capable means—really to be. One is not capable for anything that one really is not; one is not capable of anything that one does not really do. Could a man blinded by cataract see? Oh, yes, if he had his cataract successfully removed. But now he cannot see because he does not see. Possibility and reality always coincide. One can do nothing that one does not, as one does nothing that one cannot.

The singularity of this assertion vanishes when one reflects that the words "it is possible that ..." almost never contain another meaning than "I can imagine that ...," e. g., It is possible for all men to live rationally, i. e. I can imagine that all, etc. Now,—since my thinking cannot, and accordingly does not, cause all men to live rationally, but this must still be left to the men themselves,—general reason is for me only thinkable, a thinkableness, but as such in fact a reality that is called a possibility only in reference to what I can not bring to pass, to wit, the rationality of others. So far as depends on you, all men might be rational, for you have nothing against it; nay, so far as your thinking reaches, you perhaps cannot discover any hindrance either, and accordingly nothing does stand in the way of the thing in your thinking; it is thinkable to you.

As men are not all rational, though, it is probable that they—cannot be so.

If something which one imagines to be easily possible is not, or does not happen, then one may be assured that something stands in the way of the thing, and that it is—impossible. Our time has its art, science, etc.; the art may be bad in all conscience; but may one say that we deserved to have a better, and "could" have it if we only would? We have just as much art as we can have. Our art of to-day is the only art possible, and therefore real, at the time.

Even in the 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 when it has not yet appeared.

Yet wherefore this 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 of possessed men, its contemplation should trouble us little here.

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 meditate, speak, and do, nothing dangerous to the State; thinkable, that they might be obedient subjects; but, because it was thinkable, it was—so ran the inference—possible, and further, because it was possible to men (right here lies the deceptive 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 inference? Man is not the individual, but man is a thought, an 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 eternal Creator, or, according to modern views, as the specimen to the species. Here then comes to light the glorification of "humanity," the "eternal, immortal," for whose glory (in majorem humanitatis gloriam) the individual must devote himself and find his "immortal renown" in having done something for the "spirit of humanity."