The Ego and His Own

by Max Stirner

In fact, the child who tears it to pieces or plays with it, the Inca Atahualpa 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 parsons scream about when they see how Hegel and the speculative theologians make speculative thoughts out of the contents of the Bible? Precisely this, that they deal with it according to their heart's pleasure, or "proceed arbitrarily with it."

But, because we all show ourselves arbitrary in the handling of objects, i. e. do with them as we like best, at our liking (the 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 nowhere meet such grievous arbitrariness, such a frightful tendency to violence, such stupid coercion, as in this very domain of our—own free will. If we proceed arbitrarily 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 arbitrarily in their fashion, and esteem us worthy of the heretic's fire or of another 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, unbiasedly," etc. As if the child did not look at the Bible "rightly and unbiasedly" when it makes it a plaything. That shrewd precept is given us, e. g., by Feuerbach. One does look at things rightly when one makes of them what one will (by things objects in general are here understood, such as God, our fellow-men, a sweetheart, a book, a beast, etc.). And therefore the things and the looking at them are not first, but I am, my will is. One will bring thoughts out of the things, will discover reason in the world, will have sacredness in it: therefore one shall find them. "Seek and ye shall find." What I will seek, I determine: I want, e. g., to get edification from the Bible; it is to be found; I want to read and test the Bible thoroughly; 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 electing I show myself—arbitrary.

Connected with this is the discernment that every judgment 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 judger, 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 overawe me, then I have nothing more pressing to do than to take them back into their nothing, i. e. 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 once 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 eternalized and withdrawn from my power and decision. With that I should fall 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 "sacred,"—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 as 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 the sensuous world, Lavater preached the longing for the invisible. The one party wanted to call forth emotion, the other motion, activity.

The conception of objects is altogether diverse, even as God, Christ, the world, etc., were and are conceived of in the most manifold wise. In this every one is a "dissenter," and after bloody combats so much has at last been attained, 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 dissent (think otherwise) about a thing? why not push the thinking otherwise to its last extremity, viz., that of no longer having any regard at all for the thing, and therefore thinking its 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 brand me if I am an "atheist"? Because they put the creature above the creator ("They honor and serve the creature more than the Creator"[224]) 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 lights 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, Œdipus's key-word to the riddle, that 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 are there no more 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 praying is a sacred activity, then this sacred "devotion" passes over into a rational and reasoning "thinking," which, however, likewise retains in the "sacred truth" its un-derangeable basis of faith, and is only a marvelous machine that the spirit of truth winds up for its service. Free thinking and free science busy me—for it is not I that am free, not I that busy myself, but thinking is free and busies me—with heaven and the heavenly or "divine"; that is, properly, with the world and the worldly, not this world but "another" world; it is only the reversing and deranging of the world, a 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, etc., over his thinking; he forgets it as the praying man too forgets it. This is why he appears to the forceful 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 shaman and the speculative philosopher mark the bottom and top rounds on the ladder of the inward man, the—Mongol. Shaman and philosopher fight with ghosts, demons, spirits, gods.

Totally different from this free thinking is own 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 free, unruly sensuality to which I succumb.

Feuerbach, in the "Principles of the Philosophy of the Future," is always harping upon being. In this he too, with all his antagonism to Hegel and the absolute philosophy, is stuck fast in abstraction; for "being" is abstraction, as is even "the I." 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. Hegel condemns the own, mine,[225]—"opinion."[226] "Absolute thinking" is that thinking 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. e. annihilate, take back into myself, and consume. Feuerbach 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, Feuerbach does not get further than to the proof, trivial in itself, that I require the senses for everything, or that I cannot entirely do without 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, this unique myself. If I were not this one, e. g. Hegel, 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 I as Hegel do, etc. I should indeed have senses, as do other people too, but I should not utilize them as I do.