2.—BASIS
According to Stirner the supreme law for each one of us is his own welfare.
What does one's own welfare mean? "Let us seek out the enjoyment of life!"[223] "Henceforth the question is not how one can acquire life, but how he can expend it, enjoy it; not how one is to produce in himself the true ego, but how he is to dissolve himself, to live himself out."[224] "If the enjoyment of life is to triumph over the longing or hope for life, it must overcome it in its double significance which Schiller brings out in 'The Ideal and Life'; it must crush spiritual and temporal poverty, abolish the ideal and—the want of daily bread. He who must lay out his life in prolonging life cannot enjoy it, and he who is still seeking his life does not have it, and can as little enjoy it; both are poor."[225]
Our own welfare is our supreme law. Stirner recognizes no duty.[226] "Whether what I think and do is Christian, what do I care? Whether it is human, humane, liberal, or unhuman, inhumane, illiberal, what do I ask about that? If only it aims at what I would have, if only I satisfy myself in it, then fit it with predicates as you like; it is all one to me."[227] "So then my relation to the world is this: I no longer do anything for it 'for God's sake', I do nothing 'for man's sake', but what I do I do 'for my sake'."[228] "Where the world comes in my way—and it comes in my way everywhere—I devour it to appease the hunger of my egoism. You are to me nothing but—my food, just as I also am fed upon and used up by you. We have only one relation to each other, that of utility, of usableness, of use."[229] "I too love men, not merely individuals, but every one. But I love them with the consciousness of egoism; I love them because love makes me happy, I love because love is natural to me, because it pleases me. I know no 'commandment of love'."[230]
3.—LAW
I. Looking to each one's own welfare, Stirner rejects law, and that without any limitation to particular spatial or temporal conditions.
Law[231] exists not by the individual's recognizing it as favorable to his interests, but by his holding it sacred. "Who can ask about 'right' if he is not occupying the religious standpoint just like other people? Is not 'right' a religious concept, i. e. something sacred?"[232] "When the Revolution stamped liberty as a 'right' it took refuge in the religious sphere, in the region of the sacred, the ideal."[233] "I am to revere the sultanic law in a sultanate, the popular law in republics, the canon law in Catholic communities, etc. I am to subordinate myself to these laws, I am to count them sacred."[234] "The law is sacred, and he who outrages it is a criminal."[235] "There are no criminals except against something sacred";[236] crime falls when the sacred disappears.[237] Punishment has a meaning only in relation to something sacred.[238] "What does the priest who admonishes the criminal do? He sets forth to him the great wrong of having by his act desecrated that which was hallowed by the State, its property (in which, you will see, the lives of those who belong to the State must be included)."[239]
But law is no more sacred than it is favorable to the individual's welfare. "Right—is a delusion, bestowed by a ghost."[240] Men have "not recovered the mastery over the thought of 'right,' which they themselves created; their creature is running away with them."[241] "Let the individual man claim ever so many rights; what do I care for his right and his claim?"[242] I do not respect them.—"What you have the might to be you have the right to be. I deduce all right and all entitlement from myself; I am entitled to everything that I have might over. I am entitled to overthrow Zeus, Jehovah, God, etc., if I can; if I cannot, then these gods will always remain in the right and in the might as against me."[243]
