 Section 38 of the Ego and His Own This is a LibriBox recording. All LibriBox recordings are in the public domain. For more information of the volunteer, please visit LibriBox.org. The Ego and His Own by Max Sterner My Self-Enjoyment Part 4 The truth, or truth in general, people are bound not to give up, but to seek for. What else is it but the Atra Supreme? The highest essence, even true criticism, would have to despair if it lost faith in the truth. And yet the truth is only a thought. But it is not merely a thought, but the thought that is above all thoughts. The irrefutable thought, it is THE thought itself, which gives the first hallowing to all others. It is the consecration of thoughts, the absolute, the sacred thought. The truth wears longer than all the gods, for it is only in the truth's service, and for love of it, that people have overthrown the gods, and at last God himself. The truth outlasts the downfall of the world of gods, for it is the immortal soul of this transority world of gods, it is deity itself. I will answer Pilate's question. What is truth? Truth is the three thought, the three idea, the three spirit. Truth is what is free from you. What is not your own? What is not in your power? But truth is also the completely unindependent, impersonal, unreal, and incorporeal. Truth cannot step forward as you do, cannot move, change, develop. Truth awaits and receives everything from you, and itself is only through you, for it exists only in your head. You concede that the truth is a thought, but say that not every thought is a true one, or, as you are also likely to express it, not every thought is truly and really a thought. And by what do you measure and recognise the thought? By your impotence, to wit, by your being no longer able to make any successful assaults on it. When it overpowers you, inspires you, and carries you away, then you hold it to be the true one. It's the minion over you, solidifies to you its truth. And when it possesses you, and you are possessed by it, then you feel well with it, for then you have found your Lord and Master. When you are seeking the truth, what did your heart then long for? For your Master. You did not aspire to your might, but to a mighty one, and wanted to exalt a mighty one. Exalt ye the Lord our God. The truth, my dear Pilate, is the Lord, and all who seek the truth are seeking and praising the Lord. Where does the Lord exist? Where else but in your head? He is only spirit, and wherever you believe you really see him, there, he is a ghost. For the Lord is merely something that is thought of, and it was only the Christian pains and agony to make the invisible visible, the spiritual corporal, that generated the ghost and was the frightful misery of the belief in ghosts. As long as you believe in the truth, you do not believe in yourself, and you are a servant, a religious man. You alone are the truth, or rather, you are more than the truth, which is nothing at all before you. You too do assuredly ask about the truth. You too do assuredly criticise, but you do not ask about a higher truth. To wit, one that should be higher than you, nor criticise according to the criterion of such a truth. You address yourself to thoughts and notions, as you do to the appearances of things, only for the purpose of making them palatable to you, enjoyable to you, and your own. You want only to subdue them, and become their owner. You want to orientate yourself and feel at home in them, and you find them true, or see them in their true light, when they can no longer slip away from you, no longer have any unceased or uncomprehended face, or when they are right for you, when they are your property. If afterward they become heavier again, if they wriggle themselves out of your power again, then that is just their untruth to wit your impotence. Your impotence is their power, your humility, their exaltation. Their truth therefore is you, or is the nothing which you are for them, and in which they dissolve. Their truth is their nothingness. Only as the property of me do the spirits, the truths, get to rest, and they then for the first time really are, when they have been deprived of their sorry existence, and made a property of mine, when it is no longer said, the truth develops itself, rules asserts itself, a history, also the concept wins the victory, etc. The truth never has won a victory, but has always my means to the victory, like the sword, the sword of truth. The truth is dead, a letter, a word, a material that I can use up. All truth by itself is dead, a corpse. It is alive only in the same way as my lungs are alive, to wit, in the measure of my own vitality. Truths are material, like vegetables and weeds. As to whether vegetable or weed, the decision lies in me. Objects are to me only material that I use up. Wherever I put my hand, I grasp a truth, which I trim for myself. The truth is certain to me, and I do not need to long after it. To do the truth, a service is in no case my intent. It is to me only a nourishment for my thinking head, as potatoes are for my digesting stomach, or as a friend is for my social heart. As long as I have the humour and force for thinking, every truth serves me only for me to work it up according to my powers. As reality or wordliness is vain and a thing of naught, for Christians so is the truth for me. It exists exactly as much as the things of this world go on existing, although the Christian has proved their nothingness. But it is vain, because it has its value not in itself but in me. Of itself, it is valueless. The truth is a creature. As you produce innumerable things by your activity, yes, shake the earth's surface anew and set up works of men everywhere, so too you may still ascertain numberless truths by your thinking, and we will gladly take delight in them. Nevertheless, as I do not please to hand myself over to serve your newly discovered machines mechanically, but only help to set them running for my benefit, so too will I only use your truths, without letting myself be used for their demands. All truths beneath me are to my liking, a truth above me, a truth that I should have to direct myself by. I am not acquainted with. For me there is no truth, for nothing is more than I, not even my essence, not even the essence of man, is more than I, than I, this drop in the bucket, this insignificant man. You believe that you have done the utmost when you boldly assert that, because every time has its own truth, there is no absolute truth. Why? With this, you nevertheless still leave to each time its truth, and thus you quite generally create an absolute truth, a truth that no time lacks, because every time, however its truth may be, still has a truth. Is it meant only that people have been thinking in every time, and so have had thoughts or truths, and that in the subsequent time, these were other than they were in the earlier? No, the word is to be that every time had its truth of faith, and in fact none has yet appeared in which a higher truth has not been recognised, a truth that people believed they must subject themselves to, as Highness and Majesty. Every truth of a crime is its fixed idea, and if people later found another truth, this always happened only because they sought for another, they only reformed the folly and put a modern dress on it, for they did want, who would dare doubt their justification for this? They wanted to be inspired by an idea, they wanted to be dominated, possessed by a thought. The most modern ruler of this kind is our essence, or man. For all three criticism of thought was the criterion, for own criticism I am, I the unspeakable, and so not the merely thought of, for what is merely thought of is always speakable, because word and thought coincide. That is true which is mine, untrue that whose own I am, true e.g. the union, untrue the state and society. Three untrue criticism takes care for the consistent dominion of a thought and idea, a spirit, own criticism for nothing but myself enjoyment, but in this the latter is in fact, and we will not spare it this ignomality. Like the bestest or criticism of instinct, I, like the criticizing beast, am concerned only for myself, not for the cause. I am the criterion of truth, but I am not an idea, but more than an idea, e.g. unutterable. My criticism is not a free criticism, not free from me, and not servile, not in the service of an idea, but an own criticism. True or human criticism makes out only whether something is suitable to man, to the true man, but by own criticism, you ascertain whether it is suitable to you. Free criticism busies itself with ideas, and therefore is always theatrical, however it may rage against ideas, it still does not get clear of them. It pitches into the ghosts, but it can do this only as it holds them to be ghosts. The idea it has to do with do not fully disappear, the morning breeze of a new day does not scare them away. The critic may indeed come to atorixia before ideas, but he never gets rid of them, i.e. he will never comprehend that above the bodily man. There does not exist something higher, to wit, liberty, his humanity, etc. He always has a calling of man still left, humanity, and this idea of humanity remains unrealised, just because it is an idea, and is to remain such. If, on the other hand, I grasp the idea as my idea, then it is already realised, because I am its reality. Its reality consists in the fact that I, the bodily, have it. They say the idea of liberty realises itself in the history of the world. The reverse is the case. This idea is real, as a man thinks it, and it is real in the measure in which it is idea, i.e. in which I think it or have it. Which is not the idea of liberty that develops itself, but men develop themselves, and, of course, in this self-development, develop their thinking in two. In short, the critic is not yet owner, because he still fights with ideas, as with powerful aliens, as the Christian is not owner of his bad desires, so long as he has to combat them, for him who contends against advice exists. Christian remains stuck fast in the freedom of knowing, the freedom of the spirit, and the spirit gains its proper freedom when it fills itself with the pure, true idea. This is the freedom of thinking, which cannot be without thoughts. Criticisms might one idea only by another, e.g. that of privilege by that of manhood, or that of egoism by that of unsalvishness. In general, the beginning of Christianity comes on the stage again in its critical end. Egoism being combatted here as there. I am not to make myself the individual count, but the idea, the general. Why warfare of the priesthood with egoism, of the spiritually minded with the worldly minded, constitutes the substance of all Christian history? In the newest criticism, this war only becomes all embracing fanaticism complete. Indeed, neither can it pass away till it passes thus, after it has had its life and its rage out. Whether what I think and do is Christian, what do I care? Whether it is human, liberal, humane, whether unhuman, liberal, inhuman, what do I ask about that? If only it accomplishes what I want, if only I satisfy myself in it, then overlay it with predicates, as you will, it is all alike to me. Perhaps I too, in the very next moment, defend myself against my former thoughts. I too am likely to change suddenly my mode of action, but not on account of its not corresponding to Christianity. Not on account of its running counter to the eternal rights of man. Not on account of its affronting the idea of mankind, humanity, and humanitarianism. But because I am no longer all in it, because it no longer finishes me any full enjoyment, because I doubt that earlier thought, or no longer pleased myself in the mode of action, just now practiced. As the world as property has become a material with which I undertake what I will, so the spirit too as property must sink down into a material, before which I no longer entertain any sacred dread. Then firstly I shall shudder no more before a thought, let it appear as presumptuous and devilish, as it will, because if it threatens to become too inconvenient and unsatisfactory for me, its end lies in my power. But neither shall I recoil from any deed, because there dwells in it a spirit of godliness, immorality, wrongfulness, as little as Saint Boniface pleased to desist through religious scrupulousness, from cutting down the sacred oak of the heathens. If the things of the world have once become vain, the thoughts of the spirit must also become vain. No thought is sacred, for let no thought rank as devotions, no feeling is sacred, no sacred feeling of friendship, mother's feelings, etc. No belief is sacred. They are all alien-born, my alienable property, and are annihilated, as they are created by me. The Christian can lose all things or objects, the most loved persons, these objects of his love, without giving up himself, i.e. in the Christian sense, his spirit, his soul, as lost. The owner can cast from him all the thoughts that were dear to his heart, and kindled his zeal, and will likewise gain a thousandfolder gain, because he, their creator, remains. Unconsciously and involuntarily, we all strive toward oneness, and there will hardly be one among us who has not given up a sacred feeling, a sacred thought, a sacred belief. Nay, we probably meet no one who could not still deliver himself from one or another of his sacred thoughts. All our contention against convictions starts from the opinion that maybe we are capable of driving our opponent out of his entrenchments of thought. But what I do unconsciously, I have to, and therefore, after every victory over a faith, I become again the prisoner, possessed, of a faith, which then takes my whole self anew into its service, and makes me an enthusiast, for reason after I have ceased to be enthusiastic for the Bible, or an enthusiast for the idea of humanity, after I have thought long enough for that of Christianity. Doubtless as owner of thoughts, I shall cover my property with my shield, just as I do not, as owner of things, willingly let everybody help himself to them. But at the same time, I shall look forward, smilingly, to the outcome of the battle, smilingly lay the shield on the corpses of my thoughts and my faith, smilingly triumph when I am beaten. That is the very humour of the thing. Everyone who has sublimer feelings is able to vent his humour on the pettiness of men, but to let it play with all great thoughts, sublime feelings, noble inspiration, and sacred faith, who supposes that I am the owner of all. If religion has set up the proposition that we are sinners altogether, I set over against it the other, we are perfect altogether, for we are every moment, all that we can be, and we never need be more. Since no defect cleaves to us, sin has no meaning either. Show me a sinner in the world still, if one any longer needs to do what suits a superior. If I only need to do what suits myself, I am no sinner, if I do not do what suits myself, as I do not injure myself, a holy one. If, on the other hand, I am to be pious, then I must do what suits God. If I am to act humanly, I must do what suits the essence of man, the idea of mankind, etc. What religion calls the sinner, humanitarianism, calls the egoist. But once more, if I need not do what suits any other, is the egoist, in whom humanitarianism has borne to itself a new fangled devil, anything more than a piece of nonsense. The egoist, before whom the humane shudder is a spook as much as the devil is, he exists only as a bogey, and a phantomism, in their brain. If they were not unsophisticatedly drifting back and forth in the anti-deluvian opposition of good and evil, to which they have given the modern names of human and egoistic, they would not have fresh up the hooray sinner into an egoist either, and put a new patch on an old garment. That they could not do otherwise, for they hold it for their task to be men. They are rid of the good one, good is left. We are perfect altogether, and on the whole earth there is not one man who is a sinner. There are crazy people who imagine that they are God the Father, God the Son, or the man in the moon, and so too the world swarms with fools who seem to themselves to be sinners, but as the former are not the man in the moon, so the latter are not sinners. Their sin is imaginary, yet it is insidiously objected their craziness or their possessiveness is at least their sin. Their possessiveness is nothing but what they could achieve. The result of their development, just as Luther's faith in the Bible was all that he was competent to make out. The one brings himself into the madhouse with his development, the other brings himself, their will, into the pantheon, and to the loss of the hallow. There is no sinner and no sinful egoism. Get away from me with your philanthropy. Creep in, you philanthropist, into the dens of vice. Linger a wile in the throng of the great city. You are not everywhere finding sin, and sin, and against sin. Will you not wail over corrupt humanity, not lament at the monstrous egoism? Will you see a rich man without finding him pitiless and egoistic? Perhaps you already call yourself an atheist, but you remain true to the Christian feeling that a camel will sooner go through a needle's eye than a rich man not be an un-man. How many do you see anyhow that you would not throw into the egoistic mass? What, therefore, has your philanthropy, love of man, found? Nothing but unlovable men. And where do they all come from? From you, from your philanthropy. You brought the sinner with you in your head, therefore you found him, therefore you inserted him everywhere. Do not call men sinners, and they are not. You alone are the creator of sinners. You, who fancy that you love men, are the very one to throw them into the mire of sin, the very one to divide them into vicious and virtuous, into men and unmen, the very one to be found there with the slaver of your possessiveness. For you love not men, but man. But I tell you, you have never seen a sinner. You have only dreamed of him. Self-enjoyment is embedded to me by my thinking I must serve another, by my fancying myself under obligation to him, by my holding myself called to self-sacrifice, resignation, ethusm. All right, if I no longer serve any idea, any higher essence, then it is clear of itself that I no longer serve any man either, but under all circumstances myself. But thus I am not merely in fact or in being, but also for my consciousness, that you need. There pertains to you more than the divine, the human, etc. Yours pertains to you. Look upon yourself as more powerful than they give you out for, and you have more power. Look upon yourself as more, and you have more. You are then not merely called to everything divine, entitled to everything human, but owner of what is yours, i.e., of all that you possess the force to make your own, i.e., you are appropriate and capacitive for everything that is yours. People have always supposed that they must give me a destiny lying outside myself, so that at last they demanded that I should lay claim to the human because I am man. This is the Christian magic circle. Fish's ego too is the same essence outside me. For everyone is ego, and if only this ego has rights, then it is their ego. It is not I, but I am not an ego, along with other egos, but the sole ego. I am unique, hence my wants too are unique, and my deeds, in short, everything about me is unique, and it is only as this unique I that I take everything for my own. As I set myself to work and develop myself, only as this. I do not develop men, nor as man, but as I. I develop myself. This is the meaning of the unique one. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Ian Lada. The Ego and his Own by Max Turner. Section 39. The Unique One. Pre-Christian and Christian times pursue opposite goals. The former wants to idealize the real, the latter to realize the ideal. The former seeks the Holy Spirit, the latter, the glorified body. Hence, the former closes with insensitivity to the real, with contempt for the world. The latter will end with the casting off of the ideal, with contempt for the spirit. The opposition of the real and the ideal is an irreconcilable one, and the one can never become the other. If the ideal became the real, it would no longer be the ideal, and if the real became the ideal, the ideal alone would be, but not at all the real. The opposition of the two is not to be vanquished otherwise than if someone annihilates both. Only in this, someone, the third party, does the opposition find its end. Otherwise, idea and reality will ever fail to coincide. The idea cannot be so realized as to remain idea, but is realized only when it dies as idea. And it is the same with the real. But now we have before us in the ancients adherence of the idea and the modern's adherence of reality. Neither can get clear of the opposition, and both pine only. The one, party for the spirit, and when this craving of the ancient world seemed to be satisfied and this spirit have come, the others pined immediately for the secularization of the spirit again, which must forever remain a pious wish. The pious wish of the ancients was sanctity. The pious wish of the modern's is corporeity. But as antiquity had to go down if its longing was to be satisfied, for it consisted only in the longing. So too, corporeity can never be attained within the ring of christianness. As the trait of sanctification, or purification, goes through the old world, the washings, etc., so that of incorporation goes through the Christian world. God plunges down into this world, becomes flesh, and wants to redeem it. E.g. fill it with himself. But since he is the idea, or the spirit, people, e.g. Hegel, in the end introduced the idea into everything, into the world, and proved that the idea is, that reason is, in everything. Man corresponds in the culture of today to what the heathen Stoics set up as the wise man, the latter, like the former, a fleshless being. The unreal wise man, this bodiless holy one of the Stoics, became a real person, a bodily holy one, in God made flesh. The unreal man, the bodiless ego, will become real, and the corporeal ego, in me. There are winds through Christianity, the question about the existence of God, which, taken up ever and ever again, gives testimony that the craving for existence, corporeality, personality, reality, was incessantly busying the heart because it never found a satisfying solution. At last, the question about the existence of God fell, but only to rise up again, and the proposition that the divine had existence, Feuerbach. But this too has no existence, and neither will the last refuge that the purely human is realizable afford shelter much longer. No idea has existence, for none is capable of corporeality. The dualistic contention of realism and nominalism has the same content. In short, this spins itself out, through all Christian history, and cannot end in it. The world of Christians is working at realizing ideas in the individual relations of life, the institutions and laws of the church and the state. But they make resistance, and always keep back something unembodied, unrealizable. Nevertheless, this embodiment is restlessly rushed after, no matter in what degree corporeality constantly fails to result. Realities matter little to the realizer, but it matters everything that they be realizations of the idea. Hence, he is ever examining anew whether the realized doesn't truth have the idea. It's kernel dwelling in it, and in testing the real, he at the same time tests the idea, whether it is realizable as he thinks it, or is only thought by him incorrectly, and for that reason unfeasibly. The Christian is no longer to care for family, state, etc. as existences. Christians are not to sacrifice themselves for these divine things like the ancients, but these are only to be utilized to make the spirit alive in them. The real family has become indifferent, and there is to arise out of it an ideal one, which would then be truly real, a sacred family blessed by God, or according to the liberal way of thinking, a rational family, with the ancients, family, state, fatherland, is divine as a thing extant. With the modern, it is still awaiting divinity. As extant, it is only sinful, earthly, and has still to be redeemed, i.e. to become truly real. This has the following meaning. The family, etc., is not the extant and real, but the divine. The idea is extant and real. Whether this family will make itself real by taking up the truly real, the idea is still unsettled. It is not the individual's task to serve the family as the divine, but reversely to serve the divine and to bring to it the still undivined family, to subject everything in the idea's name, to set up the idea's banner everywhere, to bring the idea into real efficacy. But, since the concern of Christianity as of antiquity is for the divine, they always come out at this again on their opposite ways. At the end of heathenism, the divine becomes the extra mundane. At the end of Christianity, the intramundane. Antiquity does not succeed in putting it entirely outside the world, but within Christianity accomplishes this task. The divine instantly longs to get back into the world and wants to redeem the world, but within Christianity it does not and cannot come to this, that the divine as intramundane should really become the mundane itself. There is enough left that does and must maintain itself unpenetrated as the bad, irrational, accidental, egoistic, the mundane in the bad sense. Christianity begins with God's becoming man and carries on its work of conversion and redemption through all time in order to prepare for God a reception in all men and in everything human and to penetrate everything with the spirit. It sticks to preparing a place for the spirit. When the accent was at last laid on man or mankind, it was again the idea that they pronounced eternal. Man does not die. They thought that they had now found the reality of the idea. Man is the eye of history, of the world's history. It is he, this ideal that really develops, i.e. realizes himself. He is the really real and corporeal one, for history is his body in which individuals are only members. Christ is the eye of the world's history, even of the pre-Christian and modern apprehension it is man. The figure of Christ has developed into the figure of man. Man as such, man absolutely is the central point of history. In man, the imaginary beginnings return again, for man is as imaginary as Christ is. Man as the eye of the world's history closes the cycle of Christian apprehensions. Christianity's magic circle would be broken if the strained relation between existence and calling, i.e. between me as I am and me as I should be, ceased. It persists only as the longing of the idea for its bodyliness and vanishes with the relaxing separation of the two. Only when the idea remains, idea as man or mankind is indeed a bodyless idea, is Christianity still extant. The corporeal idea, the corporeal or completed spirit, floats before the Christians as the end of the days or as the goal of history. It is not present time to him. The individual can only have a part in the founding of the Kingdom of God or according to the modern notion of the same thing in the development and history of humanity. And only so far as he has a pardon that does a Christian or according to the modern expression human value pertain to him. For the rest he is dust and a warm bag that the individual is of himself a world's history and possesses his property in the rest of the world's history goes beyond what is Christian. To the Christian the world's history is the higher thing because it is the history of Christ or man. To the egoist only his history has value because he wants to develop only himself, not the mankind idea, not God's plan, not the purposes of providence, not liberty, etc. He does not look upon himself as a tool of the idea or a vessel of God. He recognizes no calling. It is not fancy that he exists for the further development of mankind and that he must contribute his might to it, but he lives himself out, careless of how well or ill humanity may fare thereby. If it were not open to confusion with the idea that a state of nature is to be praised, one might recall Leno's three gypsies. What? Am I in the world to realize ideas, to do my part by my citizenship, say, toward the realization of the idea state or by marriage as husband and father to bring the idea of the family into an existence? What does such a calling concern me? I live after a calling as little as the flower grows and gives fragrance after a calling. The ideal man is realized when the Christian apprehension turns about and becomes the proposition, I, this unique one, am man. The conceptual question, what is man, has then changed into the personal question, who is man? With what the concept was sought for to realize it with who, it is no longer any question at all, but the answer is personally on hand at once in the asker. The question answers itself. They say, of God, names name the not. That holds good of me. No concept expresses me. Nothing that is designated as my essence exhausts me. They are only names. Likewise, they say of God that he is perfect and has no calling to strive after perfection. That too holds good of me alone. I am the owner of my might and I am so when I know myself as unique. In the unique one, the owner himself returns into his creative nothing of which he is born. Every higher essence above me, be it God, be it man, weakens the feeling of my uniqueness and pales only before the son of this consciousness. If I concern myself for myself, the unique one, then my concern rests on its transitory, mortal creator who consumes himself and I may say all things are nothing to me. The end. End of section 39. The ego and his own by Max Turner.