This transcription is a thorough copy. The text on
each page should correspond to that of the original. Use of emphasis
and italics are also preserved. The main difference between this
reproduction and the original is that line numbers on each page
are not preserved. In addition, the advertisements that appeared
at the end of the original are not reproduced.
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Publisher's Preface Introduction Translator's Preface All Things Are Nothing To Me Part First: MAN I. -- A Human Life II. --Men of the Old Time and the New I. -- The Ancients II. -- The Moderns §1. -- The Spirit §2. -- The Possessed §3. -- The Hierarchy III. -- The Free §1. -- Political Liberalism §2. -- Social Liberalism §3. -- Humane Liberalism Part Second: I I. -- Ownness II. -- The Owner I. -- My Power II. -- My Intercourse III. -- My Self-Enjoyment III. -- The Unique One Index | Page vii xii xix 3 7 9 17 17 30 34 42 85 127 128 152 163 201 203 225 242 275 425 484 491 |
For more than twenty years I have entertained the design of publishing an English translation of "Der Einzige und Sein Eigentum." When I formed this design, the number of English-speaking persons who had ever heard of the book was very limited. The memory of Max Stirner had been virtually extinct for an entire generation. But in the last two decades there has been a remarkable revival of interest both in the book and in its author. It began in this country with a discussion in the pages of the Anarchist periodical, "Liberty," in which Stirner's thought was clearly expounded and vigorously championed by Dr. James L. Walker, who adopted for this discussion the pseudonym "Tak Kak." At that time Dr. Walker was the chief editorial writer for the Galveston "News." Some years later he became a practicing physician in Mexico, where he died in 1904. A series of essays which he began in an Anarchist periodical, "Egoism," and which he lived to complete, was published after his death in a small volume, "The Philosophy of Egoism." It is a very able and convincing exposition of Stirner's teachings, and almost the only one that exists in the English language. But the chief instrument in the revival of Stirnerism was and is the German poet, John Henry Mackay. Very early in his career he met Stirner's name in Lange's "History of Materialism," and was moved thereby to read his book. The work made such an impression on him that he resolved to devote a portion of his life to the rediscovery and rehabilitation of the lost and forgotten genius. Through years of toil and correspondence and travel, and triumphing over tremendous ob-
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stacles, he carried his task to completion, and his
biography of Stirner appeared in Berlin in 1898. It is a tribute
to the thoroughness of Mackay's work that since its publication
not one important fact about Stirner has been discovered by anybody.
During his years of investigation Mackay's advertising for information
had created a new interest in Stirner, which was enhanced by the
sudden fame of the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, an author
whose intellectual kinship with Stirner has been a subject of
much controversy. "Der Einzige,"
previously obtainable only in an expensive
form, was included in Philipp Reclam's Universal-Bibliothek, and
this cheap edition has enjoyed a wide and ever-increasing circulation.
During the last dozen years the book has been translated twice
into French, once into Italian, once into Russian, and possibly
into other languages. The Scandinavian critic, Brandes, has written
on Stirner. A large and appreciative volume, entitled "L'Individualisme
Anarchiste: Max Stirner," from the
pen of Prof Victor Basch, of the University of Rennes, has appeared
in Paris. Another large and sympathetic volume, "Max Stirner,"
written by Dr. Anselm Ruest, has been published very recently
in Berlin. Dr. Paul Eltzbacher, in his work, "Der
Anarchismus," gives a chapter to
Stirner, making him one of the seven typical Anarchists, beginning
with William Godwin and ending with Tolstoi, of whom his book
treats. There is hardly a notable magazine or a review on the
Continent that has not given at least one leading article to the
subject of Stirner. Upon the initiative of Mackay and with the
aid of other admirers a suitable stone has been placed above the
philosopher's previously neglected grave, and a memorial tablet
upon the house in Berlin where he died in 1856; and this spring
another is to be placed upon the house in Bayreuth where he was
born in 1806. As a result of these various efforts, and though
but little has been written about Stirner in the English language,
his name is now known at least to thousands in America and England
where formerly it was known only to hundreds.
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xi
Therefore conditions are now more favorable for the reception
of this volume than they were when I formed the design of publishing
it, more than twenty years ago.
The problem of securing a reasonably
good translation (for in the case of a work presenting difficulties
so enormous it was idle to hope for an adequate translation) was
finally solved by entrusting the task to Steven T. Byington, a
scholar of remarkable attainments, whose specialty is philology,
and who is also one of the ablest workers in the propaganda of
Anarchism. But, for further security from error, it was agreed
with Mr. Byington that his translation should have the benefit
of revision by Dr. Walker, the most thorough American student
of Stirner, and by Emma Heller Schumm and George Schumm, who are
not only sympathetic with Stirner, but familiar with the history
of his time, and who enjoy a knowledge of English and German that
makes it difficult to decide which is their native tongue. It
was also agreed that, upon any point of difference between the
translator and his revisers which consultation might fail to solve,
the publisher should decide. This method has been followed, and
in a considerable number of instances it has fallen to me to make
a decision. It is only fair to say, therefore, that the responsibility
for special errors and imperfections properly rests on my shoulders,
whereas, on the other hand, the credit for whatever general excellence
the translation may possess belongs with the same propriety to
Mr. Byington and his coadjutors. One thing is certain: its defects
are due to no lack of loving care and pains. And I think I may
add with confidence, while realizing fully how far short of perfection
it necessarily falls, that it may safely challenge comparison
with the translations that have been made into other languages.
In particular, I am responsible
for the admittedly erroneous rendering of the title. "The
Ego and His Own " is not an exact English equivalent of "Der
Einzige und Sein Eigentum." But then, there is no exact
English equivalent. Perhaps the nearest is "The Unique One
and His Property." But the unique one is
not strictly the Einzige, for uniqueness connotes not
only singleness but an admirable singleness, while Stirner's Einzigkeit
is admirable in his eyes only as such, it being no part of
the purpose of his book to distinguish a particular Einzigkeit
as more excellent than another. Moreover, "The Unique
One and His Property " has no graces to compel our forgiveness
of its slight inaccuracy. It is clumsy and unattractive. And the
same objections may be urged with still greater force against
all the other renderings that have been suggested, -- "The
Single One and His Property," "The Only One and His
Property," "The Lone One and His Property," "The
Unit and His Property," and, last and least and worst, "The
Individual and His Prerogative." " The Ego and His Own,"
on the other hand, if not a precise rendering, is at least an
excellent title in itself; excellent by its euphony, its monosyllabic
incisiveness, and its telling -- Einzigkeit. Another
strong argument in its favor is the emphatic correspondence of
the phrase "his own" with Mr. Byington's renderings
of the kindred words, Eigenheit and Eigner. Moreover,
no reader will be led astray who bears in mind Stirner's distinction:
"I am not an ego along with other egos, but the sole ego;
I am unique." And, to help the reader to bear this in mind,
the various renderings of the word Einzige that occur
through the volume are often accompanied by foot-notes showing
that, in the German, one and the same word does duty for all.
If the reader finds the first quarter
of this book somewhat forbidding and obscure, he is advised nevertheless
not to falter. Close attention will master almost every difficulty,
and, if he will but give it, he will find abundant reward in what
follows. For his guidance I may specify one defect in the author's
style. When controverting a view opposite to his own, he seldom
distinguishes with sufficient clearness his statement of his own
view from his re-statement of the antagonistic view. As a result,
the reader is plunged into deeper and deeper mystification, until
something suddenly reveals the cause of his misunderstanding,
after which he must go back and read again. I
therefore put him on his guard. The other difficulties lie, as
a rule, in the structure of the work. As to these I can hardly
do better than translate the following passage from Prof. Basch's
book, alluded to above: "There is nothing more disconcerting
than the first approach to this strange work. Stirner does not
condescend to inform us as to the architecture of his edifice,
or furnish us the slightest guiding thread. The apparent divisions
of the book are few and misleading. From the first page to the
last a unique thought circulates, but it divides itself among
an infinity of vessels and arteries in each of which runs a blood
so rich in ferments that one is tempted to describe them all.
There is no progress in the development, and the repetitions are
innumerable....The reader who is not deterred by this oddity,
or rather absence, of composition gives proof of genuine intellectual
courage. At first one seems to be confronted with a collection
of essays strung together, with a throng of aphorisms....But,
if you read this book several times; if, after having penetrated
the intimacy of each of its parts, you then traverse it as a whole,
-- gradually the fragments weld themselves together, and Stirner's
thought is revealed in all its unity, in all its force, and in
all its depth."
A word about the dedication. Mackay's
investigations have brought to light that Marie Dähnhardt had
nothing whatever in common with Stirner, and so was unworthy of
the honor conferred upon her. She was no Eigene. I therefore
reproduce the dedication merely in the interest of historical
accuracy.
Happy as I am in the appearance
of this book, my joy is not unmixed with sorrow. The cherished
project was as dear to the heart of Dr. Walker as to mine, and
I deeply grieve that he is no longer with us to share our delight
in the fruition. Nothing, however, can rob us of the masterly
introduction that he wrote for this volume (in 1903, or perhaps
earlier), from which I will not longer keep the reader. This introduction,
no more than the book itself, shall that Einzige, Death,
make his Eigentum.
Fifty years sooner
or later can make little difference in the; case of a book so
revolutionary as this. It saw the light when a so-called revolutionary
movement was preparing in men's minds which agitation was, however,
only a disturbance due to desires to participate in government,
and to govern and to be governed, in a manner different to that
which prevails. The "revolutionists" of 1848 were bewitched
with an idea. They were not at all the masters of ideas. Most
of those who since that time have prided themselves upon being
revolutionists have been and are likewise but the bondmen of an
idea, -- that of the different lodgment of authority.
The temptation is, of course, present
to attempt an explanation of the central thought of this work;
but such an effort appears to be unnecessary to one who has the
volume in his hand. The author's care in illustrating his meaning
shows that he realized how prone the possessed man is to misunderstand
whatever is not moulded according to the fashions in thinking.
The author's learning was considerable, his command of words and
ideas may never be excelled by another, and he judged it needful
to develop his argument in manifold ways. So those who enter into
the spirit of it will scarcely hope to impress others with the
same conclusion in a more summary manner. Or, if one might deem
that possible after reading Stirner, still one cannot think that
it could be done so surely. The author has made certain work of
it, even though he has to wait for his public; but still, the
reception of the book by its critics amply proves the truth of
the saying that one can give another arguments, but not under-
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standing. The system-makers and system-believers
thus far cannot get it out of their heads that any discourse about
the nature of an ego must turn upon the common characteristics
of egos, to make a systematic scheme of what they share as a generality.
The critics inquire what kind of man the author is talking about.
They repeat the question: What does he believe in? They fail to
grasp the purport of the recorded answer: "I believe in myself";
which is attributed to a common soldier long before the time of
Stirner. They ask, what is the principle of the self-conscious
egoist, the Einzige? To this perplexity Stirner says: Change the
question; put "who?" instead of "what?" and
an answer can then be given by naming him!
This, of course, is too simple for
persons governed by ideas, and for persons in quest of new governing
ideas. They wish to classify the man. Now, that in me which you
can classify is not my distinguishing self. "Man" is
the horizon or zero of my existence as an individual. Over that
I rise as I can. At least I am something more than "man in
general." Pre-existing worship of ideals and disrespect for
self had made of the ego at the very most a Somebody, oftener
an empty vessel to be filled with the grace or the leavings of
a tyrannous doctrine; thus a Nobody. Stirner dispels the morbid
subjection, and recognizes each one who knows and feels himself
as his own property to be neither humble Nobody nor befogged Somebody,
but henceforth flat-footed and level-headed Mr. Thisbody, who
has a character and good pleasure of his own, just as he has a
name of his own. The critics who attacked this work and were answered
in the author's minor writings, rescued from oblivion by John
Henry Mackay, nearly all display the most astonishing triviality
and impotent malice.
We owe to Dr. Eduard von Hartmann
the unquestionable service which he rendered by directing attention
to this book in his "Philosophie des Unbewußten,"
the first edition of which was published in 1869, and in other
writings. I do not begrudge Dr. von Hartmann the liberty of criticism
which he used; and I
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xviii
think the admirers of Stirner's teaching must quite appreciate
one thing which Von Hartmann did at a much later date. In "Der
Eigene" of August 10, 1896, there appeared a letter written
by him and giving, among other things, certain data from which
to judge that, when Friedrich Nietzsche wrote his later essays,
Nietzsche was not ignorant of Stirner's book.
Von Hartmann wishes that Stirner
had gone on and developed his principle. Von Hartmann suggests
that you and I are really the same spirit, looking out through
two pairs of eyes. Then, one may reply, I need not concern myself
about you, for in myself I have -- us; and at that rate Von Hartmann
is merely accusing himself of inconsistency: for, when Stirner
wrote this book, Von Hartmann's spirit was writing it; and it
is just the pity that Von Hartmann in his present form does not
indorse what he said in the form of Stirner, -- that Stirner was
different from any other man; that his ego was not Fichte's transcendental
generality, but "this transitory ego of flesh and blood."
It is not as a generality that you and I differ, but as a couple
of facts which are not to be reasoned into one. "I"
is somewise Hartmann, and thus Hartmann is "I"; but
I am not Hartmann, and Hartmann is not -- I. Neither am I the
"I" of Stirner; only Stirner himself was Stirner's "I."
Note how comparatively indifferent a matter it is with Stirner
that one is an ego, but how all-important it is that one be a
self-conscious ego, -- a self-conscious, self-willed person.
Those not self-conscious and self-willed
are constantly acting from self-interested motives, but clothing
these in various garbs. Watch those people closely in the light
of Stirner's teaching, and they seem to be hypocrites, they have
so many good moral and religious plans of which self-interest
is at the end and bottom; but they, we may believe, do not know
that this is more than a coincidence.
In Stirner we have the philosophical
foundation for political liberty. His interest in the practical
development of egoism to the dissolution of the State and the
union of free men is clear
and pronounced, and harmonizes perfectly with the economic philosophy
of Josiah Warren. Allowing for difference of temperament and language,
there is a substantial agreement between Stirner and Proudhon.
Each would be free, and sees in every increase of the number of
free people and their intelligence an auxiliary force against
the oppressor. But, on the other hand, will any one for a moment
seriously contend that Nietzsche and Proudhon march together in
general aim and tendency, -- that they have anything in common
except the daring to profane the shrine and sepulchre of superstition?
Nietzsche has been much spoken of
as a disciple of Stirner, and, owing to favorable cullings from
Nietzsche's writings, it has occurred that one of his books has
been supposed to contain more sense than it really does -- so
long as one had read only the extracts.
Nietzsche cites scores or hundreds
of authors. Had he read everything, and not read Stirner?
But Nietzsche is as unlike Stirner
as a tight-rope performance is unlike an algebraic equation.
Stirner loved liberty for himself,
and loved to see any and all men and women taking liberty, and
he had no lust of power. Democracy to him was sham liberty, egoism
the genuine liberty.
Nietzsche, on the contrary, pours
out his contempt upon democracy because it is not aristocratic.
He is predatory to the point of demanding that those who must
succumb to feline rapacity shall be taught to submit with resignation.
When he speaks of "Anarchistic dogs" scouring the streets
of great civilized cities; it is true, the context shows that
he means the Communists; but his worship of Napoleon, his bathos
of anxiety for the rise of an aristocracy that shall rule Europe
for thousands of years, his idea of treating women in the oriental
fashion, show that Nietzsche has struck out in a very old path
-- doing the apotheosis of tyranny. We individual egoistic Anarchists,
however, may say to the Nietzsche school, so as not to be misunderstood:
We do not ask of the Napoleons to have pity, nor of the
xvi
predatory barons to do justice. They will find it convenient for
their own welfare to make terms with men who have learned of Stirner
what a man can be who worships nothing, bears allegiance to nothing.
To Nietzsche's rhodomontade of eagles in baronial form, born to
prey on industrial lambs, we rather tauntingly oppose the ironical
question: Where are your claws? What if the "eagles"
are found to be plain barn-yard fowls on which more silly fowls
have fastened steel spurs to hack the victims, who, however, have
the power to disarm the sham "eagles" between two suns?
Stirner shows that men make their tyrants as they make their gods,
and his purpose is to unmake tyrants.
Nietzsche dearly loves a tyrant.
In style Stirner's work offers the
greatest possible contrast to the puerile, padded phraseology
of Nietzsche's "Zarathustra" and its false imagery.
Who ever imagined such an unnatural conjuncture as an eagle "toting"
a serpent in friendship? which performance is told of in bare
words, but nothing comes of it. In Stirner we are treated to an
enlivening and earnest discussion addressed to serious minds,
and every reader feels that the word is to him, for his instruction
and benefit, so far as he has mental independence and courage
to take it and use it. The startling intrepidity of this book
is infused with a whole-hearted love for all mankind, as evidenced
by the fact that the author shows not one iota of prejudice or
any idea of division of men into ranks. He would lay aside government,
but would establish any regulation deemed convenient, and for
this only our convenience in consulted. Thus there will be general
liberty only when the disposition toward tyranny is met by intelligent
opposition that will no longer submit to such a rule. Beyond this
the manly sympathy and philosophical bent of Stirner are such
that rulership appears by contrast a vanity, an infatuation of
perverted pride. We know not whether we more admire our author
or more love him.
Stirner's attitude toward woman
is not special. She is an in-
dividual if she can be, not handicapped by anything he says, feels,
thinks, or plans. This was more fully exemplified in his life
than even in this book; but there is not a line in the book to
put or keep woman in an inferior position to man, neither is there
anything of caste or aristocracy in the book. Likewise there is
nothing of obscurantism or affected mysticism about it. Everything
in it is made as plain as the author could make it. He who does
not so is not Stirner's disciple nor successor nor co-worker.
Some one may ask: How does plumb-line Anarchism train with the
unbridled egoism proclaimed by Stirner? The plumb-line is not
a fetish, but an intellectual conviction, and egoism is a universal
fact of animal life. Nothing could seem clearer to my mind than
that the reality of egoism must first come into the consciousness
of men, before we can have the unbiased Einzige in place of the
prejudiced biped who lends himself to the support of tyrannies
a million times stronger over me than the natural self-interest
of any individual. When plumb-line doctrine is misconceived as
duty between unequal-minded men, -- as a religion of humanity,
-- it is indeed the confusion of trying to read without knowing
the alphabet and of putting philanthropy in place of contract.
But, if the plumb-line be scientific, it is or can be my possession,
my property, and I choose it for its use -- when circumstances
admit of its use. I do not feel bound to use it because it is
scientific, in building my house; but, as my will, to be intelligent,
is not to be merely wilful, the adoption of the plumb-line follows
the discarding of incantations. There is no plumb-line without
the unvarying lead at the end of the line; not a fluttering bird
or a clawing cat.
On the practical side of the question
of egoism versus self-surrender and for a trial of egoism in politics,
this may be said: the belief that men not moved by a sense of
duty will be unkind or unjust to others is but an indirect confession
that those who hold that belief are greatly interested in having
others live for them rather than for themselves. But I do not
ask or expect so much.
I am content if others individually live for themselves, and thus
cease in so many ways to act in opposition to my living for myself,
-- to our living for ourselves.
If Christianity has failed to turn
the world from evil, it is not to be dreamed that rationalism
of a pious moral stamp will succeed in the same task. Christianity,
or all philanthropic love, is tested in non-resistance. It is
a dream that example will change the hearts of rulers, tyrants,
mobs. If the extremest self-surrender fails, how can a mixture
of Christian love and worldly caution succeed? This at least must
be given up. The policy of Christ and Tolstoi can soon be tested,
but Tolstoi's belief is not satisfied with a present test and
failure. He has the infatuation of one who persists because this
ought to be. The egoist who thinks "I should like this to
be" still has the sense to perceive that it is not accomplished
by the fact of some believing and submitting, inasmuch as others
are alert to prey upon the unresisting. The Pharaohs we have ever
with us.
Several passages in this most remarkable
book show the author as a man full of sympathy. When we reflect
upon his deliberately expressed opinions and sentiments, -- his
spurning of the sense of moral obligation as the last form of
superstition, -- may we not be warranted in thinking that the
total disappearance of the sentimental supposition of duty liberates
a quantity of nervous energy for the purest generosity and clarifies
the intellect for the more discriminating choice of objects of
merit?
If the style of this book is found
unattractive, it will show that I have done my work ill and not
represented the author truly; but, if it is found odd, I beg that
I may not bear all the blame. I have simply tried to reproduce
the author's own mixture of colloquialisms and technicalities,
and his preference for the precise expression of his thought rather
than the word conventionally expected.
One especial feature of the style,
however, gives the reason why this preface should exist. It is
characteristic of Stirner's writing that the thread of thought
is carried on largely by the repetition of the same word in a
modified form or sense. That connection of ideas which has guided
popular instinct in the formation of words is made to suggest
the line of thought which the writer wishes to follow. If this
echoing of words is missed, the bearing of the statements on each
other is in a measure lost; and, where the ideas are very new,
one cannot afford to throw away any help in following their connection.
Therefore, where a useful echo (and then are few useless ones
in the book) could not be reproduced in English, I have generally
called attention to it in a note. My notes are distinguished from
the author's by being enclosed in parentheses.
One or two of such coincidences
of language, occurring in words which are prominent throughout
the book, should be borne constantly in mind as a sort of Keri
perpetuum; for instance, the identity in the original of
the words "spirit" and "mind," and of the
phrases "supreme being" and "highest essence."
In such cases I have repeated the note where it
xx
seemed that such repetition might be absolutely necessary, but
have trusted the reader to carry it in his head where a failure
of his memory would not be ruinous or likely.
For the same reason--that is, in
order not to miss any indication of the drift of the thought --
I have followed the original in the very liberal use of italics,
and in the occasional eccentric use of a punctuation mark, as
I might not have done in translating a work of a different nature.
I have set my face as a flint against
the temptation to add notes that were not part of the translation.
There is no telling how much I might have enlarged the book if
I had put a note at every sentence which deserved to have its
truth brought out by fuller elucidation -- or even at every one
which I thought needed correction. It might have been within my
province, if I had been able, to explain all the allusions to
contemporary events, but I doubt whether any one could do that
properly without having access to the files of three or four well-chosen
German newspapers of Stirner's time. The allusions are clear enough,
without names and dates, to give a vivid picture of certain aspects
of German life then. The tone of some of them is explained by
the fact that the book was published under censorship.
I have usually preferred, for the
sake of the connection, to translate Biblical quotations somewhat
as they stand in the German, rather than conform them altogether
to the English Bible. I am sometimes quite as near the original
Greek as if I had followed the current translation.
Where German books are referred
to, the pages cited are those of the German editions even when
(usually because of some allusions in the text) the titles of
the books are translated.
What is not supposed to be my concern!
** First and foremost, the Good Cause, *** then God's cause, the
cause of mankind, of truth, of freedom, of humanity, of justice;
further, the cause of my people, my prince, my fatherland; finally,
even the cause of Mind, and a thousand other causes. Only my
cause is never to be my concern. "Shame on the egoist who
thinks only of himself!"
*"Ich hab' Mein' Sach'
auf Nichts gestellt, first line of Goethe's
poem, "Vanitas! Vanitatum Vanitas!"
Literal translation: "I have set my affair on nothing."]
4 THE EGO AND HIS OWN
ALL THINGS ARE NOTHING TO ME 5
that you grow enthusiastic and serve them?
If God, if mankind, as you affirm,
have substance enough in themselves to be all in all to themselves,
then I feel that I shall still less lack that, and that I shall
have no complaint to make of my "emptiness." I am not
nothing in the sense of emptiness, but I am the creative nothing,
the nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything.
*[Einzig]
Let us look and see, then, how they
manage their concerns -- they for whose cause we are
to labor, devote ourselves, and grow enthusiastic.
You have much profound information
to give about God, and have for thousands of years "searched
the depths of the Godhead," and looked into its heart, so
that you can doubtless tell us how God himself attends to "God's
cause," which we are called to serve. And you do not conceal
the Lord's doings, either. Now, what is his cause? Has he, as
is demanded of us, made an alien cause, the cause of truth or
love, his own? You are shocked by this misunderstanding,
** [Sache]
***[Sache]
and you instruct us that God's cause is indeed the cause of truth
and love, but that this cause cannot be called alien to him, because
God is himself truth and love; you are shocked by the assumption
that God could be like us poor worms in furthering an alien cause
as his own. "Should God take up the cause of truth if he
were not himself truth?" He cares only for his cause,
but, because he is all in all, therefore all is his cause! But
we, we are not all in all, and our cause is altogether little
and contemptible; therefore we must "serve a higher cause."
-- Now it is clear, God cares only for what is his, busies himself
only with himself, thinks only of himself, and has only himself
before his eyes; woe to all that is not well-pleasing to him.
He serves no higher person, and satisfies only himself. His cause
is -- a purely egoistic cause.
How is it with mankind, whose cause
we are to make our own? Is its cause that of another, and does
mankind serve a higher cause? No, mankind looks only at itself,
mankind will promote the interests of mankind only, mankind is
its own cause. That it may develop, it causes nations and individuals
to wear themselves out in its service, and, when they have accomplished
what mankind needs, it throws them on the dung-heap of history
in gratitude. Is not mankind's cause -- a purely egoistic cause?
I have no need to take up each
thing that wants to throw its cause on us and show that it is
occupied only with itself, not with us, only with its good, not
with ours. Look at the rest for yourselves. Do truth, freedom,
humanity, justice, desire anything else than
They all have an admirable time
of it when they receive zealous homage. Just observe the nation
that is defended by devoted patriots. The patriots fall in bloody
battle or in the fight with hunger and want; what does the nation
care for that? By the manure of their corpses the nation comes
to "its bloom"! The individuals have died "for
the great cause of the nation," and the nation sends some
words of thanks after them and -- has the profit of it. I call
that a paying kind of egoism.
But only look at that Sultan who
cares so lovingly for his people. Is he not pure unselfishness
itself, and does he not hourly sacrifice himself for his people?
Oh, yes, for "his people." Just try it; show yourself
not as his, but as your own; for breaking away from his egoism
you will take a trip to jail. The Sultan has set his cause on
nothing but himself; he is to himself all in all, he is to himself
the only one, and tolerates nobody who would dare not to be one
of "his people."
And will you not learn by these
brilliant examples that the egoist gets on best? I for my part
take a lesson from them, and propose, instead of further unselfishly
serving those great egoists, rather to be the egoist myself.
God and mankind have concerned
themselves for nothing, for nothing but themselves. Let me then
likewise concern myself for myself, who am equally with
God the nothing of all others, who am my all, who am the only
one.*
6 THE EGO AND HIS OWN
Away, then, with every concern
that is not altogether my concern! You think at least the "good
cause" must be my concern? What's good, what's bad? Why,
I myself am my concern, and I am neither good nor bad. Neither
has meaning for me.
The divine is God's concern; the
human, man's. My concern is neither the divine nor the human,
not the true, good, just, free, etc., but solely what is mine,
and it is not a general one, but is -- unique,* as I am unique.
Nothing is more to me than myself!
|
|
Man is to man the supreme being,,
says Feuerbach.
Man has just been discovered, says Bruno Bauer.
Then let us take a more careful look at this supreme
being
and this
new discovery.
|
|
From the moment when he catches sight
of the light of the world a man seeks to find out himself
and get hold of himself out of its confusion, in which
he, with everything else, is tossed about in motley mixture.
But everything that comes in contact
with the child defends itself in turn against his attacks, and
asserts its own persistence.
Accordingly, because each thing
cares for itself at the same time comes into constant collision
with other things, the combat of self-assertion is unavoidable.
Victory or defeat -- between
the two alternatives the fate of the combat wavers. The victor
becomes the lord, the vanquished one the subject:
the former exercises supremacy and "rights of supremacy,"
the latter fulfills in awe and deference the "duties of a
subject.
But both remain enemies,
and always lie in wait: they watch for each other's weaknesses
-- children for those of their parents and parents for those of
their children (e.g., their fear); either the stick conquers
the man, or the man conquers the stick.
In childhood liberation takes the
direction of trying to get to the bottom of things, to get at
what is "back
|
10 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
of" things; therefore we spy out the weak points of everybody,
for which, it is well known, children have a sure instinct; therefore
we like to smash things, like to rummage through hidden corners,
pry after what is covered up or out of the way, and try what we
can do with everything. When we once get at what is back of the
things, we know we are safe; when, e.g., we have got
at the fact that the rod is too weak against our obduracy, then
we no longer fear it, "have out-grown it."
Back of the rod, mightier than it,
stands our -- obduracy, our obdurate courage. By degrees we get
at what is back of everything that was mysterious and uncanny
to us, the mysteriously-dreaded might of the rod, the father's
stern look, etc., and back of all we find our ataraxia, i.
e. imperturbability, intrepidity, our counter force, our
odds of strength, our invincibility. Before that which formerly
inspired in us fear and deference we no longer retreat shyly,
but take courage. Back of everything we find our courage,
our superiority; back of the sharp command of parents and authorities
stands, after all, our courageous choice or our outwitting shrewdness.
And the more we feel ourselves, the smaller appears that which
before seemed invincible. And what is our trickery, shrewdness,
courage, obduracy? What else but -- mind!*
Through a considerable time we are
spared a fight that is so exhausting later -- the fight against
reason. The fairest part of childhood passes without
the ne-
*[Geist. This word will be translated sometimes "mind" and sometimes "spirit" in the following pages.]
|
A HUMAN LIFE 11 |
cessity of coming to blows with reason. We care nothing at all
about it, do not meddle with it, admit no reason. We are not to
be persuaded to anything by conviction, and are deaf
to good arguments, principles, etc.; on the other hand, coaxing,
punishment, etc. are hard for us to resist.
This stern life-and-death combat
with reason enters later, and begins a new phase; in
childhood we scamper about without racking our brains much.
Mind is the name of the
first self-discovery, the first self-discovery, the first
undeification of the divine; i. e., of the uncanny, the
spooks, the "powers above." Our fresh feeling of youth,
this feeling of self, now defers to nothing; the world is discredited,
for we are above it, we are mind.
Now for the first time we see that
hitherto we have not looked at the world intelligently
at all, but only stared at it.
We exercise the beginnings of our
strength on natural powers. We defer to parents as a
natural power; later we say: Father and mother are to be forsaken,
all natural power to be counted as riven. They are vanquished.
For the rational, i.e. the "intellectual" man,
there is no family as a natural power; a renunciation of parents,
brothers, etc., makes its appearance. If these are "born
again" as intellectual, rational powers, they are
no longer at all what they were before.
And not only parents, but men
in general, are conquered by the young man; they are no hindrance
to him, and are no longer regarded; for now he says: One must
obey God rather than men.
From this high standpoint everything
"earthly"
|
12 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
recedes into contemptible remoteness; for the standpoint is --
the heavenly.
The attitude is now altogether reversed;
the youth takes up an intellectual position, while the
boy, who did not yet feel himself as mind, grew up on mindless
learning. The former does not try to get hold of things
(e.g. to get into his head the data of history),
but of the thoughts that lie hidden in things, and so,
e.g., of the spirit of history. On the other
hand, the boy understands connections no doubt, but not
ideas, the spirit; therefore he strings together whatever can
be learned, without proceeding a priori and theoretically,
i.e. without looking for ideas.
As in childhood one had to overcome
the resistance of the laws of the world, so now in everything
that he proposes he is met by an objection of the mind, of reason,
of his own conscience. "That is unreasonable, unchristian,
unpatriotic," etc., cries conscience to us, and -- frightens
us away from it. Not the might of the avenging Eumenides, not
Poseidon's wrath, not God, far as he sees the hidden, not the
father's rod of punishment, do we fear, but -- conscience.
We "run after our thoughts"
now, and follow their commands just as before we followed parental,
human ones. Our course of action is determined by our thoughts
(ideas, conceptions, faith) as it is in childhood by
the commands of our parents.
For all that, we were already thinking
when we were children, only our thoughts were not fleshless, abstract,
absolute,
i. e., NOTHING BUT THOUGHTS, a heaven
in themselves, a pure world of thought, logical thoughts.
| A HUMAN LIFE 13 |
On the contrary, they had been only
thoughts that we had about a thing; we thought of the
thing so or so. Thus we may have thought "God made the world
that we see there," but we did not think of ("search")
the "depths of the Godhead itself"; we may have thought
"that is the truth about the matter," but we do not
think of Truth itself, nor unite into one sentence "God is
truth." The "depths of the Godhead, who is truth,"
we did not touch. Over such purely logical, i.e. theological
questions, "What is truth?" Pilate does not stop, though
he does not therefore hesitate to ascertain in an individual case
"what truth there is in the thing," i.e. whether
the thing is true.
Any thought bound to a thing
is not yet nothing but a thought, absolute thought.
To bring to light the pure thought,
or to be of its party, is the delight of youth; and all the shapes
of light in the world of thought, like truth, freedom, humanity,
Man, etc., illumine and inspire the youthful soul.
But, when the spirit is recognized
as the essential thing, it still makes a difference whether the
spirit is poor or rich, and therefore one seeks to become rich
in spirit; the spirit wants to spread out so as to found its empire
-- an empire that is not of this world, the world just conquered.
Thus, then, it longs to become all in all to itself; i.e.,
although I am spirit, I am not yet perfected spirit,
and must first seek the complete spirit.
But with that I, who had just now
found myself as spirit, lose myself again at once, bowing before
the
|
14 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
complete spirit as one not my own but supernal, and feeling
my emptiness.
Spirit is the essential point for
everything, to be sure; but then is every spirit the "right"
spirit? The right and true spirit is the ideal of spirit, the
"Holy Spirit." It is not my or your spirit, but just
-- an ideal, supernal one, it is "God." "God is
spirit." And this supernal "Father in heaven gives it
to those that pray to him."*
The man is distinguished from the
youth by the fact that he takes the world as it is, instead of
everywhere fancying it amiss and wanting to improve it, i.e.
model it after his ideal; in him the view that one must deal with
the world according to his interest, not according to
his ideals, becomes confirmed.
So long as one knows himself only
as spirit, and feels that all the value of his existence
consists in being spirit (it becomes easy for the youth to give
his life, the "bodily life," for a nothing, for the
silliest point of honor), so long it is only thoughts
that one has, ideas that he hopes to be able to realize some day
when he has found a sphere of action; thus one has meanwhile only
ideals, unexecuted ideas or thoughts.
Not till one has fallen in love
with his corporeal self, and takes a pleasure in himself
as a living flesh-and-blood person -- but it is in mature years,
in the man, that we find it so -- not till then has one a personal
or egoistic interest, i.e. an interest not only
of our spirit, e. g., but of total satisfaction, satisfaction
of the whole chap, a selfish interest. Just
|
A HUMAN LIFE 15 |
compare a man with a youth, and see if he will not appear to you
harder, less magnanimous, more selfish. Is he therefore worse?
No, you say; he has only become more definite, or, as you also
call it, more "practical." But the main point is this,
that he makes himself more the center than does the youth,
who is infatuated about other things, e.g. God, fatherland,
etc.
Therefore the man shows a second
self-discovery. The youth found himself as spirit and
lost himself again in the general spirit, the complete,
holy spirit, Man, mankind -- in short, all ideals; the man finds
himself as embodied spirit.
Boys had only unintellectual
interests (i.e. interests devoid of thoughts and ideas),
youths only intellectual ones; the man has bodily, personal,
egoistic interests.
If the child has not an object
that it can occupy itself with, it feels ennui; for it
does not yet know how to occupy itself with itself. The
youth, on the contrary, throws the object aside, because for him
thoughts arose out of the object; he occupies himself
with his thoughts, his dreams, occupies himself intellectually,
or "his mind is occupied."
The young man includes everything
not intellectual under the contemptuous name of "externalities."
If he nevertheless sticks to the most trivial externalities (e.g.
the customs of students' clubs and other formalities), it is because,
and when, he discovers mind in them, i.e. when
they are symbols to him.
As I find myself back of things,
and that as mind, so I must later find myself also back
of thoughts -- to wit, as their creator and owner. In
the time of spirits
|
16 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
thoughts grew till they overtopped my head, whose offspring they
yet were; they hovered about me and convulsed me like fever-phantasies
-- an awful power. The thoughts had become corporeal
on their own account, were ghosts, e. g. God, Emperor,
Pope, Fatherland, etc. If I destroy their corporeity, then I take
them back into mine, and say: "I alone am corporeal."
And now I take the world as what it is to me, as mine,
as my property; I refer all to myself.
If as spirit I had thrust away the
world in the deepest contempt, so as owner I thrust spirits or
ideas away into their "vanity." They have no longer
any power over me, as no "earthly might" has power over
the spirit.
The child was realistic, taken up
with the things of this world, till little by little he succeeded
in getting at what was back of these very things; the youth was
idealistic, inspired by thoughts, till he worked his way up to
where he became the man, the egoistic man, who deals with things
and thoughts according to his heart's pleasure, and sets his personal
interest above everything. Finally, the old man? When I become
one, there will still be time enough to speak of that.
| MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 17 |
How each of us developed himself,
what he strove for, attained, or missed, what objects he formerly
pursued and what plans and wishes his heart is now set on, what
transformation his views have experienced, what perturbations
his principles -- in short, how he has today become what yesterday
or years ago he was not -- this he brings out again from his memory
with more or less ease, and he feels with especial vividness what
changes have taken place in himself when he has before his eyes
the unrolling of another's life.
Let us therefore look into the activities
our forefathers busied themselves with.
Custom having once given the name
of "the ancients" to our pre-Christian ancestors, we
will not throw it up against them that, in comparison with us
experienced people, they ought properly to be called children,
but will rather continue to honor them as our good old fathers.
But how have they come to be antiquated, and who could displace
them through his pretended newness?
We know, of course, the revolutionary
innovator and
|
18 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
disrespectful heir, who even took away the sanctity of the fathers'
sabbath to hallow his Sunday, and interrupted the course of time
to begin at himself with a new chronology; we know him, and know
that it is -- the Christian. But does he remain forever young,
and is he today still the new man, or will he too be superseded,
as he has superseded the "ancients"?
The fathers must doubtless have
themselves begotten the young one who entombed them. Let us then
peep at this act of generation.
"To the ancients the world
was a truth," says Feuerbach, but he forgets to make the
important addition, "a truth whose untruth they tried to
get back of, and at last really did." What is meant by those
words of Feuerbach will be easily recognized if they are put alongside
the Christian thesis of the "vanity and transitoriness of
the world." For, as the Christian can never convince himself
of the vanity of the divine word, but believes in its eternal
and unshakable truth, which, the more its depths are searched,
must all the more brilliantly come to light and triumph, so the
ancients on their side lived in the feeling that the world and
mundane relations (e.g. the natural ties of blood) were
the truth before which their powerless "I" must bow.
The very thing on which the ancients set the highest value is
spurned by Christians as the valueless, and what they recognized
as truth these brand as idle lies; the high significance of the
fatherland disappears, and the Christian must regard himself as
"a stranger on earth";* the sanc-
|
MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 19 |
tity of funeral rites, from which sprang a work of art like the
Antigone of Sophocles, is designated as a paltry thing ("Let
the dead bury their dead"); the infrangible truth of family
ties is represented as an untruth which one cannot promptly enough
get clear of;* and so in everything.
If we now see that to the two sides
opposite things appear as truth, to one the natural, to the other
the intellectual, to one earthly things and relations, to the
other heavenly (the heavenly fatherland, "Jerusalem that
is above," etc.), it still remains to be considered how the
new time and that undeniable reversal could come out of antiquity.
But the ancients themselves worked toward making their truth a
lie.
Let us plunge at once into the midst
of the most brilliant years of the ancients, into the Periclean
century. Then the Sophistic culture was spreading, and Greece
made a pastime of what had hitherto been to her a monstrously
serious matter.
The fathers had been enslaved by
the undisturbed power of existing things too long for the posterity
not to have to learn by bitter experience to feel themselves.
Therefore the Sophists, with courageous sauciness, pronounce the
reassuring words, "Don't be bluffed!" and diffuse the
rationalistic doctrine, "Use your understanding, your wit,
your mind, against everything; it is by having a good and well-drilled
understanding that one gets through the world best, provides for
himself the best lot, the most pleasant life." Thus
they recognize in mind man's true weapon
|
20 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
against the world. This is why they lay such stress on dialectic
skill, command of language, the art of disputation, etc. They
announce that mind is to be used against everything; but they
are still far removed from the holiness of the Spirit, for to
them it is a means, a weapon, as trickery and defiance
serve children for the same purpose; their mind is the unbribable
understanding.
Today we should call that a one-sided
culture of the understanding, and add the warning, "Cultivate
not only your understanding, but also, and especially, your heart."
Socrates did the same. For, if the heart did not become free from
its natural impulses, but remained filled with the most fortuitous
contents and, as an uncriticized avidity, altogether
in the power of things, i.e. nothing but a vessel of
the most various appetites -- then it was unavoidable
that the free understanding must serve the "bad heart"
and was ready to justify everything that the wicked heart desired.
Therefore Socrates says that it
is not enough for one to use his understanding in all things,
but it is a question of what cause one exerts it for.
We should now say, one must serve the "good cause."
But serving the good cause is -- being moral. Hence Socrates is
the founder of ethics.
Certainly the principle of the Sophistic
doctrine must lead to the possibility that the blindest and most
dependent slave of his desires might yet be an excellent sophist,
and, with keen understanding, trim and expound everything in favor
of his coarse heart. What could there be for which a "good
reason"
|
MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 21 |
might not be found, or which might not be defended through thick
and thin?
Therefore Socrates says: "You
must be 'pure-hearted' if your shrewdness is to be valued."
At this point begins the second period of Greek liberation of
the mind, the period of purity of heart. For the first
was brought to a close by the Sophists in their proclaiming the
omnipotence of the understanding. But the heart remained worldly-minded,
remained a servant of the world, always affected by worldly wishes.
This coarse heart was to be cultivated from now on -- the era
of culture of the heart. But how is the heart to be cultivated?
What the understanding; this one side of the mind, has reached
-- to wit, the capability of playing freely with and over every
concern -- awaits the heart also; everything worldly
must come to grief before it, so that at last family, commonwealth,
fatherland, etc., are given up for the sake of the heart, i.
e., of blessedness, the heart's blessedness.
Daily experience confirms the truth
that the understanding may have renounced a thing many years before
the heart has ceased to beat for it. So the Sophistic understanding
too had so far become master over the dominant, ancient powers
that they now needed only to be driven out of the heart, in which
they dwelt unmolested, to have at last no part at all left in
man. This war is opened by Socrates, and not till the dying day
of the old world does it end in peace.
The examination of the heart takes
its start with Socrates, and all the contents of the heart are
sifted. In their last and extremest struggles the ancients
| 22 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
threw all contents out of the heart and let it no longer beat
for anything; this was the deed of the Skeptics. The same purgation
of the heart was now achieved in the Skeptical age, as the understanding
had succeeded in establishing in the Sophistic age.
The Sophistic culture has brought
it to pass that one's understanding no longer stands still
before anything, and the Skeptical, that his heart is no longer
moved by anything.
So long as man is entangled in the
movements of the world and embarrassed by relations to the world
-- and he is so till the end of antiquity, because his heart still
has to struggle for independence from the worldly -- so long he
is not yet spirit; for spirit is without body, and has no relations
to the world and corporeality; for it the world does not exist,
nor natural bonds, but only the spiritual, and spiritual bonds.
Therefore man must first become so completely unconcerned and
reckless, so altogether without relations, as the Skeptical culture
presents him -- so altogether indifferent to the world that even
its falling in ruins would not move him -- before he could feel
himself as worldless; i. e., as spirit. And this is the
result of the gigantic work of the ancients: that man knows himself
as a being without relations and without a world, as spirit.
Only now, after all worldly care
has left him, is he all in all to himself, is he only for himself,
i.e. he is he spirit for the spirit, or, in plainer language,
he cares only for the spiritual.
In the Christian wisdom of serpents
and innocence of doves the two sides -- understanding and heart
-- of
|
MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 23 |
the ancient liberation of mind are so completed that they appear
young and new again, and neither the one nor the other lets itself
be bluffed any longer by the worldly and natural.
Thus the ancients mounted to spirit,
and strove to become spiritual. But a man who wishes
to be active as spirit is drawn to quite other tasks than he was
able to set himself formerly: to tasks which really give something
to do to the spirit and not to mere sense or acuteness,* which
exerts itself only to become master of things. The spirit
busies itself solely about the spiritual, and seeks out the "traces
of mind" in everything; to the believing spirit
"everything comes from God," and interests him only
to the extent that it reveals this origin; to the philosophic
spirit everything appears with the stamp of reason, and interests
him only so far as he is able to discover in it reason, i.
e., spiritual content.
Not the spirit, then, which has
to do with absolutely nothing unspiritual, with no thing,
but only with the essence which exists behind and above things,
with thoughts -- not that did the ancients exert, for
they did not yet have it; no, they had only reached the point
of struggling and longing for it, and therefore sharpened it against
their too-powerful foe, the world of sense (but what would not
have been sensuous for them, since Jehovah or the gods of the
heathen were yet far removed from the conception "God is
spirit," since the "heavenly fatherland"
had not yet stepped into the place of the sensuous, etc.?) --
they sharpened
*Italicized in the original for the sake of its etymology, Scharfsinn -- "sharp-sense". Compare next paragraph.
|
24 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
against the world of sense their sense, their acuteness.
To this day the Jews, those precocious children of antiquity,
have got no farther; and with all the subtlety and strength of
their prudence and understanding, which easily becomes master
of things and forces them to obey it, they cannot discover spirit,
which takes no account whatever of things.
The Christian has spiritual interests,
because he allows himself to be a spiritual man; the
Jew does not even understand these interests in their purity,
because he does not allow himself to assign no value
to things. He does not arrive at pure spirituality, a
spirituality e. g. is religiously expressed, e. g.,
in the faith of Christians, which alone (i.e.
without works) justifies. Their unspirituality sets Jews
forever apart from Christians; for the spiritual man is incomprehensible
to the unspiritual, as the unspiritual is contemptible to the
spiritual. But the Jews have only "the spirit of this world."
The ancient acuteness and profundity
lies as far from the spirit and the spirituality of the Christian
world as earth from heaven.
He who feels himself as free spirit
is not oppressed and made anxious by the things of this world,
because he does not care for them; if one is still to feel their
burden, he must be narrow enough to attach weight to
them -- as is evidently the case,
e. g., when one is still concerned for his "dear
life." He to whom everything centers in knowing and conducting
himself as a free spirit gives little heed to how scantily he
is supplied meanwhile, and does not reflect at all on how he must
make his arrangements to have a thoroughly
|
MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 25 |
inconveniences of the life that depends on things, because he
lives only spiritually and on spiritual food, while aside from
this he only gulps things down like a beast, hardly knowing it,
and dies bodily, to be sure, when his fodder gives out, but knows
himself immortal as spirit, and closes his eyes with an adoration
or a thought. His life is occupation with the spiritual, is --
thinking; the rest does not bother him; let him busy himself with
the spiritual in any way that he can and chooses -- in devotion,
in contemplation, or in philosophic cognition -- his doing is
always thinking; and therefore Descartes, to whom this had at
last become quite clear, could lay down the proposition: "I
think, that is -- I am." This means, my thinking is my being
or my life; only when I live spiritually do I live; only as spirit
am I really, or -- I am spirit through and through and nothing
but spirit. Unlucky Peter Schlemihl, who has lost his shadow,
is the portrait of this man become a spirit; for the spirit's
body is shadowless. -- Over against this, how different among
the ancients! Stoutly and manfully as they might bear themselves
against the might of things, they must yet acknowledge the might
itself, and got no farther than to protect their life
against it as well as possible. Only at a late hour did they recognize
that their "true life" was not that which they led in
the fight against the things of the world, but the "spiritual
life," "turned away" from these things; and, when
they saw this, they became Christians, i.e. the moderns,
and innovators upon the ancients. But the life turned away from
things, the spiritual life, no
| 26 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
longer draws any nourishment from nature, but "lives only
on thoughts," and therefore is no longer "life,"
but -- thinking.
Yet it must not be supposed now
that the ancients were without thoughts, just as the
most spiritual man is not to be conceived of as if he could be
without life. Rather, they had their thoughts about everything,
about the world, man, the gods, etc., and showed themselves keenly
active in bringing all this to their consciousness. But they did
not know thought, even though they thought of all sorts
of things and "worried themselves with their thoughts."
Compare with their position the Christian saying, "My thoughts
are not your thoughts; as the heaven is higher than the earth,
so are my thoughts higher than your thoughts," and remember
what was said above about our child-thoughts.
What is antiquity seeking, then?
The true enjoyment of life! You will find that at bottom
it is all the same as "the true life."
The Greek poet Simonides sings:
"Health is the noblest good for mortal man, the next to this
is beauty, the third riches acquired without guile, the fourth
the enjoyment of social pleasures in the company of young friends."
These are all good things of life, pleasures of life.
What else was Diogenes of Sinope seeking for than the true enjoyment
of life, which he discovered in having the least possible wants?
What else Aristippus, who found it in a cheery temper under all
circumstances? They are seeking for cheery, unclouded life-courage,
for cheeriness; they are seeking to "be of good
cheer."
|
MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 27 |
The Stoics want to realize the wise
man, the man with practical philosophy, the man
who knows how to live -- a wise life, therefore; they
find him in contempt for the world, in a life without development,
without spreading out, without friendly relations with the world,
thus in the isolated life, in life as life, not in life
with others; only the Stoic lives, all else is dead for
him. The Epicureans, on the contrary, demand a moving life.
The ancients, as they want to be
of good cheer, desire good living (the Jews especially
a long life, blessed with children and goods), eudaemonia,
well-being in the most various forms. Democritus, e. g.,
praises as such the "calm of the soul" in which one
"lives smoothly, without fear and without excitement."
So what he thinks is that with this
he gets on best, provides for himself the best lot, and gets through
the world best. But as he cannot get rid of the world -- and in
fact cannot for the very reason that his whole activity is taken
up in the effort to get rid of it, i. e., in repelling
the world (for which it is yet necessary that what can be
and is repelled should remain existing, otherwise there would
be no longer anything to repel) -- he reaches at most an extreme
degree of liberation, and is distinguishable only in degree from
the less liberated. If he even got as far as the deadening of
the earthly sense, which at last admits only the monotonous whisper
of the word "Brahm," he nevertheless would not be essentially
distinguishable from the sensual man.
Even the stoic attitude and manly
virtue amounts
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28 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
only to this -- that one must maintain and assert himself against
the world; and the ethics of the Stoics (their only science, since
they could tell nothing about the spirit but how it should behave
toward the world, and of nature (physics) only this, that the
wise man must assert himself against it) is not a doctrine of
the spirit, but only a doctrine of the repelling of the world
and of self-assertion against the world. And this consists in
"imperturbability and equanimity of life," and so in
the most explicit Roman virtue.
The Romans too (Horace, Cicero,
etc.) went no further than this practical philosophy.
The comfort (hedone)
of the Epicureans is the same practical philosophy the
Stoics teach, only trickier, more deceitful. They teach only another
behavior toward the world, exhort us only to take a shrewd
attitude toward the world; the world must be deceived, for it
is my enemy.
The break with the world is completely
carried through by the Skeptics. My entire relation to the world
is "worthless and truthless." Timon says, "The
feelings and thoughts which we draw from the world contain no
truth." "What is truth?" cries Pilate. According
to Pyrrho's doctrine the world is neither good nor bad, neither
beautiful nor ugly, etc., but these are predicates which I give
it. Timon says that "in itself nothing is either good or
bad, but man only thinks of it thus or thus"; to
face the world only ataraxia (unmovedness) and aphasia
(speechlessness -- or, in other words, isolated inwardness)
are left. There is "no longer any truth to be recognized"
in the world; things contradict themselves; thoughts about
|
MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 29 |
things are without distinction (good and bad are all the same,
so that what one calls good another finds bad); here the recognition
of "truth" is at an end, and only the man without
power of recognition, the man who finds in the world
nothing to recognize, is left, and this man just leaves the truth-vacant
world where it is and takes no account of it.
So antiquity gets through with the
world of things, the order of the world, the world as
a whole; but to the order of the world, or the things of this
world, belong not only nature, but all relations in which man
sees himself placed by nature, e. g. the family, the
community -- in short, the so-called "natural bonds."
With the world of the spirit Christianity then begins.
The man who still faces the world armed is the ancient,
the -- heathen (to which class the Jew, too, as non-Christian,
belongs); the man who has come to be led by nothing but his "heart's
pleasure," the interest he takes, his fellow-feeling, his
--spirit, is the modern, the -- Christian.
As the ancients worked toward the
conquest of the world and strove to release man from
the heavy trammels of connection with other things, at
last they came also to the dissolution of the State and giving
preference to everything private. Of course community, family,
etc., as natural relations, are burdensome hindrances
which diminish my spiritual freedom.
|
30 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
"If any man be in Christ, he
is a new creature; the old is passed away, behold, all
is become new."*
As it was said above, "To the
ancients the world was a truth," we must say here, "To
the moderns the spirit was a truth"; but here, as there,
we must not omit the supplement, "a truth whose untruth they
tried to get back of, and at last they really do."
A course similar to that which antiquity
took may be demonstrated in Christianity also, in that the understanding
was held a prisoner under the dominion of the Christian dogmas
up to the time preparatory to the Reformation, but in the pre-Reformation
century asserted itself sophistically and played heretical
pranks with all tenets of the faith. And the talk then was, especially
in Italy and at the Roman court, "If only the heart remains
Christian-minded, the understanding may go right on taking its
pleasure."
Long before the Reformation, people
were so thoroughly accustomed to fine-spun "wranglings"
that the pope, and most others, looked on Luther's appearance
too as a mere "wrangling of monks" at first. Humanism
corresponds to Sophisticism, and, as in the time of the Sophists
Greek life stood in its fullest bloom (the Periclean age), so
the most brilliant things happened in the time of Humanism, or,
as one might perhaps also say, of Machiavellianism (printing,
the New World, etc.). At this time the heart was still far from
wanting to relieve itself of its Christian
* 2 Cor. 5. 17. [The words "new" and "modern"
are the same in German.]
| MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 31 |
contents.
But finally the Reformation, like
Socrates, took hold seriously of the heart itself, and
since then hearts have kept growing visibly -- more unchristian.
As with Luther people began to take the matter to heart, the outcome
of this step of the Reformation must be that the heart also gets
lightened of the heavy burden of Christian faith. The heart, from
day to day more unchristian, loses the contents with which it
had busied itself, till at last nothing but empty warmheartedness
is left it, the quite general love of men, the love of Man,
the consciousness of freedom, "self-consciousness."
Only so is Christianity complete,
because it has become bald, withered, and void of contents. There
are now no contents whatever against which the heart does not
mutiny, unless indeed the heart unconsciously or without "self-
consciousness" lets them slip in. The heart criticises
to death with hard-hearted mercilessness everything that
wants to make its way in, and is capable (except, as before, unconsciously
or taken by surprise) of no friendship, no love. What could there
be in men to love, since they are all alike "egoists,"
none of them man as such, i.e. none spirit only?
The Christian loves only the spirit; but where could one be found
who should be really nothing but spirit?
To have a liking for the corporeal
man with hide and hair -- why, that would no longer be a "spiritual"
warmheartedness, it would be treason against "pure"
warmheartedness, the "theoretical regard." For pure
warmheartedness is by no means to be conceived as like that kindliness
that gives everybody a
|
32 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
friendly hand-shake; on the contrary, pure warmheartedness is
warm-hearted toward nobody, it is only a theoretical interest,
concern for man as man, not as a person. The person is repulsive
to it because of being "egoistic," because of not being
that abstraction, Man. But it is only for the abstraction that
one can have a theoretical regard. To pure warmheartedness or
pure theory men exist only to be criticized, scoffed at, and thoroughly
despised; to it, no less than to the fanatical parson, they are
only "filth" and other such nice things.
Pushed to this extremity of disinterested
warmheartedness, we must finally become conscious that the spirit,
which alone the Christian loves, is nothing; in other words, that
the spirit is -- a lie.
What has here been set down roughly,
summarily, and doubtless as yet incomprehensibly, will, it is
to be hoped, become clear as we go on.
Let us take up the inheritance left
by the ancients, and, as active workmen, do with it as much as
-- can be done with it! The world lies despised at our feet, far
beneath us and our heaven, into which its mighty arms are no longer
thrust and its stupefying breath does not come. Seductively as
it may pose, it can delude nothing but our sense; it
cannot lead astray the spirit -- and spirit alone, after all,
we really are. Having once got back of things, the spirit
has also got above them, and become free from their bonds,
emancipated, supernal, free. So speaks "spiritual freedom."
To the spirit which, after long
toil, has got rid of the world, the worldless spirit, nothing
is left after the
|
MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 33 |
loss of the world and the worldly but -- the spirit and the spiritual.
Yet, as it has only moved away from
the world and made of itself a being free from the world,
without being able really to annihilate the world, this remains
to it a stumbling-block that cannot be cleared away, a discredited
existence; and, as, on the other hand, it knows and recognizes
nothing but the spirit and the spiritual, it must perpetually
carry about with it the longing to spiritualize the world, i.e.
to redeem it from the "black list." Therefore, like
a youth, it goes about with plans for the redemption or improvement
of the world.
The ancients, we saw, served the
natural, the worldly, the natural order of the world, but they
incessantly asked themselves of this service; and, when they had
tired themselves to death in ever-renewed attempts at revolt,
then, among their last sighs, was born to them the God,
the "conqueror of the world." All their doing had been
nothing but wisdom of the world, an effort to get back
of the world and above it. And what is the wisdom of the many
following centuries? What did the moderns try to get back of?
No longer to get back of the world, for the ancients had accomplished
that; but back of the God whom the ancients bequeathed to them,
back of the God who "is spirit," back of everything
that is the spirit's, the spiritual. But the activity of the spirit,
which "searches even the depths of the Godhead," is
theology. If the ancients have nothing to show but wisdom
of the world, the moderns never did nor do
|
34 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
make their way further than to theology. We shall see later that
even the newest revolts against God are nothing but the extremest
efforts of "theology," i. e., theological insurrections.
The realm of spirits is monstrously
great, there is an infinite deal of the spiritual; yet let us
look and see what the spirit, this bequest of the ancients, properly
is.
Out of their birth-pangs it came
forth, but they themselves could not utter themselves as spirit;
they could give birth to it, it itself must speak. The "born
God, the Son of Man," is the first to utter the word that
the spirit, i.e. he, God, has to do with nothing earthly
and no earthly relationship, but solely, with the spirit and spiritual
relationships.
Is my courage, indestructible under
all the world's blows, my inflexibility and my obduracy, perchance
already spirit in the full sense, because the world cannot touch
it? Why, then it would not yet be at enmity with the world, and
all its action would consist merely in not succumbing to the world!
No, so long as it does not busy itself with itself alone, so long
as it does not have to do with its world, the spiritual,
alone, it is not free spirit, but only the "spirit
of this world," the spirit fettered to it. The spirit is
free spirit, i. e., really spirit, only in a world of
its own; in "this," the earthly world, it is
a stranger. Only through a spiritual world is the spirit really
spirit, for "this" world does not understand it and
does not know how to keep
| MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 35 |
"the maiden from a foreign land"* from departing.
But where is it to get this spiritual
world? Where but out of itself? It must reveal itself; and the
words that it speaks, the revelations in which it unveils itself,
these are its world. As a visionary lives and has his
world only in the visionary pictures that he himself creates,
as a crazy man generates for himself his own dream-world, without
which he could not be crazy, so the spirit must create for itself
its spirit world, and is not spirit till it creates it.
Thus its creations make it spirit,
and by its creatures we know it, the creator; in them it lives,
they are its world.
Now, what is the spirit? It is the
creator of a spiritual world! Even in you and me people do not
recognize spirit till they see that we have appropriated to ourselves
something spiritual, -- i.e. though thoughts may have
been set before us, we have at least brought them to live in ourselves;
for, as long as we were children, the most edifying thoughts might
have been laid before us without our wishing, or being able, to
reproduce them in ourselves. So the spirit also exists only when
it creates something spiritual; it is real only together with
the spiritual, its creature.
As, then, we know it by its works,
the question is what these works are. But the works or children
of the spirit are nothing else but -- spirits.
If I had before me Jews, Jews of
the true metal, I should have to stop here and leave them standing
before this mystery as for almost two thousand years
*[Title of a poem by Schiller]
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36 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
they have remained standing before it, unbelieving and without
knowledge. But, as you, my dear reader, are at least not a full-blooded
Jew -- for such a one will not go astray as far as this -- we
will still go along a bit of road together, till perhaps you too
turn your back on me because I laugh in your face.
If somebody told you were altogether
spirit, you would take hold of your body and not believe him,
but answer: "I have a spirit, no doubt, but do not
exist only as spirit, but as a man with a body." You would
still distinguish yourself from "your spirit."
"But," replies he, "it is your destiny, even though
now you are yet going about in the fetters of the body, to be
one day a 'blessed spirit,' and, however you may conceive of the
future aspect of your spirit, so much is yet certain, that in
death you will put off this body and yet keep yourself, i.e.
your spirit, for all eternity; accordingly your spirit is the
eternal and true in you, the body only a dwelling here below,
which you may leave and perhaps exchange for another."
Now you believe him! For the present,
indeed, you are not spirit only; but, when you emigrate from the
mortal body, as one day you must, then you will have to help yourself
without the body, and therefore it is needful that you be prudent
and care in time for your proper self. "What should it profit
a man if he gained the whole world and yet suffered damage in
his soul?"
But, even granted that doubts, raised
in the course of time against the tenets of the Christian faith,
have long since robbed you of faith in the immortality of
|
MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 37 |
your spirit, you have nevertheless left one tenet undisturbed,
and still ingenuously adhere to the one truth, that the spirit
is your better part, and that the spiritual has greater claims
on you than anything else. Despite all your atheism, in zeal against
egoism you concur with the believers in immortality.
But whom do you think of under the
name of egoist? A man who, instead of living to an idea, i.
e., a spiritual thing, and sacrificing to it his personal
advantage, serves the latter. A good patriot brings his sacrifice
to the altar of the fatherland; but it cannot be disputed that
the fatherland is an idea, since for beasts incapable of mind,*
or children as yet without mind, there is no fatherland and no
patriotism. Now, if any one does not approve himself as a good
patriot, he betrays his egoism with reference to the fatherland.
And so the matter stands in innumerable other cases: he who in
human society takes the benefit of a prerogative sins egoistically
against the idea of equality; he who exercises dominion is blamed
as an egoist against the idea of liberty, -- etc.
You despise the egoist because he
puts the spiritual in the background as compared with the personal,
and has his eyes on himself where you would like to see him act
to favor an idea. The distinction between you is that he makes
himself the central point, but you the spirit; or that you cut
your identity in two
* [The reader will remember (it is to be hoped has
never forgotten) that "mind" and "spirit"
are one and the same word in German. For several pages back the
connection of the discourse has seemed to require the almost exclusive
use of the translation "spirit," but to complete the
sense it has often been necessary that the reader recall the thought
of its identity with "mind," as stated in a previous
note.]
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38 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
and exalt your "proper self," the spirit, to be ruler
of the paltrier remainder, while he will hear nothing of this
cutting in two, and pursues spiritual and material interests just
as he pleases. You think, to be sure, that you are falling
foul of those only who enter into no spiritual interest at all,
but in fact you curse at everybody who does not look on the spiritual
interest as his "true and highest" interest. You carry
your knightly service for this beauty so far that you affirm her
to be the only beauty of the world. You live not to yourself,
but to your spirit and to what is the spirit's, i.
e. ideas.
As the spirit exists only in its
creating of the spiritual, let us take a look about us for its
first creation. If only it has accomplished this, there follows
thenceforth a natural propagation of creations, as according to
the myth only the first human beings needed to be created, the
rest of the race propagating of itself. The first creation, on
the other hand, must come forth "out of nothing" --
i.e. the spirit has toward its realization nothing but
itself, or rather it has not yet even itself, but must create
itself; hence its first creation is itself, the spirit.
Mystical as this sounds, we yet go through it as an every-day
experience. Are you a thinking being before you think? In creating
the first thought you create yourself, the thinking one; for you
do not think before you think a thought, i.e. have a
thought. Is it not your singing that first makes you a singer,
your talking that makes you a talker? Now, so too it is the production
of the spiritual that first makes you a spirit.
Meantime, as you distinguish yourself
from the
| MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 39 |
thinker, singer, and talker, so you no less distinguish yourself
from the spirit, and feel very clearly that you are something
beside spirit. But, as in the thinking ego hearing and sight easily
vanish in the enthusiasm of thought, so you also have been seized
by the spirit-enthusiasm, and you now long with all your might
to become wholly spirit and to be dissolved in spirit. The spirit
is your ideal, the unattained, the other-worldly; spirit
is the name of your -- god, "God is spirit."
Against all that is not spirit you
are a zealot, and therefore you play the zealot against yourself
who cannot get rid of a remainder of the non-spiritual. Instead
of saying, "I am more than spirit," you say
with contrition, "I am less than spirit; and spirit, pure
spirit, or the spirit that is nothing but spirit, I can only think
of, but am not; and, since I am not it, it is another, exists
as another, whom I call 'God'."
It lies in the nature of the case
that the spirit that is to exist as pure spirit must be an otherworldly
one, for, since I am not it, it follows that it can only be outside
me; since in any case a human being is not fully comprehended
in the concept "spirit," it follows that the pure spirit,
the spirit as such, can only be outside of men, beyond the human
world -- not earthly, but heavenly.
Only from this disunion in which
I and the spirit lie; only because "I" and "spirit"
are not names for one and the same thing, but different names
for completely different things; only because I am not spirit
and spirit not I -- only from this do we get a quite tautological
explanation of the necessity that the spirit
|
40 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
dwells in the other world, i. e. is God.
But from this it also appears how
thoroughly theological is the liberation that Feuerbach* is laboring
to give us. What he says is that we had only mistaken our own
essence, and therefore looked for it in the other world, but that
now, when we see that God was only our human essence, we must
recognize it again as ours and move it back out of the other world
into this. To God, who is spirit, Feuerbach gives the name "Our
Essence." Can we put up with this, that "Our Essence"
is brought into opposition to us -- that we are split
into an essential and an unessential self? Do we not therewith
go back into the dreary misery of seeing ourselves banished out
of ourselves?
What have we gained, then, when
for a variation we have transferred into ourselves the divine
outside us? Are we that which is in us? As little as
we are that which is outside us. I am as little my heart as I
am my sweetheart, this "other self" of mine. Just because
we are not the spirit that dwells in us, just for that reason
we had to take it and set it outside us; it was not we, did not
coincide with us, and therefore we could, not think of it as existing
otherwise than outside us, on the other side from us, in the other
world.
With the strength of despair
Feuerbach clutches at the total substance of Christianity, not
to throw it away, no, to drag it to himself, to draw it, the long-yearned-for,
ever-distant, out of its heaven with a last effort, and keep it
by him forever. Is not that a clutch of the uttermost despair,
a clutch for life or
|
MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 41 |
death, and is it not at the same time the Christian yearning and
hungering for the other world? The hero wants not to go into the
other world, but to draw the other world to him, and compel it
to become this world! And since then has not all the world, with
more or less consciousness, been crying that "this world"
is the vital point, and heaven must come down on earth and be
experienced even here?
Let us, in brief, set Feuerbach's
theological view and our contradiction over against each other!
"The essence of man is man's supreme being;* now by religion,
to be sure, the supreme being is called God
and regarded as an objective essence, but in truth it is only
man's own essence; and therefore the turning point of the world's
history is that henceforth no longer God, but man, is
to appear to man as God."**
To this we reply: The supreme being
is indeed the essence of man, but, just because it is his essence
and not he himself, it remains quite immaterial whether we see
it outside him and view it as "God," or find it in him
and call it "Essence of Man" or "Man." I am
neither God nor Man,*** neither the supreme essence nor my essence,
and therefore it is all one in the main whether I think of the
essence as in me or outside me. Nay, we really do always think
of the supreme being as in both kinds of otherworldliness, the
inward and
*[Or, "highest essence." The word Wesen,
which means both "essence" and "being," will
be translated now one way and now the other in the following pages.
The reader must bear in mind that these two words are identical
in German; and so are "supreme" and "highest."]
**Cf. e. g. "Essence
of Christianity", p. 402.
***[That is, the abstract conception of man, as in the preceding
sentence.]
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42 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
outward, at once; for the "Spirit of God" is, according
to the Christian view, also "our spirit," and "dwells
in us."* It dwells in heaven and dwells in us; we poor things
are just its "dwelling," and, if Feuerbach goes on to
destroy its heavenly dwelling and force it to move to us bag and
baggage, then we, its earthly apartments, will be badly overcrowded.
But after this digression (which,
if we were at all proposing to work by line and level, we should
have had to save for later pages in order to avoid repetition)
we return to the spirit's first creation, the spirit itself.
The spirit is something other than
myself. But this other, what is it?
Have you ever seen a spirit? "No,
not I, but my grandmother." Now, you see, it's just so with
me too; I myself haven't seen any, but my grandmother had them
running between her feet all sorts of ways, and out of confidence
in our grandmothers' honesty we believe in the existence of spirits.
But had we no grandfathers then,
and did they not shrug their shoulders every time our grandmothers
told about their ghosts? Yes, those were unbelieving men who have
harmed our good religion much, those rationalists! We shall feel
that! What else lies at the bottom of this warm faith in ghosts,
if not the faith in "the existence of spiritual beings in
general," and is not this latter itself disastrously unsettled
if
*E.g.
Rom. 8. 9, 1 Cor. 3. 16, John 20. 22 and innumerable other passages.
| MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 43 |
saucy men of the understanding may disturb the former? The Romanticists
were quite conscious what a blow the very belief in God suffered
by the laying aside of the belief in spirits or ghosts, and they
tried to help us out of the baleful consequences not only by their
reawakened fairy world, but at last, and especially, by the "intrusion
of a higher world," by their somnambulists of Prevorst, etc.
The good believers and fathers of the church did not suspect that
with the belief in ghosts the foundation of religion was withdrawn,
and that since then it had been floating in the air. He who no
longer believes in any ghost needs only to travel on consistently
in his unbelief to see that there is no separate being at all
concealed behind things, no ghost or -- what is naively reckoned
as synonymous even in our use of words -- no "spirit."
"Spirits exist!" Look
about in the world, and say for yourself whether a spirit does
not gaze upon you out of everything. Out of the lovely little
flower there speaks to you the spirit of the Creator, who has
shaped it so wonderfully; the stars proclaim the spirit that established
their order; from the mountain-tops a spirit of sublimity breathes
down; out of the waters a spirit of yearning murmurs up; and --
out of men millions of spirits speak. The mountains may sink,
the flowers fade, the world of stars fall in ruins, the men die
-- what matters the wreck of these visible bodies? The spirit,
the "invisible spirit," abides eternally!
Yes, the whole world is haunted!
Only is haunted? Nay, it itself "walks," it is uncanny
through and through, it is the wandering seeming-
|
44 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
body of a spirit, it is a spook. What else should a ghost be,
then, than an apparent body, but real spirit? Well, the world
is "empty," is "naught," is only glamorous
"semblance"; its truth is the spirit alone; it is the
seeming-body of a spirit.
Look out near or far, a ghostly
world surrounds you everywhere; you are always having "apparitions"
or visions. Everything that appears to you is only the phantasm
of an indwelling spirit, is a ghostly "apparition";
the world is to you only a "world of appearances," behind
which the spirit walks. You "see spirits."
Are you perchance thinking of comparing
yourself with the ancients, who saw gods everywhere? Gods, my
dear modern, are not spirits; gods do not degrade the world to
a semblance, and do not spiritualize it.
But to you the whole world is spiritualized,
and has become an enigmatical ghost; therefore do not wonder if
you likewise find in yourself nothing but a spook. Is not your
body haunted by your spirit, and is not the latter alone the true
and real, the former only the "transitory, naught" or
a "semblance"? Are we not all ghosts, uncanny beings
that wait for "deliverance" -- to wit, "spirits"?
Since the spirit appeared in the
world, since "the Word became flesh," since then the
world has been spiritualized, enchanted, a spook.
You have spirit, for you have thoughts.
What are your thoughts? "Spiritual entities." Not things,
then? "No, but the spirit of things, the main point in all
things, the inmost in them, their -- idea." Consequently
what you think is not only your thought?
|
MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 45 |
"On the contrary, it is that in the world which is most real,
that which is properly to be called true; it is the truth itself;
if I only think truly, I think the truth. I may, to be sure, err
with regard to the truth, and fail to recognize it; but,
if I recognize truly, the object of my cognition is the
truth." So, I suppose, you strive at all times to recognize
the truth? "To me the truth is sacred. It may well happen
that I find a truth incomplete and replace it with a better, but
the truth I cannot abrogate. I believe in the
truth, therefore I search in it; nothing transcends it, it is
eternal."
Sacred, eternal is the truth; it
is the Sacred, the Eternal. But you, who let yourself be filled
and led by this sacred thing, are yourself hallowed. Further,
the sacred is not for your senses -- and you never as a sensual
man discover its trace -- but for your faith, or, more definitely
still, for your spirit; for it itself, you know, is a
spiritual thing, a spirit -- is spirit for the spirit.
The sacred is by no means so easily
to be set aside as many at present affirm, who no longer take
this "unsuitable" word into their mouths. If even in
a single respect I am still upbraided as an "egoist,"
there is left the thought of something else which I should serve
more than myself, and which must be to me more important than
everything; in short, somewhat in which I should have to seek
my true welfare,* something -- "sacred."** However human
this sacred thing may look, though it be the Human itself, that
|
46 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
does not take away its sacredness, but at most changes it from
an unearthly to an earthly sacred thing, from a divine one to
a human.
Sacred things exist only for the
egoist who does not acknowledge himself, the involuntary egoist,
for him who is always looking after his own and yet does not count
himself as the highest being, who serves only himself and at the
same time always thinks he is serving a higher being, who knows
nothing higher than himself and yet is infatuated about something
higher; in short, for the egoist who would like not to be an egoist,
and abases himself (i.e. combats his egoism), but at
the same time abases himself only for the sake of "being
exalted," and therefore of gratifying his egoism. Because
he would like to cease to be an egoist, he looks about in heaven
and earth for higher beings to serve and sacrifice himself to;
but, however much he shakes and disciplines himself, in the end
he does all for his own sake, and the disreputable egoism will
not come off him. On this account I call him the involuntary egoist.
His toil and care to get away from
himself is nothing but the misunderstood impulse to self-dissolution.
If you are bound to your past hour, if you must babble today because
you babbled yesterday,* if you cannot transform yourself each
instant, you feel yourself
*[How the priests tinkle! how important they
Would make it out, that men should come their way
And babble, just as yesterday, today!
Oh, blame them not! They know man's need, I say!
For he takes all his happiness this way,
To babble just tomorrow as today.
-- Translated
from Goethe's "Venetian Epigrams."
| MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 47 |
fettered in slavery and benumbed. Therefore over each minute of
your existence a fresh minute of the future beckons to you, and,
developing yourself, you get away "from yourself," i.
e., from the self that was at that moment. As you are at
each instant, you are your own creature, and in this very "creature"
you do not wish to lose yourself, the creator. You are yourself
a higher being than you are, and surpass yourself. But that you
are the one who is higher than you, i. e., that you are
not only creature, but likewise your creator -- just this, as
an involuntary egoist, you fail to recognize; and therefore the
"higher essence" is to you -- an alien* essence. Every
higher essence, e. g. truth, mankind, etc., is an essence
over us.
Alienness is a criterion of the
"sacred." In everything sacred there lies something
"uncanny," i.e. strange,** e. g. we
are not quite familiar and at home in. What is sacred to me is
not my own; and if, e. g.,, the property of
others was not sacred to me, I should look on it as mine,
which I should take to myself when occasion offered. Or, on the
other side, if I regard the face of the Chinese emperor as sacred,
it remains strange to my eye, which I close at its appearance.
Why is an incontrovertible mathematical
truth, which might even be called eternal according to the common
understanding of words, not -- sacred? Because it is not revealed,
or not the revelation of, a higher being. If by revealed we understand
only the
|
48 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
so-called religious truths, we go far astray, and entirely fail
to recognize the breadth of the concept "higher being."
Atheists keep up their scoffing at the higher being, which was
also honored under the name of the "highest" or Être
suprême, and trample in the dust one "proof of
his existence" after another, without noticing that they
themselves, out of need for a higher being, only annihilate the
old to make room for a new. Is "Man" perchance not a
higher essence than an individual man, and must not the truths,
rights, and ideas which result from the concept of him be honored
and --counted sacred, as revelations of this very concept? For,
even though we should abrogate again many a truth that seemed
to be made manifest by this concept, yet this would only evince
a misunderstanding on our part, without in the least degree harming
the sacred concept itself or taking their sacredness from those
truths that must "rightly" be looked upon as its revelations.
Man reaches beyond every individual man, and yet -- though
he be "his essence" -- is not in fact his essence
(which rather would be as single* as he the individual himself),
but a general and "higher," yes, for atheists "the
highest essence."** And, as the divine revelations were not
written down by God with his own hand, but made public through
"the Lord's instruments," so also the new highest essence
does not write out its revelations itself, but lets them come
to our knowledge through "true men." Only the new essence
betrays, in fact, a more spiritual style of conception than the
old God,
* [einzig]
**["the supreme being."]
|
MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 49 |
because the latter was still represented in a sort of embodiedness
or form, while the undimmed spirituality of the new is retained,
and no special material body is fancied for it. And withal it
does not lack corporeity, which even takes on a yet more seductive
appearance because it looks more natural and mundane and consists
in nothing less than in every bodily man -- yes, or outright in
"humanity" or "all men." Thereby the spectralness
of the spirit in a seeming body has once again become really solid
and popular.
Sacred, then, is the highest essence
and everything in which this highest essence reveals or will reveal
itself; but hallowed are they who recognize this highest essence
together with its own, i.e. together with its revelations.
The sacred hallows in turn its reverer