4. The Moderns
"Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature; old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new" (2 Corinthians 5:17) (p. 33).
By means of this biblical saying the ancient world has now indeed "passed away" or, as Saint Max really wanted to say, "all gone",b and with one leapc we have jumped over to the new, Christian, youthful, Mongoloid "world of the spirit". We shall see that this, too, will have "all gone" in a very short space of time.
"Whereas it was stated above 'for the ancients, the world was a truth', we must say here 'for the moderns the spirit was a truth', but in neither case should we forget the important addition: a truth, the untruth of which they sought to penetrate and, finally, did indeed penetrate'" (p. 33).
While we do not wish to devise any Stirner-like constructions, "we must say here": for the moderns truth was a spirit, namely the holy spirit. Jacques le bonhomme again takes the moderns not in their actual historical connection with the "world of things"—which, despite being "all gone", nevertheless continues to exist — but in their theoretical, and indeed religious, attitude. For him the history of the Middle Ages and modern times again exists only as the history of religion and philosophy; he devoutly believes all the illusions of these epochs and the philosophical illusions about these illusions. Thus, having given the history of the moderns the same turn as he gave that of the ancients, Saint Max can then easily "demonstrate" in it a "similar course to that taken by antiquity", and pass from the Christian religion to modern German philosophy as rapidly as he passed from ancient philosophy to the Christian religion. On page 37 he himself gives a characterisation of his historical illusions, by making the discovery that "the ancients have nothing to offer but worldly wisdom" and that "the moderns have never gone, and do not go, beyond theology", and he solemnly asks: "What did the moderns seek to penetrate?" The ancients and moderns alike do nothing else in history but "seek to penetrate something"—the ancients try to find out what is behind the world of things, the moderns behind the world of the spirit. In the end the ancients are left "without a world" and the moderns "without a spirit"; the ancients wanted to become idealists, the moderns to become realists (p. 485), but both of them were only occupied with the divine (p. 488)—"history up to now" is only the "history of the spiritual man" (what faith!) (p. 442)—in short we have again the child and the youth, the Negro and the Mongol, and all the rest of the terminology of the "various transformations".
At the same time we see a faithful imitation of the speculative manner, by which children beget their father, and what is earlier is brought about by what is later. From the very outset Christians must "seek to penetrate the untruthfulness of their truth", they must immediately be hidden atheists and critics, as was already indicated concerning the ancients. But not satisfied with this, Saint Max gives one more brilliant example of his "virtuosity in" (speculative) "thought" (p. 280):
ones have transformed what was earlier "one can state" that the earlier ones "originally", namely "in truth", in essence, in heaven, as hidden Jews, "set themselves no other task" than that of being transformed by the later ones. Christianity, for Jacques le bonhomme, is a self-positing subject, the absolute spirit, which "originally" posits its end as its beginning. Cf. Hegel's Encyclopädie, etc.
"Hence" (namely because one can attribute an imaginary task to Christianity) "there follows the delusion" (of course, before Feuerbach it was impossible to know what task Christianity "had originally set itself") "that Christianity attaches infinite value to the ego, as revealed, for example, in the theory of immortality and pastoral work. No, it attaches this value to man alone, man alone is immortal, and only because I am a man, am I also immortal."
If, then, from the whole of Stirner's scheme and formulation of tasks it emerges, already sufficiently clearly, that Christianity can lend immortality only to Feuerbach's "man", we learn here in addition that this comes about also because Christianity does not ascribe this immortality — to animals as well.
Let us now also draw up a scheme à la Saint Max. "Now, after" modern large-scale landownership, which has arisen from the process of parcellation, has actually "proclaimed" primogeniture, "one can state that thereby only the last consequence" of the parcellation of landed property "has been drawn" "and that" parcellation "in truth originally set itself no other task than that of realising" primogeniture, true primogeniture. "Hence there follows the delusion" that parcellation "attaches infinite value" to equal rights of members of the family, "as revealed, for example", in the laws of inheritance of the Code Napoléon. "No, it,attaches this value solely" to the eldest son; "only" the eldest son, the future owner of the entailed estate, will become a large landowner, "and only because I am" the eldest son "I will also be" a large landowner.
In this way it is infinitely easy to give history "unique" turns, as one has only to describe its very latest result as the "task" which "in truth originally it set itself". Thereby earlier times acquire a bizarre and hitherto unprecedented appearance. It produces a striking impression, and does not require great production costs. As, for instance, if one says that the real "task" which the institution of landed property "originally set itself" was to replace people by sheep — a consequence which has recently become manifest in Scotland, etc., or that the proclamation of the Capet dynasty[51]
"originally in truth set itself the task" of sending Louis XVI to the guillotine and M. Guizot into the Government. The important thing is to do it in a solemn, pious, priestly way, to draw a deep breath, and then suddenly to burst out: "Now, at last, one can state it."
What Saint Max says about the moderns in the above section (pp. 33-37) is only the prologue to the spirit history which is in store for us. Here, too, we see how he tries "to rid himself as quickly as possible" of empirical facts and parades before us the same categories as in the case of the ancients—reason, heart, spirit, etc.—only they are given different names. The Sophists become sophistical scholastics, "humanists, Machiavellism (the art of printing, the New World", etc.; cf. Hegel's Geschichte der Philosophie* III, p. 128) who represent reason; Socrates is transformed into Luther, who extols the heart (Hegel, I.e., p. 227), and of the post-Reformation period we learn that during that time it was a matter of "empty cordiality" (which in the section about the ancients was called "purity of heart", cf. Hegel, I.e., p. 241). All this on page 34. In this way Saint Max "proves" that "Christianity takes a course similar to that of antiquity". After Luther he no longer even troubles to provide names for his categories; he hurries in seven-league boots to modern German philosophy. Four appositions ("until nothing remains but empty cordiality, all the universal love of mankind, love of man, consciousness of freedom, 'self-consciousness'", p. 34; Hegel, I.e., pp. 228, 229), four words fill the gulf between Luther and Hegel and "only thus is Christianity completed". This whole argument is achieved in one masterly sentence, with the help of such levers as "at last"—"and from that time"—"since one"—"also"— "from day to day"—"until finally", etc., a sentence which the reader can verify for himself on the classic page 34 already mentioned.
Finally Saint Max gives us a few more examples of his faith, showing that he is so little ashamed of the Gospel that he asserts: "We really are nothing but spirit", and maintains that at the end of the ancient world "after long efforts" the "spirit" has really "rid itself of the world". And immediately afterwards he once more betrays the secret of his scheme, by declaring of the Christian spirit that "like a youth it entertains plans for improving or saving the world". All this on page 36.
"So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet-coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy.... And upon her forehead was a name written, Mystery, Babylon the Great... and I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints", etc. (Revelation of St. John, 17, Verses 3, 5, 6).
The apocalyptic prophet did not prophesy accurately this time. Now at last, after Stirner has acclaimed man, one can state that he ought to have said: So he carried me into the wilderness of the spirit. And I saw a man sit upon a scarlet-coloured beast, full of blasphemy of names ... and upon his forehead was a name written, Mystery, the unique ... and I saw the man drunken with the blood of holy, etc. So we now enter the wilderness of the spirit.
A. The Spirit ( Pure History of Spirits)
The first thing we learn about the "spirit" is that it is not the spirit but "the realm of spirits" that "is immensely large". Saint Max has nothing to say immediately of the spirit except that "an immensely large realm of spirits" exists — just as all he knows of the Middle Ages is that this period lasted for "a long time". Having presupposed that this "realm of spirits" exists, he subsequently proves its existence with the help of ten theses.
1. The spirit is not a free spirit until it is not occupied with itself alone, until it is not "solely concerned" with its own world, the "spiritual" world (first with itself alone and then with its own world).
2. "It is a free spirit only in a world of its own." 3. "Only by means of a spiritual world is the spirit really spirit." 4. "Before the spirit has created its world of spirits, it is not spirit." 5. "Its creations make it spirit."... 6. "Its creations are its world." ... 7. "The spirit is the creator of a spiritual world." ... 8. "The spirit exists only when it creates the spiritual." ... 9. "Only together with the spiritual, which is its creation, is it real."... 10. "ß u t the works or offspring of the spirit are nothing but — spirits" (pp. 38-39).
In thesis 1 the "spiritual world" is again immediately presupposed as existing, instead of being deduced, and this thesis 1 is again preached to us in theses 2-9 in eight new transformations. At the end of thesis 9 we find ourselves exactly where we were at the end of thesis 1 — and then in thesis 10 a "fru£" suddenly introduces us to " spirits'', about whom so far nothing has been said.
"Since the spirit exists only by creating the spiritual, we look around for its first creations" (p. 41).
According to theses 3, 4, 5, 8, and 9, however, the spirit is its own creation. This is now expressed thus, the spirit, i.e., the first creation of the spirit, the thinker, for you do not think until you think, i.e."—i.e.,—"havesome thought. Is it not your singing alone that makes you a singer, your speech that makes you a speaking person? Well, in the same way only the creation of the spiritual makes you spirit."
Our saintly conjurer assumes that the spirit creates the spiritual in order to draw the conclusion that the spirit creates itself as spirit; on the other hand, he assumes it as spirit in order to allow it to arrive at its spiritual creations (which, "according to the myth, are reproduced of themselves" and become spirits). So far we have the long-familiar orthodox-Hegelian phrases. The genuinely "unique" exposition of what Saint Max wants to say only begins with the example he gives. That is to say, if Jacques le bonhomme cannot get any further, if even "One" and "It" are unable to float his stranded ship, "Stirner" calls his third serf to his assistance, the "You", who never leaves him in the lurch and on whom he can rely in extremity. This "You" is an individual whom we are not encountering for the first time, a pious and faithful servant,3 whom we have seen going through fire and water, a worker in the vineyard of his lord, a man who does not allow anything to terrify him, in a word he is: Szeliga.(1) When "Stirner" is in the utmost plight in his exposition he cries out: Szeliga, help!—and trusty Eckart Szeliga immediately puts his shoulder to the wheel to get the cart out of the mire. We shall have more to say later about Saint Max's relation to Szeliga.
It is a question of spirit which creates itself out of nothing, hence it is a question of nothing, which out of nothing makes itself spirit. From this Saint Max derives the creation of Szeliga's spirit from Szeliga. And who else if not Szeliga could "Stirner" count on allowing himself to be put in the place of nothing in the manner indicated above? Who could be taken in by such a trick but Szeliga, who feels highly flattered at being allowed to appear at all as one of the dramatis personae? What Saint Max had to prove was not that a given "you", i.e., the given Szeliga, becomes a thinker, speaker, singer from the moment when he begins to think, speak, sing — but that the thinker creates himself out of nothing by beginning to think, that the singer creates himself out of nothingby beginning to sing, etc., and it is not even the thinker and the singer, but the thought and the singing as subjects that create themselves out of nothingby beginning to think and to sing. For the rest, "Stirner makes only the extremely simple reflection" and states only the "extremely popular" proposition (cf.
Wigand, p. 156) that Szeliga develops one of his qualities by developing it. There is, of course, absolutely nothing "to be wondered at" in the fact that Saint Max does not even "make" correctly "such simple reflections", but expresses them incorrectly in order thereby to prove a still much more incorrect proposition with the aid of the most incorrect logic in the world.
Far from it being true that "out of nothing" I make myself, for example, a "speaker", the nothing which forms the basis here is a very manifold something, the real individual, his speech organs, a definite stage of physical development, an existing language and dialects, ears capable of hearing and a human environment from which it is possible to hear something, etc., etc. Therefore, in the development of a property something is created by something out of something, and by no means comes, as in Hegel's Logik, from nothing, through nothing to nothing,3
Now that Saint Max has his faithful Szeliga close at hand, everything goes forward smoothly again. We shall see how, by means of his "you", he again transforms the spirit into the youth, exactly as he earlier transformed the youth into the spirit; here we shall again find the whole history of the youth repeated almost word for word, only with a few camouflaging alterations — just as the "immensely large realm of spirits" mentioned on page 37 was nothing but the "realm of the spirit", to found and enlarge which was the "aim" of the spirit of the youth (p. 17).
"Just as you, however, distinguish yourself from the thinker, singer, speaker, so you distinguish yourself no less from the spirit and are well aware that you are something else as well as spirit. However, just as in the enthusiasm of thinking it may easily happen that sight and hearing fail the thinking ego, so the enthusiasm of the spirit has seized you too, and you now aspire with all your might to become wholly spirit and merged in spirit. The spirit is vour ideal, something unattained, something of the beyond: spirit means your — God, 'God is spirit' .... You inveigh against yourself, you who cannot get rid of a relic of the non-spiritual. Instead of saying: I am more than spirit, you say contritely: I am less than spirit, and I can only envisage spirit, pure spirit, or the spirit which is nothing but spirit, but I am not it, and since Î am not it, then it is an other, it exists as an other, whom I call 'God'."
After previously for a long time occupying ourselves with the trick of making something out of nothing, we now suddenly, perfectly "naturally", come to an individual who is something else as well as spirit, consequently is something, and wants to become pure spirit, i.e., nothing. This much easier problem, i.e., to turn something into nothing, once again poses the whole storv of the vouth, w[7]ho "has ve to seek the perfect soiri'", and one needs mereiv to repeat the old Dhrases irom pages 17-18 to be extricated from all difficulties. Particularly, when one has such an obedient and gullible servant as Szeiiga, on whom "Stirne~ can impose the idea that just as "in the enthusiasm of thinking it mav easily" (Ts "happen that sight and hearing fail" him "Stirner". 50 he, Szeliga. has also neen 'seized with tne enthusiasm of the spirit' and he, Szeliga. is now aspiring with aL his mignt to become spirit'', instead of acouiring spirit, that is to sa\, ne now has to piav the ro^e or the voutii as presented on page 16. Szeliga believes it and in fear and trembling he obevs: he obevs when Saint Max thunders at him: The spirit is vour ideal — vour God Y01: do this for me, YOU do that for me. Nov vou ' inveigh'", now \m: sav", now 'vou can envisage", etc. When "Stirner'" imposes on him the idea that "the pure spirit is an other, for he" CSzeliga) 'is notv' then in truth, it is onlv Szeliga who is capable of believing him and wno gabbles the entire nonsense after him, word for word. Ina dentally, the method by which Jacques le bonhomme makes up this nonsense was alreadv exhaustively anaivsed when dealing with th'j
vouth Since you are well aware that vou are something else as well as a mathematician, vou aspire to become wholly a mathematician, to become merged in mathematics, the mathematician is your ideal, mathematician means vour — God. Y ou sav contritelv: I am less than a mathematician and I can oniv envisage the mathematician, and since I am not him, then he is an other he exists as an other, whom 1 cal! "God". Someone else in Szehga s place would say — Arago.
"Now. ar last, after' we have proved Stirner's thesis to be a repetition of the 'vouth'", 'one can state' that he "in truth originally set himsell no other task" than to identity the spirit of Christian asceticism with spirit in general, and to identify the frivolous esprit, for example, of the eighteenth centurv with Christian spiritlessness.
It follows, therefore that the necessio of spirit dwelling in the bevonu, i.e., being Got*, is nor to be explained, as Stirner asserts, 'because ego and spirit are different names lor different things, because ego is not spirit and spirit is not ego" (p. 42). The explanation lies in the "enthusiasm of the spirit" which is ascribed without any grounds to Szeliga and which makes him an ascetic, i.e., a man who wishes to become God (pure spirit), and because he is not able to do this posits God outside himself. But it was a matter of the spirit having first to create itselj out of nothing and then having to create spirits out of itself. Instead of this, Szeliga now produces God (the unique spirit that makes its appearance here) not because he, Szeliga, is the spirit, but because he is Szeliga, i.e., imperfect spirit, unspiritual spirit, and therefore at the same time non-spirit. But Saint Max does not say a word about how the Christian conception of spirit as God arises, although this is now no longer such a clever feat; he assumes the existence of this conception in order to explain it. The history of the creation of the spirit "has in truth originally set itself no other task" than to put Stirner's stomach among the stars.
"Precisely because we are not the Precisely because we are not the spirit which dwells within us, for that stomach which dwells within us, for that very reason we had to very reason we had to
put it outside of ourselves; it was not us, and therefore we could not conceive it as existing except outside of ourselves, beyond us, in the beyond" (p. 43).
It was a matter of the spirit having first to create itself and then having to create something other than itself out of itself; the question was: What is this something else? No answer is given to this question, but after the above-mentioned "various transformations" and twists, it becomes distorted into the following new question:
"The spirit is something other than the ego. But what is this something other?" (p. 45).
Now, therefore, the question arises: What is the spirit other than the ego? whereas the original question was: What is the spirit, owing to its creation out of nothing, other than itself? With this Saint Max jumps to the next "transformation".
B. The Possessed ( Impure History of Spirits)
Without realising it, Saint Max has so far done no more than give instruction in the art of spirit-seeing, by regarding the ancient and modern world only as the "pseudo-body of a spirit", as a spectral phenomenon, and seeing in it only struggles of spirits. Now, however, he consciously and ex professo gives instruction in the art of ghost-seeing.
Instructions in the art of seeing spirits. First of all one must become transformed into a complete fool, i.e., imagine oneself to be Szeliga, and then say to oneself, as Saint Max does to this Szeliga: "Look around you in the world and say for yourself whether a spirit is not looking at you from everywhere!" If one can bring oneself to imagine this, then the spirits will come "easily", of themselves; in a "flower" one sees only the "creator", in the mountains — a^'spirit of loftiness", in water — a "spirit of longing" or the longing of the spirit, and one hears "millions of spirits speak through the mouths of people". If one has achieved this level, if one can exclaim with Stirner: " Yes, ghosts are teeming in the whole world," then "it is not difficult to advance to the point" (p. 93) where one makes the further exclamation: "Only in it? No, the world itself is an apparition" (let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil,(1) i.e., a logical transition), "it is the wandering pseudo-body of a spirit, it is an apparition." Then cheerfully "look near at hand or into the distance, you are surrounded by a ghostly world.... You see spirits". If you are an ordinary person you can be satisfied with that, but if you are thinking of ranking yourself with Szeliga, then you can also look into yourself and then "you should not be surprised" if, in these circumstances and from the heights of Szeligality, you discover also that "your spirit is a ghost haunting your body", that you yourself are a ghost which "awaits salvation, that is, a spirit". Thereby you will have arrived at the point where you are capable of seeing "spirits" and "ghosts" in "all" people, and therewith spirit-seeing "reaches its final goal" (pp. 46, 47).
The basis of this instruction, only much more correctly expressed, is to be found in Hegel, inter alia, in the Geschichte der Philosophie, III, pp. 124, 125.
Saint Max has such faith in his own instruction that as a result he himself becomes Szeliga and asserts that
"ever since the word was made flesh, the world is spiritualised, bewitched, a ghost" (p. 47).
"Stirner" "sees spirits". Saint Max intends to give us a phenomenology of the Christian spirit and in his usual way seizes on only one aspect. For the Christian the world was not only spiritualised but equally ^spiritualised as, for example, Hegel quite correctly admits in the passage mentioned, where he brings the two aspects into relation with each other, which Saint Max should also have done if he wanted to proceed historically. As against the world's despiritualisation in the Christian consciousness, the ancients, "who saw gods everywhere", can with equal justification be regarded as the spiritualisers of the world — a conception which our saintly dialectician rejects with the well-meaning warning: "Gods, my dear modern man, are not spirits" (p. 47). Pious Max recognises only the holy spirit as spirit.
But even if he had given us this phenomenology (which after Hegel is moreover superfluous), he would all the same have given us
:I Matthew 5 : 37.—Ed.
nothing. The standpoint at which people are content with such tales about spirits is itself a religious one, because for people who adopt it religion is a satisfactory answer, they regard religion as causa suia (for both "self-consciousness" and "man" are still religious) instead of explaining it from the empirical conditions and showing how definite relations of industry and intercourse are necessarily connected with a definite form of society, hence, with a definite form of state and hence with a definite form of religious consciousness. If Stirner had looked at the real history of the Middle Ages, he could have found why the Christian's notion of the world took precisely this form in the Middle Ages, and how it happened that it subsequently passed into a different one; he could have found that " Christianity" has no history whatever and that all the different forms in which it was visualised at various times were not "self-determinations" and "further developments" "of the religious spirit", but were brought about by wholly empirical causes in no way dependent on any influence of the religious spirit.
Since Stirner "does not stick to the rules" (p. 45), it is possible, before dealing in more detail with spirit-seeing, to say here and now that the various "transformations" of Stirner's people and their world consist merely in the transformation of the entire history of the world into the body of Hegel's philosophy; into ghosts, which only apparently are an "other being" of the thoughts of the Berlin professor. In the Phänomenologie, the Hegelian bible, "the book", individuals are first of all transformed into "consciousness" [and the] world into "object", whereby the manifold variety of forms of life and history is reduced to a different attitude of "consciousness" to the "object". This different attitude is reduced, in turn, to three cardinal relations: 1) the relation of consciousness to the object as to truth, or to truth as mere object (for example, sensual consciousness, natural religion, Ionic philosophy, Catholicism, the authoritarian state, etc.); 2) the relation of consciousness as the true to the object (reason, spiritual religion, Socrates, Protestantism, the French Revolution); 3) the true relation of consciousness to truth as object, or to the object as truth (logical thinking, speculative philosophy, the spirit as existing for the spirit). In Hegel, too, the first relation is defined as God the Father, the second as Christ, the third as the Holy Spirit, etc. Stirner already used these transformations when speaking of child and youth, of ancient and modern, and he repeats them later in regard to Catholicism and Protestantism, the Negro and the Mongol, etc., and then accepts this series of camouflages of a thought in all good faith as the world against which he has to assert and maintain himself as a 'corporeal individual".
Second set of instructions in spirit-seeing. How to transform the world into the spectre of truth, and oneself into something made holv or spectral. A conversation between Saint Max and his servant Szeiiga (pp. 47, 48).
Saint Max; "You have spirit, ior you have thoughts. What are your thoughts"" Szeiiga: "Spiritual entities.'
Saint Max: "Kence thev are not things-*"
Szeiiga: "No, but thev are the spirit of things, tne important element in all tfiings, their innermost essence, their idea."
Saint Max: ' Wnat vou think is, therefore, not merelv your thought0"
Szeiiga: "On the contrarv, it is the most real, genuinely true thing in the world: it I-, truth itself: when Î but trulv think. I think the truth. Î can admittedlv be mistaken about the truth and fail to perceive it, but when I trulv perceive, then the object of mv perception is the truth "
Saint Max: "Thus, you endeavour all the time to perceive the truth0" Szeiiga: 'Tor me the truth is sacred'.... The truth I cannot abolish; in the truth i believe, and therefore I investigate into its nature: there is nothing higher than k. it is eternal. The truth is sacred, eternal, it is the hoiv, the eternal."
Saint Max (indignantly): "But you, bv allowing yourself to become filled with this holiness, become yourself holv.'
Thus, when Szeliga truly perceives some object, the object ceases to be an object and becomes "the truth". This is the first manufacture of spectres on a large scale.—It is now no longer a matter of perceiving objects, but of perceiving the truth: first he perceives objects truiy, which ne defines as the truth of perception and he transforms this into perception of the truth. But after Szeiiga has thus allowed truth as a spectre to be imposed on him bv the threatening saint, his siern master strikes home with a question o' conscience, whether he is filled "all the time" with longing for the truth whereupon the thoroughly confused Szeiiga blurts oir somewhat prematurely: "For me the truth is sacred." Bu; iu immediatelv notices his error and tries to correct it, by shamefaced h transforming objects no longer into the truth, out into a number o-truths, and abstracting "the truth'" as the trutn of these truths, "the truth" which he can now no longer abolish after he has distinguished it from truths which are capable of being abolished. Therebv it becomes "eternal". But not satisfied with giving it predicates such as "sacred, eternal", he transforms it into the holy, the eternal, as suoject. Alter this, of course. Saint Max can explain to him tha having become "filled" with this holiness, he "himself becomes holy" and "should not be surprised" if he now "finds nothing but a spectre" in himself. Then our saint begins a sermon:
"The holy, moreover, is not for your senses" and quite consistently appends by means of the conjunction "and': "never will you, as a sensuous being, discover its traces"; that is to say, after sensuous objects are "all gone" and "the truth", "the sacred truth", "the holy" has taken their place. "But"—obviously!—"for your faith or more exactly for your spirit" (for your lack of spirit), "for it is itself som^/ungspiritual" (per appositionerrf), "a spirit" (again per appos.), "is spirit for the spirif.
Such is the art of transforming the ordinary world, "objects", by means of an arithmetical series of appositions, into "spirit for the spirit". Here we can only admire this dialectical method of appositions — later we shall have occasion to explore it and present it in all its classical beauty .b
The method of appositions can also be reversed — for example here, after we have once produced "the holy", it does not receive further appositions, but is made the apposition of a new definition; this is combining progression with equation. Thus, as a result of some dialectical process "there remains the idea of another entity" which "I should serve more than myself" (per appos.), "which for me should be more important than everything else" (per appos.), "in short — a something in which I should seek my true salvation'' (and finally per appos. the return to the first series), and which becomes "something 'holy' " (p. 48). We have here two progressions which are equated to each other and can thus provide the opportunity for a great variety of equations. We shall deal with this later. By this method too, "the sacred", which hitherto we have been acquainted with only as a purely theoretical designation of purely theoretical relations, has acquired a new practical meaning as "something in which I should seek my true salvation", which makes it possible to make the holy the opposite of the egoist. Incidentally we need hardly mention that this entire dialogue with the sermon that follows is nothing but another repetition of the story of the youth already met with three or four times before.
Here, having arrived at the "egoist", we need not stick to Stirner's "rules" either, because, firstly, we have to present his argument in all its purity, free from any intervening intermezzos, and, secondly, because in any case these intermezzi (on the analogy of "a Laza-roni"—Wigand, p. 159, the word should be Lazzarone — Sancho would say intermezzi's) will occur again in other parts of the book, for Stirner, far from obeying his own requirement "always to draw back into himself", on the contrary expresses himself again and again. We shall only just mention that the question raised on page 45: What is this something distinct from the "ego" that is the spirit? is now answered to the effect that it is the holy, i.e., that which is foreign to the "ego", and that everything that is foreign to the "ego" is — thanks to some unstated appositions, appositions "in themselves"—accordingly without more ado regarded as spirit. Spirit, the holy, the foreign are identical ideas, on which he declares war, in the same way almost word for word as he did at the very outset in regard to the youth and the man. We have, therefore, still not advanced a step further than we had on page 20.
a) The Apparition
Saint Max now begins to deal seriously with the "spirits" that are "offspring of the spirit" (p. 39), with the ghostliness of everything (p. 47). At any rate, he imagines so. Actually, however, he only substitutes a new name for his former conception of history according to which people were from the outset the representatives of general concepts. These general concepts appear here first of all in the Negroid form as objective spirits having for people the character of objects, and at this level are called spectres or—apparitions. The chief spectre is, of course, "man" himself, because, according to what has been previously said, people only exist for one another as representatives of a universal — essence, concept, the holy, the foreign, the spirit — i.e., only as spectral persons, spectres, and because, according to Hegel's Phänomenologie, page 255 and elsewhere, the spirit, insofar as for man it has the "form of thinghood", is another man (see below about "the man').
Thus, we see here the skies opening and the various kinds of spectres passing before us one after the other. Jacques le bonhomme forgets only that he has already caused ancient and modern times to parade before us like gigantic spectres, compared with which ail the harmless fancies about God, etc., are sheer trifies.
Spectre No. 1 : the supreme being, God (p. 53). As was to be expected from what has preceded, Jacques le bonhomme, whose faith moves all the mountains(1) of world history, believes that "for thousands of years people have set themselves the task", "have tired themselves out struggling with the awful impossibility, the endless Danaidean labour"—"to prove the existence of God". We need not waste any more words on this incredible belief.
Spectre No. 2: essence. What our good man says about essence is limited — apart from what has been copied out of Hegel — to "pompous words and miserable thoughts" (p. 53). "The advance from" essence "to" world essence "is not difficult", and this world essence is, of course,
Spectre No. 3: the vanity of the world. There is nothing to say about this except that from it "easily" arises
Spectre No. 4: good and evil beings. Something, indeed, could be said about this but is not said — and one passes at once to the next:
Spectre No. 5: the essence and its realm. We should not be at all surprised that we find here essence for the second time in our honest author, for he is fully aware of his "clumsiness" (Wigand, p. 166), and therefore repeats everything several times in order not to be misunderstood. Essence is here in the first place defined as the proprietor of a "realm" and then it is said of it that it is "essence" (p. 54), after which it is swiftly transformed into
Spectre No. 6: "essences". To perceive and to recognise them, and them alone, is religion. "Their realm" (of essences) "is — a realm of essences" (p. 54). Here there suddenly appears for no apparent reason
Spectre No. 7: the God-Man, Christ. Of him Stirner is able to say that he was "corpulent". If Saint Max does not believe in Christ, he at least believes in his "actual corpus". According to Stirner, Christ introduced great distress into history, and our sentimental saint relates with tears in his eyes "how the strongest Christians have racked their brains in order to comprehend him"—indeed,
"there has never been a spectre that caused such mental anguish, and no shaman, spurring himself into wild frenzy and nerve-racking convulsions, can have suffered such agony as Christians have suffered on account of this most incomprehensible spectre".
Saint Max sheds a sympathetic tear at the grave of the victims of Christ and then passes on to the "horrible being",
Spectre No. 8, man. Here our bold writer is seized with immediate "horror"—"he is terrified of himself", he sees in every man a "frightful spectre", a "sinister spectre." in which something "stalks" (pp. 55, 56). He feels highly uncomfortable. The split between phenomenon and essence gives him no peace. He is like Nabal, Abigail's husband, of whom it is written that his essence too was separated from his phenomenal appearance: "And there was a man in Maon, whose possessions'1 were in Carmel". (1 Samuel 25 : 2.) But in the nick of time, before the "mental anguish" causes Saint Max in desperation to put a bullet through his head, he suddenly remembers the ancients who "took no notice of anything of the kind in their slaves". This leads him to
Spectre No. 9, the national spirit (p. 56), about which too Saint Max, who can no longer be restrained, indulges in "frightful" fantasies, in order to transform
Spectre No. 10, "everything", into an apparition and, finally, where all enumeration ends, to hurl together in the class of spectres the "holy spirit", truth, justice, law, the good cause (which he still cannot forget) and half a dozen other things completely foreign to one another.
Apart from this there is nothing remarkable in the whole chapter except that Saint Max's faith moves an historical mountain. That is to say, he utters the opinion (p. 56):
"Only for the sake of a supreme being has anyone ever been worshipped, only as a spectre has he been regarded as a sanctified, i.e." (that is!) "protected and recognised person."
If we shift this mountain, moved by faith alone, back into its proper place, then "it will read": Only for the sake of persons who are protected, i.e., who protect themselves, and who are privileged, i.e., who seize privileges for themselves, have supreme beings been worshipped and spectres sanctified. Saint Max imagines, for example, that in antiquity, when each people was held together by material relations and interests, e.g., by the hostility of the various tribes, etc., when owing to a shortage of productive forces each had either to be a slave or to possess slaves, etc., etc., when, therefore, belonging to a particular people was a matter of "the most natural interest" (Wigand, p. [162])—that then it was only the concept people, or "nationality" that gave birth to these interests from itself; he imagines also that in modern times, when free competition and world trade gave birth to hypocritical, bourgeois cosmopolitanism and the notion of man — that here, on the contrary, the later philosophical construction of man brought about those relations as its "revelations" (p. 51). It is the same with religion, with the realm of essences, which he considers the unique realm, but concerning the essence of which he knows nothing, for otherwise he must have known that religion as such has neither essence, nor realm. In religion people make their empirical world into an entity that is only conceived, imagined, that confronts them as something foreign. This again is by no means to be explained from other concepts, from "self-consciousness" and similar nonsense, but from the entire hitherto existing mode of production and intercourse, which is just as independent of the pure concept as the invention of the self-acting mulea and the use of railways are independent of Hegelian philosophy. If he wants to speak of an "essence" of religion, i.e., of a material basis of this inessentiality,b then he should look for it neither in the "essence of man", nor in the predicates of God, but in the material world which each stage of religious development finds in existence (cf. above Feuerbach).c
All the "spectres" which have filed before us were concepts. These concepts — leaving aside their real basis (which Stirner in any case leaves aside)—understood as concepts inside consciousness, as thoughts in people's heads, transferred from their objectivity back into the subject, elevated from substance into self-consciousness, are—whimsies or fixed ideas.
Concerning the origin of Saint Max's history of ghosts, see Feuerbach in Anekdota II, p. 66.d where it is stated:
"Theology is belief in ghosts. Ordinary theology, however, has its ghosts in the sensuous imagination, speculative theology has them in non-sensuous abstraction."
And since Saint Max shares the belief of all critical speculative philosophers of modern times that thoughts, which have become independent, objectified thoughts — ghosts — have ruled the world and continue to rule it, and that all history up to now was the history of theology, nothing could be easier for him than to transform history into a history of ghosts. Sancho's history of ghosts, therefore, rests on the traditional belief in ghosts of the speculative philosophers.
b) Whimsy
"Man, there are spectres in your head!... You have a fixed idea!" thunders Saint Max at his slave Szeliga. "Don't think I am joking," he threatens him. Don't dare to think that the solemn "Max Stirner" is capable of joking.
The man of God is again in need of his faithful Szeliga in order to pass from the object to the subject, from the apparition to the whimsy.
Whimsy is the hierarchy in the single individual, the domination
The English term is used in the manuscript.—Ed.
In German a pun on the words Wesen—essence, substance, being — and Unwesen—literally inessence. Unwesen can be rendered in English as disorder, nuisance, confusion or, in a different context, monster.—Ed.
See this volume, pp. 53-54.—Ed.
Ludwig Feuerbach, "Vorläufige Thesen zur Reformation der Philosophie".— Ed.
of thought "in him over him". After the world has confronted the fantasy-making youth (of page 20) as a world of his "feverish fantasies", as a world of ghosts, "the offsprings of his own head" inside his head begin to dominate him. The world of his feverish fantasies — this is the step forward he has made — now exists as the world of his deranged mind. Saint Max — the man who is confronted by "the world of the moderns" in the form of the fantasy-making youth — has necessarily to declare that "almost the whole of mankind consists of veritable fools, inmates of a mad-house" (p. 57).
The whimsy which Saint Max discovers in the heads of people is nothing but his own whimsy — the whimsy of the "saint" who views the world sub specie aeterno and who takes both the hypocritical phrases of people and their illusions for the true motives of their actions; that is why our naive, pious man confidently pronounces the great proposition: "Almost all mankind clings to something higher" (P- 57).
"Whimsy" is "a fixed idea", i.e., "an idea which has subordinated man to itself" or — as is said later in more popular form — all kinds of absurdities which people "have stuffed into their heads". With the utmost ease, Saint Max arrives at the conclusion that everything that has subordinated people to itself — for example, the need to produce in order to live, and the relations dependent on this — is such an "absurdity" or "fixed idea". Since the child's world is the only "world of things", as we learned in the myth of "a man's life", everything that does not exist "for the child" (at times also for the animal) is in any case an "idea" and "easily also" a "fixed idea". We are still a long way from getting rid of the youth and the child.
The chapter on whimsy aims merely at establishing the existence of the category of whimsy in the history of "man". The actual struggle against whimsy is waged throughout the entire "book" and particularly in the second part. Hence a few examples of whimsy can suffice us here.
On page 59, Jacques le bonhomme believes that "our newspapers are full of politics, because they are in the grip of the delusion that man was created in order to become a zoon politikon" .
Hence, according to Jacques le bonhomme, people engage in politics because our newspapers are full of them! If a church father were to glance at the stock exchange reports of our newspapers, he could not judge differently from Saint Max and would have to say: these newspapers are full of stock exchange reports because they are in the grip of the delusion that man was created in order to engage in financial speculation. Thus, it is not the newspapers that possess whimsies, but whimsies that possess "Stirner".
Stirner explains the condemnation of incest and the institutions of monogamy from "the holy", "they are the holy". If among the Persians incest is not condemned, and if the institution of polygamv occurs among the Turks, then in those places incest and polygamy are "the holy". It is not possible to see any difference between these two "holies" other than that the nonsense with which the Persiajhs and Turks have "stuffed their heads" is different from that with which the Christian Germanic peoples have stuffed their heads.—Such is the church father s manner of "detaching himself" from historv "in good time".—Jacques le bonhomme has so little inkling of the real, materialist causes for the condemnation of polygamy and incest in certain social conditions that he considers this condemnation to be merely the dogma of a creed and in common with every philistine imagines that when a man is imprisoned for a crime of this kind, it means that "moral puritv" is confining him in a "house of moral correction" (p. 60)—just as jails in general seem to him to be houses for moral correction — in this respect he is at a lower level than the educated bourgeois, who has a better understanding of the matter — cf. the literature on prisons. "Stirner's" "jails" are the most trite illusions of the Berlin burgher which for him, however, hardly deserve to be called a "house of moral correction".
After Stirner, with the help of an "episodically included" "historical reflection", has discovered that
"u had to come to pass that the whole man with all his abilities would prove to be religious" (p. 64) "so, too, in point of fact" "it is not surprising"—"for we are now so thoroughly religious"—"that" the oath "of the members ofthe /uncondemns us to death and that bv means of the 'official oath' the police constable, as a good Christian, has us put in the clink".
When a gendarme stops him for smoking in the Tiergarten,[52] the cigar is knocked out of his mouth not by the royal Prussian gendarme who is paid to do so and shares in the monev from fines, but by the "official oath". In precisely the same way the power of the bourgeois in the jurv court becomes transformed for Stirner — owing to the pseudo-hoiy appearance which the amis du commerce assume here — into the power of making a vow, the power of the oath, into the "holy". "Verily, I say unto you: I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel." (Matthew 8 : 10.)
Therefore Saint Max has on the same page to receive several thorns in the flesh3 and must give us a number of maxims: firstly, the maxim [to recognise] no maxims, with which goes, secondly, the maxim not to have any firm standpoint; thirdly, the maxim "although we should possess spirit, spirit should not possess us"; and fourthly, the maxim that one should also be aware of one's flesh, "for only by being aware of his flesh is man fully aware of himself, and only by being fully aware of himself, is he aware or rational".
C. The Impurely Impure History of Spirits loo a) Negroes and Mongols
We now go back to the beginning of the "unique" historical scheme and nomenclature. The child becomes the Negro, the youth — the Mongol. See "The Economy of the Old Testament".
"The historical reflection on our Mongolhood, which I shall include episodically at this point, I present without any claim to thoroughness or even to authenticity, but solely because it seems to me that it can contribute to clarifying the rest" (p. 87).
Saint Max tries to "clarify" for himself his phrases about the child and the youth by giving them world-embracing names, and he tries to "clarify" these world-embracing names by replacing them with his phrases about the child and the youth. "The Negroid character represents antiquity, dependence on things" (child); "the Mongoloid character—the period of dependence on thoughts, the Christian epoch" (the youth). (Cf. "The Economy of the Old Testament".) "The following words are reserved for the future: I am owner of the world of things, and I am owner of the world of thoughts" (pp. 87, 88). This "future" has already happened once, on page 20, in connection with the man, and it will occur again later, beginning with page 226.
First "historical reflection without claim to thoroughness or even to authenticity": Since Egypt is part of Africa where Negroes live, it follows that "included" "in the Negro era" (p. 88) are the "campaigns of Sesostris", which never took place, and the "significance of Egypt" (the significance it had also at the time of the Ptolemies, Napoleon's expedition to Egypt, Mohammed Ali, the Eastern question, the pamphlets of Duvergier de Haurannes, etc.), "and of North Africa in general" (and therefore of Carthage, Hannibal's campaign against Rome, and "easily also", the significance of Syracuse and Spain, the Vandals, Tertullian, the Moors, Al Hussein Abu Ali Ben Abdallah Ibn Sina, piratical states, the French in Algeria, Abd-el-Kader, Père Enfantin[53] and the four new toads of the Charivari) (p. 88). Consequently, Stirner clarifies the campaigns of Sesostris, etc., by transferring them to the Negro era, and he clarifies the Negro era by "episodically including" it as a historical illustration of his unique thoughts "about our childhood years".
Second "historical reflection": "To the Mongoloid era belong the campaigns of the Huns and Mongols up to the Russians" (and Wasserpolackerf4): thus here again the campaigns of the Huns and Mongols, together with the Russians, are "clarified" by their inclusion in the "Mongoloid era", and the "Mongoloid era"—by pointing out that it is the era of the phrase "dependence on thoughts", which we have already encountered in connection with the youth.
Third "historical reflection": In the Mongoloid era the "value of my ego cannot possibly be put at a high level because the hard diamond of the non-ego is too high in price, because it is still too gritty and impregnable for it to be absorbed and consumed by my ego. On the contrary, people are simply exceptionally busv crawling about on this static world, this substance, like parasitic animalcules on a body from whose juices they extract nourishment, but nevertheless do not devour the body. It is the bustling activity of noxious insects, the industriousness of Mongols. Among the Chinese indeed everything remains as of old, etc.... Therefore" (because among the Chinese everything remains as of old) "in our Mongol era every change has onlv been reformatory and corrective, and not destructive, devouring or annihilating. The substance, the object remains. All our industriousness is only the activity of ants and the jumping of fleas ... juggling on the tightrope of the objective", etc. (p. 88. Cf. Hegel, Philosophie der Geschichte, pp. 113, 118, 119 (unsoftened substance), p. 140, etc., where China is understood as "substan-tiality").
We learn here, therefore, that in the true Caucasian era people will be guided by the maxim that the earth, "substance", the "object", the "static" has to be devoured, "consumed", "annihilated", "absorbed", "destroyed", and along with the earth the solar system that is inseparable from it. World-devouring "Stirner" has alread) introduced us to the "reformatory or corrective activity" of the Mongols as the youth's and Christian's "pians for the salvation and correction of the world" on page 36. Thus we have still not advanced a step. It is characteristic of the entire "unique" conception of history that the highest stage of this Mongol activity earns the title of "scientific"—from which already now the conclusion can be drawn, which Saint Max later tells us, that the culmination of the Mongolian heaven is the Hegelian kingdom of spirits.
Fourth "historical reflection". The world on which the Mongols crawl about is now transformed by means of a "flea jump" into the "positive", this into the "precept", and, with the help of a paragraph on page 89. the precept becomes "morality". "Morality appears in its first form as custom"—hence it comes forward as a person, but in a trice it becomes transformed into a sphere:
"To act in accordance with the morals and customs of one's country means here" (i.e., in the sphere of morality) "to be moral". "Therefore" (because this occurs in the sphere of morality as a custom) "pure, moral behaviour in the most straightforward form is practised in ... China]"
Saint Max is unfortunate in his examples. On page 116 in just the same way he attributes to the North Americans the "religion of honesty". He regards the two most rascally nations on earth, the patriarchal swindlers — the Chinese, and the civilised swindlers — the Yankees, as "straightforward", "moral" and "honest". If he had looked up his crib he could have found the North Americans classed as swindlers on page 81 of the Philosophie der Geschichte and the Chinese ditto on page 130.
"One"—that friend of the saintly worthy man — now helps him to arrive at innovation, and from this an "and" brings him back to custom, and thus the material is prepared for achieving a master stroke in the
Fifth historical reflection: "There is in fact no doubt that by means of custom man protects himself against the importunity of things, of the world"—for example, from hunger;
"and"—as quite naturally follows from this— "founds a world of his own"—which "Stirner" has need of now— "in which alone he feels in his native element and at home",—"alone", after he has first by "custom" made himself "at home" in the existing "world"—
"i.e., builds himself a heaven"—because China is called the Celestial Empire.
"For indeed heaven has no other significance than that of being the real homeland of man"—in this context, however, it signifies the imagined unreality of the real homeland—
"where nothing alien any longer prevails upon him", i.e., where what is his own prevails upon him as something alien, and all the rest of the old story. "Or rather", to use Saint Bruno's words, or "it is easily possible", to use Saint Max's words, that this proposition should read as follows:
Stirner's proposition without claim to thoroughness or even to authenticity
"There is in fact no doubt that by means of custom man protects himself against the importunity of things, of the world, and founds a world of his own., in which alone he feels in his native element and at home, i.e., builds himself a heaven.
Clarified proposition
"There is in fact no doubt" that because China is called the Celestial Empire, because "Stirner" happens tobe speaking of China and as he is "accustomed" by means of ignorance "to protect himself against the importunity of things, of the world, and to found a 16*1
world o r his own, in which alone he teeis in ins native element and at home'"—therefore he "builds himseli a heaven' out of the Chinese Celestial Lmrjire. "For indeed'' tne importunitv of the world, of things "has no other significance than that of oeing the real" hell of the unique, 'in which,' everything prevails upon him and rules over him" as something "aiier", bur which he is abie to transform into a "heaven' bv "estranging himself" from al1 "earthlv influenced , historical raas and connections, and hence no longer thinks them strange: "in short", it is a sphere 'where the earthiy", the historical ' dross is thrown aside", and where Stirner "do"; not find' in the 'end" "oi the world any more "struggle"—and thereby evervthing has been said.
Sixth "historical reflection". On pasre 90, Stirner imagines tha?
"in Cnina everyttiing is provided for; no matter what happens, the Chinese always knows how he should behave, and he has no need to decide according to circumstances; no unforeseen event will overthrow his celestial calm .
Nor anv British bombardment eitner — he knew exactly 'how he should behave", particularly in regard to the unfamiliar steamships and shrapnel-bombs.0"
Saint Max extracted that from Hegel s Philosophie der Geschichte. pages 118 and 127. to which, of course he had to add something unique, in order to achieve his reflection as given above.
' Consequenti}.' continues Saint Max, ' mankind climbs the first rung of the ladder oi education bv means oi custom, and since u imagines that bv gaining culture, it has gained heaven, rhe realm oi culture or second nature it actually mounts the first run^ o! the heaveniv ladder" .p. 90;.
"Consequently", i.e., because Hegei oegins history with China and because 'the Chinese does not lose ms equanimity", "Stirner" transforms mankind into a person who ' mounts the first rung of the ladder o culture' and indeed does so '"bv means of custom", because China has no other meaning for Stirner than that of being the embodiment of "custom". Now it is oni\ a question for our zealoî against the holv of transforming the "ladder" into a 'heaveniv ladder", since China is also called the Celestial Empire. "Since mankind imagines" ("wherefrom" does Stirner 'know everything that" mankind imagines, see Wigand, page 189)—and this ought to have been proved by Stirner — firstly that it transforms "culture" into the "heaven of culture", and secondly that it transforms the "heaven of
F'o- indeed 'heaven' has no other sis"-nu.cance than tirai oi being tne rea; nomelana of man wnere notning alter-am longer prevails upon him and rules over him. no earthh' influence anv lonsrer estranses him Irom himseli. in short, wnere earthly dross is thrown aside and the struggle against the world nas come to an end, where, therefore, nothing is forbidden him anv more" •,p. 89:.
culture" into the 'culture of heaver."—an alleged notion on the part of mankind which appears on page 9i as a notion of Stirner's and therebv receives its correct expression»—"so it actually mounts the first rung of the heaveniv ladder". Since it imagines that it mounts the first rung of the heaveniv iadder — so — it mounts ir actuallyl "Since" the youth" "imagines' that he becomes pure spirit, he does actually become such! See the ' vouth" and the "Christian" on the transition from the world of things to the world of the spirit, where the simple formula for this heavenly ladder of * unique" ideas alreadv occurs.
Seventh historical reflection, page 90. "If Mongolism" (it follows immediatelv after the heaveniv iadder, whereby "Stirner", through the alleged notion on the part of mankind, was able to ascertain the existence of a spiritual essence [Wesen]), "if Mongolism has established the existence of spiritual beings [Wesen]" (rather — if "Stirner" has established his fancv about the spiritual essence of the Mongols), "then the Caucasians have fought for thousands of years against these spiritual beings, in order to get to the bottom of their". (The youth, who becomes a man and tries all the time" "to penetrate behind thoughts", the Christian who "tries all the time" "to explore the depths of divinity".'} Since the Chinese have noted the existence of God knows what spiritual beings ("Stirner" does not note a single one, apart from his heavenly iadder)—so for thousands of years the Caucasians have to wrangle with 'these" Chinese "spiritual beings"; moreover, two lines below Surner puts on record that they actually "stormed the Mongolian heaven, the tien", and continues: "When will they destroy this heaven, when will thev finally become actual (Caucasians and find themselves^"
Here we have the negative unity, already seen earlier as man, now appearing as the 'actual Caucasian", i.e., not Negroid, no*. Mongolian, but as the Caucasian Caucasian. This latter, therefore a> a concept, as essence, is here separated from the actual Caucasians, is counterposed to them as the ' ideai of the Caucasian'', as a "vocation" in which thev should "lind themselves", as a "destiny". ;< "task", as "the hoiv", as 'the holv" Caucasian, 'the perfect" Caucasian, "who indeed" is the Caucasian "in heaven—God".
"in the sedulous struggle of the Mongolian race, men had built a heaven"—so "Stirner" believes iyp. 91), forgetting that actual Mongols are much more occupied with sheep than with heavena— when the people of the Caucasian stock, so long as they ... have
In German a pun based on the words die Hammel—the-sheep, and die Himmel—the heavens.—Ed.
to do with heaven ... undertook the business of storming heaven." Had built a heaven, when ... so long as they have... [they] undertook. The unassuming "historical reflection" is here expressed in a consecutio temporunf which also does not "lay claim" to classic form "or even" to grammatical correctness; the construction of the sentences corresponds to the construction of history. "Stirner's" "claims" "are restricted to this" and "thereby achieve their final goal".
Eighth historical reflection, which is the reflection of reflections, the alpha and omega of the whole of Stirner's history: Jacques le bonhomme, as we have pointed out from the beginning, sees in all the movement of nations that has so far taken place merely a sequence of heavens (p. 91), which can also be expressed as follows: successive generations of the Caucasian race up to the present day did nothing but squabble about the concept of morality (p. 92) and "their activity has been restricted to this" (p. 91). If they had got out of their heads this unfortunate morality, this apparition, they would have achieved something; as it was, they achieved nothing, absolutely nothing, and have to allow Saint Max to set them a task as if they were schoolboys. It is completely in accordance with his view of history that at the end (p. 92) he conjures up speculative philosophy so that "in it this heavenly kingdom, the kingdom of spirits and spectres, should find its proper order"—and that in a later passage speculative philosophy should be conceived as the "perfect kingdom of spirits".
Why it is that for those who regard history in the Hegelian manner the result of all preceding history was finally bound to be the kingdom of spirits perfected and brought into order in speculative philosophy — the solution of this secret "Stirner" could have very simply found by recourse to Hegel himself. To arrive at this result "the concept of spirit must be taken as the basis and then it must be shown that history is the process of the spirit itself" (Geschichte der Philosophie, III, p. 91). After the "concept of spirit" has been imposed on history as its basis, it is very easy, of course, to "show" that it is to be discovered everywhere, and then to make this as a process "find its proper order".
After making everything "find its proper order", Saint Max can now exclaim with enthusiasm: "To desire to win freedom for the spirit, that is Mongolism", etc. (cf. p. 17: "To bring to light pure thought, etc.—that is the joy of the youth", etc.), and can declare hypocritically: "Hence it is obvious that Mongolism ... represents non-sensuousness and unnaturalness", etc.—when he ought to have said: it is obvious that the Mongol is only the disguised youth who,
Sequence of tenses.—Ed.
being the negation of the world of things, can also be called "unnaturalness", "non-sensuousness", etc.
We have again reached the point where the "youth" can pass into the "man": "But who will transform the spirit into its nothing? He, who by means of the spirit represented nature as the futile, the finite, the transitory" (i.e., imagined it as such — and, according to page 16 et seq., this was done by the youth, later the Christian, then the Mongol, then the Mongoloid Caucasian, but properly speaking only by idealism), "he alone can also degrade the "spirit" (namely in his imagination) "to the same futility" (therefore the Christian, etc.? No, exclaims "Stirner" resorting to a similar trick as on pages 19-20 in the case of the man). "I can do it, each of you can do it who operates and creates" (in his imagination) "as the unrestricted ego", "in a word, the egoist can do it" (p. 93), i.e., the man, the Caucasian Caucasian, who therefore is the perfect Christian, the true Christian, the holy one, the embodiment of the holy.
Before dealing with the further nomenclature, we also "should like at this point to include an historical reflection" on the origin of Stirner's "historical reflection about our Mongolism"; our reflection differs, however, from Stirner's in that it definitely "lays claim to thoroughness and authenticity". His whole historical reflection, just as that on the "ancients", is a concoction out of Hegel.
The Negroid state is conceived as "the child" because Hegel says on page 89 of his Philosophie der Geschichte:
"Africa is the country of the childhood of history." "In defining the African" (Negroid) "spirit we must entirely discard the category of universality" (p. 90)—i.e., although the child or the Negro has ideas, he still does not have the idea. "Among the Negroes consciousness has not yet reached a firm objective existence, as for example God, law, in which man would have the perception of his essence" ... "thanks to which, knowledge of an absolute being is totally absent. The Negro represents natural man in all his lack of restraint" (p. 90). "Although they must be conscious of their dependence on the natural" (on things, as "Stirner" says), "this, however, does not lead them to the consciousness of something higher" (p. 91).
Here we meet again all Stirner's determinations of the child and the Negro — dependence on things, independence of ideas and especially of "the idea", "the essence", "the absolute" (holy) "being", etc.
He found that in Hegel the Mongols and, in particular, the Chinese appear as the beginning of history and since for Hegel, too, history is a history of spirits (but not in such a childish way as with "Stirner"), it goes without saying that the Mongols brought the spirit into history and are the original representatives of everything "sacred". In particular, on page 110, Hegel describes the "Mongolian kingdom" (of the Dalai-Lama) as the "ecclesiastical" realm, the "kingdom of theocratic rule", a "spiritual, religious kingdom"—in contrast to the worldly empire of the Chinese. "Stirner", of course, has to identify China with the Mongols. In Hegel, on page 140, there even occurs the "Mongolian principle" from which "Stirner" derived his "Mongolism". Incidentally, if he really wanted to reduce the Mongols to the category of "idealism", he could have "found established" in the Dalai-Lama system and Buddhism quite different "spiritual beings" from his fragile "heavenly ladder". But he did not even have time to look properly at Hegel's Philosophie der Geschichte. The peculiarity and uniqueness of Stirner's attitude to history consists in the egoist being transformed into a "clumsy" copier of Hegel.
b) Catholicism and Protestantism
•w What we here call Catholicism, "Stirner" calls the "Middle Ages", but as he confuses (as "in everything") the pious, religious character of the Middle Ages, the religion of the Middle Ages, with the actual, profane Middle Ages in flesh and blood, we prefer to give the matter its right name at once.
"The Middle Ages" were a "lengthy period, in which people were content with the illusion of having the truth" (they did not desire or do anything else), "without seriously thinking about whether one must be true oneself in order to possess the truth".—"In the Middle Ages people" (that is, the whole of the Middle Ages) "mortified the flesh, in order to become capable of assimilating the holy" (p. 108).
Hegel defines the attitude to the divine in the Catholic church by saying
"that people's attitude to the absolute was as to something purely external" (Christianity in the form of externality) (Geschichte der Philosophie, III, p. 148, and elsewhere). Of course, the individual has to be purified in order to assimilate the truth, but "this also occurs in an external way, through redemptions, fasts, self-flagellations, visits to holy places, pilgrimages" (ibid., p. 140).
"Stirner" makes this transition by saying:
"In the same way, too, as people strain their eyes in order to see a distant object... so they mortified the flesh, etc."
Since in "Stirner's" "book" the Middle Ages are identified with Catholicism, they naturally end with Luther (p. 108). Luther himself is reduced to the following definition, which has already cropped up in connection with the youth, in the conversation with Szeliga and elsewhere:
"Man, if he wants to attain truth, must become as true as truth itself. Only he who already has truth in faith can participate in it."
Concerning Lutheranism, Hegel says:
"The truth o! the gospe! exists onlv in the true attitude to it.... The essential attitude of the spirit exists only for the spirit.... Hence the attitude of the spirit to the content is that although the content is essential, it is equally essential that the hoiy and consecrating spirit should stand in relation to this content" (Geschichte der Philosophie, III, p. 234s "This then is the Lutheran faith — his" u.e., man's) "faith is required of him aim it alone can truly he taken into account'' (ibid., p. 230;. "Luther ... affirms tha: the divine is divine oiiiv msoiar as it IS apprehended in this subjective spirituaiitv o: faith" (ibid., p. 138). "1 he doctrine of the' (Catholic) "church is truth as existent truth" (Philosophie der Religion,'" II, p. 331).
"Stirne^" continues:
"Accordingly, with Luther the knowledge arises that truth, because it is though*, exists oniv tor the thinking man and this means that with regard to his objerr— thought — man must adopt a totaliv difiereni standpoint, a pious" (per uppos.). 'scientific standpoint, or that of thinking' (p. 110).
Apart from the repetition which "Stirner" again "includes" here, only the transition from faith to thinking deserves attention. Hegel makes the transition in the following wav:
"But this spirit" (nameiv, the holy and consecrating spirit) ' is, secondly, essentially also thinking spirit. Thinking a- surh must also have its development in i ' , etc. ([Geschichte der Philosophie,] p. 234;.
"Stirner" continues:
"This thought" ("that I am spirit, spirit aione") "pervades the historv of the Reformation down to the present dav" (p. 111;.
From the sixteenth century onw(1)ards. no other historv exists for "Stirner" than the historv of the Reformation — and the latter only in the interpretation in which Hegel presents it.
Saint Max has again dispiaved his gigantic faith. He has again taken as literal truth all the illusions of German speculative Philosophv; indeed, he has made them still more speculative, still more abstract. For him there exists only the history ot religion and philosophy — and this exists for him onlv through the medium of Hegel, who with the passage of time has become the universal crib, the rererence source for all the latest German speculators about principles and manufacturers oi systems.
Catholicism — attitude to truth as thing, child, Negro, the 'ancient".
Protestantism = attitude to truth in the spirit, youth, Mongol, the "modern".
The whole scheme was superfluous, since all this was already-present in the section on "spirit".
As already mentioned in "The Economy of the Old Testament", it is now possible to make the child and the youth appear again in new "transformations" within Protestantism, as "Stirner" actually does on page 112, where he conceives English, empirical philosophy as the child, in contrast to German, speculative philosophy as the youth. Here again he copies out Hegel, who here, as elsewhere in the "book", frequently appears as "one".
"One"—i.e., Hegel—"expelled Bacon from the realm of philosophy." "And, indeed, what is called English philosophy does not seem to have got any farther than the discoveries made by so-called clear intellects such as Bacon and Hume" (p. 112).
Hegel expresses this as follows:
"Bacon is in fact the real leader and representative of what is called philosophy in England and beyond which the English have by no means gone as yet" (Geschichte der Philosophie, III, p. 254).
The people whom "Stirner" calls "clear intellects" Hegel (ibid., p. 255) calls "educated men of the world"—Saint Max on one occasion even transforms them into the "simplicity of childish nature", for the English philosophers have to represent the child. On the same childish grounds Bacon is not allowed to have "concerned himself with theological problems and cardinal propositions", regardless of what may be said in his writings (particularly De Augmentis Scientiarum* Novum Organum and the Essaysb). On the other hand, "German thought ... sees life only in cognition itself" (p. 112), for it is the youth. Ecce iterum Crispinus!c
How Stirner transforms Descartes into a German philosopher, the reader can see for himself in the "book", p. 112.
D. Hierarchy
In the foregoing presentation Jacques le bonhomme conceives history merely as the product of abstract thoughts — or, rather, of his notions of abstract thoughts — as governed by these notions, which, in the final analysis, are all resolved into the "holy". This domination of the "holy", of thought, of the Hegelian absolute idea over the empirical world he further portrays as a historical relation existing at the present time, as the domination of the holy ones, the ideologists, over the vulgar world — as a hierarchy. In this hierarchy, what previously appeared consecutively exists side by side, so that one of the two co-existing forms of development rules over the other. Thus, the youth rules over the child, the Mongol over the Negro, the modern over the ancient, the selfless egoist (citoyen) over the egoist in the usual sense of the word (bourgeois), etc.—see "The Economy of the Old Testament". The "destruction" of the "world of things" by the "world of the spirit" appears here as the "domination" of the "world of thoughts" over the "world of things". The outcome, of course, is bound to be that the domination which the "world of thoughts" exercises from the outset in history is at the end of the latter also presented as the real, actually existing domination of the thinkers — and, as we shall see, in the final analysis, as the domination of the speculative philosophers — over the world of things, so that Saint Max has only to fight against thoughts and ideas of the ideologists and to overcome them, in order to make himself "possessor of the world of things and the world of thoughts".
"Hierarchy is the domination of thought, the domination of the spirit. We are still hierarchical to this day, we are under the yoke of those who rely on thoughts, and thoughts"—who has failed to notice it long ago?—"are the holy" (p. 97). (Stirner has tried to safeguard himself against the reproach that in his whole book he has only been producing "thoughts", i.e., the "holy", by in fact nowhere producing any thoughts in it. Although in the Wigand periodical he ascribes to himself "virtuosity in thinking", i.e., according to his interpretation, virtuosity in the fabrication of the "holy"—and this we shall concede him.)—"Hierarchy is the supreme domination of spirit" (p. 467). —"The medieval hierarchy was only a weak hierarchy, for it was forced to allow all kinds of profane barbarism to exist unrestricted alongside it" ("how Stirner know;; so much about what the hierarchy was forced to do", we shall soon see), "and onlv the Reformation steeled the power of the hierarchy" (p. 310). "Stirner" indeed thinks that "the domination of spirits was never before so all-embracing and omnipotent" as after the Reformation; he thinks that this domination of spirits "instead of divorcing the religious principle from art, sto;-' and science, on the contrary, raised these wholh from actuality into the kingdom of the spirit and made them religious".
This view of modern history merely dilates upon speculative philosophv's old illusion of the domination of spirit in history. Indeed, this passage even shows how pious Jacques le bonhomme in all good faith continually takes the world outlook derived from Hegel, and which has become traditional for him, as the real world, and "manoeuvres" on that basis. What may appear as "his own" and "unique" in this passage is the conception of this domination of the spirit as a hierarchy—and here, again, we will "include" a brief "historical reflection" on the origin of Stirner's "hierarchy".
Hegel speaks of the philosophy of hierarchy in the following "transformations" :
(Geschichte der Philosophie, III, p. 132).—"Thereby actuality, the mundane, is forsaken by God ... a few individual persons are holy, the others unholy" (ibid., p. 136). "Godforsakenness" is more closely defined thus: "All these forms" (family, work, political life, etc.) "are considered nugatory, unholy" (Philosophie der Religion, II, p. 343).—"It is a union with worldliness which is unreconciled, worldliness which is crude in itself" (for this Hegel elsewhere also uses the word "barbarism"; cf., for example, Geschichte der Philosophie, III, p. 136) "and, being crude in itself, is simply subjected to domination." (Philosophie der Religion, II, pp. 342, 343).—"This domination" (the hierarchy of the Catholic church) "is, therefore, a domination of passion, although it should be the domination of the spiritual" (Geschichte der Philosophie, III, p. 134).—"The true domination of the spirit, however, cannot be domination of the spirit in the sense that what opposes it should be something subordinate" (ibid., p. 131).—"The true meaning is that the spiritual as such" (according to "Stirner" the "holy") "should be the determining factor, and this has been so until our times; thus, we see in the French Revolution" (following in the wake of Hegel, "Stirner" sees it) "that the abstract idea should dominate: state constitutions and laws should be determined by it, it should constitute the bond between people, and people should be conscious that that which they hold as valid are abstract ideas, liberty and equality, etc." (Geschichte der Philosophie, III, p. 132). The true domination of spirit as brought about by Protestantism, in contrast to its imperfect form in the Catholic hierarchy, is defined further in the sense that "the earthly is made spiritual in itself" (Geschichte der Philosophie, III, p. 185); "that the divine is realised in the sphere of actuality" (the Catholic Godforsakenness of actuality, therefore, ceases to exist— Philosophie der Religion, II, p. 344); that the "contradiction" between holiness and worldliness "is resolved in morality" (Philosophie der Religion, II, p. 343); that "moral institutions" (marriage, the family the state, earning one's livelihood, etc.) are "divine, holy" (Philosophie der Religion, II, p. 344).
Hegel expresses this true domination of spirit in two forms:
"State, government, law, property, civic order" (and, as we know from his other works, art, science, etc., as well), "all this is the religious... emerging in the form of the finite" (Geschichte der Philosophie, III, p. 185).
And, finally, this domination of the religious, the spiritual, etc., is expressed as the domination of philosophy:
"Consciousness of the spiritual is now" (in the eighteenth century) "essentially the foundation, and thereby domination has passed to philosophy" (Philosophie der Geschichte, p. 440).
Hegel, therefore, ascribes to the Catholic hierarchy of the Middle Ages the intention of wanting "to be the domination of spirit" and thereupon regards it as a restricted imperfect form of this domination of spirit, the culmination of which he sees in Protestantism and its alleged further development. However unhistorical this may be, nevertheless, Hegel is sufficiently historically-minded not to extend the use of the name "hierarchy" beyond the bounds of the Middle Ages. But Saint Max knows from this same Hegel that the later epoch is the "truth" of the preceding one; hence the epoch of the perfect domination of spirit is the truth of that epoch in which the domination of spirit was as yet imperfect, so that Protestantism is the truth of hierarchy and therefore true hierarchy. Since, however, only true hierarchy deserves to be called hierarchy, it is clear that the hierarchy of the Middle Ages had to be "weakly", and it is all the easier for Stirner to prove this since in the passages given above and in hundreds of other passages from Hegel the imperfection of the domination of spirit in the Middle Ages is portrayed. He only needed to copy these out, the whole of his "own" work consisting in substituting the word "hierarchy" for "domination of spirit". There was no need for him even to formulate the simple argument by means of which domination of spirit as such is transformed by him into hierarchy, since it has become the fashion among German theoreticians to give the name of the cause to the effect and, for example, to put back into the category of theology everything that has arisen out of theology and has not yet fully attained the height of the principles of these theoreticians — e.g., Hegelian speculation, Straussian pantheism, etc.—a trick especially prevalent in 1842. From the above-quoted passages it also follows that Hegel: 1) appraises the French Revolution as a new and more perfect phase of this domination of spirit; 2) regards philosophers as the rulers of the world of the nineteenth century; 3) maintains that now only abstract ideas have validity among people; 4) that he already regards marriage, the family, the state, earning one's livelihood, civic order, property, etc., as "divine and holy", as the "religious principle" and 5) that morality as worldly sanctity or as sanctified worldliness is represented as the highest and ultimate form of the domination of spirit over the world — all these things are repeated word for word in "Stirner".
Accordingly there is no need to say or prove anything more concerning Stirner's hierarchy, apart from why Saint Max copied out Hegel — a fact, however, for the explanation of which further material data are necessarv, and which, therefore, is only explicable for those who are acquainted with the Berlin atmosphere. It is another question how the Hegelian idea of the domination of spirit arose, and about this see what has been said above.3
Saint Max's adoption of Hegel's world domination of the philosophers and his transformation of it into a hierarchy are due to the extremely uncritical credulity of our saint and to a "holy" or unholy ignorance which is content with "seeing through" history (i.e., with glancing through Hegel's historical writings) without trou-bling to "know" many "things" about it. In general, he was bound to be afraid that as soon as he "learned" he would no longer be able to "abolish and dissolve" (p. 96), and, therefore, remain stuck in the
'' See this volume, pp. 59-62.—Ed.
"bustling activity of noxious insects"—a sufficient reason not to "proceed" to the "abolition and dissolution" of his own ignorance.
If, like Hegel, one designs such a system for the first time, a system embracing the whole of history and the present-day world in all its scope, one cannot possibly do so without comprehensive, positive knowledge, without great energy and keen insight and without dealing at least in some passages with empirical history. On the other hand, if one is satisfied with exploiting an already existing pattern, transforming it for one's "own" purposes and demonstrating this conception of one's own by means of isolated examples (e.g., Negroes and Mongols, Catholics and Protestants, the French Revolution, etc.)—and this is precisely what our warrior against the holy does — then absolutely no knowledge of history is necessary. The result of all this exploitation inevitably becomes comic; most of all comic when a jump is made from the past into the immediate present, examples of which we saw already in connection with "whimsy".3
As for the actual hierarchy of the Middle Ages, we shall merely note here that it did not exist for the people, for the great mass ot human beings. For the great mass only feudalism existed, and hierarchy only existed insofar as it was itself either feudal or anti-feudal (within the framework of feudalism). Feudalism itself had entirely empirical relations as its basis. Hierarchy and its struggle against feudalism (the struggle of the ideologists of a class against the class itself) are only the ideological expression of feudalism and of the struggles developing within feudalism itself — which include also the struggles of the feudally organised nations among themselves. Hierarchy is the ideal form of feudalism; feudalism is the political form of the medieval relations of production and intercourse. Consequently, the struggle of feudalism against hierarchy can only be explained by elucidating these practical material relations. This elucidation of itself puts an end to the previous conception of history which took the illusions of the Middle Ages >n trust, in particular those illusions which the Emperor and the Pope brought to bear in their struggle against each other.
Since Saint Max merely reduces the Hegelian abstractions about the Middle Ages and hierarchy to "pompous words and paltry thoughts", there is no need to examine in more detail the actual, historical hierarchy.
From the above it is now clear that the trick can also be reversed and Catholicism regarded not just as a preliminary stage, bur
See this volume, pp. 160-63.—Ed.
also as the negation of the real hierarchy; in which case Catholicism = negation of spirit, non-spirit, sensuousness, and then one gets the great proposition of Jacques le bonhomme — that the Jesuits "saved us from the decay and destruction of sensuousness" (p. 118). What would have happened to "us" if the "destruction' ^f sensuousness had come to pass, we do not learn. The whole material movement since the sixteenth century, which did not save "us" from the "decay" of sensuousness, but, on the contrary, developed "sensuousness" to a much wider extent, does not exist for "Stirner"—it is the Jesuits who brought about all that. Compare, incidentally, Hegel's Philosophie der Geschichte, p. 425.
By carrying over the old domination of the clerics to modern times, Saint Max interprets modern times as "clericalism"; and then by regarding this domination of the clerics carried over to modern times as something distinct from the old medieval clerical domination, he depicts it as domination of the ideologists, as "scholasticism". Thus clericalism=hierarchy as the domination of the spirit, scholasticism = the domination of the spirit as hierarchy.
"Stirner" achieves this simple transition to clericalism — which is no transition at all — by means of three weighty transformations.
Firstly, he "has" the "concept of clericalism" in anyone "who lives for a great idea, for a good cause" (still the good cause!), "for a doctrine, etc."
Secondly, in his world of illusion Stirner "comes up against" the "age-old illusion of a world that has not yet learned to dispense with clericalism", namely—"to live and create for the sake of an idea, etc."
Thirdly, "it is the domination of the idea, i.e., clericalism", that is: "Robespierre, for example" (for example!), "Saint-Just, and so on" (and so on!) "were out-and-out priests", etc. All three transformations in which clericalism is "discovered", "encountered" and "called upon" (all this on p. 100), therefore, express nothing more than what Saint Max has already repeatedly told us, namely, the domination of spirit, of the idea, of the holy, over "life" (ibid.).
After the "domination of the idea, i.e., clericalism" has thus been foisted upon history, Saint Max can, of course, without difficulty find this "clericalism" again in the whole of preceding history, and thus depict "Robespierre, for example, Saint-Just, and so on" as priests and identify them with Innocent III and Gregory VII, and so all uniqueness vanishes in the face of the unique. All of them, properly speaking, are merely different names, different disguises for one person, "clericalism", which made all history from the beginning of Christianity. As to how, with this sort of conception of history, "all cats become grey", since all historical differences are "abolished"
and "resolved" in the 'notion of clericalism"—as to this. Saint Max at once gives us a striking example in his "Robespierre, ror example, Saint-just, and so on". Here we are first given Robespierre as an "example" of Saint-Just, and Saint-just — as an "and-so-or" of Robespierre. It is then said:
"These representatives of holy interests are confronted by a world of innumerable "personal , earthly interests."
Bv whom were they confronted? Bv the Girondists and Ther-midonans, who (see "for example" R. Levasseurs Mémoires, "and so on", "i.e.", Nougaret, Histoire des prisons; Barère; "Deux amis de la liberté"4'* \et au commerce)': Montgaillard, Histoire de trance; Madame Roland, Appel a la postérité; T. B. Louvet's Mémoires and even the disgusting Essais historiques by Beauneu, etc., etc., as weh as all the proceedings before tne revolutionary tribunal, ' and so on") constantly reproached tnem, the real representatives ot revolutionary power, i.e., of the class which alone was trulv revolutionary, the ' innumerable' masses, for violating "sacred interests", tne constitution, ireedom, equality, the rights of man, republicanism, law, sainte propriété? "tor example" the division of powers, humamtv, morality, moderation, "and so on". They were opposed by all the priests, who accused them of violating all the mam and secondary items of the religious and moral catechism (see "for example" Histoire du clergé de France pendant la révolution, by M. R.c, Paris, libraire catholique, 1828, ' ana so on"). The historical comment oî the bourgeois that during the règne de la terreur "Robespierre, for example, Saint-just, and so on" cut off the heads of honnêtes gens1' see the numerous writings of the simpleton Monsieur Peltier, "tor example", La conspiration ae Robespierre bv Montjoie ' and so on") is expressed bv Samt Max in the following transformation:
"Because the revolutionary nriests and schooi-masters served Man, they cut the tnroats of mer '
This, of course, saves Saint Max the trouble of wasting even one "unique" little word about the actual, empirical grounds for the cutting off of heads — grounds which were based on extremelv worldiv interests, though not, of course, of the stockjobbers, but of the 'innumerable" masses. An earlier "priest", Spinoza, already in the seventeenth centurv had the brazen audacity to act the "strict
Two friends of freedom i.and of commerce).—Ed. Sacred property.—Ed. Hippolvte Régnier d'Estourbet.—Ed. Respectable people.—Ed.
school-master" of Saint Max, by saying: "Ignorance is no argument."3 Consequently Saint Max loathes the priest Spinoza to such an extent that he accepts his anti-cleric, the priest Leibniz, and for all such astonishing phenomena as the terror, "for example", the cutting off of heads, "and so on", produces "sufficient grounds", viz., that "the ecclesiastics stuffed their heads with something of the kind" (p. 98).
Blessed Max, who has found sufficient grounds for everything ("I have now found the ground into which my anchor is eternally fastened,"b in the idea, "for example", in the "clericalism", "and so on" of "Robespierre, for example, Saint-Just, and so on", George Sand, Proudhon, the chaste Berlin seamstress,0 etc.)—this blessed Max "does not blame the class of the bourgeoisie for having asked its egoism how far it should give way to the revolutionary idea as such". For Saint Max "the revolutionary idea" which inspired the habits bleus"*[7] and honnêtes gens of 1789 is the same "idea" as that of the sansculottes of 1793, the same idea concerning which people deliberate whether to "give way" to it — but no further "space can be given"d to any "idea" about this point.
We now come to present-day hierarchy, to the domination of the idea in ordinary life. The whole of the second part of "the book" is filled with struggle against this "hierarchy". Therefore we shall deal with it in detail when we come to this second part. But since Saint Max, as in the section on "whimsy", takes delight in anticipating his ideas here and repeats what comes later in the beginning, as he repeats the beginning in what comes later, we are compelled already at this point to note a few examples of his hierarchy. His method of writing a book is the unique "egoism" which we find in the whole book. His self-delight stands in inverse proportion to the delight experienced by the reader.
Since the middle class demand love for their kingdom, their regime, they want, according to Jacques le bonhomme, to "establish the kingdom of love on earth" (p. 98). Since they demand respect for their domination and for the conditions in which it is exercised, and therefore want to usurp domination over respect, they demand, according to this worthy man, the domination of respectas such, their attitude towards respect is the same as towards the holy spirit dwelling within them (p. 95). Jacques le bonhomme, with his faith that can move mountains, takes as the actual, earthly basis of the bourgeois world the distorted form in which the sanctimonious and hypocritical ideology of the bourgeoisie voices their particular interests as universal interests. Why this ideological delusion assumes precisely this form for our saint, we shall see in connection with "political liberalism".(1)
Saint Max gives us a new example on page 115, speaking of the family. He declares that, although it is very easy to become emancipated from the domination of one's own family, nevertheless, "refusal of allegiance easily arouses pangs of conscience", and so people retain family affection, the concept of the family, and therefore have the "holy conception of the family", the "holy" (p. 116).
Here again our good man perceives the domination of the holy where entirely empirical relations dominate. The attitude of the bourgeois to the institutions of his regime is like that of the Jew to the law; he evades them whenever it is possible to do so in each individual case, but he wants everyone else to observe them. If the entire bourgeoisie, in a mass and at one time, were to evade bourgeois institutions, it would cease to be bourgeois — a conduct which, of course, never occurs to the bourgeois and by no means depends on their willing or running.[58] The dissolute bourgeois evades marriage and secretly commits adultery; the merchant evades the institution of property by depriving others of property by speculation, bankruptcy, etc.; the young bourgeois makes himself independent of his own family, if he can by in fact abolishing the family as far as he is concerned. But marriage, property, the family remain untouched in theory, because they are the practical basis on which the bourgeoisie has erected its domination, and because in their bourgeois form they are the conditions which make the bourgeois a bourgeois, just as the constantly evaded law makes the religious Jew a religious Jew. This attitude of the bourgeois to the conditions of his existence acquires one of its universal forms in bourgeois morality. One cannot speak at all of the family "as such''. Historically, the bourgeois gives the family the character of the bourgeois family, in which boredom and money are the binding link, and which also includes the bourgeois dissolution of the family, which does not prevent the family itself from always continuing to exist. Its dirty existence has its counterpart in the holy concept of it in official phraseology and universal hypocrisy. Where the family is actually abolished, as with the proletariat, just the opposite of what "stirner" thinks takes place. There the concept of the family does not exist at all, but here and there family affection based on extremely real relations is certainly to be found. In the eighteenth century the concept of the family was abolished by the philosophers, because the actual family was already in process of dissolution at the highest pinnacles of civilisation. The internal family bond, the separate components constituting the concept of the family were dissolved, for example, obedience, piety, fidelity in marriage, etc.; but the real body of the family, the property relation, the exclusive attitude in relation to other families, forced cohabitation — relations determined by the existence of children, the structure of modern towns, the formation of capital, etc.—all these were preserved, although with numerous violations, because the existence of the family is made necessary by its connection with the mode of production, which exists independently of the will of bourgeois society. That it was impossible to do without it was demonstrated in the most striking way during the French Revolution, when for a moment the family was as good as legally abolished. The family continues to exist even in the nineteenth century, only the process of its dissolution has become more general, not on account of the concept, but because of the higher development of industry and competition; the family still exists although its dissolution was long ago proclaimed by French and English socialists and this has at last penetrated also to the German church fathers, by way of French novels.
One other example of the domination of the idea in everyday life. Since school-masters may be told to find consolation for their scanty pay in the holiness of the cause they serve (which could only occur in Germany), Jacques le bonhomme actually believes that such talk is the reason for their low salaries (p. 100). He believes that "theholy" in the present-day bourgeois world has an actual money value, he believes that the meagre funds of the Prussian state (see, inter alia, Browning on this subject(2)) would be so increased by the abolition of "the holy" that every village school-master could suddenly be paid a ministerial salary.
This is the hierarchy of nonsense. The "keystone of the magnificent cathedral"—as the great Michelet(3) puts it — of hierarchy is "sometimes" the work of "One"
18":
''One sometime'; divides people into two classes, the educated and the uneducated." 'One sometimes divides aoes into two classes, the tailed and the tailless.) "The former insofar as thev were worthv of tneir name, occupied themselves witn thoughts, with the spirit." Thev "dominatea in the post-Christian epoch and ror their thoughts they demanded ... respec•;'". The uneducated (the animal, the child, the Negro; are "powerless" against thoughts and ' are dominated bv them. That is the meaning of hierarchv "
The 'educated'" (the vouth, the Mongol, the modern) are, therefore, again onlv occupied with "spirit' , pure thought, etc.; they are metaphysicians by profession, in the final analysis Hegelians. "Hence" the "uneducated" are the non-Hegehans.a Hegei was indubitabiv ' the most educated" Hegelian and therefore in his case it mus* "become apparent what a longing for things particularly me most educated man possesses". The point is that the " educated" anu * uneducated" are within themselves in conflict with each other mdeed, in everv man the 'uneducated' is in conflict with the "educated". And since the greatest longing for things, i.e., for that which belongs to the 'uneducated' , becomes apparent in Hegel, ir also becomes apparent here that "the most educated" man is at the same time "the most uneducated' .
"There" {in Hegel', "realirv should be completer ir accordance with thought anc no conceoi be withou; reaiiu
This should read: there the ordinary idea of reality should receive its complete philosophical expression, while Hegei imagines, on the contrary, that "consequently" every philosophical expression creates the reality that is in accordance with it. Jacques le bonhomme takes Hegels illusion about his own phiiosophv for tne genuine coin of Hegelian piiiiosophv
The Hegehan philosophy, which in the form of the domination of the Hegelians over the non-Hegelians appears as the crown of the hierarchy, now conquers the last world empire.
"Hege", svsieni «as -he supreme des-honsrn and autocrac\ of thought. th.~ omnivoience and aimightiness of the spin " >> 9 [7]
Here, therefore, we tina ourselves in the realm of spirits of Hegeiian philosophy, which stretches from Berlin to Halle and Tübingen, the realm oi spirits whose history was written by Herr Bayrhoffer-" and lor which the great Michelet collected the statistical aata.
The preparation for this realm of spirits was the French Revolution, which "did nothing but transform things into ideas about things" (p. 115; cf. above Hegel on the revolution, p. [..."]).
"So people remained citizens" (in "Stirner", this occurs earlier, but "what Stirner says is not what he has in mind, and what he has in mind cannot be said", Wigand, p. 149) and "lived in reflection, they had their eye on an object, before which" (per appos.) "they felt reverence and fear". "Stirner" says in a passage on page 98: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." But we say: the road to the unique is paved with bad concluding clauses b, with appositions, which are his "heavenly ladder" borrowed from the Chinese, and his "rope of the objective" (p. 88) on which he makes his "flea-jumps". In accordance with this, for "modern philosophy or modern times"—since the emergence of the realm of spirits modern times are indeed nothing but modern philosophy — it is an easy matter to "transform the existing objects into notional objects, i.e., into concepts", page 114, a work which Saint Max continues.
We have already seen our knight of the rueful countenance even "before the mountains were brought forth"/ which he later moved by his faith, right at the beginning of his book, galloping headlong towards the great result of his "magnificent cathedral". His "donkey", apposition, could not jump swiftly enough for him; now, at last, on page 114, he has reached his goal and by means of a mighty "or" has transformed modern times into modern philosophy.
Thereby ancient times (i.e., the ancient and modern, Negroid and Mongolian but, properly speaking, only pre-Stirnerian times) "reached their final goal". We can now reveal why Saint Max gave the title "Man" to the whole of the first part of his book and made out his entire history of miracles, ghosts and knights to be the history of "man". The ideas and thoughts of people were, of course, ideas and thoughts about themselves and their relationships, their consciousness of themselves and of people in general—for it was the consciousness not merely of a single individual but of the individual in his interconnection with the whole of society and about the whole of the society in which they lived. The conditions, independent of them, in which they produced their life, the necessary forms of intercourse connected herewith, and the personal and social relations thereby given, had to take the form — insofar as they were expressed in thoughts — of ideal conditions and necessary relations, i.e., they had to be expressed in consciousness as determinations arising from the concept of man as such, from human essence, from the nature of man, from man as such. What people were, what their relations were, appeared in consciousness as ideas of man as such, of his modes of existence or of his immediate conceptual determinations. So, after the ideologists had assumed that ideas and thoughts had dominated history up to now, that the history of these ideas and thoughts constitutes all history up to now, after they had imagined that real conditions had conformed to man as such and his ideal conditions, i.e., to conceptual determinations, after they had made the history of people's consciousness of themselves the basis of their actual history, after all this, nothing was easier than to call the history of consciousness, of ideas, of the holy, of established concepts — the history of "man" and to put it in the place of real history. The only distinction between Saint Max and all his predecessors is that he knows nothing about these concepts — even in their arbitrary isolation from real life, whose products they were — and his trivial creative work in his copy of Hegelian ideology is restricted to establishing his ignorance even of what he copies.—It is already evident from this how he can counterpose the history of the real individual in the form of the unique to his fantasy about the history of man.
The unique history takes place at the beginning in the Stoa in Athens, later almost wholly in Germany, and finally at the Kupfergraben[59] in Berlin, where the despot of "modern philosophy or modern times" set up his imperial residence. That already shows how exclusively national and local is the matter dealt with. Instead of world history, Saint Max gives a few and, what is more, extremely meagre and biased comments on the history of German theology and philosophy. If on occasion we appear to go outside Germany, it is only in order to cause the deeds and thoughts of other peoples, e.g., the French Revolution, to "reach their final goal" in Germany, namely, at the Kupfergraben. Only national-German facts are given, they are dealt with and interpreted in a national-German manner, and the result remains a national-German one. But even that is not enough. The views and education of our saint are not only German, but of a Berlin nature through and through. The role allotted to Hegelian philosophy is that which it plays in Berlin, and Stirner confuses Berlin with the world and world history. The "youth" is a Berliner; the good citizens that we encounter throughout the book are Berlin beer-drinking philistines. With such premises for the starting-point, it is natural that the result arrived at is merely one confined within the national and local framework. "Stirner" and his whole philosophical fraternity, among whom he is the weakest and most ignorant member, afford a practical commentary to the valiant lines of the valiant Hoffmann von Fallersleben:
In Germany alone, in Germany alone, Would I for ever live.(4)
The local Berlin conclusion of our valiant saint — that in Hegelian philosophy the world has "all gone"—enables him now without much expense to arrive at a universal empire of his "own". The Hegelian philosophy transformed everything into thought, into the holy, into apparition, into spirit, into spirits, into spectres. "Stirner" will fight against them, he will conquer them in his imagination and will erect on their dead bodies his "own", "unique", "corporeal" empire, the empire of the "whole fellow".
"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places" (Ephesians 6:12).
Now "Stirner" has his "feet shod with the preparation" for waging the fight against thoughts. He has no need first to "take the shield of faith", for he has never laid it down. Armed with the "helmet" of disaster and the "sword" of spiritlessness (see ibid.(5)), he goes into battle. "And it was given unto him to make war with the holy" but not "to overcome" it. (Revelation of St. John 13:7.)
Endnotes
[51] From 987, when Hugh Capet claimed the throne of France, until the French Revolution, the kings of France were in fact members of the Capet dynasty, for both the Valois, who ruled from 1328, and the Bourbons, who followed them in 1589, were branches of the Capet family. Louis XVI, a member of the Bourbon dynasty, was executed in January 1793 by order of the National Convention.
[52] Until the revolution of 1848 smoking was prohibited in the streets of Berlin and in the Tiergarten (a park in the city) under penalty of a fine or corporal punishment.
[53] The attempt which Enfantin made in 1832 to establish a labour commune in Ménilmontant, then a suburb of Paris, led to legal proceedings against the Saint-Simonists, who were accused of immorality and the spread of dangerous ideas. On August 28, 1832, Enfantin was sentenced to one year's imprisonment but was released before serving the full term. Afterwards, Enfantin and several of his followers went to Egypt, where he worked as an engineer.
[58] See Note 18.
[59] Kupfergraben—the name of a canal in Berlin. Hegel lived on the Kupfergraben embankment.
[7] The German Ideology — Die deutsche Ideologie. Kritik der neuesten deutschen Philosophie in ihren Repräsentanten Feuerbach, B. Bauer und Stirner, und des deutschen Sozialismus in seinen verschiedenen Propheten—is the joint work of Marx and Engels which they wrote in Brussels in 1845 and 1846. Marx and Engels decided to write a philosophical work in which they intended to counterpose their materialist conception of history to the idealist views of the Young Hegelians and to Feuerbach's inconsistent materialism in the spring of 1845, when Engels came to Brussels (early in April) and Marx outlined to him his materialist conception, which had nearly taken shape by then. Marx's "Theses on Feuerbach" were written in connection with this project. In the autumn of 1845 the project took the form of a definite plan to write a two-volume work directed against the Young Hegelians and the "true socialists". In November 1845 Marx and Engels began writing the book. In the course of their work the plan and composition of the book were changed several times. Moses Hess was enlisted to write two chapters. But the chapter against the Young Hegelian Arnold Ruge, which Hess wrote for Volume I, was excluded from the final version of The German Ideology, and the other chapter, dealing with the "true socialist" Kuhlmann, which Hess wrote for Volume II, was edited by Marx and Engels. Work on The German Ideology was in the main terminated in April 1846; it seems, however, that the authors continued working on Chapter I of the first volume until the middle of July, but it was never completed. The draft of the preface for Volume I was written by Marx not later than the middle of August. Work on Volume II was completed by early June 1846. Engels' work The True Socialists, which was intended as the concluding chapter of Volume II, was written between January and April 1847. In 1846 and 1847 Marx and Engels made repeated attempts to find a publisher in Germany for their work, but they were unsuccessful. This was due partly to difficulties made by the police and partly to the reluctance of the publishers to print the work, since their sympathies were on the side of the trends which Marx and Engels criticised. The only Chapter of The German Ideology known to be published during their lifetime was Chapter IV of Volume II, which appeared in the journal Das Westphälische Dampßoot in August and September 1847. The text of a few pages in Chapter II of Volume I (pp. 112-14 of this volume) is similar to that of an anonymous item dated "Brussels, November 20" (see this volume, pp. 15-18), which appeared in the Gesellschaftsspiegel, Heft VII, Januar 1846 (in the section "Nachrichten und Notizen"). Neither the title of the whole work nor the headings of the first and the second volumes have survived in the manuscript. They are, however, mentioned by Marx m his article "Declaration against Karl Grün" (see present edition, Vol. 6) and have been taken from there. The manuscript of chapters II and III of Volume II is missing, and it is possible that the "Circular against Kriege" by Marx and Engels and Engels' article "German Socialism in Verse and Prose" (see present edition, Vol. 6) formed part of this volume. The manuscript is in a rather poor condition, the paper has turned yellow and is damaged in places. "The gnawing criticism of the mice", as Marx wrote later in his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, has left its mark on a number of pages, other pages are missing. The Preface to The German Ideology and some of the alterations and additions are in Marx's hand; the bulk of the manuscript, however, is in Engels' hand, except for Chapter V of Volume II and some passages in Chapter III of Volume I. which are in Joseph Weydemeyer's hand. As a rule, the pages are divided into two parts: the main text is on the left side while additions and changes are on the right. A number of passages were crossed out by the authors, and a few more passages were crossed out by Eduard Bernstein (this has been pointed out by S. Bahne in his article "Die Deutsche Ideologie von Marx und Engels. Einige Textergänzungen", published in the International Review of Social History, Vol. VII, 1962, Part I). Words and passages which have become unreadable have been reconstructed on the basis of the unimpaired parts whenever possible; they are enclosed in square brackets. Wherever it was necessary to insert a few words to clarify the meaning, they are likewise printed in square brackets. Gaps in the manuscript are indicated in footnotes. Marginal notes as well as the most important of the crossed-out passages are given in footnotes which are indicated by asterisks, whereas the editors' footnotes are indicated by index letters. Passages crossed out by Bernstein, wherever it was possible to decipher them, have been restored. After Engels' death the manuscript of The German Ideology came into the hands of the leaders of the German Social-Democratic Party, who in the course of 37 years published less than half of it. Part of Chapter III, "Saint Max", was published by Bernstein in 1903-04 (see Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels, "III. Sankt Max", in Dokumente des Sozialismus, Stuttgart, Bd. III, Hefte 1-4 and 7-8, Januar-April and Juli-August 1903; Bd. IV, Hefte 5-9, Mai-September 1904). Another part of this chapter—"My Self-Enjoyment" — was brought out in 1913 (see Karl Marx, "Mein Selbstgenuss", in Arbeiter-Feuilleton, München. Nr. 8 and 9, März 1913). Gustav Meyer published the introductory pages of "The Leipzig Council" and Chapter II, "Saint Bruno", in 1921 (see Friedrich Engels und Karl Marx, "Das Leipziger Konzil", in Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 47. Band, 3. Heft, Tübingen, 1921). Chapter I, "Feuerbach", the most important chapter of The German Ideology, was first published by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. in Russian in 1924 (Marx-Engels Archives, Book I) and in German in 1926 (Marx-Engels Archiv, I. Band). The whole work as it has come down to us (except for the six pages which were found later and printed in the International Review of Social History, Vol. VII, 1962, Part 1) was first published in Marx/Engels Gesamtausgabe, Erste Abteilung, 5. Band, in 1932 by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. The first English version of Chapter I, translated from the Russian, was published in the American journal The Marxist No. 3, July 1926. A small part of this chapter, translated from the German, was published in the British journal The Labour Monthly, Vol. 15, No. 3, March 1933. An English translation of Chapter I, "Feuerbach", and Volume II, "Der wahre Sozialismus", was published by I^awrence and Wishart Ltd., London, 1938, under the title The German Ideology, Parts J & III. The first English translation of the whole work, except for one passage from Chapter I of the first volume (p. 29 of the manuscript), was issued by Progress Publishers, Moscow, in 1964.