The New Testament: " Ego"
1. The Economy of the New Testament
Whereas in the Old Testament the object of our edification was "unique" logic in the framework of the past, we are now confronted by the present time in the framework of "unique" logic. We have already thrown sufficient light on the "unique" in his manifold antediluvian "refractions"—as man, Caucasian Caucasian, perfect Christian, truth of humane liberalism, negative unity of realism and idealism, etc., etc. Along with the historical construction of the "ego", the "ego" itself also collapses. This "ego", the end of the historical construction, is no "corporeal" ego, carnally procreated by man and woman, which needs no construction in order to exist; it is an "ego" spiritually created by two categories, "idealism" and "realism," a merely conceptual existence.
The New Testament, which has already been dissolved together with its premise, the Old Testament, possesses a domestic economy that is literally as wisely designed as that of the Old, namely the same "with various transformations", as can be seen from the following table:
I. Peculiarity=the ancients, child, Negro, etc., in their truth, i.e., development from the "world of things" to one's "own" outlook and taking possession of this world. Among the ancients this led to riddance of the world, among the moderns — riddance of spirit, among the liberals—-riddance of the individual, among the communists — riddance of property, among the • humane [liberals]—riddance of God: hence it led in general to the category of riddance (freedom) as the goal. The negated category of riddance is peculiarity, which of course has no other content than this riddance. Peculiarity is the philosophically constructed quality of all the qualities of Stirner's individual.
II. The owner—as such Stirner has penetrated beyond the un-truthfulness of the world of things and the world of spirit; hence the moderns, the phase of Christianity within the logical development: youth, Mongol.—Just as the moderns divide into the triply determined free ones, so the owner falls into three further determinations:
1. My power, corresponding to political liberalism, where the truth of right is brought to light and right as the power of "man" is resolved in power as the right of the "ego". The struggle against the state as such.
2. My intercourse, corresponding to communism, whereby the truth of society is brought to light and society (in its forms of prison society, family, state, bourgeois society, etc.) as intercourse mediated by "man" is resolved in the intercourse of the "ego".
3. My self-enjoyment, corresponding to critical, humane liberalism, in which the truth of criticism, the consumption, dissolution and truth of absolute self-consciousness, comes to light as self-consumption, and criticism as dissolution in the interests of man is transformed into dissolution in the interests of the "ego". The peculiarity of the individuals was resolved, as we have seen, in the universal category of peculiarity, which was the negation of riddance, of freedom in general. A description of the special qualities of the individual, therefore, can again only consist in the negation of this "freedom" in its three "refractions"; each of these negative freedoms is now converted by its negation into a positive quality. Obviously, just as in the Old Testament riddance of the world of things and the world of thoughts was already regarded as the acquisition of both these worlds, so here also it is a matter of course that this peculiarity or acquisition of things and thoughts is in its turn represented as perfect riddance. The "ego" with its property, its world, consisting of the qualities just "pointed out", is owner. As self-enjoying and self-consuming, it is the "ego" raised to the second power, the owner of the owner, it being as much rid of the owner as the owner belongs to it; the result is "absolute negativity" in its dual determination as indifference, "unconcern"3 and negative relation to itself, the owner. Its property in respect of the world and its riddance of the world is now transformed into this negative relation to itself, into this self-dissolution and self-ownership of the owner. The ego, thus determined, is—
III. The unique, who again, therefore, has no other content than that of owner plus the philosophical determination of the "negative relation to himself". The profound Jacques pretends that there is nothing to say about this unique, because it is a corporeal, not constructed individual. But the matter here is rather the same as in the case of Hegel's absolute idea at the end of the Logik and of absolute personality at the end of the Encyklopädie, about which there is likewise nothing to say because the construction contains everything that can be said about such constructed per-
In the manuscript the Berlin dialect form Jleichjiiltigkeit (unconcern) is used.—Ed, sonalities. Hegel knows this and does not mind admitting it, whereas Stirner hypocritically maintains that his "unique" is also something different from the constructed unique alone, but something that cannot be expressed, viz., a corporeal individual. This hypocritical appearance vanishes if the thing is reversed, if the unique is defined as owner, and it is said of the owner that he has the universal category of peculiarity as his universal determination. This not only says everything that is "sayable" about the unique, but also what he is in general — minus the fantasy of Jacques le bonhomme about him.
"O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of the unique! How incomprehensible are his thoughts, and his ways past finding out!"3
"Lo, these are parts of his ways: but how little a portion is heard of him!" (Job 26:14.)
2. The Phenomenology of the Egoist in Agreement with Himself, or the Theory of Justification
As we have already seen in "The Economy of the Old Testament" and afterwards, Saint Sancho's true egoist in agreement with himself must on no account be confused with the trivial, everyday egoist, the "egoist in the ordinary sense". Rather he has as his presupposition both this latter (the one in thrall to the world of things, child, Negro, ancient, etc.) and the selfless egoist (the one in thrall to the world of thoughts, youth, Mongol, modern, etc.). It is, however, part of the nature of the secrets of the unique that this antithesis and the negative unity which follows from it — the "egoist in agreement with himself—can be examined only now, in the New Testament. Since Saint Max wishes to present the "true egoist" as something quite new, as the goal of all preceding history, he must, on the one hand, prove to the selfless, the advocates of dévoûment, that they are egoists against their will, and he must prove to the egoists in the ordinary sense that they are selfless, that they are not true, holy, egoists.—Let us begin with the first, with the selfless.
We have already seen countless times that in the world of Jacques le bonhomme everyone is obsessed by the holy. "Nevertheless it makes a difference" whether "one is educated or uneducated". The educated, who are occupied with pure thought, confront us here as "obsessed" by the holy par excellence. They are the "selfless" in their practical guise.
Romans 11 : 33 (paraphrased).—Ed.
"Who then is selfless? Completely" (!) "most" (!!) "likely" (!!!) "he who stakes everything else on one thing, one aim, one purpose, one passion.... He is ruled by a passion to which he sacrifices all others. And are these selfless not selfish, perhaps? Since they possess only a single ruling passion, they are concerned only with a single satisfaction, but the more ardently on that account. All their deeds and actions are egoistic, but it is a one-sided, concealed, narrow egoism; it is — obsession" (p. 99).
Hence, according to Saint Sancho, they possess only a single ruling passion; ought they to be concerned also with the passions which not they, but others possess, in order to rise to an all-round, unconcealed, unrestricted egoism, in order to correspond to this alien scale of "holy" egoism?
In this passage are incidentally introduced also the "miser" and the "pleasure-seeker" (probably because Stirner thinks that he seeks "pleasure" as such, holy pleasure, and not all sorts of real pleasures), as also "Robespierre, for example, Saint-Just, and so on" (p. 100) as examples of "selfless, obsessed egoists". "From a certain moral point of view it is argued" (i.e., our holy "egoist in agreement with himself" argues from his own point of view in extreme disagreement with himself) "approximately as follows":
"But if I sacrifice other passions to one passion, I still do not thereby sacrifice myself to this passion, and I do not sacrifice anything thanks to which I am truly I myself" (p. 386).
Saint Max is compelled by these two propositions "in disagreement with each other" to make the "paltry" distinction that one may well sacrifice six "for example", or seven, "and so on", passions to a single other passion without ceasing to be "truly I myself", but by no means ten passions, or a still greater number. Of course, neither Robespierre nor Saint-Just was "truly I myself", just as neither was truly "man", but they were truly Robespierre and Saint-Just, those unique, incomparable individuals.
The trick of proving to the "selfless" that they are egoists is an old dodge, sufficiently exploited already by Helvetius and Bentham. Saint Sancho's "own" trick consists in the transformation of "egoists in the ordinary sense", the bourgeois, into non-egoists. Helvetius and Bentham, at any rate, prove to the bourgeois that by their narrow-mindedness they in practice harm themselves, but Saint Max's "own" trick consists in proving that they do not correspond to the "ideal", the "concept", the "essence", the "calling", etc., of the egoist and that their attitude towards themselves is not that of absolute negation. Here again he has in mind only his German petty bourgeois. Let us point out, incidentally, that whereas on page 99 our saint makes the "miser" figure as a "selfless egoist", on page 78, on the other hand, the "avaricious one" is included among "egoists in the ordinary sense", among the "impure, unholy".
This second class of the hitherto existing egoists is defined on page 99 as follows:
"These people" (the bourgeois) "are therefore not selfless, not inspired, not ideal, not consistent, not enthusiasts; they are egoists in the ordinary sense, selfish people, thinking of their own advantage, sober, calculating, etc."
Since "the book" is not all of a piece, we have already had occasion, in connection with "whimsy" and "political liberalism", to see how Stirner achieves the trick of transforming the bourgeois into non-egoists, chiefly owing to his great ignorance of real people and conditions. This same ignorance serves him here as a lever.
"This" (i.e., Stirner's fantasy about unselfishness) "is repugnant to the stubborn brain of worldly man but for thousands of years he at least succumbed so far that he had to bend his obstinate neck and worship higher powers" (p. 104). The egoists in the ordinary sense "behave half clerically and half in a worldly way, they serve both God and Mammon" (p. 105).
We learn on page 78: "The Mammon of heaven and the God of the world both demand precisely the same degree of self-denial", hence it is impossible to understand how self-denial for Mammon and self-denial for God can be opposed to each other as "worldly" and "clerical".
On page 105-106, Jacques le bonhomme asks himself:
"How does it happen, then, that the egoism of those who assert their personal interest nevertheless constantly succumbs to a clerical or school-masterly, i.e., an ideal, interest?"
(Here, one must in passing "point out" that in this passage the bourgeois are depicted as representatives of personal interests.) It happens because:
"Their personality seems to them too small, too unimportant — as indeed it is — to lay claim to everything and be able to assert itself fully. A sure sign of this is the fact that they divide themselves into two persons, an eternal and a temporal; on Sundays they take care of the eternal aspect and on weekdays the temporal. They have the priest within them, therefore they cannot get rid of him."
Sancho experiences some scruples here; he asks anxiously whether "the same thing will happen" to peculiarity, the egoism in the extraordinary sense.
We shall see that it is not without grounds that this anxious question is asked. Before the cock has crowed twice, Saint Jacob (Jacques le bonhomme) will have "denied" himself thrice.(1) He discovers to his great displeasure that the two sides prominent-ly appearing in history, the private interest of individuals and the so-called general interest, always accompany each other. As usual, he discovers this in a false form, in its holy form, from the aspect of ideal interests, of the holy, of illusion. He asks: how is it that the ordinary egoists, the representatives of personal interests, are at the same time dominated by general interests, by school-masters, by the hierarchy? His reply to the question is to the effect that the bourgeois, etc., "seem to themselves too small", and he discovers a "sure sign" of this in the fact that they behave in a religious way, i.e., that their personality is divided into a temporal and an eternal one, that is to say, he explains their religious behaviour by their religious behaviour, after first transforming the struggle between general and personal interests into a mirror image of the struggle, into a simple reflection inside religious fantasy.
How the matter stands as regards the domination of the ideal, see above in the section on hierarchy.
If Sancho's question is translated from its highflown form into everyday language, then "it now reads":
How is it that personal interests always develop, against the will of individuals, into class interests, into common interests which acquire independent existence in relation to the individual persons, and in their independence assume the form of general interests? How is it that as such they come into contradiction with the actual individuals and in this contradiction, by which they are defined as general interests, they can be conceived by consciousness as ideal and even as religious, holy interests? How is it that in this process of private interests acquiring independent existence as class interests the personal behaviour of the individual is bound to be objectified [sich versachlichen], estranged [sich entfremden], and at the same time exists as a power independent of him and without him, created by intercourse, and is transformed into social relations, into a series of powers which determine and subordinate the individual, and which, therefore, appear in the imagination as "holy" powers? Had Sancho understood the fact that within the framework of definite modes of production, which, of course, are not dependent on the will, alien [fremde] practical forces, which are independent not only of isolated individuals but even of all of them together, always come to stand above people — then he could be fairly indifferent as to whether this fact is presented in a religious form or distorted in the fancy of the egoist, above whom everything is placed in imagination, in such a way that he places nothing above himself. Sancho would then have descended from the realm of speculation into the realm of reality, from what people fancy to what they actually are, from what they imagine to how they act and are bound to act in definite circumstances. What seems to him a product of thought, he would have understood to be a product of life. He would not then have arrived at the absurdity worthy of him — of explaining the division between personal and general interests by saying that people imagine this division also in a religious way and seem to themselves to be such and such, which is, however, only another word for "imagining".
Incidentally, even in the banal, petty-bourgeois German form in which Sancho perceives the contradiction of personal and general interests, he should have realised that individuals have always started out from themselves, and could not do otherwise, and that therefore the two aspects he noted are aspects of the personal development of individuals; both are equally engendered by the empirical conditions under which the individuals live, both are only expressions of one and the same personal development of people and are therefore only in seeming contradiction to each other. As regards the position — determined by the special circumstances of development and by division of labour — which falls to the lot of the given individual, whether he represents to a greater extent one or the other aspect of the antithesis, whether he appears more as an egoist or more as selfless — that was a quite subordinate question, which could only acquire any interest at all if it were raised in definite epochs of history in relation to definite individuals. Otherwise this question could only lead to morally false, charlatan phrases. But as a dogmatist Sancho falls into error here and finds no other way out than by declaring that the Sancho Panzas and Don Quixotes are born such, and that then the Don Quixotes stuff all kinds of nonsense into the heads of the Sanchos; as a dogmatist he seizes on one aspect, conceived in a school-masterly manner, declares it to be characteristic of individuals as such, and expresses his aversion to the other aspect. Therefore, too, as a dogmatist, the other aspect appears to him partly as a mere state of mind, dévoûment, partly as a mere "principle", and not as a relation necessarily arising from the preceding natural mode of life of individuals. One has, therefore, only to "get this principle out of one's head", although, according to Sancho's ideology, it creates all kinds of empirical things. Thus, for example, on page 180 "social life, all sociability, all fraternity and all that ... was created by the life principle(2) or social principle". It is better the other way round: life created the principle.
Communism is quite incomprehensible to our saint because the communists do not oppose egoism to selflessness or selflessness to egoism, nor do they express this contradiction theoretically either in its sentimental or in its highflown ideological form; they rather demonstrate its material source, with which it disappears of itself. The communists do not preach morality at all, as Stirner does so extensively. They do not put to people the moral demand: love one another, do not be egoists, etc.; on the contrary, they are very well aware that egoism, just as much as selflessness, is in definite circumstances a necessary form of the self-assertion of individuals. Hence, the communists by no means want, as Saint Max believes, and as his loyal Dottore Graziano (Arnold Ruge) repeats after him (for which Saint Max calls him "an unusually cunning and politic mind", Wigand, p. 192), to do away with the "private individual" for the sake of the "general", selfless man. That is a figment of the imagination concerning which both of them could already have found the necessary explanation in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. Communist theoreticians, the only communists who have time to devote to the study of history, are distinguished precisely by the fact that they alone have discovered that throughout history the "general interest" is created by individuals who are defined as "private persons". They know that this contradiction is only a seeming one because one side of it, what is called the "general interest", is constantly being produced by the other side, private interest, and in relation to the latter it is by no means an independent force with an independent history — so that this contradiction is in practice constantly destroyed and reproduced. Hence it is not a question of the Hegelian "negative unity" of two sides of a contradiction, but of the materially determined destruction of the preceding materially determined mode of life of individuals, with the disappearance of which this contradiction together with its unity also disappears.
Thus we see how the "egoist in agreement with himself" as opposed to the "egoist in the ordinary sense" and the "selfless egoist", is based from the outset on an illusion about both of these and about the real relations of real people. The representative of personal interests is merely an "egoist in the ordinary sense" because of his necessary contradiction to communal interests which, within the existing mode of production and intercourse, are given an independent existence as general interests and are conceived and vindicated in the form of ideal interests. The representative of the interests of the community is merely "selfless" because of his opposition to personal interests, fixed as private interests, and because the interests of the community are defined as general and ideal interests.
Both the "selfless egoist" and the "egoist in the ordinary sense" coincide, in the final analysis, in self-denial.
Page 78: "Thus, self-denial is common to both the holy and unholy, the pure and impure: the impure denies all better feelings, all shame, even natural timidity, and follows only the desire which rules him. The pure renounces his natural relation to the world.... Impelled by the thirst for money, the avaricious person denies all promptings of conscience, all sense of honour, all soft-heartedness and pity; he is blind to all consideration, his desire drives him on. The holy person acts similarly: he makes himself a laughing-stock in the eyes of the world, he is 'hard-hearted' and 'severely just', for he is carried away by his longing."
The "avaricious man", shown here as an impure, unholy egoist, hence as an egoist in the ordinary sense, is nothing but a figure on whom moral readers for children and novels dilate, but that actually occurs only as an exception, and is by no means the representative of the avaricious bourgeois. The latter, on the contrary, have no need to deny the "promptings of conscience", "the sense of honour", etc., or to restrict themselves to the one passion of avarice alone. On the contrary, their avarice engenders a series of other passions— political, etc.—the satisfaction of which the bourgeois on no account sacrifice. Without going more deeply into this matter, let us at once turn to Stirner's "self-denial".
For the self which denies itself, Saint Max here substitutes a different self which exists only in Saint Max's imagination. He makes the "impure" sacrifice general qualities such as "better feelings", "shame", "timidity", "sense of honour", etc., and does not at all ask whether the impure actually possesses these properties. As if the "impure" is necessarily bound to possess all these qualities! But even if the "impure" did possess all of them, the sacrifice of these qualities would stiii be no self-denial, but only confirm the fact — which has to be justified even in morality "in agreement with itself"—that for the sake of one passion several others are sacrificed. And, finally, according to this theory, everything that Sancho does or does not do is "self-denial". He may or may not act in a particular manner [...].(3) Although* on* page 420 Saint Max now says:
"Over the portals of our [epoch] are written not the words ... 'know thyself, [but] 'turn yourself to account'" [Verwerte Dich] (here our school-master again transforms the actual turning to account which he finds in existence into a moral precept about turning to account), nevertheless [for the] "egoist in the ordinary [sense' instead of for] the former "selfless egoist", "the [Apollonic" maxim ' should read:
"Only know yourselves], only know what [you] are in reality and give up vour foolish endeavour to be something different from what you are!" "For' : "This leads to the phenomenon of deceived egoism, in which I satisfy not myself, but] only one [of my desires, e.] g., the [thirst for] happiness. [—All] your deeds and [actions are secret], concealed ... [egoism,] unconscious egoism, [but] for that very reason not egoism, but slavery, service, self-denial. You are egoists and at the same time not egoists, inasmuch as you deny egoism" (p. 217).
"No sheep, no dog, endeavours to become a real" egoist (p. 443); "no animal" calls to the others: "Only know yourselves, only know
We are really very happy [about the "unselfishness" j of the consciousness of the German petty [bourgeois]....
He immediately gives a good example of this unselfishness by [adducing] Orphanage-F[rancke, ' O'Connell, Saint Boniface, Robespierre, Theodor Körner...].
O'Connell [...], every [child] in Britain knows this. Only in Germany, and particularly in Berlin, is it still possible to believe that O'Connell is "unselfish". O'Connell, who "tirelessly works" to place his illegitimate children and to enlarge his fortune, who has not for love exchanged his lucrative legal practice (£10,000 per annum) for the even more lucrative job of an agitator (£20,000-30,000 per annum) ('especially lucrative in Ireland, where he has no competition); O'Connell who, acting as middleman,'1 "hard-heartedlv" exploits the Irish peasants making them live with their pigs while he, King Dan, holds court in princely style in his palace in Merrion Square and at the same time laments continually over the misery of these peasants, "for he is carried away by his longing"; O'Connell, who always pushes the movement just as far as is necessary to secure his national tribute ' and his position as chief, and who every year after collecting the tribute gives up all agitation in order to pamper himself on his estate at Derrynane. Because of his legal charlatanism carried on over many years and his exceedingly brazen exploitation of every movement in which he participated, O'Connell is regarded with contempt even by the English bourgeoisie, despite his usefulness.
It is moreover obvious that Saint Max, the discoverer of true egoism, is strongly interested in proving that unselfishness has hitherto ruled the world. Therefore he puts forward the great proposition (Wigand, p. 165) that the world was "not egoistic tor millennia". At most he admits that from time to time the "egoist" appeared as Stirner's forerunner and "ruined nations".
what you are in reality".—"It is your nature to be" egoistical, "you are" egoistical "natures, i. e.", egoists. "But precisely because you*are that already, you have no need to become so" (ibid.). To what you are belongs also your consciousness, and since you are egoists you possess also the consciousness corresponding to your egoism, and therefore there is no reason at all for paying the slightest heed to Stirner's moral preaching to look into your heart and do penance.
Here again Stirner exploits the old philosophical device to which we shall return later. The philosopher does not say directly: You are not people. [He says:] You have always been people, but you were not conscious of what you were, and for that very reason you were not in reality True People. Therefore your appearance was not appropriate to your essence. You were people and you were not people.
In a roundabout way the philosopher here admits that a definite consciousness is appropriate to definite people and definite circumstances. But at the same time he imagines that his moral demand to people — the demand that they should change their consciousness — will bring about this altered consciousness, and in people who have changed owing to changed empirical conditions and who, of course, now also possess a different consciousness, he sees nothing but a changed [consciousness].—It is just the same [with the consciousness for which you are secretly] longing; [in regard to this] you are [secret, unconscious] egoists — i.e., you are really egoists, insofar as you are unconscious, but you are non-egoists, insofar as you are conscious. Or: at the root of your present [consciousness lies] a definite being, which is not the [being] which I demand; your consciousness is the consciousness of the egoist such as he should not [be], and therefore it shows that you yourselves are egoists such as egoists should not be — or it shows that you should be different from what you really are. This entire separation of consciousness from the individuals who are its basis and from their actual conditions, this notion that the egoist of present-day bourgeois society does not possess the consciousness corresponding to his egoism, is merely an old philosophical fad that Jacques le bonhomme here credulously accepts and copies.(4) Let us deal with Stirner's "touching example" of the avaricious person. He wants to persuade this avaricious person, who is not an "avaricious person" in general, but the avaricious "Tom or Dick"; a quite individually defined, "unique" avaricious person, whose avarice is not the category of "avarice" (an abstraction of Saint Max's from his all-embracing, complex, "unique" manifestation of life) and "does not depend on the heading under which other people" (for example, Saint Max) "classify it"—he wants to persuade this avaricious person by moral exhortations that he "is satisfying not himself but one of his desires". But "you are you only for a [moment], only as a momentary being are you real. What [is separated from you,] from the momentary being" is something absolutely higher, [e.g., money. But whether] "for you" money is "rather" [a higher pleasure], whether it is for you [something "absolutely higher" or] not [...](5) perhaps ["deny"] myself [?—He] finds that I am possessed [by avarice] day and night, [but] this is so only in his reflection. It is he who makes "day and night" out of the many moments in which I am always the momentary being, always myself, always real, just as he alone embraces in one moral judgment the different moments of my manifestation of life and asserts that they are the satisfaction of avarice. When Saint Max announces that I am satisfying only one of my desires, and not myself, he puts me as a complete and whole being in opposition to me myself. "And in what does this complete and whole being consist? It is certainly not your momentary being, not what you are at the present moment"—hence, according to Saint Max himself, it consists in the holy "being" (Wigand, p. 171). When "Stirner" says that I must change my consciousness, then I know for my part that my momentary consciousness also belongs to my momentary being, and Saint Max, by disputing that I have this consciousness, attacks as a covert moralist my whole mode of life.(6) And then—"do you exist only when you think about yourself, do you exist only owing to self-consciousness?" (Wigand, pp. 157-158.) How can I be anything but an egoist? How can Stirner, for example, be anything but an egoist — whether he denies egoism or not? "You are egoists and you are not egoists, inasmuch as you deny egoism,"—that is what you preach.
Innocent, "deceived", "unavowed" school-master! Things are just the reverse. We egoists in the ordinary sense, we bourgeois, know quite well: Charité bien ordonnée commence par soi-même^ and we have long had the motto: love thy neighbour as thyself,3 interpreted in the sense that each is his own neighbour. But we deny that we are heartless egoists, exploiters, ordinary egoists, whose hearts cannot be lifted up to the exalted feeling of making the interests of their fellow-men their own — which, between ourselves, onlv means that we declare our interests to be the interests of our fellow-men. [You] deny the "ordinary" [egoism of the] unique egoist [only because] you ["deny]" your ["natural] relations to the [world]". Hence you do not understand why we bring practical egoism to perfection precisely by denying the phraseology of egoism — we who are concerned with realising real egoistical interests, not the holy interest of egoism. Incidentallv, it could be foreseen — and here the bourgeois coollv turns his back on Saint Max — that you German school-masters, if you once took up the defence of egoism, would proclaim not real, "mundane and plainly evident" egoism ("the book", p. 455), that is to say, "not what is called" egoism, but egoism in the extraordinary, school-masterly sense, philosophical or vagabond egoism.
The egoist in the extraordinary sense, therefore, is "only now discovered". "Let us examine this new discovery more closelv" (p. 11).
From what has been just said it is already clear that the egoists who existed till now have only to change their consciousness in order to become egoists in the extraordinarv sense, hence that the egoist in agreement with himself is distinguished from the previous type only by consciousness-, i.e., only as a learned man, as a philosopher. It further follows from the whole historical outlook of Saint Max that, because the former egoists were ruled only by the "holy", the true egoist has to fight only against the "holy". "Unique" history has shown us how Saint Max transformed historical conditions into ideas, and then the egoist into a sinner against these ideas; how every egoistic manifestation was transformed into a sin [against these] ideas, [the power of] the privileged into a sin [against the idea] of equality, into the sin of despotism. [Concerning the] idea of freedom [of competition,] therefore, it could be [said in "the book"] that [private property is regarded] by him [(p. 155) as"] the personal" [...] great, [...] [selfless] egoists [...] essential and invincible [...] only to be fought by transforming them into something holy and then asserting that he abolishes the holiness in them, i.e., his holy idea about them, [i.e.,] abolishes them only insofar as they exist in him as a holy one.b Page 50*: "How you are at each moment you are as your creation, and it is precisely m this creation that you do not want to lose yourself, the creator. You yourself are a higher being than yourself, i.e., vou are not merely a creation, but likewise a creator; and it is this that you fail to recognise as an involuntary egoist, and for that reason the higher being is something foreign to you."
In a somewhat different variation, this same wisdom is stated on page 239 of "the book":
"The species is nothing" (later it becomes all sorts of things, see "Self-Enjoyment"), "and when the individual rises above the limitations of his individuality, it is precisely here that he himself appears as an individual; he exists only by raising himself, he exists only by not remaining what he is. otherwise he would be done for, dead."
In relation to these propositions, to his "creation", Stirner at once begins to behave as 'creator'*, "by no means losing himself in them":
"You are vou only for a moment, onlv as a momentary being are vou real.... At each moment I am wholly what 1 am ... what is separated from you. the momentary being", is "something absolutely higher" ... (Wigand, p. 170); and, on page 171 (ibid.), "your being" is defined as "vour momentary being".
Whereas in "the book" Saint Max says that besides a momentary being he has also another, higher being, in the "Apologetical Commentary" "the momentary being" [of his] individual is equated with his "complete [and whole] being", and every [being] as a "momentary being" is transformed [into an] "absolutely higher being". In "the book" therefore he is, at every moment, a higher being than what he is at that moment, whereas in the Commentary", everything that he is not directly at a given moment is defined as an "absolutely higher being", a holv being.—And in contrast to all this division we read on page 200 of "the book":
"I know nothing about a division into an 'imperfect' and a 'perfect' ego." "The egoist in agreement with himself" needs no longer sacrifice himself to something higher, since in his own eyes he is himself this higher being, and he transfers this schism between a "higher" and a "lower being" into himself. So, in fact (Saint Sancho contra
Feuerbach, "the book", p. 243), "the highest being has undergone nothing but a metamorphosis". The true egoism of Saint Max consists in an egoistic attitude to real egoism, to himself, as he is "at each moment". This egoistic attitude to egoism is selflessness. From this aspect Saint Max as a creation is an egoist in the ordinary sense; as creator he is a selfless egoist. We shall also become acquainted with the opposite aspect, for both these aspects prove to be genuine determinations of reflection since they undergo absolute dialectics in which each of them is the opposite of itself.
Before entering more deeply into this mystery in its esoteric form, one has to observe some of [its arduous] life battles.
[On pages 82, 83 Stirner achieves the feat of] bringing the most general quality, [the egoist,] [into agreement] with himself as creator, [from the standpoint of the world] of spirit:
["Christianity aimed] at [delivering us from natural determination (determination through nature), from desires as a driving force, it consequently wished that man should not allow himself to be] determined [by his desires. This does not mean that] he [should have] no [desires], but that [desires] should not possess [him,] that [they] should not become fixed, unconquerable, ineradicable. Could we not apply these machinations of Christianity against desires to its own precept, that we should be determined by the spirit...? ... Then this would signify the dissolution of spirit, the dissolution of all thoughts. As one ought to have said there ... so one would have to say now: We should indeed possess spirit, but spirit should not possess us."
"And they that are Christ's have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts" (Galatians 5:24)—thus, according to Stirner, they deal with their crucified affections and lusts like true owners. He accepts Christianity in instalments, but will not let matters rest at the crucified flesh alone, wanting to crucify his spirit as well, consequently, the "whole fellow".
The only reason why Christianity wanted to free us from the domination of the flesh and "desires as a driving force" was because it regarded our flesh, our desires as something foreign to us; it wanted to free us from determination by nature only because it regarded our own nature as not belonging to us. For if I myself am not nature, if my natural desires, my whole natural character, do not belong to myself — and this is the doctrine of Christianity — then all determination by nature — whether due to my own natural character or to what is known as external nature — seems to me a determination by something foreign, a fetter, compulsion used against me, heteronomy as opposed to autonomy of the spirit. Stirner accepts this Christian dialectic without examining it and then applies it to our spirit. Incidentally, Christianity has indeed never succeeded in freeing us from the domination of desires, even in that juste milieu sense foisted on it by Saint Max; it does not go beyond mere moral injunctions, which remain ineffective in real life. Stirner takes moral injunctions for real deeds and supplements them with the further categorical imperative: "We should indeed possess spirit, but spirit should not possess us"—and consequently all his egoism in agreement with itself is reduced "on closer examination", as Hegel would say, to a moral philosophy that is as delightful as it is edifying and contemplative.
Whether a desire becomes fixed or not, i.e., whether it obtains exclusive [power over us]—which, however, does [not] exclude [further progress]—depends on whether material circumstances, "bad" mundane conditions permit the normal satisfaction of this desire and, on the other hand, the development of a totality of desires. This latter depends, in turn, on whether we live in circumstances that allow all-round activity and thereby the full development of all our potentialities. On the actual conditions, and the possibility of development they give each individual, depends also whether thoughts become fixed or not — just as, for example, the fixed ideas of the German philosophers, these "victims of society", qui nous font pitié* are inseparable from the German conditions. Incidentally, in Stirner the domination of desires is a mere phrase, the imprint of the absolute saint. Thus, still keeping to the "touching example" of the avaricious person, we read:
"An avaricious person is not an owner, but a servant, and he can do nothing for his own sake without at the same time doing it for the sake of his master" (p. 400).
No one can do anything without at the same time doing it for the sake of one or other of his needs and for the sake of the organ of this need — for Stirner this means that this need and its organ are made into a master over him, just as earlier he made the means for satisfying a need (cf. the sections on political liberalism and communism) into a master over him. Stirner cannot eat without at the same time eating for the sake of his stomach. If the worldly conditions prevent him from satisfying his stomach, then his stomach becomes a master over him, the desire to eat becomes a fixed desire, and the thought of eating becomes a fixed idea — which at the same time gives him an example of the influence of world conditions in fixing his desires and ideas. Sancho's "revolt" against the fixation of desires and thoughts is thus reduced to an impotent moral injunction about self-control and provides new evidence that he merely gives an ideologically high-sounding expression to the most trivial sentiments of the petty bourgeois.* Thus, in this first example he fights, on the one hand, against his carnal desires, and on the other against his spiritual thoughts — on the one hand against his flesh, on the other against his spirit — when they, his creations, want to become independent of him, their creator. How our saint conducts this struggle, how he behaves as creator towards his creation, we shall now see.
In the Christian "in the ordinary sense", in the chrétien "simple", to use Fourier's expression,
"spirit has undivided power and pays no heed to any persuasion of the 'flesh'. However, only through the 'flesh' can I break the tyranny of the spirit; for only when man perceives also his flesh does he perceive himself wholly, and only when he perceives himself wholly does he become perceptive or rational.... But as soon as the flesh speaks and — as cannot be otherwise — in a passionate tone ... then he" (the chrétien
simple) "believes he hears devil voices, voices against the spirit... and with good reason comes out passionately against them. He would not be a Christian if he were prepared to tolerate them" (p. 83).
Hence, when his spirit wishes to acquire independence in relation to him, Saint Max calls his flesh to his aid, and when his flesh
individual by present-day relations; some of these desires — namely desires which exist under all relations, and only change their form and direction under different social relations — are merely altered by the communist social system, for they are given the opportunity to develop normallv: but others — namelv those originating solely in a particular society, under particular conditions of [production] and intercourse — are totally deprived of their conditions of existence. Which [of the desires] will be merely changed and [which eliminated] in a communist [society] can [only be determined in a practical] way, by [changing the real], actual ["desires", and not by making comparisons with earlier historical conditions].
The two expressions: ["fixed" and "desires"], which we [have just used in order to be able] to disprove [this "unique" fact of] Stirner's, [are of course] quite inappropriate. The fact that one desire of an individual in modern society can be satisfied at the expense of all others, and that this "ought not to be" and that this is more or less the case with all individuals in the world today and that thereby the free development of the individual as a whole is made impossible — this fact is expressed by Stirner thus: "the desires become fixed" in the egoist in disagreement with himself, for Stirner knows nothing of the empirical connection of this fact with the world as it is today. A desire is already by its mere existence something "fixed", and it can occur only to Saint Max and his like not to allow his sex instinct, for instance, to become "fixed"; it is that already and will cease to be fixed only as the result of castration or impotence. Each need, which forms the basis of a "desire", is likewise something "fixed", and try as he may Saint Max cannot abolish this "fixedness" and for example contrive to free himself from the necessity of eating within "fixed" periods of time. The communists have no intention of abolishing the fixedness of their desires and needs, an intention which Stirner, immersed in his world of fancy, ascribes to them and to all other men; they only strive to achieve an organisation of production and intercourse which will make possible the normal satisfaction of all needs, i.e., a satisfaction which is limited only by the needs themselves.
becomes rebellious, he remembers that he is also spirit. What the Christian does in one direction, Saint Max does in both. He is the chrétien "composé", he once again reveals himself as the perfect Christian.
Here, in this example, Saint Max, as spirit, does not appear as the creator of his flesh and vice versa; he finds his flesh and his spirit both present, and only when one side rebels does he remember that he has also the other, and asserts this other side, as his true ego, against it. Here, therefore, Saint Max is creator only insofar as he is one who is " also-otherwise-determined", insofar as he possesses yet another quality besides that which it just suits him to subsume under the category of "creation". His entire creative activity consists here in the good resolution to perceive himself, and indeed to perceive himself entirely or be rational,(7) to perceive himself as a ''complete, entire being", as a being different from "his momentary being", and even in direct contradiction to the kind of being he is "momen-tarily".
[Let us now turn to one of the "arduous] life battles" [of our saint]:
[Pages 80, 81 : "My zeal] need not [be less than the] most fanatical, [but at the same] time [I remain] towards [it cold as ice, sceptical], and its [most irreconcilable enemy;] I remain [its judge, for I am its] owner."
[If one desires to] give [meaning] to what Saint [Sancho] says about himself, then it amounts to this: his creative activity here is limited to the fact that in his zeal he preserves the consciousness of his zeal, that he reflects on it, that he adopts the attitude of the reflecting ego to himself as the real ego. It is to consciousness that he arbitrarily gives the name "creator". He is "creator" only insofar as he possesses consciousness.
"Thereupon, you forget yourself in sweet self-oblivion.... But do you exist only when you think of yourself, and do you vanish when you forget yourself? Who does not forget himself at every instant, who does not lose sight of himself a thousand times an hour?" (Wigand, pp. 157, 158).
This, of course, Sancho cannot forgive his "self-oblivion" and therefore "remains at the same time its most irreconcilable enemy".
Saint Max, the creation, burns with immense zeal at the very time when Saint Max, the creator, has already risen above his zeal by means of reflection; or the real Saint Max burns with zeal, and the reflecting Saint Max imagines that he has risen above this zeal. This rising in reflection above what he actually is, is now amusingly and adventurously described in the phrases of a novel to the effect that he allows his zeal to remain in existence, i.e., he does not draw any serious consequences from his hostility to it, but his attitude towards it is "cold as ice", "sceptical" and that of its "most irreconcilable enemy".
Insofar as Saint Max burns with zeal, i.e., insofar as zeal is his true quality, his attitude to it is not that of creator; and insofar as his attitude is that of creator, he does not really burn with zeal, zeal is foreign to him, not a quality of him. So long as he burns with zeal he is not the owner of zeal, and as soon as he becomes the owner, he ceases to burn with zeal. As an aggregate complex, he is at every instant, in the capacity of creator and owner, the sum total of all his qualities, with the exception of the one quality which he puts in opposition to himself, the embodiment of all the others, as creation and property — so that precisely that quality which he stresses as his own is always foreign to him.
No matter how extravagant Saint Max's true story of his heroic exploits within himself, in his own consciousness, may sound, it is nevertheless an acknowledged fact that there do exist reflecting individuals, who imagine that in and through reflection they have risen above everything,(8) because in actual fact they never go beyond reflection.
This trick — of declaring oneself against some definite quality as being someone who is also-otherwise-determined, namely, in the present example as being the possessor of reflection directed towards the opposite—this trick can be applied with the necessary variations to any quality you choose. For example, my indifference need be no less than that of the most blasé person; but at the same time I remain towards it extremely ardent, sceptical and its most irreconcilable enemy, etc.
[It should] not be forgotten that [the aggregate] complex of all his [qualities, the owner]—in which capacity [Saint] Sancho [by reflecting opposes one particular] quality — is in this [case nothing but Sancho's] simple [reflection about this] one quality, [which he has] transformed [into his ego by] putting forward, instead of the whole [complex, one] merely reflecting [quality and] putting forward in opposition to each of his qualities [and to] the series [merely the one] quality of reflection, an ego, and himself as the imagined ego.
Now he himself gives expression to this hostile attitude to himself, this solemn parody of Bentham's book-keeping[81] of his own interests and qualities.
Page 188: "An interest, no matter towards what end it may be directed, acquires a slave in the shape of myself, if I am unable to rid myself of it; it is no longer my property, but I am its property. Let us, therefore, accept the directive of criticism that we should feel happy only in dissolution."
"We!"—Who are "We?" It never occurs to "us" to "accept" the "directive of criticism".—Thus Saint Max, who for the moment is under the police surveillance of "criticism", here demands "the same well-being for all", "equal well-being for all in one and the same [respect]", "the direct tyrannical domination of religion".
His interestedness in the extraordinary sense is here revealed as a heavenly disinterestedness.
Incidentally, there is no need here to deal at length with the fact that in existing society it does not at all depend on Saint Sancho whether an "interest" "acquires a slave in the shape of himself" and whether "he is unable to rid himself of it". The fixation of interests through division of labour and class relations is far more obvious than the fixation of "desires" and "thoughts".
In order to outbid critical criticism, our saint should at least have gone as far as the dissolution of dissolution, for otherwise dissolution becomes an interest which he cannot get rid of, which in him acquires a slave. Dissolution is no longer his property, but he is the property of dissolution. Had he wanted to be consistent in the example just given, [he should] [have treated his zeal against his] own "zeal" as [an "interest"] and [behaved] towards it [as an "irreconcilable] enemy". [But he should have] also considered his ["ice-cold" disinterestedness] in relation to his ["ice-cold" zeal] and become [just as wholly "ice-cold"]—and thereby, [obviously, he would have spared] his original ["interest"] and hence himself the "tempta-tion" to turn [in a circle] on the [heel] of speculation.—Instead, he cheerfully continues (ibid.):
any time, I destroy in it any inclination towards independence and absorb it before it becomes fixed and can become a fixed idea or passion."
How does Stirner "absorb" the persons who are his property! Stirner has just allowed himself to be given a "vocation" by "criticism". He asserts that he at once absorbs this "vocation" again, by saying on page 189:
"I do this, however, not for the sake of my human vocation, but because I call OR myself to do so."
If I do not call on myself to do so, I am, as we have just heard, a slave, not an owner, not a true egoist, I do not behave to myself as creator, as I should do as a true egoist; therefore, insofar as a person wants to be a true egoist, he must call himself to this vocation given him by "criticism". Thus, it is a universal vocation, a vocation for all, not merely his vocation, but also his vocation.
On the other hand, the true egoist appears here as an ideal which is unattainable by the majority of individuals, for (p. 434) "innately limited intellects unquestionably form the most numerous class of mankind"—and how could these "limited intellects" be able to penetrate the mvstery of unlimited absorption of oneself and the world.
Incidentally, all these terrible expressions — to destroy, to absorb etc.—are merely a new variation of the above-mentioned "ice-cold, most irreconcilable enemy".
Now, at last, we are put in a position to obtain an insight into Stirner's objections to communism. They were nothing but a preliminary, concealed legitimisation of his egoism in agreement with itself, in which these objections are resurrected in the flesh. The "equal well-being of all in one and the same respect" is resurrected in the demand that "we should [only] feel happy in [dissolution". "Care}" is resurrected [in the form of the unique "care]" to secure [one's ego] [as one's property]; [but "with the passage of time]" ["care"] again arises as to "how" [one can arrive] at a [unity—] viz., unity [of creator and creation.] And, finally, humanism re[-appears, which in the form of the true] egoist confronts empirical individuals as an unattainable ideal. Hence page 117 of "the book" should read as follows: Egoism in agreement with itself really endeavours to transform every man into a "secret police state". The spy and sleuth "reflection" keeps a strict eye on every impulse of spirit and body, and every deed and thought, every manifestation of life is, for him, a matter of reflection, i.e., a police matter. It is this dismemberment of man into "natural instinct" and "reflection" (the inner plebeian— creation, and the internal police — creator) which constitutes the egoist in agreement with himself.(9)
Hess (Die letzten Philosophen, p. 26) reproached our saint:
"He is constantly under the secret police surveillance of his critical conscience .... He has not forgotten the 'directive of criticism ... to feel happy only in dissolution'.... The egoist — his critical conscience is always reminding him — should never become so interested in anything as to devote himself entirely to his subject", and so on.
Saint Max "empowers himself" to answer as follows:
When "Hess says of Stirner that he is constantly, etcl — what does this mean except that when he criticises he wants to criticise not at random" (i.e., by the way: in the unique fashion), "not talking twaddle, but criticising properly" (i.e., like a human being)?
"What it means", when Hess speaks of the secret police, etc., is so clear from the passage by Hess quoted above that even Saint Max's "unique" understanding of it can onlv be explained as a deliberate misunderstanding. His "virtuositv of thought" is transformed here into a virtuosity in lying, for which we do not reproach him since it was his only way out, but which is hardly in keeping with the subtle little distinctions on the right to lie which he sets out elsewhere in "the book". Incidentally, we have already demonstrated — at greater length than he deserves — that "when he criticises", Sancho by no means "criticises properly", but "criticises at random" and "talks twaddle".
Thus, the attitude of the true egoist as creator towards himself as creation was first of all defined in the sense that in opposition to a definition in which he became fixed as a creation — for example, as against himself as thinker, as spirit — he asserts himself as a person also-otherwise-determined, as flesh. Later, he no longer asserts himself as really also-otherwise-determined, but as the mere idea of being also-otherwise-determined in general — hence, in the above example as someone who also-does-not think, who is thoughtless or indifferent to thought, an idea which he abandons again as soon as its nonsensicalness becomes evident. See above on turning round on the heel of speculation.2 Hence the creative activity consisted here in the reflection that this single determination, in the present case thought, could also be indifferent for him, i.e., it consisted in reflecting in general; as a result, of course, he creates only reflective definitions, if he creates anything at all (e.g., the idea of antithesis, the simple essence of which is concealed by all kinds of fiery arabesques).
As for the content of himself as a creation, we have seen that nowhere does he create this content, these definite qualities, e.g., his thought, his zeal, etc., but only the reflective definition of this content as creation, the idea that these definite qualities are his creations. All his qualities are present in him and whence they come is all the same to him. He, therefore, needs neither to develop them — for example, to learn to dance, in order to have mastery over his feet, or to exercise his thought on material which is not given to everyone, and is not procurable by everyone, in order to become the owner of his thought — nor does he need to worry about the conditions in the world, which in reality determine the extent to which an individual can develop.
Stirner actually only rids himself of one quality by means of another (i.e., the suppression of his remaining qualities by this "other"). In reality, however, [as we] have [already shown,] he does this only insofar as this quality has not only achieved free development, i.e., has not remained merely potential, but also insofar as conditions in the world have permitted him to develop in an equal measure a totality of qualities, [that is to say,] thanks to the division of [labour,]3 thus making possible the [predominant pursuit] of a [single passion, e.]g., that of [writing] books. [In general], it is an [absurdity to assume], as Saint [Max does], that one could satisfy one [passion], apart from all others, that one could satisfy it without at the same time satisfying oneself, the entire living individual. If this passion assumes an abstract, isolated character, if it confronts me as an alien power, if, therefore, the satisfaction of the individual appears as the one-sided satisfaction of a single passion — this by no means depends on consciousness or "good will" and least of all on lack of reflection on the concept of this quality, as Saint Max imagines.
It depends not on consciousness, but on being; not on thought, but on life; it depends on the individual's empirical development and manifestation of life, which in turn depends on the conditions obtaining in the world. If the circumstances in which the individual lives allow him only the [one]-sided development of one quality at the expense of all the rest, [if] they give him the material and time to develop only that one quality, then this individual achieves only a one-sided, crippled development. No moral preaching avails here.
And the manner in which this one, pre-eminently favoured quality develops depends again, on the one hand, on the material available for its development and, on the other hand, on the degree and manner in which the other qualities are suppressed. Precisely because thought, for example, is the thought of a particular, definite individual, it remains his definite thought, determined by his individuality and the conditions in which he lives. The thinking individual therefore has no need to resort to prolonged reflection about thought as such in order to declare that his thought is his own thought, his property; from the outset it is his own, peculiarly determined thought and it was precisely his peculiarity which [in the case of Saint] Sancho [was found to be] the "opposite" of this, a peculiarity which is peculiarity "as such". In the case of an individual, for example, whose life embraces a wide circle of varied activities and practical relations to the world, and who, therefore, lives a many-sided life, thought has the same character of universality as every other manifestation of his life. Consequently, it neither becomes fixed in the form of abstract thought nor does it need complicated tricks of reflection when the individual passes from thought to some other manifestation of life. From the outset it is always a factor in the total life of the individual, one which disappears and is reproduced as required.
In the case of a parochial Berlin school-master or author, however, whose activity is restricted to arduous work on the one hand and the pleasure of thought on the other, whose world extends from Moabit to Köpenick and ends behind the Hamburger Tor,[82] whose relations to this world are reduced to a minimum by his pitiful position in life, when such an individual experiences the need to think, it is indeed inevitable that his thought becomes just as abstract as he himself and his life, and that thought confronts him, who is quite incapable of resistance, in the form of a fixed power, whose activity offers the individual the possibility of a momentary escape from his "bad world", of a momentary pleasure. In the case of such an individual the few remaining desires, which arise not so much from intercourse with the world as from the constitution of the human body, express themselves only through repercussion, i.e., they assume in their narrow development the same one-sided and crude character as does his thought, they appear only at long intervals, stimulated by the excessive development of the predominant desire (fortified by immediate physical causes, e.g. [stomach] spasm) and are manifested turbulently and forcibly, with the most brutal suppression of the ordinary, [natural] desire [—this leads to further] domination over [thought.] As a matter of course, the school-master's [thinking reflects on and speculates about] this empirical [fact in a school]-masterly fashion. [But the mere announcement] that Stirner in general "creates" [his qualities] .does not [explain] even their particular form of development. The extent to which these qualities develop on the universal or local scale, the extent to which they transcend local narrow-mindedness or remain within its confines, depends not on Stirner, but on the development of world intercourse and on the part which he and the locality where he lives play in it. That under favourable circumstances some individuals are able to rid themselves of their local narrow-mindedness is by no means due to individuals imagining that they have got rid of, or intend to get rid of their local narrow-mindedness, but is only due to the fact that in their real empirical life individuals, actuated by empirical needs, have been able to bring about world intercourse.(10)
The only thing our saint achieves with the aid of his arduous reflection about his qualities and passions is that by his constant crotchetiness and scuffling with them he poisons the enjoyment and satisfaction of them.
Saint Max creates, as already said, only himself as a creation, i.e., he is satisfied with placing himself in this category of created entity. His activity [as] creator consists in regarding himself as a creation, and he does not even go on to resolve this division of himself into [creator and] creation, which is his own [product]. The division [into the "essential" and] the "inessential" becomes [for him a] permanent life process, [hence mere appearance,] i.e., his real life exists only [in "pure"] reflection, is [not] even actual existence; [for since this latter is at every] instant outside [him and his reflection], he tries [in vain to] present [reflection as] essential.
"But [since] this enemy" (viz., the true egoist as a creation) "begets himself in his defeat, since consciousness, by becoming fixed on him, does not free itself from him, but instead always dwells on him and always sees itself besmirched, and since this content of his endeavour is at the same time the very lowest, we find only an individual restricted to himself and his petty activity" (inactivity), "and brooding over himself, as unhappy as he is wretched" (Hegel)'.
What we have said so far about the division of Sancho into creator and creation, he himself now finally expresses in a logical form: the creator and the creation are transformed into the presupposing and the presupposed ego, or (inasmuch as his presupposition [of his ego] is a positing) into the positing and the posited ego:
"I for my part start from a certain presupposition since I presuppose myself ; but my presupposition does not strive for its perfection" (rather does Saint Max strive for its abasement), "on the contrary, it serves me merely as something to enjoy and consume"' (an enviable enjoyment!). "I am nourished by my presupposition alone and exist only bv consuming it. But for that reason" (a grand "for that reason"!) "the presupposition in question is no presupposition at all, for since" (a grand "for since"!) "I am the unique" (it should read: the true egoist in agreement with himself), "I know nothing about the duality of a presupposing and presupposed ego (of an 'imperfect' and perfect' ego or man)"—it should read: the perfection of my ego consists in this alone, that at every instant I know myself as an imperfect ego, as a creation—"but" (a magnificent "but"!) "the fact that I consume myself signifies merely that I am." (It should read: The fact that I am signifies here merely that in me I consume in imagination the category of the presupposed.) "I do not presuppose myself, because I really only posit or create myself perpetually" (viz., I posit and create myself as the presupposed, posited or created) "and I am I only because I am not presupposed, but posited" (it should read: and I exist only because I am antecedent to my positingj "and, again, I am posited only at the moment when I posit myself, i.e., I am creator and creation in one."
Stirner is a "posited man"," since he is always a posited ego, and his ego is ''also a man" ( Wigand, p. 183). "For that reason" he is a posited man; "for since" he is never driven by his passions to excesses, "therefore", he is what burghers call a sedate man, "but" the fact that he is a sedate man "signifies merely" that he always keeps an account of his own transformations and refractions.
What was so far only "for us"—to use for once, as Stirner does, the ianguage of Hegel — viz., that his whole creative activity had no other content than general definitions of reflection, is now "posited" by Stirner himself. Saini Max's struggle against "essence" here attains its "final goal" in that he identifies himself with essence, and indeed with pure, speculative essence. The relation of creator and creation is transformed into an explication of self-presupposition, i.e., [Stirner transforms] into an extremely "clumsy" and confused [idea] what Hegel [says] about reflection in "the [Doctrine of Essence]". [Since] Saint Max takes out one [dement of his] reflection, [viz., positing reflection, his fantasies become] "negative", [because he] transforms himself, etc., into "self-[presupposition", in] contradistinction to [himself as the positing] and himself as the posited, [and] transforms reflection into the mystical antithesis of creator and creation. It should be pointed out, by the way, that in thig section of his Logik Hegel analyses the "machinations" of the "creative nothing", which explains also why Saint Max already on page 8 had to "posit" himself as this "creative nothing".
We shall now "episodically insert" a few passages from Hegel's explanation of self-presupposition for comparison with Saint Max's explanation. But as Hegel does not write so incoherently and "at random" as our Jacques le bonhomme, we shall have to collect these passages from various pages of the Logik in order to bring them into correspondence with Sancho's great thesis.
"Essence presupposes itself and is itself the transcendence of this presupposition. Since it is the repulsion of itself from itself or indifference towards itself, negative relation to itself, it thereby posits itself against itself ... positing has no presupposition ... the other is only posited through essence itself... Thus, reflection is only the negative of itself. Reflection in so far as it presupposes is simply positing reflection. It consists therefore in this, that it is itself and' not itself in a unity" ("creator and creation in one") (Hegel, Logik, II, pp. 5, 16, 17, 18, 22).
One might have expected from Stirner's "virtuosity of thought" that he would have gone on to further researches into Hegel's Logik. However, he wisely refrained from doing so. For, if he had done so, he would have found that he, as mere "posited" ego, as creation, i.e., insofar as he possesses existence, is merely a seeming ego, and he is "essence", creator, only insofar as he does not exist, but only imagines himself. We have already seen, and shall see again further on, that all his qualities, his whole activity, and his whole attitude to the world, are a mere appearance which he creates for himself, nothing but "juggling tricks on the tightrope of the objective". His ego is always a dumb, hidden "ego", hidden in his ego imagined as essence.
Since the true egoist in his creative activity is, therefore, only a paraphrase of speculative reflection or pure essence, it follows, "according to the myth", "by natural reproduction", as was already revealed when examining the "arduous life battles" of the true egoist, that his "creations" are limited to the simplest determinations of reflection, such as identity, difference, equality, inequality, [opposition,] etc.—determinations [of reflection] which he [tries] to make clear for himself in ["himself"], concerning whom "the tidings have [gone] as far as [Berlin]". [Concerning] his presuppositionless yyUfArt Ifa'iuttAtutf
Max Stirner
Drawing by Engels (The inscription in German reads: "Max Stirner. Drawn from memory by Frederick Engels. London, 1892 ".)
[ego] we [shall] have occasion to "hear [a little] word" later on. See, inter alia, "The Unique".3
As in Sanchà's construction of history the later historical phenomenon is transformed, by Hegel's method, into the cause, the creator, of an earlier phenomenon, so in the case of the egoist in agreement with himself the Stirner of today is transformed into the creator of the Stirner of yesterday, although, to use his language, the Stirner of today is the creation of the Stirner of yesterday. Reflection, indeed, reverses all this, and in reflection the Stirner of yesterday is the creation of the Stirner of today, as a product of reflection, as an idea — just as in reflection the conditions of the external world are creations of his reflection.
Page 216: "Do not seek in 'self-denial' the freedom that actually deprives you of yourselves, but seek yourselves" (i.e., seek yourselves in self-denial), "become egoists, each of you should become an all-powerful ego!"
After the foregoing, we should not be surprised if later on Saint Max's attitude to this proposition is again that of creator and most irreconcilable enemy and he "dissolves" his lofty moral postulate: "Become an all-powerful ego" into this, that each, in any case, does what he can, and that he can do what he does, and therefore, of course, for Saint Max, he is "all-powerful".
Incidentally, the nonsense of the egoist in agreement with himself is summarised in the proposition quoted above. First comes the moral injunction to seek and, moreover, to seek oneself. This is defined in the sense that man should become something that he so far is not, namely, an egoist, and this egoist is defined as being an "all-powerful ego", in whom the peculiar ability has become resolved from actual ability into the ego, into omnipotence, into the fantastic idea of ability. To seek oneself means, therefore, to become something different from what one is and, indeed, to become all-powerful, i.e., nothing, a non-thing, a phantasmagoria.
We have now progressed so far that one of the profoundest mysteries of the unique, and at the same time a problem that has long kept the civilised world in a state of anxious suspense, can be disclosed and solved.
Who is Szeliga? Since the appearance of the critical Literatur-Zeitung (see Die heilige Familie, etc.) this question has been put by
See this volume, p. 433.— Ed.
everyone who has followed the development of German philosophy. Who is Szeliga? Everyone asks, everyone listens attentively when he hears the barbaric sound of this name — but no one replies.
Who is Szeliga? Saint Max gives us the key to this "secret of secrets".
Szeliga is Stirner as a creation, Stirner is Szeliga as creator. Stirner is the "I", Szeliga the "you", in "the book". Hence Stirner, the creator, behaves towards Szeliga, his creation, as towards his "most irreconcilable enemy". As soon as Szeliga wishes to acquire independence in relation to Stirner — he made a hapless attempt in this direction in the Norddeutsche Blätter*—Saint Max "takes him back into himself", an experiment which was carried out against this attempt of Szeliga's on pages 176-79 of the "Apologetic Commentary" in Wigand. The struggle of the creator against the creation, of Stirner against Szeliga, is, however, only a seeming one: [Now] Szeliga advances against his creator the phrases of this [creator himself]—for example, the assertion "that [the mere,] bare body is [absence of] thought" (Wigand, p. 148). Saint [Max,] as we have seen, [was thinking] only of [the bare flesh], the body before its [formation], and in [this connection] he gave the body the [determination] of being "the other of thought", non-thought and the non-thinking being, hence absence of thought; and indeed in a later passage he bluntly declares that only absence of thought (as previously only the flesh — thus the two concepts are treated as identical) saves him from thoughts (p. 196).
We find a still more striking proof of this mysterious connection in Wigand. We have already seen on page 7 of "the book" that the "ego", i.e., Stirner, is "the unique". On page 153 of the "Commentary" he addresses his "you": "You" ... "are the content of the phrase", viz., the content of the "unique", and on the same page it is stated: "he overlooks the fact that he himself, Szeliga, is the content of the phrase". "The unique" is a phrase, as Saint Max says in so many words. Considered as the "ego", i.e., as creator, he is the owner of the phrase—this is Saint Max. Considered as "you", i.e., as creation, he is the content of the phrase—this is Szeliga, as we have just been told. Szeliga the creation appears as a selfless egoist, as a degenerate Don Quixote; Stirner the creator appears as an egoist in the ordinary sense, as Saint Sancho Panza.
Here, therefore, the other aspect of the antithesis of creator and creation makes its appearance, each of the two aspects containing its opposite in itself. Here Sancho Panza Stirner, the egoist in the
Szeliga, "Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum, Von Max Stirner".—Ed.
ordinary sense, is victorious over Don Quixote Szeliga, the selfless and illusory egoist, is victorious over him precisely as Don Quixote by his faith in the world domination of the holy. Who indeed was Stirner's egoist in the [ordinary] sense if not Sancho [Panza,] and who his self-sacrificing egoist [if not] Don Quixote, and what was [their mutual] relation in the [form in which it has so far existed if] not the relation of [Sancho Panza Stirner] to Don Quixote [Szeliga? Now as] Sancho Panza [Stirner belongs to himself as] Sancho only [in order to make Szeliga as] Don Quixote [believe that] he surpasses him in Don [quixotry,] and [in accordance with this role, as] the presupposed universal Don [quixotry,] he takes [no steps] against the [Don quixotry of his] former master (Don quixotry, by which he swears with all the firm faith of a servant), and at the same time he displays the cunning already described by Cervantes. In actual content he* is, therefore, the defender of the practical petty bourgeois, but he combats the consciousness that corresponds to the petty bourgeois, a consciousness which in the final analysis reduces itself to the idealising ideas of the petty bourgeois about the bourgeoisie to whom he cannot attain.
Thus, Don Quixote now, as Szeliga, performs mental services for his former armour-bearer.
How greatly Sancho in his new "transformation" has retained his old habits, he shows on every page. "Swallowing" and "consuming" still constitute one of his chief qualities, his "natural timidity" has still such mastery over him that the King of Prussia and Prince Heinrich LXXII become transformed for him into the "Emperor of China" or the "Sultan" and he ventures to speak only about the "G (11)
chambers"; he still strews around him proverbs and moral sayings from his knapsack, he continues to be afraid of "spectres" and even asserts that they alone are to be feared; the only difference is that whereas Sancho in his unholiness was bamboozled by the peasants in the tavern, now in a state of saintliness he continually bamboozles himself.
But let us return to Szeliga. Who has not long ago discovered the hand of Szeliga in all the "phrases" which Saint Sancho put into the mouth of his "you"? And it is always possible to discover traces of Szeliga not only in the phrases of this "you", but also in the phrases in which Szeliga appears as creator, i.e., as Stirner. But because Szeliga is a creation, he could only figure in Die heilige Familie as a "mystery". The revelation of this mystery was the task of Stirner the creator. We surmised, of course, that some great, holy adventure was at the root of this. Nor were we deceived. The unique adventure really has never been seen or heard of and surpasses the adventure with the fulling mills in Cervantes' twentieth chapter.
3. The Revelation of John the Divine, or " The Logic of the New Wisdom"
In the beginning was the word, the logos. In it was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shone in darkness and the darkness did not comprehend it. That was the true light, it was in the world, and the world did not know it. He came into his own, and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become owners, who believe in the name of the unique. [But who] has ever [seen] the unique [?](1)
[Let] us now [examine] this "light of the [world" in "the] logic of the new wisdom [", for Saint] Sancho does not rest content with his previous [destructions].
[In the case of our] "unique" author, it is a matter [of course that] the basis of his [genius lies] in the brilliant [series of personal] advantages [w[7]hich constitute] his special [virtuosity] of thought. [Since] all these advantages have already been extensively demonstrated, it suffices here to give a brief summary of the most important of them: carelessness of thought — confusion — incoherence — admitted clumsiness — endless repetitions — constant contradiction with himself — unequalled comparisons — attempts to in-timidate the reader — systematic legacy-hunting in the realm of thoughts by means of the levers "you", "it", "one", etc., and crude abuse of the conjunctions for, therefore, for that reason, because, accordingly, but, etc.—ignorance — clumsy assertions — solemn frivolity — revolutionary phrases and peaceful thoughts — bluster — bombastic vulgaritv and coquetting with cheap indecency — elevation of Name the loafer[83] to the rank of an absolute concept — dependence on Hegelian traditions and current Berlin phrases — in short, sheer manufacture of a thin beggar's broth (491 pages of it) in the Rumford manner.
Drifting like bones in this beggar's broth are a whole series of transitions, a few specimens of which we shall now give for the amusement of the German public depressed as it is:
"Could we not — now, however — one sometimes shares — one can then — to the efficacy of ... belongs especially that which one frequently ... hears called—-and that is to say — to conclude, it can now be clear — in the meantime — thus it can, incidentally, be thought here — were it not for — or if, perhaps, it were not — progress from ... to the point that ... is not difficult — from a certain point of view it is argued approximately thus — for example, and so on", etc., and "it is to that" in all possible "transformations".
We can at once mention here a [logical] trick about which [it is impossible] to decide whether it owes [its] existence to the [lauded] efficiency of Sancho [or to] the inefficiency of his [thinking]. This [trick consists] in seizing on [one aspect], treating it as if it were the sole [and only] aspect so far known of an idea [or] concept which [has several well]-defined aspects, foisting this aspect [on the concept as] its sole characteristic and then setting [against it every other] aspect under a [new name, as] something original. This is how the concepts of freedom and peculiarity are dealt with, [as] we shall see later.a
Among the categories which owe their origin not so much to the personality of Sancho, as to the universal distress in which the German theoreticians find themselves at the present time, the first place is taken by trashy distinction, the extreme of trashiness. Since our saint immerses himself in such "soul-torturing" antitheses as singular and universal, private interest and universal interest, ordinary egoism and selflessness, etc., in the final analysis one arrives at the trashiest mutual concessions and dealings between the two aspects, which again rest on the most subtle distinctions — distinctions whose existence side by side is expressed by "also" and whose separation from each other is then maintained by means of a miserable "insofar as". Such trashy distinctions, for instance, are: how people exploit one another, but none does so at the expense of another, the extent to which something in me is inherent or suggested; the construction of human and of unique work, existing side by side, what is indispensable for human life and what is indispensable for unique life; what belongs to personality in its pure form and what is essentially fortuitous, to decide which Saint Max, from his point of view, has no criterion at all; what belongs to the rags and tatters and what to the skin of the individual; what by means of denial he gets rid of altogether or appropriates, to what extent he sacrifices merely his freedom or merely his peculiarity, in which case he also makes a sacrifice but only insofar as, properly speaking, he does not make a sacrifice; what brings me into relation with others as a link or as a personal relation. Some of these distinctions are absolutely trashy, others — in the case of Sancho at least — lose all meaning and foundation. One can regard as the peak of these trashy distinctions that between the creation of the worldby the individual and the impulse which the individual receives from the world. If, for example, he had gone more deeply here into this impulse, into the whole extent and multifarious character of its influence on him, he would in the end have discovered the contradiction that he is as blindly [dependent] on the world as he [egoistically] and ideologically creates [it]. (See: "My Self-Enjoyment"a.) He [would not then have put] side by side [his"] a/50" and "insofar as", [any more than] "human" work [and] "unique" work; he would not have opposed one to the other, therefore one would [not have] attacked the other [in the rear,] and the "egoist in agreement [with himself"] would not be completely [subordinated to himself]—but we [know] that the latter did not need to be [presupposed] because from the outset this was the point of departure.
This trashy play with distinctions occurs throughout "the book"; it is a main lever also for the other logical tricks and particularly takes the form of a moral casuistry that is as self-satisfied as it is ridiculously cheap. Thus, it is made clear to us by means of examples how far the true egoist has the right to tell lies and how far he has not; to what extent the betrayal of confidence is "despicable" and to what extent it is not; to what extent the Emperor Sigismund and the French King Francis I had the right to break their oath[84] and how far their behaviour in this respect was "disgraceful", and other subtle historical illustrations of the same sort. Against these painstaking distinctions and petty questions there stands out in strong relief the indifference of our Sancho for whom it is all the same and who ignores all actual, practical and conceptual differences. In general we can already say now that his ability to distinguish is far inferior to his ability not to distinguish, to regard all cats as black in the darkness of the holy, and to reduce everything to anything — an art which finds its adequate expression in the use of the apposition.
Embrace your "ass", Sancho, you have found him again here. He gallops merrily to meet you, taking no notice of the kicks he has been given, and greets you with his ringing voice. Kneel before him, embrace his neck and fulfil the calling laid down for you by Cervantes in Chapter XXX.
The apposition is Saint Sancho's ass, his logical and historical locomotive, the driving force of "the book", reduced to its briefest and simplest expression. In order to transform one idea into another, or to prove the identity of two quite different things, a few intermediate links are sought which partly by their meaning, partly by their etymology and partly by their mere sound can be used to establish an apparent connection between the two basic ideas. These links are then appended to the first idea in the form of an apposition, See this volume, p. 422.— Ed.
and in such a way that one gets farther and farther away from the starting-point and nearer and nearer to the point one wants to reach. If the chain of appositions has got so far that one can draw a conclusion withfout any danger, the final idea is likewise fastened on in the form of an apposition by means of a dash, and the trick is done. This is a highly recommendable method of insinuating thoughts, which is the more effective the more it is made to serve as the lever for the main arguments. When this trick has been successfully performed several times, one can, following Saint Sancho's procedure, gradually omit some of the intermediate links and finally reduce the series of appositions to a few absolutely essential hooks.
The apposition, as we have seen above, can also be reversed and thus lead to new, even more complicated tricks and more astounding results. We have seen there, too, that the apposition is the logical form of the infinite series of mathematics.3
Saint Sancho employs the apposition in two ways: on the one hand, purely logically, in the canonisation of the world, where it enables him to transform any earthly thing into "the holy", and, on the other hand, historically, in disquisitions on the connection of various epochs and in summing them up, each historical stage being reduced to a single word, and the final result is that the last link of the historical series has not got us an inch farther than the first, and in the end all the epochs of the series are combined in a single abstract category like idealism, dependence on thoughts, etc. If the historical series of appositions is to be given the appearance of progress, this is achieved by regarding the concluding phrase as the completion of the first epoch of the series, and the intermediate links as ascending stages of development leading to the final, culminating phrase.
Alongside the apposition we have synonymy, which Saint Sancho exploits in every way. If two words are etymologically linked or are merely similar in sound, they are made responsible for each other, or if one word has different meanings, then, according to need, it is used sometimes in one sense and sometimes in the other, while Saint Sancho makes it appear that he is speaking of one and the same thing in different "refractions". Further, a special branch of synonymy consists of translation, where a French or Latin expression is supplemented by a German one which only half-expresses it, and in addition denotes something totally different; as we saw above, for example, when the word "respektieren" was translated "to experience reverence and fear", and so on. One recalls the words Staat, Status,
' See this volume, p. 156.— Ed.
Stand, Notstand, etc.a In the section on communism we have already had the opportunity of observing numerous examples of this use of ambiguous expressions. Let us briefly examine an example of etymological synonymy.
"The word 'Gesellschaft' is derived from the word 'Sal'. If there are many people in a Saal,c then the Saal brings it about that thev are in society. They are in society and they constitute at most a salon society, since they talk in conventional salon phrases. If real intercourse takes place, it should be regarded as independent of society" (p. 286).
Since the "word 'Gesellschaft' is derived from 'Sa/'" (which, incidentally, is not true, for the original roots of all words are verbs) then "Sat" must be equivalent to "Saal". But "Sal" in old High-German means a building; Kisello, Geselle—from which Gesellschaft is derived — means a house companion; hence "Saa!" is dragged in here quite arbitrarily. But that does not matter; "Saar* is immediately transformed into "salon", as though there was not a gap of about a thousand years and a great many miles between the old High-German "Sat' and the modern French "salon". Thus society is transformed into a salon society, in which, according to the German philistine idea, an intercourse consisting only of phrases takes place and all real intercourse is excluded.— Incidentally since Saint Max only aimed at transforming society into "the holy", he could have arrived at this by a much shorter route if he had made a somewhat more accurate study of etymology and consulted any dictionary of word roots. What a find it would have been for him to discover there the etymological connection between the words "Geseilschaft" and
"selig"; Gesellschaft—selig—heilig—das Heilige[6]—what could look simpler?
If "Stirner's" etymological synonymy is correct, then the communists are seeking the true earldom, the earldom as the holy. As
Gesellschaft comes from Sal, a building, so Grafe (Gothic garâvjo) comes from the Gothic râvo, house. Sal, building=râvo, house; consequently Gesellschaft — Grafschaft! The prefixes and suffixes are the same in both words, the root syllables have the same meaning— hence the holy societv of the communists is the holy earldom, the earldom as the holy — what could look simpler? Saint Sancho had an inkling of this, when he saw in communism the perfection of the feudal system, i.e., the system of earldoms.
See this volume, p. 212.—Ed. Society.— Ed. Hall, room.— Ed.
Synonymy serves our saint, on the one hand, to transform empirical relations into speculative relations, by using in its speculative meaning a word that occurs both in practical life and in philosophical speculation, uttering a few phrases about this speculative meaning and then making out that he has thereby also criticised the actual relations which this word denotes as well. He does this with the word speculation. On page 406, "speculation" "appears" showing two sides as one essence that possesses a "dual manifestation"—O Szeliga! He rages against philosophical speculation and thinks he has thereby also settled accounts with commercial speculation, about [which] he knows nothing. On the other hand, this svnonymy enables him, a concealed petty bourgeois, to transform bourgeois relations (see what was said above in dealing with "communism" about the connection between language and bourgeois relations3) into personal, individual relations, which one cannot attack without attacking the individuality, "peculiarity" and "uniqueness" of the individual. Thus, for example, Sancho exploits the etymological connection between Geldb and Geltung," Vermögend and
vermögen1; etc.
Synonymy, combined with the apposition, provides the main lever for his conjuring tricks, which we have already exposed on countless occasions. To give an example how easv this art is, let us also perform a conjuring trick à la Sancho.
Wechsel, as change, is the law of phenomena, says Hegel, This is the reason, "Stirner" could continue, for the phenomenon of the strictness of the law against false bills of exchange; for we see here the law raised above phenomena, the law as such, holy law, the law as the holy, the holy itself, against which sin is committed and which is avenged in the punishment. Or in other words: Wechsel "in its dual manifestation", as a bill of exchange (lettre de changé) and as change (changement), leads to Verfall (échéance and décadence). Decline as a result of change is observed in history, inter alia, in the fall of the Roman Empire, feudalism, the German Empire and the domination of Napoleon. The "transition from" these great historical crises "to" the commercial crises of our day "is not difficult", and this explains also why these commercial crises are always determined by the expiry of bills of exchange.
Or he could also, as in the case of " Vermögen" and "Geld', justify the " Wechsel" etymologically arid "from a certain point of view argue approximately as follows". The communists want, among other things, to abolish the Wechsel (bill of exchange). But does not the main pleasure of the world lie precisely in Wechsel (change)? They want, therefore, the dead, the immobile, China—that is to say, the perfect Chinese is a communist. "Hence" communist declamations against Wechselbriefea and Wechsler. As though every letter were not a Wechselbrief, a letter that notes a change, and every man not a
Wechselnder, a Wechsler.
To give the simplicity of his construction and logical tricks the appearance of great variety, Saint Sancho needs the episode. From time to time he "episodically" inserts a passage which belongs to another part of the book, or which could quite well have been left out altogether, and thus still further breaks the thread of his so-called argument, which has already been repeatedly broken without that. This is accompanied by the naive statement that "we" "do not stick to the rules", and after numerous repetitions causes in the reader a certain insensitiveness to even the greatest incoherence. When one reads "the book", one becomes accustomed to everything and finally one readily submits even to the worst. Incidentally, these episodes (as was only [to be] expected from Saint Sancho) are themselves only imaginary and mere repetitions under [other guises] of phrases encountered hundreds of times [already].
After Saint Max has [thus displayed] his personal qualities, and then revealed himself as ["appearance" and] as "essence" in the distinction, [in] synonymy and in the episode, [we] come [to the] true culmination and completion of logic, the "concept".
[The] concept is the "ego" (see Hegel's Logik, Part 3), logic [as the ego]. This is the pure relation [of the] ego to the world, a relation [divested] of all the real relations that exist for it; [a formula] for all the equations to [which the holy] man reduces mundane [concepts]. It was already [revealed] above that by applying this formula to all sorts of things Sancho merely makes an unsuccessful "attempt" to understand the various pure determinations of reflection, such as identity, antithesis, etc.
Let us begin at once with a definite example, e.g., the relation between the "ego" and the people.
I am not the people. The people = non-I I = the non-people.
Hence, I am the negation of the people, the people is dissolved in me.
The second equation can be expressed also by an auxiliary ecfuation:
The people's ego is non-existent, or:
The ego of the people is the negation of my ego.
The whole trick, therefore, consists in: 1) that the negation which at the outset belonged to the copula is attached first to the subject and then to the predicate; and 2) that the negation, the "not", is, according to convenience, regarded as an expression of dissimilarity, difference, antithesis or direct dissolution. In the present example it is regarded as absolute dissolution, as complete negation; we shall find that — at Saint Max's convenience — it is used also in the other meanings. Thus the tautological proposition that I am not the people is transformed into the tremendous new discovery that I am the dissolution of the people.
For the equations given above, it was not even necessary for Saint Sancho to have any idea of the people; it was enough for him to know that I and the people are "totally different names for totally different things"; it was sufficient that the two words do not have a single letter in common. If now there is to be further speculation about the people from the standpoint of egoistical logic, it suffices to attach any kind of trivial determination to the people and to "I" from outside, from day-to-day experience, thus giving rise to new equations. At the same time it is made to appear that different determinations are being criticised in different ways. We shall now proceed to speculate in this manner about freedom, happiness and wealth :
Basic equations: The people = non-I. Equation No. 1 : Freedom of the people = Not my freedom. Freedom of the people = My non-freedom. Freedom of the people = My lack of freedom. (This can also be reversed, resulting in the grand proposition: My lack of freedom = slavery is the freedom of the people.)
Equation No. 2: Happiness of the people = Not my happiness. Happiness of the people = My non-happiness. Happiness of the people = My unhappiness.
(Reversed equation: My unhappiness, my distress, is the happiness of the people.)
Equation No. 3: Wealth of the people = Not my wealth. Wealth of the people = My non-wealth. Wealth of the people = My poverty. (Reversed equation: My poverty is the wealth of the people.) This can be continued ad libitum and extended to other determinations.
For the formation of such equations all that is required, apart from a very general acquaintance with such ideas as Stirner can combine in one notion with "people", is to know the positive expression for the result obtained in the negative form, e.g., "poverty"—for "non-wealth", etc. That is to say, as much knowledge of the language as one acquires in everyday life is quite sufficient to arrive in this way at the most surprising discoveries.
The entire trick here, therefore, consisted in transforming not-my-wealth, not-my-happiness, not-my-freedom into my non-wealth, my non-happiness, my non-freedom. The "not", which in the first equation is a general negation that can express all possible forms of difference, e.g., it may merely mean that it is our common, and not exclusively my, wealth — this "not" is transformed in the [second] equation into the negation of my wealth, [my] happiness, etc., and ascribes to me [non-happiness], unhappiness, slavery. [Since] I am denied some definite form of wealth, [the people's] wealth but by no means [wealth] in general, [Sancho believes poverty] must be ascribed to me. [But] this is also [brought about] by expressing my non-freedom in a positive way and so transforming it into my ["lack of freedom"]. But [my non-freedom] can, of course, also mean hundreds [of other] things — e.g., my ["lack of freedom]", my non-freedom from [my] body, etc.
We started out just now from the second equation: the people = non-I. We could also have taken the third equation as our starting-point: I = the non-people, and then, in the case of wealth for example, according to the same method, it would be proved in the end that "my wealth is the poverty of the people". Here, however, Saint Sancho would not proceed in this way, but would dissolve altogether the property relations of the people and the people itself, and then arrive at the following result: my wealth is the destruction not only of the people's wealth but of the people itself. This shows how arbitrarily Saint Sancho acted when he transformed non-wealth into poverty. Our saint applies these different methods higgledy-piggledy and exploits negation sometimes in one meaning and sometimes in another. Even "anyone who has not read Stirner's book" "sees at once" (Wigand, p. 191) what confusions this is liable to produce.
In just the same way the "ego" "operates" against the state. I am not the state. State = non-I.
I = "Negation" of the state. Nothing of the state=I. Or in other words: I am the "creative nothing" in which the state is swallowed up.
This simple melody can be used to ring the changes with any subject.
The great proposition that forms the basis of all these equations is: I am not non-I. This non-I is given various names, which, on the one hand, can be purely logical, e.g., being-in-itself, other-being, or, on the other hand, the names of concrete ideas such as the people, state, etc. In this way the appearance of a development can be produced by taking these names as the starting-point and gradually reducing them — with the aid of equations, or a series of appositions — again to the non-ego, which was their basis at the outset. Since the real relations thus introduced figure only as different modifications of the non-ego, and only nominally different modifications at that — nothing at all need be said about these real relations themselves. This is all the more ludicrous since [the real] relations are the relations [of the individuals] themselves, and declaring them to be relations [of the non]-ego only proves that one knows nothing about them. The matter is thereby so greatly simplified that even "the great majority consisting of innately limited intellects" can learn the trick in ten minutes at most. At the same time, this gives us a criterion of the "uniqueness" of Saint Sancho.
Saint' Sancho further defines the non-ego opposed to the ego as being that which is alien to the ego, that which is the alien. The relation of the non-ego to the ego is "therefore" that of alienation [Entfremdung]. We have just given the logical formula by which Saint Sancho presents any object or relation whatsoever as that which is alien to the ego, as the alienation of the ego; on the other hand, Saint Sancho can, as we shall see, also present any object or relation as something created by the ego and belonging to it Apart, first of all, from the arbitrary way in which he presents, or does not present, any relation as a relation of alienation (for everything can be made to fit in the above equations), we see already here that his only concern is to present all actual relations, [and also] actual individuals, [as alienated] (to retain this philosophical [expression] for the time being), to [transform] them into the wholly [abstract] phrase of alienation. Thus [instead] of the task of describing [actual] individuals in their [actual] alienation and in the empirical relations of this
11* alienation, [purely empirical] relations, the same happens here — the setting forth is replaced by the [mere idea] of alienation, of [the Alien], of the Holy. [The] substitution of the category of alienation (this is again a determination of reflection which can be considered as antithesis, difference, non-identity, etc.) finds its final and highest expression in "the alien" being transformed again into "the holy", and alienation into the relation of the ego to anything whatever as the holy. We prefer to elucidate the logical process on the basis of Saint Sancho's relation to the holy, since this is the predominant formula, and in passing we note that "the alien" is considered also as "the existing" (per appos.), that which exists apart from me, that which exists independently of me, per appos., that which is regarded as independent owing to my non-independence, so that Saint Sancho can depict as the holy everything that exists independently of him, e.g., the Blocksberg.[85]
Because the holy is something alien, everything alien is transformed into the holy; and because everything holy is a bond, a fetter, all bonds and all fetters are transformed into the holy. By this means Saint Sancho has already achieved the result that everything alien becomes for him a mere appearance, a mere idea, from which he frees himself by simply protesting against it and declaring that he does not have this idea. Just as we saw in the case of the egoist not in agreement with himself3: people have only to change their consciousness to make everything in the world all right.b
Our whole exposition has shown that Saint Sancho criticises all actual conditions by declaring them "the holy", and combats them by combating his holy idea of them. This simple trick of transforming everything into the holy was achieved, as we have already seen in detail above, by Jacques le bonhomme accepting in good faith the illusions of philosophy, the ideological, speculative expression of reality divorced from its empirical basis, for reality, just as he mistook the illusions of the petty [bourgeois concerning] the bourgeoisie for the "[holy essence" of the] bourgeoisie, and could therefore imagine that he was only dealing with thoughts and ideas. With equal ease people were transformed into the "holy", for after their thoughts had been divorced from them themselves and from their empirical relations, it became possible to consider people as mere vehicles for these thoughts and thus, for example, the bourgeois was made into the holy liberal.
The positive relation of [Sancho]—who is in the final analysis [pious]—to the holy (a relation [he] calls respect) figures also [under the] name of "love". "Love" [is a ] relation that approves of "[man"], the holy, the ideal, the supreme being, or such a human, holy, ideal, essential relation. Anything that was elsewhere designated as the existence of the holy, e.g., the state, prisons, torture, police, trade and traffic, etc., can also be regarded by Sancho as "another example" of "love". This new nomenclature enables him to write new chapters about what he has already utterly rejected under the trade mark of the holy and respect. It is the old story of the goats of the shepherdess Torralva, in a holy form. And as at one time, with the aid of this story, he led his master by the nose, so now he leads himself and the public by the nose throughout the book without, however, being able to break off his story as wittily as he did in those earlier times when he was still a secular armour-bearer. In general, since his canonisation Sancho has lost all his original mother wit.
The first difficulty appears to arise because this holy is in itself very diverse, so that when criticising some definite holy thing one ought to leave the holiness out of account and criticise the definite content itself. Saint Sancho avoids this rock by presenting everything definite as merely an "example" of the holy; just as in Hegel's Logik it is immaterial whether atom or personality is adduced to explain "being-for-itself", or the solar system, magnetism or sexual love as an example of attraction. It is, therefore, by no means an accident that "the book" teems with examples, but is rooted in the innermost essence of the method of exposition employed in it. This is the "unique" possibility which Saint Sancho has of producing an appearance of some sort of content, the prototype of which is already to be found in Cervantes, since Sancho also speaks all the time in examples. Thus Sancho is able to say: "Another example of the holy" (the uninteresting) "is labour". He could have continued: another example is the state, another is the family, another is rent of land, another is Saint Jacob (Saint-Jacques, le bonhomme), another is Saint Ursula and her eleven thousand virgins.[86] Indeed, in his imagination, all these things have this in common: that they are the "holy". But at the same time they are totally different things, and it is just this that constitutes their specific nature. Insofar as one speaks of their specific nature, one does not speak of them as "the holy".
[Labour is] not rent of land, and [rent of land] is not the state; [the main] thing, therefore, is to define [what] the state, land rent and labour are [apart from] their imagined holiness, [and Saint] Max achieves this in the following way. [He pretends to] be speaking about the state, [labour,] etc., and then calls ["the" state] the reality of some [sort of idea]—of love, of [being]-for-one-another, of the existing, of power over [individuals], and — by means [of a] dash — of "the holy", but [he could] have said [that at the] outset. Or [he says] of labour that it is regarded as a life task, [a vocation, a] destiny—"the holy". That is to say, the state and labour are first of all brought under a particular kind of the holy which has been previously prepared in the same way, and this particular holy is then again dissolved in the universal "holy"; all of which can take place without saying anything about labour and the state. The same stale cud can then be chewed over again on any convenient occasion, because everything that is apparently the object of criticism serves our Sancho merely as an excuse for declaring that the abstract ideas and the predicates transformed into subjects (which are nothing but suitably assorted holies, a sufficient store of which is always kept in reserve) are what they were made to be at the outset, viz., the holy. He has in fact reduced everything to its exhaustive, classic expression, by saying of it that it is "another example of the holy". The definitions which he has picked up by hearsay, and which are supposed to relate to content, are altogether superfluous, and on closer examination it is found, too, that they introduce neither definition nor content and amount to no more than ignorant banalities. This cheap "virtuosity of thought" which polishes off any subject-matter whatever even before knowing anything about it, can of course be acquired by anyone, and not in ten minutes, as previously [stated],(2) but even in five. In the "Commentary" Saint Sancho threatens us with "treatises" about Feuerbach, socialism, bourgeois society, and only the holy knows what else. Provisionally we can already here reduce these treatises to their simplest expression as follows:
First treatise: Another example of the holy is Feuerbach. Second treatise: Another example of the holy is socialism.
Third treatise: Another example of the holy is bourgeois society. Fourth treatise: Another example of the holy is the "treatise" in the Stirner manner.
Etc., in infinitum. A little reflection shows that the second rock against which Saint Sancho was bound to suffer shipwreck was his own assertion that every individual is totally different from every other, is unique. Since every individual is an altogether different being, hence an other-being, it is by no means necessary that what is alien, holy, for one individual should be so for another individual; it even cannot be so. And the common name used, such as state, religion, morality, etc., should not mislead us, for these names are only abstractions from the actual attitude of separate individuals, and these objects, in consequence of the totally different attitude towards them of the unique individuals, become for each of the latter unique objects, hence totally different objects, which have only their name in common. Consequently, Saint Sancho could at most have said: for me, Saint Sancho, the state, religion, etc., are the alien, the holy. Instead of this he has to make them the absolutely holy, the holy for all individuals — how else could he have fabricated his constructed ego, his egoist in agreement with himself, etc., how else could he at all have written his whole "book"? How little it occurs to him to make each "unique" the measure of his own "uniqueness", how much he uses his own "uniqueness" as a measure, as a moral norm, to be applied to all other individuals, like a true moralist forcing them into his Procrustean bed, is already evident, inter alia, from his judgment on the departed and forgotten Klopstock, whom he opposes with the moral maxim that he ought to have adopted an "attitude to religion altogether his own"; in that case he would have arrived not at a religion of his own, which would be the correct conclusion (a conclusion that "Stirner" himself draws innumerable times, e.g., in regard to money), but at a "dissolution and swallowing up of religion" (p. 85), a universal result instead of an individual, unique result. As though Klopstock had not arrived at a "dissolution and swallowing up of religion", and indeed at a quite individual, unique dissolution, such as only this unique Klopstock could have "achieved", a dissolution whose uniqueness "Stirner" could have easily seen even from the many unsuccessful imitations. Klopstock's attitude to religion is supposed to be not his "own", although it was altogether peculiar to him, and indeed was a relation to religion which made Klopstock Klopstock. His attitude to religion would have been "peculiar"a only if he had behaved towards it not like Klopstock but like a modern German philosopher.
The "egoist in the ordinary sense", who is not so docile as Szeliga and who has already above put forward all sorts of objections, here makes the following retort to our saint: here in the actual world, as I know very well, I am concerned with my own advantage and nothing else, rien pour la gloire.b Besides this, I enjoy thinking that I am immortal and can have advantages also in heaven. Ought I to sacrifice this egoistical conception for the sake of the mere consciousness of egoism in agreement with itself, which will not bring me in a farthing? The philosophers tell me: that is inhuman. What do I care? Am I not a human being? Is not everything I do human, and human because I do it, and is it any concern of mine how "others" "classify" my actions? You, Sancho, who indeed are also a philosopher, but a bankrupt one — and because of your philosophy you deserve no financial credit, and because of your bankruptcy you deserve no intellectual credit — you tell me that my attitude to religion is not one peculiar to me. What you say, therefore, is the same as what the other philosophers tell me, but in your case, as usual, it loses all meaning since you call "peculiar" what they call "human". Could you speak of any other peculiarity than your own and transform your own relation again into a universal one? In my own way, my attitude to religion, if you like, is also a critical one. Firstly, I have no hesitation in sacrificing it, as soon as it attempts to interfere in my commerce; secondly, in my business affairs it is useful for me to be regarded as religious (as it is useful for my proletarian, if the pie that I eat here he eats at least in heaven); and, finally, I turn heaven into my property. It is une propriété ajoutée à la propriété* although already Montesquieu, who was of course a quite different type of man from you, tried to make me believe that it is une terreur ajoutée à la terreur}3 My attitude to heaven is not like that of any other person, and by virtue of the unique attitude that I adopt towards it, it is a unique object, a unique heaven. At most, therefore, you are criticising your idea of my heaven, but not my heaven. And now immortality! Here you become simply ridiculous. I deny my egoism — as you assert to please the philosophers — because I immortalise it and declare the laws of nature and thought null and void, as soon as they want to give my existence a determination which is not produced by me myself and is highly unpleasant for me, namely, death. You call immortality "tedious stability"—as though I could not always live an "eventful" life so long as trade is flourishing in this or the other world and I can do business in other things than your "book". And what can be "more stable" than death, which against my will puts an end to my movement and submerges me in the universal, nature, the species, the holy? And now the state, law, police! For many an "ego" they may appear to be alien powers; but I know that they are my own powers. Incidentally — and at this point the bourgeois, this time with a gracious nod of the head, again turns his back on our saint — as far as I am concerned, go on blustering against religion, heaven, God and so on. I know all the same that in everything that interests me — private property, value, price, money, purchase and sale — you always perceive something "peculiar".
We have just seen how individuals differ from one another. But every individual again is diverse in himself. Thus, by reflecting himself in one of these qualities, i.e., by regarding, defininghis "ego" through one of these determinations, Saint Sancho can define the object of the other qualities and these other qualities themselves as the alien, the holy; and so in turn with all his qualities. Thus, for example, that which is object for his flesh is the holy for his spirit, or that which is object for his need of rest is the holy for his need of movement. His transformation, described above, of all action and inaction into self-denial is based on this trick. Moreover, his ego is no real ego, but only the ego of the equations given above, the same ego that in formal logic, in the theory of propositions, figures as Caius.[87]
"Another example", namely, a more general example of the canonisation of the world, is the transformation of real collisions, i.e., collisions between individuals and their actual conditions of life, into ideal collisions, i.e., into collisions between these individuals and the ideas which they form or get into their heads. This trick, too, is extremely simple. As Saint Sancho earlier made the thoughts of individuals into something existing independently, so here he separates the ideal reflection of real collisions from these collisions and turns this reflection into something existing independently. The real contradictions in which the individual finds himself are transformed into contradictions of the individual with his idea or, as Saint Sancho also expresses it more simply, into contradictions with the idea as such, with the holy. Thus he manages to transform the real collision, the prototype of its ideal copy, into the consequence of this ideological pretence. Thus he arrives at the result that it is not a question of the practical abolition of the practical collision, but only of renouncing the idea of this collision, a renunciation which he, as a good moralist, insistently urges people to carry out.
After Saint Sancho has thus transformed all the contradictions and collisions in which the individual finds himself into mere contradictions and collisions of the individual with one or other of his ideas, an idea which has become independent of him and has subordinated him to itself, and, therefore, is "easily" transformed into the idea as such, the holy idea, the holy — after this there remains only one thing for the individual to do: to commit the sin against the Holy Spirit, to abstract from this idea and declare the holy to be a spectre. This logical swindle, which the individual performs on himself, our saint regards as one of the greatest efforts of the egoist. On the other hand, however, anyone can see how easy it is in this way to declare that from the egoistical point of view all historically occurring conflicts and movements are subsidiary, without knowing anything about them. To do this one has only to extract a few of the phrases usually adopted in such cases, to transform them, in the manner indicated, into "the holy", to depict the individuals as being subordinated to this holy, and to put oneself forward as one who despises "the holy as such".
A further offshoot of this logical trick, and indeed our saint's favourite manoeuvre, is the exploitation of the words designation, vocation, task, etc., thereby immensely facilitating the transformation of whatever he likes into the holy. For, in vocation, designation, task, etc., the individual appears in his own imagination as something different from what he actually is, as the alien, hence as the holy, and in opposition to his real being he asserts his idea of what he ought to be as the rightful, the ideal, the holy. Thus, when it is necessary for him, Saint Sancho can transform everything into the holy by means of the following series of appositions: to designate oneself, i.e., to choose a designation (insert here any content you like) for oneself; to choose the designation as such; to choose a holy designation, to choose a designation as the holy, i.e., to choose the holy as designation. Or: to be designated, i.e., to have a designation, to have the designation, the holy designation, designation as the holy, the holy as designation, the holy for designation, the designation of the holy.
And now, of course, it only remains for him strongly to admonish people to select for themselves the designation of absence of any designation, the vocation of absence of any vocation, the task of absence of any task — although throughout "the book", "up to and including" the "Commentary", he does nothing but select designations for people, set people tasks and, like a prophet in the wilderness, call them to the gospel of true egoism, about whom, of course, it is said: many are called but only one—O'Connell—is chosen.(3)
We have already seen above how Saint Sancho separates the ideas of individuals from the conditions of their life, from their practical collisions and contradictions, in order then to transform them into the holy. Now these ideas appear in the form of designation, vocation, task. For Saint Sancho vocation has a double form; firstly as the vocation which others choose for me — examples of which we have already had above in the case of the newspapers that are full of politics and the prisons that our saint mistook for houses of moral correction.*3 Afterwards vocation appears also as a vocation in which the individual himself believes. If the ego is divorced from all its empirical conditions of life, its activity, the conditions of its existence, if it is separated from the world that forms its basis and from its own body, then, of course, it has no other vocation and no other designation than that of representing the Caius of the logical proposition and to assist Saint Sancho in arriving at the equations given above. In the real world, on the other hand, where individuals have needs, they thereby already have a vocation and task; and at the outset it is still immaterial whether they make this their vocation in their imagination as well. It is clear, however, that because the individuals possess consciousness they form an idea of this vocation which their empirical existence has given them and, thus, furnish Saint Sancho with the opportunity of seizing on the word vocation, that is, on the mental expression of their actual conditions of life, and of leaving out of account these conditions of life themselves. The proletarian, for example, who like'every human being has the vocation of satisfying his needs and who is not in a position to satisfy even the needs that he has in common with all human beings, the proletarian whom the necessity to work a 14-hour day debases to the level of a beast of burden, whom competition degrades to a mere thing, an article of trade, who from his position as a mere productive force, the sole position left to him, is squeezed out by other, more powerful productive forces — this proletarian is, if only for these reasons, confronted with the real task of revolutionising his conditions. He can, of course, imagine this to be his "vocation", he can also, if he likes to engage in propaganda, express his "vocation" by saying that to do this or that is the human vocation of the proletarian, the more so since his position does not even allow him to satisfy the needs arising directly from his human nature. Saint Sancho does not concern himself with the reality underlying this idea, with the practical aim of this proletarian — he clings to the word "vocation" and declares it to be the holy, and the proletarian to be a servant of the holy — the easiest way of considering himself superior and "proceeding further".
Particularly in the relations that have existed hitherto, when one class always ruled, when the conditions of life of an individual always coincided with the conditions of life of a class, when, therefore, the practical task of each newly emerging class was bound to appear to each of its members as a universal task, and when each class could actually overthrow its predecessor only by liberating the individuals of all classes from certain chains which had hitherto fettered them — under these circumstances it was essential that the task of the individual members of a class striving for domination should be described as a universal human task.
Incidentally, when for example the bourgeois tells the proletarian that his, the proletarian's, human task is to work fourteen hours a day, the proletarian is quite justified in replying in the same language that on the contrary his task is to overthrow the entire bourgeois system.
We have already repeatedly seen how Saint Sancho puts forward a whole series of tasks all of which resolve themselves into the final task, which exists for all people, that of true egoism. But even where he does not reflect, and does not see himself as creator and creation, he manages to arrive at a task by means of the following trashy distinction.
Page 466: "Whether you want to continue to occupy yourself with thinking depends on you. If you wish to achieve anything substantial in thinking, then" (the conditions and designations begin for you) "then ... anyone who wishes to think, therefore, certainly has a task, which by having that wish he sets himself, consciously or unconsciously; but no one has the task of thinking."
First of all, apart from any other content of this proposition, it is incorrect even from Saint Sancho's own viewpoint, since the egoist in agreement with himself, whether he wishes it or not, certainly has the "task" of thinking. He must think, on the one hand, to keep in check the flesh, which can be tamed only through the spirit, through thought, and, on the other hand, to be able to fulfil his reflective determination as creator and creation. Consequently he sets the whole world of deceived egoists the "task" of knowing themselves — a "task" which, of course, cannot be accomplished without thought.
In order to change this proposition from the form of trashy distinction into a logical form, one must first of all get rid of the term "substantial". For each person the "substantial" that he wishes to achieve in thought is something different, depending on his degree of education, the conditions of his life and his aim at the time. Saint Max, therefore, does not give us here any firm criterion for determining when the task begins which one sets oneself by thinking and how far one can go in thought without setting oneself any task — he limits himself to the relative expression "substantial". But for me everything is "substantial" that induces me to think, everything about which I think is "substantial". Therefore instead of: "if you want to achieve anything substantial in thinking", it should read: "if you want to thinkat all". This depends, however, not at all on your wishing or not wishing, since you possess consciousness and can satisfy your needs only by an activity in which you have to use your consciousness as well. Further, the hypothetical form must be got rid of. "7/you want to think"—then from the outset you are setting yourself the "task" of thinking; Saint Sancho had no need to proclaim this tautological statement with such pomposity. The whole proposition was only clothed in this form of trashy distinction and pompous tautology in order to conceal the content: as a definite person, an actual person, you have a designation, a task, whether you are conscious of it or not.(4) It arises from your need and the connection of the latter with the existing world. Sancho's real wisdom lies in his assertion that it depends on your will whether you think, live, etc., whether in general you possess any sort of determinateness. He is afraid that otherwise determination would cease to be your self-determination. When you equate your self with your reflection, or according to need, with your will, then it is obvious that in this abstraction everything that is not posited by your reflection or your will is not self-determination — therefore also, for example, your breathing, your blood circulation, thought, life, etc. For Saint Sancho, however, self-determination does not even consist in will but, as we saw already in regard to the true egoist,3 in the reservatio mentalis of indifference to any kind of determinateness — an indifference which reappears here as absence of determination. In his "own" series of appositions this would assume the following form: as opposed to all real determination, he chooses absence of determination as his determination, at each moment he distinguishes between himself and the undeterminated, thus at each moment he is also some other than he is, a third person, and indeed the other pure and simple, the holy other, the other counterposed to all uniqueness, the undeterminated, the universal, the ordinary — the ragamuffin.
If Saint Sancho saves himself from determination by his leap into absence of determination (which is itself a determination and indeed the worst of all), then the practical, moral content of this whole trick, apart from what was said above in connection with the true egoist, is merely an apology for the vocation forced on every individual in the world as it has existed so far. If, for example, the workers assert in their communist propaganda that the vocation, designation, task of every person is to achieve all-round development of all his abilities, including, for example, the ability to think, Saint Sancho sees in this only the vocation to something alien, the assertion of "the holy". He seeks to free them from this by defending the individual who has been crippled by the division of labour at the expense of his abilities and relegated to a one-sided vocation against his own need to become different, a need which has been stated to be his vocation by others. What is here asserted in the form of a vocation, a designation, is precisely the negation of the vocation that has hitherto resulted in practice from the division of labour, i.e., the only actually existing vocation — hence, the negation of vocation altogether. The all-round realisation of the individual will only cease to be conceived as an ideal, a vocation, etc., when the impact of the world which stimulates the real development of the abilities of the individual is under the control of the individuals themselves, as the communists desire.
Finally, in the egoistical logic all the twaddle about vocation has moreover the purpose of making it possible to introduce the holy into things and to enable us to destroy them without having to touch them. Thus, for example, one person or another regards work, business affairs, etc., as his vocation. Thereby these become holy work, holy business affairs, the holy. The true egoist does not regard them as vocation; thereby he has dissolved holy work and holy business affairs. So they remain what they are and he remains what he was. It does not occur to him to investigate whether work, business affairs, etc., these modes of existence of individuals, by their real content and process of development necessarily lead to those ideological notions which he combats as independent beings, or, to use his expression, which he canonises.
Just as Saint Sancho canonises communism in order later, in connection with the union, the better to palm off his holy idea of it as his "own" invention, so, in exactly the same way, he blusters against "vocation, designation, task" merely in order to reproduce them throughout his book as the categorical imperative. Wherever difficulties arise, Sancho hacks his way through them by means of a categorical imperative such as "turn yourself to account", "recognise vourself", "let each become an all-powerful ego", etc. On the categorical imperative, see the section on the "union"; on "vocation", etc., see the section on "self-enjoyment".
We have now revealed the chief logical tricks Saint Sancho uses to canonise the existing world and thereby to criticise and consume it. Actually, however, he consumes only the holy in the world, without even touching the world itself. Hence it is obvious that he has to remain wholly conservative in practice. If he wanted to criticise, then earthly criticism would begin just where any possible halo ends. The more the normal form of intercourse of society, and with it the conditions of the ruling class, develop their contradiction to the advanced productive forces, and the greater the consequent discord within the ruling class itself as well as between it and the class ruled by it, the more fictitious, of course, becomes the consciousness which originally corresponded to this form of intercourse (i.e., it ceases to be the consciousness corresponding to this form of intercourse), and the more do the old traditional ideas of these relations of intercourse, in which actual private interests, etc., etc., are expressed as universal interests, descend to the level of mere idealising phrases, conscious illusion, deliberate hypocrisy. But the more their falsity is exposed by life, and the less meaning they have for consciousness itself, the more resolutely are they asserted, the more hypocritical, moral and holy becomes the language of this normal society. The more hypocritical this society becomes, the easier it is for such a credulous man as Sancho to discover everywhere the idea of the holy, the ideal. From the universal hypocrisy of society he, the credulous, can deduce universal faith in the holy, the domination of the holy, and can even mistake this holy for the pedestal of existing society. He is the dupe of this hypocrisy, from which he should have drawn exactly the opposite conclusion.
The world of the holy is in the final analysis epitomised in "man". As we have already seen throughout the Old Testament, Sancho regards "man" as the active subject on which the whole of previous history is based; in the New Testament he extends this domination of "man" to the whole of the existing, contemporary physical and spiritual world, and also to the properties of the individuals at present existing. Everything belongs to "man" and thus the world is transformed into the "world of man". The holy as a person is "man", which for Sancho is only another name for the concept, the idea. The conceptions and ideas of people, separated from actual things, are bound, of course, to have as their basis not actual individuals, but the individual of the philosophical conception, the individual separated from his actuality and existing only in thought, "man" as such, the concept of man. With this, his faith in philosophy reaches its culmination.
Now that everything has been transformed into "the holy" or into what belongs to "man", our saint is enabled to proceed further to appropriation, by renouncing the idea of "the holy" or of "man" as a power standing above him. Owing to the alien having been transformed into the holy, into a mere idea, this idea of the alien, which he mistakes for the actually existing alien, is of course his property. The basic formulas for the appropriation of the world of man (the way in which the ego gains possession of the world when it no longer has any respect for the holy) are already contained in the equations given above.
As we have seen, Saint Sancho is already master of his qualities as the egoist in agreement with himself. In order to become master of the world, all he has to do is to make it one of his qualities. The simplest way of doing so is for Sancho to proclaim the quality of "man", with all the nonsense contained in this, directly as his quality. Thus he claims for himself, for example, as a quality of the ego, the nonsense of universal love of mankind by asserting that he loves "everyone" (p. 387) and indeed with the consciousness of egoism, for "love makes him happy". A person who has such a happy nature, indubitably belongs to those of whom it is said: Woe unto you if you offend even one of these little onesl3
The second method is that Saint Sancho tries to preserve something as a quality of his, while he transforms it — when it seems necessary to him as a relation—into a relation, a mode of existence, of "man", a holy relation, and thereby repudiates it. Saint Sancho does this even when the quality, separated from the relation through which it is realised, becomes pure nonsense. Thus, for example, on page 322 he wants to preserve national pride by declaring that "nationality is one of his qualities and the nation his owner and master". He could have continued: religiousness is a quality of mine, I have no intention of renouncing it as one of my qualities — religion is my master, the holy. Family love is a quality of mine, the family is my master. Justice is a quality of mine, the law is my master; to engage in politics is a quality of mine, the state is my master.
The third method of appropriation is employed when some alien power whose force he experiences in practice is regarded by him as holy and spurned altogether without being appropriated. In this case he sees his own powerlessness in the alien power and recognises this powerlessness as his property, his creation, above which he always stands as creator. This, for example, is the case with the state. Here, too, he fortunately arrives at the point at which he has to deal not with something alien, but only with a quality of his own, against
Cf. Luke 17: 1-2.— Ed.
which he needs only to set himself as creator in order to overcome it. In an emergency, therefore, the lack of a quality is also taken by him .as a quality of his. When Saint Sancho is starving to death it is not due to lack of food, but to his own hungriness, his own quality of starving. If he falls out of a window and breaks his neck, it happens not because the force of gravity plunges him downwards, but because absence of wings, inability to fly, is a quality of his own.
The fourth method, which he employs with the most brilliant success, consists in declaring that everything that is the object of one of his qualities, is, since it is his object, his property, because he has a relation to it by virtue of one of his qualities, irrespective of the character of this relation. Thus, what has up to now been called seeing, hearing, feeling, etc., Sancho, this inoffensive acquisitor, calls: acquiring property. The shop at which I am looking is, as something seen by me, the object of my eye, and its reflection on my retina is the possession of my eye. And now the shop, besides its relation to the eye, becomes his possession and not merely the possession of his eye — his possession, which is as much upside-down as the image of the shop on his retina. When the shopkeeper lets down the shutters (or, as Szeliga puts it, the "blinds and curtains"3), his property disappears and, like a bankrupt bourgeois, he retains only the painful memory of vanished brilliance. If "Stirner" passes by the royal kitchen he will undoubtedly acquire possession of the smell of the pheasants roasting there, but he will not even see the pheasants themselves. The only persisting possession that falls to his share is a more or less vociferous rumbling in his stomach. Incidentally, what and how much he can see depends not only on the existing state of affairs in the world, a state of affairs by no means created by him, but also on his purse and on the position in life which falls to his lot owing to division of labour, which perhaps shuts away very much from him, although he may have very acquisitive eyes and ears.
If Saint Sancho had said simply and frankly that everything that is the object of his imagination, as an object imagined by him, i.e., as his idea of an object, is his idea, i.e., his possession (and the same thing holds with looking at something, etc.), one would only have mar-velled at the childish naïveté of a man who believes that such a triv-iality is a discovery and a fortune. But the fact that he passes off this conjectural property as property in general was bound, of course, to have a magical attraction for the propertyless German ideologists.
The words are from Szeliga's article "Eugen Sue: 'Die Geheimnisse von Paris'".— Ed.
Every other person in his sphere of action, too, is his object, and "as his object — his property", his creature. Each ego says to the other (see p. 184):
"For me you are only what you are for me" (for example, my exploiteur), "namely my object and, because my object, my property."
Hence also my creature, which at any moment as creator I can swallow up and take back into myself. Thus, each ego regards the other not as a property-owner, but as his property; not as "ego" (see [p. 184)] but as being-for-him, as object; not as belonging to himself, but as belonging to him, to another, as alienated from himself. "Let us take both for what they give themselves out to be" (p. 187), for property-owners, for something belonging to themselves, "and for what they take each other to be", for property, for something belonging to the alien. They are property-owners and they are not property-owners (cf. p. 187). What is important for Saint Sancho, however, in all relations to others, is not to take the real relation, but how each can see himself in his imagination, in his reflection.
Since everything that is object for the "ego" is, through the medium of one or other of his properties, also his object and, therefore, his property—thus, for example, the beatings he receives as the object of his members, his feelings and his mind, are his object and, therefore, his property — he is able to proclaim himself the owner of every object that exists for him. By this means he can proclaim that the world surrounding him is his property, and that he is its owner — no matter how much it maltreats him and debases him to the level of a "man having only ideal wealth, a ragamuffin". On the other hand, since every object for the "ego" is not only my object, but also my object, it is possible, with the same indifference towards the content, to declare that every object is not-my-own, alien, holy. One and the same object and one and the same relation can, therefore, with equal ease and with equal success be declared to be the holy and my property. Everything depends on whether stress is laid on the word "my" or on the word "object". The methods of appropriation and canonisation are merely two different "refractions" of one "transformation".
All these methods are merely positive expressions for negating what was posited as alien to the ego in the above equations; except that the negation is again, as above, taken in various determinations. Negation can, firstly, be determined in a purely formal way, so that it does not at all affect the content — as we saw above in the case of love of mankind and in all cases when its whole alteration is limited to introducing consciousness of indifference. Or the whole sphere of the object or predicate, the whole content, can be negated, as in the case of religion and the state. Or, thirdly, the copula alone, my hitherto alien relation to the predicate, can be negated and the stress laid on the word "ray" so that my attitude to what is mine is that of property-owner — in the case of money, for instance, which becomes coin of my own coining. In this last case both the quality of Man and his relation can lose all meaning. Every one of the qualities of Man, by being taken back into myself, is extinguished in my individuality. It is no longer possible to say what the quality is. It remains only nominally what it was. As "miné"', as determinateness dissolved in me, it no longer has any determinateness whether in relation to others»or in relation to me, it is only posited by me, an illusory quality. Thus, for example, my thought. Just as with my qualities, so with the things which stand in a relation to me and which, as we have seen above, are basically also only my qualities — as, for example, in the case of the shop I am looking at. Insofar, [therefore,] as thought in me is totally [different] from all [other] qualities, just as, for example, a jeweller's shop is totally different from a sausage shop, etc.—the [difference] emerges again as a difference of appearance, and re-asserts itself externally too in my manifestation for others. Thereby this annihilated determinateness is fortunately restored and, insofar as it is at all possible to express it in words, must also be reproduced in the old expressions. (Incidentally, we shall be hearing a little more yet concerning Saint Sancho's non-etymological illusions about language.)
The simple equation encountered above is here replaced by the antithesis. In its simplest form it is expressed, for example, as follows:
Man's thought—my thought, egoistical thought, where the word my means only that he can also be without thoughts, so that the word my abolishes thought. The antithesis already becomes more complicated in the following example:
Money as man's means of I J Money of my own coining as the exchange— f \ egoist's means of exchange
where the absurdity stands revealed.
The antithesis becomes still more complicated when Saint Max introduces a determination and wants to create the appearance of a far-reaching development. Here the single antithesis becomes a series of antitheses. First of all, for example, it is stated:
Right in general as the right 1 i Right is what is right for of man j \ me, where, instead of right, he might equally well have put any other word, since admittedly it no longer has any meaning. Although this nonsense continues to crop up all the time, in order to proceed further he has to introduce another, well-known determination of right which can be used both in the purely personal and in the ideological sense — for example, might as the basis of right. Only now, where the right mentioned in the first thesis has acquired yet another determination, which is retained in the antithesis, can this antithesis produce some content. Now we get:
Right — might of Man I J Might — my right
which then again simply becomes reduced to: Might as my right=My might.
These antitheses are no more than positive reversals of the above-mentioned negative equations, in which antitheses continually proved to be contained in the conclusion. They even surpass those equations in simple grandeur and great simple-mindedness.
Just as previously Saint Sancho could regard everything as alien, as existing independently of him, as holy, so now with equal ease he can regard everything as his own product, as only existing thanks to him, as his property. Indeed, since he transforms everything into his qualities, it only remains for him to behave towards them as he behaves towards his original qualities, in the capacity of the egoist in agreement with himself, a procedure we do not need to repeat here. In this way our Berlin school-master becomes the absolute master of the world—"this, of course, is also the case with every goose, every dog, every horse" (Wigand, p. 187).
The real logical experiment, on which all these forms of appropriation are based, is a mere form of speech, namely a paraphrase, expressing one relation as a manifestation, as a mode of existence of another. Just as we have seen that every relation can be depicted as an example of the relation of property, in exactly the same way it can be depicted as the relation of love, might, exploitation, etc. Saint Sancho found this manner of paraphrase ready-made in philosophical speculation where it plays a very important part. See below on the "theory of exploitation".3
The various categories of appropriation become emotional categories as soon as the appearance of practice is introduced and appropriation is to be taken seriously. The emotional form of assertion of the ego against the alien, the holy, the world of "Man",
See this volume, pp. 411-14.— Ed.
is bragging. Refusal to revere the holy is proclaimed (reverence, respect, etc.—these emotional categories serve to express his relation to the holy or to some third thing as the holy), and this permanent refusal is entitled a deed, a deed that appears all the more comic because all the time Sancho is battling only against the spectre of his own sanctifying conception. On the other hand, since the world, despite his refusal to revere the holy, treats him in the most ungodly fashion, he enjoys the inner satisfaction of declaring to the world that he has only to attain power over it in order to treat it without any reverence. This threat with its world-shattering reservatio mentalis completes the comedy. To the first form of bragging belongs Saint Sancho's statement on page 16 that he "is not afraid of the anger of Poseidon, nor of the vengeful Eumenides", "does not fear the curse" (p. 58), "desires no forgiveness" (p. 242), etc., and his final assurance that he commits "the most boundless desecration" of the holy. To the second form belongs his threat against the moon (p. 218):
"If only I could seize you, I would in truth seize you, and if only I could find a means to get to you, you would in no way terrify me.... I do not surrender to you, but am only biding my time. Even if for the present I refrain from having designs on you, I still have a grudge against you"—
an apostrophe in which our saint sinks below the level of Pfeffel's pug-dog in the ditch.[88] And likewise on page 425, where he "does not renounce power over life and death", etc.
Finally, the practice of bragging [can] again become mere [practice] within the sphere of theory [by] our holy man [asserting] in the [most] pompous language that he has performed actions that he has never performed, and [at the same time] endeavouring by means of high-sounding phrases to smuggle in traditional trivialities [as] his original creations. Actually this is characteristic of the entire book, particularly his construction of history — which is foisted on us as an exposition of his thought but is only a bad piece of copying out — then the assurance that "the book" "appears to be written against man" (Wigand, p. 168), and a multitude of separate assertions, such as: "With one puff of the living ego I blow down whole peoples" (p. 219 of "the book"), "I recklessly attack" (p. 254), "the people is dead" (p. 285), further the assurance that he "delves into the bowels of right" (p. 275), and, finally, the challenging call, embellished with quotations and aphorisms, for "a flesh-and-blood opponent" (p. 280).
Bragging is already in itself sentimental. But, in addition, sentimentality occurs in "the book" as a particular category, which plays a definite part especially in positive appropriation that is no longer mere assertion against the alien. However simple the methods of appropriation so far examined, with a more detailed exposition the appearance has to be given that the ego thereby acquires also property "in the ordinary sense", and this can only be achieved by a forcible puffing-up of this ego, by enveloping himself and others in a sentimental charm. Sentimentality cannot be avoided since, without previous examination, he claims the predicates of "Man" as his own — he asserts, for example, that he "loves" "everyone" "out of egoism"—and thus gives his qualities an exuberant turgidity. Thus, on page 351, he declares that the "smile of the infant" is "his property" and in the same passage the stage of civilisation at which old men are no longer killed off is depicted with the most touching expressions as the deed of these old men themselves, etc. His attitude to Maritornes also belongs wholly to this same sentimentality.
The unity of sentimentality and bragging is rebellion. Directed outwards, against others, it is bragging; directed inwards, as grumbling-in-oneself, it is sentimentality. It is the specific expression of the impotent dissatisfaction of the philistine. He waxes indignant at the thought of atheism, terrorism, communism, regicide, etc. The object against which Saint Sancho rebels is the holy; therefore rebellion, which indeed is also characterised as a crime, becomes, in the final analysis, a sin. It is therefore by no means necessary for rebellion to take the form of an action, as it is only the "sin" against "the holy". Saint Sancho, therefore, is satisfied with "getting" "holiness" or the "spirit of alienation" "out of his head" and accomplishing his ideological appropriation. But just as present and future are altogether confused in his head, and just as he sometimes asserts that he has already appropriated everything and sometimes that it has still to be acquired, so in connection with rebellion also at times it occurs to him quite accidentally that he is still confronted by the actually existing alien even after he has finished with the halo of the alien. In this case, or rather in the case of this sudden idea, rebellion is transformed into an imaginary act, and the ego into "we". We shall examine this in more detail later (see "Rebellion"a).
The true egoist, who from the description given so far has proved to be the greatest conservative, finally collects up the fragments of the "world of man", twelve basketfuls; for "far be it that anything should be lost!" Since his whole activity is limited to trying a few hackneyed, casuistical tricks on the world of thoughts handed down to him by philosophical tradition, it is a matter of course that the real world does not exist for him at all and, therefore, too, remains in
This volume, pp. 382-83.— Ed.
existence as before. The content of the New Testament will furnish us with detailed proof of this.
Thus, "we appear at the bar of majority and are declared of age" (p. 86).
4. Peculiarity
"To create for oneself one's own world, that means building a heaven for oneself" (p. 89 of "the book").*
We have already "penetrated" into the innermost sanctuary of this heaven; now we shall try to learn "more things" about it. In the New Testament, however, we shall rediscover the same hypocrisy that permeated the Old Testament. Just as in the latter the historical data were only names for a few simple categories, so here in the New Testament, too, all worldly relations are only disguises, different designations, for the meagre content which we have assembled in the "Phenomenology" and "Logic". Under the appearance of speaking about the actual world, Saint Sancho always speaks only about these meagre categories.
"You do not want the freedom to have all these fine things.... You want to have them in actuality ... to possess them as your property.... You ought to be not only a free person, but also an owner" (p. 205).
One of the oldest formulas arrived at by the early social movement — the opposition between socialism in its most miserable form and liberalism — is here exalted into an utterance of the "egoist in agreement with himself". How old this opposition is even for Berlin, our holy man could have seen if only from the fact that it is mentioned with terror already in Ranke's Historisch-politische Zeitschrift, Berlin, 1831.a
* [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] Up to now freedom has been defined by philosophers in two ways; on the one hand, as power, as domination over the circumstances and conditions in which an individual lives — by all materialists; on the other hand, as self-determination, riddance of the real world, as merely imaginary freedom of the spirit — this definition was given by all idealists, especially the German idealists.
Having seen in the "Phenomenology" above how Saint Max's true egoist seeks his egoism in dissolution, in achieving riddance, the idealist freedom, it seems strange that in the chapter on "Peculiarity" he puts forward against "riddance" the opposite definition, i.e., power over the circumstances which determine him, materialist freedom.
Leopold Ranke's "Einleitung" in Historisch-politische Zeitschrift. I. Band, Hamburg-, 1832 (the place and date of publication are cited incorrectly in the text).—F.d.
The great dialectician can also reverse this and say: "How I utilise my peculiarity depends on my freedom."—Then he continues:
"Free — from what?" Here, therefore, by means of a dash freedom is already transformed into freedom from something and, per appos., from "everything". This time, however, the apposition is given in the form of a proposition that apparently provides a closer definition. Having thus achieved this great result, Sancho becomes sentimental.
"Oh, how much can be shaken off!" First, the "yoke of serfdom", then a whole series of other yokes, leading imperceptibly to the result that "the most perfect self-denial is nothing but freedom, freedom ... from one's own ego, and the urge towards freedom as something absolute ... has deprived us of our peculiarity."
By means of an extremely artless series of yokes, liberation from serfdom, which was the assertion of the individuality of the serfs and at the same time the abolition of a definite empirical barrier, is here equated with the much earlier Christian-idealist freedom of the Epistles to the Romans and Corinthians, thereby transforming freedom in general into self-denial. At this point we have already finished with freedom, since it is now indisputably the "holy". Saint Max transforms a definite historical act of self-liberation into the abstract category of "freedom", and this category is then defined more closely by means of a totally different historical phenomenon which can likewise be included under the general conception of "freedom". This is the whole trick by which the throwing off of the yoke of serfdom is transformed into self-denial.
To make his theory of freedom as clear as noonday to the German burgher, Sancho now begins to declaim in the burgher's own language, particularly that of the Berlin burgher:
"But the freer I become, the larger does compulsion loom before my eyes, and the more powerless do I feel. The unfree son of the wilds is not yet aware of all the limitations that trouble an 'educated' man, he imagines himself freer than the latter. In proportion as I achieve freedom for myself I create new limits and new tasks for myself; no sooner have I invented railways than I again feel myself weak because I still cannot sail through the air like a bird, and I have no sooner solved a problem that was perplexing my mind than countless others await me," etc. (pp. 205, 206).
O "clumsy" story-writer for townsman and villager! Not the "unfree sons of the wilds" but "educated people" "imagine" the savage freer than the educated man. That the "son of the wilds" (whom F. Halm brought on the stage3) is ignorant of the
Friedrich Halm, Der Sohn der Wildniss.— Ed.
limitations of the educated man because he cannot experience them is just as clear as that the "educated" citizen of Berlin, who only knows the "son of the wilds" from the theatre, knows nothing of the limitations of the savage. The simple fact is this: the limitations of the savage are not those of the civilised man. The comparison that our saint draws between them is the fantastic comparison of an "educated" Berliner whose education consists of knowing nothing about either of them. That he knows nothing of the limitations of the savage is explicable, although after the large number of new travel books, it is certainly easy enough to know something about them; but that he is also ignorant of the limitations of the educated man, is proved by his example of railways and flying. The inactive petty bourgeois, for whom railways dropped from the sky and who for that very reason imagines that he invented them himself, begins to indulge in fantasies about aerial flight after having once travelled by railway. Actually, the balloon came first and then the railways. Saint Sancho had to reverse this, for otherwise everyone would have seen that when the balloon was invented the demand for railways was still a long way off, whereas the opposite is easy to imagine. In general, Sancho turns empirical relations upside down. When hackney carriages and carts no longer sufficed for the growing requirements of communication, when, inter alia, the centralisation of production due to large-scale industry necessitated new methods to accelerate and expand the transport of its mass of products, the locomotive was invented and thus the use of railways for transport on a large scale. The inventor and shareholders were interested in their profits, and commerce in general in reducing production costs; the possibility, indeed the absolute necessity, of the invention lay in the empirical conditions. The application of the new invention in the various countries depended on the various empirical conditions; in America, for example, on the need to unite the individual states of that vast area and to link the semi-civilised districts of the interior with the sea and the markets for their products. (Compare, inter alia, M. Chevalier, Lettres sur l'Amérique du Nord.) In other countries, for example in Germany, where every new invention makes people regret that it does not complete the sum total of inventions — in such countries after stubbornly resisting these detestable railways which cannot supply them with wings, people are nevertheless compelled by competition to accept them in the end and to give up hackney carriages and carts along with the time-honoured, respectable spinning-wheel. The absence of other profitable investment of capital made railway construction the predominant branch of industry in Germany. The development of her railway construction and reverses on the world market went hand in hand. But nowhere are railways built for the sake of the category "freedom from"; Saint Max could have realised this even from the fact that no one builds railways in order to free himself from his money. The real kernel of the burgher's ideological contempt for railways due to his longing to fly like a bird is to be found in his preference for hackney carriages, vans and country roads. Sancho yearns for his "own world" which, as we saw above, is heaven. Therefore he wants to replace the locomotive by Elijah's fiery chariot and be carried up to heaven.
After the actual tearing down of restrictions — which is at the same time an extremely positive development of the productive forces, real energy and satisfaction of urgent requirements, and an expansion of the power of individuals — after the actual tearing down of restrictions has been transformed in the eyes of this passive and ignorant spectator into simple freedom from a restriction, which he can again logically make into a postulate of freedom from restriction as such—at the conclusion of the whole argument, we arrive at what was already presupposed at the beginning:
"To be free from something means only to be relieved of something, to be rid of something" (p. 206).
He at once gives an extremely unfortunate example: "He is free of headache is equivalent to saying: he is rid of it"; as though this "riddance" of headache were not equivalent to a wholly positive ability to dispose of my head, equivalent to ownership of my head, while as long as I had a headache I was the property of my sick head.
"In 'riddance'—in riddance from sin, from God, from morality, etc.—we consummate the freedom that Christianity recommends" (p. 206).
Hence our "consummate Christian", too, finds his peculiarity only in "riddance" from "thought", from "determination", from "vocation", from "law", from "constitution", etc., and invites his brothers in Christ to "feel happy only in dissolution", i.e., in accomplishing "riddance" and the " cons urn mate", "Christian freedom".
He continues:
"Ought we, perhaps, to renounce freedom because it turns out to be a Christian ideal? No, nothing should be lost" (voilà notre conservateur tout trouvé3), "freedom too should not be lost, it should however become our own, and it cannot become our own in the form of freedom" (p. 207).
Here "our egoist" (toujours et partout) "in agreement with
There's the conservative all complete.— Ed. Always and everywhere.— Ed.
himself" forgets that already in the Old Testament, thanks to the Christian ideal of freedom, i.e., thanks to the illusion of freedom, we became "owners" of the "world of things"; he forgets, likewise, that accordingly we had only to get rid of the "world of thoughts" to become "owners" of that world as well, that in this context "peculiarity" was for him a consequence of freedom, of riddance.
Having interpreted freedom as the state of being free from something, and this, in turn, as "riddance", and this as the Christian ideal of freedom, and hence as the freedom of "Man", our saint can, with the material thus prepared, carry through a practical course of his logic. The first, simplest antithesis reads:
Freedom of Man — My freedom,
where in the antithesis freedom ceases to exist "in the form of freedom". Or:
Riddance in the interests I / Riddance in my interests. of Man I )
Both these antitheses, with a numerous retinue of declamations, continually appear throughout the chapter on peculiarity, but with their help alone our world-conquering Sancho would attain very little, he would not even attain the island of Barataria. Earlier, when observing the behaviour of people from his "own world", from his "heaven", he set aside two factors of actual liberation in making his abstraction of freedom. The first factor was that individuals in their self-liberation satisfy a definite need actually experienced by them. As the result of setting aside this factor, "Man" has been substituted for actual individuals, and striving for a fantastic ideal — for freedom as such, for the "freedom of Man"—has been substituted for the satisfaction of actual needs.
The second factor was that an ability that has hitherto existed merely as a potentiality in the individuals who are freeing themselves begins to function as a real power, or that an already existing power becomes greater by removal of some restriction. The removal of the restriction, which is merely a consequence of the new creation of power, can of course be considered the main thing. But this illusion arises only if one takes politics as the basis of empirical history, or if, like Hegel, one wants everywhere to demonstrate the negation of negation, or finally if, after the new power has been created, one reflects, as an ignorant citizen of Berlin, on this new creation.
By setting aside this second factor for his own use, Saint Sancho acquires a determinateness that he can counterpose to the remaining, abstract caput mortuum of "freedom". Thus he arrives at the following new antitheses: Freedom, the empty removal of I (Peculiarity, the actual posses-alien power I \sion of one's own power.
Or, even:
Freedom, repulsion of alien 1 i Peculiarity, possession of one's power ) \own power. To show the extent to which Saint Sancho has juggled his own "power", which he here counterposes to freedom, out of this same freedom and into himself, we do not intend to refer him to the materialists or communists, but merely to the Dictionnaire de l'académie, where he will find that the word liberté is most frequently used in the sense of puissance. If, however, Saint Sancho should maintain that he does not combat "liberté", but "freedom", then he ought to consult Hegel on negative and positive freedom.3 As a German petty bourgeois, he might enjoy the concluding remark in this chapter.
The antithesis can also be expressed as follows: Freedom, idealistic striving for \ J Peculiarity, actual riddance riddance and the struggle)—\ and pleasure in one's own against other-being j ' existence.
Having thus, by means of a cheap abstraction, distinguished peculiarity from freedom, Sancho pretends that he is only now beginning to analyse this difference and exclaims:
"What a difference there is between freedom and peculiarity!" (p. 207).
We shall see that, apart from the general antitheses, he has achieved nothing, and that peculiarity "in the ordinary sense" continues most amusingly to creep in side by side with this definition of peculiarity.
"In spite of the state of slavery, one can be inwardly free, although, again, only from various things, but not from everything; but the slave cannot be free from the whip, from the despotic mood, etc., of his master."
"On the other hand, peculiarity is my whole essence and existence, it is I myself. I am free from that which I have got rid of; I am the owner of that which I have in my power or which I have mastered. I am my own at all times and under all circumstances, if only I know how to possess myself and do not abandon myself to others. I cannot truly want the state of being free, because I cannot ... achieve it; I can only wish for it and strive towards it, for it remains an ideal, a spectre. At every moment the fetters of actuality cut very deeply into my flesh. But I remain my own. Belonging as a feudal serf
G.W.F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. Einleitung.—Ed.
strike me: I am not free from them; but I endure them only for my own good, for example, in order to deceive him by an appearance of patience and to lull him into security or perhaps in order not to incur something worse by my defiance. But since I constantly have in mind myself and my own advantage" (while the blows retain possession of him and his back) "I seize on the first convenient opportunity" (i.e., he "wishes", he "strives" towards the first convenient opportunity, which, however, "remains an ideal, a spectre") "to crush the slave-owner. That I then become free from him and his whip is only a consequence of my previous egoism. It will, perhaps, be said here that even in the state of slavery I was free, namely 'in myself or 'inwardly'; however, 'free in oneself is not 'actually free', and 'inwardly' is not 'outwardly'. On the other hand, I was myself, my own wholly and completely, both inwardly and outwardly. Under the domination of a cruel master, my body is not 'free' from the pain of torture and the lashes of the whip; but it is my bones that crack under torture, my muscles that twitch under the blows, and it is I who groan because m y body suffers. The fact that I sigh and tremble proves that I still belong to myself, that I am my own" (pp. 207, 208).
Our Sancho, who here again acts the story-teller for the petty bourgeois and villagers, proves here that, despite the numerous drubbings he has already received in Cervantes, he has always remained "owner" of himself and that these blows belonged rather to his "peculiarity". He is "his own" "at all times and under all circumstances" provided he knows how to possess himself. Here, therefore, peculiarity is hypothetical and depends on his knowledge, by which term he understands a slavish casuistry. This knowledge later on becomes thinking as well, when he begins "to think" about himself and his "advantage"—this thinking and this imagined "advantage" being his imagined "property". It is further interpreted in the sense that he endures the blows "for his own good", where peculiarity once again consists in the idea of "good", and where he "endures" the bad in order not to become the "owner" of "something worse". Subsequently, knowledge is revealed also as the "owner" of the reservation about "the first convenient opportunity", hence of a mere reservatio mentalis, and, finally, as the "crushing" of the "slave-owner", in the anticipation of the idea, in which case he is the "owner" of this anticipation, whereas at present the slave-owner actually tramples him underfoot. While, therefore, he identifies himself here with his consciousness, which endeavours to calm itself by means of all kinds of maxims of worldly wisdom, in the end he identifies himself with his body, so that he is wholly "his own", outwardly as well as inwardly, so long as he still retains a spark of life, even if it is merely unconscious life. Such phenomena as the cracking of his "bones", the twitching of his muscles, etc., are phenomena which, when translated from the language of unique natural science into the language of pathology, can be produced with the aid of galvanism on his corpse, when freshly cut down from the gallows on which he hanged himself, as we saw above, and which can be produced even in a dead frog — these phenomena serve him here as proof that he is "wholly and completely" "both inwardly and outwardly" still "his own", that he still has control over himself. The very fact which demonstrates the power and peculiarity of the slave-owner, namely that it is precisely he who is flogged and not someone else, that it is precisely his bones that "crack", his muscles that twitch, without his being able to alter it — this very fact here serves our saint as proof of his own peculiarity and power. Thus, when he lies trussed up in the spanso bocko[89] torture of Surinam, unable to move hand or foot, or any other of his limbs, and has to put up with everything done to him, in such circumstances his power and peculiarity do not consist in his being able to make use of his limbs, but in the fact that they are his limbs. Here once again he has saved his peculiarity by always considering himself as otherwise-determined — sometimes as mere consciousness, sometimes as an unconscious body (see the "Phenomenology"3).
At any rate, Saint Sancho "endures" his portion of blows with more dignity than actual slaves do. However often, in the interests of the slave-owners, missionaries may tell the slaves that they have to "endure" the blows "for their own good", the slaves are not taken in by such twaddle. They do not coldly and timidly reflect that they would otherwise "incur something worse", nor do they imagine that they "deceive the slave-owner by an appearance of patience". On the contrary, they scoff at their torturers, they jeer at the latter's impotence even to force them to humble themselves, and they suppress every "groan" and every sigh, as long as the physical pain permits them to do so. (See Charles Comte, Traité de législation.) They are therefore, neither "inwardly" nor "outwardly" their own "owners", but only the "owners" of their defiance, which could equally well be expressed by saying that they are neither "inwardly" nor "outwardly" "free", but are free only in one respect, namely that they are "inwardly" free from self-humiliation as they also show "outwardly". Insofar as "Stirner" suffers blows, he is the owner of the blows and thus free from being not beaten; and this freedom, this riddance, belongs to his peculiarity.
From the fact that Saint Sancho assumes that the reservation about running away at "the first convenient opportunity" is a special characteristic of peculiarity and sees in the "liberation" thus obtained "merely the consequence of his previous egoism" (of his own egoism, i.e., egoism in agreement with itself), it follows that he
This volume, p. 273.— Ed.
imagines that the insurgent Negroes of Haiti[90] and the fugitive Negroes of all the colonies wanted to free not themselves, but "man". The slave who takes the decision to free himself must already be superior to the idea that slavery is his "peculiarity". He must be "free" from this "peculiarity". The "peculiarity" of an individual, however, can consist in his "abandoning'' himself. For "one" to assert the opposite means to apply an "alien scale" to this individual.
In conclusion, Saint Sancho takes revenge for the blows he has received by the following address to the "owner" of his "peculiarity", the slave-owner:
"My leg is not 'free' from the blows of the master, but it is my leg, and it cannot be taken away. Let him tear it from me and see whether he has possession of my leg! He will find in his hands nothing but the corpse of my leg, which is as little my leg as a dead dog is a dog" (p. 208).
But let him — Sancho, who imagines here that the slave-owner wants to have his living leg, probably for his own use — let him "see" what he still retains of his leg which "cannot be taken away". He retains nothing but the loss of his leg and has become the one-legged owner of his torn-out leg. If he has to labour at a treadmill eight hours every dav, then it is he who in the course of time becomes an idiot, and idiocy will then be his "peculiarity". Let the judge who sentences him to this "see" whether he has still Sancho's brain "in his hands". But that will be of little help to poor Sancho.
"The first property, the first splendour has been won!" After our saint, by means of these examples, which are worthy of an ascetic, has revealed the difference between freedom and peculiarity, at a considerable belletristical production cost, he quite unexpectedly declares on page 209 that
"between peculiarity and freedom there lies a still deeper gulf than the simple verbal difference".
This "deeper gulf" consists in the fact that the above definition of freedom is repeated with "manifold transformations" and "refractions" and numerous "episodical insertions". From the definition of "freedom" as "riddance" the questions arise: from what should people be free (p. 209), etc., disputes concerning this "from what" (ibid.) (here, too, as a German petty bourgeois, he sees in the struggle of actual interests only wrangling about the definition of this "from what", in which connection, of course, it appears very strange to him that the "citizen" does not wish to be free "from citizenship", page 210). Then the proposition is repeated that the removal of a barrier is the establishment of a new barrier, in the form that "the striving for a definite freedom always includes the aim of a new rule", page 210 (in which connection we learn that in the revolution the bourgeois was not striving for his own rule but for the "rule of law"—see above concerning liberalism3); then follows the result that one does not wish to be rid of what "is wholly to one's liking, e.g., the irresistible glance of the beloved" (p. 211). Further on, it turns out that freedom is a "phantom" (p. 211), a "dream" (p. 212); then we learn by the way that the "voice of nature" can sometimes also become "peculiarity" (p. 213); on the other hand the "voice of God and conscience" is to be considered "devil's work", and the author boasts: "Such godless people" (who consider it the work of the devil) "do exist; how will you deal with them?" (pp. 213, 214). But it is not nature that should determine me, but I who should determine my nature, says the egoist in agreement with himself. And my conscience is also a "voice of nature".
In this connection it also turns out that the animal "takes very correct steps" (p. 213). We learn further that "freedom is silent about what should happen after I have become free" (p. 215). (See "Solomon's Song of Songs" .b) The exposition of the above-mentioned "deeper gulf" is closed by Saint Sancho repeating the scene with the blows and this time expressing himself somewhat more clearly about peculiarity:
"Even when unfree, even bound by a thousand fetters, I nevertheless exist, and I exist not only just in the future, and in the hope, like freedom, but even as the most abject of slaves I am present" (p. 215).
Here, therefore, he counterposes himself and "freedom" as two persons, and peculiarity becomes mere existence, being present, and indeed the "most abject" presence. Peculiarity here is the simple registering of personal identity. Stirner, who in an earlier passage has already constituted himself the "secret police state", here sets himself up as the passport department. "By no means" should "anything be lost" from "the world of human beings!" (See "Solomon's Song of Songs".)
According to page 218, one can also "give up" one's peculiarity through "submissiveness", "submission", although, according to the preceding, peculiarity cannot cease so long as one is present at all, even in the most "abject" or "submissive" form. And is not the "most abject" slave the "most submissive"? According to one of the earlier descriptions of peculiarity, one can only "give up" one's peculiarity by giving up one's life.
This volume, pp. 221-22.— Ed. This volume, p. 435.— Ed.
On page 218, peculiarity as one aspect of freedom, as power, is once again set against freedom as riddance; and among the means by which Sancho pretends to protect his peculiarity, are mentioned "hypocrisy", "deception" (means which my peculiarity employs, because it had to 'submit" to the conditions of the world), etc.,
"for the means that I employ are determined by what I am".
We have alreadv seen that among these means the absence of any means plays a major role, as was evident also from his proceedings against the moon (see above "Logic"3). Then, for a change, freedom is regarded as "self-liberation", "i.e., that I can only have as much freedom as I procure by my peculiarity", where the definition of freedom as self-determination, which occurs among all, and particularly German, ideologists, makes its appearance as peculiarity. This is then explained to us on the example of "sheep"; to whom it is of no "use" at all "if they are given freedom of speech" (p. 220). How-trivial is his conception here of peculiarity as self-liberation is evident if only from his repetition of the most hackneyed phrases about granted freedom, setting free, self-liberation, etc. (pp. 220, 221). The antithesis between freedom as riddance and peculiarity as the negation of this riddance is now also portrayed poetically:
"Freedom arouses your wrath against everything that you are not" (it is, therefore, wrathful peculiarity, or have choleric natures, e.g., Guizot, in Saint Sancho's opinion, no "peculiarity"? And do I not enjoy myself in wrath against others?), "egoism calls on you to rejoice over yourself, to delight in yourself" (hence egoism is freedom which rejoices; incidentally, we have already become acquainted with the joy and self-enjoyment of the egoist in agreement with himself). "Freedom is and remains a longing" (as though longing were not also a peculiarity, the self-enjoyment of individuals of a particular nature, especially of Christian-German individuals — and should this longing "be lost"?). "Peculiarity is a reality which of itself abolishes all the non-freedom which is an impediment and blocks your own path" (in which case, then, until non-freedom is abolished my peculiarity is a blocked peculiarity. It is characteristic again of the German petty bourgeois that for him all barriers and obstacles disappear "of themselves", since he never lifts a finger to achieve it, and by habit he turns those barriers which do not disappear "of themselves" into his peculiarity. It mav be remarked in passing that peculiarity appears here as an acting person, although it is later demoted to a mere description of its owner) (p. 215).
This volume, p. 299.—Ed.
12 — 2086 The same antithesis appears again in the following form:
"As being your own, you are in actuality rid of everything, and what remains with you, you have yourself accepted, it is your choice and option. One who is his own is born free, one who is free on the other hand is only one who desires freedom."
Nevertheless Saint Sancho "admits" on page 252 "that each is born as a human being; hence in this respect the newborn children are equal".
What you as being your own have not "rid yourself of" is "your choice and option", as in the case of the beatings of the slave mentioned above.—Banal paraphrase!—Here, therefore, peculiarity is reduced to the fantastic idea that Saint Sancho has voluntarily accepted and retained everything from which he has not "rid" himself, e.g., hunger when he has no money. Apart from the many things, e.g., dialect, scrofula, haemorrhoids, poverty, one-leggedness, forced philosophising imposed on him by division of labour, etc., etc.—apart from the fact that it in no way depends on him whether he "accepts" these things or not; all the same, even if for an instant we accept his premises, he has only the choice between definite things which lie within his province and which are in no way posited by his peculiarity. As an Irish peasant, for example, he can only choose to eat potatoes or starve, and he is not always free to make even this choice. In the sentence quoted above one should note also the beautiful apposition, by which, just as in jurispru-dence, "acceptance" is directly identified with "choice" and "option". Incidentally, it is impossible to say what Saint Sancho means by one who is "born free", whether in the context or outside it.
And is not a feeling instilled into him, his feeling accepted by him? And do we not learn on pages 84, 85, that "instilled" feelings are not "one's own" feelings? For the rest, it turns out here, as we have already seen in connection with Klopstock(1) (who is put forward here as an example), that "one's own" behaviour by no means coincides with individual behaviour, although for Klopstock Christianity seems to have been "quite right" and in no way to have "obstructively blocked his path".
"One who is his own does not need to free himself, because from the outset he rejects everything except himself.... Although he remains in the confines of childish reverence, he already works to 'free himself from this enthralment."
Since one who is his own does not need to free himself, already as a child he works' to free himself, and all this because, as we have seen, he is one who is "born free". "Although he remains in the confines of childish reverence" he already reflects without any restraint, namely in his own fashion, about this his own enthralment. But this should not surprise us: we already saw at the beginning of the Old Testament what a prodigy the egoist in agreement with himself was.
"Peculiarity works in the little egoist and secures him the desired 'freedom'."
It is not "Stirner" who lives, it is "peculiarity" that lives, "works" and "secures" in him. Here we learn that peculiarity is not a description of one who is his own, but that one who is his own is merely a paraphrase of peculiarity.
As we have seen, "riddance" at its climax was riddance from one's own self, self-denial. We saw also that on the other hand he put forward "peculiarity" as the assertion of self, as self-interestedness. But we have seen likewise that this self-interestedness itself was again self-denial.
For some time past we have been painfully aware that "the holy" was missing. But we rediscover it suddenly, on page 224, at the end of the section on peculiarity, where it stands quite bashfully and proves its identity by means of the following new turn of expression:
"My relation to something which I selfishly carry on" (or do not carry on at all) "is different from my relation to something which I unselfishly serve" (or which I carry on).
But Saint Max is not satisfied with this remarkable piece of tautology, which he "accepted" from "choice and option"; there suddenly reappears the long forgotten "one", in the shape of the night watchman who establishes the identity of the holy, and declares that he "could put forward the following distinguishing mark: against the former I can sin or commit a sin" (a remarkable tautology!), "the other I can only lose by my folly, push away from myself, deprive myself of it, i.e., do something stupid" (it follows that he can lose himself by his folly, can deprive himself of himself, can be deprived of himself — can be deprived of life). "Both these points of view are applicable to freedom of trade, because it" is partly taken for the holy and partly not so taken, or, as Sancho himself expresses it more circumstantially, "because it is partly regarded as a freedom which can be granted or withdrawn depending on circumstances, and partly as a freedom which should be regarded as holy under all circumstances" (pp. 224, 225).
Here again Sancho reveals his "peculiar" "penetration" into the question of freedom of trade and protective tariffs. He is herewith given the "vocation" of pointing out just one single case where freedom of trade was regarded as "holy" 1) because it is a "freedom", and 2) "under all circumstances". The holy comes in useful for all purposes.
After peculiarity, by means of logical antitheses and the phenomenological "being-also-otherwise-determined", has been constructed, as we have seen, from a "freedom" previously trimmed up for the purpose — Saint Sancho meanwhile having "dismissed" everything that happened to suit him (e.g., beatings) into peculiarity, and whatever did not suit him into freedom — we learn finally that all this was still not true peculiarity.
"Peculiarity," it is stated on page 225, "is not at all an idea, such as freedom, etc., it is only a description — of the owner."
We shall see that this "description of the owner" consists in negating freedom in the three refractions which Saint Sancho ascribes to it — liberalism, communism and humanism — comprehending it in its truth and then calling this process of thought, which is extremely simple according to advanced logic, the description of a real ego.
The entire chapter about peculiarity boils down to the most trivial self-embellishments by means of which the German petty bourgeois consoles himself for his own impotence. Exactly like Sancho, he thinks that in the struggle of bourgeois interests against the remnants of feudalism and absolute monarchy in other countries everything turns merely on a question of principles, on the question of from what "Man" should free himself. (See also above on political liberalism.(2)) Therefore in freedom of trade he sees only a freedom and, exactly like Sancho, expatiates with a great air of importance about whether "Man" ought to enjoy freedom of trade "under all circumstances" or not. And when, as is inevitable in such conditions, his aspirations for freedom suffer a miserable collapse, then, again like Sancho, he consoles himself that "Man", or he himseif, cannot "become free from everything", that freedom is a highly indefinite concept, and that even Metternich and Charles X were able to appeal to "true freedom" (p. 210 of "the book"; and it need only be remarked here that it is precisely the reactionaries, especially the Historical School and the Romanticists[91] who — again just like Sancho — reduce true freedom to peculiarity, for instance, to the peculiarity of the Tyrolean peasants, and in general, to the peculiar development of individuals, and also of localities, provinces and estates).—The petty bourgeois also consoles himself that as a German, even if he is not free, he finds compensation for all sufferings in his own indisputable peculiarity. Again like Sancho, he does not see in freedom a power that he is able to obtain and therefore declares his own impotence to be power.
What the ordinary German petty bourgeois whispers to himself as a consolation, in the quiet depths of his mind, the Berliner trumpets out loudly as an ingenious turn of thought. He is proud of his trashy peculiarity and his peculiar trashiness.
5. The Owner
For the way in which the "owner" is divided into three "refractions": "my power", "my intercourse" and "my self-enjoyment", see "The Economy of the New Testament". We shall pass directly to the first of these refractions.
Endnotes
[81] According to Bentham's utilitarian ethics, actions were to be considered good if they produced a greater amount of pleasure than suffering. The compilation of long tedious lists cataloguing pleasure and suffering, and their subsequent balancing in order to determine the morality of an action, is here called by Marx and Engels "Bentham's book-keeping".
[82] In the middle of the 19th century Moabit was a north-western suburb of Berlin; Köpenick—a south-eastern suburb of Berlin, and the Hamburger Tor (Hamburg Gate) — a gate at the northern boundary of Berlin.
[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.
[83] Nante the loafer (Eckensteher Nante)—a character in Karl von Holtei's play Ein Trauerspiel in Berlin. On the basis of this prototype Fritz Beckmann, a well-known German comedian, produced a popular farce Der Eckensteher Nante im Verhör. The name Nante became a byword for a garrulous, philosophising wag, who seizes every opportunity to crack stale jokes in the Berlin dialect,
[84] Emperor Sigismund handed over Jan Huss to the Council of Constance (1414-15) despite the safe conduct he had granted him. Francis I, who was defeated at Pavia (1525) and taken prisoner by Charles V. was released only after renouncing his claims to Milan and Burgundy (Madrid Treaty of 1526). But after his release he repudiated the treaty. Blocksberg—popular name of several German mountains and in particular of the
[6] The review was published anonymously under the heading "Die heilige Familie oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik. Gegen Br. Bauer und Consorten. Von F. Engels und K. Marx, Frankfurt, 1845".
[85] Brocken, the highest peak of the Harz Mountains. According to German folklore, the witches meet to celebrate their sabbath on the Blocksberg.
[86] According to legend, the early Christian Saint Ursula and "her eleven thousand virgins" were martyred in Cologne. The alleged number of virgins is probably due to the name of Ursula's companion, Undecimilla, which in Latin means "eleven thousand".
[87] Caius—a name adopted by many textbooks and other works on formal logic to denote a human being, especially in syllogisms.
[88] Apparently a reference to Gottlieb Konrad Pfeffel's book Biographie eines Pudels.
[89] Spanso bocko—one of the most cruel forms of corporal punishment, which was used by the colonialists in Surinam (in the north-eastern part of South America).
[90] The uprising of Negro slaves which took place in Haiti in 1791 marked the beginning of a revolutionary movement against the colonial regime. Toussaint Louverture, the leader of the insurgents, played an outstanding part in the war of liberation which the Negroes waged against the French, English and Spanish colonialists. In the course of the struggle, which ended with the proclamation of Haiti's independence in January 1804, slavery was abolished and subsequendy the estates of the planters were divided among the former slaves.
[91] The Historical School of Law—a trend in German historiography and jurispru-dence in the late 18th century. The representatives of this school, Gustav Hugo, Friedrich Karl Savigny and others, sought to justify the privileges of the nobility and feudal institutions by referring to the inviolability of historical traditions. Romanticists— adherents of reactionary romanticism in the social sciences who tried to vindicate the Middle Ages and the feudal system and to oppose them to the ideas of bourgeois Enlightenment, democracy and liberalism. Among the prominent ideologists of romanticism were Louis Gabriel Bonald, Joseph de Maistre, Karl Ludwig Haller and Adam Müller. For a criticism of these two trends see Marx's works: "The Philosophical Manifesto of the Historical School of Law" and "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law. Introduction" (present edition, Vols. 1 and 3).