In a review of egotism in German philosophy it would hardly be
excusable to ignore the one notable writer who has openly adopted
egotism in name as well as in fact. The work of Max Stirner on the
single separate person and what he may call his own hardly belongs
to German philosophy as I have been using the words: it lacks the
transcendental point of departure, as well as all breadth of view,
metaphysical subtlety, or generous afflatus; it is a bold, frank, and
rather tiresome protest against the folly of moral idealism, against
the sacrifice of the individual to any ghostly powers such as God,
duty, the state, humanity, or society; all of which this redoubtable
critic called "spooks" and regarded as fixed ideas and pathological
obsessions. This crudity was relieved by a strong mother-wit and a
dogged honesty; and it is not impossible that this poor schoolmaster,
in his solitary meditations, may have embodied prophetically a
rebellion against polite and religious follies which is brewing in the
working classes--classes which to-morrow perhaps will absorb all
mankind and give for the first time a plebeian tone to philosophy.
[Pg 100] Max Stirner called the migratory ego back to its nest. He
exorcised that "spook" which had been ascending and descending the
ladder of abstractions, lodged now in a single passion, now in a
political body, now in a logical term, now in the outspread universe.
The only true ego, he insisted, was the bodily person, the natural
individual who is born and dies. No other organ or seat existed for
the mind, or for any of its functions. Personal interests were the
only honest interests a man could have, and if he was brow-beaten or
indoctrinated into sacrificing them, that moral coercion was a scandal
and a wrong. The indomitable individual should shake off those chains,
which were only cobwebs, and come into his own.
Egotism thus becomes individualism, and threatens to become
selfishness. The logic of these positions does not seem to have been
clear to Max Stirner. That the individual must _possess_ all his wishes
and aspirations, even the most self-denying and suicidal, is obvious;
he is the seat of those very obsessions and superstitions which Max
Stirner deplored. The same thing is true of knowledge: a man can
know only what _he_ knows and what his faculties make him capable of
knowing. This fact is the excuse for transcendentalism, and the element
of truth in it. But the fact that volition and knowledge must have
their [Pg 101] seat in some person prejudges nothing about the scope of
their objects. The fallacy of egotism begins with the inference that,
therefore, a person can know only his ideas and can live only for his
own benefit. On the contrary, what makes knowledge knowledge is that
our sensibility may report something which is not merely our feeling;
and our moral being arises when our interests likewise begin to range
over the world. To deny that a man is capable of generosity because
his generosity must be his own, is insufferable quibbling. Even our
vanities and follies are disinterested in their way; their egotism is
not a calculated selfishness. When a man orders his tomb according to
his taste, it is not in the hope of enjoying his residence in it.
Max Stirner, while deprecating all subordination of the individual to
society, expected people, even after they were emancipated, to form
voluntary unions for specific purposes, such as playing games. Did
he think that such companionship and co-operation would go without
gregarious feelings and ideal interests? Would not a player wish his
side to win? Would he not impose a rather painful strain upon himself
at times for the sake of that "spook," victory? All the sacrifices that
society or religion imposes on a man, when they are legitimate, are
based on the same principle.
[Pg 102] The protest of Max Stirner against sham ideals and aims forced
upon us by social pressure should not then have extended to ideals
congenial to the natural man and founded on his instincts. Since the
seat of our enthusiasms must be personal, their appeal should be so
too, if they are to inspire us efficaciously; but every art and science
shows that they may be utterly impersonal in their object. It was not
in proposing ideal aims that the German philosophers were wrong: that
was the noble and heroic side of their doctrine, as well as a point in
which their psychology was correct. Their error lay in defining these
aims arbitrarily and imposing them absolutely, trying to thrust into us
ideals like endless strife and absolute will, which perhaps our souls
abhor. But if our souls abhor those things, it is because they love
something else; and this other thing they love for its own sake, so
that the very refusal to sacrifice to those idols is a proof of faith
in a true God.
The conclusion of Max Stirner, that because those idols are false,
and the worship of them is cruel and superstitious, therefore we must
worship nothing and merely enjoy in a piggish way what we may call our
own, is a conclusion that misreads human nature. It overlooks the fact
that man lives by the imagination, that the imagination--when not
chaotic and futile--is exercised in the arts of life, that the
objects [Pg 103] of these arts are impersonal, and that to achieve
these objects brings us a natural happiness.
The Germans are by nature a good stolid people, and it is curious that
their moralists, of every school, are so fantastic and bad. The trouble
lies perhaps in this, that they are all precipitate. They have not
taken the trouble to decipher human nature, which is an _endowment_,
something many-sided, unconscious, with a margin of variation, and have
started instead with the will, which is only an _attitude_, something
casual, conscious, and narrowly absolute. Nor have they learned
to respect sufficiently the external conditions under which human
nature operates and to which it must conform--God, the material
world, the nature and will of other men. Their morality consequently
terminates in ideals, casual, conscious, and absolute expressions of
the passions, or else expires in a mysticism which renounces all moral
judgment. A reasonable morality terminates instead in the arts, by
which human ideals and passions are compounded with experience and
adapted to the materials they must work in. The immaturity of the
German moralists appears in their conception that the good is life,
which is what an irrational animal might say: whereas for a rational
being the good is only the good part of life, that healthy, stable,
wise, kind, and beautiful sort of life which he calls happiness.
[Pg 104] CHAPTER X