For those who love to think of the visible universe as a cosy corner
of God's footstool, there is something bleak and terrifying in the
isolated position of man since science has postulated him as an
infinitesimal bubble on an unimportant planet. The soul shrinks as our
conception of outer space widens. Thomas Hardy describes the sensation
as "ghastly." There is said to be no purpose, no design in all the
gleaming phantasmagoria revealed by the astronomer's glass; while on
our globe we are a brother to lizards, bacteria furnish our motor
force, and our brain is but a subtly fashioned mirror, composed of
neuronic filaments, a sort of "darkroom" in which is somehow pictured
the life without. Well, we admit, for the sake of the argument, that
we banish God from the firmament, substituting a superior mechanism;
we admit our descent from star-dust and apes, we know that we have no
free will, because man, like the unicellular organisms, "gives to every
stimulus without an inevitable response." That, of course, settles all
moral obligations. But we had hoped, we of the old sentimental brigade,
that all things being thus adjusted we could live with our fellow man
in (comparative) peace, cheating him only in a legitimate business
way, and loving our neighbour better than ourselves (in public). Ibsen
had jostled our self-satisfaction sadly, but some obliging critic
had discovered his formula--a pessimistic decadent--and with bare
verbal bones we worried the old white-haired mastiff of Norway. Only
a decadent It is an easy word to speak and it means nothing. With
Nietzsche the case was simpler. We couldn't read him because he was a
madman; but he at least was an aristocrat who held the _bourgeois_ in
contempt, and he also held a brief for culture. Ah! when we are young
we are altruists; as Thackeray says, "Youths go to balls; men go to
dinners."
But along comes this dreadful Stirner, who cries out: Hypocrites all
of you. You are not altruists, but selfish persons, who, self-illuded,
believe yourselves to be disinterested. Be Egoists. Confess the truth
in the secrecy of your mean, little souls. We are all Egotists. Be
Egoists. There is no truth but my truth. No world but my world. I
am I. And then Stirner waves away God, State, society, the family,
morals, mankind, leaving only the "hateful" Ego. The cosmos is frosty
and inhuman, and old Mother Earth no longer offers us her bosom as a
reclining-place. Stirner has so decreed it. We are suspended between
heaven and earth, like Mahomet's coffin, hermetically sealed in Self.
Instead of "smiting the chord of self," we must reorchestrate the chord
that it may give out richer music. (Perhaps the Higher Egoism which
often leads to low selfishness.)
Nevertheless, there is an honesty in the words of Max Stirner. We are
weary of the crying in the market-place, "Lo! Christ is risen," only
to find an old nostrum tricked out in socialistic phrases; and fine
phrases make fine feathers for these gentlemen who offer the millennium
in one hand and perfect peace in the other. Stirner is the frankest
thinker of his century. He does not soften his propositions, harsh ones
for most of us, with promises, but pursues his thought with ferocious
logic to its covert. There is no such hybrid with him as Christian
Socialism, no dodging issues. He is a Teutonic Childe Roland who to
the dark tower comes, but instead of blowing his horn--as Nietzsche
did--he blows up the tower itself. Such an iconoclast has never before
put pen to paper. He is so sincere in his scorn of all we hold dear
that he is refreshing. Nietzsche's flashing epigrammatic blade often
snaps after it is fleshed; the grim, cruel Stirner, after he makes a
jab at his opponent, twists the steel in the wound. Having no mercy for
himself, he has no mercy for others. He is never a hypocrite. He erects
no altars to known or unknown gods. Humanity, he says, has become the
Moloch to-day to which everything is sacrificed. Humanity--that is,
the State, perhaps, even the socialistic state (the most terrible yoke
of all for the individual soul). This assumed love of humanity, this
sacrifice of our own personality, are the blights of modern life. The
Ego has too long been suppressed by ideas, sacred ideas of religion,
state, family, law, morals. The conceptual question, "What is Man?"
must be changed to "Who is Man?" I am the owner of my might, and I am
so when I know myself as _unique_.
Stirner is not a communist--so long confounded with anarchs--he does
not believe in force. That element came into the world with the advent
of Bakounine and Russian nihilism. Stirner would replace society
by groups; property would be held, money would be a circulating
medium; the present compulsory system would be voluntary instead of
involuntary. Unlike his great contemporary, Joseph Proudhon, Stirner
is not a constructive philosopher. Indeed, he is no philosopher. A
moralist (or immoralist), an _Ethiker_, his book is a defence of
Egoism, of the submerged rights of the Ego, and in these piping times
of peace and fraternal humbug, when every nation, every man embraces
his neighbour preparatory to disembowelling him in commerce or war,
Max Stirner's words are like a trumpet-blast. And many Jericho-built
walls go down before these ringing tones. His doctrine is the Fourth
Dimension of ethics. That his book will be more dangerous than a
million bombs, if misapprehended, is no reason why it should not be
read. Its author can no more be held responsible for its misreading
than the orthodox faiths for their backsliders. Nietzsche has been
wofully misunderstood; Nietzsche, the despiser of mob rule, has been
acclaimed a very Attila--instead of which he is a culture-philosopher,
one who insists that reform must be first spiritual. Individualism
for him means only an end to culture. Stirner is not a metaphysician;
he is too much realist. He is really a topsy-turvy Hegelian, a
political pyrrhonist. His Ego is his Categorical Imperative. And if the
Individual loses his value, what is his _raison d'être_ for existence?
What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses
his own Ego? Make your value felt, cries Stirner. The minority may
occasionally err, but the majority is always in the wrong. Egoism must
not be misinterpreted as petty selfishness or as an excuse to do wrong.
Life will be ennobled and sweeter if we respect ourselves. "There is
no sinner and no sinful egoism.... Do not call men sinful; and _they
are not_" Freedom is not a goal. "Free--from what? Oh! what is there
that cannot be shaken off? The yoke of serfdom, of sovereignty, of
aristocracy and princes, the dominion of the desires and passions;
yes, even the dominion of one's own will, of self-will, for the
completest self-denial is nothing but freedom--freedom, to wit, from
self-determination, from one's own self." This has an ascetic tang,
and indicates that to compass our complete Ego the road travelled will
be as thorny as any saint's of old. Where does Woman come into this
scheme? There is no Woman, only a human Ego. Humanity is a convenient
fiction to harry the individualist. So, society, family are the clamps
that compress the soul of woman. If woman is to be free she must first
be an individual, an Ego. In America, to talk of female suffrage is to
propound the paradox of the masters attacking their slaves; yet female
suffrage might prove a good thing--it might demonstrate the _reductio
ad absurdum_ of the administration of the present ballot system.
Our wail over our neighbour's soul is simply the wail of a busybody.
Mind your own business! is the pregnant device of the new Egoism.
Puritanism is not morality, but a psychic disorder.
Stirner, in his way, teaches that the Kingdom of God is within you.
That man will ever be sufficiently perfected to become his own master
is a dreamer's dream. Yet let us dream it. At least by that road we
make for righteousness. But let us drop all cant about brotherly love
and self-sacrifice. Let us love ourselves (respect our Ego), that we
may learn to respect our brother; self-sacrifice means doing something
that we believe to be good for our souls, therefore _egotism_--the
higher _egotism_, withal _egotism_. As for going to the people--the
Russian phrase--let the people forget themselves as a collective body,
tribe, or group, and each man and woman develop his or her Ego. In
Russia "going to the people" may have been sincere--in America it is a
trick to catch, not souls, but votes.
"The time is not far distant when it will be impossible for any proud,
free, independent spirit to call himself a socialist, since he would
be classed with those wretched toadies and worshippers of success who
even now lie on their knees before every workingman and lick his hands
simply because he is a workingman."
John Henry Mackay spoke these words in a book of his. Did not
Campanella, in an unforgettable sonnet, sing, "The people is a beast of
muddy brain that knows not its own strength.... With its own hands it
ties and gags itself"?