The Ego and His Own is divided into two parts: first, The Man; second,
I. Its motto should be, "I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own
bones." But Walt Whitman's pronouncement had not been made, and Stirner
was forced to fall back on Goethe--Goethe, the grand Immoralist of his
epoch, wise and wicked Goethe, from whom flows all that is modern. "I
place my all on Nothing" ("Ich hab' Mein Sach' auf Nichts gestellt,"
in the joyous poem Vanitas! Vanitatum Vanitas!) is Stirner's keynote
to his Egoistic symphony. The hateful I, as Pascal called it, caused
Zola, a solid egotist himself, to assert that the English were the most
egotistic of races because their I in their tongue was but a single
letter, while the French employed two, and not capitalised unless
beginning a sentence. Stirner must have admired the English, as his I
was the sole counter in his philosophy. His Ego and not the family is
the unit of the social life. In antique times, when men were really
the young, not the ancient, it was a world of reality. Men enjoyed the
material. With Christianity came the rule of the spirit; ideas were
become sacred, with the concepts of God, Goodness, Sin, Salvation.
After Rousseau and the French Revolution humanity was enthroned, and
the State became our oppressor. Our first enemies are our parents, our
educators. It follows, then, that the only criterion of life is my Ego.
Without my Ego I could not apprehend existence. Altruism is a pretty
disguise for egotism. No one is or can be disinterested. He gives up
one thing for another because the other seems better, nobler to him.
Egotism! The ascetic renounces the pleasures of life because in his
eyes renunciation is nobler than enjoyment. Egotism again! "You are to
benefit yourself, and you are not to seek your benefit," cries Stirner.
Explain the paradox! The one sure thing of life is the Ego. Therefore,
"I am not you, but I'll use you if you are agreeable to me." Not to
God, not to man, must be given the glory. "I'll keep the glory myself."
What is Humanity but an abstraction? I am Humanity. Therefore the State
is a monster that devours its children. It must not dictate to me.
"The State and I are enemies." The State is a spook. A spook, too, is
freedom. What is freedom? Who is free? The world belongs to all, but
_all_ are _I_. I alone am individual proprietor.
Property is conditioned by might. What I have is mine. "Whoever knows
how to take, to defend, the thing, to him belongs property." Stirner
would have held that property was not only nine but ten points of the
law. This is Pragmatism with a vengeance. He repudiates all laws;
repudiates competition, for persons are not the subject of competition,
but "things" are; therefore if you are without "things" how can you
compete? Persons are free, not "things." The world, therefore, is not
"free." Socialism is but a further screwing up of the State machine
to limit the individual. Socialism is a new god, a new abstraction
to tyrannise over the Ego. And remember that Stirner is not speaking
of the metaphysical Ego of Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, but of your I,
my I, the political, the social I, the economic I of every man and
woman. Stirner spun no metaphysical cobwebs. He reared no lofty cloud
palaces. He did not bring from Asia its pessimism, as did Schopenhauer;
nor deny reality, as did Berkeley. He was a foe to general ideas. He
was an implacable realist. Yet while he denies the existence of an
Absolute, of a Deity, State, Categorical Imperative, he nevertheless
had not shaken himself free from Hegelianism (he is Extreme Left as a
Hegelian), for he erected his I as an Absolute, though only dealing
with it in its relations to society. Now, nature abhors an absolute.
Everything is relative. So we shall see presently that with Stirner,
too, his I is not so independent as he imagines.
He says "crimes spring from fixed ideas." The Church, State, the
Family, Morals, are fixed ideas. "Atheists are pious people." They
reject one fiction only to cling to many old ones. Liberty for the
people is not my liberty. Socrates was a fool in that he conceded to
the Athenians the right to condemn him. Proudhon said (rather, Brisson
before him), "Property is theft." Theft from whom? From society? But
society is not the sole proprietor. Pauperism is the valuelessness of
Me. The State and pauperism are the same. Communism, Socialism abolish
private property and push us back into Collectivism. The individual is
enslaved by the machinery of the State or by socialism. Your Ego is not
free if you allow your vices or virtues to enslave it. The intellect
has too long ruled, says Stirner; it is the will (not Schopenhauer's
Will to Live, or Nietzsche's Will to Power, but the sum of our activity
expressed by an act of volition; old-fashioned will, in a word) to
exercise itself to the utmost. Nothing compulsory, all voluntary. Do
what you will. _Fay ce que vouldras_, as Rabelais has it in his Abbey
of Thélème. Not "Know thyself," but get the value out of yourself. Make
your value felt. The poor are to blame for the rich. Our art to-day
is the only art possible, and therefore real at the time. We are at
every moment all we can be. There is no such thing as sin. It is an
invention to keep imprisoned the will of our Ego. And as mankind is
forced to believe theoretically in the evil of sin, yet commit it in
its daily life, hypocrisy and crime are engendered. If the concept of
sin had never been used as a club over the weak-minded, there would be
no sinners--i.e., wicked people. The individual is himself the world's
history. The world is my picture. There is no other Ego but mine. Louis
XIV. said, "_L'Etat, c'est moi_"; I say, "_l'Univers, c'est moi._" John
Stuart Mill wrote in his famous essay on liberty that "Society has now
got the better of the individual."
Rousseau is to blame for the "Social Contract" and the "Equality"
nonsense that has poisoned more than one nation's political ideas. The
minority is always in the right, declared Ibsen, as opposed to Comte's
"Submission is the base of perfection." "Liberty means responsibility.
That is why most men dread it" (Bernard Shaw). "Nature does not seem
to have made man for independence" (Vauvenargues). "What can give a
man liberty? Will, his own will, and it gives power, which is better
than liberty" (Turgenev). To have the will to be responsible for one's
self, advises Nietzsche. "I am what I am" (Brand). "To thyself be
sufficient" (Peer Gynt). Both men failed, for their freedom kills. To
thine own self be true. God is within you. Best of all is Lord Acton's
dictum that "Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is of
itself the highest political end." To will is to have to will (Ibsen).
My truth is the truth (Stirner). Mortal has made the immortal, says
the Rig Veda. Nothing is greater than I (Bhagavat Gita). I am that I
am (the Avesta, also Exodus). Taine wrote, "Nature is in reality a
tapestry of which we see the reverse side. This is why we try to turn
it." Hierarchy, oligarchy, both forms submerge the Ego. J. S. Mill
demanded: "How can great minds be produced in a country where the test
of a great mind is agreeing in the opinions of small minds?" Bakounine
in his fragmentary essay on God and the State feared the domination of
science quite as much as an autocracy. "Politics is the madness of the
many for the gain of the few," Pope asserted. Read Spinoza, The Citizen
and the State (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus). Or Oscar Wilde's
epigram: "Charity creates a multitude of sins." "I am not poor enough
to give alms," says Nietzsche. But Max Beerbohm has wittily said--and
his words contain as much wisdom as wit--that "If he would have his
ideas realised, the Socialist must first kill the Snob."
Science tells us that our _I_ is really a _We_; a colony of cells, an
orchestra of inherited instincts. We have not even free will, or at
least only in a limited sense. We are an instrument played upon by our
heredity and our environment. The cell, then, is the unit, not the Ego.
Very well, Stirner would exclaim (if he had lived after Darwin and
1859), the cell is my cell, not yours! Away with other cells! But such
an autonomous gospel is surely a phantasm. Stirner saw a ghost. He,
too, in his proud Individualism was an aristocrat. No man may separate
himself from the tradition of his race unless to incur the penalty of a
sterile isolation. The solitary is the abnormal man. Man is gregarious.
Man is a political animal. Even Stirner recognises that man is not man
without society.
In practice he would not have agreed with Havelock Ellis that "all
the art of living lies in the fine mingling of letting go and holding
on." Stirner, sentimental, henpecked, myopic Berlin professor, was
too actively engaged in wholesale criticism--that is, destruction of
society, with all its props and standards, its hidden selfishness
and heartlessness--to bother with theories of reconstruction. His
disciples have remedied the omission. In the United States, for
example, Benjamin R. Tucker, a follower of Josiah Warren, teaches a
practical and philosophical form of Individualism. He is an Anarch
who believes in passive resistance. Stirner speaks, though vaguely,
of a Union of Egoists, a Verein, where all would rule all, where
man, through self-mastery, would be his own master. ("In those days
there was no king in Israel; every man did that which was right in
his own eyes.") Indeed, his notions as to Property and Money--"it
will always be money"--sound suspiciously like those of our "captains
of industry." Might conquers Right. He has brought to bear the most
blazing light-rays upon the shifts and evasions of those who decry
Egoism, who are what he calls "involuntary," not voluntary, egotists.
Their motives are shown to the bone. Your Sir Willoughby Patternes
are not real Egoists, but only half-hearted, selfish weaklings. The
true egotist is the altruist, says Stirner; yet Leibnitz was right; so
was Dr. Pangloss. This is the best of possible worlds. Any other is
not conceivable for man, who is at the top of his zoological series.
(Though Quinton has made the statement that birds followed the mammal.)
We are all "spectres of the dust," and to live on an overcrowded planet
we must follow the advice of the Boyg: "Go roundabout!" Compromise
is the only sane attitude. The world is not, will never be, to the
strong of arm or spirit, as Nietzsche believes. The race is to the
mediocre. The survival of the fittest means survival of the weakest.
Society shields and upholds the feeble. Mediocrity rules, let Carlyle
or Nietzsche thunder to the contrary. It was the perception of these
facts that drove Stirner to formulate his theories in The Ego and His
Own. He was poor, a failure, and despised by his wife. He lived under
a dull, brutal régime. The Individual was naught, the State all. His
book was his great revenge. It was the efflorescence of his Ego. It
was his romance, his dream of an ideal world, his Platonic republic.
Philosophy is more a matter of man's temperament than some suppose.
And philosophers often live by opposites. Schopenhauer preached
asceticism, but hardly led an ascetic life; Nietzsche's injunctions to
become Immoralists and Supermen were but the buttressing up of a will
diseased, by the needs of a man who suffered his life long from morbid
sensibility. James Walker's suggestion that "We will not allow the
world to wait for the Superman. We are the Supermen," is a convincing
criticism of Nietzscheism. I am Unique. Never again will this
aggregation of atoms stand on earth. Therefore I must be free. I will
myself free. (It is spiritual liberty that only counts.) But my I must
not be of the kind described by the madhouse doctor in Peer Gynt: "Each
one shuts himself up in the barrel of self. In the self-fermentation
he dives to the bottom; with the self-bung he seals it hermetically."
The increased self-responsibility of life in an Egoist Union would
prevent the world from ever entering into such ideal anarchy (an-arch,
i.e., without government). There is too much of renunciation in the
absolute freedom of the will--that is its final, if paradoxical,
implication--for mankind. Our Utopias are secretly based on Chance.
Deny Chance in our existence and life would be without salt. Man is not
a perfectible animal; not on this side of eternity. He fears the new
and therefore clings to his old beliefs. To each his own chimera. He
has not grown mentally or physically since the Sumerians--or a million
years before the Sumerians. The squirrel in the revolving cage thinks
it is progressing; Man is in a revolving cage. He goes round but he
does not progress. Man is not a logical animal. He is governed by his
emotions, his affective life. He lives by his illusions. His brains are
an accident, possibly from overnutrition as De Gourmont has declared.
To fancy him capable of existing in a community where all will be
selfgoverned is a poet's vision. That way the millennium lies, or the
High Noon of Nietzsche. And would the world be happier if it ever did
attain this condition?
The English translation of The Ego and His Own, by Stephen T. Byington,
is admirable; it is that of a philologist and a versatile scholar.
Stirner's form is open to criticism. It is vermicular. His thought is
sometimes confused; he sees so many sides of his theme, embroiders
it with so many variations, that he repeats himself. He has neither
the crystalline brilliance nor the poetic glamour of Nietzsche. But
he left behind him a veritable breviary of destruction, a striking
and dangerous book. It is dangerous in every sense of the word--to
socialism, to politicians, to hypocrisy. It asserts the dignity of the
Individual, not his debasement.
"Is it not the chief disgrace in the world not to be a unit; to be
reckoned one character; not to yield that peculiar fruit which each
man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the
hundred of thousands, of the party, of the section to which we belong,
and our opinion predicted geographically as the North or the South?"
Herbert Spencer did not write these words, nor Max Stirner. Ralph Waldo
Emerson wrote them.