The Ego and His Own

The Case of the Individual Against Authority

Max Stirner

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781781681565
• eBook ISBN: 9781781685198
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Existentialism in Philosophy

The Ego and His Own, the seminal defence of individualism, coloured the thinking of Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Ernst, Henrik Ibsen and Victor Serge, among many others, some of whom would vigorously deny any such influence in later years. Less reticent was Marcel Duchamp, who described Max Stirner as the philosopher most important to his work.
Challenging the religious, philosophical and political constraints on personal freedom, Stirner criticizes all doctrines and beliefs that place the interests of God, the state, humanity or society over those of the individual. Anticipating the later work of nihilists, existentialists, and anarchists, The Ego and His Own upholds personal autonomy against all that might oppose it.

PART SECOND
I

At the entrance of the modern time stands the “God-man.” At its exit will only the God in the God-man evaporate? And can the God-man really die if only the God in him dies? They did not think of this question, and thought they were through when in our days they brought to a victorious end the work of the Illumination, the vanquishing of God: they did not notice that Man has killed God in order to become now—“sole God on high.” The other world outside us is indeed brushed away, and the great undertaking of the Illuminators completed; but the other world in us has become a new heaven and calls us forth to renewed heaven-storming: God has had to give place, yet not to us, but to—Man. How can you believe that the God-man is dead before the Man in him, besides the God, is dead?

3

Ownness¹

“Does not the spirit thirst for freedom?”—Alas, not my spirit alone, my body too thirsts for it hourly! When before the odorous castle-kitchen my nose tells my palate of the savory dishes that are being prepared therein, it feels a fearful pining at its dry bread; when my eyes tell the hardened back about soft down on which one may lie more delightfully than on its compressed straw, a suppressed rage seizes it; when—but let us not follow the pains further.—And you call that a longing for freedom? What do you want to become free from, then? From your hardtack and your straw bed? Then throw them away!—But that seems not to serve you: you want rather to have the freedom to enjoy delicious foods and downy beds. Are men to give you this “freedom”—are they to permit it to you? You do not hope that from their philanthropy, because you know they all think like—you: each is the nearest to himself! How, therefore, do you mean to come to the enjoyment of those foods and beds? Evidently not otherwise than in making them your property!

If you think it over rightly, you do not want the freedom to have all these fine things, for with this freedom you still do not have them; you want really to have them, to call them yours and possess them as your property. Of what use is a freedom to you, indeed, if it brings in nothing? And, if you became free from everything, you would no longer have anything; for freedom is empty of substance. Whoso knows not how to make use of it, for him it has no value, this useless permission; but how I make use of it depends on my personality.²

I have no objection to freedom, but I wish more than freedom for you: you should not merely be rid of what you do not want; you should not only be a “freeman,” you should be an ‘owner’ too.

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 selfdenial is nothing but freedom—freedom, to wit, from self-determination, from one’s own self. And the craving for freedom as for something absolute, worthy of every praise, deprived us of ownness: it created self-denial. However, the freer I become, the more compulsion piles up before my eyes; and the more impotent I feel myself. The unfree son of the wilderness does not yet feel anything of all the limits that crowd a civilized man: he seems to himself freer than this latter. In the measure that I conquer freedom for myself I create for myself new bounds and new tasks: if I have invented railroads, I feel myself weak again because I cannot yet sail through the skies like the bird;³ and, if I have solved a problem whose obscurity disturbed my mind, at once there await me innumerable others, whose perplexities impede my progress, dim my free gaze, make the limits of my freedom painfully sensible to me. “Now that you have become free from sin, you have become servants of righteousness.”⁴ Republicans in their broad freedom, do they not become servants of the law? How true Christian hearts at all times longed to “become free,” how they pined to see themselves delivered from the “bonds of this earth-life”! They looked out toward the land of freedom. (“The Jerusalem that is above is the freewoman; she is the mother of us all.” Gal. 4:26.)

Being free from anything—means only being clear or rid. “He is free from headache” is equal to “he is rid of it.” “He is free from this prejudice” is equal to “he has never conceived it” or “he has got rid of it.” In “less” we complete the freedom recommended by Christianity, in sinless, godless, moralityless, etc.

Freedom is the doctrine of Christianity. “Ye, dear brethren, are called to freedom.”⁵ “So speak and so do, as those who are to be judged by the law of freedom.”⁶

Must we then, because freedom betrays itself as a Christian ideal, give it up? No, nothing is to be lost, freedom no more than the rest; but it is to become our own, and in the form of freedom it cannot.

What a difference between freedom and ownness! One can get rid of a great many things, one yet does not get rid of all; one becomes free from much, not from everything. Inwardly one may be free in spite of the condition of slavery, although, too, it is again only from all sorts of things, not from everything; but from the whip, the domineering temper, of the master, one does not as slave become free. “Freedom lives only in the realm of dreams!” Ownness, on the contrary, is my whole being and existence, it is I myself. I am free from what I am rid of, owner of what I have in my power or what I control. My own I am at all times and under all circumstances, if I know how to have myself and do not throw myself away on others. To be free is something that I cannot truly will, because I cannot make it, cannot create it: I can only wish it and—aspire toward it, for it remains an ideal, a spook. The fetters of reality cut the sharpest welts in my flesh every moment. But my own I remain. Given up as serf to a master, I think only of myself and my advantage; his blows strike me indeed, I am not free from them; but I endure them only for my benefit, perhaps in order to deceive him and make him secure by the semblance of patience, or, again, not to draw worse upon myself by contumacy. But, as I keep my eye on myself and my selfishness, I take by the forelock the first good opportunity to trample the slaveholder into the dust. That I then become free from him and his whip is only the consequence of my antecedent egoism. Here one perhaps says I was “free” even in the condition of slavery—to wit, “intrinsically” or “inwardly.” But “intrinsically free” is not “really free,” and “inwardly” is not “outwardly.” I was own, on the other hand, my own, altogether, inwardly and outwardly. Under the dominion of a cruel master my body is not “free” from torments and lashes; but it is my bones that moan under the torture, my fibres that quiver under the blows, and I moan because my body moans. That I sigh and shiver proves that I have not yet lost myself, that I am still my own. My leg is not “free” from the master’s stick, but it is my leg and is inseparable. Let him tear it off me and look and see if he still has my leg! He retains in his hand nothing but the—corpse of my leg, which is as little my leg as a dead dog is still a dog: a dog has a pulsating heart, a so-called dead dog has none and is therefore no longer a dog.

If one opines that a slave may yet be inwardly free, he says in fact only the most indisputable and trivial thing. For who is going to assert that any man is wholly without freedom? If I am an eye-servant, can I therefore not be free from innumerable things, from faith in Zeus, from the desire for fame, and the like? Why then should not a whipped slave also be able to be inwardly free from un-Christian sentiments, from hatred of his enemy, etc.? He then has “Christian freedom,” is rid of the un-Christian; but has he absolute freedom, freedom from everything, as from the Christian delusion, or from bodily pain?

In the meantime, all this seems to be said more against names than against the thing. But is the name indifferent, and has not a word, a shibboleth, always inspired and—fooled men? Yet between freedom and ownness there lies still a deeper chasm than the mere difference of the words.

All the world desires freedom, all long for its reign to come. Oh, enchantingly beautiful dream of a blooming “reign of freedom,” a “free human race!”—who has not dreamed it? So men shall become free, entirely free, free from all constraint! From all contraint, really from all? Are they never to put constraint on themselves any more? “Oh yes, that, of course; don’t you see, that is no constraint at all?” Well, then at any rate they are to become free from religious faith, from the strict duties of morality, from the inexorability of the law, from—“What a fearful misunderstanding!” Well, what are they to be free from then, and what not?

The lovely dream is dissipated; awakened, one rubs his half-opened eyes and stares at the prosaic questioner. “What men are to be free from?”—From blind credulity, cries one. What’s that? exclaims another, all faith is blind credulity; they must become free from all faith. No, no, for God’s sake—inveighs the first again—do not cast all faith from you, else the power of brutality breaks in. We must have the republic—a third makes himself heard—and become—free from all commanding lords. There is no help in that, says a fourth: we only get a new lord then, a “dominant majority”; let us rather free ourselves from this dreadful inequality. O, hapless equality, already I hear your plebeian roar again! How I had dreamed so beautifully just now of a paradise of freedom, and what—impudence and licentiousness now raises its wild clamor! Thus the first laments, and gets on his feet to grasp the sword against “unmeasured freedom.” Soon we no longer hear anything but the clashing of the swords of the disagreeing dreamers of freedom.

What the craving for freedom has always come to has been the desire for a particular freedom, such as freedom of faith; the believing man wanted to be free and independent; of what? of faith perhaps? no! but of the inquisitors of faith. So now “political or civil” freedom. The citizen wants to become free not from citizenhood, but from bureaucracy, the arbitrariness of princes, and the like. Prince Metternich⁷ once said he had “found a way that was adapted to guide men in the path of genuine freedom for all the future.” The Count of Provence⁸ ran away from France precisely at the time when she was preparing the “reign of freedom,” and said: “My imprisonment had become intolerable to me; I had only one passion, the desire for freedom; I thought only of it.”

The craving for a particular freedom always includes the purpose of a new dominion, as it was with the Revolution, which indeed “could give its defenders the uplifting feeling that they were fighting for freedom,” but in truth only because they were after a particular freedom, therefore a new dominion, the “dominion of the law.”

Freedom you all want, you want freedom. Why then do you higgle over a more or less? Freedom can only be the whole of freedom; a piece of freedom is not freedom. You despair of the possibility of obtaining the whole of freedom, freedom from everything—yes, you consider it insanity even to wish this?—Well, then leave off chasing after the phantom, and spend your pains on something better than the—unattainable.

“Ah, but there is nothing better than freedom!”

What have you then when you have freedom—for I will not speak here of your piecemeal bits of freedom—complete freedom? Then you are rid of everything that embarrasses you, everything, and there is probably nothing that does not once in your life embarrass you and cause you inconvenience. And for whose sake, then, did you want to be rid of it? Doubtless for your sake, because it is in your way! But, if something were not inconvenient to you; if, on the contrary, it were quite to your mind (such as the gently but irresistibly commanding look of your loved one)—then you would not want to be rid of it and free from it. Why not? For your sake again! So you take yourselves as measure and judge over all. You gladly let freedom go when unfreedom, the “sweet service of love,” suits you; and you take up your freedom again on occasion when it begins to suit you better—that is, supposing, which is not the point here, that you are not afraid of such a Repeal of the Union for other (perhaps religious) reasons.

Why will you not take courage now to really make yourselves the central point and the main thing altogether? Why grasp in the air at freedom, your dream? Are you your dream? Do not begin by inquiring of your dreams, your notions, your thoughts, for that is all “hollow theory.” Ask yourselves and ask after yourselves—that is practical, and you know you want very much to be “practical.” But there the one hearkens what his God (of course what he thinks of at the name God is his God) may be going to say to it, and another what his moral feelings, his conscience, his feeling of duty, may determine about it, and a third calculates what folks will think of it—and, when each has thus asked his Lord God (folks are a Lord God just as good as, nay, even more compact than, the other-worldly and imaginary one: vox populi, vox dei), then he accommodates himself to his Lord’s will and listens no more at all for what he himself would like to say and decid...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editor’s Introduction
• Translator’s Preface
• Dedication
• All Things Are Nothing to Me
• Part First: Man
• Part Second: I