Ego-Sovereignty
Strange that neither of these philosophers of individuality, Nietzsche or Stirner, ever took the trouble to investigate what an individual is! Stirner halts before this most momentous question of his world-conception, and so he overlooks that his ego, his own individuality, this supreme sovereign standing beyond right and wrong, the ultimate authority of everything, is a hazy, fluctuating, uncertain thing which differs from day to day and Anally disappears.
The individuality of any man is the product of communal life. No one of us could exist as a rational personality were he not a member of a social group from which he has imbibed his ideas as well as his language. Every word is a product of his intercourse with his fellow-beings. His entire existence consists in his relations toward others and finds expression in his attitude toward social institutions. We may criticize existent institutions but we can never do without any. A denial of either their existence or their significance proves an utter lack of insight into the nature of personality.
We insert here a few characteristic sentences of Stirner’s views, and in order to be fair we follow the condensation of John Henry Mackay (pp. 135-192) than whom certainly we could find no more sympathetic or intelligent student of this individualistic philosophy.
Here are Stirner’s arguments:
The ancients arrived at the conclusion that man was spirit. They created a world of spirit, and in this world of spirit Christianity begins. But what is spirit? Spirit has originated from nothing. It is its own creation and man makes it the center of the world. The injunction was given, Thou shalt not live to thyself but to thy spirit, to thy ideas. Spirit is the God, the ego and the spirit are in constant conflict. Spirit dwells beyond the earth. It is in vain to force the divine into service here for I am neither God nor man, neither the highest being nor my being. The spirit is like a ghost whom no one has seen, but of whom there are innumerable creditable witnesses, such as grandmother can give account of. The whole world that surrounds thee is filled with spooks of thy imagination. The holiness of truth which hallows thee is a strange element. It is not thine own and strangeness is a characteristic of holiness. The specter is truly only in thine ownhood..... Right is a spleen conferred by a spook; might, that is myself. I am the mighty one and the owner of might.... Right is the royal will of society. Every right which exists is created right. I am expected to honor it where I find it and subject myself to it. But what to me is the right of society, the right of all? What do I care for equality of right, for the struggle for right, for inalienable rights? Right becomes word in law. The dominant will is the preserver of the states. My own will shall upset them. Every state is a despotism. All right and all power is claimed to belong to the community of the people. I, however, shall not allow myself to be bound by it, for I recognize no duty even though the state may call crime in me what it considers right for itself. My relation to the state is not the relation of one ego to another ego. It is the relation of the sinner to the saint, but the saint is a mere fixed idea from which crimes originate (Mackay, pages 154-5).
It will sometimes be difficult to translate Stirner’s declarations in their true meaning; for instance: “I am the owner of mankind, I am mankind and shall do nothing for the benefit of another mankind. The property of mankind is mine. I do not respect the property of mankind. Poverty originates when I can not utilize my own self as I want to. It is the state which hinders men from entering into a direct relation with others. On the mercy of right my private property depends. Only within prescribed limits am I allowed to compete. Only the medium of exchange, the money which the state makes, am I allowed to use. The forms of the state may change, the purpose of the state always remains the same. My property, however, is what I empower myself to. Let violence decide, I expect all from my own.
“You shall not lure me with love, nor catch me with the promise of communion of possessions, but the question of property will be solved only through a war of all against all, and what a slave will do as soon as he has broken his fetters we shall have to see. I know no law of love. As every one of my sentiments is my property, so also is love. I give it, I donate it, I squander it merely because it makes me happy. Earn it if you believe you have a right to it. The measure of my sentiments can not be prescribed to me, nor the aim of my feelings determined. We and the world have only one relation toward each other, that of usefulness. Yea, I use the world and men.” (Pp. 156-157.)
As to promises made and confidence solicited Stirner would not allow a limitation of freedom. He says: “In itself an oath is no more sacred than a lie is contemptible.” Stirner opposes the idea of communism. “The community of man creates laws for society. Communism is a communion in equality.” Says Stirner, “I prefer to depend on the egotism of men rather than on their compassion.” He feels himself swelled into a temporary, transient, puny deity. No man expresses him rightly, no concept defines him; he, the ego, is perfect. Stirner concludes his book: “Owner I am of my own power and I am such only when I know myself as the only one. In the only one even the owner returns into his creative nothingness from which he was born. Any higher being above, be it God or man, detracts from the feeling of my uniqueness and it pales before the sun of this consciousness. If I place my trust in myself, the only one, it will stand upon a transient mortal creator of himself, who feeds upon himself, and I can say,
“Ich hab mein Sach’ auf nichts gestellt.”
“My trust in nothingness is placed.’”
We call attention to Stirner’s book, “The Only One and His Ownhood,” not because we are strongly impressed by the profundity of his thought but because we believe that here is a man who ought to be answered, whose world-conception deserves a careful analysis which finally would lead to a justification of society, the state and the ideals of right and truth.
Society is not, as Stirner imagines, an artificial product of men who band themselves together in order to produce a state for the benefit of a clique. Society and state, as well as their foundation the family, are of a natural growth. All the several social institutions (kind of spiritual organisms) are as much organisms as are plants and animals. The co-operation of the state with religious, legal, civic and other institutions, are as much realities as are individuals, and any one who would undertake to struggle against them or treat them as nonentities will be implicated in innumerable struggles.
Stirner is the philosopher of individualism. To him the individual, this complicated and fluctuant being, is a reality, indeed the only true reality, while other combinations, institutions and social units are deemed to be mere nonentities. If from this standpoint the individualism of Stirner were revised, the student would come to radically different conclusions, and these conclusions would show that not without good reasons has the individual developed as a by-product of society, and all the possessions, intellectual as well as material, which exist are held by individuals only through the assistance and with the permission of the whole society or its dominant factors.
Both socialism and its opposite, individualism, which is ultimately the same as anarchism, are extremes that are based upon an erroneous interpretation of communal life. Socialists make society, and anarchists the individual their ultimate principle of human existence. Neither socialism nor anarchism are principles; both are factors, and both factors are needed for preserving the health of society as well as comprehending the nature of mankind. By neglecting either of these factors, we can only be led astray and arrive at wrong conclusions.
Poor Stirner wanted to exalt the ego, the sovereign individual, not only to the exclusion of a transcendent God and of the state or any other power, divine or social, but even to the exclusion of his own ideals, be it truth or anything spiritual; and yet he himself sacrificed his life for a propaganda of the ego as a unique and sovereign being. He died in misery and the recognition of his labors has slowly, very slowly, followed after his death. Yea, even after his death a rival individualist, Friedrich Nietzsche, stole his thunder and reaped the fame which Stirner had earned. Certainly this noble-minded, modest, altruistic egotist was paid in his own coin.
Did Stirner live up to his principle of ego sovereignty? In one sense he did; he recognized the right of every one to be himself, even when others infringed upon his own well-being. His wife fell out with him but he respected her sovereignty and justified her irregularities. Apparently he said to himself, “She has as much right to her own personality as I have to mine.” But in another sense, so far as he himself was concerned, he did not. What became of his own rights, his ownhood, and the sweeping claim that the world was his property, that he was entitled to use or misuse the world and all mankind as he saw fit; that no other human being could expect recognition, nay not even on the basis of contracts, or promises, or for the sake of love, or humaneness and compassion? Did Stirner in his poverty ever act on the principle that he was the owner of the world, that there was no tie of morality binding on him, no principle which he had to respect? Nothing of the kind. He lived and died in peace with all the world, and the belief in the great ego sovereignty with its bold renunciation of all morality was a mere Platonic idea, a tame theory which had not the slightest influence upon his practical life.
Men of Stirner’s type do not fare well in a world where the ego has come into its own. They will be trampled under foot, they will be bruised and starved, and they will die by the wayside. No, men of Stirner’s type had better live in the protective shadow of a state; the worst and most despotic state will be better than none, for no state means mob rule or the tyranny of the bulldozer, the ruffian, the brutal and unprincipled self-seeker.
Here Friedrich Nietzsche comes in. Like Stirner, Nietzsche was a peaceful man; but unlike Stirner, Nietzsche had a hankering for power. Being pathological himself, without energy, without strength and without a healthy appetite and a good stomach, Nietzsche longed to play the part of a bulldozer among a herd of submissive human creatures whom he would control and command. This is Nietzsche’s ideal, and he calls it the “overman.” Here Nietzsche modified and added his own notion to Stirner’s philosophy.
Individualistic philosophies are therefore based on an obvious error by misunderstanding the nature of the individual man, by forgetting the reality of society and its continued significance for the individual life. A careful investigation of the nature of the state as well as of our personality would have taught Stirner that both the state and the individual are realities. The state and society exist as much as the individuals of which they are composed,1 and no individual can ignore in his maxims of life the rules of conduct, the moral principles, or whatever you may call that something which constitutes the conditions of his existence, of his physical and social surroundings. The dignity and divinity of personality does not exclude the significance of super-personalities; indeed, the two, super personal presences with their moral obligations and concrete human persons with their rights and duties, co-operate with each other and produce thereby all the higher values of life.
Stirner is onesided but, within the field of his onesided view, consistent. Nietzsche spurns consistency but accepts the field of notions created by Stirner, and, glorying in the same extreme individualism, proclaims the gospel of that individual who on the basis of Stirner’s philosophy would make the best of a disorganized state of society, who by taking upon himself the functions of the state would utilize the advantages thus gained for the suppression of his fellow beings; and this kind of individual is dignified with the title “overman.”
Nietzsche has been blamed for appropriating Stirner’s thoughts and twisting them out of shape from the self-assertion of every ego consciousness into the autocracy of the unprincipled man of power; but we must concede that the common rules of literary ethics can not apply to individualists who deny all and any moral authority. Why should Nietzsche give credit to the author from whom he drew his inspiration if neither acknowledges any rule which he feels obliged to observe? Nietzsche uses Stirner as Stirner declares that it is the good right of every ego to use his fellows, and Nietzsche shows us what the result would be—the rise of a political boss, a brute in human shape, the overman.
Nietzsche is a poet, not a philosopher, not even a thinker, but as a poet he exercises a peculiar fascination upon many people who would never think of agreeing with him. Most admirers of Nietzsche belong to the class which Nietzsche calls the “herd animals,” people who have no chance of ever asserting themselves, and become hungry for power as a sick man longs for health.
Individualism and anarchism continue to denounce the state, when they ought to reform it and improve its institutions. In the meantime the world wags on. The state exists, society exists, and innumerable social institutions exist. The individual grows under the influence of other individuals, his ideas—mere spooks of his brain—yet the factors of his life, right or wrong, guide him and determine his fate. There are as rare exceptions a few lawless societies in the wild West where a few outlaws meet by chance, revolver in hand, but even among them the state of anarchy does not last long, for by habit and precedent certain rules are established, and wherever man meets man, wherever they offer and accept one another’s help, they co-operate or compete, they join hands or fight, they make contracts, form alliances, and establish rules, the result of which is society, the state, with all the institutions of the state, the administration, the legislature, the judiciary, with all the intricate machinery that regulates the interrelations of man to man.
The truth is that man develops into a rational, human and humane being through society by his intercourse with other men. Man is not really an individual in the sense of Stirner and Nietzsche, a being by himself and for himself, having no obligations to his fellows. Man is a part of the society through which he originated and to which he belongs and to overlook, to neglect and to ignore his relations to society, not to recognize definite obligations or rules of conduct which we formulate as duties is the grossest mistake philosophers can make, and this becomes obvious if we consider the nature of man as a social being as Aristotle has defined it.
Notes
1 See the author’s The Nature of the State, 1894, and Personality, 1911.
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