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Title: Stirner Author: Miguel GimĂ©nez Igualada Date: April 1968 Language: en Topics: Max Stirner, egoism, egoist, individualist anarchism, individualism Source: Retrieved on 2/1/2020 from the Spanish text on the Anarchist Library Notes: Translated by the Sewer Owl. Stirner, October 26, 1806 â June 23, 1856, Miguel Gimenez Igualada
In Memorium
To Emile Armand, individualist anarchist, as an offering of profound
admiration and great affection.
M.G.I.
Today, June 23, 1956,
Makes one hundred years since the death of Juan Gaspar Schmidt,
Born in Bayreuth, Germany,
October 25, 1806
This single man gave birth to the most original and daring book of the
recent centuries, The Unique and Its Property, signing it with the name
Max Stirner.
As a tribute of gratitude to those who offered me the spring of virgin
knowledge, from which I drank, sounding like my word, perhaps alone in
the world.[1]
Miguel Gimenez Igualada
When human material vibrated for the first time, the entire Universe
vibrated; upon vibrating, man was conceived and, upon conceiving
himself, acquired the knowledge of himself and of created work.
To say man is to say cosmos: creator, creature, environment, and
creation.
Without man, there would not have been virtue in the cosmos, nor beauty
nor happiness. He created crying and laughter, pain, pleasure, justice,
religion, and science. Because of him, god and fossil live. On him,
depend the human and the unhuman, the political, the religious, and the
atheist.
Man was created by creating, and in creating man increases, expands,
grows, and raises â the last and most important dimensional direction of
the man who wants to be unity, togetherness, Everything.
Because only in man do the cosmos vibrate, only he can express them.
That which he doesnât express, doesnât exist.
God exists because man created him. It was a hairbrained idea of his, a
desire, a dream, a concept. Perhaps out of fear of falling into egotism,
man made the ideal of himself, personifying the ideal in being its
creation.
It is that as far as he saw or dreamed, or sees or dreams, man
communicates his life, his vibration.
Man created time and space, the finite and the infinite, and there is no
time, nor space, nor limits for him. His thinking, the only affirmation
of his life, protects him in space, destroys the barriers that limit
him, and drills into the infinite.
The message that he put on the lips of Christ, and that he made Buddha
speak earlier, is the expression of his messages of light, the light of
tomorrow that is to illuminate the centuries to come, and the light of
yesterday that illuminated the centuries that passed. And it is that the
steps of man pierce through prehistory and lose themselves in time,
towards the future.
Because of this, only man is capable of poetry, that is to say, capable
of creating, and only he can rummage through the baggage that another
man, his ancestor, was leaving in the darkness of yesterday, in order to
uncover it today now that he illuminates it, today that he summarizes
the past and puts it on a pedestal to jump into tomorrow.
Not all of the creatures have vibrated; not all, to our disgrace, will
vibrate; not all reach or have reached the ability to pierce time and
space. Some only are, theyâre there, without consciousness of their own,
without life, without vibration. They are in pain and they arenât
capable of transforming the pain into pleasure.
A brain that forges thoughts, is something that does not admit
comparison. Because what eagleâs nest can be made in an altitude that
man doesnât scale? What mountain fills the heavens that man doesnât
fill?
Man brought pregnancy the 19^(th) century in its fertilized womb, so
that he couldnât disappear without leaving planted in life two of his
children, commissioned to launch to their siblings the messages that
they extracted from the quarry of manhood.
Thus, shortly after arriving, and calling him to shake the foundations
of society, he gives birth to his first child, Stirner, and,
immediately, to remove the cobwebs that he previously might have left in
gullible minds, paired him with his second, Darwin. Because of them, the
19^(th) century will be full of commotion: a volcano that will launch
thoughts like boiling larvae.
After this birth he smiles with content and satisfaction: it will not be
a dark century, as so many were, but a century that will mark an epoch:
in the midst of creatures that, like human-nothings, vegetated and died
without name and without light, he has planted, in order to illuminate
the coming centuries, two men that bring hardy baggage.
The previous centuries, those of the fall of Greece, put in circulation
an essay of a man: Jesus; but this double birth is a reality: manhood
has exceeded for having acquired its maximum potential. Stirner and
Darwin are two beacons that will light a world in darkness by having
recognized in themselves the light that couldnât shine from Thales.
His first explosion, his first eruption, an earthquake that should the
planet and space, is produced in 1844, when the century is in its
maturity, with the appearance of The Unique and Its Property, the work
of his first son; the second and third take place, one in the year 1859
with the appearance of The Origin of Species, that drives a landmark
into the world of biology, and another in 1871, in which Darwin speaks
to the world about The Origin of Man, casting Adam and Eve not only out
of their Garden of Eden, but out of the world, by demonstrating that
they were only a pipe dream and not the parents of the human race.
What a commotion this produced on the planet! What kinds of discussions
were heard from all parts of the world! What damning words poured from
believing lips!
It is that the century had given birth to two men and, consequently, the
works and prose that they have produced have left the Earth to fill the
Cosmos, for cosmic thoughts populate the brains of these unique.
Because Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle arenât Hellenic, but precursors
to the Triune God, they dirty all that pertains to the individual,
sewing his lips so that he cannot speak nor laugh, for if with Thales
and the philosophers of his school man is incited to engage in struggle
with the world to dominate it, with Socrates, with Plato, and with
Aristotle man is invited to have contempt for the worldly goods, to
believe in The Idea and to worship God.
Both represent the two paths that the world has to follow, the two paths
it will walk, the two principles or concepts that men will use to
regulate their lives. The former are triumphant; gradually walking, the
Hellenic grace disappears and with it the joy of living, the terracotta
of Tanagra and the majestic marbles of Phidias following.
Then arrives Christ, prohibiting thought and belittling man, entering
into the Middle Ages with his procession of darkness. And though it
produces a kind of renaissance, life falls into a stupor. Ideas
ruminate, they are not thought. Christ prevails, and with him enter or
prevail over the world Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, his precursors.
But as the path of manhood could not be stopped nor directed askew,
though banned, men work in the shadows, clandestinely, digging a tunnel
in time to emerge in the 19^(th) century.
Because of this, Stirner, heir of Thales and Anaximander, strains
himself, like others, in putting the world at the service of man, for
that which leaves the Earth, that elevates man to space, finding in it
an immense vacancy: the Aristotelian god, who is so feared, is a spook
created by feverish imaginations; the paths of man are free of nuisances
and can travel them without fear.
How Stirner would have enjoyed, if he were alive, the affirmations of
his brother Darwin! In power and in truth, the glory was in the Earth,
filling all of it, and it would be tomorrow if one creature after
another were abandoning their false positions from the nobodies of the
species to acquire the hierarchy of unities, of individuals, of men, of
unique.
For if there are not gods, we can understand ourselves, we that live on
this land, which should no longer be a valley of fears.
Give me wide, clear fronts that are like clean, open skies through which
worlds of light circulate.
Stirner is not known. Philosophers, who should know him, are panicked at
the irreverent that rises up against all divine and human dogmas, and
libertarians, who should not ignore him, have only read intentionally
misrepresented excerpts from his portentous work or evil spins of
criticism from those who could not understand him.
Today makes one hundred years since the death of Stirner, and like the
world of hypocrisy, and that of barbarism, and that of cowardice remain
the same as those he wrote, his thoughts, from which the great
libertarians who succeeded him seem so fresh, clear, and pure, as if
they had just been written today.
But letâs look for him, as he is here before us.
For being a child of the century, it was this, his great parent, who
gave him brand and name. Brand, because he gave him a clear and
beautiful forehead; name, to enhance its attributes.
In the baptismal font he was adopted by Juan Gaspar, that is to say,
zero, nothing; the century, not conforming, baptized him in light. His
name would be Stirner, for his beautiful and luminous forehead: it was
his childhood nickname and he couldnât agree to having a Christian name,
since he would not be a follower of Christ.
Nor did he have ancestors, since the genealogical tree of Miletus had
been extinguished and a surname wasnât necessary. Stirner, child of
Time, would fill the coming centuries with light.
Because thoughts flow within that create cranial box, his young friends
call him the century, and in the University, he is known as Stirner, for
his beautiful forehead. Without a doubt, they see or admire that which
stirs in that head as without equal.
Needing language as a necessary, precise, and reliable instrument to
express the beauty and charm of the thoughts that dwell in his young
mind, he becomes a philologist, longing to know that which each word
carries, its formation and origin, since through words passed down the
world can understand the men that gave it life; and because he needed to
know how to pierce through things, and through the acts that produce
things, he studies philosophy. With these weapons, that only the unique
knows and can brandish, he charges against the ideas of God and the
State, considered by him as the most harmful ideas that could harbor in
the mind of the human creature.
He studies with Hegel in the University of Berlin; but he quickly fights
with his teacher, a metaphysician with grand views of rationalism. Who
could have imagined then that the young man with a wide forehead, blue
eyes, and a clear and dreamy look would come to be the greatest
nonconformist that the human race would ever meet!
Michelet, then at the head of the Hegelian left, gives some courses in
the University of Berlin, and, knowing of it, there runs Stirner,
anxious to drink from the fountain of pure thought. But neither did it
satisfy him, nor did he shape him. A divorce had been produced between
teachers and disciples, and that powerful mind went off drawing a new
path.
In 1835 the Life of Jesus, by Strauss, was published, producing a deep
stir in the spheres of German intellectualism. There were moments where
it appeared that in the garden of intellectual life the beliefs in
divinity were blooming for the last time; but Strauss, who poetized
religious legends, making them more attractive and beautiful, reinforced
the idea of God. In the Life of Jesus, Christ is more god and less man
than in the biblical legend. And it is that the rationalism of Hegel,
reinforced by Bruno BaĂŒer, Strauss, and Feuerbach, is at its source an
exacerbation of theology.
It is said that Hegel had been overcome, that the concept of individual
liberty, and that of the individual, are going to bloom, but
Protestantism, which brings God down from the heavens to seat him in
each home to preside over family gatherings, reinforces, rather than
destroys, the idea of divinity.
Therefore, theologians end up embracing Straussâs Man-God, and of the
few who dare to scrutinize the Bible, some accept as truths the legends
that others poetize, and they listen to the heresies that frightened
them yesterday. So, many believe, few think, and all argue, as both Marx
and Engels, who stroll through those circuses, make the Hegelian
dialectic their own, which has so much use in supporting their God-State
theories.
From that epoch, three books are conserved: The Life of Jesus, by
Strauss, the Essence of Christianity, by Feuerbach, and the Unique and
Its Property, by Stirner. The strongest, firmest, most
thought-provoking, and the one that stays the surest, is The Unique and
Its Property, which is the one that most shakes the foundations of the
old; the one which, for its great originality, encapsulates in its pages
the most audacious and novel ideas; the one which obliges you to think.
Strauss and Feuerbach are Christians, though the latter calls himself an
atheist. Stirner, not needing to make a show of his atheism, is the
supreme negator of God.
Feuerbachâs book, which incarnates the rational atheism of those years,
germinated socialism â Lasalle and Feuerbach are friends, coinciding in
the theoretical aspects of the rationalist theology â, that, for not
being able to be the absolute negator of divinity and, consequently, of
authority, translates both to the Earth, conserving for Society,
converted by them into God, the same earthly prerogatives that are given
to God in heaven.
Socialism is, then, though a negator of Christ, a Christian sect: it
denies God in the heavens, but erects the State, which is its God, and
even has its iconography. Thus, Lenin can say that âliberty is a
bourgeois prejudiceâ, just like it is also a prejudice for socialists to
be owners. Like ancient Christianity, its ancestor, socialism comes to
be the religion of the poor, of those that neither want to be nor feel
like having. The huge collective houses of today are the successors of
churches, collective houses of yesterday, and the proletarian family is
the same Christian family that has changed in name. Therefore, if
yesterday it was burning someone who denied God, today it shoots someone
who denies that State, because those men fit neither in the house of God
nor in the house of the People.
But then why do socialists laugh at Mosaic law? Thatâs true, thatâs
true; but it is no less true that they require that the law of the State
is accepted, and that the commandments for this, of an origin as
doubtful as those from Moses, are equally demanding and inexorable,
which is why the contributions and taxes are as burdensome as the tithes
and offerings, the former keeping the political hierarchies plump and
lustrous, the latter keeping the bishops plump and lustrous.[2]
A current socialist minister takes on the jurisdictions of a cardinal,
and the provincial governors are equated to the old bishops. From there
they invoke the same rights â oh how they confuse divine and human
rights! â in order to direct the masses, fiercely disputing their
catechization. And those catechized are not the men, we have them for
sure, but spooks of men, human nothings. The order, which isnât maximum,
from Ignacio de Loyola is accepted and practiced equally by Christians
and socialists: you will be like the assistant of a blind man who is
unwilling to move.
And as reforming is reinforcing, reinforced are those who reform. Thatâs
why, justly, Lutheranism is called Reform: Luther reformed and
reinforced the idea of God, which was fading, undone, and lost in the
Middle Ages. Therefore, viewed correctly, the idea of God doesnât end in
1459 with the fall of Constantinople in the hands of the Turks bringing
an end to the Byzantine Empire, but that it is Luther who brings it down
to Earth, because with him is who produces the rapture of the previous
epoch. The day that Luther (1517) nails into the doors of the Church of
Wittenberg his ninety-five theses against Catholicism, begins the Reform
and, consequently, a new historical epoch, making the fall of Byzantium
represent no more than an episode, a guerrilla skirmish with luck for
the Turks and disgrace for the Byzantine. With him, then, with Luther,
the Middle Ages die and the Modern begins, which is the time of
Socialism, or that of the collective or common against the human unit;
that of the flock against the individual; that of the masses against the
man.
Marxism had to be born by force in the rich land by the protestant, and
Karl Marx is as Lutheran as Luther, his putative father, as protestant
and as reformist and as reinforcing as him. Thinking in detail and
examining carefully and attentively the intellectual movement of Germany
of the 19^(th) century, it is easily explained that socialism was born
from the fatherhood of Luther, and that Marx, son of a German Jew, was
who filled it with breath and provided it with life. Israel and Germany
are two nations that considered themselves the chosen people, and Marx,
raised and cultivated in this double environment of religion and
authoritarianism, believed, like another Messiah of Moses and Wotan,
that he was chosen to reincarnate the new God State. In the base of
Marxâs consciousness germinated a strong religious feeling, therefore,
thinking, creatures should be united (subjected, voluntarily enslaved,
which is the most abject of slavery) to the State. The idea of God did
not reach such development in the Middle Ages as socialism (Marxism) has
reached in the present, having overcome Lutheranism, of which it is a
direct, legitimate descendent.
The Lutheran Hegel would say that the State was the reality of moral
life, because it was the manifestation of God on Earth. Hence, he would
also need to make clear the idea of the Prince, of the First, incarnated
in him the idea of the State, being the Prince a kind of God against
whom creatures are worthless nothings. Thereâs nothing strange about how
Hegel triumphed in that faithful Germany, as the greatest singer of
despotism. The Prussian government paid its zeal through making the
Hegelian philosophy obligatorily the official philosophy of the State.
Hegel coincided with Calvin in that the Church and the State were divine
institutions, and with Marx in that the State is the regulator of life.
The great âdoctrinarianâ despots Lenin and Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini,
thought in the same way. And it is that there is no difference at all
between the Hegelian conception of the State, and Hitlerâs conception,
and the Marxist conception, and Mussoliniâs conception, though they
arrived to it through different routes. The state, the only moral force,
is the regulator of life (Wotan). Marx wasnât a Hegelian in vain, Hegel
wasnât a fervent Lutheran in vain, and not in vain were, and until they
disappeared, after filling the world with men, with anger, with pain,
and with fears, convinced socialists, composing between them the high
clergy of Socialism.[3]
Alone, defiant, upright towards everyone, Stirner raises his powerful
voice denying from gods, popes, princes, and governments their human and
divine rights, showing with his accusing finger at the theologues of all
sorts and faiths that, covered in false principles, that they build with
sacred doctrines, they overexploit man.
Before his powerful voice, everything trembles; before his pickaxe,
everything crumbles.
And with that it is explained that all the religious hate him: among the
flocks. Stirner is the man; among the human nothings, Stirner is the
unit of value; among those that permit that they be divided, Stirner is
the individual, the indivisible; among those that, through fear, stay
mute, Stirner is he who speaks, and therefore, the rebel, the deserter,
the Unique, he who sends to man, his brothers, the message of freedom
that has never been heard on the planet.
The job of man is not to conquer bodies to subdue and devour them, that
is the job of rapacious animals; the job of man is that of creating
light. Thatâs why Stirner said: âI am like a candle that illuminates and
consumes itselfâ. A candle, is to say, a light. And that was his job.
When someone opens the Unique and Its Property, the first thing they
will read is the following: âI have not based my cause on anythingâ,
title of the preface; but if upon beginning to read one is frightened,
it is better they throw away the book, because The Unique was not
written for cowardly people, believers in God, in the Law, in the State,
in Justice, in Truth, in the Crown, in Spirit, or in Homeland, causes in
which all or almost all found or base their own cause, but for those
that believe in themselves, for he ends his short preface with these
words:
âEvil is every cause that is not entirely and exclusively mine! ⊠I am
my cause, and I am neither good nor bad, for to me those are wordsâ.
We now know, then, that Stirner bases his cause in himself, that his
cause âis neither divine nor human; not the truth nor the just nor the
free; it is mine; it is not general, but unique, like I am uniqueâ.
Thatâs why, some pages further, and after attacking the Spirit â the
idea of the spirit â, he exclaims: âFor me, nothing is above meâ. âAnd
blasphemy doesnât scare me, because I do not fearâ, thus if âthe divine
looks at God and the human looks at manâ, I look at myself.
Until Stirner arrived, such irreverence was never pronounced, hence he
is paid with contempt, casting a thousand curses upon him that he always
hears with Olympic disdain.
Speaking of the Moral, a god that also calls for sacrifices, he says:
âSocrates, the perfectly moral man, despises the offers of Crito to
escape from prison, and for his subjugation to the Moral, Socrates dies.
And it is that Socrates â we say â couldnât do anything else because the
sophist lacked a sense of freedom and even a sense of personality,
clinging as he was to the Moral. With Socrates, the Moral was a religion
for which he would die. With his renunciation of life, he intends to
keep the moral principle safe â to save the ideas though the man
perishes, principle of the religious Plato â, and the Moral doesnât
triumph, and the man dies. The cause of Socrates is the cause of the
Moral, the ungodly God who, like the other gods, demands sacrifices.
And it is that âfanaticism â Stirner continues â is especially typical
of educated people, because the culture of a man is in relation with the
interest that he takes for the things of the spirit, and this interest,
if it is strong and lively, cannot be more than fanaticism, interest for
the sacred (fanum)â.
And we should ask ourselves in order to see how, though we changed in
the exterior, that not in our insides, Socratic ideas perpetuate. Donât
our democrats, and our socialists, and our communists, and our
unionists, and our conservatives put as much fanaticism in their actions
as the Jesuits? Like Socrates, they are all ready to die for their
cause, which is God. However, they all call themselves free men, whether
theyâre liberals that speak â like Feuerbach, of the man-god, or
communists that speak of the man-masses.
Referring to freedom, always as judicious as he is irreverent, Stirner
says:
âDoesnât the spirit aspire to freedom? Oh! Itâs not just my spirit, itâs
all my flesh that burns incessantly in the same desireâ.
And he gives an example:
When you think about what others have and what you donât get to enjoy,
âwhat you want is not the freedom to have those beautiful things,
because freedom does not give them to you; what you want are those exact
things, call them yours, own them as property. How does a freedom that
gives you nothing serve you? If you free yourself from everything, you
will not have anything, because freedom is, in its essence, emptiness
from everythingâ.
âI find nothing to disapprove of in freedom; but I wish you more than
freedom: that you have what you need and want, because it is not enough
to bee free, you must be more: ownerâ.
âFreedom is the doctrine of Christianity. Thus, it says: âYou are
called, dear brothers, to freedomââ.
âBut should we reject freedom because it is revealed as a Christian
ideal? We shouldnât lose anything; we should only make our own what is
presented to us as an ideal of freedomâ.
âWhat a difference between freedom and individuality! Because one can be
without many things, but one cannot be without everything. Freedom
doesnât exist more than in the world of dreams; but individuality, my
property, is, conversely, my demand and my reality. I am free of what I
do not have; I am owner of what is in my powerâ.
âSubmitting into servitude of an owner, I set my sights onto no more
than myself⊠and since I have no sight but myself, I will take the first
opportunity that arises and crush my owner. And I will be free of him
and of his whip. And my action will be the consequence of my egoismâ.
âThink maturely about it and decide whether you will inscribe upon your
flag the word freedom, a dream, or individualism, a reality. Freedom
activates your anger against anything but you; egoism calls you to the
joy of yourself, to the joy of being; freedom is an aspiration, a
Christian hope for the future, individuality is a reality that in itself
suppresses all obstacles to freedomâ. âThe individual is radically free;
the free is a dreamerâ. âMy freedom becomes complete only when it is my
power; for the latter I only give up being free to become an individual,
possessorâ.
And later on, continuing with the same theme, since the changes mean
nothing more than greater exaltation of the individual, he affirms:
âMan is an ideal; the species, a thought. For me, to be man is to be
individual⊠I am who I am⊠because I am without rule, without law,
without model. Perhaps I can do little, but that little is worth more
than what a strange force could make of me: God, the Moral, Religion,
Law, or the Stateâ.
â⊠the social reformers tell me that the individual doesnât have more
rights than those that Society grants to him, that is to say, that he
has rights if he lives not as an individual, but as a legal person. And
the Christians tell me the same, and the communists, and the socialists,
and the libertarians, ignoring or wanting to ignore that who gives me
rights can take them away whenever he pleases, because if I do not
submit, Society, the State, the Prince, or the President may declare me
outside the law, amassing any social or treasonous laws against me. And
it is that in a compulsory society it is to say as Euripides said: âWe
serve the gods, whoever they are. That is to say, the law, whatever it
is, god, whatever it is.â And in this we live just like they did six
thousand years agoâ.
This explains why âmy individual will be destructive to the State; so,
society dehorns it in the name of indiscipline. Individual will and the
State are enemy powers between whom peace is not possibleâ, because âthe
power of the State manifests itself under the power of compulsion: it
employs force. This force, when the State employs it against me, is
called right, and when I employ it against the State, is called crimeâ.
âNow, when the individual considers that the State is a God which he
must respect, that is, that the State is sacred, he respects it and
abides; but if the individual considers himself above the State, he
tries to destroy it. The barbarian Roman emperors spoke of the
sacramautoritatem, and Augustus, sacred himself, turns Rome into the
Urbs Sacra. Brutus, who does not respect the consecrated endowments,
attacks Caesarâ.
Man: open the window of your intellect to all the winds, and when you
have bathed in them, judge and tell us, with serene judgment, which was
the purest.
To understand Stirner, the language of Christianity isnât useful to us,
because many times he gives a meaning to the words that, though real and
logical, Christianity doesnât accept, this occurs with individual,
personality, egoist, autonomy, autocrat, which is to say governing
oneself, and that autocratism, and not the other, is what he recommends,
knowing as he knows, that one cannot be an egoist â a cultivator of
oneâs ego â any more than one is the owner and master of oneself. Thatâs
why the association he speaks of is an association of autocrats, of
autonomies, of masters of themselves, of anarchists, of unique,
extending anarchism to not only rejecting external governments or
forces, but also refusing to impose their will on anyone else. Hence, he
calls to men â the single call that records history, because it is the
call of an unmatched consciousness â to be units of value, to not just
look like it, because only among high individuals, between unique, can
there be understanding, and because only among them, among egoists,
cultivators of their personality, can they enjoy true freedom.
And that is why he doesnât give his conclusions the character of
doctrine, as do those who consider themselves creators of ideas,
parties, organizations, or religions, for doctrine binds and compels,
and he wishes that no one will be endowed with powers to organize and
direct the life of another person. So, when he searches for men â he
greatly enjoys meeting with the people â he wants to find in each one a
unique with his own desires, with particular needs, with singular
thoughts; he seeks unique with the will to be, loving themselves not to
risk their salvation by putting their salvation into the hands of
others, so they refuse to hierarchicalize manâs activities, not wanting
masters nor slaves; he seeks men as associates â âtake me, he says, and
spend me to your advantage, as I take you and spend you in mineâ â not
like things to climb upon to achieve power, for even though he wants to
be powerful â power of himself and in himself, inner and proper strength
â he does not wish to force any person to think or act as he pleases,
but so that no divine or human power can silence his voice or twist his
thought. Hence, when he exalts force it does not refer to the force of
subduing, but, on the contrary, to the force that does not allow himself
to be subdued.
Considering that being and having are the same â it is not, for him,
that someone doesnât own the property of his individuality, which is the
greatest treasure, and doesnât have that which is not personal or
individual â he says to men: âYou will never exist more than when you
are your owner and will never have more property than when you lose
respect for property, the same way that slaves quit being slaves and
become men when they lose respect for the masterâ. And like
individualists, free in their fullness of joy, they wouldnât come to be
free as long as they have to rent their minds or their bodies, he
invites men not to defect from work, but not to work for someone else.
âWork for yourself, and not for anyone other than you; for your
association, and not with another person you havenât given life to, but
with someone who forms with you a partnership of shared interestâ.
âIf you work for yourself, you wonât have a master that orders you nor
exploits you, for the master becomes so when you humbly erect him as
such and ceases to be so as soon as you refuse to kneel before him. Put,
then, your will at your own service, and not at the service of another
personâ.
Can our trade unionists speak like this, whatever their ideological or
doctrinal position, as they call it? No, they cannot, because if one day
they began speaking like this it would be because they had quit being
herders of men.
If the workers were advised not of production, but of insubmission; if
they were made to desire property and manhood, instead of working for
the bourgeois, they would work for themselves, and the bourgeois, who
will exist as long as they have employees at their service, would have
to partner with those who are trained to produce. And then the unions
would disappear, that tyranny, just as the churches will disappear when
the fear of God disappears.
Understand why the word individualist is spoken with contempt and why it
is wanted to be made synonymous with inhumane. Oneness, that is,
manhood, is reached when the powers of individuality are highlighted;
when one does not live dependent to anyone, man or god, idea or society;
when one wants to be and feels like having: bread and ideas, their own
bread that they owe to no one and their own ideas that have formed in
their own brain. Because there is no individuality in humanity taken
collectively; there is individuality in the ego. From one ego to another
there can be understanding and commerce, while as a people no one can
understand anyone, because the unique necessarily hinders the State and
the people. Between individuals, the individual unites with the other,
because an egoist can unite with another egoist, and between themselves
form an association.
âI do not pretend â and it is Stirner speaking â to have or be anything
particularly to make me pass before the others; I do not want to benefit
myself at their expense through any privilege; but I donât measure
myself with the measure of others, and I donât want reason in my favor,
I donât want any kind of right either. I want to be everything that I
can be, to have everything that I can have. That the others are or have
something analogous, I donât car. I have what I have, and I am what I
am, what they canât beâ.
And I beg readers to pay attention to the following words:
âBecause, I have discovered in you the gift of enlightening my life, I
have made you my companion. Take me as I take you and use me as I use
you. I make you my property, you make me yoursâ. But for this it is
precise that you begin by being the owner of yourself. âMy
individuality, that is to say, my property is myself. I am at all times
and in all circumstances mine, and from the moment that I understand
being mine, I do not prostitute myselfâ. Do not prostitute yourself and
we will be able to take the path together, hand in hand.
Who talks like that? The individualist anarchist Stirner; the man that
without calling himself moral gave the world the strongest and highest
morality the world could see.
Stirner killed within himself the hatreds, all the hatreds, even the
grudges, because placed outside of all the beliefs that teach to hate
those who do not accept their political or religious dogmas, he feels
free, totally and completely free. Through being free and living on the
margin of those hatreds, he understands those who live dominated by
their passions. Hence his sense of full freedom. He is freed from all
othersâ doctrinal guardians and even from those that he could give
himself. Thatâs why he is an egoist, individualist, and anarchist;
unique.
It will be madness, though beautiful madness, to raise the problem of
harmonious human living; but it is possible, and magnificent, to solve
it in itself.
Those who, without fear, would have finished reading The Unique and Its
Property will have verified that this book, after one hundred and
twenty-four years of its publication, remains a spring from which flows
the always virgin lymph of pure thought, so in it they drank and so do
the philosophers and revolutionaries of this century and of the past and
they will continue to drink for generations to come.
Bakuninâs affirmative denial, âto destroy is to createâ, was clear water
from the Stirnerian source: âeverything we destroy in us from ghostly
prejudices, let us exalt our personalityâ.
Not in Hegel, as some have awkwardly said, but in that song to the will
to overcome, that is The Unique and Its Property, did the Russian
nihilists rely on to carry out those formidable extermination campaigns
against Tsarist absolutism, and when in St. Petersburg or in Moscow a
tsar or a grand duke âflewâ, the dynamite was, neither more nor less,
the voice of Stirner, that of that broad and dreamy forehead, who spoke
to the world through the interpretation made of his ideas by the Russian
nihilists.
From him, and from no other, springs the International, for when no one
had dreamed of speaking to the workers as men, he speaks to them, and
when everyone finds it that the worker lives only dying wrapped in his
misery, he calls to the unique who can be germinating or asleep in every
man to rebel against his exploiter. Bakunin and Marx, who heard his
words, were the clumsy craftsmen of what the genius dreamed of.
Kropotkin, who before Stirner feels a kind of doctrinal terror â
Kropotkin in a Socratic moralist â endorses a principle of Stirnerâs,
which is the vital law: the evolution of man and the tendency of every
living thing towards a happier existence.
Guyau, a tinker and moralist, endorses the same affirmation considered
by him as an appetite that frees the species. Stirner said: âIt is
necessary to banish pain so that instead satisfaction and joy may grow
in its placeâ. And some time later, Guyau says: âPain approximates
death; joy leads to lifeâ.
Tucker, the individualist anarchist cult, in love with Stirnerian
thought, propagates, as a legacy or inheritance of the great egoist, his
libertarian egoism.
But did Owen know Stirnerâs ideas? Possibly, even if it cannot be
confirmed. Owen unveiled his cooperativist ideas in 1844, the same year
that The Unique and Its Property appeared. Stirner had previously talked
about his ideas on the âassociation of individualsâ who refused to work
for the lords, and although the cooperative is only a caricature of the
association between individualists, there is nothing particular about
Owenâs idea having its roots in Stirner. (The participation of workers
in the profits of enterprises, which poses as a socialist idea or
conquest, is nothing more than a disguise of what Stirner posed by
telling the unique: âwork for yourself and form the association of
uniques in which you neither exploit nor are exploitedâ.)
And is Nietzsche not a non-confessed disciple of Stirner? Doesnât his
better, radical evolution have its antecedent in The Unique and Its
Property? Is there no analogy between the superman â man overcome â and
the Stirnerian unique? Is the Nietzschean will not directly related to
Stirnerâs will of power, to such an extent that they are the two
anarchies, since they mean neither power of dominance, but power not to
allow being dominated? The exaltation of Stirnerâs individuality?
Couldnât Nietzscheâs commitment against Christianity have itâs origin in
Stirnerâs attacking the idea of divinity? And isnât the great
philologistâs aristocratism the child of the other great philologistâs
autocratism?
These two thinkers present such analogies, that it would be good and
curious to be able to investigate the influence that Stirner might have
had on Nietzsche, which would have happened if he could have freely
rummaged through the six thousand kilos of papers that the loner of
Engandina left in the basement of his home; but who that knows Stirner
will not think that he was looking at him as Nietzsche wrote Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, although it was conceived and written when Nietzsche had
already lost his mind?
Finally, and to finish, even Tolstoyâs pietism has a kinship, and not
far away, with that immense spring of thoughts and suggestions that was
Stirner.
In love with is mettle and strength, his talent and depth, Mackay
collected his works, and Armando constantly made known since lâ en de
hors ideas of production from which he was undoubtedly the father of
anarchism. Thus, we know that, apart from The Unique and Its Property,
Stirner published a translation, in eight volumes, of the major works of
J.B. Say and Adam Smith, a History of Reaction, due to his pen and an
essay by J.B. Say about Capital and Interest. In Small Writings Mackay
collected his studies and replies to the criticism that were made to
him.
He died â June 23, 1856, 112 years ago â in poverty, if by poverty we
understand the non-possession of gold, in wealth, if by wealth one can
understand self-dominance, living his ideas, feeling unique in the midst
of the whirlwind of human-zeros who, terrified of thoughts, throw
themselves against each other with open jaws. He could have asked for a
professorship in the State, but he preferred to go looking for
candidates to whom to freely give a lesson in manhood.
Mexico, April 1968.
[1] This tribute should have been edited on the date indicated, but
misplaced by a change of domicile, I lost the manuscript. Today, April
1, 1968, I found it in the background of an old, abandoned trunk and I
hasten to publish it. M.G.I.
[2] The socialist clergy, like the Christian clergy, considers itself as
the direct heir of God, although, the socialist god is named Society.
[3] Current socialists offer to the world a second edition of the fights
that the Church supported between the empires of the East and the West.
It should not be forgotten that the Catholic crusades looted their
brothers in Constantinople.