42. Voilà un homme

What went on in Max Stirner's soul before he presented his life's work to the world is something that the many people who call his creation that of a cold, sober rationalist have no idea about. I have often met people who have called him that. Then I was always at a loss, because I did not know how to talk to such people. When I read Stirner's book, I felt an echo of suffering and joy, of passions and longings that have shaken the hearts of humanity for centuries, in whose chains almost our entire race still lives today. And I had a sense of the bliss that permeated the breast of the man who could say: “All truths below me are dear to me; I know of no truth above me, no truth by which I must be guided.” Fichte, too, was a proud, powerful personality. But what does he say? “I am a priest of truth; I am in her pay; I have bound myself to do everything for her and to dare and suffer for her.” Max Stirner is a conqueror without equal, for he is no longer in the pay of truth; truth is in his pay. “The owner,” says Stirner, ‘can cast off all thoughts that were dear to his heart and inflamed his zeal, and will ’gain a thousandfold again, because he remains their creator.” Those who can live through in their souls what it takes to free themselves not only from the chains of slavery that God, humanity, humanity, justice, the state impose on us, but also from those forged by the «eternal truth» eternal truth», will read Stirner's book, which tells us how its author broke these chains, with feelings that go far beyond the warmth of anything else we feel in the most sublime creations and achievements of mankind.

And how little Max Stirner revealed of the passions that had churned his soul until the time when he wrote his proud book! John Henry Mackay has rescued five short works from oblivion in his booklet “Max Stirner's Minor Writings” (Berlin 1898, Schuster & Loeffler). One would like to see our cowardly contemporaries, who are so timid in all things that relate to world views and the highest interests of humanity, read this slim volume and read it again and again. If they can only overcome their shame at how small their intellectual dwarfs appear in comparison to the intellectual giants of this great man, then they can benefit greatly from the book.

I do not want to say anything about the content of the book here. Because those who do not read such things do not deserve to learn about their content second-hand. But I would like to say how the book affected me.

In his “Der Einzige und sein Eigentum” Stirner appeared to me as a perfect man. How did this man rise to such heights? I see him growing as I read the five essays that Mackay has published.

I see Max Stirner's passionate struggle.

“The Untrue Principle of Our Education, or Humanism and Realism” is the first of the essays. It was published by Stirner in the “Rheinische Zeitung” in April 1842. A piece of the man's inner life has found words in this essay. I will not say that our wise educational and teaching reformers should sit down for a few hours – they would probably need much longer – and study the essay. For they could learn more from it than from the impotent negotiations that our schoolmen conduct today with the expenditure of all their mental power. But I will say that this essay characterizes Stirner's entire world view in a unique way.

The philosophers of all times wanted impersonal knowledge. Knowledge that would reveal to them the powers that hold the world together at its core. They lustfully demanded such “science”. The world is there, they said. It is lawful. We are driven to explore the laws by which an objective power has formed it. And when they had then “honestly” researched what “holds the world together at its core”, the philosophers felt as blissful as when the bride has given her hand in marriage to the bridegroom. For - as Nietzsche says - truth is a woman. Stirner is not a suitor; he is a conqueror. He overcomes truth. He digests it. And it does not become a philosophy or a world view that he communicates to us. It becomes personality. Knowledge is no longer something that people receive from the outside, suffering; it becomes flesh and blood in them. They no longer merely perceive the laws of the world: they represent them themselves. They now want what their predecessors merely knew. The essay that proclaims this ends with the words: “The necessary decline of the will-less science and the rise of the self-conscious will, which is perfected in the sun-glow of the free personality, could be summarized as follows: Knowledge must die in order to resurrect as will, and to create itself anew as a free person every day.”

In this essay, Stirner answers the question of how knowledge can become personal, how that which one recognizes through thinking can pass into the power of the personal will. How one can become the Lord of truth from the world's ruler, from the priest of truth, was the question for him.

I will not go into the other essays by Stirner. I will merely advise the clever weekly magazine writers, who are masters of the pen but have little control over reason, to read a few pages of the book that Mackay has now published before they write their ridiculously boundless sentences about Stirner in the beautiful alliance with Bismarck and the agrarians. The “Ego and his Own” is a little too heavy for such henchmen of the Farmers' League, even if they manage to get into questionable collision with the paragraph on lèse-majesté. But the preliminary stages that gradually led Stirner to his life's work, they could perhaps still climb. And if they then economically hold together the little nerve strength that they still have, then perhaps they could defend themselves just as manfully against their accusers as Stirner did in the “Replies” to his main work, which were also published by Mackay, and not have to call upon “the aged officers who have been pensioned off”, Prince Bismarck, Mr. von Stumm, Mr. Bronsart von Schellendorf and the “crowned cousins” etc. as chief witnesses for their insignificant assertions. But I am a fool to remember the German leading article writers of weekly newspapers when considering Stirner. My kindred spirit Mackay will forgive me for that. What can I do about it if a croaky rooster crows outside while Konrad Ansorge plays the most sublime piano composition for me.