Hide Notes
⬅ Back
On this page
The Curriculum Vitae of the Unique One The Ghost of All Ghosts The Criticism and the Unique One
☰
The ego and its own
By Max Stirner

Critique by Szeliga

English machine

Author: Szeliga  Year: 1844 

§ 1 Pure Critique has for the first time shown that the spiritual struggle is no duel, — no duel in which two principles, each swinging its sword of truth, stand opposed and the one aims at the annihilation of the other. So little is it concerned with the overthrow of the one and the elevation of another to sole dominion, that it rather impels the critic to set himself as one with the object under consideration, to acknowledge it as spirit born of spirit, to betake himself into the inner being of that which is to be combated, there to loose and to burst the bonds and fetters which hindered it from free self-development, to create for the object in this way its power and its right only first, and to prepare for it its glorification, — a glorification which consists in this, that the principle which has arisen in history is led back to its home, into the inner man, into self-consciousness, into its origin. To be sure, this glorification of the principle is at the same time its dissolution; but not its dissolution into nothing, rather into the elements of the eternally creative spirit. Pure Critique therefore at once frees, within the inner being of the principle, together with the drive of the latter toward self-affirmation, also that drive’s enemy, which compels the principle, in the very moment when it would become world-power, to withdraw and become a purely private matter, a need of weakness, to strike and to punish itself with its own indeterminacy and timidity.
[Notes for § 1 here]
§ 2 Critique characterizes and develops itself as it characterizes its object and allows it to develop.
[Notes for § 2 here]
§ 3 The Unique One gives it the occasion for a new act of self-perfection.
[Notes for § 3 here]
§ 4 It will first follow the life-course of the Unique One.
[Notes for § 4 here]

The Curriculum Vitae of the Unique One

§ 5 The Unique One at once makes himself known as he who has staked his cause on Nothing.
[Notes for § 5 here]
§ 6 I have staked my cause on Nothing, he says, on nothing but on Me, on Me, who am the nothing of all others, who am my everything, who am the Unique One. I have before my eyes the most brilliant examples that the egoist gets on best: I see that that sultan suffers no one who dared not be his, throws everyone into the dungeon who would withdraw from His (the sultan’s) egoism, that he is Everything in All to Himself, to Himself the Unique One. I see further the lucrative egoism of the people, who let themselves be protected by devoted patriots, let these fall in bloody battle or in the struggle with hunger and want, and by the dung of their corpses become a flourishing nation. I see further that truth, freedom, humanity, justice demand nothing other than that one enthuse for them, serve them, their cause. I see further that mankind does not serve some higher cause, but only wishes to promote itself. In order that it develop, it lets peoples and individuals toil in its service, and when these have accomplished what mankind needs, then out of gratitude it throws them on the manure-heap of history. I see finally that God, only because He is all in all, therefore makes everything His affair, but serves no higher cause, rather only satisfies Himself.
[Notes for § 6 here]
§ 7 I will take, cries the Unique One, a lesson from these brilliant examples, and, instead of selflessly serving those great egoists any longer, I will rather myself be the egoist. From now on nothing goes before Me. My cause is not the true, the free, etc., but solely what is mine; it is no universal cause, but — unique, as I am unique.
[Notes for § 7 here]
§ 8 You say: I take a lesson from these brilliant examples. So you mean to have learned from them? No, good Unique One — according to your principle of arbitrariness you must put up with being called “good Unique One!” even though you contemptuously cry: What is good, what is evil! no, good Unique One, you have learned nothing, you only ape your brilliant examples, you are merely docile, you deem yourself worthy to be made a monkey of your brilliant examples.
[Notes for § 8 here]
§ 9 The Unique One, who in this way begins to plant his feet in his manhood, to set his cause upon Himself alone, has not always been Unique, not always a man, but was once a child and then a youth. He has grown up like everyone, he has lived “a human life,” as everyone before and beside him has, as everyone after him will. From the moment he beheld the light of the world he sought, as every other human being does, to find his way out of its confusion, in which he too is tossed higgledy-piggledy with all the others, and to win himself. During childhood his liberation — as every person’s — in the struggle of self-assertion against all with which the child comes into contact took the course that he sought to get to the ground of things or behind things. He eavesdropped on everyone’s weaknesses — for this, like every child, he had a sure instinct — liked to break things, liked to spy out hidden corners, peered after what was veiled and withheld, and tried his hand at everything. As he then got behind the fact that the rod was too weak against his defiance, as from that moment he no longer feared it, had outgrown it; so too he gradually came to see through everything that to him, as to us, seemed uncanny and eerie. He lost fear and respect for it, took heart. He found his courage, his superiority behind everything, as it goes with every child that grows up. He found his bold good pleasure, his outwitting cleverness; in a word — he found spirit, for our cunning, cleverness, courage, defiance, what are they else than — spirit? asks the Unique One.
[Notes for § 9 here]
§ 10 Since this first finding of himself, however, the Unique One has also — like everyone who lives a human life — fully outgrown the child. Nothing any longer impressed his fresh youthful feeling, this self-feeling: he put the world into disrepute, for he saw himself as spirit above it. As a youth he sought, as every youth does, no longer to get hold of things — for example, not to cram the data of history into his head — but of the thoughts hidden in things, for example of the spirit of history. He found that up to then he had not looked at the world with spirit at all, but only stared at it. He became aware that even as a child he had indeed already thought, but that his thoughts had only been those he made about a thing. He had thought the thing thus or so, and what of truth was in the thing, but not truth itself. As a child he had been Pilate, and did not tarry at the purely logical, i.e. theological question: What is truth? though in particular cases he also doubted what of truth might be in the thing. Only now as a youth did he think absolute thoughts, bound to no thing, such as are nothing but thoughts. All earthly things then receded for the Unique One, under this high standpoint, into contemptible distance; his youthful desire was now to bring to light all the radiant forms of the world of thought — truth, freedom, humanity, man, etc. — to illumine and inspire his youthful soul by them. But not content with being spirit, he longed to become perfected spirit, and had first to seek the perfect spirit. Thereby the youth again lost himself, lost his I which he had just found as spirit, in that before the perfect, the holy spirit, the ideal of spirit — God is spirit — as a spirit not his own but beyond him, he bowed and felt his emptiness.
[Notes for § 10 here]
§ 11 The youth would have to find himself anew as man, as Unique One. The Unique One, like everyone who enters riper manhood, surveys his youth, remembers his childhood, and says to himself: Once already I found myself, but only as spirit, not yet truly Myself, not Myself with consciousness. Out of the child who was realistically entangled in the things of this world, had only unspiritual, i.e. thoughtless interests, I once worked myself up into the idealistic youth inspired by thoughts. But then I had only spiritual interests. Now it is time that I win myself egoistically, bodily, personally dear; that I take the world as it is, deal with it according to my interest, no longer according to my ideal, i.e. that I henceforth have an interest not only of my spirit, but an interest of total satisfaction, satisfaction of the whole fellow, a self-interested interest, in short that I become the Unique One; and as I did not find Myself behind things, so now I likewise find Myself behind thoughts, namely as their creator and owner. (Here the ape appears again: he wants to get “behind it” as once he got “behind it” before. The youth was the ape of the child, the man wants to be the ape of the youth.) As over spirit no power of the earth has might, so henceforth spirits, ideas, thoughts have no power over me! cries the Unique One. Does he add: ideas and thoughts have so little power over me that rather they are My power, which I use to conquer and ban the tyrannical spirits that have snatched Me from Myself and alienated Me? — No! This time, over against the spirits, the Unique One does not take courage, as once as a child when he had to do only with uncanny and eerie things. He does not take courage for combat, he only wants to save himself: only thoughtlessness, he says, truly saves Me from thoughts. The Unique One flees into his corporeality. And so he has become a man.
[Notes for § 11 here]
§ 12 Finally the old man? the Unique One asks himself, and answers: When I shall be one, there will be time enough to speak of it. He does not notice that he has already spoken of it, of nothing else than of the old man; that, while he, the Unique One, meant to portray himself as the mature man, from the features of the picture he drew there can be recognized only a frost-covered, decrepit, life-weary old man in despair at himself, a child again; for as a child he had as yet no courage, as Unique One he has no courage any more.
[Notes for § 12 here]
§ 13 Yet let us not judge too soon. That, after all, was only the life-course of the Unique One in its most general outlines, only an ordinary human life, not yet his true and real life-course. This latter is far richer, embracing not merely the short span of thirty, forty, fifty years — there are people who only with their fortieth, fiftieth year become men (Unique Ones!), others who do not become so at all, but straightway old men (the genuine Unique Ones!) — but six thousand years, the whole of world history.
[Notes for § 13 here]
§ 14 As a child he came not only behind things — such things as ordinary children are wont to come into contact with: hobby-horses, lead soldiers, rods, parents, black men, etc. — not merely behind things, but behind all things, the world, the whole world. The childhood of the Unique One has been antiquity; his breaking, rummaging and spying no common “getting-behind” of ill-behaved children, but world-wisdom, the world-wisdom of the ancients.
[Notes for § 14 here]
§ 15 Now we should expect from the Unique One, as description of his earliest years, a complete history of antiquity. Doubtless he did not wish to weary us with so great a child-history. He therefore reaches at once into the very midst of the most brilliant years of his childhood, into the Periclean century. Then as sophist — or rather as the sophists; childishly the Unique One as child named himself in the plural — then he uttered with daring boldness the manning-up word: Do not let yourself be bluffed! and spread the enlightening doctrine: Use your understanding against everything! The sophistic culture spread abroad, and Greece — Greece must again of necessity be the Unique One himself as child — made sport of what had hitherto been to it a tremendous earnest. The child thus first found, behind what enslaved, the existing that until then had remained unshaken but now no longer, his cunning and defiance, namely understanding — not yet spirit, namely not the whole spirit, spirit itself, the holy spirit, but only the weapon of spirit, incorruptible understanding — and used this weapon in dialectical adroitness, fluency of speech, love of disputation, etc., against the world, until he then came further behind it, to grind this sword to a double edge with a keener sharpness, to add heart-culture to understanding-culture. The Unique One, since he was not yet Unique but a child, in this way grew up and became Socrates, and as such the founder of ethics. And further he grew and became a skeptic, and as such threw the fragments of the old powers over which understanding had long become lord out of the heart as well. Now his understanding stood still before nothing, his heart was moved by nothing. In the skeptical period he had become so wholly regardless and unconcerned, so entirely without relations, so entirely indifferent to the world, that even its collapse no longer moved him. This collapse was indeed his own work, the passion for smashing of his childhood — the Unique One, who is only half conscious of his life-description, says: the giant-work of the ancients, in order, he adds, to speak according to custom, although in comparison with us experienced folk they are evidently the children. Were he sure of his cause, he would have said: although antiquity is My childhood — of the experienced man, of the mature Unique One. He had now become worldless; for behind the world of things, the world-order, the world-whole, he had found his understanding and his heart, i.e. his spirit. He could feel himself as spirit, know himself as a being without relations and without world. The Unique One had outgrown childhood, had become youth, had become Christian.
[Notes for § 15 here]
§ 16 Once he had come behind things, spirit soon came over them as well, became free from their bonds, a dis-enslaved, beyond-this-world, free one.
[Notes for § 16 here]
§ 17 To the spirit who, after long labors, had gotten rid of the world, to the worldless spirit, after the loss of the world and the worldly, nothing remained but — spirit and the spiritual. Since, however, he had only removed himself from the world and made himself into a being free of it, without being able in truth to annihilate it, it remained for him an irremovable stumbling-block, a being brought into disrepute; and since on the other hand he knew and acknowledged nothing but spirit and spiritual things, he had to carry continually the longing to spiritualize the world, i.e. to redeem it out of its disgraced condition. Therefore he, the youth, the Christian, busied himself with world-redemption and world-improvement plans.
[Notes for § 17 here]
§ 18 We already know that at that time the Unique One had again to come “behind” something — with him nothing develops, everything is only repeated: thus the Unique One repeats in the pre-Reformation his sophistic time, in the Reformation his Socratic period, and thereafter today skepticism, through which he completely outgrew childhood; with today’s he takes leave of the youth. Already having come behind the world, now nothing else remains to him than the attempt to come behind spirit. But God is spirit. The moderns — namely, do not forget, the Unique One in his youth, in the Middle Ages — the moderns therefore never get further than theological erudition — the child was world-wise — and even the newest insurrections against God are nothing — we shall see this later, adds the Unique One — but the utmost exertions of theological erudition, i.e. theological insurrections.
[Notes for § 18 here]
§ 19 The Unique One, now already a man, i.e. only now truly and self-consciously Unique, looks back with a mocking smile upon his youth — the Middle Ages — how laboriously he then wound his way through the snares and traps which spirit everywhere knew how to lay for him. He rejoices too that it did succeed for him just as well as once for the child the unwinding from the swaddling-clothes — the world.
[Notes for § 19 here]
§ 20 As spirit, as real spirit, he knew — so the Unique One tells and motivates this section of his life-story — that it was impossible any longer to live in “this” world in which rather he had become a stranger; he knew only how to exist in a world of his own; he therefore became the fantasist who lived only in fantastic, self-created formations and had his world; the fool who produced his own dream-world, without which he could not have been fool, fantasist, spirit. Thus, in order to be spirit, he had to create and beget his world, his works, his children — these were, of course, nothing but spirits.
[Notes for § 20 here]
§ 21 But with all this he was still always the becoming Unique One, i.e. he who had once already found Himself; only then spirit had come over him, he had lost Himself again to spirit; he did not have spirit, rather spirit had him. In this way he became the slave, the affair of spirit, the one possessed by spirit, or simply the possessed man. Of this he has now convinced himself, now, when he knows that behind things there lurks no separate being at all, no specter — or, which in naive fashion is also verbally taken as equivalent — no spirit. For spook and specter had under his creative, spiritual, spectral hands become everything; he himself: he shuddered at himself, at himself, this spirit of sin. This, however, was all nothing, nothing but his craze, his fixed idea. And fixed ideas he had many: morality, chastity, friendship, property, marriage, freedom, truth, humanity, etc., all fixed ideas for which he enthused, grew zealous, became fanatical, i.e. by which he was possessed, and which made him just as ripe for the madhouse as the madman’s fixed idea that he is pope or emperor of China or some other spooky thing.
[Notes for § 21 here]
§ 22 As a youth the Unique One had slavishly submitted to the rule of thoughts, i.e. to hierarchy; for no worldly, egoistic interest might he have any more, only give himself wholly to an idea; for its sake, e.g. for justice, God, humanity, he had to sacrifice everything. That indeed was the starkest priestcraft. Priest-like he conducted himself then too: he could, for example, be most loveless toward the individual if only he recognized the highest being of love. That existed, indeed, that exercised love upon all, for all, therefore also for him. As there he gave himself to the religious, so at another time he surrendered to moral priestcraft, enthused, for example, for the most general unselfishness, and before his ideal interest then no respect of persons obtained. Consequently he thus came to revolutionary priestcraft and, in order to serve Man, had human beings’ necks cut.
[Notes for § 22 here]
§ 23 To his priestly activity there especially belonged also the so-called moral influence which he arrogated to himself over everything. He preached humiliation before the vocation of man; he called “well-bred” only those to whom good principles had been brought, impressed, drummed and hammered in, the Unique One tells. Later he had indeed given up educating men to fear of God, but in return he demanded all the more strictly: fear of man, i.e. fear before Man, and through discipline he awakened enthusiasm for the truly human vocation. He awakened, demanded; for for Him as man, as Unique One, this last period of youth, liberalism, already lies behind. He himself has in truth had very little time to awaken men for the truly human vocation, since he only flew through liberalism — think of his long childhood, and how otherwise, as a youth, he loved to linger with fixed ideas — and quickly became Unique. But this last youthful folly too he has once gone through, and now can all the more look on with a smile when it spreads itself in full.
[Notes for § 23 here]
§ 24 There are some — the most backward liberals — who have the fixed idea that the state is the realization of man, that the state is Man, that all individuals are nothing but the limbs and tools of the state, this single man. And that because, they imagine, the state is the realization of man in that it brings to life the idea — the fixed idea — of political equality: before the law all are equal; no one has anything to command another, only the state — namely the realized Man — lays down the laws; the king as constitutional is no person but an idea, a specter.
[Notes for § 24 here]
§ 25 But now there come other liberals, the social ones — or the Unique One, when he had again become somewhat older and cleverer, but still had his craze — who say: You politically liberal, you good “citizens,” you pride yourselves far too much on your personal equality — it is all very well that you, for example, recognize no privilege of birth but only merit; but that is itself still a privilege, is still no equality: for now one has more merit, earns more than another, one has more money and property than another. That is nothing! Your state is a fixed idea; in it man cannot in truth realize himself. He can do so only in all, in the whole society. This is his body, and every member in this body is for the other, and all for one another. They all work for the welfare of all, namely of Man. And only what they work, that are they worth, and because they work, they are worth something. No one may have property; for he himself is to work, not his capital, not paid forces work for him. Therefore property must be impersonal, common property of society, of the whole Man, whose body is pieced together out of the bodies of all human beings.
[Notes for § 25 here]
§ 26 Halt! there rises a new voice, that of humane or critical liberalism — or the Unique One, a little older again, now only one step away from his uniqueness, turns against his the-day-before-yesterday standpoint from that of yesterday — Halt! Communist! Your society is nothing but a fixed idea. It is not in a position to realize man truly, or the true man; for it does not yet know the true man at all, but only working, interested men who, since they have their particular, own, egoistic interest, cannot be entirely equal. I do recognize this much: the political liberals have broken self-will, you social liberals have destroyed property; but the main thing still remains to me, in order to make men wholly equal, to establish true humanity — I must also take from them their ownness, their egoistic interest, their egoism. No! here the Unique One steps forth and thereby makes himself the Unique One: no! I will not let my ownness, my egoism be taken from me. True humanity — why that is the maddest spook of all, the spook of spooks. The best is only this, that since I have once come behind this last craze, no other is any longer possible; for now that I have recognized “humanity” as a fixed idea, fixed ideas have in fact — because ideas in general are exhausted — come to an end. Hurrah! now I am rid of all burdens! not merely the burdens of years but of millennia — for I, the Unique One, in my youth — the Middle Ages — had to be plagued and tormented for two thousand years with ideas, fixed ideas — Hurrah! now I am rid of all burdens! A single shrug does for me the service of the most careful thinking, a stretching of the limbs shakes off the torment of thoughts, a spring to my feet slings the incubus of the religious world from my breast! The enormous significance of mindless exultation I — the world — could not recognize in the long night of thinking and believing. Now at last I ward myself against thought with my very skin. Now I am a man, now I am the Unique One.
[Notes for § 26 here]
§ 27 Now that the life-course of the Unique One lies unrolled before us, we ask ourselves: What is the Unique One?
[Notes for § 27 here]

The Ghost of All Ghosts

§ 28 Critique has not made sport of the Unique One by letting him himself tell the whole history of the world as his own history, describe it as his life-course. For critique is very much in earnest about this, because the Unique One himself is in earnest about it. He is only not yet fully conscious of his life-course — more than a presentiment of it he certainly has already; — therefore, instead of speaking straight out about his youth, he speaks of the ancients, of the moderns and of the free, the most modern; he gives a brief sketch of world history, but not openly as of his own history; he does not utter the word: I am history, history is nothing other than a great egoistic, interested individual, and this individual am I, the Unique One. In his unconsciousness that he in truth is the Unique One, can only be the sole Unique One, he expresses himself thus: the individual is for himself a world history and possesses in the remaining world history his property. He thus creates for himself the illusion that he is not the sole Unique One, that beside him others too can have a world history as their own history. And yet he has portrayed not merely a world history among many but precisely world history as that of the Unique One. The Unique One wants only to develop himself, not the idea of humanity, and has thereby shown that up to this point he could only develop himself through the whole of world history.
[Notes for § 28 here]
§ 29 He says: For my part I do not do it as critique — no longer as critique, for I have also gone beyond it, my last fixed idea — which claims to proceed from no presupposition, but without its knowing it makes man its presupposition. For my part I proceed from a presupposition in that I presuppose Myself; but my presupposition does not strive after its completion, as does the man of critique who strives after his completion, but serves me only in order to enjoy and consume it. I consume precisely my presupposition alone and am only insofar as I consume it. For that reason, however, that presupposition is no presupposition at all. For I am the Unique One. I do not presuppose Myself, because I set or create Myself every moment, and am only thereby that I am not presupposed but posited, and again only in the moment posited in which I posit Myself. That is: I am creator and creature in one. I am not the absolute I, but the finite, perishable I, the bodily I. I make Myself. (Assuredly not as a bodily being!)
[Notes for § 29 here]
§ 30 So says the Unique One, and forgets that he says it at the end of a treatise which expressly proves that only now, at the end of the Middle Ages, on the occasion of the second finding-of-self and after antiquity had previously accomplished the giant-work of the first finding-of-self, can he say it; he therefore forgets that history itself speaks out of him, that thus he himself, he, the Unique One, must of necessity be not a world history but world history, and can suffer beside himself no other world history.
[Notes for § 30 here]
§ 31 To be sure, before he comes to the portrayal of world history, the Unique One sketches a human life — we have seen how the same prepares in its outlines for the life of the sole world-historical individual — he sketches the human life of a single person, how all individuals gradually get behind everything, develop themselves. But this ordinary development of the individual, in manhood, proceeds only as far as that egoism which sets personal interest above all, takes the world as it is, not the world in general but only the particular world in which, as this individual, he sees himself placed, who thus uses this determinate reality to his advantage, for example, as a slave under the lash he suffers keeps his self-interest in view in that through submissiveness he deceives the cruel lord in order to seize the next good opportunity to trample him down. Only up to this limited, powerless egoism, which manifests itself as force, persuasion, entreaty, categorical demand, hypocrisy, deceit, etc., is the ordinary single man able to raise himself, not up to the grandiose egoism of the bodily Unique One who, with a single leap, is in a position to fling off of himself the incubus of the religious world — he has proved that the religious world is the world as such, world history — thus the world as such, world history, his past.
[Notes for § 31 here]
§ 32 If therefore the Unique One says: I presuppose only Myself, he thereby presupposes only the whole of world history; and if he adds: I am creator and creature in one, he makes world history, which he himself is, at the same time his creation, i.e. the Unique One, who also characterizes himself as the thoughtless bodily being, is the bodily world history. To be sure, he is not that mass of individuals and peoples who have toiled themselves to exhaustion in the service of humanity and who have been thrown by it, out of gratitude, onto the dung-heap of history — onto the dung-heap of history the bodily being has indeed not let himself be thrown — he is the Unique One whose body is the spirit of history. And in this body, which is spirit, there now lodges a spirit which is body, because thoughtless. Through this complete reversal the Unique One now reveals himself as the genuine spook. For is it not precisely the stepping forth of spirit out of the inner, invisible, its homeland, onto the surface, into appearance — is it not the ghostly outwardness, the body which is spirit, that makes the specter a specter? The white sheet with which the spook has wrapped himself, that is it before which I tremble as before the spirit appearing to me. In this sheet there sits, as the inner, a very tangible body. If I say of someone that he looks like a spirit, a specter, I designate thereby not the spirit that dwells in him, but the sunken cheeks, the deep-set eyes, the pale complexion, the long gaunt figure, in short the body that is a spirit, a specter. The core of this ghostly body is then the wholly bodily body: bones, sinews, blood and entrails.
[Notes for § 32 here]
§ 33 The Unique One is consequently the specter of all specters; for the spirit of history, spirit as such, thoughts are for him an outer covering, a white sheet, within which as core there is the mere bare body, thoughtlessness. The poodle from which, behind the stove, Mephistopheles emerges is, as long as it remains a poodle, no specter. But Mephistopheles, the devil, the egoist, the Unique One is a specter. When his inner comes to light, how one will be horrified before it! — It is the poodle in which Mephistopheles otherwise kept himself hidden — the poodle, a thoughtless, irrational, at bottom good-natured animal that, if one only lets it run in a circle and now and then throws it a bone, does harm to no one.
[Notes for § 33 here]
§ 34 Measured by his own principle, the principle of seeing spooks everywhere, the Unique One, as we have seen, becomes the specter of all specters.
[Notes for § 34 here]
§ 35 For the critic, who in world history does not merely see fixed ideas superseding one another but creative thoughts developing themselves on and on, for the critic the Unique One is nevertheless no specter, but a deed of creative self-consciousness which had to appear for its time, our time, and had to fulfill its, a determinate, task.
[Notes for § 35 here]
§ 36 What task this is will be taken up in what follows, wherein critique has to set forth its own relation to the Unique One. Critique has to correct his false conception of it. The tool imagines itself above its master. But the Unique One only carries out in practice what critique, through its all-powerful pure theory, has compelled him to do.
[Notes for § 36 here]

The Criticism and the Unique One

§ 37 Critique, the Unique One claims, is the struggle of the possessed against possession as such; it wants to dissolve thoughts by thinking; it is thus nothing but a last theological insurrection. Admittedly, he concedes, from the standpoint of thought there is no power that could be superior to it, and it is a pleasure to see how lightly and playfully this dragon devours every other swarm of thoughts.
[Notes for § 37 here]
§ 38 Critique is therefore nothing more than a swarm of thoughts as well, only a mightier, overmastering one, with which the Unique One now, according to his whim and fancy, wants to make sport, now to play with it, now to trample it underfoot. In truth, in his thirty-one-sheet manifesto against spirit and its heavenly hosts, the thoughts, the Unique One has done nothing further than play with the dragon. Has he also trampled it down? Has he even played with it? Has he really only hauled it to and fro, used it to swallow every other swarm of thoughts, taken his delight in it, in order at last, as for example with the state—also a swarm of thoughts—to conquer it with his impudent arbitrariness?
[Notes for § 38 here]
§ 39 Let us follow the diverting play further. We have already attended the first act of the comedy, and seen how the Unique One, in the proud self-feeling of victory over countless specters, transformed himself, unbeknown to him, into the most frightful specter.
[Notes for § 39 here]
§ 40 The Unique One in his ownness first lures the dragon—critique—hither and goads it on to swallow the swarm of thoughts of freedom and disinterestedness. He looks on with folded arms, holding his belly for laughter if possible. Then it begins:
[Notes for § 40 here]
§ 41 All the world demands freedom. But at every time the drive for freedom amounted to the demand for a determinate freedom. All want freedom. Why do you haggle, spits the dragon at the swarm of thoughts, why do you haggle over a more or a less?—Because your drive for a determinate freedom always includes the intention of a new domination! You want to be rid of the inquisition of faith, the domination of officials. For whose sake? For your own sake, because they irk you, stand in your way! Faith itself, the bourgeois estate are quite fine by you, because through them you want to come to rule!—Besides, you find yourselves at every turn compelled to betray your secret and to acknowledge openly that you are forced to believe in self-interest as an all-subduing power. Welcker, for example, and with him the Baden burghers, the citizens of a free constitutional state, consider themselves, i.e. their freedom, secure only when the members of their courts are no longer dreadful, dismissible, transferable and pensionable judges, since these lack all reliability, indeed forfeit all respect and all trust among the people. Rather, they must stand so independent of the government that by a judgment conforming to the matter they do not cast their own cause into shadow.—The secret of your freedom is therefore self-interest, egoism, your I!
[Notes for § 41 here]
§ 42 Freedom, this swarm of thoughts, is swallowed, the dragon has done its service. It is shoved aside. And the Unique One now himself attempts to digest what he had let that one swallow. If freedom is yet striven for for the I’s sake, why then not choose the I itself for beginning, middle, and end? So, straightway pin to the banner the resolve of egoism, of ownness!
[Notes for § 42 here]
§ 43 Has the bodily Unique One in this way really digested the swarm of thoughts the dragon swallowed?—How can the bodily one digest something he has not himself had between his teeth! No! he only wants to imitate—we have already often come to know his simian nature—only to imitate, only also to be what, as critique has shown him, the freedom up to now, i.e. the particular freedom, is. Like it he wants to be domineering, sole ruler, Unique; like it he wants to stick egoism, ownness, on his banner. To be sure, he is now no longer a swarm of thoughts; but that he is not counts in no way to his honor: he is less than a swarm—he is the ape of a swarm.
[Notes for § 43 here]
§ 44 Critique itself, which has brought the lie of particular freedom to light, meanwhile develops itself into the idea of true, human freedom, or first into the idea of freedom in general; for the lie of freedom is not even the lie of freedom, but only lie and egoism. Critique therefore develops in the corner into which it has been thrust by the Unique One, by egoism, into the idea of disinterested, true, human freedom, the freedom which is no fixed idea because it does not set itself fast in the state or society or a faith or whatever particularity it may be; rather it recognizes itself in every human being, in every self-consciousness, leaves to this very one in each the measure of his freedom to himself, but at the same time also measures him according to this his own measure.
[Notes for § 44 here]
§ 45 The Unique One lets the dragon loose against another swarm of thoughts: right and law. But since it is only his pleasure and fancy that he satisfies by setting swarms of thoughts upon one another, since he always stands by in mockery, to send the dragon with a kick into the corner according to caprice and liking, the struggle always leads only to the same result:
[Notes for § 45 here]
§ 46 The Unique One takes accurate note that right up to now, the dreamed-of right, in the turns of this struggle, has been forced to turn out its inmost nature as privilege and prerogative; that the quarrel of the various rights, which are eternally at each other’s hair and cannot even unite in the face of the common enemy, the dragon, is nothing but right-having; that the final decision of this quarrel is always brought about only by force, which allies itself with the one right against the other; that thus at bottom power is right. All this the Unique One notes and again takes pleasure in playing the ape:—My power is my right; I am empowered for everything for which I have the power. In the absence of a better—or not better, only another more powerful—power, lying and cheating and hypocrisy and the like are my power. Everything is right which is right for me. Possibly for that reason it is not yet right for the others; that is their concern, not mine: let them defend themselves.
[Notes for § 46 here]
§ 47 Critique, which after ending its struggle does not demand mimicry, but develops itself to the point of demanding the giving up of privilege, of violent right, the giving up of the power to assert and enforce a prerogative, in short the giving up of egoism—this advancing purity of critique the Unique One is not in a position to grasp. He chases the dragon precisely into its corner.
[Notes for § 47 here]
§ 48 From a new struggle of the dragon with yet another swarm of thoughts the Unique One gathers that the intercourse of human beings with one another hitherto, in family, state, society, only ostensibly rested on love, on considerate doing-for-one-another, but in the light was again rather grounded in self-interest and egoism. Instead of seeing that thus there was no question, or rather only talk, of love and considerate doing-for-one-another, that in consequence love must first be a new creation which critique intends to bring forth, instead of this the Unique One wants to remain with the old, and not merely let the old be, but be downright active that the old—self-interest and egoism—do not go out of fashion; he wants to use the world for himself—cheat and ever cheat, take in. If, for example, he loves, he wants to love with full soul, to let the most consuming glow of passion burn in his heart, without taking the beloved for anything other than the nourishment of his passion. Only my love do I feed with him, says the Unique One, I enjoy him.
[Notes for § 48 here]
§ 49 The Unique One has his eye, in general, always on enjoyment, i.e. as a bodily one on chewing and devouring. But the food he loves most, that is the swarms of thoughts, which to chew, or sometimes merely to draw in their scent, to blow them away, affords him a peculiar pleasure.
[Notes for § 49 here]
§ 50 So long has he, however, out of whim let the dragon do the swallowing. At last he has learned it, he imitates its swallowing, he swallows it himself. But not hide and hair: some of it he chews, some he blows away, of still other parts he draws in the scent, in short he orders and disposes of the dragon purely according to caprice, which alone is worthy of him as Unique. You, simple dragon, says the Unique One, are concerned too only for life, for dear life, not for the enjoyment of life. Therefore I will now just take the fun of taking your life from you! You are as stupid as all who have a spar. You all together seek life, the true life, some in the beyond, others in the here-below, and these in the state, in society, you, foolish dragon! in humanity. And over your seeking you forget that you lose the enjoyment of life. You live there in the fog of longing and hope for an eternal or true life. Therefore you do not live at all, not even the so-called man of pleasure; for even he once pauses from his self-consumption: he keeps his Sundays and holidays. I want for once really to live, i.e. to set no value on life at all, only to enjoy it, to chew, to devour it. Naturally to my enjoyment of life there also belongs that I do not only enjoy myself but everything that comes before my beak, when I happen to have an appetite for it. So, dragon, I will now also devour you for breakfast; you have lived long enough, or rather: I have let you live long enough; you are also nicely fat, after I have fattened you with every other swarm of thoughts.
[Notes for § 50 here]
§ 51 But when it comes to chewing—alas, we must report the dreadful—it turns out that the Unique One has no teeth at all, at least none he could use against the dragon. He, the bodily one, thus cannot devour it in the bodily manner alone worthy of him, but must, against critique, set thoughts in motion instead of jaws. To be sure, these thoughts are of the kind of those thoughtless thoughts, i.e. of the thoughts loose, free from the individuals who think them, even when they brood in deepest thinking upon them, which have developed through history down to here, down to where, through critique, they have been and are continually being led back into human consciousness.
[Notes for § 51 here]
§ 52 True humanity, the species-man, says the Unique One, is the spook, the fixed idea of critique, which thereby, in the very midst of the here-below into which it wants to let spirit live, creates a new beyond, i.e. is nothing but a last theological insurrection. Human beings are not Man; thus Man is a beyond for them.
[Notes for § 52 here]
§ 53 So little has the Unique One understood the development of critique that he does not see, does not grasp, how precisely the proof that human beings, human beings down to this very day, are nothing other than Man, the species-man—how this proof is the present result of pure critique, which fixes itself in no concept, no category. Critique has not introduced the concept of species-man into world history in order that human beings should now become species-men; but to bring human beings to consciousness of what they have hitherto been. Indeed, it has already renounced the category species-man, since this wanted to make itself the foundation for erecting a philosophy of the future. For pure critique the species-man is nothing more than the man to whom it always went to the heart that his pigtail hung down his back, who turned right and left, did nothing good and nothing bad, whirled in a circle—yet the pigtail still hung down his back. Species-man is precisely the man unconscious of himself, thoughtless man, the man who has only the shape, the body, of man; the ape, the beast-man, half beast half angel; the man in whom everything has always remained as of old, like the animal which today prepares its lair, its nest, as it did thousands of years ago. That it is so, critique has called into human consciousness with the positing of the concept species-man, called into consciousness that hitherto man was the highest being for man, i.e. each was for himself the highest and nearest; that man thus was nothing better than the bird for whom being-winged counts as highest, than the caterpillar which takes the leaf for the whole world—nothing better than they, because his species determinations counted for him as absolute determinations, determinations of the absolute, beyond which he could not get. The species-man is for himself the highest being, the egoistic man, only that he thought himself rid of his egoism when he set it outside himself, in his unconsciousness even made it into an ideal, into the ideal of the state or of society, or into the ideal in general.
[Notes for § 53 here]
§ 54 The struggle of critique is not at all directed against the ideal, but against this ideal which is no ideal, yet not for that reason a nothing because it is merely possible, thinkable, but because, as thought, it is not merely possible but real. For everything thought is real. For example, the dream of the egoist, of species-man, of a society, is not merely a possible society, but is this society, his society. As his dream it is not possible otherwise than as it really is. He dreams only because his dream is realized in advance. Because, awake, he thinks and acts just as he thinks and acts, therefore he dreams as he dreams. Dream and life are one, life a dream in which everything turns about the I.
[Notes for § 54 here]
§ 55 It must be stated here, over against those who always make every thought, every word, straightway into a category, i.e. in truth into a spook, a specter, a fixed idea, that theological comportment does not consist in seeing something beyond everywhere, but rather conversely in having nothing beyond at all, instead wanting to know everything better, best of all, before one has known and investigated it. For the pre-Columbian age there was no beyond of the sea, no America; one knew that there could be no land beyond the sea. For the pre-Copernican age the whole world was full of worlds, the whole starry heaven nothing beyond, but the most ordinary here-below: everything revolved around the earth, i.e. around the egoism of man; only for his sake was there day and night, so that he could wake, so that he could sleep.—That marks species-man, the theologian, the egoist, that he will investigate nothing because he needs to investigate nothing—he knows it already in advance—that he thus has not a beyond but an uninvestigated, uninvestigable beyond, hence no beyond at all but only a here-below: his interest, his egoism. That marks species-man, the theologian, the egoist, that he takes the world and human beings as they ought to be, i.e. as, for the sake of his egoism, they ought to be according to his sense, as he wills them to be; that thus they are not themselves, not others than he, but are to be he.
[Notes for § 55 here]
§ 56 Hence also your self-consciousness, as you make it into an all-powerful category with which you march into the field against faith, coal-heaver’s faith, as you say, is worth nothing. For it has rammed itself fast into the consciousness of the species. It is consciousness of the sum, of the mass, represented, constitutional consciousness, which shirks the labor of seeking itself out, of creating itself, consequently consciousness of laziness, lazy essence, decay, the decay of the old time that has run its course, which has let the essence of man—otherwise a mysterious point in head and heart—penetrate the bodily human being to the utmost. The bodily human being is the human being become through and through his essence, the decayed human being.
[Notes for § 56 here]
§ 57 With your hopes you can therefore make yourselves only ridiculous. For you do not have the courage to fashion for yourselves true hopes, worthy of the name alone. For that you are too averse to labor; you hope for roasted pigeons to fly into your mouth. And because you do not set your whole strength upon the realization of a great hope, therefore you know only hopes that are always realized in advance, namely deceived hopes. The egoist hopes for a carefree, happy life. He marries a rich girl—and now has a jealous, scolding wife, i.e. his hope has been realized, deceived. Deception is the only possible realization of all your hopes, because from the outset you deceive yourselves about your hopes. You imagine you have the wish for the realization of an ideal; but the ideal is your egoism, your self; it is thus already real in you, in your egoistic wish, and never has been ideal. You hope that you shall be otherwise than you are, and yet you will not yourself become otherwise.
[Notes for § 57 here]
§ 58 Likewise “humanity,” “man,” as the egoism, this mysterious principle of the world hitherto, which has now in the Unique One at last alienated itself completely into the sheet, has upon its lips, are mere phrases. One might grieve over this, were it not the fate of all words and vocables to be misused by egoism, i.e. used, consumed into categories. The “man” of the egoist is nothing further than the thing Man, namely a thing which he uses for the satisfaction of his lust and his need. The thing Man has, in the state, for example, been seized upon exclusively by the bourgeois: he enjoys Man, he feeds upon Man, i.e. the sweat of the proletarian is his food. The communist wants the worker alone to enjoy the thing, the food, Man; he wants that no one should suffer hunger.
[Notes for § 58 here]
§ 59 The Unique One, who is as candid as the madman who takes himself for the emperor or the pope or our Lord God, the Unique One now does not even make the mere thing Man into the exclusive thing of his appetite—the bourgeois, the communist do not either, to be sure, but they at least pretend it—but a toy: he has lead soldiers, hobby-horses and the like. Man is for him a mere property, just as he can also have the properties of being Chinese or hunchbacked or a glutton, or something else good or bad, or rather nothing good or bad.
[Notes for § 59 here]
§ 60 To promote decay the Unique One fulfills as his task, or rather he himself is this decay in its last stage. The world will at last be so filled with the pestilential stench of cunning, lying and cheating and hypocrisy that it will no longer be able to endure it, but will have to resolve to open the windows that look out upon the uncharted beyond, so that the pure free air, which one has hitherto not dared, may for once penetrate. Egoism, which hitherto was the great general matter on earth, is now so splintered and decomposed that it has become unique, that it, which for so long had subjugated unselfishness, magnanimity, self-sacrificing friendship and love and pressed them down into the private affair of individuals, has been forced to make itself into a private affair, into the affair of the Unique One, to give up the half-angel by which it knew how to give itself a fair appearance, to deceive itself about itself, and to sink down wholly into animality. The Unique One straightway takes the animal as his model. He says: To no animal does its essence appear as a task. It does not require to be or to become anything other than what it is. But he does not want to admit to us that he counsels us to be like the animals. He adds: You are human beings, your nature is from the outset a human one; you therefore need not first become human. That is to say: human being, you need not become anything other than you are, you have nothing to investigate and to find, you have no beyond like the animal, you have no thoughts, you are mere body, thus animal after all. And now be animal too! Be for yourself your highest being!
[Notes for § 60 here]
§ 61 But the dung of history makes it at the same time fruitful. The world, which has become entirely individualized, the Unique One, who is decayed through and through, embodied, are at once full of expectation of the seed and content that are to be let into them in the murky autumn, that after a perhaps severe cold winter they may sprout in spring and green and blossom. The seed, that is the human being who is yet to be found, the human being who does not already know himself so, has not learned out so, that he can look down to the end of the world and beyond; who rather sees that he knows himself so little as yet that he has only now arrived at the concept “human being,” and must now create the science of the human being. This science, however, knows no bounds and will never be learned out. Through it the human being first becomes the imperishable and eternal. It, not the Unique One, is all in all, everything that is still to be discovered and conquered. For the human spirit, for human consciousness, not only the earth is to be conquered. The human being who is yet to be found is no fixed idea. For this new science does not say: thus and as this he is to find himself, as this ideal which I set up for him; but, like every science, it does not know to what results it will lead, each new side is for it a new result. “Human being” is nothing further than the name, the title, for this most comprehensive science, which would not be science if its name already exhausted it. Yes, it may come about that, as with most sciences, in its development the name will appear inappropriate. But we have not now to concern ourselves with that, rather only bravely to begin the development.
[Notes for § 61 here]
§ 62 After the Unique One, and with him the world which he concludes, has found enjoyment in self-dissolution, self-devouring, decay, the new enjoyment of life will consist in creating oneself; it will no longer be a consumption of the old, long accumulated, a continual becoming poorer, but a joy in ever new things, an eternal joyful surprise, a happiness to find oneself ever richer and richer than one still knew oneself but shortly before.
[Notes for § 62 here]
§ 63 The science of the human being can and will not deem any guild, any faculty particularly privileged to build upon it. It is the completely free science which for the first time will realize freedom of teaching and learning; for everyone is capable of furthering it if he acknowledges himself, the human being, and his neighbors, human beings, as an inexhaustible treasure lode to learn from, and believes—yes, believes!—in this inexhaustibility. Not even faith, just as little as the ideal or the beyond, did critique want to combat and conquer, but only the lie. Faith is first to awaken, as the human being is first to be found. The one to be found is no longer a category, and thus not something particular besides human beings. The word enters into its original rights and expresses what it can express only. If, in addition, it is written on the title page of the new universal science, discovered only in its first germs, it is thereby yet made into no new category, but only into the name of that which is still nameless. As commonly the child is given the name of the godfather who holds it over the font, so too here. The human being who in our days has come to consciousness that he has up to here indeed been human, the human being holds the child over the baptism, therefore it is named after him.
[Notes for § 63 here]
§ 64 Therein the Unique One has also fulfilled his task, that he has isolated, individualized the human beings who up to then out of sloth, out of egoistic interest leaned upon one another, put themselves together, associated, united. They may see how far they will get with their self-interested single-unique strength, how far with mere cunning and dexterity in using the world. They will have to resolve, when they reach one another the hand, no longer to hold back the heart and the will for themselves; have to resolve to strive after that which alone is worth striving and seeking, after what the other has done and does for the science, the consciousness of the human being; not after his money, but his worth, not after his bodily but spiritual means. They will have to resolve no longer to set their cause upon nothing, but upon everything, upon themselves and the others, upon the and the human beings. It is then no longer merely their cause, but their work and their enjoyment.
[Notes for § 64 here]
§ 65 The Unique One has set his cause upon nothing, upon nothing not merely in the half sense in which he takes it, where there straightway follows the addition: namely upon Myself; but in the full sense of complete nothing. For at bottom it is a delusion when the Unique One believes he has set his cause upon himself, and only therefore upon nothing because the nominative devours the accusative, the creator the creature. On the contrary, he has set his cause upon all others and therefore upon nothing, because he alone is everything to himself, he is his highest essence, while the others are nothing to him.—What a contradiction on both sides! If he is himself the nothing, then he is also everything to himself. If everything outside him is nothing, then he has nonetheless this nothing as his base. That is to say, he has in fact taken himself at his word—the word “nothing” has become mightier than his category “nothing”—he has set himself upon nothing, into the air, just as into the air are those ideals, specters, fixed ideas which he so greatly mocked. And he is worse off than these; for they, the fixed ones, the gases, can still maintain themselves in the air.—But how about the bodily one?—No, the bodily one can never stand upon nothing; on the contrary, his standing and sitting can always only be a bodily standing and sitting, i.e. upon something bodily: he must by all means stand and sit upon a real thing. If therefore he says: I set Myself, and connects with it the sense: I create Myself, then he, the bodily one, can only create himself when he sits himself on the chair, or sits himself on the earth, or sits himself at command, like the serving dog.
[Notes for § 65 here]
§ 66 From that resolve to renounce egoism the individualized world, the world of individuals, the individuals, can no longer be far. The Unique One himself, precisely as Unique, precisely at the time when he wholly gives himself over to egoism, wants to make it into his own and thereby into the principle of the world, sees himself compelled to turn away from it: he is candid, and candor is obviously the first alienation from cunning, deceit and hypocrisy, through which the Unique One thinks precisely to assert himself as Unique.
[Notes for § 66 here]
§ 67 The Unique One therefore does not even bring shame upon himself; rather the world which he completes has given itself, in him and through him, the most complete refutation. And critique can take leave of it, this old, shattered, decomposed, decaying world.
[Notes for § 67 here]