The Ego and His Own
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text · 2 illegible passages, excluded from answers
- Extent:
- ~160,000 words · 774 passages
Cite this work
- APAMax Stirner. (n.d.). The Ego and His Own. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/max-stirner/the-ego-and-his-own
- MLAMax Stirner. "The Ego and His Own." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/max-stirner/the-ego-and-his-own.
- ChicagoMax Stirner. The Ego and His Own. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/max-stirner/the-ego-and-his-own.
What it is about
Stirner's 1844 attack on every cause that demands sacrifice from the individual — God, the state, humanity, morality — in the name of a self that acknowledges nothing above it.
Context and history
The German title is 'Der Einzige und sein Eigentum', and 'the unique one' does not mean exceptional: it means unrepeatable, not to be subsumed under any category. Stirner argues that the Enlightenment left the job half done: it removed God and put Man, the State and Morality in his place, phantoms just as demanding. Byington's 1907 English title, 'The Ego and His Own', misleads: the book is not about the psychological ego. It provoked Marx and Engels's 'The German Ideology', which spends hundreds of pages answering it, and it is one of the sources of individualist anarchism.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
What is not supposed, to be my concern[2]! First and foremost, the Good Cause,[3] then God's cause, the cause of mankind, of truth, of freedom, of humanity, of justice; further, the cause of my people, my prince, my fatherland; finally, even the cause of Mind, and a thousand other causes. Only _my_ cause is never to be my concern. "Shame on the egoist who thinks only of himself!" Let us look and see, then, how they manage _their_ concerns--they for whose cause we are to labor, devote ourselves, and grow enthusiastic. You have much profound information to give about God, and have for thousands of years "searched the depths of the Godhead," and looked into its heart, so that you can doubtless tell us how God himself attends to "God's cause," which we are called to serve. And you do not conceal the Lord's doings, either. Now, what is his cause? Has he, as is demanded of us, made an alien cause, the cause of truth or love, his own? You are shocked by this misunderstanding, and you instruct us that God's cause is indeed the cause of truth and love, but that this cause cannot be called alien to him, because God is himself truth and love; you are shocked by the assumption that God could be like us poor worms in furthering an alien cause as his own. "Should God take up the cause of truth if he were not himself truth?" He cares only for _his_ cause, but, because he is all in all, therefore all is _his_ cause! But we, we are not all in all, and our cause is altogether little and contemptible; therefore we must "serve a higher cause."--Now it is clear, God cares only for what is his, busies himself only with himself, thinks only of himself, and has only himself before his eyes; woe to all that is not well-pleasing to him! He serves no higher person, and satisfies only himself. His cause is--a purely egoistic cause.