The Ego and His Own
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Some scanning errors (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand) · 2 illegible passages, excluded from answers
- Extent:
- ~160,000 words · 774 passages
Cite this work
- APAMax Stirner. (n.d.). The Ego and His Own. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/max-stirner/the-ego-and-his-own
- MLAMax Stirner. The Ego and His Own. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/max-stirner/the-ego-and-his-own.
- ChicagoMax Stirner. The Ego and His Own. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/max-stirner/the-ego-and-his-own.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
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.
Not the spirit, then, which has to do with absolutely nothing unspiritual, with no _thing_, but only with the essence which exists behind and above things, with _thoughts_,--not that did the ancients exert, for they did not yet have it; no, they had only reached the point of struggling and longing for it, and therefore sharpened it against their too-powerful foe, the world of sense (but what would not have been sensuous for them, since Jehovah or the gods of the heathen were yet far removed from the conception "God is _spirit_," since the "heavenly fatherland" had not yet stepped into the place of the sensuous, etc?)--they sharpened against the world of sense their _sense_, their acuteness. To this day the Jews, those precocious children of antiquity, have got no farther; and with all the subtlety and strength of their prudence and understanding, which easily becomes master of things and forces them to obey it, they cannot discover _spirit_, which _takes no account whatever of things_. The Christian has spiritual interests, because he allows himself to be a _spiritual_ man; the Jew does not even understand these interests in their purity, because he does not allow himself to assign _no value_ to things. He does not arrive at pure _spirituality_, a spirituality such as is religiously expressed, _e. g._, in the _faith_, of Christians, which alone (_i. e._ without works) justifies. Their _unspirituality_ sets Jews forever apart from Christians; for the spiritual man is incomprehensible to the unspiritual, as the unspiritual is contemptible to the spiritual. But the Jews have only "the spirit of this world." The ancient acuteness and profundity lies as far from the spirit and the spirituality of the Christian world as earth from heaven.