The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Radical worldviews

[ 1 ] In the early 1840s, a man launched a vigorous attack on Hegel's worldview, which he had previously embraced thoroughly and intimately. That man was Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872). His declaration of war on the worldview from which he had grown out is expressed in radical form in his writings: “Provisional Theses on the Reform of Philosophy” (1842) and “Principles of the Philosophy of the Future” (1843). We can follow the further development of his thoughts in his other writings: “The Essence of Christianity” (1841), “The Essence of Religion” (1845), and “Theogony” (1857). Ludwig Feuerbach's work repeated in the field of Spiritual Science a process that had taken place almost a century earlier in the field of natural sciences (1759) with the appearance of Caspar Friedrich Wolff. Wolff's work represents a reform of the idea of development in the field of the science of living beings. How development was understood before Wolff can be seen most clearly in the views of the man who most vehemently opposed this change in mental images: Albrecht von Haller. This man, whom physiologists rightly revere as one of the most important minds in their science, could not form a mental image of the development of a living being other than in such a way that the germ already contained all the parts that appear during the course of life, in miniature but perfectly preformed. Development, therefore, is supposed to be the unfolding of something that already existed but was initially hidden from perception because of its small size or for other reasons. If this view is consistently adhered to, then nothing new arises in the course of development, but rather something hidden and enclosed is continuously brought to light. Haller represented this view quite bluntly. In the primordial mother Eve, the entire human race was already present in a small, hidden form. These human germs have only been developed in the course of world history. Consider how the philosopher Leibniz (1646-1716) expresses the same mental image: “So I should think that the souls which will one day be human souls have been present in the seed, like those of other species, that they have always existed in the form of organized things in the ancestors back to Adam, that is, since the beginning of things.” In his “Theoria generationis,” published in 1759, Wolff contrasted this idea of development with another, which assumes that members that appear in the course of an organism's life did not exist in any way before, but only come into being as real new formations at the moment they become perceptible. Wolff showed that nothing of the form of the developed organism is present in the egg, but that its development is a chain of new formations. This view is what makes the mental image of real becoming possible. For it explains that something arises that did not exist before, i.e., in the true sense, “becomes.”

[ 2 ] Haller's view denies becoming, as it only admits the continuous becoming visible of something that already existed. This natural scientist therefore countered Wolff's idea with the authoritative statement: “There is no becoming” (Nulla est epigenesis!). In doing so, he effectively ensured that Wolff's view was completely ignored for decades. Goethe [blames] the resistance that has been met with in his efforts to explain living beings on the doctrine of encasement. He strove to understand the forms within organic nature from their becoming, entirely in the spirit of a true view of development, according to which what appears in a living being has not already been hidden there, but really only comes into being when it appears. In 1817, he wrote that this attempt, which formed the basis of his 1790 treatise on the “Metamorphosis of Plants,” had been met with a “cold, almost unfriendly reception.” Such aversion, however, was quite natural: the doctrine of preformation, the concept of successive development of what had already existed since Adam's time, had taken hold of even the best minds in general." Even in Hegel's worldview, there were still remnants of the old doctrine of preformation. The pure thought that appears in the human spirit: it should be enclosed in all phenomena before it reaches perceptible existence in humans. Hegel places this pure thought before nature and the individual spirit, which is supposed to be, as it were, the “representation of God as he was in his eternal essence before the creation” of the world. The development of the world thus presents itself as an unfolding of pure thought. Ludwig Feuerbach's protest against Hegel's worldview is based on the fact that he could no more recognize the existence of the spirit before its actual appearance in man than Wolff was able to admit that the parts of the living organism were already preformed in the egg. Just as Wolff saw new formations in the organs of living beings, so Feuerbach saw them in the individual spirit of human beings. This spirit does not exist in any way before its perceptible existence; it only comes into being at the moment when it actually appears. It is therefore unjustified to speak of an universal spirit, of a divine being in which the individual spirit has its origin. There is no rational being present before its actual appearance in the world that shapes matter, the perceptible world, in such a way that its image ultimately appears in humans. Rather, before the emergence of the human spirit, there are only irrational substances and forces that form a nervous system concentrated in the brain; and in this, something completely new arises: the human soul, endowed with reason. For such a worldview, there is no possibility of deriving events and things from a spiritual primordial being. For a spiritual being is a new formation resulting from the organization of the brain. And when humans transfer the spiritual into the outside world, they imagine, completely arbitrarily, that a being like the one underlying their own actions exists outside of them and rules the world. Humans must first create any spiritual primordial being out of their imagination; the things and processes of the world give no reason to assume such a being exists. It is not the spiritual primordial being, in which things are enclosed, that created humans in its image, but humans who formed the imaginary image of such a primordial being according to their own nature. That is Feuerbach's conviction. “Man's knowledge of God is man's knowledge of himself, of his own nature. Only the unity of nature and consciousness is truth. Where there is consciousness of God, there is also the nature of God—that is, in man.” Man did not feel strong enough to rely entirely on himself; therefore, he created an infinite being in his own image, which he reveres and worships. Hegel's worldview removed all other characteristics from the primordial being, but retained its rationality. Feuerbach removes this as well, thereby eliminating the primordial being itself. He replaces the wisdom of God entirely with the wisdom of the world. Feuerbach describes as a necessary turning point in the development of worldview the “open confession and admission that the consciousness of God is nothing other than the consciousness” of humanity, that man cannot “think, sense, create mental images, feel, believe, will, love, and worship any other being as absolute, as divine, than the human being.” There is a view of nature and one of the human spirit, but none of the essence of God. Nothing is real except what is actual. "The real in its reality or as real is the real as an object of the senses, is the sensual. Truth, reality, sensuality are identical. Only a sensual being is a true, a real being. Only through the senses is an object given in the true sense—not through thinking for itself. The object given or identical with thinking is only thought." This means nothing other than: Thinking appears in the human organism as a new formation; and one is not justified in having a mental image of thought being already hidden in some form in the world before its appearance. One should not try to explain the nature of what actually exists by deriving it from something that already existed. Only what is factual is true and divine, that which "is immediately certain of itself, speaks and captivates immediately, immediately entails the affirmation that it is — that which is absolutely decisive, absolutely indubitable, crystal clear. But only the sensual is crystal clear; only where sensuality begins do all doubt and dispute cease. The secret of immediate knowledge is sensuality.“ Feuerbach's confession culminates in the words: ”To make philosophy the business of humanity was my first endeavor. But once you embark on this path, you inevitably end up making humanity the business of philosophy." “The new philosophy makes man, including nature as the basis of man, the sole, universal, and highest object of philosophy, i.e., anthropology, including physiology, as a universal science.” Feuerbach demands that reason not be placed at the forefront of worldview as a starting point, as Hegel does, but that it be regarded as a product of development, as a new formation in the human organism in which it actually occurs. And he finds any separation of the spiritual from the physical repugnant, because it cannot be understood as anything other than the result of the development of the physical. "When the psychologist says, ‘I am distinct from my body,’ this says as much as when the philosopher says in logic or in the ‘metaphysics of morals,’ 'I abstract from human nature. Is it possible for you to abstract from your essence? Do you not abstract as a human being? Do you think without your head? [...] Thoughts are ‘departed souls’. Fine; but isn't the departed soul still a faithful image of the once physical human being? Don't even the most general metaphysical concepts, the concepts of being and essence, change as the real being and essence of human beings changes? So what does it mean to say that I abstract from human nature? Nothing more than that I abstract from the human being as the object of my consciousness and thinking, but never from the human being who lies behind my consciousness, i.e., from my nature, to which my abstraction is inextricably bound, willy-nilly. As a psychologist, you also abstract from your body in your thoughts, but at the same time you are intimately connected with it in essence, i.e., you think of yourself as distinct from it, but you are by no means really distinct from it." "Is Lichtenberg not also right when he claims that one should not actually say ‘I think,’ but rather ‘it thinks’? If, then, ‘I think’ is distinct from the body, does it follow that ‘it thinks,’ the involuntary aspect of our thinking, the root and basis of ‘I think,’ is also distinct from the body? Why is it that we cannot think at all times, that our thoughts are not at our disposal at will, that we often get stuck in the middle of mental work despite the most strenuous efforts of will, until some external stimulus, often just a change in the weather, gets our thoughts flowing again? Because thinking is also an organic activity. Why do we often have to carry thoughts around with us for years before they become clear to us? Because thoughts are also subject to organic development; thoughts must also mature and bear fruit, just like the fruits in the field and the children in the womb.

[ 3 ] Feuerbach aptly refers here to Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, the thinker who died in 1799 and who, with some of his ideas, must be regarded as a precursor of the worldview that found expression in minds such as Feuerbach's, and whose stimulating mental images did not become as influential in the nineteenth century only because the powerful intellectual constructs of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel overshadowed everything else and monopolized intellectual development to such an extent that aphoristic flashes of insight, even if they were as illuminating as Lichtenberg's, could be overlooked. One need only recall individual statements by this important man to show how his spirit was revived in the intellectual movement initiated by Feuerbach. “God created man in his own image, which presumably means that man created God in his own image.” “Our world will become so refined that it will be as ridiculous to believe in a God as it is today to believe in ghosts.” “Is our concept of God anything other than personified incomprehensibility?” “The mental image we have of a soul is very similar to that of a magnet in the earth. It is merely an image. It is an innate human device to think of everything in this form.” “Instead of saying that the world is reflected in us, we should rather say that our reason is reflected in the world. We cannot do otherwise; we must recognize order and wise government in the world; this follows from the structure of our thinking power. But it does not follow that something we must necessarily think is actually so... therefore, no God can be proven from this.” “We become aware of certain mental images that do not depend on us; we believe that others at least depend on us; where is the boundary? We know only the existence of our feelings, mental images, and thoughts. It thinks, one should say, just as one says: it flashes.” Had Lichtenberg had the ability to develop a harmonious worldview based on such ideas, he could not have been ignored to the extent that he was. The formation of a worldview requires not only intellectual superiority, which he possessed, but also the ability to develop ideas in a comprehensive and vivid manner. He lacked this ability. His superiority is expressed in an excellent judgment of Kant's relationship to his contemporaries: "I believe that, just as Mr. Kant's followers always accuse his opponents of not understanding him, so too do some believe that Mr. Kant is right because they understand him. His way of thinking is new and very different from the usual; and when one suddenly gains insight into it, one is also very inclined to believe it to be true, especially since he has so many zealous followers. However, one should always bear in mind that this understanding is not a reason to believe it to be true oneself. I believe that most people, in their joy at understanding a very abstract and obscure system, believed at the same time that it had been proven. How kindred spirits Ludwig Feuerbach and Lichtenberg must have felt is particularly evident when one compares the perspectives both thinkers took when considering the relationship between their worldview and practical life. Feuerbach concluded the lectures he gave to a number of students in the winter of 1848 on the “essence of religion” with the words: I "only hope that I have not failed in the task set before me, which I stated in one of the first lectures, namely, the task of turning you from friends of God into friends of humanity, from believers into thinkers, from worshippers into workers, from candidates for the hereafter into students of the here and now, from Christians, who according to their own confession and admission “half animal, half angel,” into human beings, into whole human beings." Anyone who, like Feuerbach, bases their entire worldview on the knowledge of nature and humanity must also reject all tasks and duties in the field of morality that originate from a domain other than the natural dispositions of human beings, or that have a goal other than one that relates entirely to the perceptible world. “My right is my legally recognized drive for happiness; my duty is the drive for happiness of others, which compels me to recognize them.” It is not the prospect of an afterlife that tells me what I should do, but the contemplation of this life. The more energy I expend on fulfilling tasks that relate to the hereafter, the more I deprive myself of my abilities in this world, for which I am solely destined. “Concentration on this world” is therefore what Ludwig Feuerbach demands. We can read similar words in Lichtenberg's writings. But these are mixed with elements that show how little a thinker who is unable to develop his ideas harmoniously within himself succeeds in pursuing an idea to its ultimate consequences. Lichtenberg already demands concentration on this world, but he still intersperses this demand with mental images that point to the hereafter. "I believe that many people forget about their education for heaven, which is for earth. I should think that man would act most wisely if he left the former entirely in its place. For if we have been placed in this position by a wise being, which is beyond doubt, let us do our best in this station and not be blinded by revelations. What man needs to know for his happiness, he knows for certain without any other revelation than that which he possesses by his very nature." Comparisons such as that between Lichtenberg and Feuerbach are significant for the history of the development of worldviews. They show the progress of minds most vividly, because they reveal what the time gap between them has brought about in this progress. Feuerbach went through Hegel's worldview; he drew from it the strength to develop his opposing view in all its aspects. He was no longer troubled by Kant's question: do we really have the right to attribute reality to the world we perceive, or does this world exist only in our mental images? Those who assert the latter can transfer all possible driving forces for human beings to the true world that lies beyond mental images. They can accept a supernatural world order alongside the natural one, as Kant did. But those who, like Feuerbach, declare the perceptible to be the real must reject any supernatural world order. For them, there is no categorical imperative originating from somewhere in the beyond; for them, there are only duties that arise from the natural drives and goals of human beings.

[ 4 ] In order to develop a worldview that stood in such contrast to Hegel's, as Feuerbach did, it took a personality that was as different from Hegel's as his own. Hegel felt at home in the midst of the hustle and bustle of his present life. Mastering the immediate hustle and bustle of the world with his philosophical mind was a wonderful task for him. When he wanted to be relieved of his teaching duties in Heidelberg in order to move to Prussia, he made it clear in his letter of resignation that he was attracted by the prospect of finding a field of activity that would not limit him to mere teaching, but would enable him to intervene in practice. “For him, the prospect of being able to move on to another activity and be needed as he grew older, rather than remaining in the precarious position of lecturing philosophy at a university, must have been of the utmost importance.” Anyone who thinks in this way must be at peace with the form that practical life has taken in his time. He must find the ideas that permeate it reasonable. Only then can he draw the enthusiasm to participate in their development. Feuerbach was not friendly toward the life of his time. He preferred the quiet of a secluded place to the hustle and bustle of what was considered “modern” life in his time. He expresses this clearly: "I will never reconcile myself to city life. From time to time, I move to the city to teach, which I consider, based on the impressions I have already made here, to be good, indeed my duty; but then I must return to rural solitude to study and rest here in the bosom of nature. My next task is to prepare my lectures, as my listeners wish, or my father's papers for printing." From his solitude, Feuerbach believed he was best able to judge what in the form that real life has taken is not natural, but has been brought into it only through human illusion. He considered it his task to purify life of illusions. To do this, he had to distance himself as far as possible from life in these illusions. He sought true life; he could not find it in the form it had taken on through the culture of the time. How sincere he was in his “concentration on the here and now” is shown by a statement he made about the March Revolution. It seemed fruitless to him because the old belief in the hereafter still lived on in the mental images that underpinned it: "The March Revolution was still a child of the Christian faith, albeit an illegitimate one. The constitutionalists believed that the Lord only had to say: let there be freedom! let there be justice! and justice and freedom would be; and the republicans believed that one only had to want a republic in order to bring it into being; they believed, in other words, in the creation of a republic out of nothing. The former transferred the Christian miracles of the world, the latter the Christian miracles of action to the realm of politics." Only a strong personality who carries within himself the harmony of life that man needs can, in the deep discord in which Feuerbach lived with reality, at the same time speak the hymns to reality that he spoke. We hear this strength in words such as these: “In the absence of any prospect of the hereafter, I can only preserve my life and sanity in this world, in the vale of tears that is German, indeed European, politics, by making the present an object of Aristophanic laughter [...]”. But only such a personality could also seek in man himself all the strength that others derive from an external power.

[ 5 ] “God was my first thought, reason my second, man my third and last thought.” This is how Feuerbach describes the path he took from believer to follower of Hegel, and then to his own worldview. The same could have been said of the thinker who, in 1834, produced one of the most influential books of the century, The Life of Jesus. That thinker was David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874). Feuerbach began with an examination of the human soul and found that it strives to project its own essence into the world and worship it as a divine primordial being. He attempted a psychological explanation of how the concept of God arises. Strauss's views were based on a similar goal, but unlike Feuerbach, he did not take the path of the psychologist, but that of the historian. And he did not place the concept of God in general, in the comprehensive sense in which Feuerbach did, at the center of his reflections, but rather the Christian concept of Jesus as the God-man. He wanted to show how humanity had arrived at this mental image in the course of history. The Hegelian worldview was convinced that the divine primordial being was revealed in the human spirit. Strauss had also adopted this view. But the divine idea cannot be realized in its entirety in a single human being. The individual human being is always only an imperfect imprint of the divine spirit. What one person lacks in perfection, another has. If one looks at the whole human race, one will find in it, distributed among countless individuals, all the perfections that are characteristic of divinity. The human race as a whole is thus God incarnate, the God-man. This, in Strauss's opinion, is the thinker's concept of Jesus. From this point of view, Strauss approaches the critique of the Christian concept of the God-man. What, according to this idea, is distributed among the entire human race, Christianity attributes to a personality who is said to have actually existed at one time in the course of history. “When conceived in an individual, a God-man, the characteristics and functions that church doctrine attributes to Christ contradict each other; in the human race, they coincide.” Based on careful research into the historical foundations of the Gospels, Strauss seeks to prove that the mental images of Christianity are the result of religious imagination. Religion had vaguely sensed the religious truth that the human species was the God-man, but had not expressed it in clear terms, instead giving it expression in a poetic form, in a myth. The story of the Son of God is a myth in which the idea of humanity was poetically shaped long before it was recognized by thinkers in the form of pure thought. From this point of view, everything wonderful in Christian history can be explained without resorting to the trivial view that miracles are deliberate deceptions or frauds, which the founder of the religion either resorted to himself in order to make the greatest possible impression with his teachings, or which the apostles devised for this purpose. Another view, which sought to see all kinds of natural processes in miracles, was also eliminated. Miracles presented themselves as a poetic garment for real truths. How humanity rises from its finite interests, everyday life, to its infinite ones, to the knowledge of divine truth and reason: this is what the myth depicts in the image of the dying and resurrecting Savior. The finite dies in order to be resurrected as the infinite. Strauss takes an even more radical approach in his book “The Christian Doctrine in its Historical Development and in its Struggle with Modern Science,” published in 1840-41. Here he is concerned with dissolving Christian dogmas from their poetic form into the intellectual truths that underlie them. He now emphasizes the incompatibility of modern consciousness with that which adheres to the old pictorial-mythical representations of truth. “So let the believer let the knower, and the knower let the believer, go their separate ways; we will leave them their faith, and they will leave us our philosophy; and if the ultra-pious succeed in excluding us from their church, we will consider this a gain. Enough false attempts at mediation have now been made; only the separation of opposites can lead us forward.” Strauss's views had caused tremendous excitement. It was bitterly felt that the modern worldview was no longer content to meet basic religious ideas in general, but that it wanted to eliminate the “inconsistency” that Lichtenberg had once said consisted in the fact that “human nature had even nestled under the yoke of a book. One cannot imagine anything more appalling,” he continues, "and this example alone shows what a helpless creature man is in concreto, I mean enclosed in this two-legged vial of earth, water, and salt. If it were possible for reason to ever build itself a despotic throne, then a man who seriously wanted to refute the Copernican system through the authority of a book would have to be hanged. The fact that a book says it is from God is no proof that it is from God; but that our reason is from God is certain, however one may take the word God. Where reason reigns, it punishes only with the natural consequences of transgression or with instruction, if instruction can be called punishment. The fact that the mythical beliefs of the time were not yet ready to be transformed into pure thought by the majority of the population and the political powers that be was demonstrated by the fate of Strauss. He was removed from his position as a tutor at the Tübingen seminary as a result of “The Life of Jesus”; and when he then took up a professorship in theology at the University of Zurich, the rural population came with flails to make the destroyer of the myth impossible and force him into retirement.

[ 6 ] Far beyond the goal that Strauss set himself, another thinker went from the standpoint of the new worldview in his criticism of the old: Bruno Bauer. The view that Feuerbach represents, that the essence of man is also his highest essence and that every other higher essence is only an illusion that he has created in his own image and placed above himself, is also found in Bruno Bauer, but in a grotesque form. He describes how the human ego came to create an illusory counter-image for itself, in terms that clearly show that they arose not from a need for a loving understanding of religious consciousness, as in Strauss, but from a joy in destruction. He says that the “all-devouring ego was horrified by itself; it did not dare to conceive of itself as everything and as the most universal power, i.e., it remained the religious spirit and completed its alienation by opposing its universal power as something foreign to itself and working in fear and trembling for its preservation and bliss in the face of this power.” Bruno Bauer is a personality who sets out to critically test his spirited thinking on everything that exists. He took his conviction that thinking is called upon to penetrate the essence of things from Hegel's worldview. But unlike Hegel, he is not inclined to allow thought to express itself in a result, in a structure of ideas. His thinking is not productive, but critical. He would have felt limited by a specific thought, by a positive idea. He does not want to define the critical power of thought by starting from a thought as a specific point of view, as Hegel did. “Criticism is, on the one hand, the final act of a particular philosophy, which must free itself from a positive certainty that still limits its true generality—and, on the other hand, the prerequisite without which it cannot rise to the ultimate generality of self-consciousness.” This is the creed of the “critique” of worldview to which Bruno Bauer professed. The “critique” does not believe in thoughts or ideas, but only in thinking. “Man has now been found,” Bauer triumphs. For man is now bound by nothing more than his thinking. It is not human to devote oneself to anything outside of humanity, but to process everything in the crucible of thought. Man should not be the image of another being, but above all “human,” and he can only do so by making himself so through his thinking. The thinking human being is the true human being. It is not something external, not religion, law, the state, legislation, etc., that can make humans human, but their thinking alone.

[ 7 ] What Feuerbach declared to be the highest essence of man, which Bruno Bauer claimed had only been found through criticism as a worldview: to view “man” completely impartially and without preconditions, is the task that Max Stirner (1806-1856) set himself in his book “The Ego and Its Own,” published in 1845. In this man, thinking has borne one of its ripest fruits. He was thus able to truly attain freedom through thought, because he had the courage and strength to fight to the end against the illusions that had made man dependent. Through Stirner, who was truly a free thinker, one can see how great man's tendency is to throw himself into the arms of some power or other. Does Bruno Bauer, for example, not believe that he can completely liberate man by wanting to make him a thinking human being? But does he not thereby make him dependent again, namely on thinking? Man should not be a slave to religion, law, state, legislation, etc.; he should not even produce a certain structure of thought through his thinking, so that he is not dependent on it. But they should surrender themselves unreservedly to thinking, make themselves slaves to it. To Stirner, anyone who surrenders to a power, who allows themselves to be determined by it, appears to be possessed. And it is quite irrelevant whether people are possessed by an infinite divine primordial being or by the being they have created as their own. Stirner finds: "With the power of despair, Feuerbach grasps the entire content of Christianity, not to throw it away, no, to seize it, to pull it, the long-awaited, ever-elusive, from heaven with a final effort and keep it with him forever. Is this not a grasp of last-ditch desperation, a grasp of life and death, and is it not at the same time the Christian longing and desire for the hereafter? The hero does not want to enter the hereafter, but to draw the hereafter to himself and force it to become the here and now! And since then, has not the whole world been crying out, with more or less awareness, that the “here and now” is what matters, and that heaven must come to earth and be experienced here already? Stirner vehemently contradicts Feuerbach's view: "The highest being is indeed the being of man, but precisely because it is his being and not himself, it remains all the same whether we see it outside of him and regard it as ‘God,’ or find it within him and call it ‘the being of man’ or 'man. I am neither God nor man, neither the highest being nor my being, and therefore it is essentially all the same whether I think of the being within me or outside me. Yes, we really always think of the highest essence in both otherworldliness, internal and external, at the same time, because according to Christian belief, the "Spirit of God is also ‘our spirit’ and ‘dwells in us’. He dwells in heaven and dwells in us. We poor creatures are merely his ‘dwelling place,’ and if Feuerbach destroys his heavenly dwelling place and forces him to move in with us, bag and baggage, then we, his earthly lodgings, will become very crowded." As long as the individual human ego still exerts some power on which it feels dependent, it does not see itself from its own point of view, but from that of this foreign power. It does not possess itself; it is possessed by this power. The religious person says: There is a divine primordial being, and man is its image. He is possessed by the divine archetype. The Hegelian says: There is a general world reason, and this is realized in the world in order to reach its peak in the human ego. The ego is therefore possessed by world reason. Feuerbach says that there is a human essence, and each individual is an individual image of this essence. Each individual is therefore possessed by the “essence of humanity.” For only the individual human being really exists, not the “generic concept of humanity” that Feuerbach substitutes for the divine being. So when the individual human being places the “human species” above himself, he surrenders himself to an illusion just as much as when he feels dependent on a personal God. For Feuerbach, therefore, the commandments that Christians believe to have been instituted by God and therefore consider binding become commandments that exist because they correspond to the general idea of humanity. Humans judge themselves morally by asking themselves: Do my actions as an individual correspond to what is appropriate to the essence of universal humanity? For Feuerbach says: “If the essence of man is the highest essence of man, then in practice the highest and first law must also be man's love for man. Homo homini deus est.” “Ethics is in and of itself a divine power.” “Moral relationships are truly religious relationships in themselves. Life is, in its essential substantial relationships, thoroughly divine in nature.” “Everything that is right, true, and good has its sanctification everywhere in itself, in its properties.” “Friendship is and should be sacred, property is sacred, marriage is sacred, the welfare of every human being is sacred, but sacred in and of itself.” So there are universal human powers; ethics is one of them. It is sacred in and of itself; the individual must submit to it. This individual should not want what he wants of his own accord, but what is in accordance with sacred ethics. He is possessed by ethics. Stirner characterizes this view: “For the God of the individual, the God of all, namely ‘man,’ has now been exalted: ‘it is, after all, the highest of all for us to be human.’ But since no one can fully become what the idea of ‘man’ signifies, man remains for the individual a sublime beyond, an unattained highest being, a God.” But such a supreme being is also the thinking that has made criticism into a worldview, into a god. Stirner therefore cannot stop short of it either. "The critic fears becoming dogmatic or establishing dogmas. Of course, this would make him the opposite of a critic, a dogmatist; he would, as he is good as a critic, now become evil, [...] etc. — “No dogma,” that is his dogma. For the critic remains on the same ground as the dogmatist, that of thought. Like the latter, he always starts from a thought, but he differs in that he gives up on maintaining the fundamental thought in the thought process, thus not allowing it to become stable. He only asserts the thought process against belief in thought, progress in thought against stagnation in it. No thought is safe from criticism, since it is thought or the thinking mind itself.“ ”I am no opponent of criticism, i.e., I am no dogmatist, and I do not feel affected by the critic's teeth, with which he tears the dogmatist to pieces. If I were a “dogmatist,” I would place a dogma, i.e., a thought, an idea, a principle, at the top and complete this as a “systematizer” by expanding it into a system, i.e., a structure of thought. If, on the other hand, I were a critic, namely an opponent of the dogmatist, I would wage the battle of free thought against servile thought, defending thinking against the thought. But I am neither a champion of a thought nor of thinking." Every thought is also generated by the individual self of a single person, even if it is the thought of one's own being. And when a person believes they recognize their own self and somehow wants to follow its essence, they already make it dependent on this essence. I may conceive whatever I want: as soon as I define myself conceptually, I make myself a slave to what the concept, the definition, provides me. Hegel made the self an appearance of reason, i.e., he made it dependent on it. But none of these dependencies can apply to the self, because they are all taken from it. They are therefore based on the self deceiving itself. In truth, it is not dependent. For everything on which it is supposed to be dependent must first be created by itself. It must take something from itself in order to place it above itself as a “specter.” “Man, your head is haunted; you have a screw loose! You imagine great things and conjure up a whole world of gods that is there for you, a realm of spirits to which you are called, an ideal that beckons you. You have a fixed idea!” In truth, no thought can approach what lives in me as the ego. I can reach everything with my thinking, but I must stop before my self. I cannot think that, I can only experience it. I am not will; I am not idea, just as I am not the image of a deity. I make all other things comprehensible to myself through my thinking. I live the self. I do not need to define or describe myself further, for I experience myself in every moment. I only need to describe what I do not experience directly, what is outside of me. It is absurd that I, who always have myself as a thing, should also want to grasp myself as a thought, as an idea. When I have a stone in front of me, I try to explain to myself through my thinking what this stone is. I do not need to explain to myself what I myself am, for I live it. Stirner responds aptly to an attack on his book: "The Unique One is a word, and with a word one should be able to think something, a word should have a thought content. But The Egoist is a thoughtless word; it has no thought content. What, then, is its content, if it is not thought? It is something that cannot exist a second time and therefore cannot be expressed; for if it could be expressed, truly and completely expressed, it would exist a second time, it would exist in its “expression.” Because the content of the Only One is not a thought, it is therefore also unthinkable and unspeakable, but because it is unspeakable, this complete phrase is at the same time not a phrase. Only when nothing is said about you and you are only named are you recognized as you. As long as something is said about you, you are only recognized as that something (human, spirit, Christian, etc.). But the Unique One says nothing, because he is only a name, only saying that you are you and nothing other than you, that you are a single “you” and yourself. Through this, you are without predicate, but at the same time without purpose, without profession, without law, etc." (See Stirner's “Kleine Schriften” [Small Writings], published by J. H. Mackay, p. 116.) As early as 1842, in an essay in the Rheinische Zeitung, which is one of the most important works ever produced in the field of education, Stirner clearly stated that thinking and knowledge cannot penetrate to the core of personality. He therefore considers it a false educational principle when “Kleine Schriften,” $. 5ff.). He therefore considers it a false principle of education if this core of personality is not made the center of attention, but rather knowledge in a one-sided manner. "Knowledge that is not purified and concentrated in such a way that it impels one to will, or in other words, knowledge that only burdens me as something I have and possess, instead of having gone completely together with me, so that the freely mobile self, unencumbered by any trailing possessions, traverses the world with a fresh mind—such knowledge, which has not become personal, provides a miserable preparation for life. "If it is the urge of our time, after freedom of thought has been achieved, to pursue it to perfection, through which it turns into freedom of will, in order to realize the latter as the principle of a new epoch, then the ultimate goal of education can no longer be knowledge, but the will born of knowledge, and the eloquent expression of what it must strive for is: the personal or free human being.“ ”As in certain other spheres, so too in the educational sphere, freedom is not allowed to break through, the power of opposition is not allowed to have its say: submissiveness is desired. Only formal and material training is aimed at, and only scholars emerge from the menageries of the humanists, only “useful citizens” from those of the realists, both of whom are nothing but submissive people.“ ”Knowledge must die in order to be reborn as will and to recreate itself anew every day as a free person." The source of what an individual does can only lie within that individual. Moral duties cannot be commandments given to humans from somewhere else, but rather goals that they set for themselves. It is a delusion when humans believe that they do something because they are following a commandment of a universal sacred ethic. They do it because the life of their ego drives them to do so. I do not love my neighbor because I am obeying a sacred commandment of charity, but because my ego draws me to my neighbor. I am not supposed to love him; I want to love him. What people have wanted, they have imposed on themselves as commandments. This is the point at which Stirner is most easily misunderstood. He does not deny moral action. He merely denies moral commandments. How people act when they understand themselves correctly will automatically result in a moral world order. Moral precepts are a specter, a fixed idea. They establish something that people come to on their own when they surrender completely to their nature. Moralists naturally object: Are there not criminals? Are they allowed to act according to what their nature dictates? These moralists foresee general chaos if moral precepts are not sacred to humans. One must answer them in Stirner's spirit: Are there not also diseases in nature? Are they not produced by eternal, iron laws just like everything healthy? But does that mean we cannot distinguish the sick from the healthy? Just as it would never occur to a reasonable person to count the sick as healthy because they are produced by the same laws of nature, it did not occur to Stirner to count the immoral as moral because it arises in the same way when the individual is left to his own devices. But what distinguishes Stirner from the moralists is his conviction that in human life, when individuals are left to their own devices, morality will prevail just as health prevails in nature. He believes in the moral nobility of human nature, in the free development of morality from within individuals; moralists do not believe in this nobility; therefore, they degrade the nature of the individual to a slave of general commandments, the means of discipline of human action. These “moral people” must have much evil and wickedness in the depths of their souls, because they demand moral precepts; they must be quite unloving, because they want to have love, which should arise in them as a free impulse, commanded by a precept. And if seven years ago, in a serious work, it was still possible to say reproachfully: “Max Stirner's work ‘The Ego and Its Own’ smashed spirit and humanity, law and state, truth and virtue as idols of intellectual slavery and freely professes: ‘Nothing is above me!’” (Heinrich von Treitschke, “German History,” Part 5, p. 424), this is only proof of how far today's awareness of the times is still removed from the understanding of the man who saw the human individual as something so noble, sublime, unique, and free that not even the flight of the world of ideas is capable of reaching it. In the second half of the century, Max Stirner was all but forgotten. It is thanks to the efforts of John Henry Mackay that we now have a picture of his life and character. In his book “Max Stirner: His Life and Work” (Berlin 1898, Schuster und Loeffler), he compiled everything that years of searching had yielded as material for characterizing the “boldest and most consistent thinker.”

[ 8 ] This thinker was forgotten for decades because the means to understand him could only be used in the right way in the second half of the century. The development of worldview started from an illusory otherworldliness. Stirner was the first to completely overcome this otherworldliness. Like a shot from a pistol, the free, sovereign individual appears on the scene of worldview development through him. He recognized this through brilliant intuition. It was not everyone's cup of tea to reflect on this brilliant intuition. In the second half of the century, however, something intervened in the development of worldviews that methodically and vividly led to Stirner's view: scientific ideas. The first half of the nineteenth century gave birth to worldviews based on idealism. When a bridge to natural science is built, as in the case of Schelling, Lorenz Oken (1779-1851), and Henrik Stejfens (1773-1845), it is done from the perspective of the idealistic worldview and in the interest of that worldview. The time is so unripe for making scientific ideas fruitful for the worldview that Jean Lamarck's ingenious view of the development of the most perfect organisms from the simplest, which came to light in 1809, has been completely ignored, and that when Geoffroy de St. Hilaire defended the idea of a general natural relationship between all forms of organisms in 1830 in his battle against Cuvier, it was Goethe's genius that enabled him to grasp the significance of this idea. The numerous scientific discoveries that the first half of the century also brought forth only became fruitful for the development of worldviews in the second half, namely after Charles Darwin had opened up entirely new perspectives for the understanding of the living world in 1859. They can therefore only be discussed in the second volume.