The German Ideology - Negroes and Mongols
The Moderns
C. The Impurely Impure History of Spirits
a) Negroes and Mongols
We now go back to the beginning of the “unique” historical scheme and nomenclature. The child becomes the Negro, the youth — the Mongol. See “The Economy of the Old Testament”.
“The historical reflection on our mongolhood, which I shall include episodically at this point, I present without any claim to thoroughness or even to authenticity, but solely because it seems to me that it can contribute to clarifying the rest” (p. 87).
Saint Max tries to “clarify” for himself his phrases about the child and the youth by giving them world-embracing names, and he tries to “clarify” these world-embracing names by replacing them with his phrases about the child and the youth. “The Negroid character represents antiquity, dependence on things” (child); “the Mongoloid character — the period of dependence on thoughts, the Christian epoch” (the youth). (Cf. “The Economy of the Old Testament”.) “The following words are reserved for the future: I am owner of the world of things, and I am owner of the world of thoughts” (pp. 87, 88). This “future” has already happened once, on page 20, in connection with the man, and it will occur again later, beginning with page 226.
First “historical reflection without claim to thoroughness or even to authenticity": Since Egypt is part of Africa where Negroes live, it follows that “included” “in the Negro era” (p. 88) are the “campaigns of Sesostris”, which never took place, and the “significance of Egypt” (the significance it had also at the time of the Ptolemics, Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt, Mohammed All, the Eastern question, the pamphlets of Duvergier de Haurannes, etc.), land of North Africa in general” (and therefore of Carthage, Hannibal’s campaign against Rome, and “easily also”, the significance of Syracuse and Spain, the Vandals, Tertuilian, the Moors, AI Hussein Abu Ali Ben Abdallah Ibn Sina, piratical states, the French in Algeria, Abd-el-Kader, Père Enfantin and the font. new toads of the Charivari) (p. 88). Consequently, Stirner clarifies the campaigns of Sesostris, etc., by transferring them to the Negro era, and he clarifies the Negro era by “episodically including” it as a historical illustration of his unique thoughts “about our childhood years”.
Second “historical reflection": “To the Mongoloid era belong the campaigns of the Huns and Mongols up to the Russians” (and Wasserpolaken; thus here again the campaigns of the Huns and Mongols, together with the Russians, are “clarified” by their inclusion in the “Mongoloid era”, and the “Mongoloid era” — by pointing out that it is the era of the phrase “dependence on thoughts”, which we have already encountered in connection with the youth.
Third “historical reflection":
In the Mongoloid era the “value of my ego cannot possibly be put at a high level because the hard diamond of the non-ego is too high in price, because it is still too gritty and impregnable for it to be absorbed and consumed by my ego. On the contrary, people are simply exceptionally busy crawling about on this static world, this substance, like parasitic animalcules on a body from whose juices they extract nourishment, but nevertheless do not devour the body. It is the bustling activity of noxious insects, the industriousness of Mongols. Among the Chinese indeed everything remains as of old, etc.... Therefore” (because among the Chinese everything remains as of old) “in our Mongol era every change has only been reformatory and corrective, and not destructive, devouring or annihilating. The substance, the object remains. All our industriousness is only the activity of ants and the jumping of fleas ... juggling on the tightrope of the objective”, etc. (p. 88. Cf. Hegel, Philosophie der Geschichte, pp. 113, 118, 119 (unsoftened substance). p. 140, etc., where China is understood as “substantiality”).
We learn here, therefore, that in the true Caucasian era people will be guided by the maxim that the earth, “substance”, the “object”, the “static” has to be devoured, “consumed”, “annihilated”, “absorbed”, “destroyed”, and along with the earth the solar system that is inseparable from it. World-devouring “Stirner” has already introduced us to the “reformatory or corrective activity” of the Mongols as the youth’s and Christian’s “plans for the salvation and correction of the world” on page 36. Thus we have still not advanced a step. It is characteristic of the entire “unique” conception of history that the highest stage of this Mongol activity earns the title of “scientific” — from which already now the conclusion can be drawn, which Saint Max later tells us, that the culmination of the Mongolian heaven is the Hegelian kingdom of spirits.
Fourth “historical reflection”. The world on which the Mongols crawl about is now transformed by means of a “flea jump” into the “positive”, this into the “precept”, and, with the help of a paragraph on page 89, the precept becomes “morality”. “Morality appears in its first form as custom” — hence it conies forward as a person, but in a trice it becomes transformed into a sphere:
“To act in accordance with the morals and customs of one’s country means here” (i.e., in the sphere of morality) “to be moral....... Therefore” (because this occurs in the sphere of morality as a custom) “pure, moral behaviour in the most straightforward form is practised in ... China! “
Saint Max is unfortunate in his examples. On page 116 in just the same way he attributes to the North Americans the “religion of honesty”. He regards the two most rascally nations on earth, the patriarchal swindlers — the Chinese, and the civilised swindlers — the Yankees, as “straightforward”, “moral” and “honest”. If he had looked up his crib he could have found the North Americans classed as swindlers on page 81 of the Philosophie der Geschichte and the Chinese ditto on page 130.
“One” — that friend of the saintly worthy man — now helps him to arrive at innovation, and from this an “and” brings him back to custom, and thus the material is prepared for achieving a masterstroke in the
Fifth historical reflection: “There is in fact no doubt that by means of custom man protects himself against the importunity of things, of the world” — for example, from hunger;
“and” — as quite naturally follows from this —
“founds a world of his own” — which “Stirner” has need of now —
“in which alone he feels in his native element and at home”, — “alone”, after he has first by “custom” made himself “at home” in the existing “world” —
“i.e., builds himself a heaven” — because China is called the Celestial Empire.
“For indeed heaven has no other significance than that of being the real homeland of man” — in this context, however, it signifies the imagined unreality of the real homeland —
“where nothing alien any longer prevails upon him”, i.e., where what is his own prevails upon him as something alien, and all the rest of the old story. “Or rather”, to use Saint Bruno’s words, or “it is easily possible”, to use Saint Max’s words, that this proposition should read as follows:
Stirner’s proposition without claim to thoroughness or even to authenticity
“There is in fact no doubt that by means of custom man protects himself against the importunity of things, of the world, and founds a world of his own, in which alone he feels in his native element and at home, i.e., builds himself a heaven.
For indeed ‘heaven’ has no other significance than that of being the real homeland of man, where nothing alien any longer prevails upon him and rules over him, no earthly influence any longer estranges him from himself, in short, where earthly dross is thrown aside and the struggle against the world has come to an end. where, therefore, nothing is forbidden him any more” (p. 89).
Clarified proposition
“There is in fact no doubt” that because China is called the Celestial Empire, because “Stirner” happens to be speaking of China and as he is “accustomed” by means of ignorance “to protect himself against the importunity of things, ,f the world, and to found a world of his own, in which alone he feels in his native element and at home” — therefore he “builds himself a heaven” out of the Chinese Celestial Empire. “For indeed” the importunity of the world, of things, “has no other significance than that of being the real” hell of the unique, “in which” everything “prevails upon him and rules over him” as something “alien”, but which he is able to transform into a “heaven” by “estranging himself” from all “earthly influences”, historical facts and connections, and hence no longer thinks them strange; “in short”, it is a sphere “where the earthly”, the historical “dross is thrown aside”, and where Stirner “does not find” in the “end” “of the world” any more “struggle” — and thereby everything has been said.
Sixth “historical reflection”. On page 90, Stirner imagines that
“in China everything is provided for; no matter what happens, the Chinese always knows how he should behave, and he has no need to decide according to circumstances; no unforeseen event will overthrow his celestial calm”.
Nor any British bombardment either — he knew exactly “how he should behave”, particularly in regard to the unfamiliar steamships and shrapnel-bombs.
Saint Max extracted that from Hegel’s Philosophie der Geschichte, pages 118 and 127, to which, of course, he had to add something unique, in order to achieve his reflection as given above.
“Consequently,” continues Saint Max, “mankind climbs the first rung of the ladder of education by means of custom, and since it imagines that by gaining culture, it has gained heaven, the realm of culture or second nature, it actually mounts the first rung of the heavenly ladder” (p. 90).
“Consequently”, i.e., because Hegel begins history with China, and because “the Chinese does not lose his equanimity”, “Stirner” transforms mankind into a person who “mounts the first rung of the ladder of culture” and indeed does so “by means of custom”, because China has no other meaning for Stirner than that of being the embodiment of “custom”. Now it is only a question for our zealot against the holy of transforming the “ladder” into a “heavenly ladder”, since China is also called the Celestial Empire. “Since mankind imagines” (“wherefrom” does Stirner “know everything that” mankind imagines, see Wigand, page 189) — and this ought to have been proved by Stirner — firstly that it transforms “culture” into the “heaven of culture”, and secondly that it transforms the “heaven of culture” into the “culture of heaven” — (an alleged notion on the part of mankind which appears on page 91 as a notion of Stirner’s and thereby receives its correct expression) — “so it actually mounts the first rung of the heavenly ladder”. Since it imagines that it mounts the first rung of the heavenly ladder — so — it mounts it actually! “Since” the “youth” “imagines” that he becomes pure spirit, he does actually become such! See the “youth” and the “Christian” on the transition from the world of things to the world of the spirit, where the simple formula for this heavenly ladder of “unique” ideas already occurs.
Seventh historical reflection, page 90. “If Mongolism” (it follows immediately after the heavenly ladder, whereby “Stirner”, through the alleged notion on the part of mankind, was able to ascertain the existence of a spiritual essence [Wesen]), “if Mongolism has established the existence of spiritual beings [Wesen]” (rather — if “Stirner” has established his fancy about the spiritual essence of the Mongols), “then the Caucasians have fought for thousands of years against these spiritual beings, in order to get to the bottom of them”. (The youth, who becomes a man and “tries all the time” “to penetrate behind thoughts”, the Christian, who “tries all the time” ‘,to explore the depths of divinity”.) Since the Chinese have noted the existence of God knows what spiritual beings (“Stirner” does not note a single one, apart from his heavenly ladder) — so for thousands of years the Caucasians have to wrangle with “these” Chinese “spiritual beings”; moreover, two lines below Stirner puts on record that they actually “stormed the Mongolian heaven, the tien”, and continues: “When will they destroy this heaven, when will they finally become actual Caucasians and find themselves?”
Here we have the negative unity, already seen earlier as man, now appearing as the “actual Caucasian”, i.e., not Negroid, not Mongolian, but as the Caucasian Caucasian. This latter, therefore, as a concept, as essence, is here separated from the actual Caucasians, is counterposed to them as the “ideal of the Caucasian”, as a ,,vocation” in which they should “find themselves”, as a “destiny”, a “task”, as “the holy”, as “the holy” Caucasian, “the perfect” Caucasian, “who indeed” is the Caucasian “in heaven — God”.
“In the sedulous struggle of the Mongolian race, men had built a heaven” — so “Stirner” believes (p. 91), forgetting that actual Mongols are much more occupied with sheep than with heaven — “when the people of the Caucasian stock, so long as they ... have to do with heaven ... undertook the business of storming heaven.” Had built a heaven, when ... so long as they have... [they] undertook. The unassuming “historical reflection” is here expressed in a comecutio temporumwhich also does not “lay claim” to classic form “or even” to grammatical correctness; the construction of the sentences corresponds to the construction of history. “Stirner’s” “claims” “are restricted to this” and “thereby achieve their final goal”.
Eighth historical reflection, which is the reflection of reflections, the alpha and omega of the whole of Stirner’s history: Jacques le bonhomme, as we have pointed out from the beginning, sees in all the movement of nations that has so far taken place merely a sequence of heavens (p. 91), which can also be expressed as follows: successive generations of the Caucasian race up to the present day did nothing but squabble about the concept of morality (p. 92) and “their activity has been restricted to this” (p. 91). If they had got out of their heads this unfortunate morality, this apparition, they would have achieved something; as it was, they achieved nothing, absolutely nothing, and have to allow Saint Max to set them a task as if they were schoolboys. It is completely in accordance with his view of history that at the end (p. 92) he conjures up speculative philosophy so that “in it this heavenly kingdom, the kingdom of spirits and spectres, should find its proper order” — and that in a later passage speculative philosophy should be conceived as the “perfect kingdom of spirits”.
Why it is that for those who regard history in the Hegelian manner the result of all preceding history was finally bound to be the kingdom of spirits perfected and brought into order in speculative philosophy — the solution of this secret “Stirner” could have very simply found by recourse to Hegel himself. To arrive at this result ‘,the concept of spirit must be taken as the basis and then it must be shown that history is the process of the spirit itself” (Geschichte derPhilosophie, III, p. 91). After the “concept of spirit” has been imposed on history as its basis, it is very easy, of course, to “show” that it is to be discovered everywhere, and then to make this as a process “find its proper order”.
After making everything “find its proper order”, Saint Max can now exclaim with enthusiasm: “To desire to win freedom for the spirit, that is Mongolism”, etc. (cf. p. 17: “To bring to light pure thought, etc. — that is the joy of the youth”, etc.), and can declare hypocritically: “Hence it is obvious that Mongolism ... represents non-sensuousness and unnaturalness”, etc. — when he ought to have said: it is obvious that the Mongol is only the disguised youth who, being the negation of the world of things, can also be called unnaturalness”, “non-sensuousness”, etc.
We have again reached the point where the “youth” can pass into the “man": “But who will transform the spirit into its nothing? He, who by means of the spirit represented nature as the futile, the finite, the transitory” (i.e., imagined it as such — and, according to page 16 et seq., this was done by the youth, later the Christian, then the Mongol, then the Mongoloid Caucasian, but properly speaking only by idealism), “he alone can also degrade the spirit” (namely ‘it his imagination) “to the same futility” (therefore the Christian, etc.? No, exclaims “Stirner” resorting to a similar trick as on pages 19-20 in the case of the man). “I can do it, each of you can do it who operates and creates” (in his imagination) “as the unrestricted ego”, “in a word, the egoist can do it” (p. 93), i.e., the man, the Caucasian Caucasian, who therefore is the perfect Christian, the true Christian, the holy one, the embodiment of the holy.
Before dealing with the further nomenclature, we also “should like at this point to include an historical reflection” on the origin of Stirner’s “historical reflection about our Mongolism”; our reflection differs, however, from Stirner’s ‘n that it definitely “lays claim to thoroughness and authenticity”. His whole historical reflection, just as that on the “ancients”, is a concoction out of Hegel.
The Negroid state is conceived as “the child” because Hegel says on page 89 of his Philosophie der Geschichte:
“Africa is the country of the childhood of history.” “in defining the African” (Negroid) “spirit we must entirety discard the category of universality” (p. 90) — i.e., although the child or the Negro has ideas, he still does not have the idea. “Among the Negroes consciousness has not yet reached a firm objective existence, as for example God, law, in which man would have the perception of his essence” ... “thanks to which, knowledge of an absolute being is totally absent. The Negro represents natural man in all his lack of restraint” (p. 90). “Although they must be conscious of their dependence on the natural” (on things, as “Stirner” says), “this, however, does not lead them to the consciousness of something higher” (p. 91).
Here we meet again all Stirner’s determinations of the child and the Negro — dependence on things, independence of ideas and especially of “the idea”, “the essence”, “the absolute” (holy) “being”, etc.
He found that in Hegel the Mongols and, in particular, the Chinese appear as the beginning of history and since for Hegel, too, history is a history of spirits (but not in such a childish way as with “Stirner”), it goes without saying that the Mongols brought the spirit into history and are the original representatives of everything “sacred”. In particular, on page 110, Hegel describes the “ Mongolian kingdom” (of the Dalai-Lama) as the “ecclesiastical” realm, the “kingdom of theocratic rule”, a “spiritual, religious kingdom” — in contrast to the worldly empire of the Chinese. “Stirner”, of course, has to identify China with the Mongols. In Hegel, on page 140, there even occurs the “Mongolian principle” from which “Stirner” derived his “Mongolism”. Incidentally, if he really wanted to reduce the Mongols to the category of “idealism”, he could have “found established” in the Dalai-Lama system and Buddhism quite different “spiritual beings” from his fragile “heavenly ladder”. But he did not even have time to look properly at Hegel’s Philosophie der Geschichte. The peculiarity and uniqueness of Stirner’s attitude to history consists in the egoist being transformed into a “clumsy” copier of Hegel.
b) Catholicism and Protestantism (Cf. “The Economy of the Old Testament”)
What we here call Catholicism, “Stirner” calls the “Middle Ages”, but as he confuses (as “in everything”) the pious, religious character of the Middle Ages, the religion of the Middle Ages, with the actual, profane Middle Ages in flesh and blood, we prefer to give the matter its right name at once.
“The Middle Ages” were a “lengthy period, in which people were content with the illusion of having the truth” (they did not desire or do anything else), “without seriously thinking about whether one must he true oneself in order to possess the truth”. — “In the Middle Ages people” (that is, the whole of the Middle Ages) “mortified the flesh, in order to become capable of assimilating the holy” (p. 108).
Hegel defines the attitude to the divine in the Catholic church by saying
“that people’s attitude to the absolute was as to something purely external” (Christianity in the form of externality) (Geschichte der Philosophie, Ill, p. 148, and elsewhere). Of course, the individual has to be purified in order to assimilate the truth, but “this also occurs in an external way, through redemptions, fasts, self-flagellations, visits to holy places, pilgrimages” (ibid., p. 140).
“Stirner” makes this transition by saying:
“In the same way, too, as people strain their eyes in order to see a distant object ... so they mortified the flesh, etc.”
Since in “Stirner’s” “book” the Middle Ages are identified with Catholicism, they naturally end with Luther (p. 108). Luther himself is reduced to the following definition, which has already cropped up in connection with the youth, in the conversation with Szeliga and elsewhere:
“Man, if he wants to attain truth, must become as true as truth itself. Only he who already has truth in faith can participate in it.”
Concerning Lutheranism, Hegel says:
“The truth of the gospel exists only in the true attitude to it...... The essential attitude of the spirit exists only for the spirit.... Hence the attitude of the spirit to the content is that although the content is essential, it is equally essential that the holy and consecrating spirit should stand in relation to this content” (Geschichte der Philosophie, III, p. 234). “This then is the Lutheran faith — his” (i.e., man’s) “faith is required of him and it alone can truly be taken into account” (ibid., p. 230). “Luther ... affirms that the divine is divine only insofar as it is apprehended in this subjective spirituality of faith” (ibid., p. 138). “The doctrine of the” (Catholic) “church is truth as existent truth” (Philosophie der Religion, II, p. 331).
“Stirner” continues:
“Accordingly, with Luther the knowledge arises that truth, because it is thought, exists only for the thinking man, and this means that with regard to his object — thought — man must adopt a totally different standpoint, a pious” (per appos.),“scientific standpoint, or that of thinking” (p. 110).
Apart from the repetition which “Stirner” again “includes” here, only the transition from faith to thinking deserves attention. Hegel makes the transition in the following way:
“But this spirit” (namely, the holy and consecrating spirit) “is, secondly, essentially also thinking spirit. Thinking as such must also have its development in it”, etc. ([Geschichte der Philosophie,] p. 234).
“Stirner” continues:
“This thought” (“that I am spirit, spirit alone”) “pervades the history of the Reformation down to the present day” (p. 111).
From the sixteenth century onwards, no other history exists for “Stirner” than the history of the Reformation — and the latter only in the interpretation in which Hegel presents it.
Saint Max has again displayed his gigantic faith. He has again taken as literal truth all the illusions of German speculative philosophy; indeed, he has made them still more speculative, still more abstract. For him there exists only the history of religion and philosophy — and this exists for him only through the medium of Hegel, who with the passage of time has become the universal crib, the reference source for all the latest German speculators about principles and manufacturers of systems.
Catholicism = attitude to truth as thing, child, Negro, the “ancient”.
Protestantism = attitude to truth in the spirit, youth, Mongol, the “modern”.
The whole scheme was superfluous, since all this was already present in the section on “spirit”.
As already mentioned in “The Economy of the Old Testament”, it is now possible to make the child and the youth appear again in new transformations” within Protestantism, as “Stirner” actually does on page 112, where he conceives English, empirical philosophy as the child, in contrast to German, speculative philosophy as the youth. Here again he copies out Hegel, who here, as elsewhere in the “book”, frequently appears as “one”.
“One” — i.e., Hegel — “expelled Bacon from the realm of philosophy.” “And, indeed, what is called English philosophy does not seem to have got any farther than the discoveries made by so-called clear intellects such as Bacon arid Hume” (p. 112).
Hegel expresses this as follows:
“Bacon is in fact the real leader and representative of what is called philosophy in England and beyond which the English have by no means gone as yet” (Geschichte der Philosophie, III, p. 254).
The people whom “Stirner” calls “clear intellects” Hegel (ibid., p. 255) calls “educated men of the world” — Saint Max on one occasion even transforms them into the “simplicity of childish nature”, for the English philosophers have to represent the child. On the same childish grounds Bacon is not allowed to have “concerned himself with theological problems and cardinal propositions”, regardless of what may be said in his writings (particularly De Augmentis Scientiarum, Novum Organum and the Essays). On the other hand, “German thought ... sees life only in cognition itself” (p. 112), for it is the youth. Ecce iterum Crispinus!
How Stirner transforms Descartes into a German philosopher, the reader can see for himself in the “book”, p. 112.
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