Commentary on a passage by Stirner by Carlo Michelstaedter

'Man, your head is haunted; you have bats in your belfry! You're imagining big things and painting for yourself a whole world of gods that is there for you, a haunted realm to which you are called, an ideal that beckons to you. You have a fixed idea! Do not think that I am joking or speaking figuratively when I look upon those who cling to something higher, and, since this includes the vast majority, almost the whole human world, as veritable fools, fools in a madhouse. What, then, is called a "fixed idea"?'

Max Stirner, the sad philosopher of anarchy, asks this question, and does not think that those fixed ideas bend man not because he is compelled by something that is outside him, but because he loves them. And if this love is not a necessity, it does not mean that outside of it there is no necessity. It is a part of the unified love, a perpetual reason for life, a perpetual necessity that is expressed in us, in all our desires, as in every beast, as in every plant, as in any part of nature. Our will is nothing but the act of this necessity passed through the "necessary" distance of our soul. And what about freedom? And what about free will then? ... All illusions for those who know no other state but slavery, to which therefore slavery does not exist. Such are the beasts. And so men believe in free will as they have settled into slavery so as to proclaim the only truth, the only love the chain that binds them to the wrists and the jailer - as they are beasts.

Whoever leaves this illusion immediately feels the weight of the yoke, feels the desperate pain of slavery. He could annihilate himself and be free in death. But before annihilating himself he must materially annihilate himself morally, killing the affections that bind him ... but here is the supreme mockery of the inexorable necessity. He cannot dissolve what he did not tie himself to. - I also want freedom, and I will be able to reach it ... or I will succumb. - And if I can no longer buy the illusion of freedom at the price of "enmity", nor can I stretch my back over a mountain peak irradiated by the sun, raise my eyes to the sky and contemplate, I want and can shape my life like a 'work of art, to feel in everything the infinite beauty of nature (in the broadest sense) and of the "first engine", as Leonardo da Vinci says, and to draw from every vision from every happy or sad feeling an exaltation of strength , an increase in my individuality and an increase in my vitality, and escape the necessity of things, idealizing them, ideally mastering them.

But sometimes I feel weak in the face of this ambitious dream, but free from what is commonly called ambition, a dream that does not give joy to me and to those who loved in me not the "man who lives" - that is, the one that only family members love, but the personality that transcends the petty terms of life ... I sometimes feel weak and small, and I see with horror the "animal transport" train that warns me that it should take me to the bourgeois world, triumphantly stupid ...

This short text shows Michelstaedter's own take on anarcho-egoism. Not at all unfamiliar to Stirner, but whereas Stirner is a sort of optimistic nihilist, seeing the world as his playground, a sort of "philosophy of enjoyment", Michelstaedter's egoistic vision is more pessimistic, taking a bit from Schopenhauer as well.