286 Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume 1
different than religious believers but only believe in other gods:^12
reason, truth, man, the good, justice, humanity, freedom.^13
This is a crucial point in Stirner’s line of thought but at the
same time one that is hard to fathom. What, exactly, is it that
Stirner criticises? What is an “ideal”? As I understand Stirner, it
is not attempting to achieve something in general he finds prob-
lematic. What is it he finds problematic? The problem, if there is
one, becomes especially poignant when failure to live up to the
ideal is inevitable: since it is not possible to be reason, the good,
humanity, or, for that matter, God, my life, if I made these ideals
central to it, would, according to Stirner, always be a failure.^14 But
what makes failure so bad? What Stirner finds problematic is, as
I understand him, hence rather one possible attitude to failure:
when I relate to myself as to a possible object of disrespect and
self-contempt.
One way of explaining this is by means of an example. A good
one could be one in which the ideals are ideals of etiquette. I try
to become a refined person, but if those ideals of refinement I
have adopted are impossible to live up to, I will always, though
to different degrees, see myself as vulgar and shabby. And even
if they are not impossible to live up to, and even if I succeed in
living up to them, this will not be a permanent accomplishment:
I will always need to keep up this refinement, against the risk of
sinking into vulgarity. Here we have a case where the ideals ap-
parently create the possibility of refinement but in fact only create
alienation.
Of course, a more sophisticated form of etiquette will not make
its distinctions in terms that are obviously empty and vain. On the
contrary, taking clothes and superficial manners to be essential to
etiquette could be seen as vulgar. So the more sophisticated form
of etiquette will make its distinctions in other terms, for example
moral ones. The alienation is created when I relate my distance
to the moral ideal to myself. Hurting somebody is thus here un-
derstood not as something I do to her but as something I do to
myself: I fail to live up to the ideal. And doing good to her is not
something I do for her sake but for the sake of the good, that is
for the sake of the ideal. Stirner writes: