Stirner

Max Stirner

Max Stirner wrote one strange and explosive book, and it has unsettled philosophy ever since. The Ego and His Own carries the Young Hegelian critique of religion to its furthest and most disturbing conclusion: not only God but every ideal we are told to serve, Humanity, Morality, the State, Truth, Justice, even Man himself, is a spook, a ghostly abstraction that haunts and enslaves the living individual. Against them all Stirner sets the one thing that is real and unrepeatable, the concrete self, and proclaims an egoism so radical that Marx wrote hundreds of pages to bury it and Nietzsche has long been suspected of borrowing from it.

The corpus and how the chat cites it. This room reads The Ego and His Own (Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, 1844) in Steven Byington's 1907 translation, made for the anarchist publisher Benjamin Tucker and public domain by way of Project Gutenberg. The book falls into two parts, titled "Man" and "I"; the chat cites by work and part. Expect citations to The Ego and His Own by part.

Life. Stirner was born in 1806 in Bayreuth, and his real name was Johann Kaspar Schmidt; Max Stirner was a nickname, drawn from his high brow, that he took as a pen name. He earned a modest living teaching at a Berlin academy for girls and belonged to Die Freien, the Free Ones, the circle of radical Young Hegelians who argued in a Berlin wine bar alongside Bruno Bauer and the young Friedrich Engels, who left a sketch of him. Out of that ferment came his one great book, published in 1844, after which he lived in obscurity. The book itself has never stopped detonating.

Where to begin. The Ego and His Own is the work. Read its first part, "Man," for the demolition of the ideals, and its second part, "I," for the egoist's positive self-assertion, his ownness, his property, and the union of egoists.

The critique of spooks. Here is Stirner's central operation. Feuerbach had shown that God is a projection of human nature and called on humanity to take back its essence and revere Man instead. Stirner turns the same weapon against Feuerbach and against the whole Enlightenment: Man, Humanity, is simply another God, one more abstraction set above the individual to be served and adored. And so are all the rest, Morality and the State, Society and Truth, Freedom and the Good and the Cause and the People. Stirner calls them spooks and wheels in the head, fixed ideas that haunt us, and he charges that in serving them the individual gives himself away. The modern man who has proudly thrown off God is still on his knees before a whole crowd of secular gods.

The Unique One. What remains once the spooks are exorcised is the one thing no abstraction can capture: this concrete, living, particular self, the Unique One. I am not an instance of Man, not a citizen, not a soul, not a rational being, not anything general; I am simply and irreducibly myself, and no concept holds me. Stirner founds this unique self on no fixed essence and no higher principle but on what he calls the creative nothing, the ego grounded in nothing and therefore free to make itself out of nothing. The book opens and closes on the cry that all things are nothing to him, and that nothing is more to him than himself.

Ownness and property. The egoist does not serve causes; he owns himself, and he treats everything else, ideas, institutions, the world, as his property, to be used so far as it serves him and dropped when it does not. Stirner calls this ownness, self-possession, and sets it against the false freedom that is really only servitude to some new master. Right, he says with deliberate provocation, is nothing but might: what I have in my power is my own. There is no sacred authority above me, no duty I have not chosen, no morality that binds me from outside; there is only what is mine and what I can make mine.

The Union of Egoists. In place of the State and of society, which claim the individual as their property, Stirner puts the union of egoists, a voluntary and fluid association that individuals enter for their own advantage and dissolve the instant it ceases to serve them. The union is the egoists' instrument and never their master; in it each remains his own, joining with others not from duty or from love of the whole but because it suits him. It is a vision of association without subordination, cooperation that never hardens into one more spook claiming its members.

The unsettling legacy. Stirner's book detonated among the Young Hegelians, and Marx and Engels devoted the vast central section of The German Ideology, mocking him as Saint Max, to demolishing it, a labor whose sheer length betrays how dangerous they found him; in the act of answering Stirner, Marx worked out historical materialism. Stirner became the patron of individualist anarchism, translated and championed by Benjamin Tucker and read by Emma Goldman. And his radical egoism, his war on morality and fixed ideas, and his self-creating individual so resemble Nietzsche's that the question of influence has never been settled, though Stirner reached the ground first.

Reception, and adjacent reading. Read now, Stirner is the great provocateur of modern philosophy, the thinker who refuses every higher claim on the individual and dares us to see our most cherished ideals as ghosts. He took the dialectic of Hegel and the critique of religion of Feuerbach and turned them against all ideals whatever, Feuerbach's own Humanity included; he provoked Marx into the sharpest self-definition of his career; his egoism and his assault on morality anticipate, decades early and without any proven line of influence, the revaluation of values in Nietzsche; his union of egoists and his self-ownership flow into the individualist anarchism of Emma Goldman and others; and his creative nothing, the self that must invent itself out of no given essence, points ahead to the existentialism of Sartre. To set your affair on nothing, Stirner insists, is to set it at last on yourself.