Max Stirner
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Template:Infobox Biography Johann Kaspar Schmidt (October 25, 1806 – June 26, 1856), better known as Max Stirner (the nom de plume he adopted from a schoolyard nickname he had acquired as a child because of his high brow [Stirn]), German philosopher, who ranks as one of the literary grandfathers of nihilism, existentialism and anarchism, especially of individualist anarchism. Stirner himself explicitly denied to hold any absolute position in his philosophy, further stating that if he must be identified with some "-ism" let it be egoism — the antithesis of all ideologies and social causes, as he conceived of it.
Stirner has been broadly understood as a proponent of both psychological egoism and ethical egoism, although he did refute the latter position in his own writing, maintaining that there is no sense in which one "ought to" pursue one's own interest, and further claiming any such category of "ought" to belie a crypto-religious conceit/cause. The notion that one's own interest (or one's own nature) is a "calling" to which one is beholden (or "ought to follow" in any moral or imperative sense) is, strictly speaking, contrary to Stirner's tenets.
Stirner's main work is The Ego and Its Own, also known as The Ego and His Own (org. Der Einzige und sein Eigentum), which was first published in Leipzig, 1844, and has since appeared in numerous editions and translations.
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Biography
Stirner was born in Bayreuth 25th of October 1806. What little is known of his life is mostly due to the Scottish-German writer John Henry Mackay, who wrote a biography of Stirner (Max Stirner - sein Leben und sein Werk), published in German in 1898. A 2005 English translation has now appeared.
Stirner attended university in Berlin, where he attended the lectures of Hegel, among others. Some modern Hegelians maintain that Hegel was an important inspiration for Stirner's thinking, although there are neither structural, nor logical similarities between their philosophies, and Stirner's own comments about Hegel's work are entirely contemptuous and dismissive thereof. However, some Hegelians feel that Stirner's critique of Hegel shows a profound awareness of Hegel's work, and therefore suggest that Hegel's philosophy must be important to Stirner's intellectual development --even if Stirner's mature philosophy comprises a thorough repudiation of Hegelianism (both in form and content).
While in Berlin, Stirner also met Ludwig Feuerbach, whose ideas of humanism and humanity he later vigorously attacked in The Ego and Its Own. Both had associations with the so-called Young Hegelians, who clustered around Arnold Ruge and Bruno Bauer in Berlin in the 1830s and 40s. Eager subscribers to Hegel’s dialectical method, the Young Hegelians applied a dialectical approach to Hegel’s own conclusions, which led not only to new, politically more radical and disturbing conclusions than Hegel’s own, but also to internal dispute and disruption. Frequently the debates would take place at Hippel's, a Weinstube (wine bar) in Friedrichstrasse, attended by, amongst others, the young Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. One of the few portraits we have of Stirner consists of a cartoon by Engels.
Stirner worked as a schoolteacher employed in a academy for young girls when he wrote The Ego and Its Own, although he resigned this position in anticipation of the controversy arising from his major work's publication.
Stirner married twice; his first wife was a household servant, with whom he fell in love at an early age. Soon after their marriage, she died due to complications with pregnancy in 1838. Stirner's second wife was an intellectual associated with Die Freien who abandoned him just prior to the publication of The Ego and Its Own. The heartfelt dedication to her on the first edition's title page served also as a plea for her return.
In one of the most curious events in the history of 19th century philosophy, Stirner planned and financed (with his wife's inheritance) a short-lived attempt by the Young Hegelians to own and operate a milk-shop on co-operative principles. This enterprise failed because the German dairy farmers harboured suspicions of these well-dressed intellectuals with their confusing talk about profit-sharing and other high-minded ideals. Meanwhile, the milk shop itself appeared so ostentatiously decorated that most of the customers felt too poorly dressed to buy their milk there.
In 1856, Stirner died from an infected insect bite. After The Ego and Its Own he published his German translation of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations in 1847 and a History of Reaction (1852) --the latter being a short reply to the collected comments of some of his critics.
Philosophy
Stirner's main work is The Ego and Its Own (org. 'Der Einzige und sein Eigentum'), which appeared in Leipzig in 1844. One can chart the development of his philosophy through a series of articles that appeared shortly before this central work (the article The False Principle of Our Education (http://www.nonserviam.com/stirner/bookshelf/false.html) furnishing particular interest).
In The Ego and Its Own Stirner launches a radical anti-authoritarian and individualist critique of contemporary Prussian society, and modernity and modern western society as such, and offers an approach to human existence which depicts the self as a creative non-entity, beyond the boundaries of language and reality as they were generally conceived of in the western philosophical tradition.
Stirner extends and explores the limits of Hegelian criticism, aiming his critique especially at those of his contemporaries (particularly colleagues amongst the Young Hegelians, most importantly Ludwig Feuerbach), embracing popular 'ideologies', explicitly including nationalism, statism, liberalism, socialism, communism and humanism.
In the time of spirits thoughts grew till they overtopped my head, whose offspring they yet were; they hovered about me and convulsed me like fever-phantasies -- an awful power. The thoughts had become corporeal on their own account, were ghosts, e. g. God, Emperor, Pope, Fatherland, etc. If I destroy their corporeity, then I take them back into mine, and say: "I alone am corporeal." And now I take the world as what it is to me, as mine, as my property; I refer all to myself.- The Ego and Its Own, p 15]
In short, the book proclaims that all religions and ideologies rest on empty concepts, that, once undermined by individual self-interest, break apart to reveal their emptiness. The same holds true for those of society's institutions, that uphold these concepts, be it the state, legislation, the church, the systems of education, or other institutions that claim authority over the individual.
Only when the false claims of authority by such concepts and institutions are revealed, can real individual action, power and identity take place. Individual self-realization rests on each individual's desire to fulfill his egoism, be it by instinct, unknowingly, unwillingly - or consciously, fully aware of his self-interest. The only difference between an unwilling and a willing egoist, is that the first will be 'possessed' by an empty idea, or a 'spook', in the hope that this idea will make him happy, and the last, in contrast, will be able to freely choose the ways of his egoism, and enjoy himself while doing it. Only when one realizes that law, right, morality, religion etc., are nothing other than artificial concepts, and not holy authorities to be obeyed, can one act freely.
The political ramifications of Stirner's work are generally described as a form of radical anarchism --however Stirner does not identify himself as an anarchist, and includes anarchists among the parties subject to his criticism. In particular, Stirner's political doctrine repudiates revolution, and ridicules social movements aimed at overturning the state as tacitly statist (i.e., aimed at the establishment of a new state thereafter), putting forth instead a unique model of self-empowerment and social change through "union activism" --although the definition and explanation of the latter is unique to Stirner, and does not resemble a standard socialist doctrine of trade unionism.
The depth and complexity of Stirner's philosophy reaches beyond the sphere of politics, to a place without language. Stirner's radical critique of "Fixed concepts" and "Truth" as such (derided as 'spooks' of contemporary philosophy) leads him to a nameless void, without meaning and without existence: a 'creative nothing' from which mind and will arises.
'Power' is of central importance for Stirner. In Stirner's sense power, also referred to as the acquisition of 'property', has a broad meaning, ranging from the smile of the child, that acquires its mothers' love, over the sensual and material pleasures and meanings of taking what one desires, to the wholesale attribution of meaning, value and existence in language and life. Power in this sense is synonymous with the dynamics of utter autonomy (a non-rational or pre-rational form of mental creativity) and is represented as the key to both the psychological and social possibility of radical change, for persons (and nations) restricted by inclucated Christian values (or acting out against them by what Stirner describes as equally worthless counter-Christian ideologies, such as Humanism, Liberalism, Communism, etc.).
Influence
Stirner's work did not go unnoticed among his colleagues among the Young Hegelians. Stirner's attacks on ideology, in particular Feuerbach's humanism, forced not only Feuerbach (who engaged in a subsequent debate with Stirner ín a German periodical), but also Karl Marx into print. Marx wrote a histrionic indictment of Stirner spanning several hundred pages (in the original, unexpurgated text) of his book The German Ideology, co-authored with Engels and written in 1845 - 1846. Marx's lengthy, ferocious polemic against Stirner has been considered an important turning point in Marx's intellectual development from "idealism" to "materialism". While The German Ideology so assured The Ego and Its Own a place of curious interest among Marxist readers, Marx's ridicule of Stirner has played a significant role in the subsequent marginalization of Stirner's work, in popular and academic discourse.
Over the course of the last hundred and fifty years, Stirner's thinking has proved an intellectual challenge, reminiscent of the challenge cartesian criticism as a whole brought to western philosophy, converging with it in nihilism. His philosophy has been characterized as disturbing, sometimes even considered a direct threat to civilization, that it should not even be mentioned in polite company, that it should be, if encountered by some unfortunate happenstance, as briefly examined as possible and then forgotten. Stirner's relentlessness in the service of scuttling the most tenaciously held tenets of the Western mindset yields a terrain which bears testimony to the radical threat he posed; most writers who read and were influenced by Stirner failed to make any references to him or The Ego and Its Own at all in their writing. As the renowned art critic Herbert Read has observed, Stirner's book has remained "stuck in the gizzard" of Western culture since it first appeared.
It has recently been established that Nietzsche did read Stirner's book. Nietzsche's thinking resembles Stirner's to such a degree that Nietzsche is sometimes referred to by readers of Stirner as 'the great copyist', yet even Nietzsche failed to make any mention of Stirner anywhere in his work. While the existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard also makes no direct references to Stirner, it is possible that the two could have actually met during Kierkegaard's visits to Berlin to attend Hegel's lectures.
Yet several other authors, ideologists and philosophers have cited, quoted or otherwise referred to Max Stirner. They include Benjamin Tucker, Dora Marsden, Georg Brandes, Rudolf Steiner, Robert Anton Wilson, several writers of the situationist movement, and Max Ernst, who titled a 1925 painting L'unique et sa propriété. Perhaps the most significant figure to have been influenced by Stirner has been the notorious antiartist Marcel Duchamp, who seems to have made a significant break with his former concerns just when he was formulating his most important work, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bacherlors, Even (1915-23), which was, according to the best reconstructions that have been attempted, already in his mind several years earlier when certain commentators, perhaps most notably the Duchamp scholar Francis Naumann, believe Duchamp first encountered the work of Stirner.
Otherwise largely ignored and forgotten, The Ego and Its Own has seen periodic revivals of popular, political and academic interest, based around widely divergent translations and interpretations -- some psychological, others political in their emphasis -- and has experienced some rather revisionist interpretations to suit various political movements.
The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini read and was inspired by Stirner, and made several references to him in his newspaper articles, prior to rising to power. His later writings would uphold a view opposed to Stirner, a trajectory mirrored by the composer Richard Wagner.
Today, many ideas associated with post-left anarchy criticism of ideology and uncompromising individualism - are clearly related to Stirner's. He has also been regarded as pioneering individualist feminism, in contrast to most other German philosophers of the time, since his objection to any absolute concept also clearly counts gender roles as 'spooks'.
Stirner's demolition of absolute concepts disturbs traditional concepts of attribution of meaning to language and human existence, and can be seen as pioneering a modern media theory which focuses on dynamic conceptions of language and reality, in contrast to reality as subject to any absolute definition. Jean Baudrillard's critique of Marxism and development of a dynamic theory of media, simulation and 'the real' employs some of the same elements Stirner used in his Hegelian critique without, however, making recourse to very much that lies at the heart of the plumb-line libertarian core of Stirner's philosophy. Though many in the poststructuralist camp have championed Stirner's thought, the core tenets of these two entities are wholly incompatible; Stirner would never agree, for example, with that fundamental poststructuralist idea, that as a product of systems, the self is undermined. For Stirner, the self cannot be a mere product of systems. There remains, in the Stirnerian schema, a place deep within the self which language and social systems cannot destroy; this idea finds expression, perhaps, in a concept put forward by the contemporary philosopher Julia Kristeva; the "semiotic chora", as she calls it, represents a state of mind which predates the inculcation of the social apparatus in the mind of the young child.
At present, Stirner remains at the centre of a diffuse but highly charged debate; ample secondary literature appears in German, Italian, French, and Spanish. English sources lag in number, and tend to reflect either anarchist or existentialist interpretations.
External Links
- Max Stirner in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/max-stirner/), an extensive and recommended introduction
- Svein Olav Nybergs website on Max Stirner (http://www.nonserviam.com/stirner/), with extensive links to texts and references
- The complete original text in German of "Der Einzige und sein Eigentum" (http://www.lsr-projekt.de/msee.html)
- The complete English edition of "The Ego and his Own" (http://www.blancmange.net/tmh/teaho/theego0.html), in the translation of Steven T. Byington.
- Non Serviam (http://www.nonserviam.com/), Internet periodical dedicated to Stirner's ideas
- Max Stirner, a durable dissident (http://www.lsr-projekt.de/poly/eninnuce.html), 'How Marx and Nietzsche suppressed their colleague Max Stirner and why he has intellectually survived them'
- “Stirner” Delighted in His Construction (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch03d.htm#c.1.5) — "loves miracles, but can only perform a logical miracle," by Karl Marx
- Stirner and Nietzsche (http://kropot.free.fr/Stirner-Nietszche.htm), thesis examining Nietszche's relation to Stirner (In French).de:Max Stirner
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