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Title: Nihilism as Egoism Author: Keiji Nishitani Date: 1990 Language: en Topics: Max Stirner, egoism, Nihilism Source: Retrieved on May 13th, 2018 from http://writerror.com/texts/nihilism-as-egoism Notes: Keiji Nishitani. Nihilism as Egoism: Max Stirner. The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism. 1990
While Dostoevsky and Nietzsche must be acknowledged as the thinkers who
plumbed the depths of nihilism most deeply, we can see the outlines of
nihilism—though not fully developed as such—in an earlier work published
by Max Stirner in 1844, The Ego and His Own.[1]Thanks to the revival of
interest in Stirner’s work by J. H. Mackay (Max Stirner, Sein Leben und
Sein Werk, 1897), attention has been drawn to various similarities
between Stirner’s ideas and those of Nietzsche. It is almost certain
that Nietzsche did not read Stirner’s work. If he was acquainted with
Stirner at all, it was probably indirectly through Lange’s History of
Materialism.[2] In the absence of direct and substantive influence, the
presence of such similarities raises a number of questions.
At the same time, comparisons must not be allowed to obscure the great
difference in the foundations of their philosophies and in the spirit
that pervades the entirety of their thought. Although Mackay regards
Stirner far more highly than he does Nietzsche, there is in Stirner
nothing of the great metaphysical spirit excavating the subterranean
depths we find in Nietzsche. Stirner’s critiques do not display the
anatomical thoroughness of Nietzsche’s painstaking engagement with all
aspects of culture; nor does one hear in Stirner the prophetic voice of
a Zarathustra resounding from the depths of the soul. The unique style
of Stirner’s thinking lay in a combination of a razor-sharp logic that
cuts through straight to the consequences of things and an irony that
radically inverts all standpoints with a lightness approaching humor. In
this regard his work is not without its genius. Feuerbach, even though
he was one of the primary targets of Stirner’s criticisms, admired The
Ego and His Own greatly, referring to it in a letter addressed to his
brother shortly after the book appeared as “a work of genius, filled
with spirit.” Feuerbach allowed that even though what Stirner had said
about him was not right, he was nevertheless “the most brilliant and
liberated writer I have ever known.”
Stirner’s book showed him at his best in his confrontation with the
turbulent Zeitgeist of the period, set in a highly charged political
atmosphere culminating in the outbreak of the February Revolution of
1848. Among the intelligentsia the radical ideas of the “Hegelian left”
were in high fashion. As Nietzsche was to write later: “The whole of
human idealism up until now is about to turn into nihilism” (WP 617);
and indeed such a turn was already beginning to show signs of emerging
from the intellectual turmoil of the earlier period. It was Stirner who
grasped what Nietzsche was to call the “turn into nihilism” in its
beginning stages, presenting it as egoism.
Around the beginning of the 1840s a group of people who called
themselves “Die Freien” used to gather in Hippel’s tavern on the
Friedrichstrasse in Berlin. The central figure of the group was Bruno
Bauer, and such people as Marx and Engels occasionally attended as well.
Stirner was among these “Free Ones.” The trend at that time was a sharp
turn away from idealism and romanticism in favor of realism and
political criticism. The criticism of the liberals was focused on
overthrowing the coalition of Christian theology, Hegelian philosophy,
and political conservatism. It was only natural that Feuerbach’s The
Essence of Christianity which appeared in 1841 would cause a great shock
through its severe critique of religion. The current of thought broke
forth into a rushing torrent. In no time Marx and others had developed
Feuerbach’s ideas into a materialism of praxis and history, while Bruno
Bauer developed them in the opposite direction of “consciousness of
self.” Stirner then took the latter’s ideas to the extreme to develop a
standpoint of egoism. It was only three years after Feuerbach’s The
Essence of Christianity that Stirner’s The Ego and His Own was
published, which shows how rapidly ideas were changing at the time. His
critique of Feuerbach is directed at his basic principle of
“anthropology,” the standpoint that “human being” is the supreme essence
for human beings. In this sense, Stirner and Marx exemplify two entirely
opposite directions of transcending the standpoint of humanity in human
beings.
As mentioned earlier, Feuerbach represented a reaction against Hegel’s
philosophy of absolute Spirit, in much the same way as Schopenhauer had,
since both criticized the idealism of the speculative thinking in Hegel
and the Christian “religious nature of spirit” at its foundation. But
just as Nietzsche detected a residue of the Christian spirit in
Schopenhauer’s negative attitude towards “will to life,” Stirner
recognized vestiges of the religious spirit and idealism in the
theological negation of God and Hegelian idealism in Feuerbach. Both
Nietzsche and Stirner, by pushing the negation of idealism and
spiritualism to the extreme, ended up at the opposite pole of their
predecessors. This may account for some of the similarities between
them.
At the beginning of his major work Stirner cites the motto “Ich hab’
Mein’ Sach’ auf Nichts gestellt.” Translated literally, this means “I
have founded my affair on nothing.” Here we have Stirner’s basic
standpoint in nuce: the negation of any and all standpoints. Nothing,
whether God or morality, may be set up as a ground to support the self
and its activity. It is in effect a standpoint that rejects standing on
anything other than the self itself, a standpoint based on “nothing.”
The motto is ordinarily used to express the attitude of indifference to
everything, the feeling of “I don’t care.”[3] It means a lack of
interest in anything, a loss of the passion to immerse oneself in
things, and a feeling of general apathy. But it also includes a kind of
negative positiveness, a nonchalant acceptance of things which
appropriates them as the life-content of the self and enjoys the life of
the self in all things. (There are affinities here to the idea of acting
in “empty non-attachment” in Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu.[4]) Its
positiveness negates any positiveness that makes something other than
the self the affair to which one devotes oneself. It is an attitude of
enjoying what one has rejected from the self as the content of one’s
life, transforming everything into the self’s own concern. It is, in
short, the “egoistic” posture.
One normally considers the higher things to be those that relate to a
universal apart from the self. One devotes oneself to such matters and
makes them the concerns of the self. The religious person serves God,
the socialist serves society, patriots their country, the housewife her
home, as the concern (Sache) of the self. Each sees the meaning of life
in this concern and finds his or her mission in it. To efface the self
and devote oneself to one’s concern is regarded as a superior way of
life. By making God, country, humanity, society, and so forth one’s own
concern, one forgets the self and invests one’s interest in something
outside the self which then becomes one’s own affair. This is one’s
Sache, the focus of ideals or values regarded as sacred. The foundation
of such concern could be religion or ethics, which are standpoints in
which one makes something beyond oneself the self’s Sache, in such a way
that the self loses its own Sache. But even where religion and ethics
have been shaken by some “revolution” or other, these revolutionary
standpoints continue to acknowledge something other than the self as the
proper object of one’s devotion, thus restoring in a new guise the very
religious and ethical standpoints they had negated. Stirner steps in
here to advocate egoism as the utter negation of all such standpoints.
Nietzsche thought that the ideals and values that had controlled
European history up to the present were hastening the advent of nihilism
as their own logical consequence. He himself pre-empted this advent
voluntarily and carried it out psychologically and experientially in
himself, and by living nihilism through to the end turned it into a
standpoint of will to power. Though he did not use the word “nihilism,”
Stirner tried-as Nietzsche was to do later-to demonstrate logically that
previous ideals and values undermine themselves and collapse into
nothing precisely as a result of the effort to make them consummate and
exhaustive. He proposed his idea of egoism as the inevitable result and
ultimate consequence of such a collapse. His egoism emerged from his
discovery of the hollowness of the foundations on which previous
religion, philosophy, and morality had rested. As a result, it attained
an ironic depth not achieved by ordinary forms of egoism.
In religion and philosophy God is “all in all,” and all things other
than God are to devote themselves to him. From God’s point of view,
everything is part of the divine Sache. God is One, and as a unique
being does not tolerate anyone’s refusing to be part of the divine
economy. “His Sache is-a purely egoistic Sache.”[5] It is virtually the
same with human beings. All sorts of people devote themselves to the
service of humanity, but for humanity the only concern is that it
develop itself through such devotion. For humanity, humanity itself is
the Sache. As Stirner asks: “Is the Sache of humanity not a purely
egoistic Sache?” (4/4).
God and humanity have set their concern on nothing, on nothing other
than themselves. I may then set my concern similarly on myself, who as
much as God am the Nothing of all else (?das Nichts von allem anderen),
who am my all, who am the only individual. . . . What is divine is God's
concern (Sache), what is human is "man's" concern. My concern is neither
divine nor human, nor the true, the good, the just, the free, and so on;
my concern is only mine, and is not universal but isunique, as I am
unique. (4-5/5)
This is the standpoint of “the unique one and its own,” which, as we
shall see presently, is all there is.
Why does Stirner refuse to acknowledge a higher self in something
universal above the self? Why can he not acknowledge a truer life than
the life of the self, for example in God or humanity, nation or society?
According to Stirner, at the basis of such religious or ethical
ideas-and even of ideas opposed to them-there is a standpoint of
“spirit” (Geist) and the “spiritual” world. Once this spirit world has
been exposed as a lie, the religious and ethical ways of life based on
it are forced into hypocrisy.
In coming to this conclusion, Stirner took a position in direct
confrontation to the ideas of his immediate milieu, principally those of
Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, and the Communists. In a time of historical
crisis such confrontations take on the quality of a face-off with
history as a whole. In Stirner’s own words, the problem is that “several
thousand years of history” (as Nietzsche also realized) come to a head
in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Thus Stirner’s critique of
history has a very different character from the typical observations of
the general historian. As with Nietzsche, his philosophy confronts
history existentially and sees the whole of world history perspectively.
Marx criticizes him for numerous inaccuracies of historical fact, but
for a thinker like Stirner, what is important are not the particular
data but the understanding of history as a whole.
Stirner divides history into three periods, which he compares to three
stages in the development of the individual: namely, boyhood, youth, and
the prime of manhood. The boy lives only in relation to things in this
world, unable to conceive of anything like a spiritual world beyond it.
In that sense he is a realist. In general the boy is under the control
of the power of nature, and things like parental authority confront him
as natural rather than spiritual powers. Still, from the beginning there
is a drive in the boy to “strike to the ground of things and get around
behind them” (hinter die Dinge kommen);[6] and through the knowledge he
gains he can elude or get the better of the powers that govern him. When
the boy knows something to be true, its truth is not some independent
being transcendent to the world; it remains a truth within things. In
this sense the boy lives only in this world.
The youth, on the other hand, is an idealist. He feels the courage to
resist things before which he had once felt fear and awe. He prides
himself on his intelligence in seeing through such things and opposing
them with something like reason or conscience. His is the “spiritual”
attitude. In the young man, “truth” is something ideal that exists by
itself from the beginning, independent of the things of the world; as
something “heavenly” it is opposed to all despicable “earthly” things.
From this standpoint thoughts are no more than disembodied abstract
ideas, pure “logical” thoughts, “absolute” ideas in Hegel’s sense.
Once in the prime of life, however, the youth turns into an egoist. He
knows that the ideal is void. Instead of looking at the world from the
standpoint of ideals, he see it as it is. He relates to the world
according to his concern in the interest of the self. “The boy had only
unspiritual interests, free of thoughts or ideas; the youth had only
spiritual interests; but the man has bodily, personal, and egoistic
(leibhaftig, persönlich, egoistisch) interests.” Or again: “The youth
found himself as spirit and lost himself again in universal spirit, in
[the consummate,] holy spirit, in the human, in humanity, in short in
all kinds of ideals; the man finds himself as bodily spirit” (13/14).
The growth of the individual through the stages of realist, idealist,
and egoist is a process of discovering and attaining the self. At first
the self gets behind all things and finds itself-the standpoint of
spirit. The self as spirit acknowledges the world as spirit, but the
self must then go behind this spirit to recover itself. This consists
the realization that the self is the creator-owner of the spiritual
world, spirit, thoughts, and so on. Spirit is “the first self-discovery”
(10/10); the self as egoist is “the second self-discovery” (13/14), in
which the self becomes truly itself. With this latter stage, the self is
released from its ties to this real world and to the ideal world beyond,
free to return to the vacuity at the base of those things. The vacuity
of this world was already realized in idealism; the egoist goes on to
see the vacuity of the other world.
The egoist bases himself on absolute “nothing,” and this is neither
realism nor an idealism. Where formerly “spirit” was conceived as the
creator-owner of this world, the egoist’s standpoint sees the self as
the creator and owner of spirit and the spiritual world. This is what it
means to “set one’s concern on nothing”“not in the sense of a void, but
creative nothing (das schöpferische Nichts), the nothing out of which I
myself as creator create everything.”[7] At the basis of Stirner’s
egoism is the Hegelian idea of absolute negativity (absolute
Negativität) in which realism and idealism are superseded.
Parallel to the development in the individual from realism to idealism
and egoism, Stirner sees a similar development in world history. He
distinguishes between “ancients” and “moderns,” the line between them
being drawn at the birth of Christianity. Among these latter he also
distinguishes “free people,” a general term for radical liberals of the
period who criticized the Christian worldview and its morality.
According to Stirner, even these “free people” had not yet escaped the
foundation of the Christian morality they were busy negating and hence
were not yet true egoists. In the following section we shall trace this
development from paganism to Christianity, and from Christianity to the
liberalism that necessarily results in egoism.
According to Stirner, the ancient pagans and the Christians after them
had completely opposite ideas of truth. For the pagans, things and
relations of this world and this earth were true, whereas for
Christianity truth resided in heaven. While the pagan held ties to
homeland and family as sacred, to the Christians these were so many
empty fictions. For the latter the earth was a foreign land, and their
true ho e in heaven. Under the influence of Hegelian thought, Stirner
viewed the development from paganism to Christianity dialectically,
insofar as Christianity was the inevitable unfolding of the opposite
standpoint of paganism.
"For the ancients the world was a truth," says Feuerbach, but he forgets
to add the important proviso: a truth whose untruth they sought to
discover-and eventually did discover (15-16/16).
Like the young boy who naturally wants to get behind things, primitive
peoples were possessed of a drive to discover the untruth of things
within the very perspective that regards things as true. This
dialectical irony is typical of Stirner’s historical perspective.
The first signs of this dialectical progression appear, according to
Stirner, with the Sophists. Realizing the power of intellectual
understanding, they grew progressively critical of established
authority. Socrates internalized this criticism further and brought it
deep into the heart. In Socrates the efforts of the heart to purify
itself came to term, and this purification grew more and more rigorous
until nothing in this world was able to meet the standard of the heart’s
purity. Out of this developed the standpoint of the Skeptics, who
refused to let themselves be affected by anything in this world. What
began with the Sophists, Stirner said, was carried ahead by Socrates and
completed by the Skeptics. With the Skeptics the human individual was
liberated from the bonds of life, grew indifferent to the world, and
developed a posture that refused to have to do with anything-a state of
mind that did not care if the whole world were to collapse. Karl Jaspers
considers the skepticism represented by Pyrrho as a kind of nihilism.[8]
In any event, this mentality paved the way for Christianity, since for
the first time the self had come to be experienced as “worldless”
(weltlos), as “spirit”: “That one became aware of oneself as a being
that is not related to anything, a worldless being, as spirit, was the
result of the enormous labor of the ancients” (19/20). Christianity was
in this sense the “result” of the development of paganism.
For Stirner, the standpoint of spirit in the true sense is not one of
passive negation and refusing to relate to the things of this world, but
an active standpoint of choosing to relate to spiritual things, and to
spiritual things exclusively. Initially, these spiritual things are the
thoughts grasped in reflection, but the spirit goes on to create a
spiritual world really existing behind things. In Stirner’s view,
“Spirit is spirit only when it creates spiritual things.” Spirit is
regarded as spirit only over against spirit; it takes shape only through
continued positive interest in spiritual things. This is the difference
between the worldless standpoint of the Skeptics and the standpoint of
true spirit in Christianity’s creation of a new spiritual world. And
only in this kind of creation of a world unique to itself is spirit able
to become free. In contrast, the pagans remained in the standpoint of
being “armed against the world” (24/25).
When Christianity set up God in the world beyond, according to Stirner,
this was the inevitable result of the notion of spirit itself. Your self
is not your “spirit,” he says, and your “spirit” is not your self. In
spirit you split yourself into two; your spirit, which is called your
true self, becomes your center, and this center of the spirit is spirit
itself. Even though you are more than spirit and all spiritual things
come from you, you consider yourself lower than spirit. This spirit is
your ideal and as such is set up in the world beyond as something
unattainable. As long as spirit is imagined to be in control, it must
reside in the world beyond. This is why the Christian theological
worldview eventually requires an idea of God as spirit. [See pp.
30-32/31-34.] The irony of history for Stirner is that the truth of the
other world which Christianity opposed to the pagan truth of this world
is something of which the Christians themselves tried “to disclose the
untruth-and eventually succeeded” (24/26).
During the centuries prior to the Reformation, intellectual
understanding, long shackled by dogma, showed the ardor of a
Sophist-like rebellion. Only with the Reformation did the problem of the
heart which Socrates had pursued come to be taken up seriously. At the
same time, however, the notion of the heart became so vacuous, as in the
case of the so-called liberals from Feuerbach to Bruno Bauer, that “only
an empty cordiality (leere Herzlich it) remained, as universal love for
all human beings, love of ‘humanity,’ consciousness of freedom,
self-consciousness” (25/27). This corresponds to the posture of the
ancient Skeptics, ending up in the “pure” standpoint in which the heart
not only criticizes everything but also keeps the criticism entirely
free of any egoistic concern of the criticizer. It is the standpoint of
criticism of the critical standpoint itself, or absolute criticism. Even
though this view of the heart derived originally from Christianity, the
religious content able to put up with criticism from the standpoint of
the heart could no longer be found there. The heart, or spirit, standing
in front of itself, spontaneously sees itself as having been a fiction,
and with that all things become fictions. “Driven to the extreme edge of
disinterested cordiality we must finally acknowledge that the spirit
which the Christian loves is [nothing, or that the spirit is]-a lie”
(26/27). This is reminiscent of Nietzsche’s view that through the
sincerity cultivated by Christian morality the values and ideals
established by that morality itself are revealed as fictions.[9]
At this point Feuerbach’s anthropology steps in to liberate people from
the standpoint of Christian theology. As Stirner points out, however,
the attempt itself is entirely theological. Feuerbach’s anthropology
internalized the divine spirit into the essence of humanity (“unser
Wesen”). As a result, we are split into an essential self and a
non-essential self, and we are thus again driven out of our selves
[33/34]. As long as we are not our own essence, it is really the same
whether it be seen as a transcendent “God” external to us, or as an
“essence” internal to us: “I am neither God nor ‘humanity,’ neither the
supreme essence nor my essence“[33/35]. Feuerbach’s idea that my essence
is “humanity” and I am supposed to realize this essence is not really
any different from the Hegelian idealism he rejected. I am a human
being, to be sure, but “humanity” is not me. Being a “human being” is an
attribute or predicate of mine, but the “humanity” that is presumed to
give laws to the self and transcend the self is a ghostly illusion for
the very reasons that Feuerbach regarded God as an illusion. This ghost
drains the ego of its content, leaving it null and void. Feuerbach
preached love of humanity, where “the human is God for the human.” But
for an “I” to love the “humanity” within a Thou does not indicate true
love, any more than the old religion which spoke of loving God in one’s
neighbor. True love means that I as an individual love a Thou as an
individual. In this way, Stirner argues, Feuerbach merely substituted
“humanity” for God. Ethical love (sittliche Liebe) is no more than a
modern substitute for religious love (religiöse Liebe), which had become
difficult to sustain. True love must be totally egoistic, individual
love, the love of a Thou as an individual.
From this perspective, Stirner would have us understand spirit as a sort
of ghost. The modern world may disclaim belief in ghosts, but what they
call spirit (Geist) is precisely that-a disembodied spirit or specter.
Spirit is still thought to be behind everything. The world remains full
of specters because both those who believe in ghosts (Spuk) and those
who believe in spirit are seeking some kind of suprasensible world
behind the sensible world. In other words, they fabricate a kind of
other world and then invest belief in it.
There are ghosts everywhere in the world (es spunkt in der ganzen Welt).
[Only in it?] No: rather, the world itself is a kind of ghost; [it is
uncanny-unheimlich-through and through.] it is the wandering
apparitional body [Scheinleib] of a spirit. . . . and don't be surprised
if you find nothing other in yourself than a ghost. Does your spirit not
haunt your body, and isn't that spirit what is true and actual, and the
body only something "ephemeral, null" or mere "appearance"? Aren't we
all ghosts, uncanny beings awaiting "redemption"-that is, "spirits"?
(35/37)
Spirit, it is said, is holy. God is holy, humanity is holy, and so on.
But what on earth does it mean to regard something as holy? Here Stirner
launches an attack against the subjectivity behind the objective
standpoint of spirit: “There is a ghost in your head, and you are crazy
(du hast einen Sparren zu viel).”[10] What is this one rafter [Sparren]
too many? It is nothing more than an ideal created in the head, an ideal
to which one feels called or to the actualization of which one feels
obligated to devote oneself, such as the kingdom of God, the realm of
spirit, or what have you. Stirner claims that the various ideals
emphasized in religion, morality, law, and so on are all idées fixe[11]
that lead people around by the nose and make them possessed. They
breathe spirit into people, inflating them with inspiration
(Begeisterung) and enthusiasm (Enthusiasmus). They move people and drive
them into frenzy and the fanaticism of a blindly unquestioning
fascination with “holy” things.[12] Whether it is a matter of harboring
ghosts and blind faith (Spuk und Sparren) or of being possessed by a
certain idée fixe, the fanaticism is basically the same. It makes no
difference whether one takes religious ideals as holy, or merely regards
ethical ideals as holy out of a mistrust of religion. One can be just as
fanatical in one’s mistrust of religion and faith in ethics-just as
possessed by an idée fixe—as in one’s religious trust [46/49]. In both
cases one remains fettered, which is the essence of “spirit.” Religion
means to “be tied,” as indicated by its etymology in the word re-ligare.
Religion and the holy occupy the deepest part of our inner being, where
freedom of the spirit emerges. “Spirit” becomes freedom within us, but
in that very fact our self becomes fettered [pp. 49-52/52-5].
Feuerbach undertook to internalize spirit as humanity and to transpose
religion into ethics. According to Stirner, this means making “humanity”
the lawgiver rather than God, and placing the self under the governance
of ethical rules rather than God. This amounts only to a change of
rulers, and does not affect the self’s enslavement [p. 58/62]. In fact,
those who have ruled from the standpoint of spirit have done so by means
of such ideas as the state, emperor, church, God, morality, law, order,
and so on, thereby establishing political, ethical, and religious
hierarchies. Indeed, for Stirner, hierarchy itself means the rule of
ideas and spirit [pp. 65-74/69-79]. Spirit constructs systems of rule
and obedience by sacralizing law and duty and transforming them into
matters of conscience. The only thing that can fundamentally destroy
this kind of hierarchical system is the standpoint of the egoist which
discloses “spirit” as a fabrication. It is not hard to see how Stirner’s
ideas came to provide an influential philosophical foundation for
anarchism.
The curtain came down on ancient history when the world ceased to be
seen as divine. The self as spirit became master of the world and
conquered it as its own possession. There God appeared as the Holy: “All
things have been delivered to me by my Father” (Matthew 11:27) [p.
94/102]. Thus the self became master of the world but did not become
master of its own ideal, since the spirit was sacralized as “Holy
Spirit.” A Christian “without the world” could not yet become a person
“without God.” If the battle during the ancient period had been waged
against the world, the medieval Christian battle was fought against the
self itself. The battleground shifted from outside the self to within
it. The wisdom of the ancients was a wisdom of the world, a philosophy;
the wisdom of the “moderns” is a knowledge of God, a theology. Just as
philosophy got around behind the world, so theology tries to get around
behind God. The pagans completely disposed of the world, but now the
problem is to dispose of the spirit. For almost two thousand years,
Stirner says, we have striven to conquer the “spirit that is holy,” the
“Holy Spirit.” However many times its holiness has been plucked off and
trampled underfoot, the gigantic enemy continues to rise up anew,
changing its shape and names [94-95/103].
As a prime example of this phenomenon Stirner, like Nietzsche, cites
modern liberalism. He usually refers to modern liberals as “the Free
Ones” [die Freien] in contrast to the “ancients” and “moderns” mentioned
earlier. What they have in common is that they plan the social
actualization of the standpoint of humanity and try to negate the
various ideals of previous religion and metaphysics as lies. Stirner
distinguishes three kinds of liberal thought: political, social, and
humanitarian.
Political liberalism is the standpoint of the freedom of citizens. The
citizen class eliminated the absolute monarch and the privileged class.
No longer a class, they universalized themselves into a “nation”
[98/107]. Under the constitutional state of liberalism, the people gain
political freedom and equality as members of the state. They regard this
system as an actualization of their pure humanity and see anything
extraneous to it as merely private or egoistic, adventitious, and
therefore inhuman. For Stirner, what has happened is that tyranny of the
law has replaced tyranny of the monarch: “All states are tyrannies. . .
. I am the arch-enemy of the state and am suspended in the alternative
choice between the state and me.” Political freedom is not my own
freedom because my own will (Eigen-wille) is negated. It is true that in
the citizen state each citizen negates the will of the ruler, who had
suppressed individual will up until then, and takes a stand on personal
free will. But at the same time the citizen voluntarily suppresses
individual will to seek an idealized actualization of the will and
freedom of the self through the state [106-109/116-119]. This political
freedom means that the polis becomes free and the concern (Sache) of the
polis becomes my concern-but this means precisely that I am tied to the
state from within myself.
In the citizen state, political equality was achieved but not equality
of property. Thus in place of political liberalism, social
liberalism-namely, communism-appears on the stage. In the same way that
in political liberalism each person renounces the self’s immediate right
to rule and transfers it to the state, thereby indirectly regaining the
right to rule, everyone now has to renounce the property (Eigentum) of
the self and transfer everything to the society, so that the people as a
whole may recover the property that belongs to them. According to
communism, it is not that our dignity as human beings consists in an
essential equality as children of the same state, as the bourgeoisie
says; rather, our human dignity consists in our not existing for the
sake of the state but for each other, so that each person exists
essentially through others and for the sake of others. All of us become
workers for the others. Only in this way are all people equal and repaid
in equal compensation. This is how Stirner sees communism [117/129].
Just as his critique of democracy is directed at the state as the
supreme ruler, so his critique of communism is directed at society as
the supreme property owner.
That we become equal as members of the state and grant it the status of
supreme ruler actually means that we become equal zeroes. In the same
way, when society is made the supreme property owner we become equally
“tramps” (Lumpen). In the name of the interests of “humanity,” the
individual is first deprived of the right to rule by the state, and then
even the individual’s property is taken away by society. What is more,
in communism we are for the first time equal only as workers, not as
human beings or individual selves [119/130].
That the communist sees in you "humanity," or a brother, is only the
"Sunday-side" of communism; from the perspective of the weekday [he]
never accepts you simply as a man, but merely as a human worker or a
working man. The liberal principle can be found in the first aspect, but
in the second the unliberal is concealed. (122/133)
The satisfaction that communism offers the spirit it takes away from the
body by compelling one to work. Communism makes workers feel this
compulsion as social duty and makes them think that being a worker and
abandoning egoism is the essential thing. Just as “citizens” devote
themselves to the state, so do “workers” obey the rule of society and
serve it. But society is a tool that should rather be serving our
interests. Insofar as socialists seek a sacred society, they are as
shackled to religious principle as the liberals: “Society, from which we
receive everything, is the new master, a new ghost, a new ‘supreme
being,’ which makes us bear the burden of ‘devotion and duty’ “
(123/135). Such is Stirner’s conclusion.
The third form of liberal thought is humanitarian liberalism, as
represented by Bruno Bauer and his followers. For Stirner, this form
most thoroughly pursues the standpoint of “humanity” as the principle of
liberalism, and is therefore the consummate form of liberalism. With the
individual as citizen in political liberalism and as worker in
communism, human being is understood from the perspective of the
fulfillment of desire. Even in the case of a worker who regards labor as
a duty to society and works mutually for the sake of others, an egoistic
interest, the fulfillment of the materialistic desire of the self, lurks
beneath the surface. It is the same with the citizen who regards
devotion to the state as a duty. The attack of humanitarian liberalism
is directed precisely at this point. The humanitarian liberalist
criticizes the socialist: “As the citizen does with the state, so the
worker makes use of society for his own egoistic purposes. After all,
don’t you still have an egoistic purpose-your own welfare?” (124/136).
The humanitarian demands that human action be completely free of
egoistic concern. Only there is true humanity found and true liberalism
established. “Only humanity is dinterested; the egoist is always
concerned with interests” (125/137). Thus humanitarian liberalism tries
to press the negation of private and egoistic concerns to the innermost
heart. It is a critical liberalism that does not stop short with
criticizing others, but goes on to criticize itself.
While the politicians thought they had eliminated each individual's own
will, self-will (Eigenwille), or willfulness, they did not realize that
this self-will found a safe refuge through property (Eigentum).
When socialists take away even property, they do not notice that
ownership secures its continuation within ownness (Eigenheit).[13]
No matter how much property is taken away, opinion (Meinung) in the
heart remains mine (das Meinige), and to that extent ownership
remains.[14] Therefore, we must eliminate not only selfwill or private
ownership but also private opinion.
Just as self-will is transferred to the state and private property to
the society, private opinion also is transferred to something
universal-namely, to 'man'-and thereby becomes general human opinion. .
. . Just as self-will and property become powerless, so must ownness [or
egoism] in general become powerless. (128-129/141)
Humane liberalism demands that we abandon welfare-ism, voluntarily
criticize all egoistic and “inhuman” things and attain “consciousness of
self” as “humanity.” Further, with respect to labor, it demands that we
understand it in a universal sense, as encompassing all of humankind in
such a way that spirit reforms all material things. Labor for communism,
in contrast, is merely “collective labor without spirit.”
Stirner says that with this kind of humanitarian liberalism, “the circle
of liberalism is completed” (127-128/140). Liberalism in general
recognizes in humanity and human freedom the principle of the good, and
in all egoistic and private things the principle of evil. This
standpoint is taken to the extreme in humanitarian liberalism in its
attempt to eliminate egoistic and private concerns from the human heart.
The critique that includes this self-criticism may be the best of the
critical social theories, but for Stirner, it is precisely because of
this that the contradiction inherent in liberalism in general appears
most clearly in humanitarian liberalism. For in spite of the elimination
of self-will, private proper , and private opinion, for the rst time the
unique individual who cannot be eliminated comes to light. “Ownness”-the
selfness of the self-is revealed. Critical liberalism tries through its
“criticism” to eliminate from the individual everything private and
everything that would exclude all others. But the ownness of the
individual is immune to this purging. Indeed, the person is an
individual precisely because he or she excludes from the self everything
that is not self. In this sense we might say that the most unique person
is the most exclusive. This eliminates even the “criticism” that tries
to exclude the very thing that excludes others (namely, one’s private
affairs). As Stirner says: “It is precisely the sharpest critic who is
hit hardest by the curse of his own principle” (134/148).
The pursuit of freedom, once arrived at humanitarian liberalism, goes to
the extreme of making humanity everything and the individual person
nothing. We are deprived of everything and our Lumpen-condition is made
complete. A radical reversal now becomes possible:
If we want to attain the nature of ownness we must first decline even to
the most shabby, the most destitute condition-because we must remove and
discard everything that is foreign to the self. (139/153)
The utmost Lumpen-condition is that of a naked man, stripped even of his
tatters (Lumpen). Therefore, when one removes and discards even one’s
“humanity” true nakedness-the condition (Ent-blössung) in which one is
stripped of all that is alien to the selfappears.[15] The tramp escapes
his condition by tearing off his rags. Such is the standpoint of
Stirner’s egoist. The egoist i s the archenemy of all liberalism as well
as of Christianity: to human beings he is inhuman; to God, a devil.
Though repudiated by all forms of liberalism, the egoist goes through
them one after another, eliminating from the self all ghosts and rafters
of idée fixes. Finally, with the turn from the absolute destitution of
the self, the egoist for the first time can truly say “I am I.”
The self as egoist was present all along as the object of the most basic
negations of the God of religion or the ethical person. The self was
repudiated as “sinner” and “inhuman wretch.” But nothing could erase the
self’s being the self-this bodily self, with its inherent I-ness, its
ownness (Eigenheit). Beaten down by God, the state, society, and
humanity, it nevertheless slowly began to raise its head again. It could
do this because fanatics brandishing Bibles or reason or the ideals of
humanity “are unconsciously and unintentionally pursuing I-ness”
(358/403). Firstly, it was revealed that “God’s” true body was “man,”
which represented one step toward the selfdiscovery of the ego. The
search for the self remained unconscious as the ego lost itself in
fanaticism over reason or the idea of humanity. In humanism’s
denunciations of the egoism of the ego as inhuman and selfish, the more
vigorous its efforts, the clearer it became that the ego was not
something to be set aside. It was only from the depths of nihility to
which the ego had been banished that it could, in a gesture of negating
all negation, rise to reclaim itself.
In the first half of his work, Stirner develops this ironical dialectic;
in the second half, he deals with the positive standpoint of egoism,
showing how the ego claims its uniqueness and ownness, embraces within
itself all other things and ideas, assimilates and appropriates them to
itself as owner (Eigner), and thus reaches the awareness of the unique
one (Einzige) who has appropriated everything within his own I-ness and
has made the world the content of his own life.
Stirner understands the ownness of the self as the consummation of
“freedom.” “Freedom” is originally a Christian doctrine having to do
with freeing the self from this world and renouncing all the things that
weigh the self down. This teaching eventually led to the abandoning of
Christianity and its morality in favor of a standpoint of the ego
“without sin, without God, without morality, and so on” [1571173]. This
“freedom,” however, is merely negative and passive. The ego still had to
take control of the things from which it has been released and make them
its own; it must become their owner (Eigner). This is the standpoint of
ownness (Eigenheit).
What a difference there is between freedom and I-ness. . . . I am free
from things that I have got rid of but I am the owner (Eigner) of things
which I have within my power (Macht) and which I control (mächtig).[16]
Eigenheit is the standpoint of the Eigene; in this standpoint freedom
itself becomes my property for the first time. Once the ego controls
everything and owns it as its property, it truly possesses freedom. In
other words, when it overcomes even the “form of freedom,” freedom
becomes its property. Stirner says that “the individual (der Eigene) is
one who is born free; but the liberal is one who seeks freedom, as a
dreamer and fanatic” (164/181). And again: “Ownness has created a new
freedom, insofar as it is the creator of everything” (163/179). This
ownness is I myself, and “my entire essence and existence.” Stirner
calls the essential being of this kind of ownness “unnameable,”
“conceptually unthinkable,” and “unsayable” (148/164, 183/201). The ego
thinks and is the controller and owner of all thinking, but it cannot
itself be grasped through thought. In this sense it is even said to be
“a state of thoughtlessness (Gedankenlosigkeit)” (148/164). In contrast
to Feuerbach, who considers “humanity” as the essence of human being and
the egoist who violates humanity as “an inhuman wretch,” Stirner claims
that there is no way to separate the notion of a human being from its
existence (178/195). If anything, Stirner’s existentialism dissolves the
essence of human being into its unnameable Existence.
From everything that has been said, Stirner’s deep affinity with
Nietzsche should be clear. His standpoint of the “power” to assimilate
everything in the world into the self is reminiscent of Nietzsche’s idea
of will to power. In Nietzsche it is folly as the culmination of
knowledge, and in Stirner it is “thoughtlessness” that makes all
thinking my property. The ego in Nietzsche is also ultimately nameless,
or at most symbolically called Dionysus. In Stirner’s case we also find
the element of “creative nothing,” a creative nihilism. This latter
point merits closer examination. In a remarkable passage, Stirner
confronts the “faith in truth,” just as Nietzsche does, and emphasizes
“faith in the self itself” as the standpoint of nihilism.
As long as you believe in truth, you do not believe in yourself and are
a —servant, a religious person. You alone are the truth, or rather, you
are more than the truth, which is nothing at all before you. Of course
even you inquire after the truth, of course even you "criticize," but
you do not inquire after a "higher truth," which would be higher than
you, and you do not criticize according to the criterion of such a
truth. You engage thoughts and ideas, as you do the appearances of
things, only for the purpose of making them . . . your own, you want
only to master them and become their owner, you want to orient yourself
and be at home in them, and you find them true or see them in their true
light . . . when they are right for you, when they are your property. If
they should later become heavier again, if they should disengage
themselves again from your power, that is then precisely their
untruth-namely, your powerlessness. Your powerlessness [Ohnmacht] is
their power [Macht], your humility their greatness. Their truth,
therefore, is you, or is the nothing[17] that you are for them, and in
which they dissolve, their truth is their nullity (Nichtigkeit).
(353-541/397-98)
Stirner’s assertion here that the truth of thought is one’s nihility,
and the power of truth one’s powerlessness, comes to the same thing as
Nietzsche’s assertion that “the will to truth” is the impotence of the
will, that “truth” is an illusion with which the will deceives itself,
and that behind a philosophy that seeks truth runs the current of
nihilism. Further, Stirner’s idea that when thought becomes one’s
property it becomes true for the first time parallels Nietzsche’s saying
that illusion is reaffirmed as useful for life from the standpoint of
will to power. In Stirner’s terms, nihility as powerlessness turns into
creative nothing. This “self-overcoming of nihilism” and “faith in the
self” constitute his egoism. He goes on: “All truth in itself is dead, a
corpse; it is alive only in the way that my lungs are alive-namely, in
proportion to my own vitality” (354/398). Any truth established above
the ego kills the ego; and as long as it kills the ego, it is itself
dead, and merely appears as a “ghost” or an idée fixe.
Every truth of an era is the idée fixe of that era . . . one wanted
after all to be 'inspired' (begeistert) by such an 'idea.' One wanted to
be ruled by a thought-and possessed by it! (355/399-400)
It is thus possible to discern a clear thread of nihilism running
through the fifty years that separate Nietzsche from Stirner, each of
whom recognized his nihilism as the expression of a great revolution in
the history of the European world. As Stirner says: “We are standing at
the borderline.” Both were truly thinkers of crisis in the most radical
sense.
We saw how Feuerbach criticized Hegel’s absolute spirit as an
“abstraction” and offered a posture of truly real existence in place of
it. According to Stirner, this “existence” of Feuerbach’s is no less of
an abstraction.
But I am not merely abstraction, I am all in all, and consequently
myself am abstraction or nothing. I am all and nothing; [I am no mere
thought, but 1 am at the same time full of thoughts, a world of
thoughts.] Hegel condemns I-ness, what is mine (Meinige)-that is,
"opinion" (Meinung). However, "absolute thinking" . . . has forgotten
that it is my thinking, and that it is I who think (ich denke), that it
itself exists through me . . . it is merely my opinion. (339/381-82)
The same can be said of Feuerbach’s emphasis on sensation [Sinnlichkeit]
in opposition to Hegel:
But in order to think and also to feel, and so for the abstract as much
as for the sensible, I need above all things me myself, and indeed me as
this absolutely definite me, this unique individual. (340/382)
The ego, which is all and nothing, which can call even absolute thinking
my thinking, is the ego that expels from the self all things and ideas,
reveals the nihility of the self, and at the same time nullifies their
“truth.” It is the same ego that then makes them its own flesh and
blood, owning them and “enjoying” (geniessen) the use of them. The ego
inserts nihility behind the “essence” of all things, behind the “truth”
of all ideas, and behind “God” who is at their ground. Within this
nihility these sacred things which used to reign over the ego are
stripped of their outer coverings to reveal their true nature. The ego
takes their place and makes all things and ideas its own, becoming one
with the world in the standpoint of nihility. In other words, Stirner’s
egoism is based on something similar to what Kierkegaard called “the
abyss of pantheistic nihility” or to what Nietzsche called “pantheistic
faith” in eternal recurrence. This is why Stirner called this “ownness”
the creator of all things, born free. From this standpoint he can claim
that, for the individual, thinking itself becomes a mere “pastime”
(Kurzweile) or “the equation of the thoughtless and the thoughtful I”
(150/166). I have already touched on the way in which the abyss of
nihility reveals the true face of life as boredom (Langweile) in
connection with Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard. The creative nihilism
which overcame this kind of nihilism appears as “play” in Nietzsche and
as “pastime” in Stirner.
Stirner differs from Nietzsche in being primarily a social thinker. The
emphasis of his major work is on a critique of various social ideas and
on the advocacy of a society “without government or law.” Here I forgo
taking on this manifold argument in order to focus on its foundational
philosophical ideas of human existence itself. Social ideas are, of
course, important, but for me what makes them important would be
something along the lines of Dostoevsky’s understanding of socialism as
atheism. It is nevertheless necessary to touch upon Stirner’s social
ideas to some extent in order to give a comprehensive exposition of his
nihilism.
Stirner exhibits the same irony toward the state as he does toward
“truth.”
It is no longer so much a matter of the state but rather of me. With
this all problems regarding sovereign power, the constitution, and so on
completely sink down into their true abyss and nihility [ihr wahres
Nichts]. I-this nihility-shall drive out my various creations from
myself. (235/259)
Stirner means that the nihility of the ego is inserted behind the
authority of the state, and that in this light the fundamental
hollowness of the state’s authority is revealed. At that point the human
relationships that are to replace the state emerge from the “creative
nothing” of the individual. The same is true of political parties and
factions: “Precisely those who shout most loudly that the state needs an
opposition oppose most eagerly every kind of disharmony within the
party. This is proof that they, too, only want-a state” [235/260].
Neither the state nor the opposition party is able to bring about the
collapse of the other; rather, both collapse when they collide with the
ego. This is because the citizens and party members are more than the
fact of their belonging to the nation or party. Ownness, which contains
at its roots something unpolitical, cannot be extinguished, no matter
how much state and party strengthen their binding power. Once the ego
becomes aware of its inherently unpolitical nature and becomes egoistic,
state and party collapse. It is the same way with the contradiction
between the state and humankind.
The nationalists are right: one cannot negate one's nationality. And the
humanists are right: one should not remain in the narrowness of
nationalism. The contradiction is resolved only within unique
individuality [Einzigkeit]: nationality is a property [Eigenschaft] of
mine. But I am not reducible to my properties, just as humanity is a
property of mine though it is only through my individuality that "man"
receives Existence. (244-45/270-71)
Proudhon and the communists say that the world belongs to everybody.
They make the ghost called “everybody” holy, and set it up as a
terrifying ruler over the individual. But this everybody is actually
each individual self for itself, and it is to this self that the world
belongs. Stirner says: “Just as the isolated individual (Einzelne) is
the whole of nature, he is also the whole species”; or “I am the owner
of humankind, I am humankind . . .”[18] This kind of egoistic standpoint
has been recovered as creative nothing from lithe abyss of nihility”
after having been negated by all other standpoints and having itself
broken through and negated all other standpoints. Now everything lives
as my own, “like my lungs.”
From Protagoras to Feuerbach it has been said that “man is the measure
of all things” (352/395); but it is rather the ego that is the measure
of all things. This egoistic posture allows us for the first time to
“judge from the self,” while other standpoints oblige us to “judge from
the other.” Furthermore, the dissolution of all things into the
“vitality” of the self as the property and “enjoyment” of the self sets
up a new mode of intercourse with the world for the individual. “My
intercourse with the world . . . is enjoyment of the world (Weltgenuss)
and belongs to my self-enjoyment” (319/358). The standpoint of enjoyment
of the world as enjoyment of the self in Stirner is reminiscent of the
samadhi of “self-enjoyment,” an important state in Buddhist practice.
The difference is that in Buddhism the samadhi of self-enjoyment cannot
be separated from the samadhi of “the enjoyment of the other.”[19] This
is, I would say, the locus of the fundamental distinction between
nothingness [mu] in Buddhism and Stirner’s nothingness. Nothingness in
Buddhism is “self-benefit-benefitting-others,”[20] which is a higher and
more comprehensive standpoint. Stirner is thinking about an
“association” (Verein) of individuals sharing the standpoint of the
unique individual, and he imagines the citizen-state of the political
liberals and the society of the communists dissolving into this kind of
association.
The association of unique individuals differs from the state or society
in not being master over individuals and making them its servants: “You
can assert yourself as an individual only within the association”
(312/349). It is a relationship of individuals without mutual domination
or enslavement, mutually enjoying and making use of each other. How can
we conceive of egoists uniting together? Obviously we cannot take egoism
in its ordinary colloquial sense. Stirner says that the happiness or
welfare of others is a genuine concern of his. In order to increase the
other’s pleasure one is willing “to sacrifice gladly innumerable
pleasures” [290/323]. I am prepared to risk “my life, my welfare, my
freedom”-because to enjoy the other’s happiness is my happiness.
“However, I do not sacrifice me, me myself to the other, but remain an
egoist and-enjoy him” (290/324). There should be no misunderstanding the
import of these words: Stirner means that one can sacrifice one’s life
for the other but not one’s self. To sacrifice oneself for the other is
to grant the other a “ghostly” power and enslave oneself to it, the self
thereby failing to be itself. This is entirely different from ordinary
egoism. But can we then conceive of an association of egoists in this
sense? Stirner answers this question as follows:
If they were able to be perfect egoists, they would exclude each other
entirely and hold together that much more strongly. Their disgrace is
not that they exclude each other, but that they only half do this.
(181/198)
In another passage Stirner pursues this issue further in suggesting,
perhaps with Hegel in mind, that to try to dissolve the opposition of
two things into a third thing is to understand their significance in too
weak a sense. Opposition should rather be intensified. That we are not
entirely separated from others, that we seek a certain “community” or
“bond” with others and recognize a certain ideal within the community,
is, according to Stirner, our weakness. From this he draws the following
remarkable conclusion, which is probably one of the clearest answers to
the question of how the relationship between one human being and another
should be set up from a standpoint of affirmative nihilism.
The final and most decisive opposition, that of the unique individual
against the unique individual, is basically beyond what is called
opposition, yet without sinking back into "unity" and unanimity. As a
unique individual you no longer have anything in common with the others
and therefore also nothing divisive or hostile; you do not seek your
right with respect to him before a third party nor stand with him either
on a "ground of law" [Rechtsboden] or on any other communal ground.
Opposition disappears in perfect separation (Geschiedenheit) or
uniqueness . . . here equally consists precisely in inequality and is
itself nothing other than inequality . . . (208-09/229)
The passage clearly exemplifies the close connection between Stirner’s
social ideas and their philosophical foundation. Individuals are
individuals because they stand on “nothing.” And for the same reason
“decisive opposition” and its “complete disappearance” arise
simultaneously between individuals entirely separated. This is the
“association” of the egoists: because they are entirely separated, they
are a firm unity. “Only with the ultimate separation does separation
itself come to an end and turn into unity” (231/254). Moreover, there
are no bonds to a third party and therefore no community existing
independently of the individuals, so that relationships in terms of
rights and legalities disappear. This idea of Stirner’s might seem no
more than a trick of logic. But insofar as only the “ego” has the
attribute of being absolutely unique, it cannot be a specimen of
something universal. For this very reason, it is possible to conceive of
“nothing” at the ground of the ego. If such egos are, moreover, to
associate with each other, there is a sense in which Stirner’s
understanding of their mode of association grasps something that even
Kant and Hegel were unable to appreciate. It would seem that he has hit
on something totally familiar and yet deeply hidden concerning our
association with others.
Stirner’s view appears at first glance to be close to Fichte’s
standpoint of pure ego, but he repeatedly emphasizes the difference
between them. According to Stirner, Fichte’s ego is the generalization
of an “I” that ultimately exists outside of me. “I am not, however, one
I alongside other I’s, but the one and only I . . .” (361/406). Here, a
general person in any sense, even an “I” in general, must be negated. In
spite of the abyss of nihility this leaves us with, or rather because of
it, I am a bodily ego. Stirner repeatedly emphasizes the fact of
embodiment: “there does not exist anything higher above the bodily human
being” (356/400). This bodily human being, as I said earlier, is
understood as something that has gone through Hegel’s absolute spirit
and passed beyond it. Similarly, Stirner emphasizes the self’s finitude:
When Fichte says, "The I is everything," this appears to be in perfect
harmony with my own expositions. But it is not that the I is everything,
but rather the I destroys everything, and only the I that dissolves
itself, that never "is," the —finite I, is really 1. Fichte speaks of
the "absolute" I, whereas I speak of me, the perishing 1. (182/199)
The background to the finitude of which Stirner speaks lies in the
dissolution of the self and the destruction of everything. Feuerbach’s
“humanity” is not a “perishing and individual self,” insofar as the
individual is said to raise itself beyond the limit of individuality,
and enter into the unity of love between one human being and another.
Even here the individual is seen as unable to go beyond the various laws
governing this unity, “the positive and essential determinations of the
[human] species.” Stirner counters:
But the species is nothing, and if the individual raises himself beyond
the boundaries of his individuality, this is rather precisely he himself
as an individual; he is only insofar as he raises himself, he is only
insofar as he does not remain what he is; otherwise he would be
finished, dead.[21]
Stirner is saying that “the human species” is merely a conceptualized
ideal. This negation of the “species” is the standpoint of nihility
without any kind of general person, and in this standpoint “going beyond
the boundaries of individuality” has an entirely different significance.
It is not that one enters into communal relationships with others at the
standpoint of the species as Feuerbach would have it, but rather that
the life of the individual overflows, so to speak, the limits of the
self. With this, the individual becomes for the first time the living
individual. This is the meaning of the terms “dissolving the self,”
“perishing,” or not remaining in the mode of fixed “being.” On this
standpoint, everything that the self touches fuses with the self. This
is also, I think, what Stirner means by saying that it is not that the
ego is everything but that it destroys everything. Thus what he means by
the perishing and finite ego is a continual overflowing of the self,
where everything is melted into the self’s vitality, and “enjoyed.” This
flow of nihility Stirner’s “creative nothing,” represents a fundamental
unity of creative nihilism and finitude.
Nietzsche, it will be recalled, also emphasized the bodily aspect of
human being: “the awakened one, the one who knows, says: I am entirely
body and nothing besides; and soul is only a word for something about
the body. The body is a great reason . . .” (Za 1,4). Moreover, he holds
fixed “being” to be an illusion, based on the “perishing” of becoming,
and affirms a Dionysian life that makes this perishing one’s own
“ceaseless creation.” He, too, subscribed to the fundamental unity of
creative nihilism and finitude, which he expressed by speaking of “this
life-this eternal life.” Here Stirner, breaking with Feuerbach, and
Nietzsche, breaking with Schopenhauer, meet at a deep level, even though
their points of departure, their concerns, their perspectives, and also
the character, scale, and profundity of their philosophies are somewhat
different.
Marx’s satirical critique entitled “Saint Max” does not show a very
profound understanding of Stirner’s enterprise. It rather gives the
impression that the materialistic view of history does not have the
wherewithal for understanding Stirner. For example, where Stirner
writes: “I am not nothing in the sense of a void but creative nothing,
the nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything,” Marx
turns the words around by saying: “The Holy Father [Stirner] could have
expressed this as follows: I am everything in the void of nonsense but
the null creator, the all from which I myself as creator create
nothing.”[22] Stirner could well have responded to this as follows: “You
have said something wise by mistake in saying that Stirner creates
nothing from everything. My standpoint is exactly as you say, but its
meaning is entirely different from what you think.”
For both Stirner and Nietzsche their nihilism was their existence, and,
as a self-interpretation of their existence, their philosophy.
Philosophy in turn was a stimulus toward Existence, but not yet
scientific in the original sense.[23] From the viewpoint of the human
way of being, both criticized the scientific standpoint. This accounts
for their negative attitude toward traditional metaphysics. But can a
standpoint of the fundamental uni of creative nihilism and finitude lead
to a scientific philosophy? Can the inquiry into nihilism as the
self-interpretation of existence yield a thinking in the form of
scientific philosophy? Or to put it the other way round, can the
thinking of scientific philosophy constitute a standpoint of Existence
as the self-interpretation of existence? It is not until Heidegger that
we have an existential philosophy in this sense, where the standpoint of
scientific philosophy for the first time appears on the ground of
nihilism . His attempt to reconnect with the tradition of metaphysics by
“destructing” it[24] opened up a new and expansive phase in the
development of nihilism.
[1] Max Stirner (real name: Johann Kaspar Schmidt), Der Einzige und sein
Eigentum (Stuttgart, 1981); English translation by S. T. Byington, The
Ego and His Own (New York, 1963). A more recent English edition of
selections from the text is the volume by John Carroll, Max Stirner: The
Ego and His Own in the “Roots of the Right” series edited by George
Steiner (New York, 1971), which appeared the same year as the only
recent book-length study of Stirner in English: R. W. K. Patersun, The
Nihilistic Egoist: Max Stirner (London and New York, 1971). The classic
study locating Stirner’s work in the more general development of
nineteenth-century German philosophy is Karl Löwith, From Hegel to
Nietzsche. I retain the translation of the title as “The Ego and His
Own” only because the book is so widely known under this name. The
German title is admittedly difficult to translate, but “Ego” is not a
happy rendering of Der Einzige- Stirner’s espousal of (a peculiar form
of) egoism notwithstanding. “The Unique One and Its Own” would not only
be a better translation of the German but also of Nishitani’s rendering
of it as Yuiitsusha to sono shoyu.
[2] On the question of Stirner’s influence on Nietzsche, see Carroll,
pp. 24-25, and Paterson, chapter 7. For a recent treatment of Lange’s
influence on Nietzsche, see George J. Stack, Lange and Nietzsche
(Berlin, 1983).
[3] Löwith points to the source of this motto in one of Goethe’s
Gesellige Lieder entitled “Vanitas! vanitatum vanitas!” which begins
with the lines: “I have founded my affair on nothing./That’s why I feel
so well in the world.” I have to thank my friend Eberhard Scheiffele of
Waseda University for pointing out that Goethe is here parodying a
Pietistic hymn which begins: “I have founded my affair on God . . . “
Löwith notes that Kierkegaard was also acquainted with the line from
Goethe and thought it interesting as “the nihilistic ‘summation of life’
of a very great individuality (From Hegel to Nietzsche, p. 411, note
155).
[4] Kyomu tentan-Chinese: hsü-wu t’ien-t’an. Although this term does not
actually appear in the Lao-tzu it is a quintessentially Taoist phrase,
and appears frequently, for example, in the Huai Nan Tzu, a later Taoist
text from the Han dynasty. In chapter 15 of the Chuang-tzu the phrase
hsü-wu rien-t’an occurs in a description of the Taoist sage, of whom it
is said: “in emptiness and nothingness, calm and indifference, he joins
with Heaven’s Power”-see A. C. Graham, Chuang Tzu: The Inner Chapters
(London, 1981), p. 266. This joining with the power (te) of heaven
(t’ien) involves emptying the self in such a way that the forces of the
natural world can operate through it unobstructedly-which may result in
a condition not unlike the one Stirner is talking about, though from an
opposite direction.
[5] The Ego and His Own, p. 4; Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, p. 4.
References t o Stirner’s book, separated b y a slash, refer to the page
numbers first of The Ego and His Own and then of the German edition. For
the German text I have given references to the new Reclam edition rather
than to the 1901 edition used by Nishitani, since the latter is no
longer readily available. As usual I have translated from the original
German while “leaning” toward Nishitani’s Japanese rendering, but the
results are similar enough to Byington’s to enable the reader to locate
passages in his translation.
[6] 9/8; I have translated Nishitani’s phrase rather literally; a more
idiomatic rendering of “hinter die Dinge kommen” would be simply “to get
to the bottom of things.”
[7] 5/5. The German reads: “Ich bin [nicht] Nichts im Sinne der
Leerheit, sondern das schopferische Nichts, das Nichts, aus welchem Ich
selbst als Schopfer alles schaffe.” Nishitani translates Leerheit as ku
o, which is here rendered, as usual, as “void.” Nichts, with its
obviously “positive” meaning, he translates as mu, “nothing.” This is a
remarkable passage, which surprisingly anticipates both Nietzsche and
Heidegger and resonates deeply with a whole range of Buddhist and Taoist
ideas. A couple of sentences later, in response to his own rhetorical
question concerning the need for his Sache at least to be “good,”
Stirner exclaims: “What is good or evil! . . . I am neither good nor
evil. Neither of them has any sense for me.”
[8] Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, pp. 296-300.
[9] See above, chapter 3, sec. 4.
[10] 43/46. “Ou hast einen Sparren zu viel” means literally “you have
one rafter too many,” equivalent to the English expression “to have a
screw loose.”
[11] At the end of the Preface to The Essence of Christianity, written
shortly before Stirner’s book was published, Feuerbach referred to
Christianity as a “fixed idea.”
[12] The word “fanatic” comes from the Latin fanum, meaning “temple.”
Enthusiasmus has a similarly religious connotation, being derived from
the Greek entheos, which means “having god or divinity in one.”
[13] 128/141. Nishitani translates Eigenheit as gasei, literally
“I-ness,” which emphasizes its connection with jiga, or “ego.”
[14] Hegel had earlier pointed to the significance of the connection
between Meinung, “opinion,” and “mineness”; see The Phenomenology of
Spirit, section A, chapter I, which bears the title: “Sense-Certainty:
or the ‘This’ and ‘Meaning’ [Meinen].”
[15] On Nishitani’s use of the verb datsuraku for “removes and
discards,” see chapter five, note 6. The idea of “casting off all robes”
of any kind figures prominently in the ideas of Rinzai; see The Record
of Lin-chi, Discourse 18. Stirner’s admonition to strip away everything
that is alien to oneself, everything that is not truly one’s own, is a
remarkable anticipation of the respects in which the “existential”
aspects of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger are congruent with
later Buddhist ideas.
[16] 157/173. Stirner’s use of Macht and mächtig here and elsewhere
gives the entire text a quite different illumination when read-as
Nishitani reads it-in the light of Nietzsche’s Wille zur Macht, as a
power that is not primarily physical.
[17] I have translated Stirner’s Nichts here as “nothing,” even though
Nishitani uses kyomu; for Nichtigkeit later in the sentence he uses
kümusei, which is rendered, as usual, “nullity.”
[18] 183/201; 245/271. This anticipates another important theme in
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche: the identity of each individual with the
entire race.
[19] Jijuyo zammai and tajuyo zammai; on the idea of the samadhi of
selfenjoyment, see Dogen, Shobogenzo, “Bendowa,” 15 i. Nishitani
discusses “self-joyous samadhi” in the context of the “dropping-off
[datsurakuJ of body-and-mind” in chapter 5 of Religion and Nothingness.
[20] Jiririta kakugyo uman. This idea is another expression of “the
bodhisattva ideal” of Mahayana Buddhism, in which a person’s
enlightenment conduces to the enlightenment of all sentient beings.
[21] 182/200. Through a slip of the tongue, or pen, Nishitani translates
the penultimate phrase as: “insofar as he remains what he is.”
[22] See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, III “Sankt
Max,” sec. 1.
[23] “Philosophy had not yet become gaku”-this word, which appears many
times in the course of the next several pages, has the connotations of
“learning, study, scholarship, science.” It is often an apt translation
of the German Wissenschait, which has a much broader range of meaning
than the English “science”; I have consequently rendered it variously
through terms like “discipline” and “scholarship” as well as “science”
and other cognates.
[24] The reference is to Heidegger’s project of “the destruction
(Destruktion) of the history of ontology” as announced in §6 of Being
and Timea taking apart of the tradition, with what Heidegger calls a
“positive intention,” which is an important forerunner of the
contemporary movement of “deconstruction.’’