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Title: Clarifying the Unique and Its Self-Creation Author: Jason McQuinn Date: 2012 Language: en Topics: egoism, Max Stirner, introduction, egoist, biography Source: Retrieved on 10/27/2020 from https://archive.org/details/StirnerStirnersCritics Notes: Introduction anticopyright @ 2012 Jason McQuinn. This book may be freely pirated and quoted. The author and publishers would like to be informed. LBC Books. CAL Press. PO Box 24332 Oakland, CA 94623 USA http://calpress.org/
âThe World has languished long enough under the tyranny of thought,
under the terrorism of ideas; she is waking from the heavy dream....â â
Max Stirner, âThe Philosophical Reactionariesâ (1847)
Max Stirnerâs 1844 masterwork, Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum[1] (The
Unique[2] and Its Property), is one of the most subversive, radical and,
therefore, extreme texts in all of history. It can also be described as
one of the most misread, misinterpreted and misunderstood books in the
history of modern Western thought.[3] This should not be unexpected.
Subversive, radical and extreme texts will always obtain hostile
receptions from those targeted by their critiques, whether the critiques
are accurate and justified or not.
The book is rather simplyâthough very cleverlyâwritten with very little
use of technical terminology. And Stirner goes out of his way in an
attempt to use common language wherever possible, though he often does
so very creatively and idiosyncratically. It is also a fairly demanding
text for anyone (including nearly every contemporary reader) who is
unfamiliar with the cultural background within which it was conceived,
written and published. It is possible for it to be read and appreciated
without knowledge of this background, however the prospect of adequate
understandingânot only of the central points but also their extensive
implicationsâdefinitely recedes the less a reader is familiar with
topics like nominalism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, analytical and
dialectical logic, and critiques of religion, ontology, epistemology,
ideology and language that were current in Stirnerâs day.[4]
From the moment Stirnerâs text first appeared, it directly and
fundamentally challenged every religion, philosophy and ideology. It
didnât just politely challenge every existing historical religion,
philosophy and ideology, which would already have been enough to have
made its author many enemies. It also blatantly and scathingly
challenged every existing contemporary religion, philosophy and ideology
of the day. This, unsurprisingly, made its author persona non grata for
all theologians, philosophers and ideologists busily working to perfect
or put into practice their grand ideas and theories.[5]
Thus the stage was set for over a century and a half of (most often
successful, because most often unopposed) mystification of Stirnerâs
intentions by his many critics from 1844 through the present. Even the
great majority of self-proclaimed proponents of Stirnerâs work too often
tended to add to the mystification through their own misunderstandings
and unself-critical oversimplifications.[6] The most common critical
responses to Stirnerâs text have probably been dismissal or evasionâto
simply disqualify it from discussion or avoid comment and change the
subject as quickly as possible. But for those few critics unafraid to
actually mention Stirnerâs name and ideas, the dominant response has
been denigration and misinterpretation, often bordering on (or
including) intentional misdirection. Sometimes it can be blatantly clear
that misinterpretations are not accidental but quite deliberate,
especially with regard to the more absurd attacks of ideologues. But
often it is unclear whether Stirnerâs critics are too intellectually and
emotionally challenged by his text to be held accountable for
consciously knowing what it is that they are doing. Regardless, the net
effect of the constant streams of denunciation and false portrayalsâboth
pro and conâhas unquestionably taken its toll.
Max Stirnerâs original published critics were all contemporaries writing
from within the radical literary, philosophical and political milieu of
VormÀrz Germany.[7] They included Ludwig Feuerbach (the well-known
author of The Essence of Christianity, a central founding text of modern
humanism), Moses Hess (at the time a Feuerbachian communist associate of
the young Karl Marx), Bruno Bauer (a former defender of conservative
Hegelianism turned radical critic), Szeliga (pseudonym for Franz Zychlin
von Zychlinski, a Prussian officer who was also a proponent of Bruno
Bauerâs âcritical criticismâ), Kuno Fischer (while still a student,
author of a vociferous pamphlet denouncing Stirnerâalong with other left
Hegeliansâas a ânew sophist,â later a respectable historian of
philosophy) and the pseudo-proletarian duo of Friedrich Engels and Karl
Marx (although Marx and Engelsâ criticism wasnât actually published
until 80 years later!). Of these, three criticisms were published soon
enough following the original issuance of his text for Stirner to
respond in Wigandâs Vierteljahrschrift in 1845, under the title of
âRecensenten Stirnerâsâ (âStirnerâs Criticsâ). Although Stirner never
replied to him in print, Bruno Bauerâs response to Stirnerâs book also
appeared in that same 1845 issue. Later in 1847 Stirner (writing as G.
Edward) then responded to Kuno Fischer in the fifth volume of Wigandâs
Epigonen, under the title of âDie Philosophischen Reaktionaereâ (âThe
Philosophical Reactionariesâ). Unfortunately, Stirner never had a chance
to dispense with Marx and Engelsâ lengthy, nearly unreadable, diatribe
entitled Die Deutsche Ideologie (The German Ideology) since they were
unable to get it published either in Stirnerâs or their own
lifetimes.[8]
The massive tides of historical misreading, misinterpretation and
misunderstanding have too-long tended to swamp any possibility of a
genuine popular understanding of Stirnerâs work, especially in the
English language given the mistranslated titles in every edition so far
published. Along with publication of a much needed revision of the
English translation and its misleading title, probably the most
important place to begin the reinterpretation of Stirnerâs work on a
much more accurate basis is with publication of this long-overdue
translation of Stirnerâs responses to his initial critics.[9] But both
Stirnerâs texts and his responses to his critics first need to be put in
a comprehensible context.
---
Max Stirner is the pseudonym of Johann Kaspar Schmidt, born on the
morning of October 25, 1806 in Bayreuth, Bavaria, just after the Battle
of Jena and the beginning of the Napoleonic occupation of Prussia. He
was the son of a flute-maker who died when Johann was only an infant.
Before he reached the age of three his mother remarried an older
apothecary (pharmacist) and thereafter moved with him to Kulm on the
Vistula River in West Prussia (now Poland). As soon as possible (in
1810) Johann was also brought to live in Kulm, where he spent his
boyhood. Then in 1818 Schmidt moved back to Bayreuth to live with his
uncle and godfather as he began his humanistic Christian education at
the famous gymnasium there founded in 1664. He proved to be âa good and
diligent pupil,â and left the gymnasium with high marks in September,
1826.[10] He then moved to the city of Berlin where he would continue
his education at the university until 1835, live most of his remaining
life, and finally die in 1856.
Before his unexpected book, The Unique and Its Property, briefly lit up
the literary firmament after its initial appearance in late 1844,
Stirner (as Schmidt) was most notably a respected teacher in a âTeaching
and Educational Institution for Young Ladiesâ from 1839 until 1844 in
Berlin. After he became infamous as the author and critic Max Stirner,
he started an ill-fated dairy business and worked as a writer and
translator, producing the most important German translations of Adam
Smithâs The Wealth of Nations and Jean-Baptiste Sayâs TraitĂ© dâĂconomie
Politique.
Stirner studied for many years under the heavy influence of Hegelians,
both at his gymnasium and at the Universities of Berlin and Erlangen. In
Berlin he began his university studies in 1826 and ended his
institutional enrollment after several interruptions in 1834, completing
his pro facultate docendi exams in 1835.[11] In Erlangen he studied only
briefly in 1829. His Hegelian influences included the rector at the
gymnasium in Bayreuth where he had studied for eight years, Georg
Andreas Gabler. (It is important to note that it was Gabler who went on
to take over the University of Berlin chair in philosophy when Hegel
died.) They also included other prominent Hegelian professors like P.K.
Marheineke, Christian Kapp and Karl Michelet under whom Stirner studied.
Most importantly, Stirner attended the lectures of Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel himself at the University of Berlin in 1827 and 1828 at
the height of Hegelâs popularity. In addition to the Hegelians, in
Berlin Stirner also studied most notably under Friedrich Schleiermacher
(theology),[12] Heinrich Ritter (logic), and (in classical philology
studies) Philipp August Böckh and Johann August Wilhelm Neander.
Following the completion of his studies and the beginning of his career
as a teacher, Stirner began to socialize with the group of radical
intellectuals around Bruno Bauer then called die Freien (âthe Freeâ).
This group can be considered a successor to an earlier group called the
Doktorenclub (âDoctorsâ Clubâ), which according to one member had
consisted âof aspiring young men, most of whom had already finished
their studiesâ in which âreigned supreme ... idealism, the thirst for
knowledge and the liberal spirit....â[13] Aside from Bruno Bauerâs
central role, the earlier group had also been notable for the
participation of the young student, Karl Marx. However, by the time
Stirner began his long association with die Freien Marx had moved on,
rejecting any further association with most of its members. At one time
or another many of those identified as âYoung Hegeliansâ or âLeft
Hegeliansâ[14] seem to have shown up at meetings of either the
Doktorenclub or die Freien. Die Freien usually met in the evenings at
one or another Berlin wine bar or beer tavernâeventually settling on
Hippelâs as its most stable venueâfor conversation, criticism, debate,
jokes, card-games, smoking and drinking. And it was there that Stirner
found an ever-changing group of intelligent, often challenging and
outspoken comrades with whom he could feel at home as long as he
continued living in Berlin. Amongst the more notable participants in die
Freien, Bruno Bauer became one of Stirnerâs best friends (attending both
his second marriage as witness, and his funeral) and the young Prussian
officer Friedrich Engels for a time also became an enthusiastic
duzbruder with Stirner before beginning his later intense friendship
with Karl Marx.
It was during the apogee of Left Hegelian ascendance in the social and
political thought of the time, while Stirner was fully engaged with die
Freien, that Stirner began contributing to the radical press as
correspondent, reviewer and essayist. Most importantly this included his
contribution of essays entitled âThe False Principle of our Educationâ
and âArt and Religionâ to Rheinische Zeitung supplements in April and
June 1842 (both coincidentally appearing just before Karl Marx took over
as editor). Other contributions appeared elsewhere. And eventually, he
began hinting that he was even writing a book. However, none of his
comrades was prepared for the radical power and scope of The Unique and
Its Property when it actually appeared. As it turned out, Stirner had
not only been working on a critique of particular philosophical ideas or
positions, nor even a critique of the entire Hegelian philosophical
system and its own radical critics. Stirner had, instead, completed an
unprecedented critique of every possible religious, philosophical and
ideological system.
-----
It was in the fall of 1844 that the initial public copies of Stirnerâs
The Unique and Its Property first appeared. Assuming the inevitable
public controversy ahead, Stirner had already given notice to quit his
teaching position as of October 1^(st). The book was initially received
with a wide range of reactions from excitement to outrage, and confusion
to consternation. A few laudatory comments were made, notably in letters
from Ludwig Feuerbach, Friedrich Engels and Arnold Ruge.[15] But, in the
most prominent cases, any initial openness to Stirnerâs critique quickly
gave way to a closing of minds, superficial dismissals, and shudders of
contempt for the manifest evils Stirner was then alleged to have
unleashed on an unsuspecting world.
Max Stirner announced his intentions in the opening pages of his book.
He argued that if egoism was suitable for God, humanity or the sultan,
why not for me? Why is it always only the actually-existing, individual
egoist who is disparaged, while the imagined masters of the world are so
lauded? Why donât we learn from these imagined masters and put ourselves
in their place as masters of our own lives? Stirner goes on to do just
this for himself, inviting us to follow his lead. The rest of the book
is an examination of the implications which follow from this change of
perspective from willing servitude to conscious self-creation.
For the vast majority of thinking human beings, it was in Stirnerâs
timeâand remainsâGod or gods, humanity, Man, society, the political
state, the economy, or particular figures like emperors, kings or
presidents who were not merely allowed, but often expected, to proclaim
their powerâtheir egoismâwithout any necessity of justifying themselves.
These figures, all imaginary to one degree or another, depend for the
largest part of their existence and powers precisely on the mass belief
people have in their imagined reality and power. On its most important
level, Stirnerâs masterwork is a consistent examination and critique of
this phenomenon, depicting where and how people in practice invest
aspects of their own reality and powers in these phantoms through a
process of self-alienation.[16] Stirnerâs critique of this nearly
ubiquitous, but most of the time unquestioned, phenomenon is at the same
time necessarily an immanent critique. It is an immanent critique
because Stirner does not lay claim to any transcendent or absolute
Truth, Value or Reality (which would itself require the same type of
self-alienation to create) or access to any other privileged perspective
which would allow him to speak from any position beyond his own
particular, finite, unique perspective.[17] That no person before him
(nor in fact many after) had similarly made this simple observation and
critique only confirms its central importance and his original,
incredible audacity.
Despite the mightiest of efforts, once this Pandoraâs box had been
opened it could not be closed. However the efforts continue every moment
of every day from theologians, philosophers, preachers, moralists,
politicians, economists, judges, police, ideologists, psychologists and
all the other technicians of sacred power. They all want each of us to
join the chorus disparaging the egoism of any and all actually-existing,
particular individuals in order to pledge our allegiance to whichever of
the imagined egoist masters we prefer to serve. Do you want to
subordinate your life and prostrate yourself to God, to Nature, to
Jesus, Ecology, Peace, Love or Science? Or to the Proletariat or
Communism, to Free Enterprise or Capitalism, to Language, Freedom or the
Void? To many people it matters much less in whom or what you believe
enough to pledge your self-enslavement than that you at least believe in
something, anything that you imagine to be greater than yourself! The
biggest tabu is non-belief.
Only immanent critique (critique from within) can hope to dislodge those
who insist on their self-enslavement to a reified or imaginary ideal (to
a âspirit,â âghost,â conceptual âessence,â or âfixed ideaâ in Stirnerâs
terms). Any successful transcendent critique, on the contrary, merely
removes this self-enslavement from one imaginary ideal or reification in
order to restore it to some other imaginary ideal or reification. To
remove every form of self-enslavement from any possible reification or
ideal requires not the critique of particular ideals to which people
enslave themselves, it requires the critique of the practice of
self-enslavement itself. And this is where Stirner devotes his primary
efforts. He understands that attempts from outside to liberate passive
people from one institution of slavery will usually only leave them
ready to re-enslave themselves in another form. The abolition of all
forms of slavery requires that those who are enslaved fight for their
own liberation to reclaim their own practical autonomy and
self-possession. Each of those enslaved must construct her or his own
immanent, practical critique of every form of enslavement. Or else
condemn themselves to remain enslaved.
Like anyone else, Stirner constructed his critique from within a
particular time and place, history and culture, situation and milieu.
His critique, while certainly applicable to anyone able to read, reason
and relate it to his or her own life, can appear narrower or more
particular than it actually is if those who read it do not have an
understanding of the particular context of the situation in and from
which he wrote and its relation to our contemporary situations as
readers. The relationships between particular ideas, phrases and themes
in The Unique and Its Property and understandings of our more generally
shared contemporary situation can be described from different
perspectives and more or less accurately phrased in a variety of manners
and styles. Some of the most important of these ideas, phrases and
themes include the nature of Stirnerâs understanding of egoism, self,
concepts, names and language, property, alienty and ownness in relation
to his understanding of the sacred, spirit, essence, fixed ideas,
religion, language, philosophy, society, humanity and nature.
Interpretation of Stirnerâs perspective on each of these most often
founders in the translation of his own words from their particular
contexts in his text into the chosen language of each individual
interpreterâs own particular context of understanding and interpretation
and, at the same time, within the more general context of prevailing
social, linguistic and cultural reificationsâcompulsory presuppositions
or prejudices that cannot be questioned within an imagined consensus
reality of ubiquitous self-alienation. This includes the greatest
prejudice of all (especially for all those who remain self-enslaved),
that of the impossibility of selfcreation and self-possession.
-----
One way to better understand what Stirner does in The Unique and Its
Property is to grasp his effort as an attempt to employ a particular
method to all of the general cultural phenomena of religion, philosophy,
morality, science and ideology. This method was an egoist method,
possibly modeled in part on Ludwig Feuerbachâs anthropological
method.[18] But whereas Feuerbach was concerned to reduce the imaginary
ideals of religion to the supposed reality of âManâ or the âHuman,â
Stirner had a much more radical concern. His own concern, and by
implication each of our own concerns. Instead of reducing imagined
ideals into another supposedly more real conceptual ideal as does
Feuerbach, Stirner dissolves every imaginary ideal into himself and
suggests that we all choose to do likewise. What ultimately makes
Stirnerâs critique so powerful and irrefutable is that it does not, like
Feuerbachâs (or any other possible) critique begin from any fixed-idea
or ideal. Not even any conceptual ideal of an âIâ or an ego. Instead it
begins from his own, and by implication each individual personâs own
particular, phenomenal, uniquely lived experience.[19] Thus, Stirnerâs
egoism and his egoist method do not involve any reference to any other
of the usual depictions (conceptions or representations) of these âegoâ
words as aiming at self-transcendence (whether âegoisticâ or
âaltruisticâ). They resolutely and consistently express a nominalist, or
phenomenalâand thus an immanentâunderstanding. This nominalist or
phenomenal or immanent egoism is purely descriptive and empirical, with
no normative or metaphysical content in itself. It is an egoism of
intentionality that cannot itself be alienated, because it is exactly
what one chooses and does, nothing more and nothing less. (Itâs
definitely not an egoism of ends or goals oriented towards some
self-alienated image of self-interest.) As Stirner says, it âpointsâ to
something which it cannot possibly explain or define in words. It is not
an ultimate reality or truth, since these concepts cannot possibly
express what it is. Stirnerâs egoism points to Stirnerâs figure of the
Unique, which points merely to Stirner himself.[20] Similarly, according
to Stirnerâs usage, any particular personâs egoism will point to the
whole of that personâs uniquely lived experience.
That words and languageâespecially in their conventional usagesâare
inadequate to fully convey the meaning here is obvious, and is part of
the problem of both adequately understanding Stirner and avoiding all
the (more or less easy and more or less consciously intentional)
misinterpretations of Stirnerâs work. The process of self-alienationâof
separating an idea or representation of oneself from oneâs living self
and then subordinating oneâs living self to that imageâwhich Stirner
describes and criticizes is so ubiquitous and fundamental to the
functioning of modern societies that it permeates nearly every aspect of
social life.[21] Enslaving oneself to a fixed idea or imaginary ideal
(or any number of them) is not a simple thing. It requires an immense
amount of effort to work itself out in practice. This effort, in large
part, it has been the primary function of all religion, philosophy and
ideology to facilitate from the earliest days of symbolic communication.
This effort also is embodied in a large number of habits, attitudes,
modes of thought, and techniques of subordination that must be and have
been learned and perfected by the masses of people in contemporary
societies. And it is enforced by the sanctions of social, economic,
political and military institutions that are constructed and maintained
through the same types of self-alienated acts en masse.
To refer to the absence of all these processes of mass self-alienation
is what Stirner intends with his figure of the Unique and the practice
of conscious egoism. That this would mean that Stirner is a mystic[22]
and that the Unique is some sort of conceptual absolute, as many suggest
(most often, it would seem, precisely for purposes of mystification or
muddling the issue), is absurd. It does not follow that Stirner is
speaking of an imaginary ideal or a fixed idea of an ineffable,
transcendental reality simply because words cannot adequately describe
the nonconceptual, self-determining figure of Stirnerâs critique, his
own immanent life-experience as it is lived here and now prior to its
conceptual representation. To understand Stirner is to understand that
he refuses any and all forms of self-alienation. He refuses to separate
himself (as his nonconceptual life process) from himself in any fixed
symbolic form, while at the same timeâgiven the nearly ubiquitous
diffusion of language into nearly every aspect of our cultureâhe cannot
escape expressing himself and communicating with those same symbolic
forms. But his expressions are always intended in non-fixed, atheistic,
nominalist, immanent ways that together function as a critical
self-theory.
Although Stirner himself uses few of our common contemporary theoretical
categories to express himself, the meaning and implications of his
Unique are clearly indicated in his text if we but pay close enough
attention, prefiguring to one degree or another the vocabulary of modern
hermeneutics, phenomenology and existentialism (though always in a
consistently non-fixed, atheistic, phenomenal and nominalist manner).
Stirnerâs full embrace of the nonconceptual in the Unique as prior to
any conceptual understandings can be seen in particular as prefiguring
Wilhelm Diltheyâs âlife as it is livedâ or âLebenskategorieâ (âcategory
of lifeâ), albeit in a much more radical, presuppositionless form.
Dilthey followed Stirner in abandoning the common notion of the
centrality of language for all understanding in favor of Stirnerâs much
more nuanced and coherent (reversal of) perspective on language in which
conceptual understanding is seen as built upon a more fundamental level
of nonconceptual understanding (or preconceptual, bodily, perceptual or
lived understanding) as a process of that nonconceptual lived
understanding itself.[23] Similarly, Stirnerâs discussion in âStirnerâs
Criticsâ of the âworldsâ of Feuerbach, Hess and Szeliga make it clear
that he is speaking of what we would now be more likely to call
âlife-worldsâ after Edmund Husserlâs usage (âLebensweltâ) introduced
nearly a hundred years later in The Crisis of the European Sciences in
1936.[24] And, not least in importance, Stirnerâs Unique should
obviously be seen to prefigure Martin Heideggerâs âDasein,â albeit, once
again, in a much more radical, presuppositionless form. While
Heideggerâs attempt, with his conception of the âpreunderstandingâ of
âDasein,â to reject the Cartesian Cogito while hanging on to Being,
ultimately fails, Max Stirnerâs more radical rejection of Descartesâ
Cogito and his dualism of mind and body succeeds by insisting on
abandoning not only the reification involved in any fundamental concept
of an independent ego as a thinking subject, but also the reification
necessarily involved in the construction of any and all fixed ideas of
speculative ontology, including even phenomenological ontological
concepts such as Dasein.[25] Even more radically, Stirnerâs
nonconceptual Unique is explicitly non-dualistic, undermining the
dualism of both Descartesâ and all of Western philosophy.[26] It is
beyond (or prior to) any subject/object dualism because both
subjectivity and objectivity are understood as merely self-created
abstractions derived from the nonconceptual totality of the Unique, and
not conceived as ontological entities with any real existence of their
own.
-----
âBoth religion and philosophy,â as one of Stirnerâs teachers, Philipp
August Böckh has written, â...work by a priori reasoning.â[27] This is
another way of noting that all religion and all philosophy exist only as
long as they include a dogmatic or rationalist doctrinal moment, since
unprincipled empirical investigationâconceptually presuppositionless
phenomenologyâcannot qualify as either religion or philosophy.[28] Even
philosophers not generally considered counted amongst rationalists, from
Heraclitis to David Hume, among many others, dogmatically maintain
rationalist doctrinal presuppositions, though they are not always
obvious.[29]
Yet modern philosophy also always contains a restless, skeptical,
self-critical moment. The critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant, by
setting limits to undisciplined flights of pure reason, aimed to deflate
the most dogmatic and illogical forms of religion and metaphysics, but
primarily served to validate what proved to be less-obvious but in many
ways even more potent forms of metaphysical dogma.[30] Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel attempted in his own novel way to advance Kantâs
critical impetus, even though Hegelâs dialectical philosophy was also at
least partly a critique of Kantâs rigid conception of the categories of
understanding and of Kantâs attempt to completely separate appearance
from things-in-themselves, as well as pure from practical reason (by way
of a partial appropriation of Fichteâs phenomenology and Schellingâs
philosophy of identity). However, Hegelâs metaphysical conception of a
transparently self-conscious dialectical logic of historical spirit once
again reinstated dogma in place of consistent critique.[31] It was at
this point that Hegel inadvertently started the reductionist process
which ultimately deconstructed his own (and all) philosophy by himself
reducing Christianity to historical Spirit.[32] It was left to the
post-Hegelians to then relentlessly carry on this critique to its end.
David Strauss next reduced the Christ figure to the concept of the human
species in his Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (1835â1836).[33] In
1841 Ludwig Feuerbach extended Straussâ insights in his critique of
Christianity and religion as a whole, replacing them with a philosophy
of Man (â...no abstract, merely conceptual being, but a real being,â as
he said), which he then went on to suggest was actually a ânegation of
philosophy.â[34] However, as Stirner easily shows, Strauss and Feuerbach
merely replaced the religion of gods with the religion of an abstract
ideal of Man or Humanity. This ultimately left Feuerbach increasingly
silent in the face of Stirnerâs unanswerable critique. Around this time
Bruno Bauer also advanced a project of critical criticism, a commitment
to the critique of all transcendent universals from a perspective of
free, infinite self-consciousness, implying the individual criticâs
divestment of any and all âprivateâ concernsâthus reducing him to a mere
shell of abstract universality.[35] Moses Hess (at the time a comrade of
Marx and Engels), in 1844, argued on the contrary that the âessence of
man is...social being,â moving further from the species to societyâas
âthe cooperation of various individuals for one and the same end.â[36]
Later still, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels attempted to salvage a
critical social theory from the wreckage of Hegelian dialectics and
their own by-then-discredited (by Stirner) Feuerbachian materialism.
However, this attempt at critical social theory amounted to an obviously
ideological critique of ideology, itself requiring uncritical belief in
a metaphysically materialist dialectical logic, supposedly immanent in
history. We now know from its subsequent development where that story
leads: Marxâs project of the realization of philosophy is (to paraphrase
Stirner) necessarily another form of slavery.
It was left for Max Stirner to advance his egoistic critique, a critical
self-theory which did not (unlike every religion, metaphysics or
ideology) advocate the self-alienation of anyoneâs actual powers or
life-activity. Stirnerâs egoistic critique has two sides. Negatively, it
is a critique of all rationalist religious, philosophical, moral and
ideological presuppositions. Positively, it provides a phenomenal
description of unalienated self-possession or completely self-determined
activity, which can also be characterized as undetermined self-creation.
(That is, self-creation undetermined by heteronomous powers.)
There are three integral moments to Stirnerâs immanent, egoist critique.
Each one, without the others would leave the critique, not only
incomplete, but incoherent and ineffective. The three moments can be
characterized as nominal, phenomenal and dialectical. The nominal moment
consists in the refusal to invest symbols or concepts with any special
ontological status of their own. The phenomenal moment consists in a
presuppositionless phenomenology or empiricism (a presuppositionlessâand
thus a completely non-metaphysical, non-philosophical and
non-scientificâempiricism). And the dialectical moment consists in a
perspectival, contextual and pragmatic logic that allows a completely
dynamic, fluid use of conceptual distinctions and relations (with no
necessary, a priori, fixed ideas). However, given the extreme creativity
of Stirnerâs unprecedented critical synthesis of these moments,
additional explanation of each of these moments is required to avoid the
typical misinterpretations and incomprehension that too often greets
unwanted innovations which upset received dogmas and prejudices. This is
in part because, despite the relative simplicity and elegance of
presentation of Stirnerâs critiques, he never speaks directly about the
nature of his methods. Like the early Taoists Lao-tsu and Chuang-tsu,
and the proto-Taoist Yang Chu (whose texts all share some notable
similarities to The Unique and Its Property[37]), Stirner leaves it up
to usâif we wishâto observe and describe the methods for ourselves.
As Stirner understood well, if the word is sacred, then I am its slave.
In The Unique and Its Property he says: âFor me paltry language has no
word, and âthe Word,â the Logos, is to me a âmere word.ââ[38] This means
that for Stirner a complete nominalism must be central to any consistent
critique of reification. Historically, various types of nominalism
developed through a series of critical responses to belief in the real
existence of Platonic forms, essences, universals or other abstract
concepts like Pythagorean numbers supposedly existing somewhere
independently outside of space and time. Stirner uses nominalism in its
widest possible meaning as the refusal of any belief that symbols or
concepts can be more than mere arbitrary objects used for thought and
communication. Even though there is no valid or coherent argument that
can be made for a rationalist (non-nominalist, realist) understanding of
symbols and concepts that doesnât in some central way beg the question
(by assuming as a premise what is to be proved), most traditional and
modern forms of thought reject nominalism, anyway, out of hand.[39] And
those that do accept nominalism usually do so in only narrow or
incomplete ways, always preserving some form(s) of non-nominalist,
rationalist belief in other areas.
Phenomenology is a generic term referring to the empirical investigation
of the phenomena of experience. The philosophical use of the term was
originated by the mathematician and scientist Johann Heinrich Lambert
(Neues Organon, 1764), before being prominently used by Kant
(Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, 1786), Fichte, and Hegel
(The Phenomenology of Spirit, 1807), and long before it was nearly
monopolized by Edmund Husserl and those influenced by Husserl (clearly
both Husserlâs descriptive and transcendental phenomenologies are merely
types of possible phenomenologies, not some sort of
phenomenology-in-itself, as is too often implied). Stirnerâs innovation
is to insist on a completely presuppositionless phenomenology or
empiricism. Before Stirner, every attempt at empirical or
phenomenological investigation presupposed the necessary existence of a
(metaphysical or religious) conceptual context of one sort or another
(including, especially, the whole range of ontologiesâdogmatic theories
of God, Being, Substance or Mind, along with a subject/object or
mind/body dualism since Descartes). Stirner dispensed with this type of
conceptual presupposition by rejecting a beginning from any conceptual
context at all, leaving only himself (as nonconceptual, lived
experience, both pre-subjective and preobjective) as foundation.[40]
Beginning from the Unique, his phenomenally-lived experience beyond
words, Stirnerâs descriptive phenomenology then proceeds from the most
basic conceptual distinction between a completely insubstantial
subjectivity (âcreative nothingâ) and its object-world (its âpropertyâ).
Not as some sort of absolutely given metaphysical distinction, but as a
practical, finite, conceptual self-creation whose origin
(self-constructed from out of the nonconceptual Unique) is never
forgotten. Every phenomenal distinction which follows is a part of his
self-creation, a fundamentally aesthetic project pursued for his own
self-enjoyment (both appropriative and self-expressive), with no
(possible) claim to any transcendental objectivity, absolute truth or
reality beyond his own experience or power. Although often accused of
solipsism for his refusal to believe in any imaginary (rationalist)
conceptual guarantee that other individuals are somehow objectively,
absolutely or ontologically real, Stirner then goes on (in a refutation
of any possible solipsistic intention) to invite others to play the same
type of game he does. Without any rules legislated from the outside,
Stirner argues that we are each responsible for creating our own
conceptual understanding of ourselves and our world, and for
communicating as best we wish and are able with others to create our
common social world. It should be no surprise that this often seemingly
vertiginous choice of a free-falling self-creation in a world without
conceptual limits has proven to be too much for most commentators to
handle. For theologians, metaphysicians, epistemologists, moralists and
ideologists it is simply inconceivable. (They instinctually grab for the
nearest fixed idea and hang on for their lives, since they have
convinced themselves that life is impossible without fixed ideas to
guide them and anchor them in the void left if no external meanings are
given from gods or masters!)
Stirnerâs logic is an analytics and dialectics released from the prison
of metaphysicsâHegelian, Aristotelian or otherwise. It is humanly
constructed rather than a priori, transcendent or absolute in any
way.[41] Analytic (or deductive) logic derives from analysisâthe
derivation of conclusions according to (any accepted) rules of logical
operation from premises (including the most often ignored, but required
lived-context) within which these conclusions are already present. It
produces an endless variation of the same thing, but said in different
ways, which reveal the implications of particular symbolic relations
according to the accepted rules of operation (rules of the game).[42]
Dialectical logic, on the other hand, derives initially from dialogue,
questioning or argument, from the pragmatic play of different
perspectives encountering each other, employing distinctions and
removing contradictions, from which a larger, more encompassing
perspective can be constructed and understood.[43] The keys to Stirnerâs
use of dialectic are his refusal of any rationalist metaphysical or
epistemological claim to absolute or objective Truth and his complete
openness with regard to the construction and use of categories, as long
as all of the logical implications (the currently accepted rules of the
logical game of conceptual understanding one is playing) are considered.
Traditional and modern philosophy have always been made up of (revealed
or dogmatic, sometimes unacknowledged) rationalist presuppositions,
along with phenomenal or empirical descriptions, developed analytically
to reveal their implications and dialectically (pragmatically),
according to a logic of argumentative assertion which takes a certain
consideration of perspective and context in the use of categories in
order to be convincing. Hegelâs innovation was to collapse the
rationalist premises into the phenomenological development of his
dialectical logic, identifying his dialectical logic with an historical
unfolding of Being. Stirnerâs refusal of all rationalist presuppositions
including his adoption of a thoroughgoing nominalism amounts to a
refusal of philosophy. And his critical self-theory thus becomes a
presuppositionless hermeneutical phenomenology developed through
nominalist analytic and dialectical logic.
Stirnerâs dialectical phenomenology of self-creation (âownness,â âmy
powerâ) is also a dialectical phenomenology of appropriation (âmy
propertyâ) and self-expression (âmy self-enjoymentâ) in association with
others (âmy intercourseâ). These are the remaining keys to understanding
Stirnerâs critical self-theory. As Stirner puts it at one point:
âMy power is my property
My power gives me property.
My power am I myself, and through it am I my property.â[44]
In his dialectical analysis of the phenomenon of the Unique, Stirner
begins by making a purely phenomenal distinction between himself as
âcreative nothingâ and as property as horizons of his life. The boundary
or mediating relation between the two, which is also their unity, is his
egoism or power. The conceptual distinction through which these two
opposed terms are created brings forth an entire conceptual universe of
further phenomenal distinctions and relations. Yet this entire
conceptual universe is continually and fundamentally acknowledged to be
an abstract, conceptual creation with no necessary validity beyond its
appropriative and expressive contributions to his self-enjoyment! Its
truth is always a function of its power as his self-created,
self-expressive property, the artistic self-creation of his life. The
extent to which he exercises power over and through his property is the
extent of his life. As it is for ourselves our own.
-----
Stirner already makes most of this quite clear in the text of The Unique
and Its Property, at least for any careful and perceptive readers. And
it doesnât take all that much effort to fill in any of the few remaining
blanks he has left for us. Yet, the history of Stirnerâs reception is
largely a history of the incomprehension ofâand unthinking antipathy
toâhis work. Where Stirner makes it clear that the âUniqueâ is not a
concept in The Unique and Its Property, most of his readersâand
especially his criticsâinsist against all evidence on interpreting him
as speaking about not just a concept, but a concept of âthe ego,â or
even an âabsolute ego,â at that. Where Stirner makes it clear that he
speaks of egoism as the unavoidable phenomenal experience that appears
wherever I and my world are conceptually brought into being, his critics
merely see the various forms of philosophical egoism: ethical or moral,
rational or psychological. And this, once again, despite all the
abundant evidence to the contrary. When Stirner makes it clear that the
egoism he describes is not an egoism of absolute, sacred or transcendent
(âjenseitsâ) interest, or an egoism involving any sort of separation of
his life and acts from any kind of imagined conceptual essence, his
critics ignore all of this and proceed to instead mindlessly attribute
various forms of isolated, anti-social, calculating, narrowly
self-serving egoism to him. Though, as Stirner makes clear, his âEgoism
... is not opposed to love nor to thought; it is no enemy of the sweet
life of love, nor of devotion and sacrifice; and it is no enemy of
intimate warmth, but it also no enemy of critique, nor of socialism,
nor, in short of any actual interest....â Instead, Stirner says, âThe
âexclusivenessâ of the egoist, which some want to pass off as isolation,
separation, loneliness, is on the contrary full participation in the
interesting byâexclusion of the uninteresting.â And, finally, despite
the fact that Stirner subverts and destroys all of the pillars of
philosophy, while only speaking of philosophy with contempt in The
Unique and Its Property, his critics usually then insist on portraying
him precisely as a philosopher!
In âStirnerâs Criticsâ and âThe Philosophical Reactionariesâ Stirner
takes these key points (with a few less key) and remakes them, at times
in more detail than he did in his original text, and restates them in
even more clear and unambiguous terms. In their critiques Szeliga,
Feuerbach and Hess each insist on mischaracterizing Stirnerâs figure of
the âUniqueâ in various conceptual guises, which earns them in turn
well-deserved ridicule from Stirner. They each self-congratulatingly
portray their sacred conceptual ideals of the human essence as the True
and Real, apparently totally unaware of Stirnerâs forceful and
categorical critique of just that sort of mistake. And they each portray
the egoist as a sinner against their preferred absolute external scales
of value. Finally, when Kuno Fischer treats Stirner as a âreactionaryâ
âsophistâ inferior to the philosophers who have supposedly âovercomeâ
sophism, Stirner laughs at his preposterously âearth-shattering
thoughts.â
-----
Stirnerâs critical self-theory is fundamentally a practical,
self-critical attitude towards self-understanding (which necessarily
includes understanding of others and of oneâs world) and self-activity
that is adopted by anyone who refuses to be pushed around by symbolic,
conceptual or linguistic theoretical constructs or formations of any
type. He has systematized one basic approach to an attitude which itself
refuses any possible final systematizations, and has done so in a manner
which closes off no other paths to self-creation except any easy return
to the fitful, occasionally nightmarish, slumbers of religion and
rationalism and their concomitant self-alienation and
self-enslavement.[45]
We each have the power to make our own phenomenal and dialectical
distinctions and relations, in ways more or less nominal and
presuppositionless, or more or less rationalistic. We each have the
power of our own conceptual self-creation which we can use for purposes
of constructing our ownness or constructing our self-alienation, our own
self-possession or our own self-enslavement. If we refuse any and every
dogma, there is no objective, absolute or transcendent reality or truth,
beauty or morality[46] which can stop us from being who we are and
aiming at whatever we wish within the limits of our powers, including
the power of our relationships within our worlds. If we accept any
dogma, then according to that dogma we may still imagine that there is
an objective, absolute or transcendent reality, truth, beauty or
morality.[47] We can imagine and believe with all our power that we are
ruled by God or Nature, subject to laws, compelled by morals, condemned
to sin, controlled by our past, our psychic drives or our genes,
alienated from Truth, Beauty and Justice, or puppets of any other
half-plausible conceptual construction we can create. Our choice lies
between these two visions. It is our choice and, for each of us, our
choice alone: conscious self-creation or unself-conscious,
self-alienated, enslavement to fixed ideas (and to the institutions
which take advantage of them in order to aggregate and exercise peopleâs
self-alienated powers).
Over one hundred years following the initial publication of Steven
Byingtonâs English translation of Max Stirnerâs Der Einzige und Sein
Eigenthum is one hundred years too long to have had to wait to be able
to read an adequate translation of Stirnerâs own words in response to
the major published critics of this work in his lifetime. Letâs thank
Wolfi Landstreicher for producing this highly readable and enjoyable
translation not a moment too soon.
â Jason McQuinn (Originally written July-September 2011 and revised with
additional notes added October 2011 and December 2012.)
[1] Max Stirnerâs major work appeared sometime in the second half of
1844, though the publishing date was 1845. The original title was Der
Einzige und sein Eigenthum, though at some point towards the end of the
19^(th) century the German spelling of âEigenthumâ was revised to
âEigentum.â The English-language translation by Stephen Byington, was
published by Benjamin Tucker in 1907 under the extremely unfortunate
title of The Ego and His Own, despite the fact that a more accurate
translation would have been The Unique and Its Property, which I will
use here in accordance also with the translatorâs preference. (As
indicated by the title of this introduction, I would consider The Unique
and Its Self-Creation to have been a much more meaningful choice for
Stirnerâs book. But Stirner never asked me, though he does use
terminology of âself-creationâ suggestively in his review of EugĂšne
Sueâs Les MystĂšres de Paris, 1843.) As Benjamin Tucker says in his own
introduction to the original edition, he alone is âresponsible for the
admittedly erroneous rendering of the titleâ as The Ego and His Own.
However, little did he likely realize how much confusion and
mystification his inaccurate title would create for English-speaking
readers over the next century (even, eventually, helping to encourage
misinterpretation by later German-language readers of the original
text). This confusion and mystification has only been reinforced with
the more recent (only slightly more correct) re-translation of the title
as The Ego and Its Own, in which the possessive pronoun has been changed
to a more accurate (non-gender-specific) form. Despite the âegoâ in
these titles, and interspersed occasionally in the only English-language
translation of text, Stirner never once uses the word. It is only now
that this confusion and mystification is finally being thoroughly
dispelled, by this translation of âStirnerâs Critics,â along with
publication of an edited version of the first part of my recent review
of John Clarkâs Max Stirnerâs Egoism (published under the editorsâ title
of âJohn Clarkâs Spookâ in Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed #64,
March, 2010). The publication of my entire, unedited review under the
original title of âJohn Clarkâs Stirnerâ is also planned, as well as
publication of a newly revised translation of Stirnerâs The Unique and
Its Property.
[2] Following the translatorâs choice (which happens to be my own as
well), I will speak of the âUniqueâ whenever I refer to Max Stirnerâs
âEinzige.â âEinzigeâ can be translated from the German to English most
felicitously as âuniqueâ or âunique one.â However, within Max Stirnerâs
texts, it should be remembered at all times that he explicitly intends
to use this noun not as a typical concept (of an incomparable,
particular individual, for example), but as a name which points to the
actual, nonconceptual personâs lifeâthat life as it is experienced prior
to any conceptual interpretation. Thus, when I speak of Stirnerâs
âEinzigeâ I will employ âUniqueâ beginning with an upper-case âUâ to
indicate and reinforce his intended meaning. When I speak of âuniqueâ
entirely in the lower case, I will be intentionally employing the word
as a concept, rather than as a name.
[3] It can be plausibly argued that Stirnerâs text is one of the most
misread, misinterpreted and misunderstood books in the entire history of
thought, West or East. But it certainly can be considered at least one
of the more, if not the most misunderstood in modern Western thought.
Paradoxically, as a European text it is definitely Westernâthough not
necessarily in its perspective and orientation (being completely
nominalistic, atheistic, anarchistic, amoral and egoistic at the same
time, counter to the major themes of Western thought). Historically,
though it falls squarely within the modern period, it is also clearly
anti-modernist to a degree only vaguely hinted by the nominally
post-modern texts of contemporary theory.
[4] Iâm not speaking of particular forms of nominalism, phenomenology or
analytical and dialectical logic here, but generically. Stirner is not
merely a nominalist with regard to either essences or to universals in
particular, but a generic nominalist. Nor is he a phenomenologist in the
now predominantly understood philosophical sense of Edmund Husserl, nor
in the particular philosophical senses in which Martin Heidegger,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty or others used the term in following decades or in
the following century (although certain similarities or resemblances
will be inevitable). Remember that Husserl, Heidegger and MerleauPonty
followed earlier phenomenologists, including some like Stirner who did
not use the term, among others who did use the term like Johann Heinrich
Lambert, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, G.W.F Hegel and Franz
Brentano. For each of them phenomenology is a method, but for the
philosophersâunlike for Stirnerâit is always a method determined by
presupposed fixed ideas. Stirner is an early, generic practical
phenomenologist, developing the project of an empirical investigation
without presuppositions (thus nonphilosophically) in an unprecedented
manner which has yet to be fully appreciated. Norâunlike Hegel, or Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels for that matterâdoes Stirner employ a
metaphysical dialectic. Stirnerâs analytical and dialectical logic
remains, like his nominalism and phenomenology, fully self-critical and
uncommitted to any fixed metaphysical, epistemological or normative
foundation or presupposition. It is merely an empirical method of
self-understanding, a development of the lived, practical and conceptual
logic of the immanent, phenomenal Unique. (Technically, it would be
preferable to forego even the very broad description of the Unique as
âimmanent,â âphenomenalâ or even ânonconceptual,â but it is very clear
that most readers require these repeated hints or they immediately fall
back into their (unthinking) habit of interpreting all names as names of
symbolic concepts rather than as possible names of nonconceptual
experiences.)
[5] Stirnerâs big crime, a crime that cannot be named without calling
attention to exactly what all his enemies wish to hide, is his entirely
transparent, sarcastically brutal charge that not only the emperor, but
every empire and all emperors everywhere, have âno clothes.â Their
pretenses are all empty and cannot hide their actual nakedness. Their
powers are composed of the naked self-alienation which constitutes a
popular submission that must be continually implicitly encouraged at the
same time that it is explicitly ignored and covered-up. Religion,
philosophy and ideology are rationalist fetishizations. Their
explanatory, normative and regulative powers are all based upon
transparent lies, but lies which are for the most part welcomed,
repeated continuously and ultimately enforced with violence in order to
maintain institutional powers of every kind: religious, political,
economic, social, academic, scientific and cultural. Hans Christian
Andersen risked changing the ending of his original version of âThe
Emperorâs New Clothesâ just before publication to add the little child
crying out: âBut he has nothing on!â However, the expectation that the
âwhole people at lengthâ would then go on to join the little child in
repeating the childâs charge is utterly fantastic. Even Andersen
afterwards made no further criticisms aimed at the court, reportedly
bought off with gifts of jewels from the king. The reception given to
Stirnerâs critique is necessarily the norm for treatment of such
unwanted and unrepentent outburstsâat least as long as the institutions
of modern civilization hold sway. The second this fact changes the
entire social world will also change.
[6] Just like his critics many, if not most, of Stirnerâs admirers often
seem to latch on to one, two or a few of Stirnerâs concepts and
arguments or attitudes, take them as Stirnerâs central message, and go
on to attempt to reinterpret all of Stirnerâs work from the resulting
narrow, often very one-sided, partial perspective they have derived.
This is made all the more tempting by the lack of any genuinely
coherent, generally accepted understanding of Stirnerâs work. Readers
who are already predisposed to positively employ one of the traditional
meanings of âegoismâ are especially prone to then promote a
misinterpretation of Stirner based upon their preferred use of this
word, brushing aside any of the many glaring inconsistencies such
readings produce as unimportant (as yet to be understood or worked out,
as a result of one of Stirnerâs supposed âidiosyncraciesâ of expression
or an unexplained lapse in Stirnerâs logic, as a problem with
translation or the interpretation of 19^(th) century word use, etc.).
Stirnerâs more superficial critics (the great majority of all his
critics) generally employ the same method, but their predisposition
toward negative evaluations of traditional meanings of âegoismâ often
leads them to somewhat similar results, but with an emphasis on the
problems and evils. They then have every reason blame any
inconsistencies in their own misinterpretations on supposed lapses in
Stirnerâs logic, excessively idiosyncratic modes of expression,
untrustworthiness (because he is self-serving), etc. In either case,
this is where the unfortunate English title translation and occasional
entirely inappropriate use of the word âegoâ in the translation tend to
greatly reinforce erroneous tendencies in interpretation even for
readers who think they are in agreement with Stirner. Given the
contemporary denotations and connotations of the word âego,â its use in
translating any but the most clearly critical references to a concept of
the âegoâ or âthe Iâ in Stirnerâs text should be avoided, or at least
clearly explained. At this point anything less will be considered
unacceptable by any perceptive readers, commentators and critics.
[7] The VormÀrz was the period before the German Revolutionary events of
March, 1848 began.
[8] Although Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were unable to publish their
Die Deutsche Ideologie, it was apparently not for lack of trying. At any
rate, besides the problem of the apparent cluelessness of Marx and
Engels regarding the most central aspects of Stirnerâs Der Einzige und
sein Eigenthum demonstrated by their flailing attacks in Die Deutsche
Ideologie, the appearance of âRecensenten Stirnerâsâ also completely
undermined and refuted major arguments of Marx and Engels well before
their text was even completed. Unfortunately, Marxist scholars, and even
the critics of Marxism, all appear to remain ignorant of the latter fact
to this day. So far as I have found, even those few academics who have
been aware of the content of Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum and
âRecensenten Stirnerâsâ have uniformly refused to follow its arguments
to their logical conclusions. In Die Deutsche Ideologie Marx and Engels
attempt to present a more sophisticated, Hegelianized, historical
version of materialist philosophy in response to Stirnerâs destruction
of the foundation of their previous Feuerbachian, humanist materialism.
But the self-delusional, essentially religious, nature of their project
of rationalist realization requires a (self-negating & self-alienating)
identification with the ideological construction of a supposedly
transcendent, collective historical subject. This makes the
misinterpretation and intentional misrepresentation of Stirnerâs own
immanent, intentional egoism a historical necessity for the survival of
Marxist ideology in any form. This is the pathetic secret of the Marxist
ideological critique of ideology in Die Deutsche Ideologie. In order to
maintain the survival of Marxism as an ideology, Marxists are forced to
paint the genuinely non-ideological as âideologyâ even if this requires
the maintenance of a permanent, blatant lie: anarchists must all be
portrayed as bourgeois egoists from Max Stirner on. Anything less would
be an admission of the ideological, self-alienating foundation of the
Marxist âscienceâ that perfected the mass-enslavement and genocidal
campaigns of the Soviet and Maoist collectivizations, gulags,
re-education camps, resettlements, etc., as if its obviously ideological
nature should be in need of any additional revelation.
[9] A very incomplete English translation of âStirnerâs Criticsâ has
long been available, âabridged and translated byâ Frederick M. Gordon
and published in The Philosophical Forum, vol. viii, numbers 2-3-4;
Spring 1977, pp. 66â80. More recently, an original and complete new
translation of âThe Philosophical Reactionariesâ by Widukind de Ridder
was published in Max Stirner (ed. Saul Newman, Palgrave Macmillan, New
York, NY, 2011), independently of the Wolfi Landstreicherâs translation
herein, which itself was completed in 2011, following his translation of
âStirnerâs Critics.â De Ridderâs translation confirms most, though not
all, of Landstreicherâs choices in his own translation presented here.
[10] John Henry Mackay, translated by Hubert Kennedy, Max Stirner: His
Life and his Work (Peremptory Publications, Concord, CA, 2005), page 32.
[11] In 1835 he was granted qualified facultas docendi status following
extensive examinations. Stirner could have qualified for doctorate
status, but he never applied.
[12] Stirnerâs studies under Friedrich Schleiermacher, although
centering on theology (philosophical, historical and practical
theology), also integrally included Schleiermacherâs hermeneutics,
criticism, ethics, and dialectics. It is likely that Stirner learned
much more from the latter four than from Schleiermacherâs presentation
of theology, with its apologetics, polemics, dogmatics, statistics and
symbolics, and in the case of practical theology, such exciting topics
as principles of church service, pastoral work, and principles of church
government. (See Friedrich Schleiermacher, revised translation of the
1811 and 1830 editions by Terrence N. Tice, Brief Outline of Theology as
a Field of Study, 3^(rd) Edition [Westminster John Knox Press,
Louisville, KY, 2011].) Although Stirner was certainly influenced by the
whole range of (especially German) Romantics, it seems likely that
Schleiermacherâs emphasis on perception and feelingâand their central
place in hermeneuticsâconstituted a significant influence helping
Stirner to undermine and overthrow Kantian and Hegelian rationalism,
right along with Schleiermacherâs own dogmatic Christianity.
[13] David McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (Harper & Row, New
York, 1973) p. 32.
[14] âLeftâ Hegelian in this case indicated oneâs stance towards
religion. Those on the left were critical of religion while those on the
ârightâ were supporters of a Christian interpretation of Hegelianism in
one form or another.
[15] Ludwig Feuerbach wrote about Stirnerâs book in a letter that: âIt
is a brilliant and ingenious work....â And after giving criticisms of
Stirner, he then went on to say that: âHe is nonetheless the most
ingenious and freest writer Iâve had the opportunity to know.â In a
letter to Marx dated 19 November 1844, Friedrich Engels wrote that
âClearly Stirner is the most talented, independent, and hard-working of
the âFreeâ....â Arnold Ruge, publisher of the Hallesche JahrbĂŒcher fĂŒr
deutsche Kunst und Wissenschaft and co-editor (with Marx) of the
Deutsch-Französische JahrbĂŒcher, announced in a letter to his mother
that it was âthe first readable book in philosophy that Germany has
produced.â (Max Stirner, edited by David Leopold, The Ego and Its Own
[Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995] p. xiii. I cite David
Leopoldâs Cambridge University Press edition of Stirnerâs work, not
because it is adequate, but merely because it is the best of an
otherwise worse lot. The sad state of Stirner scholarship in general is
exhibited in the inadequateâand in some sections
incompetentâintroduction by Leopold in this edition, although his
extensive notes and the index in this edition are themselves competent
and important achievements. All citations from the English translation
of The Ego and Its Own in this essay refer to this edition.)
[16] In his unprecedented critique of self-alienation, Stirner
ultimately focuses on the centrality of religion since, historically,
all systematic self-alienation begins with religion. Etymologically
âreligionâ is a âRomance wordâ expressing âa condition of being bound.â
(Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, p. 48) But, as Stirner earlier points
out in his essay on âArt and Religion,â religion is first of all âa
thing of the understanding,â which means that it is actually a
conception to which we are bound. Since there has never proven to be any
genuinely credible empirical evidence for the actual existence of any
transcendental spiritual beings, religion is in actuality a conceptual
fetishization. Phenomenally, religion is the self-alienation of oneâs
own powers and activities through the imagination and belief that they
are manifestations of a (fantasized) spiritual being. However,
self-alienation is by no means confined to religion as such.
[17] The distinction and dispute between attempts to posit âtranscendent
or absolute Truth, Values or Realityâ that are supposed to rule over our
lives versus Stirnerâs âown particular, finite, unique perspectiveâ
comes down to whether the ultimate rationale for rationalist reification
makes any sense: the need to somehow guarantee a special status for
oneself in oneâs world. A special access to nonsubjective, eternal,
transcendent Truth, Value or Reality. A version of Juvenalâs question
then always arises in one form or another: âQuis custodiet ipsos
custodes?â (âWho will guard the guardians?â Or in this case, implicitly,
âWho can know a truth is the Truth, a value is the Value, or a reality
is the Reality?â) Rather than providing a foolproof solution to oneâs
problems, subjecting oneâs life to a higher level of rule in order to
guarantee adoption of appropriate beliefs and actions leads to a
recursive nightmare. Instead of directly appropriate decision-making
based on the actually experienced situation here and now at hand, the
decision is in advance âkicked upstairs,â where there is no knowledge or
understanding of the particular situations in which the decisions will
actually be applied and thus no possibility of full responsibilityâno
ability to respond according to oneâs own felt, sensible and engaged
recognition and understanding. In this rationalist mirror-world Truth,
Value and Reality are all representations rather than lived activities
in themselves. Stirner radically reverses this perspective and admits
only his own truths, his own values and his own reality, and invites us
all to do the same. Especially since it is impossible for any
nonsubjective Truth, Value or Reality to exist for anyone in the first
place except as that personâs own imagined projections of such things.
[18] Stirnerâs egoist method was possibly modeled in part on Ludwig
Feuerbachâs anthropological method, but may have been developed
independently as part of an ongoing process of which Stirnerâs seminal
âArt and Religionâ essay (published in early 1842, and most likely
written in late 1841) is one milestone. However, given the publication
date of Feuerbachâs The Essence of Christianity in 1841 and ensuing
likelihood that Stirner read it soon after, the probability that
Stirnerâs egoist method was strongly influenced by Feuerbach should not
be discounted. Feuerbachâs method was in turn undoubtedly derived from
David Straussâs earlier The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined
(1835â1836).
[19] Neither, of course, does it begin from any particular fixed idea of
what each personâs uniquely lived experience is supposed to be. It
begins from that experience as it is non-conceptually lived.
[20] As Stirner proclaims in The Unique and Its Property, the âUniqueâ
points to that which precedes all conceptualization. This means the
âUniqueâ does not point to any ideal individual person, not to a
physical person, not to some conception of a soul or a self. But to the
entire lived experience of the person. It therefore includes oneâs
entire life, including both objective and subjective aspects, which must
themselves be artificially determined and separated from each other in
order to be brought into beingâout of the always pre-existing
nonconceptual Uniqueâas concepts.
[21] The process of self-alienationâof separating an idea or
representation of oneself from oneâs living self and then subordinating
oneâs living self to that imageâis not just the foundation of modern
life or modernity, it is also the foundation of so-called âtraditionalâ
societies, basically from the neolithic age onwards up to modernity.
Though it appears it was precisely not the foundation for the earlier
(one could argue more aptly-named âtraditionalâ) paleolithic and, later,
gathering and hunting societies that are now usually called âprimitive.â
What distinguishes non-primitive traditional societies from modern
societies can be characterized as the intensity and ever-wider
dispersion of this self-alienation throughout all aspects of life,
including every social institution and form of social practice. Although
it is proper to call Max Stirner the most radical, coherent and
consistent critic of modernity, it would be incorrect to understand him
as defending these traditional institutions or life-ways. He is equally
a critic of premodern traditional and modern societies. (Given the
limits of archaeological and anthropological knowledge in his time, it
is not surprising that Stirner never mentions or hazards any guesses
regarding what are now called âprimitiveâ societies.)
[22] Mysticism is derived from the Greek âmystikos,â and generally used
to indicate some claim to direct or immediate knowledge transcending
normal human experience, especially of a sacred or divine nature as in
communion with gods. Stirner, on the contrary, is completely concerned
with the here and now, the immanence of mundane, everyday experienceâan
atheistic, anarchistic, egoistic immanence. Although many mystics tend
to refer to âimmanenceâ or at least imply some form of âimmanenceâ in
their statements, they in factâas mysticsâare always referring to
religious forms of the âimmanenceâ of otherwise transcendent ideas or
pirits. This means that they are never speaking of any actual immanence,
but of the self-alienation of human qualities which are then re-imported
back into everyday life in some sense in which these self-alienations
are then said to lie within reality, the world, the person, etc. The
title of Leo Tolstoyâs Christian homily The Kingdom of God is within You
(based on Luke 17:21) is a typical example of this genre of religious,
if not mystical, âimmanence.â
[23] Wilhelm Dilthey obtained his doctorate in philosophy in Berlin in
1864 from the same university where Stirner studied, and less than
twenty years after that universityâs most radical student had published
the most outrageously notorious critique of philosophy ever written.
While there is a slight possibility that Dilthey was completely unaware
of Stirnerâs work, it is much more likely that he was extremely aware of
it. Especially given the existence of other more reputable sources that
contributed to his developing understanding of understanding, if Dilthey
borrowed anything at all from an encounter with (and inevitably a
rejection of the most radical aspects of) Stirnerâs work, he would not
by any means be the first to do so (both) without mentioning the debt.
(Where, for example, would Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels have ended up
without their debts to Stirnerâs workâgained through its partial
appropriation while rejecting its most fundamental and radical basis? It
has only recently begun to be appreciated how much their metaphysical
dialectics of historical materialism and their ideological critique of
ideology owe to their encounter with his workâeven if they never
actually understood Stirner, nor the full import of their own
rationalist metaphysics. And what about Nietzscheâs later encounter with
Stirner, which he strove so hard to hide? Instead of looking for
similarities and plagiarism, anyone who understands the shallowness of
Nietzscheâs rhetoric will realize that he didnât steal from Stirner, so
much as he fled from the radical implications of the iron logic of
Stirnerâs critique, while appropriating a few of the less central themes
from Stirner that Nietzsche was then never able to fully master). The
similarities between some of the fundamental attitudes of Diltheyâs work
(from its beginnings) and Stirnerâs would be somewhat uncanny if there
is no connection. For one example, Diltheyâs critiques of Kant and Hegel
clearly echo (obviously, in a much less radical manner) Stirnerâs. For
another, Jacob Owensbyâs characterization of the foundation of Diltheyâs
historical understanding could almost serve as a partial (though less
than adequate) description of Stirnerâs project: â...all knowledge is
rooted in life itself as it is given in lived experience. Life is not,
however, reducible to subjectivity. Rather, life is an I-world relation
prior to the subject-object distinction.â (Jacob Owensby, Dilthey and
the Narrative of History, p. ix.) What probably clinches Diltheyâs acute
awareness of Stirnerâs work and the extreme danger, if not
impossibility, of his acknowledging any debt to Stirnerâs work is the
fact that Diltheyâs original mentor was the same Kuno Fischer whose
attempted critique was so unceremoniously demolished by Stirner in âThe
Philosophical Reactionaries.â Kuno Fischer was Diltheyâs teacher in
Heidelberg, before Dilthey began studying at the University of Berlin in
1853, itself only six years after Fischerâs antiStirner pamphlet had
been published. It is also important to note that any acknowledgment
that he borrowed anything, even critically from a hyper-radical source
like Stirner could have meant the early destruction of Diltheyâs
academic career in a potential scandal similar to the one which
temporarily derailed Kuno Fischerâs career in Heidelberg over the
latterâs alleged ties to Spinozism. On another tangent, Dilthey was also
influenced by two of the same University of Berlin professors who had
earlier taught Stirner, and from whom both undoubtedly learned much of
their philology, hermeneutics and criticism, Friedrich Schleiermacher
and Philipp August Böckh. There are other connections which could be
cited as well. For more information on Dilthey, see Jacob Owensby,
Dilthey and the Narrative of History (Cornell University Press, Ithaca,
NY, 1994).
[24] As were very probably a majority of the most noteworthy
Germanlanguage radicals, philosophers, critics and literary figures
since the mid-nineteenth century, Edmund Husserl was at least in some
fashion familiar with the nature and meaning of Stirnerâs work. Bernd
Laska reports that âEdmund Husserl once warned a small audience about
the âseducing powerâ of Der Einzigeâbut never mentioned it in his
writing.â (Bernd Laska, âMax Stirner, a durable dissidentâin a
nutshell,â available on the internet on the lsr-projekt.de web site in a
number of languages, including English.) However Dermot Moran, in Edmund
Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology (Polity, Cambridge, 2005, p. 131.),
also reports that â...in publications from Logische Untersuchungen to
MĂ©ditations CartĂ©siennes, Husserlâs approach is predominantly
individualist, or âegologicalâ, describing conscious life primarily in
the context of the individual self, for which he even invokes Max
Stirnerâs title,... (der Einzige und sein Eigentum; 35: 94).â Husserlâs
distinction (developed from Bolzanoâs distinction between subjective and
objective ideas or representations) between ânoesisâ (the intentional
process of consciousness) and ânoemaâ (the object of conscious
intention) is a weak alternative (relegated only to consciousness) to
Stirnerâs nominalist and non-metaphysical distinction between âegoismâ
(nonconceptual or phenomenally-lived intentional activity) and
âpropertyâ (the object of egoist action, including acts of
consciousness). Similarly, Husserlâs conception of âintentionalityâ
(adopted from Brentanoâwho adapted the scholastic version of Aristotleâs
conception) is also a weak philosophical (metaphysical) alternative to
Stirnerâs phenomenal âegoism.â Husserl cannot avoid reproducing most of
Stirnerâs distinctions in the later phenomenology he âinvented,â though
each of his inventions pale before Stirnerâs creative appropriation and
synthesis of Fichtean, Hegelian and Feuerbachian phenomenological
currents.
The case of Brentano is interesting since it brings up the likelihood
that Stirner was, like Brentano (with his conception of intentionality),
also in part influenced by Aristotleâs De Anima in developing his
nominalist/phenomenal conception of egoism. Once Stirner conceived and
developed his egoist method, he undoubtedly brought it to bear in
reclaiming all of the self-alienated predicates of every major
conception of god, soul and spirit. This means that he most likely
examined the general range of results produced by applying the egoist
method to every one of the major philosophies before proceeding to
compile the first draft of what would become his magnum opus.
[25] Ultimately, Heideggerâs concepts of âSeinâ and âDaseinâ are highly
abstract, cognitive metaphysical categories, and as such remain
compatible with the Cartesian tradition of rationalist philosophy of
consciousness. To this type of preaching, Stirner explains: â... for
absolute or free thinking..., thinking itself is the beginning, and it
plagues itself with propounding this beginning as the extremest
âabstractionâ (such as being). This very abstraction, or this thought,
is then spun out further.â
Absolute thinking is the affair of the human spirit, and this is a holy
spirit. Hence this thinking is an affair of the parsons, who have âa
sense for it,â a sense for the âhighest interests of mankind,â for âthe
spirit.ââ
[26] All dualism is necessarily conceptual in nature. By starting
directly from the nonconceptual, from which subjective and objective
poles (or mind and body, or self and world) have not yet been
abstracted, Stirner deftly bypasses the most fundamental problem for all
philosophy, the metaphysical problem which actually founds and defines
philosophy. Although the attempt is often made by philosophers to avoid
conceptual dualism with the creation of monistic metaphysical systems
(for examples, Schellingâs and Hegelâs), these attempts always founder
immediately on their invariably conceptual nature. Even when they are
supposed to point to something nonconceptual (for example with
Schellingâs idea of Nature), this nonconceptual is still immediately
then metaphysically conceptualized in non-nominalist ways (as Being,
God, Nature, the Absolute, etc.), rather than simply left unaltered as
with Stirner. This always leads to the reproduction of the originally
evaded overt dualism within the monistic principle itself. Within
Kantian philosophy the metaphysical dualism is overt. Within Fichtean
philosophy the overt dualism is avoided, but then immediately reproduced
within a phenomenological subjectivity. Within Schellingâs philosophy
the overt dualism is avoided, but then immediately reproduced within
objectivity. Hegel merely retraces Fichteâs route, avoiding overt
dualism, while reproducing it within subjectivity, but a subjectivity
combining being and reason.
[27] Quoted from Böckhâs âFormal Theory of Philologyâ in
Mueller-Vollmer, Kurt (ed.), The Hermeneutics Reader (Continuum
Publishing Co., New York, 1997) p. 133. At the University of Berlin
Stirner studied philology and hermeneutics under Philipp August Böckh
(who, according to Mueller-Vollmer, âcombined the ideas of
Schleiermacher with the exacting methods of classical philology taught
by Wolf and Astâ [p. 132]). Stirner also studied under Schleiermacher
himself. Among the other possible perspectives on his critical
self-theory expressed in The Unique and Its Property, we can also
characterize it as a practical hermeneutics of self-understanding and a
critical hermeneutics of self-alienation and self-enslavement.
[28] To my knowledge there is no significant writer or theorist in all
of history who has ever made any logically consistent claim that
completely unprincipled (in the sense of no a priori, necessary, eternal
or absolute metaphysical principles or laws) empirical investigation or
conceptually presuppositionless phenomenology could constitute what is
called religion or philosophy (or in most cases, if not all, science as
well). On the other hand, it is no problem to find explicit evidence
that every major theology, revealed religion and philosophy
fundamentally depends upon claims to such principles and
presuppositions. There have been confused claims from many recent
philosophers and scientists that they employ no metaphysical principles
or presuppositions even as they at the same time claim or assume
(sometimes apparently without realizing it) that their theories can
provide some form of (metaphysically) a priori, necessary, eternal or
absolute knowledge!
These naively self-contradictory theorists most often claim to be
empiricists, defenders of science or post-modern critics. However, one
of the more sophisticated and sometimes-influential claims in a related
but different direction is Klaus Hartmannâs quite-justifiably
controversial attempt at a non-metaphysical reading of Hegelâs
philosophy made in âHegel: A Non-Metaphysical Viewâ (Klaus Hartmann,
Studies in Foundational Philosophy [Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam, 1988] p.
267â287). But, as Hartmann at one point confesses, even with the
âcategorialâ and âsystematic understandingâ of Hegel that he advocates,
âwe realize that the notorious transition from Idea to Nature, or from
the Logic to âRealphilosophie,â can only be a metaphor.â (p. 277) Either
Hegel is read metaphysically (as Hegel explicitly asks), or his
âphilosophyâ or âmetaphysicsâ can be read non-metaphysically as mere
metaphor, and any claims regarding the real world vanish, and with them
so vanishes the metaphysical claims of the Logic as well. Similarly, the
âpresuppositionlessâ nature of Hegelâs categories in the Logic is also
hedged by Hartmann, as a mere âreconstruction,â whose âsequential
forward reading cannot be the whole story. How could a
presuppositionless beginning lead to anything....?â Only Stirnerâs
nonconceptual Unique offers the genuine possibility of a conceptually
presuppositionless beginning, and does so only by intentionally
abandoning philosophy.
[29] The rationalist moment in Heraclitus was, of course and not least,
his apparently metaphysical answer to the search for the ultimate
substance of reality (the noumenon beyond the phenomenal world), which
he decided was fire, modified by stages of rarefaction and condensation.
Consistent with the unstable and transient image of fire, Heraclitis
maintained a dynamic perspective on this reality in which change or flux
is constant. But he certainly did not renounce metaphysical speculation,
portraying his views not as mere poetic art, but as a revelation of an
eternal Logos. His belief that one cannot step into the same river twice
did not stop him from believing that he had some special knowledge of
the transcendent foundations of the world.
Despite David Humeâs well known empiricism and skepticism, his
philosophical speculations (like all philosophical empiricists and
skeptics) also contain unmistakably rationalist moments, metaphysically
necessary or a priori presuppositions that remain unproven and
unprovable, but are not to be questioned or in most cases even
acknowledged. For Hume this includes the usual naive empiricist
presupposition of a metaphysical subject-object dualism, in which
atomistic sense-data or perceptions are conceived as the subjective
representations of a supposedâthough not necessarily proveableâobjective
world.
Despite the fact that many philosophical empiricists and skeptics have
genuinely attempted to reduce their fetishizations of reason, as long as
they fail to reject the alleged independent truth of every rationalist
presupposition they in fact invariably remain in thrall to rationalist
reification in those remaining unquestioned forms. For more examples and
detailed examination of relation of reification to empiricist
philosophy, see the longer version of note 29 in an earlier version of
this essay appearing in Modern Slavery #1/Spring-Summer 2012 (CAL Press,
POB 24332, Oakland, CA 94623;
http://modernslavery.calpress.org
).
[30] Kant himself claimed to have destroyed all previous forms of
metaphysics. He was more reticent and ambiguous regarding claims to
religious critique, though he did openly take on some of the more
obviously illogical or irrational claims like that of the supposed
ontological proof of the existence of God. In their place he elevated
the analytic and synthetic a priori, a metaphysical conception of
mathematics, fixed categories of the understanding, wiggle room for the
possibility of religion, and an intractable metaphysical dualism of
appearance and thing-in-itself. As Kant himself explains: âAll pure a
priori knowledge... has in itself a peculiar unity; and metaphysics is
the philosophy which has as its task the statement of that knowledge in
this systematic unity. Its speculative part, which has especially
appropriated this name, namely, what we entitle metaphysics of
nature,...considers everything in so far as it is (not that which ought
to be) by means of a priori concepts,....â (Immanuel Kant, The Critique
of Pure Reason, A845 B873).
[31] Hegel claimed to carry on Kantâs critique in an attempt at a
presuppositionless phenomenology and logic, but in practice only begged
the question (the logical fallacy of already assuming that which is to
be proven) by implicitly presupposing his conceptual or logical
metaphysics from the beginning. For example, in his doctrines of being
and essence, Hegel always already assumes that an immediate experience
(lived experience, unmediated by conceptual thought) does not and cannot
exist, by always beginning from thinking (mediation) itself, rather than
beginning from outside of thought. He then concludes, quite logically
given his implicit presupposition, that immediacy is impossible. As
Hegel states in his Science of Logic (translated by A.V. Miller and
published by Humanity Books, 1999, p. 50.): â... what we are dealing
with ... is not a thinking about something which exists independently as
a base for our thinking and apart from it ... on the contrary, the
necessary forms and self-determinations of thought are the content and
the ultimate truth itself.â
[32] See Nicholas Lobkowicz, âKarl Marx and Max Stirnerâ in Frederick
Adelmann, Demythologizing Marxism (Boston College, Chestnut Hill, 1969)
pp. 64â95. (Especially relevant are pages 74â75.)
[33] Strauss was actually influenced far more by Friedrich
Schleiermacher than Hegel, but he is usually represented as the first of
the post-Hegelians, having coined the terms âright Hegelianâ and âleft
Hegelianâ to describe more tradition-oriented Christian Hegelians (like
Bruno Bauer in 1838) and more liberal or progressive approaches to
scriptural interpretation (as was his own). Strauss wrote: âThis is the
key to the whole of Christology.... In an individual, a God-man, the
properties and functions which the Church ascribes to Christ contradict
themselves; in the idea of the race, they perfectly agree.â And âBy
faith in this Christ, especially in his death and resurrection, man is
justified before God; that is, by the kindling within him of the idea of
Humanity, the individual man participates in the divinely human life of
the species.â David Friedrich Strauss, translated by George Eliot, The
Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (Swan Sonnenschein, London, 1892) p.
780.
[34] See Ludwig Feuerbach, translated by George Eliot, The Essence of
Christianity (Barnes & Noble Books, New York, 2004) p. xix. Feuerbach
argues that his philosophy: â...does not rest on an Understanding per
se, on an absolute, nameless understanding, belonging one knows not to
whom, but on the understanding of man;âthough not, I grant, on that of
man enervated by speculation and dogma;âand it speaks the language of
men, not an empty, unknown tongue. Yes, both in substance and in speech,
it places philosophy in the negation of philosophy, i.e., it declares
that alone to be the true philosophy which is converted in succum et
sanguinem, which is incarnate in Man;....â
[35] âReason is the true creative power, for it produces itself as
Infinite Self-consciousness, and its ongoing creation is...world
history. As the only power that exists, Spirit can therefore be
determined by nothing other than itself, that is, its essence is
Freedom...Freedom is the infinite power of Spirit...Freedom, the only
End of Spirit, is also the only End of History, and history is nothing
other than Spiritâs becoming conscious of its Freedom, or the becoming
of Real, Free, Infinite Self-consciousness.â Bruno Bauer, âHegelâs Lehre
von der Religion und Kunst von dem Standpunkte des Glaubens aus
Beurteiltâ (1842), translated by Douglass Moggach, 2001. Anticipating
his later, more detailed arguments, Max Stirner implicitly criticized
Bauerâs âinfinite self-consciousnessâ with his own critique of Hegelâs
teaching in an essay titled âArt and Religion,â which also appeared in
1842.
[36] âFeuerbach says that the essence of God is the transcendent essence
of man, and that the true doctrine of the divine being is the doctrine
of the human being. Theology is anthropology. This is correct, but is
not the whole truth. One must add that the essence of man (das Wesen des
Menschen) is the social being (das gesellschaftliche Wesen), the
co-operation of various individuals for one and the same end...The true
doctrine of man, true humanism, is the doctrine of human socialization,
that is, anthropology is socialism.â Moses Hess, â ber die
sozialistische Bewegung in Deutschland,â Neue Anekdota, edited by Karl
Gr n (Darmstadt, 1845), p. 203, quoted in Nicholas Lobkowicz, âKarl Marx
and Max Stirner,â Frederick Adelmann, Demythologizing Marxism (Boston
College, Chestnut Hill, 1969) p. 75.
[37] Max Stirner was undoubtedly aware of at least the Lao-tsuâor
Tao-te-ching, since it was included in Hegelâs lectures on the History
of Religion attended by Stirner in the winter of 1827â1828. Many of the
early Taoist texts share distinct nominalist, phenomenological and
dialectical traces (in which the nonconceptual nature of the Tao is
sometimes expressed similarly to the nonconceptual nature of Stirnerâs
Unique). The most remarkable for their similarities with Stirnerâs
workâincluding their wide disrepute amongst humanists of both East and
Westâmay be the texts attributed to Yang Chu. The question of whether
Stirner may have had any direct familiarity with the Chuang-tsu texts or
Yang Chu texts requires further investigation. Interestingly, though, as
far as I have been able to find to date, the first published German
translation of Yang Chuâs texts was prepared by someone very familiar
with Stirnerâs work, Martin Buber. Buber, whoâthough he was quite
(uncomprehendingly) critical of Stirnerâwas also a very good friend of
Gustav Landauer, whom it should be noted, was at one point enthusiastic
enough about Stirnerâs work that he used Stirnerâs given name for his
own pseudonym. Landauer, of course, is most widely known for a quotation
in which he paraphrases Stirner (while leaving out the mediation of
peopleâs belief in fixed ideas): âThe state is a social relationship, a
certain way of people relating to one another. It can be destroyed by
creating new social relationships, i.e. by people relating to one
another differently.â
[38] Max Stirner, edited by David Leopold, The Ego and Its Own
(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995), p. 164.
[39] Critiques of nominalism have historically relied on premises
provided by unexamined rationalist presuppositions. These
presuppositions are either smuggled in through unexamined metaphysical
or epistemological contextual assumptions, or both. Typically, for a
start, some type of ontological subjective/objective dualism and
rationalist, representational epistemology is presumed. Then nominalism
is usually rejected because it is inconsistent with or cannot provide
proofs for the presupposed rationalist forms of reality or knowledge.
That the demands imposed by adoption of rationalist presuppositions do
not and cannot logically justify any general, presuppositionless
critique of nominalism is never considered. This is a corollary of
Humeâs critique of induction and Stirnerâs critique of rationalist
presuppositions, which I call âMcQuinnâs Law.â (Since Iâm an anarchist,
this isâat least partlyâa joke!) McQuinnâs Law can be stated as: Given
any genuinely presuppositionless empiricism, there is no possible way to
prove the existence of any necessary, a priori entity. Every form of
conceptual cognition cannot be more than a hypothesis or postulate which
must be continually proven in practice. (Obviously, this also includes
McQuinnâs Law itself, which is why it actually is not a law at all! But
what did you expect from an anarchist?)
This means that, as usually conceived, there is no non-dogmatic
justification for the presumption of the existence of any natural law or
timeless or a priori universal, absolute, number, necessity, reality,
truth, value, being, beauty, gods, dogmas or any other fixed idea
(rationalist reification) which is not discovered and interpreted in
oneâs particular experience as it is lived. These entities may all be
postulated, but they are never proven. Show me (Iâm a Missouri
empiricist!) any a priori or timeless postulate, and I will show that it
cannot be proven to be a priori or timeless without begging the
question. This may not actually be a law, but it certainly trumps all
laws. Just as immanent, phenomenal anarchy trumps the existence of all
historical states. (What existed before the first political state was
created? Anarchyâthe ground of all social existence!)
[40] Whereas most philosophers since Descartes have begun from thinking
and thought or conceptual consciousness, Max Stirner begins from
non-thought, from his nonconceptual life. Stirner calls himself âthe
Uniqueâ or âthe Unique Oneâ (âder Einzigeâ) to point to himself as an
âempty concept,â a concept without any content aside from the
nonconceptual experience to which it points. An âempty conceptâ could
also be termed a ânominalâ or ânominalist concept,â a type of concept
that always necessarily corresponds perfectly to its object.
[41] As it is usually formulated, belief in any a priori is necessarily
always a belief in an unverifiable conceptual presupposition. After all,
from the instant we create a conceptual understanding of our lives
temporality in some form is already there, implied (if by nothing else)
in the very act of creation of conceptual categories (of thinking).
Prior to our memories of our own acts in the past (which are always
memories within the present) and following our current acts (in a future
which is only ever projected from the present), how can we possibly know
if any particular concept or symbol existed or will exist? Certainly not
based on any empirical, experiential evidence. The usual practice of
rationalists is to consider thinking as outside of space and time (which
is fine if you really believe you are fundamentally only a spirit or
ghost, but isnât very convincing for those of us who empirically
consider our bodies and worlds to be nonexpendable), and therefore its
contents as somehow a priori. However, if thinking is considered from a
presuppositionless phenomenological perspective as merely an activity of
a living person, whose actual essence (as Stirner would say) is
nonconceptual, then the existence of any thoughts prior to that thinking
and outside of experience (a priori concepts) will never be foundâonly
asserted on no (or highly impeachable) empirical evidence. It is not
likely that Stirner would have missed (among other similar statements
from the philosophers of his time), in an introduction to his Science of
Knowledge (Nabu Press edition, 2010, p. 26), Fichte statingâas part of a
longer argumentâthat: âPhilosophy anticipates the entirety of experience
and thinks it only as necessary, and to that extent it is, by comparison
with real experience, a priori. To the extent that it is regarded as
given, the number is a posteriori; the same number is a priori insofar
as it is derived as a product of the factors. Anyone who thinks
otherwise, simply does not know what he is talking about.â What does a
priori mean here except a statement that is already contained in some
way in its premises (factors). Stirner easily recognized that either the
premises themselves must already be a priori rather than empirical, in
which case we have a vicious circle in which we will never reach any
presuppositionless phenomenon from which we can derive an a priori (and
it is obvious that the a priori is just a baseless presupposition), or
the supposed a priori thought is really a given (an a posteriori)
phenomenon (unless thinking is metaphysically considered somehow to be
outside of experience, itself an a priori presupposition).
[42] After standing largely intact for thousands of years, Aristotleâs
analytic, or syllogistic, logic (reconstructed in the Organon) was only
replaced by modern formal deductive logics in the 19^(th) and 20^(th)
centuries, largely after Stirnerâs death. During Stirnerâs lifetime
there were, however, already hints at some of the major, imaginative
changes on their way. For a much more detailed discussion of the
implications of Stirnerâs analytic perspective, see note 42 in the
earlier version of this essay in Modern Slavery #2/Spring-Summer 2012
(CAL Press, POB 24332, Oakland, CA 94623), pp. 177â178.
[43] Developing from its earliest practices, Aristotleâs formulation of
dialectic (also reconstructed in the Organon) operates through a limited
number of potential practical strategies of argumentation, depending
upon the type of context and audience. From its beginnings, dialectic
implied a logic of communicative (social) understanding embedded in time
and history that became, especially within Hegelâs conception of
dialectic, increasingly explicit. In fact, dialectic is composed at its
most basic phenomenal level of all the extra-analytical (contextual,
interpretive, discursive and rhetorical) aspects of logic. However,
whereas Hegelâs dialectic ultimately remains (whatever Hegelâs actual
intention) no more than a self-alienated, rationalist objectification,
Stirnerâs dialectic is his own self-creation as both self-expression and
self-possession. It is a continually recreated and flexible process
whose objectifications Stirner creates and consumes at his pleasure for
his own purposesâfor his self-enjoyment.
In practice, this means that since Stirner takes full responsibility for
creating all aspects of his self-expression, he also can take full
account (to the extent he wishes in any given particular instance) of
every expressive move he makes. Thus, for each distinction Stirner
employs, he always understands that it is his act of distinction, it
occurs in a particular life context (including natural, social,
historical and personal moments), and it is based upon and operates
withinâbut also always creatively beyondâsocial and historical systems
of both preconceptual and symbolic communication. For each particular
conceptual distinction he makes, then the symbolic distinction will
nominally denote (or point to) a particular indication whose content is
only part of a story that always includes its entire context. And that
context will always include everything that the indication leaves
outâits entire ground or background, all that is not indicated. This
(more narrowly) includes everything that is not conceptually indicated,
which would be the other conceptual side of any distinction (for
example, the other side of every abstract, polar evaluative distinction
like desirable/undesirable, good/bad, right/wrong, true/false,
real/unreal, beautiful/non-beautiful, spiritual/non-spiritual and
material/non-material or the other side of every particular or
universal, objective distinction like table/non-table, Joan/non-Joan,
sleep/awake, aware/unaware, eagle/non-eagle, dust mote/non-dust mote and
god/nongod or blue-flying-elephant/non-blue-flying-elephant). According
to Stirnerâs critique, since only particulars actually exist in our
experiences, it becomes especially important to maintain an awareness of
what is necessarily suppressed by (left out of) every rationalist
(abstract, universal) distinction, since it is his goal to restore for
himselfâand to help all of us begin to restore for ourselvesâevery
particular moment or aspect of life that we currently suppress through
our rationalist self-alienations.
[44] Max Stirner, edited by David Leopold, The Ego and Its Own
(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995), p. 166.
[45] Stirner makes it hard to return to the self-alienating and
self-defeating incoherence of religious-rationalist thoughtâthe
dogmatism of religion and the built-in nihilism of every form of modern
religion, philosophy and ideology (in which frustrating, unreachably
abstract Realities, Conceptions and Values are set up as the only
acceptable objects or goals of life). This is because his critique is
not only devastating for every form of religion, philosophy and ideology
themselves, but alsoâwhen properly understood through his complete
reversal of perspectiveâhis critique reveals the path to the subversive
completion of each religiously rationalist project, through completion
of the hidden phenomenal, living core of each of these projects. This is
the case for the particular projects of ancient philosophers, the
project of Christianity, for the Cartesian project and the Kantian
project, the Fichtean and Schellingian projects, for Schleiermacherâs
project, for the Hegelian project, the various Romantic projects of
Novalis and others, all of the ideological projects the nationalists,
socialists, communists and corporativists, and all the rest of the
rationalist projects which have followed throughout the 19^(th) and
20^(th) centuries.
Taking each of these projects individually, we canâfrom Stirnerâs
critical, egoistic perspectiveâtrace the particular forms of religious
or rationalist dogma presupposed a priori in each case. (These
presuppositions are always centered around the choice of an initial
symbolic inversion, fetishizing a religious or rationalist
(representational) mirror-image of our phenomenally-experienced lives,
which is invested with the ârealityâ that is torn and self-alienated
from the nonconceptual unity of our actual lives.) These presuppositions
then logically lead further to more and more complex structures of
self-alienation, more and more intricate excuses for self-enslavement,
and more and more arcane attempts at explaining the resulting
(ultimately inexplicable) self-contradictions which result from the
assumption of the initial inversion of lived reality with its symbolic
representations.
[46] See note 41.
[47] Max Stirnerâs critique of morality is one of the hardest things for
his critics to stomach. Even when they seem to understand it in theory,
his critics remain so wedded to the self-subordination of their own
activities to moral rules in practice that they are for the most part
unable to consistently step outside their own habitual commitments, even
in their imaginations. This leads to a complete inability to understand
why the fetishized belief in compulsory morality of any kind is absurd
for those who refuse to live as slaves.
Stirnerâs whole critique is founded on the refusal of all forms of
self-alienation. And compulsory morality is one of the archetypal forms
of self-alienation. It involves either creating before the fact, or
(more often) claiming to find (or to have imposed on oneself),
predetermined rules of conduct that must be followed regardless of oneâs
situation. The absurdity of this becomes even clearer when we read the
religious, political, economic, and social moralists, or moral
philosophers, and discover that each seeks to find some way to claim
that moral rules should always trump the existential choices of
particular individuals, though none are ever able to make a logical case
for this without introducing dogmatic presuppositions that already
contain the justifications for requiring the moral rules. As soon as we
disallow these dogmatic presuppositions, these moralists can only flop
around like dying fish out of water, rehashing their baseless arguments
but going nowhere.
Even thoughâwith their dogmatic foundations removedâmoralists can only
operate with no rational basis, they still insist on claiming that the
absence of morality either isâor else definitely leads toâthe most
heinous of crimes. The typical illogical argument is that the absence of
morality means the absence of âmoral responsibility,â and the absence of
moral responsibility leads to heinous behavior. Yet, when moral
responsibility is examined, it turns out that it consists of the âgood
Germanâ rule of just following orders. Of course, it is the correct
orders that are supposed to be followed, say the moralists. But few ever
agree on which are the correct orders. There can never be any
unquestionably true, universal criteria that lead us to the correct
orders for everyone to follow. And those who yell the loudest that we
need to follow their âcorrectâ orders are usually the most ignorant and
illogical of the bunch: Marxists, liberals, Nazis, racists, Christians,
Islamics, Hindus, etc.
What is actually at stake with any submission to morality is the
necessary abdication of any directly personal responsibility for oneâs
actions, instead of accepting the inevitability that one always chooses
oneâs actions and cannot escape this lived fact. Moral responsibility is
an ideological mirage through which people can attempt to displace
responsibility from the actual agentâthemselvesâon to the set of moral
rules and its alleged source.
Genuine personal responsibility is only accepted when we make each
decision for ourselvesâunavoidably in our own interests. Unless you
believe that your own interests are actually different from the
interests involved in your own actions, a highly convoluted and
illogical idea, but typical of the distorted thought processes required
for the proper functioning of compulsory morality.
Although it is often implied by his critics, it is untrue that Stirner
rejects all questions of ethics per se (or non-compulsory morality,
should one wish to use that term). If an ethical question or a
noncompulsory moral question involves determining what is the best way
(according to oneâs own criteria of âbestâ) to achieve a particular
goal, to what would Stirner object? It is only when an ethic is fixed,
binding or compulsory in the sense in which morality is usually taken
that Stirner could be said to reject ethics.
It should be clear that Stirnerâs entire argument here turns on the
refusal to subordinate his actually lived activities to any
self-alienated symbolic representations of himself and his activities.
His egoism is an immanent, phenomenal, descriptive egoism and has no
compulsory moral content. He has no desire to separate his lived
interests from some sort of supposed âactualâ or ârealâ self-interests
that he should follow, just as he has no desire to somehow correctly
isolate some sort of supposed âactualâ or ârealâ external or
heteronomous moral interests that he should follow. The desire to impose
some sort of reified, rationalistic compulsory-moral mechanism between
oneâs otherwise felt life choices and oneâs final actions functions as a
fetishized (neurotic) repetition-compulsion preventing any exit from
habitual self-alienation (see note 17, where I describe this ârecursive
nightmareâ further). The choice of compulsory morality is necessarily
the choice of self-enslavement to that moralityâwhether it is a
supposedly âaltruisticâ or a supposedly âegoisticâ morality. Moral
altruism and moral egoism are two sides of the same phenomenon of
self-alienation that Stirner consistently and conclusively rejects.