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Title: Stirner, the Wise Guy
Author: Wolfi Landstreicher
Date: 2017
Language: en
Topics: Max Stirner, egoism, Hegel, egoist, Wolfi Landstreicher, taoism,
Source: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/max-stirner-the-unique-and-its-property

Wolfi Landstreicher

Stirner, the Wise Guy

Almost every scholar of Stirner, whether self-taught or

university-trained, insists on referring to the author of The Unique...

as a philosopher. I can’t recall Stirner ever referring to himself as

such, and certainly, by the time he wrote his book, he had concluded

that philosophy was a joke that its purveyors took far too seriously,

buffoonery deserving only laughter. And to call the mocker of philosophy

a philosopher is as absurd as calling the impious atheist[1] a

theologian.

Philosophers pursue answers in the ultimate sense—universal answers. And

so they are, indeed, lovers of wisdom. They conceive of wisdom as

something objective, as something that exists in itself, beyond any

individual, and so as something they have to pursue, rather than as

their own property, their attribute, to use as they see fit. They are

still attached to the idea of a “wisdom” that is greater than them, you

or me. Stirner called them “pious atheists,” a particularly biting barb

in a country where the most extreme Christians were known as “pietists.”

So long as a person continues to pursue this external, supposedly

universal wisdom, he may well be a wise man (whatever that means), but

he will never be a wise guy. Stirner was a wise guy, because he

recognized that there is no ultimate, universal wisdom to find; the

philosopher’s goal is a pipe dream worthy only of mockery and laughter.

And Stirner mocked and laughed often in the most delightfully crude ways

in his writings. Unfortunately, both his critics and his disciples have

largely missed the joke.[2] And explaining a joke is never as much fun

as playing the joke. Hence, Stirner’s increasing exasperation (still

humorously and even savagely expressed) in Stirner’s Critics and “The

Philosophical Reactionaries.”

Despite the tedium of explaining a joke, I will make the effort to do so

to some extent, largely because some who have taken Stirner too

literally and seriously have drawn the most ridiculous conclusions about

him and those rebels who have found his writings useful in developing

their own rebellious thought.

To begin with, Stirner is mocking philosophy itself. This is evident in

his comments on Socrates in The Unique and Its Property, as well as in

“The Philosophical Reactionaries.” Though he certainly aimed his

laughter most fiercely at the philosophy and the philosophers of Germany

in his time—Hegel, his precursors, his disciples and his “left

Hegelian”[3] critics—Stirner’s mocking, playful logic undermines the

whole of the philosophical project, leaving no place for metaphysics,

ontology, ethics, etc., beyond an individual’s own personal preferences

in behavior.

The main focus of his mockery is the Hegelian method, as this had become

the dominant philosophical method in Germany at the time Stirner lived.

And his joke is woven throughout this book. First of all, he carefully

constructed the outline of The Unique to parallel that of Hegel’s The

Phenomenology of the Spirit and Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity,

while undermining the foundations of both works. Some scholars have

called him the ultimate Hegelian, because he makes use of Hegel’s

dialectical method[4] in his book. However, in “The Philosophical

Reactionaries,” Stirner explains that this too was part of the joke: “Do

you philosophers actually have an inkling that you have been beaten with

your own weapons? Nothing but an inkling. What retort can you hearty

fellows make against it, when I again dialectically demolish what you

have just dialectically put up? You have shown me with what ‘eloquence’

one can make all into nothing and nothing into all, black into white and

white into black. What do you have against it, when I turn your neat

trick back on you? But with the dialectical trick of a philosophy of

nature, neither you nor I will cancel the great facts of modern natural

research, no more than Schelling and Hegel did.”[5] Stirner chose to use

the methods of those he was mocking to undermine what they claimed those

methods showed, not because he believed in those methods, but because he

wanted to show that, at best, they were mere intellectual tools, ones

that could be turned to damn near any use in the realm of ideas.

In fact, what Stirner has to say leaves no room for any sort of

universal or historical progress, dialectical or otherwise. It is no

accident that Stirner begins and ends his book with the same words,

taken from Goethe’s poem “Vanitas! Vanitatum Vanitas!” I have translated

these words (fairly literally) as: “I have based my affair on nothing.”

Goethe’s poem has the feel of a drinking song, something friends might

sing laughingly together at a bar. Stirner’s use of it at the beginning

and the end of the book was a way of saying, “I’m having fun, and that’s

all that matters, so don’t take any of this too seriously.” And what he

proposes—fully aware self-enjoyment and self-creation for your own

enjoyment—are as thoroughly ahistorical and anti-progressive (in any

universal or historical sense) as moralists and ideologues of the left

and right may claim. But this is what makes his proposal genuinely

rebellious and genuinely anti-authoritarian. Because history and

progress have always been the history and the progress of ruling powers

who want everyone to live for them and the ideals and values they

impose.

In light of Stirner’s anti-historical, anti-progressive, thoroughly

in-the-moment, self-centered perspective, readers need to realize that

any talk of historical processes and any apparently progressive

descriptions in Stirner’s book are part of the joke, part of his mockery

of the positions he is tearing apart. I recently read a pamphlet[6] in

which one of the writers assumes that the section in The Unique entitled

“A Human Life” expresses Stirner’s view of how individuals develop. But

in the very title of this section, Stirner gave us a heavy-handed hint

that this is not his viewpoint, that it is part of the joke. Though

Stirner’s mockery is an attack on all fixed ideas, on all ideals placed

above each unique being and his self-enjoyment, its central attack is on

the humanism that Feuerbach, Bruno and Edgar Bauer (and the other

“critical critics”), and the various liberals and radicals of the time,

put forward as the replacement for christianity and theism. When Stirner

speaks of a “human life,” he is not talking about his life, your life,

my life, or the life of “humanity” in general[7] (since for Stirner,

“humanity” itself is a mere phantasm—as he explicitly says more than

once). He is telling the reader who gets the joke that he is presenting

a caricatured, mocking perspective of how his opponents view human

development, with the intent of twisting it against them.

In the same way, the picture Stirner presented of a supposed historical

progress in “Part I: Humanity” (and particularly in “The Hierarchy) was

not his own perspective on history. Stirner was quite intentionally

ahistorical. Instead he was making a mockery of Hegel’s dialectically

progressive view of history in order to twist it back on those who used

this Hegelian view to support their perspectives. The apparent racial

hierarchy found in the perspective Stirner was mocking comes straight

out of Hegel[8] (though Hegel, like most of the progressive thinkers of

the time, did not understand race biologically and assumed all humanity

could eventually achieve the progressive transformation in which he

believed), and Stirner’s mockery is a delightfully politically incorrect

joke on the cultural hierarchy Hegel assumed. Stirner’s playful argument

is that, even if you assume that there is a history that progresses, by

Hegel’s own logic, you have to end up back at egoism. All that progress

won’t bring us anywhere else... And his attribution of “Mongolism” to

his German contemporaries shows that even one of his tactics for

avoiding the censors (using “China” or “Japan” instead of “Germany”

whenever he was making a critical reference to the German authorities of

his time) was part of the joke.

In fact, Stirner may well have been making a deeper joke here. I

realized on my first reading of Byington’s translation of Stirner that

there were many parallels between Stirner’s ideas and aspects of taoism

and buddhism. Already, in 1906, Alexandra David-Neel[9] compared

Stirner’s ideas to those of the taoist Yang-Chou. Stirner emphasized the

transience of each individual and rejected any crystallized, permanent

“I” as much as any other permanent idea, seeing it as yet another

phantasm. He saw getting beyond the limits of thought as a necessary

part of living fully as one’s transient self here and now. He saw

self-enjoyment as most fully achieved in self-forgetfulness. And in

Stirner’s Critics, he spoke of the unique (der Einzige) in ways quite

similar to those used to speak of the tao in the Tao Te Ching: “Stirner

names the unique and says at the same time ‘names don’t name it.’ He

utters a name when he names the unique, and adds that the unique is only

a name. ... What Stirner says is a word, a thought, a concept; what he

means is neither a word, nor a thought, nor a concept. What he says is

not the meaning, and what he means cannot be said.”[10] Was Stirner

aware of these similarities? I don’t know which of Hegel’s lectures

Stirner attended while he was at the university in Berlin, but I have

confirmed that Hegel gave lectures on Eastern philosophy. This indicates

that buddhist, taoist, and other Eastern writings were available in

Germany at the time. And I would like to think that Stirner read some of

these and, as is appropriate for an egoistic self-creator, took what he

found appealing and useful from these writings to enhance his own way of

living and viewing the world. If so, this adds a certain ironic depth to

his play on German “mongolism.”

I could go on trying to explain more of Stirner’s jokes, more of his

humor, his sarcasm, his mockery, but as I said above, explaining jokes

is never as much fun as making them. For Stirner, there was no ultimate

aim of history, no inherent progress, and so for him the dialectic could

never be anything more than a tool. The use he found for this tool was

precisely that of using the dialectic to undermine the dialectic. And

this worked best through mockery and sarcasm. Stirner was a thoroughly

impious atheist, what I like to call a barefisted atheist. He had no

need or desire for a god in his life, not even some ultimate

crystallized “I” to be achieved, and he was willing—and in fact took

pleasure in—accepting the full implications of his godlessness. Without

a god there is no basis for morality; without a god there is no basis

for the sacred; without a god there is no universal meaning, no

universal aim, no universal purpose; in fact, no universal universe. The

universe is an absurdity. The only meanings, aims, purposes, and

universes are the very ephemeral, transient ones that individuals create

for themselves. In the face of this overall absurdity, you could choose

to ignore it and assume the universality of your own meanings, thus

becoming what Stirner called a “duped egoist”; this is the path typical

of the religious (including ideologues like Marx and his followers,

Hitler and his, or Mises[11] and his). You could let it overwhelm you

and fall into a new religion of cosmic pessimism, where the absurdity is

a horrifying god (whether you call it by that name or not), and so again

become a “duped egoist.” Or you could do what Stirner did and see the

humor in the ultimate absurdity, recognizing that this lack of universal

meaning and purpose is what gives you and I the capacity to willfully

create our lives for ourselves. Stirner willfully grasped his own

self-creative power and took aim at all that was considered sacred with

the intention of demolishing it. He knew the best weapon for demolishing

the sacred is mocking laughter. Instead of being a wise man, Stirner

chose to be a wise guy, and if you don’t get the joke, the jokes on

you...

[1] As opposed to both the theist and the pious “atheists” who replace

god with another deity.

[2] No one who got the joke could ever be a disciple of Stirner, since

he provided no answers, nothing whatsoever to believe in, nothing more

than some tools for undermining all belief, all fixed thought.

[3] This term was not one used by any of those given the label, but one

imposed later by historians of philosophy to make it easier to

distinguish these mid-nineteenth-century critics of Hegel from the more

orthodox followers of Hegel. A number of them were friends or at least

associates in groups like die Freien (the Free Ones), who met in

Hippel’s wine bar. Stirner took part in this group.

[4] I specifically say “Hegel’s dialectical method,” because his

dialectic was a very specific, progressive formulation which was

supposed to achieve an ultimate synthesis at the end of history, unlike

the ancient Greek dialectic which simply referred to ongoing discussion

of ideas with no final culmination.

[5] Stirner, Max, “The Philosophical Reactionaries,” in Stirner’s

Critics (translated by Wolfi Landstreicher), pp. 106—107, LBC Books and

CAL Press, 2012.

[6] Max Stirner’s Political Spectrography (Spectral Emissions, Seattle,

2015), by Fabian Ludueña, introduction by Alejandro de Acosta.

[7] To use the phrase of Alejandro de Acosta, “a more or less

intentional gesture towards a prehistoric anthropogenic moment” (ibid.,

p. vii).

[8] See particularly Hegel’s Encyclopaedia and History of Philosophy.

[9] Best known for her adventures wandering in Tibet and her writings on

Tibetan buddhism that sprang from these adventures, Alexandra David-Neel

was a young friend of Elisée Reclus and sometimes wrote for anarchist

publications. In “The Theory of the Individual in Chinese Philosophy:

Yang-Chou,” she compared the ideas of an early (and somewhat

controversial) taoist, Yang-Chou, to those of Stirner. This essay can be

found in Neither Lord nor Subject: Anarchism and Eastern Thought, Enemy

Combatant Publications, 2016.

[10] Stirner, Max, op. cit., p. 54, p. 55.

[11] Ludwig von Mises was one of the major theorists of the Austrian

school of economics, an extreme laissez-faire school of economic theory.

The proponents of this school of economic thought remain thoroughly

mired in Aristotelian thinking and so assume that Reason (in an

absolute, unitary sense) provides the best understanding of economic

forces at play. For this reason, they remain as religious in their

thinking as marxists. A number of Libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, and

other free-market anarchists adhere to the doctrines of the Austrian

school.