Philosophy of Max Stirner

Portrait of Stirner by philosophical rival Friedrich Engels.

The philosophy of Max Stirner (25 October 1806 - 26 June 1856), a German philosopher, is credited as a major influence in the development of nihilism, existentialism, post-modernism, and anarchism (especially of egoist anarchism, individualist anarchism, postanarchism, and post-left anarchy). Max Stirner's main philosophical work was The Ego and Its Own, also known as The Ego and His Own (Der Einzige und sein Eigentum in German, which means, more accurately in German, The Individual and his Property).

Stirner's philosophy has been cited as an influence on both his contemporaries, most notably Karl Marx (who was strongly opposed to Stirner's views),^[1] as well as subsequent thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche,^[2] Enrico Arrigoni, Steven T. Byington, Benjamin R. Tucker, Emile Armand, Albert Camus,^[3] and Saul Newman.

Thought

The Self

Stirner argues that the concept of the self is something impossible to fully comprehend; a so-called 'creative nothing' he described as an "end-point of language".

The Unique One is the straightforward, sincere, plain-phrase. It is the end point of our phrase world, of this world in whose "beginning was the Word."

— Max Stirner, Stirner's Critics

In order to understand this 'creative nothing', Stirner uses poetry and vivid imagery. The 'creative nothing' by its dialectical shortcomings creates the need for a description, for meaning.

What Stirner says is a word, a thought, a concept; what he means is no word, no thought, no concept. What he says is not what is meant, and what he means is unsayable.

— Max Stirner, Stirner's Critics

Stirner elaborated this attempt to describe the indescribable in the essay "Stirner's Critics", written by Stirner in response to Feuerbach and others (in custom with the time, he refers to himself in the third person) :

Stirner speaks of the Unique and says immediately: Names name you not. He articulates the word, so long as he calls it the Unique, but adds nonetheless that the Unique is only a name. He thus means something different from what he says, as perhaps someone who calls you Ludwig does not mean a Ludwig in general, but means You, for which he has no word. (...) It is the end point of our phrase world, of this world in whose "beginning was the Word."

— Max Stirner, Stirner's Critics

The Ego and Its Own opens and closes with a quotation from Goethe that reads "I have taken up my cause without foundation", with the unstated next line of the poem being "…and all the world is mine". One of Stirner's central ideas is that in realizing the self is "nothing" one is said to "own the world", because as the book states in its last line: "all things are nothing to me" [Ibidem, p. 324].

By bringing the essence into prominence one degrades the hitherto misapprehended appearance to a bare semblance, a deception. The essence of the world, so attractive and splendid, is for him who looks to the bottom of it — emptiness; emptiness is — world's essence (world's doings)."

— Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, p. 40

[F]or 'being' is abstraction, as is even 'the I'. Only I am not abstraction alone: I am all in all, consequently, even abstraction or nothing: I am all and nothing; I am not a mere thought, but at the same time I am full of thoughts, a thought-world."

— Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, p. 300

I say: liberate yourself as far as you can, and you have done your part; for it is not given to every one to break through all limits, or, more expressively, not to everyone is that a limit which is a limit for the rest. Consequently, do not tire yourself with toiling at the limits of others; enough if you tear down yours. [...] He who overturns one of his limits may have shown others the way and the means; the overturning of their limits remains their affair."

— Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, p. 127

Stirner describes this world-view, in brief, as "enjoyment", and he claims that the "nothingness" of the non-self is "unutterable" (p. 314) or "unnameable" (p. 132), "unspeakable" yet "a mere word" (p. 164; cf. Stirner's comments on the Skeptic concepts ataraxia and aphasia, p. 26).

Egoism

Stirner has been broadly understood as a proponent of both psychological egoism and ethical egoism, although the latter position can be disputed, as there is no claim in Stirner's writing, in which one 'ought to' pursue one's own interest, and further claiming any 'ought' could be seen as a new 'fixed idea'. However, he may be understood as a rational egoist in the sense that he considered it irrational not to act in one's self-interest. How this self-interest is defined, however, is necessarily subjective, allowing both selfish and altruistic normative claims to be included. Further, rationality as an end in and of itself is another 'fixed idea'.

Individual self-realization rests on each individual's desire to fulfill their egoism. The difference between an unwilling and a willing egoist, is that the former will be 'possessed' by an empty idea and believe that they are fulfilling a higher cause, but usually being unaware that they are only fulfilling their own desires to be happy or secure, and the latter, in contrast, will be a person that is able to freely choose its actions, fully aware that they are only fulfilling individual desires.

Sacred things exist only for the egoist who does not acknowledge himself, the involuntary egoist ... in short, for the egoist who would like not to be an egoist, and abases himself (combats his egoism), but at the same time abases himself only for the sake of "being exalted", and therefore of gratifying his egoism. Because he would like to cease to be an egoist, he looks about in heaven and earth for higher beings to serve and sacrifice himself to; but, however much he shakes and disciplines himself, in the end he does all for his own sake... [on] this account I call him the involuntary egoist.

...As you are each instant, you are your own creature in this very 'creature' you do not wish to lose yourself, the creator. You are yourself a higher being than you are, and surpass yourself ... just this, as an involuntary egoist, you fail to recognize; and therefore the 'higher essence' is to you — an alien essence. ... Alienness is a criterion of the "sacred". [Ibidem, Cambridge edition, pp. 37–8]

The contrast is also expressed in terms of the difference between the voluntary egoist being the possessor of his concepts as opposed to being possessed. Only when one realizes that all sacred truths such as law, right, morality, religion etc., are nothing other than artificial concepts, and not to be obeyed, can one act freely. For Stirner, to be free is to be both one's own "creature" (in the sense of 'creation') and one's own "creator" (dislocating the traditional role assigned to the gods). To Stirner power is the method of egoism. It is the only justified method of gaining 'property'.

Even love is explained as "consciously egoistic":

...[Love] cuts no better figure than any other passion [if] I obey [it] blindly. The ambitious man, who is carried away by ambition... has let this passion grow up into a despot against whom he abandons all power of dissolution; he has given up himself because he cannot dissolve himself, and consequently cannot absolve himself from the passion: he is possessed.

- I love men, too, not merely individuals, but every one. But I love them with the consciousness of my egoism; I love them because love makes me happy, I love because loving is natural to me, it pleases me. I know no 'commandment of love'. I have a fellow-feeling with every feeling being, and their torment torments, their refreshment refreshes me too... [Ibidem, p. 258]

However, Stirner cautioned against any reification of the Egoist or subject:

The egoist, before whom the humane shudder, is a spook as much as the devil is: he exists only as a bogie and phantasm in their brain. If they were not unsophisticatedly drifting back and forth in the antediluvian opposition of good and evil, to which they have given the modern names of "human" and "egoistic," they would not have freshened up the hoary "sinner" into an "egoist" either, and put a new patch on an old garment. [Second Part: The Owner: 3 – My Self Enjoyment^[4]]

Anarchism

Stirner proposes that most commonly accepted social institutions—including the notion of State, property as a right, natural rights in general, and the very notion of society—were mere illusions or ghosts in the mind, saying of society that "the individuals are its reality." Stirner wants to "abolish not only the state but also society as an institution responsible for its members."^[5]

He advocated egoism and a form of amoralism, in which individuals would unite in 'unions of egoists' only when it was in their self-interest to do so. For him, property simply comes about through might: "Whoever knows how to take, to defend, the thing, to him belongs property." And, "What I have in my power, that is my own. So long as I assert myself as holder, I am the proprietor of the thing." He says, "I do not step shyly back from your property, but look upon it always as my property, in which I respect nothing. Pray do the like with what you call my property!"^[6] Stirner considers the world and everything in it, including other persons, available to one's taking or use without moral constraint^[7] —that rights do not exist in regard to objects and people at all. He sees no rationality in taking the interests of others into account unless doing so furthers one's self-interest, which he believes is the only legitimate reason for acting. He denies society as being an actual entity: "The conquerors form a society which one may imagine so great that it by degrees embraces all humanity; but so-called humanity too is as such only a thought (spook); the individuals are its reality". (The Ego and Its Own, Tucker ed., p. 329).

It should also be noted that Stirner, although an individualist anarchist in social philosophy never mentions markets and he did not believe it is a matter of moral right, but simply a matter of control. "I do not step shyly back from your property, but look upon it always as my property, in which I respect nothing. Pray do the like with what you call my property!"^[6] Stirner never referred to markets and his philosophy on property causes problems for a market system, because according to proponents of markets property is not considered to be legitimate if taken by force. Stirner was opposed to communism, seeing it as a form of authority over the individual. He said in The Ego and Its Own:

Property

Stirner has a concept of "egoistic property," in which he is referring to the absence of moral restrictions on how the individual uses everything in the world, including other people.^[7] For Stirner, property come about through might: "Whoever knows how to take, to defend, the thing, to him belongs property." "What I have in my power, that is my own. So long as I assert myself as holder, I am the proprietor of the thing." He says, "I do not step shyly back from your property, but look upon it always as my property, in which I respect nothing. Pray do the like with what you call my property!".^[6] This position on property is much different from the then prevalent form of individualist anarchism, which defended the inviolability of the private property that has been earned through labour.^[9] However, American individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker rejected the natural rights philosophy and adopted Stirner's egoism in 1886, with several others joining with him. Since he was a radical anarchist, he preferred a political-economic social condition that was anti-statist, anti-capitalist, and anti-authoritarian completely void of authoritarian monopolies (whether they positioned themselves as property or sovereignty) which were the enemies of individual liberation. Stirner's egoist anarchism is all about freeing the individual from the domination of property monopolists such as monarchs, governments, or industrialists while at the same time, egoist anarchism positions itself against the anti-individualist nature of the traditional political Left. Stirner had no concrete dogma on the issue of property and simply urged individuals to stop being ruled by others regardless of the authorities' moral claims about political sovereignty or property rights.

Union of egoists

Stirner's idea of the "Union of Egoists", was first expounded in The Ego and Its Own. The Union is understood as a non-systematic association, which Stirner proposed in contradistinction to the state.^[10] The Union is understood as a relation between egoists which is continually renewed by all parties' support through an act of will.^[11] The Union requires that all parties participate out of a conscious egoism. If one party silently finds themselves to be suffering, but puts up and keeps the appearance, the union has degenerated into something else.^[11] This union is not seen as an authority above a person's own will.

Revolution

Stirner criticizes conventional notions of revolution, arguing that social movements aimed at overturning the state are tacitly statist because they are implicitly aimed at the establishment of a new state thereafter. To illustrate this argument, he compares his own social and moral role with that of Jesus Christ:

The time [in which Jesus lived] was politically so agitated that, as is said in the gospels, people thought they could not accuse the founder of Christianity more successfully than if they arraigned him for 'political intrigue', and yet the same gospels report that he was precisely the one who took the least part in these political doings. But why was he not a revolutionary, not a demagogue, as the Jews would gladly have seen him? [...] Because he expected no salvation from a change of conditions, and this whole business was indifferent to him. He was not a revolutionary, like Caesar, but an insurgent: not a state-overturner, but one who straightened himself up. [...] [Jesus] was not carrying on any liberal or political fight against the established authorities, but wanted to walk his own way, untroubled about, and undisturbed by, these authorities. [...] But, even though not a ringleader of popular mutiny, not a demagogue or revolutionary, he (and every one of the ancient Christians) was so much the more an insurgent who lifted himself above everything that seemed so sublime to the government and its opponents, and absolved himself from everything that they remained bound to [...]; precisely because he put from him the upsetting of the established, he was its deadly enemy and real annihilator..."

— Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, pp. 280–281

As Stirner specifies in a footnote (p. 280), he was here using the word insurgent "in its etymological sense"; thus, to rise above the religion and government of one's own times and to take control of one's life with no consideration of them, but not necessarily to overthrow them. This contrasts with the method of the revolutionary who brings about a change of conditions by displacing one government with another:

The revolution aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and sets no glittering hopes on 'institutions'. It is not a fight against the established [...] it is only a working forth of me out of the established. [...] Now, as my object is not an overthrow of the established order but my elevation above it, my purpose and deed are not political or social but (as directed toward myself and my ownness alone) an egoistic purpose indeed."

— Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, p. 280

Stirner was writing about people liberating themselves from their own limits and rising above limiting social, political and ideological conditions, and for each to walk their own way. The passages quoted above are clearly incompatible with David Leopold's conclusion (in his introduction to the Cambridge University Press edition) that Stirner "...saw humankind as 'fretted in dark superstition' but denied that he sought their enlightenment and welfare" (Ibidem, p. xxxii). Stirner refused to describe himself as directly liberating others. But his stated purpose in these quotations seems to be to achieve the "enlightenment and welfare" of others by way of demonstration and "insurrection" as he defines it.

Dogma

The passages quoted above show the few points of contact between Stirner's philosophy and early Christianity. It is merely Jesus as an "annihilator" of the established biases and preconceptions of Rome that Stirner can relate to. His reason for "citing" the cultural change sparked by Jesus, is that he wants the Christian ideologies of 19th Century Europe to collapse, much as the ideology of heathen Rome did before it (e.g., "[the Christian era] will end with the casting off of the ideal, with 'contempt for the spirit'", p. 320). As with the Classical Skeptics before him, Stirner's method of self-liberation is opposed to faith or belief; he envisions a life free from "dogmatic presuppositions" (p. 135, 309) or any "fixed standpoint" (p. 295). It is not merely Christian dogma that his thought repudiates, but also a wide variety of European atheist ideologies that are condemned as crypto-Christian for putting ideas in an equivalent role:

Among many transformations, the Holy Spirit became in time the 'absolute idea' [in Hegelian philosophy], which again in manifold refractions split into the different ideas of philanthropy, reasonableness, civic virtue, and so on. [...] Antiquity, at its close, had gained its ownership of the world only when it had broken the world's overpoweringness and 'divinity', recognised the world's powerlessness and 'vanity'.

[...] [The philosophers of our time say] Concepts are to decide everywhere, concepts to regulate life, concepts to rule. This is the religious world [of our time], to which Hegel gave a systematic expression, bringing method into the nonsense and completing the conceptual precepts into a rounded, firmly-based dogmatic. Everything is sung according to concepts and the real man, I, am compelled to live according to these conceptual laws. [...]

Liberalism simply replaced Christian concepts with humanist ones; human instead of divine, political instead of ecclesiastical, 'scientific' instead of doctrinal etc."

— Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, pp. 87–8

The thinker is distinguished from the believer only by believing much more than the latter, who, on his part, thinks of much less as signified by his faith (creed). The thinker has a thousand tenets of faith where the believer gets along with few; but the former brings coherence into his tenets, and take the coherence in turn for the scale to estimate their worth by. p. 304

What Stirner proposes is not that concepts should rule people, but that people should rule concepts. The "nothingness" of all truth is rooted in the "nothingness" of the self, because the ego is the criterion of (dogmatic) truth. Again, Stirner seems closely comparable to the Skeptics in that his radical epistemology directs us to emphasise empirical experience (the "unmediated" relationship of mind as world, and world as mind) but leaves only a very limited validity to the category of "truth". When we regard the impressions of the senses with detachment, simply for what they are (e.g., neither good nor evil), we may still correctly assign truth to them.

Christianity took away from the things of this world only their irresistibleness [...]. In like manner I raise myself above truths and their power: as I am above the sensual, so I am above the truth. Before me truths are as common and as indifferent as things; they do not carry me away, and do not inspire me with enthusiasm. There exists not even one truth, not right, not freedom, humanity, etc., that has stability before me, and to which I subject myself. [...] In words and truths [...] there is no salvation for me, as little as there is for the Christian in things and vanities. As the riches of this world do not make me happy, so neither do its truths. [...] Along with worldly goods, all sacred goods too must be put away as no longer valuable. (p. 307)

Truths are material, like vegetables and weeds; as to whether vegetable or weed, the decision lies in me. (p. 313)

In place of such systems of beliefs, Stirner presents a detached life of non-dogmatic, open-minded engagement with the world "as it is" (unpolluted by "faith" of any kind, Christian or humanist), coupled with the awareness that there is no soul, no personal essence of any kind, but that the individual's uniqueness consists solely in its "creative nothingness" prior to all concepts.

Hegel's possible influence

Scholars such as Karl Löwith and Lawrence Stepelevich have argued that Hegel was a major influence on The Ego and Its Own. Stepelevich argues, that while The Ego and Its Own evidently has an "un-Hegelian structure and tone to the work as a whole", as well as being fundamentally hostile to Hegel's conclusions about the self and the world, this does not mean that Hegel had no effect on Stirner.

The main juncture leading from Hegel to Stirner is found [in The Phenomenology of the Spirit] at the termination of a phenomenological passage to absolute knowledge. Stirner's work is most clearly understood when it is taken to be the answer to the question, 'what role will consciousness play after it has traversed the series of shapes known as 'untrue' knowledge and has attained to absolute knowledge?

— Lawrence Stepelevich, "Max Stirner as Hegelian", Journal of the History of Ideas, v. 15, pp. 597-614 (1985).

To go beyond and against Hegel in true dialectical fashion is in some way continuing Hegel's project, and Stepelevich argues that this effort of Stirner's is, in fact a completion of Hegel's project. Stepelevich concludes his argument referring to Jean Hyppolite, who in summing up the intention of Hegel's Phenomenology, stated: "The history of the world is finished; all that is needed is for the specific individual to rediscover it in himself."

Stirner as an Einziger took himself directly to be that 'specific individual' and then went on as a Hegelian to propose the practical consequence which would ultimately follow upon that theoretical rediscovery, the free play of self-consciousness among the objects of its own determination: "The idols exist through me; I need only refrain from creating them anew, then they exist no longer: 'higher powers' exist only through my exalting them and abasing myself ... My intercourse with the world consists in my enjoying it, and so consuming it for my self-enjoyment" (Ego, 319)

— Lawrence Stepelevich, "Max Stirner as Hegelian"

However, Widukind De Ridder has argued that scholars who take Stirner's references to Hegel and the Young Hegelians as expressions of his own alleged Hegelianism are highly mistaken. De Ridder argues that The Ego and Its Own is in part a carefully constructed parody of Hegelianism, deliberately exposing its outwornness as a system of thought, and that Stirner's notions of "ownness" and "egoism" were part of his radical criticism of the implicit teleology of Hegelian dialectics.^[12]

Influence

Max Stirner was a philosopher whose "name appears with familiar regularity in historically-orientated surveys of anarchist thought as one of the earliest and best-known exponents of individualist anarchism."^[13] In 1844, his The Ego and Its Own (Der Einzige und sein Eigentum which may literally be translated as The Unique Individual and His Property)^[14] was published, which is considered to be "a founding text in the tradition of individualist anarchism."^[13]

Notes

See also

• Individualist anarchism
• Relationship between Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Stirner

External links

General

• Max Stirner in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, an extensive introduction to Stirner's philosophy
• Max Stirner within LSR – a paraphilosophical project original texts, articles in several languages
• Svein Olav Nybergs website on Max Stirner, with extensive links to texts and references
• Max Stirner Project by H. Ibrahim Türkdogan
• Non Serviam, Internet periodical dedicated to Stirner's ideas

Criticism and influence

• Max Stirner, a durable dissident, 'How Marx and Nietzsche suppressed their colleague Max Stirner and why he has intellectually survived them'
• Stirner Delighted in His Construction — "loves miracles, but can only perform a logical miracle," by Karl Marx
• Nietzsche's initial crisis due to an encounter with Stirner's "The Ego", by Bernd A. Laska (2002)
• Max Stirner As Hegelian, By Lawrence S. Stepelevich

Texts

• The complete original text in German of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum
• The complete English edition of "The Ego and his Own", in the translation of Steven T. Byington.
• Recensenten Stirners / Stirner's Critics bilingual: full text in German / abridged text in English (trans. Frederick M. Gordon)
• Stirner's Critics full English Translation