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Johann Kaspar Schmidt, better known as Max Stirner (the nom de plume he adopted from a schoolyard nickname he had acquired as a child because of his high brow=„Stirn“), was a German philosopher, who ranks as one of the literary grandfathers of nihilism, existentialism, post-modernism and anarchism, especially of individualist anarchism.
Stirner's main work is The Ego and Its Own, also known as The Ego and His Own (Der Einzige und sein Eigentum in German, which translates literally as The Unique One and his Property). This work was first published in 1844 in Leipzig, and has since appeared in numerous editions and translations.
Biography
Stirner was born in Bayreuth, Bavaria, on October 25, 1806.
Discussion
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Quotations
The divine is God's concern; the human, man's. My concern is neither the divine nor the human, not the true, good, just, free, etc., but solely what is mine, and it is not a general one, but is -- unique, as I am unique. Nothing is more to me than myself!
~ Cambridge 1995, p. 7
Encyclopedia
Johann Kaspar Schmidt, better known as Max Stirner (the nom de plume he adopted from a schoolyard nickname he had acquired as a child because of his high brow=„Stirn“), was a German philosopher, who ranks as one of the literary grandfathers of nihilism, existentialism, post-modernism and anarchism, especially of individualist anarchism.
Stirner's main work is The Ego and Its Own, also known as The Ego and His Own (Der Einzige und sein Eigentum in German, which translates literally as The Unique One and his Property). This work was first published in 1844 in Leipzig, and has since appeared in numerous editions and translations.
Biography
Stirner was born in Bayreuth, Bavaria, on October 25, 1806. What little is known of his life is mostly due to the Scottish born German writer John Henry Mackay, who wrote a biography of Stirner (Max Stirner - sein Leben und sein Werk), published in German in 1898 (enlarged 1910, 1914), and translated into English in 2005.
Stirner was an only child to Albert Christian Heinrich Schmidt (1769-1807), a flute maker, and Sophia Elenora Reinlein (1778-1839) a Lutheran. Just six months after he was born his father died of Tuberculosis on the 19th of April 1807 at the age of 37. In 1809 his mother remarried to Heinrich Ballerstedt a Pharmacist and settled in West Prussian Kulm (now Chelmno in Poland).
When Stirner turned 20, he attended the University of Berlin, where he studied Philology, Philosophy and Theology. He attended the lectures of Hegel, who was to become a source of inspiration for his thinking. While in Berlin in 1841, Stirner participated in discussions with a group of young philosophers called "Die Freien" ("The Free"), and whom historians have subsequently categorized as the Young Hegelians. Some of the best known names in 19th century literature and philosophy were members of this discussion group, including Bruno Bauer, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Arnold Ruge. For a lively account of Die Freien see "Red Room and White Beer" by Robert Hellman. While some of the Young Hegelians were eager subscribers to Hegel's dialectical method, and attempted to apply dialectical approaches to Hegel's conclusions, the left wing members of the Young Hegelians broke with Hegel. Feuerbach and Bauer led this charge.
Frequently the debates would take place at Hippel's, a Weinstube in Friedrichstraße, attended by, amongst others, the young Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, at that time still adherents of Feuerbach. Stirner met Engels many times and Engels even recalled that they were "great friends" (Duzbrüder). but it is still unclear whether Marx and Stirner ever met. It does not appear that Stirner contributed much to the discussions but was a faithful member of the club and an attentive listener. The most-often reproduced portrait of Stirner is a cartoon by Engels, drawn forty years later from memory on the request of Stirner's biographer John Henry Mackay; however, a "Byronic" oil-painting of Stirner also exists, with the subject's legal name indicated on the back, rather than his better-known alias.
Stirner worked as a schoolteacher in a gymnasium for young girls owned by Madame Gropius when he wrote his major work The Ego and Its Own, which in part is a polemic against the leading Young Hegelians Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, but also against communists such as Wilhelm Weitling and the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. He resigned from his teaching position in anticipation of the controversy arising from his major work's publication in October 1844.
Stirner married twice; his first wife was a household servant, with whom he fell in love at an early age. Soon after their marriage, she died due to complications with pregnancy in 1838. In 1843 he married Marie Dähnhardt, an intellectual associated with Die Freien. They divorced in 1846. The Ego and Its Own was dedicated "to my sweetheart Marie Dähnhardt". Marie later converted to Catholicism and died in 1902 in London. One of the most curious events in those times was that Stirner planned and financed (with Marie's inheritance) an attempt by some Young Hegelians to own and operate a milk-shop on co-operative principles. This enterprise failed partly because the dairy farmers were suspicious of these well-dressed intellectuals. The milk shop was also so well decorated that most of the potential customers felt too poorly dressed to buy their milk there.
After The Ego and Its Own, Stirner wrote a reply Stirner's Critics and translated Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and Jean-Baptiste Say's Traite d'Economie Politique into German, to little financial gain. He also wrote a compilation of texts titled History of Reaction in 1852. Stirner died in 1856 in Berlin from an infected insect bite; it is said that Bruno Bauer was the only Young Hegelian present at his funeral.
Philosophy
Stirner's claim that the state is an illegitimate institution has made him an influence upon the anarchist tradition; his thought is often seen as a form of individualist anarchism. Stirner however does not identify himself as an anarchist, and includes anarchists among the parties subject to his criticism.
Stirner mocks revolution in the traditional sense as tacitly statist. David Leopold's conclusion (in his introduction to the Cambridge University Press edition) is that Stirner "...saw humankind as 'fretted in dark superstition' but denied that he sought their enlightenment and welfare" (Ibidem, p. xxxii).
As with the Classical Skeptics Stirner's method of self-liberation is opposed to faith or belief; life is free from "dogmatic presuppositions" (p. 135, 309) or any "fixed standpoint" (p. 295). It is not merely Christian dogma but also a variety of European atheist ideologies that are condemned as crypto-Christian for putting ideas in an equivalent role.
What Stirner proposes is not that concepts should rule people, but that people should rule concepts. The denial of absolute truth is rooted in Stirner's the "nothingness" of the self. Stirner presents a detached life of non-dogmatic, open-minded engagement with the world "as it is" (unpolluted by "faith", Christian or humanist), coupled with the awareness that there is no soul, no personal essence of any kind.
Hegel's influenceScholars 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.
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."
Works
The False Principle of our EducationIn 1842 Das unwahre Prinzip unserer Erziehung (The false Principle of our Education) or Humanism and Realism, was published in Rheinische Zeitung, which was edited by Marx at the time. Written as a reaction to Otto Friedrich Theodor Heinsius' treatise Humanism vs. Realism. Stirner explains that education in either the classical humanist method or the practical realist method still lacks true value. Education is fulfilled in aiding the individual in becoming an individual.
Art and ReligionArt and Religion was also Published in Rheinische Zeitung in 1842 while Marx was editor. It addresses Bauer and his publication against Hegel called Hegel's doctrine of religion and art judged from the standpoint of faith.
The Ego and Its OwnStirner's main work is The Ego and Its Own (org. 'Der Einzige und sein Eigentum'), which appeared in Leipzig in 1844.In The Ego and Its Own, Stirner launches a radical anti-authoritarian and individualist critique of contemporary Prussian society, and modern western society as such. He offers an approach to human existence which depicts the self as a creative non-entity, beyond language and reality.
The book proclaims that all religions and ideologies rest on empty concepts. The same holds true for society's institutions, that claim authority over the individual, be it the state, legislation, the church, or the systems of education such as Universities.
Stirner's argument explores and extends the limits of Hegelian criticism, aiming his critique especially at those of his contemporaries, particularly Ludwig Feuerbach. And popular 'ideologies', including nationalism, statism, liberalism, socialism, communism and humanism.
Stirner's CriticsRecensenten Stirners, published in September 1845 is an article in which Stirner replies to critics of The Ego and its Own including Feuerbach.
History of ReactionGeschichte der Reaction (History of Reaction) was published in two volumes in 1851 by Allgemeine Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt and immediately banned in Austria. It was written in the context of the recent 1848 revolutions in German states and is mainly a collection of the works of others selected and translated by Stirner. The introduction and some additional passages were Stirner's work. Edmund Burke and Auguste Comte are quoted to show two opposing views of revolution.
Critical receptionStirner's work did not go unnoticed among his contemporaries. Stirner's attacks on ideology – in particular Feuerbach's humanism – forced Feuerbach into print. Moses Hess (at that time close to Marx) and Szeliga (pseudonym of Franz Zychlin von Zychlinski, an adherent of Bruno Bauer) also replied to Stirner. Stirner answered the criticism in a German periodical, in the article Stirner's Critics (org. Recensenten Stirners, September 1845), which clarifies several points of interest to readers of the book - especially in relation to Feuerbach.
While The German Ideology so assured The Ego and Its Own a place of curious interest among Marxist readers, Marx's ridicule of Stirner has played a significant role in the subsequent marginalization of Stirner's work, in popular and academic discourse.
Marx and Engels
Engels commented on Stirner in poetry at the time of Die Freien:
He once even recalled at how they were "great friends (Duzbrüder)". In November 1844, Engels wrote a letter to Marx. He reported first on a visit to Moses Hess in Cologne, and then went on to note that during this visit Hess had given him a press copy of a new book by Max Stirner, Der Einzige und Sein Eigenthum.In his letter to Marx, Engels promised to send a copy of Der Einzige to him, for it certainly deserved their attention, as Stirner: "had obviously, among the 'Free Ones', the most talent, independence and diligence". To begin with Engels was enthusiastic about the book, and expressed his opinions freely in letters to Marx:
Later, Marx and Engels wrote a major criticism of Stirner's work. The number of pages Marx and Engels devote to attacking Stirner in (the unexpurgated text of) The German Ideology exceeds the total of Stirner's written works. As Isaiah Berlin has described it, Stirner "is pursued through five hundred pages of heavy-handed mockery and insult". The book was written in 1845–1846, but not published until 1932. Marx's lengthy, ferocious polemic against Stirner has since been considered an important turning point in Marx's intellectual development from "idealism" to "materialism".
Stirner and post-structuralismSaul Newman calls Stirner a proto-poststructuralist who on the one hand basically anticipated modern post-structuralists such as Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze, and Derrida, but on the other had already transcended them, thus providing what they were unable to: paving the ground for a non-essentialist critique of present liberal capitalist society. However, Stirner might have disagreed with the poststructuralist idea that as a product of systems, the self is a determination of external factors. For Stirner, the self cannot be a mere product of systems. There remains, for Stirner, a place deep within the self which language cannot explain and that social systems cannot destroy.
Comments by contemporariesTwenty years after the appearance of Stirner's book, the author Friedrich Albert Lange wrote the following:
In a sense, a "second positive" was soon to emerge in German philosophy, though not from Stirner, but from Friedrich Nietzsche.
See also
External links
Relationship with other philosophers - , 'How Marx and Nietzsche suppressed their colleague Max Stirner and why he has intellectually survived them'
- — "loves miracles, but can only perform a logical miracle," by Karl Marx
- due to an encounter with Stirner's "The Ego", by Bernd A. Laska (2002)
- , By Lawrence S. Stepelevich
Texts -
- , in the translation of Steven T. Byington.
- bilingual: full text in German / abridged text in English (trans. Frederick M. Gordon)
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