Max Stirner

8 Key excerpts on "Max Stirner"

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  Hegel and the History of Political Philosophy

  • Gary Browning(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  But this was simply the extremist case of violence of thought, its highest pitch of despotism and sole dominion, the triumph of mind, and with it the triumph of philosophy. 12 For Stirner, Hegel's system subordinates the actual man, the egoist, to the despotism of thought, just as it subjugates the world to a procession of categories. Stirner rejects this in favour of what Brazill has termed `an extravagant titanism in which the ego became in effect its own absolute'. 13 Stirner sees all attempts to frame ideals and principles to order and restrain the self-assertiveness of the ego as so many forms of alienation. For Stirner, Hegel's philosophy, and the theories of his Young Hegelian successors such as the Bauer brothers and Feuerbach, 70 Hegel and Political Philosophy resembles religion in that true freedom in their theories is taken to be adherence to general patterns of thought and conduct. The absolute independence of the individual is denied. Just as religion subordinates the ego to the demands of an alien God, Stirner sees Hegel's thought as subordinating actual men to ideas and Spirit (Geist). The ego, for Stirner, generates its own commitments; subscription to another's code or to a political scheme that allocates an individual a specific role justified by general criteria fractures the sense of integrity and whole- ness of the egoist. Alienation is the inevitable fate of any compromise with the world and others. In the second part of The Ego and Its Own, in which Stirner discusses his own positive philosophy of ownness, there is a running critique of Hegel's political philosophy in that Stirner discusses and criticises key elements of Hegel's political thought, notably property, rights, con- tract, morality and forms of ethical life ± the family, civil society and the state. Stirner makes plain his disagreement with Hegel's entire enterprise in The Philosophy of Right by completely disavowing the notion of `right' on a social basis.

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  Max Stirner

  • Saul Newman(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Der Einzige is not haunted by the spectre of one’s own true being beyond ideology. From a socio-political point of view, however, Max Stirner: The End of Philosophy 161 its constitutive openness (‘ownness’) should not be seen as merely contingent. In its drive to self-dissolution it is aleatory, developing the possibility of overcoming ideological domination. Not only does Stirner’s radicalism not need a subject, the subject-object dichotomy itself is the spectre that haunts philosophy and political theory and explains why every revolution ultimately leads to a new constitution. Notes 1. G. Penzo (2006) Die existentielle Empörung: Max Stirner zwischen Philosophie und Anarchie, (Berlin: Peter Lang); F. Copleston (2003) A History of Philosophy: 18th and 19th century German philosophy , (London: Continuum), p. 303; H. Arvon (1954) Aux sources de l’existentialisme: Max Stirner , (Paris: PUF). 2. R. W. K. Paterson (1971) The Nihilistic Egoist Max Stirner , (Oxford: Oxford University Press). 3. The existing translation is abridged: M. Stirner (1977) ‘Stirner’s Critics’, The Philosophical Forum, 8/2-3- 4): 66–80. In the translation of ‘Kunst und Religion’ the first sentence on Hegel is omitted: M. Stirner, ‘Art and Religion’ in L. Stepelevich (1983) The Young Hegelians: An Anthology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). We will use our own translations and put the original quote in note. 4. M. Tomba (2005) Krise und Kritik bei Bruno Bauer: Kategorien des Politischen im nachhegelschen Denken, (Frankfurt: Peter Lang), pp. 24–27. 5. Tomba, Krise, pp. 2–3. 6. W. J. Brazill (1970) The Young Hegelians, (New Haven: Yale University Press); S. Hook (1962) From Hegel to Marx, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press). 7. D. Moggach (2006) The New Hegelians. Politics and Philosophy in the Hegelian School, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). 8. W. Breckman (1998) Marx, the Young Hegelians and the Origins of Radical Social Theory.

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  Existentialism and Romantic Love

  • S. Cleary(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  2 Max Stirner and Loving Egoistically

  Max Stirner was a radical philosopher of personal power and extreme individualism. Der Einzige und sein Eigentum , published in English as The Ego and His Own (“Der Einzige ”), dedicated “To my sweetheart Marie Dähnhardt”, his second wife, begins and ends with a quote from Goethe: “All things are nothing to me”.1 Stirner’s philosophy unfolds from this central theme, which places individuals at the center of their world. Individuals wield their power to gain control of their predicaments through acquiring property. They sever ties with everyone and everything, including authorities, religion, morals, values, truth, emotions, and intellect, which he dismissed as abstractions or “spooks”.2 Individuals hold nothing sacred and are masters of their own metaphysical universe. Having broken ties with everything, an individual is solitary, or in Stirner’s words, a “unique one”. Stirner’s emphasis on enjoyment, frivolity, and personal interest encourages us to ask: why would one engage in a romantic relationship that lacks these essential ingredients?

  Der Einzige burst onto the Berlin philosophical scene and sparked such outrage that the censors initially banned it. A week later, they lifted the ban, asserting that no one would take it seriously. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels took it seriously enough to warrant a direct retaliation in The German Ideology that was longer than Der Einzige itself. Undoubtedly, Stirner was fully aware of the controversy that his philosophy would spark. But he cared neither about what anyone thought nor about whether his book upset anyone. In fact, he speculated that it would only bring his readers trouble and grief. Stirner announces that his relationship to his readers is one of utility since he is a writer, and it interests him to have a paying audience.3

  Contrary to his declarations, it is possible that Der Einzige and Stirner’s response to his critics is a form of conversation. Considering the difference between content and process, Stirner’s work describes others as instruments, which is the content of his work, and publishing his book initiates a form of dialogue. He perpetuated this dialogue through a response to criticisms of Der Einzige , called Kleinere Schriften und seine Entgegnungen auf die Kritik seines Werkes “Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum”

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  Fictive Theories

  Towards a Deconstructive and Utopian Political Imagination

  • S. McManus(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  with Nietzsche. To remain with Stirner, however, the problem with political liberalism is that it asserts freedom only once: then limits, binds, and makes subservient the political subject whom it claims to have freed. Stirner’s arguments here are dependent upon an ontological individualism, but, as I go on to argue, of an uncommon type. Stirner extrapolates a definition of liberalism drawing on Hegel, the philosopher of the bourgeoisie: “liberalism is nothing other than the knowledge of reason applied to our existing relations.” 41 However, Stirner cannot read “rationality” as a quality of persons: “if reason rules,” he argues, “then the person succumbs.” 42 (Recall, however, that Kant did not read rationality as a quality of persons either; Stirner inverts the value accorded to rationality.) Similarly, freedom of religion, of conscience, a free state for Stirner means that “these despots make me a slave, and their liberty is my slavery.” 43 This would be the implication of a certain way of reading Kant. Power has become authorized as “sheer, uncanny ‘spirit,’ as an idea.” 44 To invoke a later thinker on ideology, it is a means by which the political subject, hailed by an authority (s)he misrecognizes, “works by itself,” internalizes, and believes to be its own “property” the voice of ideology, the idea(l). 45 Similarly with “social liberalism” (“like the ‘nation of the politicians,’ it will turn out to be nothing but a ‘spirit,’ its body only semblance” 46 ): Stirner criticizes the communism that Marx was also to castigate as “utopian,” a communism based on a moral ideal, as a normative cause. If communism exists as the language of an “ideal to be achieved,” then for Stirner, this does not overcome the paradigm of the spectral, and does not overcome its concomitant uncanny, inhabiting authority. Stirner argues this with regard to the concept of equality.

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  Nietzsche

  A Re-examination

  • Irving M. Zeitlin(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  From a theoretical standpoint, then, it appears that for Stirner human individuals always remain in a “state of nature,” as do States in the international arena. Is this equally true of Nietzsche’s theory, insofar as it is a political theory and not merely an aesthetic doctrine, as some might argue? As we observed earlier, Nietzsche never faces up to the Hobbesian problem: if the “will to power” is to become the principle of individual action, how is a “war of each against all” to be prevented? Or would he agree with Stirner that we have been and continue to remain in a “state of nature,” and that it is only with the coming of the “higher specimens” that the war will come to an end with the establishment of a truly worthy and mighty Leviathan consisting of supermen? Stirner goes quite far in rejecting “community” and advocating onesided egoism. He urges his readers not to dream of the most comprehensive commune, “human society,” but rather to see in others only means to one’s own egoistic ends. No one, says Stirner, is his equal; for everyone, without exception, is his property. Much of what Stirner has to say here is directed against Bruno Bauer and some of the other young Hegelians in his circle who had proposed that one should be a man among “fellow men,” that one should respect the fellow-man in all human beings. To this Stirner replies: For me no one is a person to be respected, not even the fellow man, but solely, like other beings, an object in which I take an interest or else do not, an interesting or uninteresting object, a usable or unusable person. (Ego 414–17) 9 Stirner’s philosophical aim is to teach that in one’s relation with the world, one wants the enjoyment of it. Therefore the world must become one’s property and one must want to gain it

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  Anarchism

  A Criticism and History of the Anarchist Theory

  • (Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • The Floating Press

    (Publisher)

  After completing these, he took the modest position of a teacher in a high school, and in a girls' school in Berlin. In 1844 there appeared, under the pseudonym Max Stirner, a book called The Individual and his Property , with the dedication which, under these circumstances, is touching: To my Darling, Marie Doehnhardt. The book appeared like a meteor; it caused for a short time a great deal of talk, and then sank into oblivion for ten years, till the growing stream of Anarchist thought again came back to it in more recent times. A 88 History of the Reaction , written after the year 1848, is esteemed as a good piece of historical work; and, besides this, Caspar Schmidt also produced translations of Say, Adam Smith, and other English economists. On the 26th of June, 1856, he ended his life, poor in external circumstances, rich in want and bitterness. That is all that we know of the personality of the man who has raised the idea of personality to a Titanic growth that has oppressed the world. Stirner proceeds from the fact, the validity of which we have placed in the right light at the beginning of this book, that the development of mankind and of human society has hitherto proceeded in a decidedly individualistic direction, and has consisted predominantly in the gradual emancipation of the individual from his subjection to general ideas and their corresponding correlatives in actual life, in the return of the Ego to itself. Starting from the school of Fichte and Hegel, he pursued this special individualistic tendency till close upon the limits of caricature; he formally founded a cultus of the Ego, all the while being anxious that it should not return again to the region of metaphysical soap-bubbles, and leave its psychological and practical sphere. On the contrary, Stirner appears to be rather inclined to Positivism, and to consider the details of life and of perception as real, and as the only ones whose existence is justified.

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  Autarchies

  The Invention of Selfishness

  • David Ashford(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  ‘Max Stirner’s anarchist-individualist manifesto, The Ego and Its Own , [is] a materialist critique of metaphysics […]’, explains Antliff, and this belief that Stirner’s break with Hegelian Idealism must be THE NORTH POLE OF THE EGO 29 a materialism informs a critical reading of Picabia’s five object portraits that presents these pieces as a reconnect with the physical. ‘Combatting metaphysics, Stirner countered that ideas are indelibly grounded in our corporeal being’, writes Antliff. 84 And this would seem to be how Papanikolas too, has interpreted Stirner, given her contention this philosophy is consistent with an art movement that, in her view, sought to circumvent systems and theories through a surrender to something as entirely objective as the ‘anti-law’ of chance.– ‘The importance of chance to Dada was documented in such collages as Arp’s Untitled (Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance) ’, she writes, ‘in which [Arp] evaded the constraints of conscious art-making by dropping bits of paper onto a surface and adhering them wherever they fell’. 85 If this be correct, Dadaism’s object portraits are rather more like those Nature-Mortes produced by that Formalist Picasso than one might expect: as Huelsenbeck says, these too represent a search for ‘a new, direct reality’. 86 But, as Marx and Engels categorically established, Stirner’s egoism is not a materialism . Indeed, in Stirner’s view such a move would represent an undesirable reversion to an earlier stage of being – that physical tyranny from which the ego eventually escapes – into the Spirit. The pronounced subjectivity evident in Dada experiment is no sufficient reason for considering it Stirnerian. If the ready-mades synonymous with Dadaism really do represent a re-engagement with material reality, such subjectivity merely makes it a Radical Empiricism .

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  Movies with Meaning

  Existentialism through Film

  • Dan Shaw(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER TWO Egoism in Max Stirner’s The Ego and His Own and in Hud Egoism (the notion that one should seek one’s own self-interest, in favour of the interests of others) has come under a consistent barrage of criticism throughout the history of philosophy, at least since Thrasymachus was condemned for it by Socrates in Plato’s Republic . Max Stirner tried to reverse that trend in the mid-nineteenth century, by composing the most unapologetic defence of egoism ever written, The Ego and His Own ( Der Einzige und sein Eigentum ). Hollywood has been similarly critical of egoism, and adherence to its puritanical MOVIES WITH MEANING 32 Production Code had, until the early 1960s, virtually ensured that its most egoistic characters got their miserable comeuppance in the end. One of the few egoists in the history of classical Hollywood cinema to avoid such a crushing fate was Paul Newman’s Hud , a powerfully attractive anti-hero (a type which proliferated in the 1960s). This chapter will outline a number of parallels between Stirner’s ideal egoist and Newman’s glorious bastard. Stirner’s magnum opus (i.e. major work) was published in the late 1840s, in a period when nationalism, statism and communism were all on the rise. A German philosopher with an uncanny feel for the period, he saw these forces as dwarfing individuals and hammering them into conformity with social norms. Add to this the religious and moral compunctions that Germans were taught since their early youth, and Stirner claimed that true creativity, and the individuality from which it stems, had almost been annihilated in his homeland. Stirner begins The Ego and His Own by citing the title of a poem by Goethe: ‘All things are nothing to me.’ He returns to this theme at the end of his lengthy treatise, which has led some commentators to see him as a precursor of nihilism (the claim that human existence is hopelessly meaningless).

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