Max Stirner's
Egoism and Nihilism

     In a 1973 review entitled "The Revival of Max Stirner", Lawrence Stepelevich noted the appearance of new studies on the Young Hegelian movement in pre-1848 German thought, and asked, "Are we witnessing the beginning of another cycle of interest in Stirner?" [ 1 ]
     Since John Henry Mackay's original attempt at a biography in 1898 -- the first real Stirner "revival" although in German -- philosophical interest in his philosophy at least in English-speaking countries has come in fits and starts. Partially dissipating his obscurity were discussions in Sidney Hook's From Hegel to Marx, published in 1936, and Karl Löwith's From Hegel to Nietzsche (1941).[ 2 ]
     Also notable had been Martin Buber's 1936 "Question to the Single One", and Albert Camus' brief treatment of Stirner in L'Homme Révolté, translated as The Rebel. Henri Arvon presented Stirner to postwar France in his Max Stirner, aux Sources de l'Existentialisme.[ 3 ]
     In Germany there has been continuous focus on Stirner, notably in Hans Helms' imposing 1966 treatise, Die Ideologie der Anonymen Gesellschaft. More recently and in the same vein, was a work by Hans Heinz Holz, Die Abenteurliche Rebellion.[ 4 ]
     A detailed critique of these authors, and the German philosophical tectonics they represent, is beyond our scope here of the chiefly Anglo-American 'revival'. Stepelevich's review does cite Helms' 1968 edition of Der Einzige, but it omits reference to the 1963 James J. Martin version, the only edition available for the English reading masses. Martin, in turn, had presided over a reprint of the Byington-Tucker 1907 translation, and its title as The Ego and His Own. [ 5 ]
     John P. Clark III[6] as well as Stepelevich had called attention to the new Stirner criticism, and they both single out one work as the probable apex: R.W.K. Paterson's The Nihilistic Egoist--Max Stirner. From 1973 to 1981, one serious new focus appeared, John Carroll's Breakout from the Crystal Palace.[7]
     Of the more modern works in English listed above, Arvon and Paterson have undertaken to examine Stirner's thought as a whole, and Arvon seems dated by recent scholarship: while his all-too-brief juxtapositions of Stirner and Kierkegaard are suggestive, 'existentialist' categories are taken for granted, with little interchange or polemic. Though Carroll makes the most original use of Stirner, his sociological perspective and tendentious use of key Stirnerian concepts, noted below, would inhibit effective focus on Stirner's own criteria. Therefore Paterson seems to be the only one claiming a comprehensive objectivity, relative to the long history of partisan treatment of Stirner in radical frames of reference.
     Up to now it has seemed as though there could be no neutral dissection of what Stirner means, and since one has gained a prominent place in the philosophical literature, a close scrutiny seems overdue, however the sparks of polemics cannot be doused by any declaration of objectivity, a term that tends to be used tendentiously or as a buzzword in philosophical texts. Examining the rationality of rationalities, however, is the core of philosophy. It tends where meaningful to behave like a bee's stinger, easily detached from its owner and used against him. In the case of Stirner, only a polemical and argumentative tack befits the subject, consciously at the expense of academic pretentiousness.
     In this way dialogue -- as polemic -- is restored from the institutionalized ways of thinking that create philosophical brigs and analysis that dispatches its material forthwith to walk the plank without debate. If there are no disagreements, there is no debate, and if no passions, then no premises to dogfight, and we never get off the ground.
     As it happens, Paterson's critique seems to avoid dialogue with Stirner, preferring a clinical commentary of a sanitized academic operation. We will take it up anyway, however, because of the poor form in dismissing a priori even the a priori. As Hegel noted in his Preface, there is no royal road to knowledge. Better to proceed as aroused and polemical students, neither as mere acolytes nor as logicians (engineers of language) working from a passionless and desensualized blueprint.
     A précis of Paterson's own introduction will start us off on the most complete critique of the recent Anglo-American 'revival' of Stirner. To launch his project, Paterson states that partisan and parenthetical critique of Stirner hitherto has produced virtually no real understanding of his true place in the history of philosophy. He offers us The Nihilistic Egoist as

in fact the first full-scale presentation of Stirner's philosophy in English, although more than a century has elapsed since his death.... I shall maintain that nearly all of the earlier literature of Stirner has been in large measure vitiated by a basic misunderstanding..., and that only with the rise of existentialist philosophies in Europe during the last forty years has it been possible to undertake an illuminating appraisal of his true contribution to the development of European thought.[8]

For the moralist, it appears to be a denial of all ideals and principles of conduct. For the theologian...another--perhaps the ultimate--denial of God.... Now, in the aetiology of nihilism Stirner's case history stands unique. His one great book must be the only sustained attempt to present a philosophy of unsparing nihilism systematically and without reserve.

He goes on in this vein:

For Stirner, this is the nihilism of the nihilistic egoist. Resting as it does on an ontology of negation, in which vacuity, purposelessness and disintegration are the constitutive concepts, his total egoism is essentially grounded in a world view which is starkly nihilistic and which provides the critic, therefore, with an unprecedented opportunity to study the metaphysical structure of a nihilistic system formulated in the unabashed first person with classical directness and lucidity.

entire philosophy is centred on the concept of 'self-possession', to be understood in its most literal sense as the self-love and self-assertion of the particular historical human being who was Max Stirner [emphasis added]. Although his personality is not an engaging one, therefore [sic], it is indissolubly infused with the substance and meaning of his philosophy. The substance of his message is not so affected by the intellectual fabric of [his] age...for he is essentially occupied in restating a truly perennial philosophical position, but the conceptual apparatus with which he worked was mainly supplied by the conceptual artificers of his day....(NE, pp. viii-x).

Schultze felt unable to reach an opinion as to Stirner's emotional normality. From the evidence of Der Einzige he concludes that, if the book escapes psychiatric condemnation, this is only because its author is prepared to extend to others the boundless egoistic irresponsibility which he claims for himself.

Moreover, despite its inner freedom from the intellectual resolves of its own or any other time, his philosophy in fact reflects, both by its choice of issues and by its metaphysical idiom, the German and European crisis of consciousness which it sought to abjure (NE, p. 20).

In less than three years Stirner traversed a direct and unerring route from a commonplace if militant liberal humanism, by way of a recklessly defiant individualism, to the relaxed and arrogant form of nihilistic egoism in terms of which he finally settled his philosophic identity.... In his journalistic writings we can see [his] early radical concern, his passionate detestation of social convention and political authority yielding gradually but inevitably to a self-centred disregard of moral and religious prescriptions, and then at last to the solitary and calm self-possession of the nihilist (NE, p. 46).

for every reference to the self-appropriation or the 'reckless and licentious will' of the sovereign individual,...there are twenty references to 'the truly and completely human', as constituting 'my best and true self', to the 'God within oneself', or even to 'morality and rationality' as the highest faculties of the free spirit. For the philosophical voyage on which he was now embarking Stirner had to travel lightly,...jettisoning [the] redundant burdens -- morality, social justice, reason, and humanity -- which even at the start served only as ballast and which had to go overboard if he was to carry to its destination his purely personal freight...to the very brink of that total nihilism into which his immediate course lay to plunge (NE, pp. 49-50).

The vacuous, impenetrable self of the 'free person', who negates and consumes the world in the act of exploiting and enjoying it, is the embryo of that 'creative nothingness' in which the identity of The Unique One is centred and from which he emerges to disembowel and caress the physical and social universe in which he alights.... Stirner's educational essay is not yet a testament either of nihilism or egoism in the sense to which he was later to carry these concepts, but already his moral and social dissent has taken the form of a capricious individualism (NE, p. 52).

Besides the traditional concepts of Young Hegelianism with which Stirner is plainly working in this essay, the special influence of Feuerbach is discernibly present in his endeavors to be a definitive re-appropriation of self-consciousness by itself and in his treatment of 'the divine' as the estranged and vapid parody of man's own nature.

...Sue is too parochial to conceive a man who might be 'superior to virtue as well as vice, to morality as well as sin', a 'character of steel' who has the nerve to live 'as a self-created man, fabricating his own identity from his own creative power in reckless disregard of both impulse and belief'.... To the self created man, who refuses to submit his merits or shortcomings to the reckoning, the whole arbitrary distinction between 'virtue and vice, morality and sin' is nothing but a futile obsession, an enfeebling idée fixe, and of it he makes a public and wholesale mockery. Stirner's self-created man, in short, is the settled and confident amoralist.

In Stirner's case, we have the spectacle of a man initially professing two themes, an abrupt individualism and a rapacious scepticism, either which on its own might have been harnessed in the service of a profound moral concern or of some notable social purpose.... In Stirner's case, however, a singularly truculent individualism was from the start irrigated by an explosive scepticism which would not rest until it had dissected and discredited every cause which reason or history could propose; reacting organically on each other, these turbulent elements, by an irresistible internal alchemy, transformed what had been an intense political and cultural engagement into a callous and self-centred frivolity, from within the ark of which he could subsequently write, 'Away then with every cause which is not wholly and entirely my cause!'

...Thus from January 1842, given his drive to intellectual destructiveness and moral self-sufficiency, it could be surmised that he would plunge, step by cynical step, ever more deeply into the abyss of nihilistic egoism which had seemed from the outset to beckon him (NE, p. 59).

ENDNOTES to CHAPTER I

1 Lawrence Stepelevich, "The Revival of Max Stirner," Journal of the History of Ideas, 35 (Winter, 1973), 325.

2 See John Henry Mackay, Max Stirner: Sein Leben und Sein Werk (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1898); Sidney Hook, From Hegel to Marx (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962); Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche, trans. David E. Green (New York: Anchor, 1967).

3 Martin Buber, "Question to the Single One," in Between Man and Man, trans. R.G. Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1975); Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage, 1966); Henri Arvon, Max Stirner: Aux Sources de l'Existentialisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954).

4 Hans Helms, Die Ideologie der Anonymen Gesellschaft (Köln: M. du Mont Schauberg, 1966); Hans Heinz Holz, Die Abenteurliche Rebellion (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1976).

5 Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own, trans. Stephen T. Byington (London and New York: Fifield and Walker, 1913; reprinted by Dover Books, 1973). Where my translation differs from Byington I have used the Reclam German version easily found in European bookstores, ed. Ahlrich Meyer (Stuttgart, 1972). All EO page references are to the Dover edition. All German translations other than of Der Einzige are mine, except where noted. For most browsers, German terms have been highlit in dark green, other languages in italics and titles of works in boldface.

6 John P. Clark III, in The Personalist, 55 (Winter, 1974), 67.

7 R.W.K. Paterson, The Nihilistic Egoist: Max Stirner (London: Oxford University Press, 1971); John Carroll, Breakout From the Crystal Palace (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974).

8 Paterson, op. cit., pp. vii-viii; henceforth cited as "NE" in text.

9 See NE, p. x. For "Eigenheit" I shall follow Byington's "ownness". For "Der Einzige" only "the unique one" fits though the upper or lower case is arbitrary.

10 Any psychoanalysis of Stirner should be tempered by the paucity of facts about his life. Mackay's is at best a compendium of conjecture and second hand biography, and so it is Stirner must remain ambiguous, which is good for egoism and bad for the clerics. Despite the fact that Paterson ignores the early and last writings, which show Stirner as social critic rather than solipsist, a fuller picture of Stirner is outside the scope of this essay, and in any case I believe we should, more egoistically and less scholastically, focus on his importance in a modern context.

11 See NE, p. 17. The promised argument is in his chapter "The Egoist", discussed later.

12 Paterson shows little curiosity for probing what had to be the roots of Stirner's philosophy, but again, alienation, in thought and reality, was one of the quintessential Young Hegelian concerns. For an excellent look at the topics of the Young Hegelian revolt, see Nicholas Lobkowicz, Theory and Practice (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967), esp. parts 2 and 3. See also his "Karl Marx and Max Stirner" in F.J. Adelmann, ed., Demythologizing Marxism (Beacon Hill: Boston College, 1969), pp. 64-95. Lobkowicz is one of the few philosophers along with Stepelvich to actually have read Stirner conscientiously.

13 See Stirner 1842 essay, The False Principle of Our Education, trans. Robert Beebe (Colorado Springs: Ralph Myles, 1967), p. 11 and passim. Paterson wrote a thesis on this subject, entitled "Max Stirner's Philosophy of Education" but I have not located it (NE, p. 51).

14 The skeptic finds in Art and Religion a much broader attack than indicated by our author, again directed against alienating positivities. The inner core of man, Stirner had argued, must always break forth in a new, creative Gestaltung, crumbling the old one fetishized in religion. The time has come, we are told, to let art "skip circles around the total seriousness of the ancient beliefs -- because Christianity has lost the gravity of its substance, which must now be given back to the gay poet [den fröhlichen Dichter] as a jovial comedy is now set up."
     Religion " remains as the most hackneyed thing possible, and every unimaginative booby [phantasielosen Tropf] can and will have religion...." Significantly Stirner remarks that "in the measure in which hate has waned in our time, the religious love of God has also grown fainter, and has given way to a humane love, which is not pious but ethical, since it crusades more for human welfare than for God." Thus the critique of Feuerbach is unambiguous, contra The Nihilistic Egoist, which dismisses the matter as generic 'atheism'. The essay is found in Kleinere Schriften, ed. Mackay, pp. 258-268 (henceforth "KS").

     Only three or four times does Paterson, in discussing Stirnerian atheism, cite from Der Einzige at any length, but somehow he finds enough to complain that Stirner had written a book that "takes the form of a systematic and absolute denial of every principle by which the hearts and minds of men have been moved."
     Here is where our author must attempt to convert Stirner's denial of Absolutes and ideational fetishes into fetishistic and Absolute Denial. In later discussion of what Stirner called "Sparren", or "wheels in the head", I believe that rather than a mere ad hominem tool to attack opponents, this part of Stirner's critique goes to interrogate the core premises of the debate. The holiest ground of any set of ideas being the premises, the foundations, to escape the idle infinite regress one must ask if the philosopher's starting premises are sensible, and if they are not, the broader human framework allows us to ask if they are hare-brained. This is the relevance of Sparren.
     The view that ideas are utterly apart from the persons whose creations they are is as unintelligible as the other folly, that they are 'nothing but' the reflection of the author's neuroses or material conditions. Responsible critique has to take in the psychology as well as the metaphysics, the personal daimon and the egoism of the source.
     In his chapter on "Total Atheism", Paterson at the outset proposes to show how Stirner "took it upon himself to demonstrate, with harrowing thoroughness, exactly what is involved in the full denial of God" (NE, p. 207).
     The radical atheist, says Paterson, rejects not only God-as-Subject, but all the alleged divine attributes as "ideal conceptions", and as having "any inherent claims" on anyone. Just what those would consist of, besides objects somehow sacred an sich, is not made clear by our author. In fact just this had been Feuerbach's definition of true atheism, defining "exactly the standpoint of Stirner" in 1845 and now Paterson (NE, pp. 198, 209) as history tends to repeat other people.
     He continues:

Thus the denial of God is not merely the denial of Allah, or of Jehovah, or of Christ: it is the denial that there is any absolute over us, requiring and deserving our devotion. Now, if we ask what it is that is being claimed when different adherents of religion [make claims about the divine], the answer to this question will furnish us with a definition of those attributes which are essentially involved in the idea of 'God', regardless of the identities of the particular claimants who are competing for this title. If the adherents of these different religions are really engaged in meaningful dispute, they must be engaged in making the same claim, albeit on behalf of different candidates (NE, pp. 207-208)

Horror, dread, awe, adoration -- these are the responses of the man who feels himself comprehended by the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, which cannot be comprehended by him because it eternally transcends him. The atheist, by contrast, limits his concern to what can be...grasped or appropriated by him (NE, pp. 208, 212).

A humanist [such as Feuerbach] who did not recognize such an ideal of perfection could not properly be styled a religious humanist. And of course a man who did not recognize this or any other ideal perfection would be precisely the homo irreligiosus of whom Stirner set out to be the definitive exemplar. The profoundly irreligious man, the total atheist, as we have seen, is the homo calculans, into whose calculations, inevitably, only objects of finite utility, of conditional and therefore measurable worth, can gain entry (NE, p. 209).

denial of 'God' is a denial that his existence has any intrinsic or final worth. His denial of the idea of 'God' is a denial that life has any objective or global meaning. It is an affirmation of meaninglessness and worthlessness as the constitutive features of ultimate reality, and at the same time it is an affirmation of motivelessness and wantonness as the dominant traits of the individual atheist: knowing all his choices to be equally gratuitous, he does not pretend to justify them by appeal to some fictitious standard of objective reason, for the atheist's denial of transcendence is also a denial of reason as an objective standard transcending, and therefore in the last analysis alien to, the particular concrete individuals between whom it purports to arbitrate (NE, p. 212).

What the total atheist denies...is that our experience has any ultimate moral or metaphysical meaning.... If the idea of 'God' is the idea of a unifying principle which transforms our centrifugal experiences into a coherent whole, then the atheist's denial of God is a denial of the possibility of any such ideal unity. In Stirner this...is carried to its extreme.... [as] the realization of the whole can be accomplished only by suppressing the reality of the part.... What he wants to preserve is the pure exteriority of the unrelated parts, their impenetrable identity as parts; what he wants to preserve is the exclusive being of the irreducible individual who articulates himself as purely this part-icular individual (NE, p. 214).

The truly irreligious man...is the homo calculans who, believing that everything has its price,...therefore equates 'pricelessness' with worthlessness, and whose denial of God is at the same time a denial of human dignity. [For] the calculating egoist...there is nothing that he would not sell. The full rejection of religion, Stirner claims, is thus the rejection of human dignity, freedom, justice and love, as eternal ideals demanding our unqualified homage and raised above all considerations of selfish expediency [emphasis added]. If atheism is to complete itself, it must become a denial of all men's social and moral ideals (NE, p. 216).

Egoism, as Stirner proposes it, is no antithesis to love, nor to thinking, it is no enemy of a sweet life of love, nor of devotion and sacrifice.... It is directed not against love, but against sacred [heilige] love; not against thinking, but against sacred thinking; not against the socialists, but the holy socialists, and so on.[3]

In everything sacred there lies something 'uncanny' [unheimlich], i.e., strange, wherein we are not quite at home and comfortable. What is sacred to me is not my own; and if for me another's property were not sacred, I would view it as mine when the occasion arose.... Or, on the other hand, if I look upon the face of the Chinese emperor as sacred, then it remains foreign to my eye, which I shut at the sight.[4]

Before the sacred, one loses every feeling of power, and all courage; one takes up a humble and powerless position. And yet, nothing is sacred or holy except by my declaring it so -- through my decree, my judgment, my kneeling, in short through my Conscience...

For small children, as for animals, nothing sacred exists, since in order to make room for this idea one must have already come so far in one's understanding to distinguish 'good and evil', 'warranted and unwarranted', and so on. Only at such a level of reflection or comprehension -- which is the proper standpoint of religion -- can unnatural reverence [Ehrfurcht], produced through thinking only, take the place of natural fear [Furcht]. This sacred dread', involves taking something outside oneself for mightier, greater, more entitled, superior and such. This is the attitude whereby one recognizes the power of something alien -- not merely feeling it, but expressly acknowledging it; one admits, yields, surrenders, lets oneself be bound (devotion, humility, servility, submissiveness, etc.). Here troops the entire pack of the 'Christian virtues'.

Everything towards which you cherish any respect of reverence deserves the name of sacred; you yourselves also say that you would feel a 'holy dread' of laying hands on it. And you give this tinge to the unholy too (gallows, crime, etc.) -- you have a horror of touching it. Therein lies something that is uncanny -- something unfamiliar or not your own.

...Fear always comes first, ...but in fear there always remains the attempt to free oneself from it through cunning, deception, tricks, and such. With reverence, the story is different. Here not only is something feared but revered [geehrt]: what is feared has become an inward power which I can no longer flee. I honor it, am captivated by it, belong to it. By the honor I pay, I am fully in its power; I do not even attempt liberation any more (EO, pp. 92-93).

is no longer creating, but rather learning (knowing, investigating), being occupied with a fixed object, losing himself in its depths without returning to himself. The relation to this object is that of knowing, probing, establishing, etc., not that of dissolution, abolition, and such. One says, 'one must be religious', and that settles it; thenceforth one busies oneself as to how this is to be done....
     Quite otherwise when one takes the axiom to be doubtful and questionable, though it may end up on the compost heap. Morality too is such a sacred idea.... One does not venture to go after it asking if it might not itself be a fraud. Morality remains exalted above all doubt, unchangeable (EO, pp. 72-3).

…what has gone unnoticed is that man has killed God in order to become -- sole God on high'. The Beyond outside us [das Jenseits außer uns] is indeed swept away, and the great undertaking of the Enlightenment complete; but the Beyond inside us has become a new heaven and calls us to renewed heaven-storming (EO, p. 154).

     With this higher Being, also hallowed as 'The Almighty', and Être Suprême, atheists have the butt of their jokes and trample one after another 'proof of His existence' into the dust, not realizing they themselves, out of need for a higher being, only annihilate the old one to make room for the new....Man is free [says Feuerbach] when 'Man is to man the supreme being.' Thus it belongs to the completion of liberalism that every other supreme being be annulled, theology overturned by anthropology, God and his grace laughed down, 'atheism' universal...(EO, pp. 142-3)

was shaken long ago, and a more or less conscious 'atheism', marked on the outside by a widespread 'unchurchliness', has involuntarily become the mode; but what was taken from God has been added to the account of Man...

In coarser times than ours one cherished a particular faith, demanded devotion to a particular sacred being, and did not look kindly on those who believed otherwise. However, since 'freedom of belief' has taken the field, the 'jealous God and sole Lord' gradually melted into a fairly general 'supreme Being', and humane tolerance is satisfied so long as everyone reveres 'something sacred' (EO, pp. 185, 279).

Whether the One God or the three-in-one, whether the Lutheran God or...no God at all but 'Man' instead...it makes no difference to one who negates the supreme Being itself, to one in whose eyes the servants of the latter are all together -- pious folk: the most rabid atheist no less than the most believing Christian (EO, p. 39).

After bloody combats this much has finally been attained, that opposing views...are no longer condemned as worthy of death. But why should I only dissent (think otherwise) about a subject? Why not push dissent to its last extremity, namely to the point of having no regard at all for the matter, thinking its nihilation, crushing it? Then the interpretation itself comes to an end, since there is nothing left to interpret. Why say that God is not Allah, not Brahman, not Yahweh, but -- God? Why not say instead that God is nothing but a deception? (EO, p. 338).

heretofore dominant, ancient powers" are driven from the heart, "in which they had long dwelt unmolested, to have at last no part at all in man. This war is opened by Socrates, and not till the dying day of the ancient world does it end in peace (EO, pp. 17-18).

The ancients soared to the level of Spirit and strove to become spiritual.... The Spirit busies itself solely about the spiritual, and seeks out 'traces of Mind' in everything; to the believing Spirit, 'everything comes from God' and interests him only to the extent that it reveals this origin to the philosophic spirit, everything appears with the stamp of Reason [Vernunft], and interests him only insofar as he can discover Reason, i.e. spiritual content, contained therein (EO, pp. 18-19).

With the world of Spirit Christianity then begins. The man who still faces the world armed is the ancient, the -- heathen (to which class the Jew, as non-Christian, also belongs). The man who has come to be led only be his 'heart's desire', his sympathy, his fellow-feeling, his -- spirit, is the modern, the -- Christian.
     As the ancients strove toward the overcoming of the world, and labored to release the heavy trusses of connection between man and that which is other they at last came also to the dissolution of the State and precedence to everything private. Of course community, family, and so on are thus natural relations, burdensome hindrances which curtail my spiritual freedom (EO, p. 24).

     As a visionary lives and has his world only the visionary images that he himself creates; as a lunatic generates for himself his own dream world, without which he could not be crazy, so the Spirit must create for itself its world, and is not spirit before it does so.
     And so its creations make it into Spirit, and by its creations we recognize the Creator: in them he lives, they are his world.... Now, what is der Geist? The creator of a spiritual world!
     Once this notion of Spirit becomes flesh, the 'children of Spirit' run rampant, and the new world view occupies itself with self-validation, the 'doing' of Spirit building its own body:
     The first creation...must come forth 'out of nothing' the Spirit has towards its realization only itself, or rather it has not yet even itself, but must create itself.... Mystical as this sounds, we go through it as an everyday experience in this way: Ask yourself, are you a thinking being before you think? In creating the first thought you create yourself as one who thinks;...is not your singing what makes you a singer, your speech that makes you a speaker (EO, pp. 28-31)

     But, as thinking-I, sight and hearing are foregone in the enthusiasm of thoughts, so you also have been seized by the spirit-enthusiasm... The spirit is your ideal, the unattained, the otherworldly. Spirit is your -- God, for 'God is Spirit'.
     ...Instead of saying, 'I am more than Spirit, you say with contrition, 'I am less than Spirit, and pure Spirit or nothing-but-Spirit I can only think of but am not; and since I am not it, so it is some Other, exists as an Other that I name as God' (EO, pp. 29, 31).

first to understand that man had to become other than he was, if he wanted to comprehend Truth -- namely he must become as true as Truth herself.... With Luther, accordingly, dawns the perception that Truth, because she is thought, is only for the thinking man. And this means that man must take an utterly different stance from this point on -- namely the heavenly, believing, scientific standpoint, or that of thought [des Denkens] over against its object, the --standpoint of mind in relation to mind [des Geistes gegenüber dem Geist]. Only thus can like apprehend like.

I regard the reverse [of Bruno Bauer's view] to be the case, and think that the dominion of spirits [Geisterherrschaft] or freedom of mind [Geistesfreiheit] -- they amount to the same -- was never before so omnipotent and all-embracing because now, instead of rending the religious principle from Art, State, and Science, it has raised these latter out of secularity into the 'realm of Spirit' and made them religious (EO, p. 83).

Luther's simple doctrine is that the specific embodiment of Deity -- infinite subjectivity, true spirituality, Christ -- is in no way present and actual in outward form, but as essentially spiritual.... Truth with Lutherans is not a finished and completed thing; the subject himself must be imbued with Truth, surrendering his particular being in exchanged for the substantial Truth, and making that Truth his own....

In the proclamation of these principles is unfurled the latest standard around which the peoples rally -- the banner of Free Spirit.... This is the banner under which we serve and which we bear.... This is the sense in which we must understand the State to be based on religion. States and laws are nothing else than religion manifesting itself in the relations of the actual world.
     This is the essence of the Reformation: Man is in his very nature destined to be free.[7]

take up the inheritance left by the ancients, and as active workers do with it as much as can be done with it! The world lies despised at our feet, far beneath us and our Heaven, into which her mighty arms no longer are thrust, and her sense-stupefying breath does not reach (EO, p. 26).

The heart, from day to day more unChristian, loses the contents which it had busied itself with, until at last nothing remains but empty warmheartedness, the quite general love of men, love of Man, consciousness of freedom, 'self --consciousness' and such.
     Only this is Christianity, completed because it has become bald, withered, devoid of content.... What could there be in men to love, since they are alike all 'egoists', none of them Man as such?

To...pure theory, men exist only to be criticized, scoffed at, and finally despised; for these perspectives they are, no less than for the fanatical parson, mere filth [Dreck] and other such finery
     Pressed to this extreme of disinterested warm-heartedness, we must finally realize that the spirit, which alone is the Christian's love, is nothing -- or in other words, that the Spirit is a lie (EO, pp. 25-6).

Are you perhaps thinking of comparing yourselves to the ancients, who saw gods everywhere? Gods, my dear moderns, are not spirits: gods do not degrade the world to a semblance, do not spiritualize it.
     But to you the whole world is spiritualized, and has become an enigmatic ghost. Therefore do not wonder if you likewise find in yourself nothing but a spook. Is not your body haunted by your spirit, and is not the latter alone the True and Real, the former only the 'transitory, null' or 'semblance'? Are we not all ghosts, uncanny beings awaiting our 'deliverance', namely 'spirits' (EO, p. 35)?

Not until one has come to love his bodily self, and takes delight in his own flesh and blood (but we are more apt to find this in a man of mature years), not till then has one a personal or egoistic interest -- an interest not only of our spirit, but rather of a complete satisfaction, one of the whole fellow, a selfish interest. Compare a man with a youth, and see if he does not strike you as harder, less magnanimous, more selfish [eigennütziger].... The point is, that he makes himself more the center than does the raw youth, who is infatuated [schwärmt] more about other things such as God or the Vaterland.

Indeed we were already thinking as children, only our thoughts were not yet fleshless, abstract, absolute, i.e., nothing but thoughts, a heaven in themselves, a pure world of thoughts, logical thoughts.
     Therefore the man is distinguished from the youth again in that the youth found himself as spirit but then lost himself in the general spirit... While the man finds himself as embodied Spirit.
     ...Christianity's magic circle would be shattered if the tension between existence and calling -- i.e., between me as I am and me as I should be -- were to cease.... The embodied idea, of the embodied or 'completed' spirit, floats in the air before the Christian as 'the End of my Days', or as the 'goal of History'; to him it is not present time (EO, pp. 11, 13, 365).

Luther and Descartes are fittingly placed together in their respective sayings, 'He who believes is a God', and "I think, therefore I am'. Man's heaven is thought, Geist.... Particular faith, like faith in Zeus, Astarte, Jehovah, Allah, and so on can be destroyed, but faith itself is indestructible. In thought is freedom... In short, my being is living in the heaven of thinking, of a mind, a cogitare. I myself am nothing other than mind, whether thinking for Descartes or believing for Luther. My body, on the other hand, that I am not.

For this reason the name of philosopher is not to be given to him who indeed has open eyes for the things of the world, a clear and undazzled gaze, a correct judgment about the world... But he alone is a philosopher who sees and demonstrates or proves the presence of heaven in the world, the supernal in the earthly, the divine in the mundane (EO, pp. 74, 84-86)

All religion is a cult of society [Gesellschaft], this principle by which social (cultivated) man is dominated. Neither is any God the exclusive God of an I, but always belongs to a society or community, whether that of a 'family' (the Romans' Lar and Penates), of a 'people' (national God), or that of 'all men'...
     Consequently the prospect exists of extirpating all religion, only when one is prepared to antiquate society and all that springs from this principle. But it is precisely in communism -- because everything is supposed to be held collectively so as to establish 'equality' -- that the social principle plans its highest achievement and triumph so far (EO, p. 310).

I am repulsive or odious to myself; I have a horror of, or loathe myself, am an abomination, or I am never enough to satisfy myself. From such feelings spring self- dissolution or self-criticism. Religiosity begins with self-renunciation and ends with complete criticism.
     I am possessed and want to be rid of the 'evil spirit'. How do I set about it? I fearlessly commit the sin that seems to the Christian the worst, the sin of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. Says Mark 3.29, 'But he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Spirit hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation.' I want no forgiveness and am not afraid of the Judgment (EO, p. 184).

ENDNOTES to CHAPTER II

1 "They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality. That is an English consistency... Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1979), p. 515.
     In his chapter on "Stirner and Nietzsche" Paterson basically claims that Stirner would be horrified at the idea of the Übermensch since it would be another transcendent moral ideal, but this is, of course, quibbling. Stirner did not offer egoism as a panacea, and clearly delimited its scope as not for everyone, and was clear that it was no enemy of love, devotion, poetry, cosmology, or modern cinema (c.f. footnote 3 below). Nietzsche also skewered mercilessly the 'universality' of philosophers in metaphysics and ethics.
     Parallels between Stirner and Nietzsche are rich, however, as they both rejected pedantry for mobile thinking that dances, thinking as risky, as surprising, as action or praxis. One of the most striking passages suggesting Nietzsche was certainly cognizant of Stirner is this from his Dionysos-Dithyramben: "Wer wäre das, der Recht dir geben könnte? / So nimm dir Recht!" Gedichte, (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1964), p. 568.

2 Jean-Paul Sartre, "Existentialism as a Humanism" in Walter Kaufmann, ed., Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre (New York: Meridian, 1975), p. 353. Paterson's citation of this is on his p. 222.

3 KS, p. 375. Paterson's assurances that Stirner was self-hoist on his own pétard and then cut his tether from humanity is belied by the reply to the critics, wherein Stirner goes to great lengths to correct the readings of Der Einzige by Feuerbach, Moses Hess and others.

4 EO, p. 216.

5 Ludwig Feuerbach, "The Necessity of a Reform of Philosophy", in Zawar Hanfi, ed. and trans., The Fiery Brook: Selected Writings of Ludwig Feuerbach (New York: Anchor Books, 1972), p. 145. For Wassergemütlichkeit, see his The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), pp. xl-xli.

6 G.W.F. Hegel, "The Roman World", in Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), p. 319.

7 Ibid., pp. 415-417.

8 Ibid., p. 349.

the vision of a world without God and hence without any unifying or directive principle; it is the vision of a meaningless world, in which there are no inscribed purposes or true values; it is...strictly no 'world' but rather a moral and metaphysical chaos (NE, p. 266).

'a world without signs' and therefore 'something less than a world -- a mere congerie of obtrusive existents'; it is an unstable collocation of brute facts, inexplicable, purposeless, absurd; it is the obliteration of the world in the sense of a meaningful and familiar totality', ... a dumb and massive plenitude without form or direction...

The movement in transition is a 'leap', not a development.... For that reason any particular cause embraced, any objective pursued, any principle adopted in consequence of that transitional move remains unrelated to the move itself. It is something on which the chooser 'hits', a ground upon which he lands after his leap in the dark.[2]

describes those who hide themselves from their true situation as 'cowards' and 'scum', he seems to be applying a standard of objective moral judgment of the very kind which he declares...impossible if we are to begin to live authentically. If existential authenticity means...that there are no objective and given standards in terms of which our lives can be judged, then the authentic individual is hardly entitled to pass judgment on those who do not make this frank recognition and like him found their lives upon it...

Stirner would reject the existentialist concept of authenticity, then, both because he rejects the ideas of personal integrity and dedication of purpose which are contained in this concept [of authenticity] and because in practice [it] tends to be used by existentialists, illicitly, as precisely the kind of moral standard or personal ideal which habitually excites Stirner's most vigorous loathing (NE, pp. 233-234)

     As the tone of The Nihilistic Egoist waxes and wanes from dinning to thunderingly whimperous, the author unfolds a gripping psychological drama: the "final irony" of the existentialist's dilemma is that on one hand he has set his entire cause on himself -- for our author, on the "total meaninglessness of existence" -- but he cannot "steel himself to enter and make his abode in the nihilistic void which has opened up beneath his feet."
     No, our nihilist must revert to the Gods he is trying to depose, creating a "philosophy of disloyalty" out of existentialism (NE, pp. 240-241).
     Stirner had addressed this nonsense in advance, because "if I cannot or dare not write something, perhaps the primary fault lies with me" -- which follows from the fact that "if I am weak, then of course I only have weak means" (EO, pp. 280, 165). To turn this robust idea of self-reliance into a "philosophy of disloyalty" is a daffy way to score points against what Paterson and the Siamese Helmuts take to be existential philosophy.
     For Stirner, on the other hand, when the theory by which I live becomes unlivable, I throw out the theory, not myself. The haunting of philosophy, by contrast, has always taken the opposite tack, sacrificing flesh to ideas. Need one probe much more to see which of these approaches is coded internally to fight unfreedom, and which to articulate it?
     Well, what else can we saddle existentialism with? It is not only lack of commitment, but relativism and spectatorship in regards to life as well. Thielicke's view went like this:

The moment I become a spectator and detach myself from life, looking at it as a kind of panorama that lies below me, all absolute values are become confused and are sucked into the engulfing stream of events.

     Meaninglessness, the essential nullity of everything, is for Stirner the governing and universal phenomenon, the key feature of the individual's experience, draining it of all significance and value.

vagrant, detached; frivolous, unstable, irresponsible; squandering his fluid and transient being in a consciously promiscuous career or deliberately gratuitous acts of repudiation: in the solitary and arbitrary figure of The Unique One is personified everything that is negative and destructive. On the grim, predatory features of the ruthless egoist Stirner has etched the hollow, dissipated features of the uncaring nihilist (NE, p. 248).

[Der Einzige ] is the portrait of deliberate and controlled disintegration. It is the portrait of a cynical, sophisticated, and rootless opportunist, ambiguous and evasive in his refusal to define or commit himself, deviously artificial in his avoidance of private obligation or public role. The Unique One is a portrait of refined incoherence, studied irresponsibility, accomplished purposelessness,. He personifies the motiveless, the arbitrary, the gratuitous.

If Stirner's portrait...is a documentary guide to the exploitation and abuse of others, it is also a study in the artistry of self-abuse, for The Unique One's enjoyment and consumption of the world is at the same time a consumption and dissolution of himself: his self-creation is an incessant self-destruction.

And the metaphysical disorder of this world is of course mirrored and embodied in the personal disorder of The Unique One himself, which is also an artificial and completely deliberate disorder. This immediate and symbolic transition, from the original natural, untotalized meaninglessness into the artificial totalization of meaninglessness which is the nihilist's chosen world, is the nihilistic equivalent of the existentialist 'leap' or 'conversion'.... And of course the logical discontinuity of [this] transition from Nothingness to Nothingness, its sheer gratuitousness, is again reflected in the nihilistic personality of The Unique One, in his desultoriness and motivelessness, in his severance from others and the world, and in his chosen mode of being as a kind of rupture in the world, down which it perpetually vanishes to be 'swallowed' and 'consumed'...(NE, pp. 245, 248-249).

     In order to be thorough and get a look into more rational and respectable critique of Stirner, we might for a few pages contrast with the preceding Albert Camus' consideration of Der Einzige in his book, L'Homme Revolté, known in English as The Rebel. This work also painted Stirner to be a nihilist, but I would like here to introduce a more humanistic definition of nihilist, as one who breaks with tradition and received language to create a dangerous and bold paradigm or way of expression that threatens the traditional ideas of one's contemporaries.
     If we liken nihilism to innovation, we can add the realization many of our beliefs have been wrong and that scientific discovery as well as authenticity and personal integrity require a dose of nihilism to achieve anything. Since we now enjoy a tremendous variety of so-called popular nihilism established in American and European pop culture, in art, cinema, comedy, TV, literature, fashion, and perhaps not enough in our philosophy and politics -- arguably Jesus Christ, Buddha, Socrates, the Founding Fathers, all can be identified still as nihilistic in a relative sense of the term. They broke with the established paradigm, to use a cliché, and were leaders in the revaluation or abolition of repressive institutions.
     What does it mean, then, to "eradicate the idea of God, after he had destroyed God himself"? This is how Camus painted Stirner, at odds with Stirner's own description noted above in which he did not take credit for the death of God. In a somewhat silly paraphrase, Camus adds that unlike Nietzsche, "his nihilism was gratified. Stirner laughs in his blind alley, Nietzsche beats his head against the wall."[6]
     Camus wrote that "the only truth is the Unique, the enemy of eternity and of everything, in fact, which does not further its desire for domination." Indeed with Stirner,

the concept of negation which inspires his rebellion irresistibly submerges every aspect of affirmation. It also sweeps away the substitutes for divinity with which the moral conscience is encumbered (HR, pp. 62-63)

attempted to justify crime (in this respect the terrorist forms of anarchy are directly descended from him) but is visibly intoxicated by the perspectives that he thus reveals (HR, p. 64)

Irrational crime and rational crime, in fact, both equally betray the value brought to light by the movement of rebellion. Let us first consider the former. He who denies everything and assumes the authority to kill -- Sade, the homicidal dandy, the pitiless Unique One, Karamazov, the zealous supporters of the unleashed bandit -- lay claim to nothing short of total freedom and the unlimited display of human pride (HR, p. 282).

is therefore not definitely an atheist, as one might think him, but he is inevitably a blasphemer.... Originally, at least, he does not suppress God; he merely talks to him as an equal. But it is not a polite dialogue...; when the throne of God is overturned, the rebel realizes that it is now his own responsibility to create the justice, order, and unity that he sought in vain within his own condition, and in this way to justify the fall of God (HR, pp. 23-25).

You [the German nation] will be struck down. Soon your sister nations will follow you; when all of them have gone your way, humanity will be buried and on its tomb I, sole master of myself at last, I heir to all the human race, will shout with laughter.' And so among the ruins of the world, the desolate laughter of the individual-king illustrates the last victory of the spirit of rebellion. But at this extremity, nothing else is possible but death or resurrection. Stirner, and with him all the nihilistic rebels, rush to the utmost limits, drunk with destruction. After which, when the desert has been disclosed, the next step is to learn how to live there; Nietzsche's exhaustive search then begins (HR, p. 65).

If Fichte says, 'Das Ich ist Alles', this seems to harmonize perfectly with my claims. But it is not that the I is everything, rather that the I destroys everything [zerstört Alles], and only the self-dissolving, never-being I, the finite I, is really -- I. Fichte speaks of the 'absolute' I, but Stirner speaks of me, the transitory I. (EO, p. 182)

O thou, my much-tormented German people -- what was your agony? It was the torment of a thought that cannot create for itself a body, that of a haunting spirit that fades into nothingness at every cock-crow, yet pines for deliverance and fulfillment. In me too you have lived long, dear thought, dearest -- spook...
     Farewell, thou, dream of so many millions, farewell you who have tyrannized your children for a thousand years!
     Tomorrow they carry you to the grave; soon your sisters, the people [die Völker] will follow you. When they have all done so, then -- humanity [die Menscheit] is buried and I am my own, the laughing heir!