Philosophical Egoism: Introducing Stirner

The following article was published in an issue of Freedom magazine, published in the UK ca the late 1960's. It is a fair introduction to Max Stirner's major contribution to philosophical egoism.

A Proposal for Freedom

By Shirley F. Frederick

Out of the cauldron of revolution struggled a new age. Hesitantly, falteringly, but with hope born of romanticism, men fought desperately to retain a hold on the familiar ideas of the past or turned loose of the old ideas to grasp for new patterns of thought. A staggering number of separate, but intricately related ideologies grew and competed for support. this ideological fervour that dominated nineteenth century European thought produced anarchism, undoubtedly the most paradoxical of the "isms." Around a core of commonalities clustered at least eight identifiable varieties of anarchism by 1870. But anarchists, no matter what their ilk, shared certain propositions. From these emerged the paradox--complete individual freedom and a strong sense of social responsibility. This meant that the anarchist's major concern remained the age-old question of man in relation to his society. It did not mean he gave the question an age-old answer.
To achieve individual freedom, anarchists denied authority in any guise, which of course meant that they criticized, unmercifully, the existing society. Depending on the character of their anarchist espousal, they might actively undertake to destroy what they condemned. But whether militant or pacifistic, their method was always social rebellion. Such an attitude of "austere idealism" or "apocalyptic passion" very often created saints and assassins. But it must not be thought that anarchism can equated with nihilism or terrorism. They are not necessarily synonymous. Anarchy is not malign chaos as is so often the pedestrian interpretation. To view Tolstoy, Thoreau, Kropotkin or Godwin as prophets of chaos is to make Hegel the creator of Nazism. Needless to say, such an attitude, almost of necessity, demands a belief in the natural goodness of man; and if not natural goodness, at least the natural sociability of man and an individualistic view of man's nature.
While the academician searches out this relatively orderly definition, anarchism, by its very nature, denies such neatness. Suffice it to say, anarchists rejected dogma in a deliberate attempt to avoid the rigidity that a systematic statement imposes. The anarchist believed in a freedom of choice--in a possession of one's selfness and in the primacy of the individual's ability to judge the best for that selfness. Anarchists were motivated by a consuming desire to achieve the release of the total potential of men. This would be achieved through the use of reason. Above all, anarchists were optimists.
When one understands this, the stereotype impression of the anarchist as only the bearded, bomb-throwing fanatic seems quite strange. George Woodcock suggested that people readily accepted a derogatory image of anarchism because of their fear of its doctrines, that "fear of freedom" enunciated by Erich Fromm. Perhaps also one might attribute the general fear of anarchism to Freud's idea of suppressed guilt coming from the desire to kill one's father--to kill all authority, which of course the anarchist is intent on doing. No matter what the merit of anarchism, by the very nature of its principles it could not missionize. The role of the anarchist was to enlighten by example, it was not to lead people. Certainly Max Stirner, who epitomized individualist anarchism, never suggested any desire to :mount the barricades."
Max Stirner, the unassuming German school teacher and one of the Berlin collection of Young Hegelians, helped Godwin and Proudhon lay the theoretical foundations of anarchist thought.
The idea of the extreme importance of the freedom of the individual in anarchist theory came from Stirner's contribution. Stirner wrote The Ego and His Own as a direct assault on those things in society which he felt prevented this freedom. But the book is more than a polemic. It also details the nature of human freedom and what must be done to attain it. The intent here, then, is to describe how men arrived in bondage in the nineteenth century, how that bondage could be broken, the character of a free individual, and finally to suggest some areas that might reflect the continuing influence of Stirner's ideas.
The tyrannies which prevent the freedom of men evolve out of Stirner's theory of history. While Stirner did not agree with Hegel's conclusions about the nature of history, he used Hegel's dialectic in drawing his own theory.
Stirner divided the history of men into three major epochs--the Ancients, the Moderns and the new men. The Ancients, in the "childhood" of human history, concerned themselves with the natural world, with objects, with experience, with the material. But in their efforts to understand this "world of things, the order of the world , the world as a whole" they asked questions which predicated the end of the very meaning they had achieved. The Ancients asked what was the meaning behind their world and sought to break free from the bound of things. They decided that only be becoming spirit, could they hope to end their relationship with the world. In their search for freedom from the material world--"to get back of the world and above it"--the Ancients created the world of the spirit "and this is the result of the gigantic work of the ancients; that man knows himself as a being without relations and without a world, as spirit." Only the Jews of the ancient people never accepted the spiritual world. The Ancients sought to idealize the real and gave to the West the "holy ghost"--Christianity--the second of the tyrannies.
With the advent of Christianity, man entered into the "youth" of mankind, into the Modern Age. Things spiritual, things of the mind, reason, abstractions, ideals, causes dominated the concern of the Moderns. Men tried to get behind the ideal to understand it. They attempted to make real, the ideal. Hence they produced the absolute spirit in a material body--"and the Word became flesh"--Christ.
From this point on, Christians tried to spiritualize the whole material realm, a task completed by the Reformation when men no longer needed the consecration of the sacraments of the Catholic Church because they had succeeded in putting some of the divine in all things.

Lutheranism...tries to bring spirit into all things as far as possible, to recognize the holy spirit as essence in everything, and so to hallow everything worldly....Hence it was that the Lutheran Hegel was completely successful in carrying the idea through everything. In everything there is reason, holy spirit, or "real is rational."