Max Stirner

Johann Kaspar Schmidt (October 25, 1806 – June 26, 1856), 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 ), German philosopher, who ranks as one of the literary grandfathers of nihilism, existentialism and anarchism, especially of individualist anarchism. Stirner himself explicitly denied to hold any absolute position in his philosophy, further stating that if he must be identified with some "-ism" let it be egoism — the antithesis of all ideologies and social causes, as he conceived of it.

Influence

Contemporary reactions

Stirner's work did not go unnoticed among his colleagues among the Young Hegelians. Stirner's attacks on ideology, in particular Feuerbach's humanism, forced not only Feuerbach (who engaged in a subsequent debate with Stirner in a German periodical) into print. Marx wrote a histrionic indictment of Stirner spanning several hundred pages (in the original, unexpurgated text) of his book The German Ideology, co-authored with Engels and 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".

Related Topics:
The German Ideology - Idealism - Materialism

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The marginalization of Stirner

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.

Related Topics:
The Ego and Its Own - Discourse

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Over the course of the last hundred and fifty years, Stirner's thinking has proved an intellectual challenge, reminiscent of the challenge cartesian criticism as a whole brought to western philosophy, converging with it in nihilism. His philosophy has been characterized as disturbing, sometimes even considered a direct threat to civilization; something that ought not even be mentioned in polite company, and that should be, if encountered by some unfortunate happenstance, examined as briefly as possible and then best forgotten. Stirner's relentlessness in the service of scuttling the most tenaciously held tenets of the Western mindset yields a terrain which bears testimony to the radical threat he posed; most writers who read and were influenced by Stirner failed to make any references to him or The Ego and Its Own at all in their writing. As the renowned art critic Herbert Read has observed, Stirner's book has remained 'stuck in the gizzard' of Western culture since it first appeared.

Related Topics:
Cartesian - Nihilism - Herbert Read

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Stirner and Nietzsche

It has recently been established that Nietzsche did read Stirner's book. Nietzsche's thinking resembles Stirner's to such a degree that Nietzsche is sometimes referred to by readers of Stirner as 'the great copyist', yet even Nietzsche failed to make any mention of Stirner anywhere in his work.

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Other influences

Several other authors, philosophers and artists have cited, quoted or otherwise referred to Max Stirner. They include Albert Camus (In The Rebel), Benjamin Tucker, Dora Marsden, Georg Brandes, Rudolf Steiner, Robert Anton Wilson, Italian individualist anarchist Frank Brand, the notorious antiartist Marcel Duchamp, several writers of the situationist movement, and Max Ernst, who titled a 1925 painting L'unique et sa propriété. The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini read and was inspired by Stirner, and made several references to him in his newspaper articles, prior to rising to power. His later writings would uphold a view opposed to Stirner, a trajectory mirrored by the composer Richard Wagner.

Related Topics:
Author - Philosopher - Artist - Albert Camus - Benjamin Tucker - Dora Marsden - Georg Brandes - Rudolf Steiner - Robert Anton Wilson - Frank Brand - Marcel Duchamp - Situationist - Max Ernst - Benito Mussolini - Power - Richard Wagner

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Since its appearance in 1844, The Ego and Its Own has seen periodic revivals of popular, political and academic interest, based around widely divergent translations and interpretations -- some psychological, others political in their emphasis. Today, many ideas associated with post-left anarchy criticism of ideology and uncompromising individualism - are clearly related to Stirner's. He has also been regarded as pioneering individualist feminism, since his objection to any absolute concept also clearly counts gender roles as 'spooks'.

Related Topics:
Post-left anarchy - Individualism - Individualist feminism - Gender role

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Postmodern influences?

Stirner's demolition of absolute concepts disturbs traditional concepts of attribution of meaning to language and human existence, and can be seen as pioneering a modern media theory which focuses on dynamic conceptions of language and reality, in contrast to reality as subject to any absolute definition. Jean Baudrillard's critique of Marxism and development of a dynamic theory of media, simulation and 'the real' employs some of the same elements Stirner used in his Hegelian critique without, however, making recourse to very much that lies at the heart of the plumb-line libertarian core of Stirner's philosophy. Though many in the poststructuralist camp have championed Stirner's thought, the core tenets of these two entities are wholly incompatible; Stirner would never agree, for example, with that fundamental poststructuralist idea, that as a product of systems, the self is undermined. For Stirner, the self cannot be a mere product of systems. There remains, in the Stirnerian schema, as described in the above, a place deep within the self which language and social systems cannot destroy. This idea finds expression, perhaps, in a concept put forward by the contemporary philosopher Julia Kristeva; the 'semiotic chora', as she calls it, represents a state of mind which predates the inculcation of the social apparatus in the mind of the young child.

Related Topics:
Jean Baudrillard - Julia Kristeva - Semiotic chora

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