Max Stirner
Max Stirner, born Johann Kaspar Schmidt, was a German philosopher, dealing mainly with the Hegelian notion of social alienation and self-consciousness. Stirner is often seen as one of the forerunners of nihilism, existentialism, psychoanalytic theory, postmodernism, individualist anarchism, and egoism.
Born in 1806 in Bayreuth, Bavaria, Stirner's life and work are known largely through a biography by John Henry Mackay. Following the death of his father he was raised in West Prussia after his mother's remarriage. Stirner studied at the University of Berlin, where he attended Hegel's lectures. He then moved into teaching and became involved with the Young Hegelians in Berlin. Although he struggled to secure a permanent academic post, Stirner became a fixture in intellectual circles and wrote his most famous work, The Unique and Its Property, while supporting himself as a teacher.
Stirner married twice, first to Agnes Burtz, who died in 1838, and later to Marie Dähnhardt. He attempted and failed at business before turning to translation and writing. Stirner died in Berlin in 1856, having spent his later years in relative obscurity despite the enduring influence of his radical individualist philosophy.
Biography
Stirner was born in Bayreuth, Bavaria. 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, published in German in 1898 and translated into English in 2005. Stirner was the only child of Albert Christian Heinrich Schmidt and Sophia Elenora Reinlein, who were Lutherans. His father died of tuberculosis on 19 April 1807 at the age of 37. In 1809, his mother remarried to Heinrich Ballerstedt and settled in West Prussian Kulm. When Stirner turned 20, he attended the University of Berlin, where he studied philology. He attended the lectures of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who was to become a source of inspiration for his thinking. He attended Hegel's lectures on the history of philosophy, the philosophy of religion and the subjective spirit. Stirner then moved to the University of Erlangen, which he attended at the same time as Ludwig Feuerbach.Stirner returned to Berlin and obtained a teaching certificate, but he was unable to obtain a full-time teaching post from the Prussian government. While in Berlin in 1841, Stirner participated in discussions with a group of young philosophers called Die Freien, whom historians have subsequently categorized as the Young Hegelians. Some of the best known names in 19th-century literature and philosophy were involved with this group, including Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Bruno Bauer and Arnold Ruge. 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 group broke with Hegel. Feuerbach and Bauer led this charge.
Frequently the debates would take place at Hippel's, a wine bar in Friedrichstraße, attended by among others Marx and Engels, who were both adherents of Feuerbach at the time. Stirner met with Engels many times and Engels even recalled that they were "great friends," but it is still unclear whether Marx and Stirner ever met. It does not appear that Stirner contributed much to the discussions, but he 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 at biographer Mackay's request. It is highly likely that this and the group sketch of Die Freien at Hippel's are the only firsthand images of Stirner. Stirner worked as a teacher in a school for young girls owned by Madame Gropius when he wrote his major work, The Ego and Its Own.
Stirner married twice. His first wife was Agnes Burtz, the daughter of his landlady, whom he married on 12 December 1837. However, she died from complications with pregnancy in 1838. In 1843, he married Marie Dähnhardt, an intellectual associated with Die Freien. Their ad hoc wedding took place at Stirner's apartment, during which the participants were notably dressed casually, used copper rings as they had forgotten to buy wedding rings, and needed to search the whole neighborhood for a Bible as they did not have their own. In 1844, The Unique and Its Property was dedicated "to my sweetheart Marie Dähnhardt." Afterward, using Marie's inheritance, Stirner opened a dairy shop that handled the distribution of milk from dairy farmers into the city, but was unable to solicit the customers needed to keep the business afloat. It quickly failed and drove a wedge between him and Marie, leading to their separation in 1847. Marie later converted to Catholicism and died in 1902 in London.
After The Ego and Its Own, Stirner wrote Stirner's Critics and translated Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and Jean-Baptiste Say's Traité 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 a tumor, alleged to be due to an infected insect bite. Only Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Buhl represented the Young Hegelians present at his funeral, held at the Friedhof II der Sophiengemeinde Berlin.
Philosophy
Stirner, whose main philosophical work was The Unique and Its Property, is credited as a major influence in the development of nihilism, existentialism and post-modernism as well as individualist anarchism, post-anarchism and post-left anarchy. He also influenced illegalists, feminists, nihilists and bohemians, as well as fascists, right-libertarians and anarcho-capitalists. Stirner was opposed to communism for the same reasons he opposed christianity, capitalism, humanism, liberalism, property rights and nationalism, seeing them as forms of unacceptable authority over the individual. Stirner also influenced anarcho-communists and post-left anarchists. The writers of An Anarchist FAQ report that "many in the anarchist movement in Glasgow, Scotland, took Stirner's 'Union of egoists' literally as the basis for their anarcho-syndicalist organising in the 1940s and beyond." Similarly, the noted anarchist historian Max Nettlau states that "n reading Stirner, I maintain that he cannot be interpreted except in a socialist sense." Stirner was anti-capitalist and pro-labour, attacking "the division of labour resulting from private property for its deadening effects on the ego and individuality of the worker" and writing that free competition "is not 'free,' because I lack the things for competition. Under the regime of the commonality the labourers always fall into the hands of the possessors of the capitalists . The labourer cannot realise on his labour to the extent of the value that it has for the customer. The state rests on the slavery of labour. If labour becomes free, the state is lost." For Stirner, "Labor has an egoistic character; the laborer is the egoist."Egoism
Stirner's egoism argues that individuals are impossible to fully comprehend, as no understanding of the self can adequately describe the fullness of experience. Stirner has been broadly understood as containing traits of both psychological egoism and rational egoism. Unlike the self-interest described by Ayn Rand, Stirner did not address individual self-interest, selfishness, or prescriptions for how one should act. He urged individuals to decide for themselves and fulfill their own egoism.Stirner believed that everyone was propelled by their own egoism and desires and that those who accepted this—as willing egoists—could freely live their individual desires, while those who did not—as unwilling egoists—will falsely believe they are fulfilling another cause while they are secretly fulfilling their own desires for happiness and security. The willing egoist would see that they could act freely, unbound from obedience to sacred but artificial truths like law, rights, morality, and religion. Power is the method of Stirner's egoism and the only justified method of gaining philosophical property. Stirner did not believe in the one-track pursuit of greed, which as only one aspect of the ego would lead to being possessed by a cause other than the full ego. He did not believe in natural rights to property and encouraged insurrection against all forms of authority, including disrespect for property.
Anarchism
Stirner proposes that most commonly accepted social institutions—including the notion of state, property as a right, natural rights in general and the very notion of society—were mere illusions, "spooks" or ghosts in the mind. He advocated egoism and a form of amoralism in which individuals would unite in Unions of egoists only when it was in their self-interest to do so. For him, property simply comes about through might, saying: "Whoever knows how to take and to defend the thing, to him belongs . What I have in my power, that is my own. So long as I assert myself as holder, I am the proprietor of the thing." He adds that "I do not step shyly back from your property, but look upon it always as my property, in which I respect nothing. Pray do the like with what you call my property!" Stirner considers the world and everything in it, including other persons, available to one's taking or use without moral constraint and that rights do not exist in regard to objects and people at all. He sees no rationality in taking the interests of others into account unless doing so furthers one's self-interest, which he believes is the only legitimate reason for acting. He denies society as being an actual entity, calling society a "spook" and that "the individuals are its reality."Despite being labeled as anarchist, Stirner was not necessarily one. Separation of Stirner and egoism from anarchism was first done in 1914 by Dora Marsden in her debate with Benjamin Tucker in her journals The New Freewoman and The Egoist.