His thought is sometimes confused; he sees so many sides of his theme, embroiders it with so many variations, that he repeats himself. Later Marx tried to refute Stirner’s ideas, ironically calling him “Sankt Max” (“Saint Max”). Nietzsche has been woefully misunderstood; Nietzsche, the despiser of mob rule, has been accaimed a very Attila — instead of which he is a culture-philosopher, one who insists that reform must be first spiritual. In 1856, Stirner died in Berlin from an infected insect bite. But we had hoped, we of the old sentimental brigade, that all things being thus adjusted we could live with our fellow man in (comparative) peace, cheating him only in a legitmiate business way, and loving our neighbor better than ourselves (in public). His disciples have remedied the omission. Who is free? There is no other Ego but mine. when we are young we are altruists; as Thackeray says, “Youths go to balls; men go to dinners.”, But alone comes this dreadful Stirner, who cries out: Hypocrites all of you. It is to the poet of the Letzte Erkentniss, with its stirring line, “Doch bin ich mein,” that I owe the above scanty details of the most thorough-going Nihilist who ever penned his disbelief in religion, humanity, society, the family. It is not reassuring. Did not Campanella, in an unforgetable sonnet, sing, “The people is a beast of muddy brain that knows not its own strength.... With its own hands it ties and gags itself”? But he did not win a doctor’s degree; just before examinations his mother became ill with a mental malady (a fact his critics have noted) and the son dutifully gave up everything so as to be near her. I am Humanity. Writing chiefly for working-class readers, he taught that all persons are capable of the self-awareness that would make them “egoists,” or true individuals. He is so sincere in his scorn of all we hold dear that he is refreshing. Therefore, “I am not you, but I’ll use you if you are agreeable to me.” Not to God, not to man, must be given the glory. Stirner was born as Johan Caspar Schmidt on October 25, 1806, into a lower middle class German household of a Lutheran religious affiliation. Created by. I will myself free. Stirner was born Johann Caspar Schmidt on 25 October 1806, the onlychild of lower middle class Lutheran parents living in Bayreuth.“Stirner” was originally a nickname, resulting from alarge forehead, exaggerated by the way he pushed back his hair, andonly later — in the form of “Max Stirner” —adopted as a literary pseudonym and his preferred name. My truth is the truth (Stirner). A moralist (or immoralist), and Ethiker, his book is a defense of Egoism, of the submerged rights of the Ego, and in this piping times of peace and fraternal humbug, when every nation, every man, embraces his neighbor preparatory to disembowelling him in commerce or war, Max Stirner’s words are like a trumpet-blast. If the concept of sin had never been used as a club over the weak-minded, there would be no sinners — i.e., wicked people. (“In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did that which was right in his own eyes.”) Indeed, his notions as to Property and Money — “it will always be money” — sound suspiciously like those of our “captains of industry.’ Might conquers Right. Nevertheless, there is an honesty in the words of Max Stirner. Only a decadent! Let us love ourselves (respect our Ego), that we may learn to respect our brother; self-sacrifice means doing something that we believe to be good for our souls, there egotism — the higher egotism, withal egotism. He lived under a dull brutal régime. He reared no lofty cloud palaces. Stirner continued to write intermittently, but commentators have generally found his later work to be of little independent interest." The Ego has too long been suppressed by ideas, sacred ideas of religion, state, family, law, morals. Max Stirner supposedly died in 1856. Die Kritik Stirners und die Kritik an Stirner. He died of an insect bite that got infected. Even Stirner recognizes that man is not man without society. His father was a maker of wind instruments, who died six months after his son’s birth. In Germany rebellion on the psychic plane expresses itself in metaphysics; in Poland and Russia music is the safer medium. “You have read him, then?” “No; but you haven’t read Nordau.” It was true. He erects no altars to known or unknown gods. It was his romance, his dream of an ideal world, his Platonic republic. We are all “spectres of the dust,” and to live on an overcrowded planet we must follow the advice of the Boyg: “Go roundabout!” Compromise is the only sane attitude. Gravity. Let us name two: Henrik Ibsen and Friedrich Nietzsche. I am I. Stirner’s father died when he was only six months old, and Stirner was consequently raised by his mother, and later by … “Is not all the stupid chatter of most of our newspapers the babble of fools who suffer from the fixed … Omissions? Stirner believed that there was no objective social reality independent of the individual; social classes, the state, the masses, and humanity are abstractions and therefore need not be considered seriously. The yoke of serfdom, of sovereignty, of aristocracy and princes, the dominion of the desires and passions; yes, even the dominion of one’s own will, of self-will, for the completest self-denial is nothing but freedom — freedom, to wit, from self-determination, from one’s own self.” This has an ascetic tang, and indicates that to compass our complete Ego the road traveled will be as thorny as any saint’s of old. There is no such thing as sin. “Max Stirner,” he replied. Later I secured the book, which had been reprinted in the cheap edition of Reclam (1882). So, society, family are the clamps that compress the soul of woman. The minority is always in the right, declared Ibsen, as opposed to Comte’s “Submission is the base of perfection.” “Liberty means responsibility. He mastered the classics, modern philosophy, and modern languages. Their motives are shown to the bone. Abstract. For those who love to think of the visible universe as a cosey corner of God’s footstool, there is something bleak and terrifying in the isolated position of man since science has postulated him as an infinitesimal bubble on an unimportant planet. Without my Ego I could not apprehend existence. In 1897 Mackay wrote to her in London, asking her for some facts in the life of her husband. You are not altruists, but selfish persons, who, self-illuded, believe yourselves to be disinterested. To Mackay’s labors we owe all we know of a man who was as absolutely swallowed up by the years as if he had never existed. Match. Stirner would replace society by groups; property would be held, money would be a circulating medium; the present compulsory system would be voluntary instead of involuntary. Stirner was born in Bayreuth, Bavaria. Stirner is the frankest thinker of his century. His doctrine is the Fourth Dimension of ethics. (Max Stirner: Sein Leben und sein Werk: John Henry Mackay.) The survival of the fittest means survival of the weakest. They argued that Max was instead created by Engels as a pseudonym to promote ideas Engels held but did not feel comfortable expressing publicly. The world is my picture. What I have is mine. And would the world be happier if it ever did attain this condition? The minority may occasionally err, but the majority is always in the wrong. STUDY. Max Stirner died in Berlin on 25th June, 1856, after being bitten on the neck by a winged insect. He was very industrious over his books at Bayreuth, and when he became a student at the Berlin University he attended the lectures regularly, preparing himself for a teacher’s profession. “Nature does not seem to have made man for independence” (Vauvenargues). The race is to the mediocre. This is why we try to turn it.” Hierarchy, oligarchy, both forms submerge the Ego. “You are to benefit yourself, and you are not to seek your benefit,” cries Stirner. J.S. His mother remarried, and his stepfather proved a kind protector. So we shall see presently that with Stirner, too, his I is not so independent as he imagines. Mill demanded: “How can great minds be produced in a country where the test of a great mind is agreeing in the opinion of small minds?” Bakounine in his fragmentary essay on God and the State feared the domination of science quite as much as an autocracy. After her death he married a girl who died within a short time. He is an Anarch who believes in passive resistance. Our first enemies are our parents, our educators. After studying theology and philology in Berlin, Erlangen, and Königsberg, he returned to Berlin, where he spent practically the rest of his life. Make your value felt. That is why most men dread it” (Bernard Shaw). He was of medium height, ruddy, and his eyes deep blue. Max Stirner, pseudonym of Johann Kaspar Schmidt, (born October 25, 1806, Bayreuth, Bavaria [Germany]—died June 26, 1856, Berlin, Prussia), German antistatist philosopher in whose writings many anarchists of the late 19th and the 20th centuries found ideological inspiration. Ah! Society shields and upholds the feeble. The cosmos is frosty and inhuman, and old Mother Earth no longer offers us her bosom as a reclining-place. Wagner’s adversary would, with Renan, place mankind under the yoke of a more exacting tyranny than Socialism, the tyranny of Culture, of the Superman. The old jolly crowd at Hippel’s seldom saw him. He rejects them all. Indeed, he is no philosopher. Never again will this aggregation of atoms stand on earth. James Walker’s suggestion that “We will not allow the world to wait for the Superman. Stirner spun no metaphysical cobwebs. Confess the truth in the secrecy of your mean, little souls. 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 (Max Stirner – sein Leben und sein Werk), published in German in 1898 (enlarged 1910, 1914) and translated into English in 2005. The world is not, will never be, to the strong of arm or spirit, as Nietzsche believes. It seemed colorless, or rather gray, set against the glory and gorgeous rhetoric of Nietzsche. Suppose we present Stirner with the following case. Egotism! He, the exponent of Egoism, of philosophic anarchy, starved because of his pride. Write. Updates? He was the leading figure in the egoist sub-strand of individualist anarchism and a major influence on the development of nihilism and the radical philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). Everything is relative. He gives up one thing for another because the other seems better, nobler to him. The soul shrinks as our conception of outer space widens. He is a Teutonic Childe Roland who to the dark tower comes, but instead of blowing his horn — as Nietzsche did — he blows up the tower itself. And philosophers often live by opposites. That is, if men have the will to rebel, and if they despise the sentimentality of mob rule. “Is it not the chief disgrace in the world not to be a unit; to be reckoned one character; not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred of thousands, of the party, of the section to which we belong, and our opinion predicted geographically as the North or the South?”. Stirner speaks, though vaguely, of a Union of Egoists, a Verein, where all would rule all, where man, through self-mastery would be his own master. “I am what I am” (Brand). He wrote of a finite, empirical ego, which he saw as the motive force of every human action. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Mortal has made the immortal, says the Rig Veda. He had taught for five years in a fashionable school for young ladies; he had written for several periodicals, and translated extracts from the works of Say and Adam Smith. That element came into the world with the advent of Bakounine and Russian nihilism. To have the will to be responsible for one’s self, advises Nietzsche. The philosophy of Max Stirner is credited as a major influence in the development of individualism, nihilism, existentialism, post-modernism and anarchism (especially of egoist anarchism, individualist anarchism, postanarchism and post-left anarchy). I choose to die rather than divulge, in exchange for my freedom, the whereabouts of person X who would then be killed by my captors. Nothing of external importance occurred in the life of Max Stirner that might place him apart from his fellow-students. Nothing compulsory, all voluntary. Puritanism is not morality, but a psychic disorder. We are at every moment all we can be. 162563267, citing Friedhof der Sophiengemeinde II, Berlin-Mitte, Mitte, Berlin, Germany ; Maintained by … But my I must not be of the kind described by the madhouse doctor in Peer Gynt: “Each one shuts himself up in the barrel of self. It was the perception of these facts that drove Stirner to formulate his theories in The Ego and His Own. He says “crimes spring from fixed ideas.” The Church, State, the Family, Morals, are fixed ideas. This milieu has been referred to … Individualism for him means only an end to culture. To thine own self be true. And thus he died at the age of fifty. What is freedom? Stirner died in 1856 in Berlin from an infected insect bite; it is said that Bruno Bauer was the only Young Hegelian present at his funeral, which was held at the Friedhof II der Sophiengemeinde Berlin. He was in prison twice for debt — free Prussia — and often lacked bread. Another appeal only elicited the answer that “Mary Smith is preparing for death” — she had become a Roman Catholic. His brains are an accident, possibly from overnutrition as De Gourmont has declared. Stirner, after being deserted, led a precarious existence. Max Stirner was a philosopher whose "name appears with familiar regularity in historically-orientated surveys of anarchist thought as one of the earliest and best-known exponents of individualist anarchism." Man is gregarious. It is of itself the highest political end.” To will is to have to will (Ibsen). In practice he would not have agreed with Havelock Ellis that “all the art of living lies in the fine mingling of letting go and holding on.” Stirner, sentimental, henpecked, myopic Berlin professor, was too actively engaged in wholesale criticism — that is, destruction of society, with all its props and standards, its hidden selfishness and heartlessness — to bother with theories of reconstruction. Where does Woman come into this scheme? He was an implacable realist. He is often seen as one of the forerunners of nihilism, existentialism, psychoanalytic theory, postmodernism, and anarchism, especially of individualist anarchism; Though the name of Stirner is not quoted by Nietzsche, he nevertheless recommended Stirner to a favorite pupil of his, Professor Baumgartner at Basel University. There is no Woman, only a human Ego. But he left behind him a veritable breviary of destruction, a striking and dangerous book. His most influential work is Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (1845; The Ego and His Own). The impact of Max Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own (1844) 1) The Ego and Its Own (Leipzig, 1845). Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree.... Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox. The Egoism of Higher Causes. In 1888, John Henry Mackay, the Scottish-German poet, while at the British Museum reading Lange’s History of Materialism, encountered the name of Max Stirner and a brief criticism of his forgotten book, Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum (The Only One and His Property; in French translated L’Unique et sa Propriété, and in the First English translation more aptly and euphoniously entitled The Ego and His Own). The English translation of The Ego and His Own, by Steven T. Byington, is admirable; it is that of a philologist and a versatile scholar. Later, in 1843, his second wife was Marie Dähnhardt, a very “advanced” young woman, who came from Schwerin to Berlin to lead a “free” life. Thomas Hardy describes the sensation as “ghastly.” There is said to be no purpose, no design, in all the gleaming phantasmagoria revealed by the astronomer’s glass; while on our globe we are a brother to lizards, bacteria furnish our motor force, and our brain is but a subtly fashioned mirror, composed of neuronic filaments, a sort of “dark room” in which is somehow pictured the life without. I could not see then what I saw a decade later — that Nietzsche had used Stirner as a springboard, as a point of departure, and that the Individual had vastly different meanings to those diverse temperaments. Max Stirner was the pen name of Johann Kasper Schmidt (1806-56). Egoism must not be misinterpreted as petty selfishness or as an excuse to do wrong. If woman is to be free she must first be an individual, an Ego. “I’ll keep the glory myself.” What is Humanity but an abstraction? Stirner is not a metaphysician; he is too much realist. At least by that road we make for righteousness. Vanitum Vanitas!) Spell. We have no genuine portrait of this insurrectionist — he preferred personal insurrection to general revolution; the latter, he asserted, brought in its train either Socialism or a tyrant — except a sketch hastily made by Friedrich Engels, the revolutionist, for Mackay. After teaching in a girls’ preparatory school in Berlin, Stirner made a scanty living as a translator, preparing what became a standard German version of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. (It is only spiritual liberty that counts.) Proudhon said (rather, Brisson before him), “Property is theft.” Theft from whom? Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. “The crazy Hegelian,” I retorted. Not “Know thyself,” but get the value out of yourself. He was not a practical man; if he had been he would hardly have written The Ego and His Own. BegleyKate. Herbert Spencer did not write these words, nor Max Stirner. His father died of tuberculosison 19 April 1807 at the age of 37. We are suspended between heaven and earth, like Mahomet’s coffin, hermetically sealed in Self. “I base my all on Naught” (“Ich Vanitas! He has neither the crystalline brilliance nor the poetic glamour of Nietzsche. But his icy, relentless, epigrammatic style is in the end more gripping than the spectacular, volcanic, whirling utterances of Nietzsche. Jahrbuch der Max Stirner Gesellschaft. The year after, his father died, and in 1809 his mother remarried with the pharmacist Ballerstedt and moved to Kulm in western Prussia. Stirner saw a ghost. Nietzsche lives in an ivory tower and is an aristocrat. God is within you. The individualism is enslaved by the machinery of the State or by socialism. Science tells us that our I is really a We; a colony of cells, an orchestra of inherited instincts. Life will be ennobled and sweeter if we respect ourselves. (Though Quinton has made the statement that birds followed the mammal.) No one is or can be disinterested. Mind your own business! The Ego and His Own is the most drastic criticism of Socialism thus far presented. Stirner word gebore in 1806 en studeer aan die universiteite van Berlyn, Erlangen, en Koningsberg.In Berlyn volg hy onder andere die lesings van Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). Make your value felt, cries Stirner. In America, to talk of female suffrage is to propound the paradox of the masters attacking their slaves; yet female suffrage might prove a good think — it might demonstrate the reductio ad absurdum of the administration of the present ballot system. The Individual was naught, the State all. It was finished between the years 1843 and 1845; the latter date it was published. It asserts the dignity of the Individual, not his debasement. Man is a political animal. There is no such hybird with him as Christian Socialism, no dodging issues. He fears the new and therefore clings to his old beliefs. Humanity — that is, the State, perhaps, even the socialistic state (the most terrible yoke of all for the individual soul). Feuerbach, Hess, and Szeliga answered Stirner’s terrible arraignment of society, but men’s thoughts were interested elsewhere, and with the revolt of 1848 Stirner was quite effaced. Therefore the State is a monster that devours its children. Stirner and Marx by Alexander Green. He has not grown mentally or physically since the Sumerians — or a million years before the Sumerians. Man is not a perfectible animal; not on this side of eternity. All fire and flame at that time for Nietzsche, I did not realize that the poet and rhapsodist had forerunners. Communism, Socialism abolish private property and push us back into Collectivism. Max Stirner is the pseudonym of Johann Kaspar Schmidt (1806-1856). From society? Max Stirner, whose real name was Johann Caspar Schmidt, was born on Oct. 25, 1806, in Bayreuth. Key Concepts: Terms in this set (15) What was the name of Max Stirner controversial and influential book. Max Stirner has often been considered a Young Hegelian, or even the ‘last Hegelian’. There is no truth but my truth. What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole word but loses his own Ego? He is governed by his emotions, his affective life. Well, we admit, for the sake of the argument, that we banish God from the firmament, substituting a superior mechanism; we admit our descent from stardust and apes, we know that we have no free will, because man, like the unicellular organisms, “gives to every stimulus without an inevitable response.” That, of course, settles all moral obligations. After the book appeared, relations with his wife became uneasy. And many Jericho-built walls go down before these ringing tones. The State and Pauperism are the same. “The State and I are enemies.” The State is a spook. It is an invention to keep imprisoned the will of our Ego. Property is conditioned by might. After Rousseau and the French Revolution humanity was enthroned, and the State became our oppressor. He did not bring from Asia its pessimism, as did Schopenhauer; nor deny reality, as did Berkeley. His funeral was held at Friedhof II der Sophiengemeinde Berlin. She met Stirner in the Hippel circle, at a Weinstube in the Friedrichstrasse, where radical young thinkers gathered: Bruno Bauer, Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Moses Hess, Jordan, Julius Faucher, and other stormy insurgents. In 1809, his mother remar… We are an instrument played upon by our heredity and our environment. Stirner was the only child of Albert Christian Heinrich Schmidt (1769–1807) and Sophia Elenora Reinlein (1778–1839). Johann Kaspar Schmidt, 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, in German 'Stirn'), was a German philosopher, who ranks as one of the literary grandfathers of nihilism, existentialism, post-modernism and anarchism, especially of individualist anarchism. Best of all is Lord Acton’s dictum that “Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. “To thyself be sufficient” (Peer Gynt). The true egotist is the altruist, says Stirner; yet Leibnitz was right; so was Dr. Pangloss. Yet let us dream it. Your Ego is not free if you allow your vices or virtues to enslave it. He lives by his illusions. Certainly not the figure of a stalwart shatterer of conventions, not the ideal iconoclast; above all, without a touch of the melodrama of communistic anarchy, with its black flags, its propaganda by force, its idolatry of assassinations, bomb-throwing, killing of fat, harmless policemen, and its sentimental gabble about Fraternity. Nearly a half century later Mackay, with the co-operation of Hans von Bülow, affixed a commemorative tablet on the house where he last lived, Phillipstrasse 19, Berlin, and alone Mackay placed a slab to mark his grave in the Sophienkirchhof. His thought is sometimes regarded as a source of 20th-century existentialism. “What can give a man liberty? Will, his own will, and it gives power, which is better than liberty” (Turgenev). It created a stir, though the censor did not seriously interfere with it; its attacks on the prevailing government were veiled. When did Max Stirner die? Its author can no more be held responsible for its misreading than the orthodox faiths for their backsliders. “Politics is the madness of the many for the gain of the few,” Pope asserted. His right name was Johann Caspar Schmidt, Max Stirner being a nickname bestowed upon him by his lively comrades in Berlin … This was in 1874. The hateful I, as Pascal called it, caused Zola, a solid egotist himself, to assert that the English were the most egotistic of races because their I in their tongue was but a single letter, while the French employed two, and not capitalized unless beginning a sentence. Such a reading implies that Stirner drew the logical conclusions of Hegel’s philosophy, thereby ignoring the way his thought marks a fundamental break with the philosophical tradition as a whole. Stirner’s form is open to criticism. Nietzsche’s flashing epigrammatic blade often snaps after it is fleshed; the grim, cruel Stirner, after he makes a jab at his opponent, twists the steel in the wound. No man may separate himself from the tradition of his race unless to incur the penalty of a sterile isolation. The conceptual question “What is Man?” must be changed to “Who is Man?” I am the owner of my might, and I am so when I know myself as unique. Socrates was a fool in that he conceded to the Athenians the right to condemn him. “Free — from what? Yet while he denies the existence of an Absolute, of a Deity, State, Categorical Imperative, he nevertheless had not shaken himself free from Hegelianism (he is Extreme Left as a Hegelian), for he erected his I as an Absolute, though only dealing with it in its relations to society. Stirner hated the word Equality; he knew it was a lie, knew that all men are born unequal, as no two grains of sand on earth ever are or ever will be alike. Stirner is not a communist — so long confounded with anarchs — he does not believe in force. Liberty for the people is not my liberty. The man whose theories would make a tabula rasa of civilization, was born at Bayreuth, October 25, 1806, and died at Berlin June 25, 1856. She was married with the ring wrenched from a witness’s purse — her bridegroom had forgotten to provide one.

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