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!

The opposition of the Real and the Ideal is an irreconcilable one,...not to be overcome unless some one negates both. Only in this someone [man] the third party, does the opposition come to an end; otherwise idea and reality will ever fail to coincide. The idea can never actualize itself, until it dies as Idea (EO, pp. 217, 362).

'Man' corresponds in today's culture to what the heathen Stoics set up as the 'wise man', the former and the latter alike as fleshless beings. The unreal 'sage', this bodiless 'saint' of the Stoics, became an actual person, a bodily 'Holy One', in the God made flesh [Christ]. The unreal 'Man', the bodiless I shall become actual in the bodily I, in me (EO, p. 363).

The ideal of 'Man' is realized, when the Christian intuition turns around into the proposition that 'I', this original unique [Einzige] am man. The conceptual question, 'What is Man' has been changed into the personal, 'Who is the man?' [wer ist der Mensch]. With 'what' the concept was sought after, in order to realize it; with 'who', there is no longer any question at all, but the answer is personally at hand in the asker; the question answers itself (EO, p. 366).

ENDNOTES to CHAPTER III

1 Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (Owings Mills, Md.: Stemmer House, 1978), p. 172. Bierce had 'Russian' and 'Tolstoi' for my substitutions.

2 NE, p. 229. Earlier (p. 164) Paterson has already noted in regard to Stirner and Kierkegaard "their common radicalism is the nihilism that arises from extreme isolation." One could argue in just as silly an ad hominem fashion that Kierkegaard's love of fairy tales or Stirner's nursing his senile mother was the real crucible of their ideas. It demonstrates what Ayn Rand once called the psychology of psychologizing, or here psychiatrizing even, to explain away ideas that are misbehaving before a 'holy' standpoint.
     This napping or teaseling of the texts, with the full side portion of disingenuous twittering, is pure Paterson. What else is one to call it when an objection is made to a text where the response to the objection is already present in the text? Cf. discussion of "isolation" above, p. 69.

3 EO, p. 325: "Only a few," Stirner quips, "are so imbecile that one cannot get ideas into them. Hence all men are usually considered capable of having religion."

4 Joni Mitchell, The Hissing of Summer Lawns (Asylum Records, 1975), title track.

5 In a review of an early draft, B. Lezardi commented to the author, that The Nihilistic Egoist "is quite an inadvertent compliment to its target. Could it have been written as a joke by one of the UK Stirner crowd, or by someone like Robert Anton Wilson?" The reference may be to S.I. Parker, a prominent British libertarian, and Wilson is the author of the Illuminatus Trilogy and other works. However it is doubtful that R.W.K. Paterson is a pseudonym, since he has apparently published in more than one journal since 1971.

6 Camus, op. cit., p. 62; henceforth designated as 'HR' in text.

7 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (Stuttgart, Kröner, 1964), p. 311.

8 Cf. EO, pp. 316-317 and passim; with HR, esp. p. 288: "The revolution, first of all, proposes to satisfy the spirit of rebellion which has given rise to it: then it is compelled to deny it, the better to affirm itself. There is, it would seem, an ineradicable opposition between the movement of rebellion and the attainments of revolution."
     Here of course, Marx accused Stirner of cowardice and ideological purity. The issue may be, however, the empirical tendency of revolution to re-establish the established, create new institutions of repression, and usher in a "new boss, same as the old boss", as in the 1970s song by the Who. On the other hand this risk is inherent in any institutional change, and nowhere does Stirner counsel against revolution, only making of it a panacea or historic 'inevitability', thereby making of the philosopher a prophet in the milky tones of ideological creaminess that is lampooned in Der Einzige.

9 Apocalyptic rhetorical style was of course commonplace among the Young Hegelians, and Camus missed the point following Marx's caricature of the pauvre type Stirner, passively reflecting his personal circumstances, aloof in his idea that changing his thinking is the same as changing material conditions of oppression, thereby making of himself a quintessential wallflower of history, as it were. As in any revolutionary or even coffee house insurrection, men get drunk on their own passions as far as personal attacks and pie-throwing or worse. For a later and more sober sketch of a possible German future -- decidedly not the one chosen by history for the following century -- see the essay "Reich und Staat" in KS, pp. 323-327.

10 Sociologist John Carroll, in his work Breakout from the Crystal Palace, noted the "mystical, irrationalist core of Stirner's existentialist ontology" (p. 73). Simultaneously he reintroduces Der Einzige as an exposition of radical individualist psychology", and also connects it to the roots of fascism, which is quite a step. Carroll claims that Stirner has a psychology and it "derives from an ethic which stresses the value of behaviour which transcends the patterns that can be predicted by examining previous social conditioning." Only when one "goes beyond" social roles and so on "does one become an individual -- that is unique and creative.... For Stirner the individual is unabashedly the categorical imperative" (p. 72)
     This seems to me a misreading of the texts. As shown above Stirner refuses to make another transcendental value, another 'Schuld' or should-system as this would be another ideological and ontological sales pitch. No positivities such as 'the individual' or 'individualist psychology' avoid the fate of theories in Stirner's system (or anti-system). Even when one affirms irrationalism or nontraditional intellectual values as bêtes noires the way Carroll does, is giving far too much away.
     Why are we so reluctant to concede that the 'id' (in Freud das Es) reveals on inspection -- conditioning and more conditioning? Apparently many feel the loss of intellectual sanctuaries, but sanctuaries imply the sanctum and the 'holy places' to trot off to. Stirner was saying there are none left, and that such disillusioning is necessary for self-liberation.
     There is no contradiction between awareness of my conditioned state and the thought and impulse towards freedom. Otherwise one would need to hold that since I am totally conditioned, I can do nothing. But that is a prescription as well. To be conscious is precisely to look around and see what to do, for humans no less than for animals. The realm of action is the realm of freedom.

Neither divine nor human reason, but rather your and my temporally existing reason is real [wirklich], as and because you and I [Du und Ich] are real.[3]

     Thus when Stirner speaks of 'creating himself', he is presumably referring to this project of creating his own identity as 'The Unique One' within the terms of his personal metaphysical system...[wherein] the historical Max Stirner is converted into the metaphysical 'Unique One'; the fact of his personal remoteness and insularity is converted into the doctrine of The Unique One's cosmic 'uniqueness'; and so the actual solitude...is converted into the theoretical solipsism in and through 'The Unique One'.... The solipsism...is a purely metaphysical solipsism (NE, pp. 255-257).

denying the subjectivity of others, by treating other persons as...natural phenomena to be studied and manipulated without regard to their existential claims as persons...by reducing others to the status of objects."[6]

For me, no one is a person to be respected...but solely, like other beings, an object [Gegenstand] for which I have an interest or else do not, an interesting or uninteresting object...a usable or unusable subject [Subjekt].[7]

"I can with joy sacrifice to [the friend] numberless enjoyments, says Stirner. 'I can deny myself numberless things for the enhancement of [his or her] her pleasure...but myself, my own self, I do not sacrifice but remain an egoist" and enjoy the person as the object of enjoyment, as an enjoyable subject:
     Selfish love is far distant from unselfish, mystical or romantic love.... Love becomes blind and crazy when a must takes it out of my power (infatuation), or romantic by a should entering into it.... Now the object no longer exists for me, but I for it (EO, pp. 258-259).

'loved one' is not a unique and irreplaceable object: how could he be, since it is his egoistic 'lover' who is himself The Unique One? For this reason the egoist always keeps himself aloof from the 'loved one', to whom he may give much, but to whom he will always refuse to give himself, unconditionally and in his entirety (NE, p. 258).

Only the species is in a position to both transcend religion and replace it. To have no religion is: to think only of oneself. To have religion is to think of another. And this religion is the one that alone remains, at least as long as there is not only a 'unique' man left on earth. For so long as we have just two, as man and wife, we still have religion. Two, difference, is the origin of religion -- the Thou, God of the I, for the I not without the Thou. No Thou -- no I.[8]

     The ball is really still in the other court. From the perspective of the Ideal, men are always too short or too long for the bed. Like Stephen Blackpool in Charles Dickens' Hard Times, people exist to be sacrificed as scapegoats, or caught in the crossfire of the fanatics of both sides. One need not scour the works of Dickens, Twain , Melville, Lawrence, or Ayn Rand to clinch this basic perception. Twain in fact in The Mysterious Stranger made many of Stirner's points about those imbued with "the moral sense". How much literature would be left if one subtracted stories about "honeyed speech and a lying heart, pompous words and beggarly thoughts"?[10] According to one reading of the Tao-Te-Ching: "Failing virtue, man resorts to humanity; failing humanity, man resorts to morality."[11]
     Radical finitude, though, bids you "dissolve yourself as time dissolves all things." Stirner maintained that all human worth and dignity flowed from uniqueness, singularity, and originality (all connoted by the term Einzigkeit). These qualities are antipodal to the abstract universality that reduces flesh and blood human beings to the status of a "chalk point" measured against the uncanny jealousy of spirits. Once the idea of the 'species' holds sway, men are reduced to "specimens."[12] The people with wheels in the head are always well down the slope of seeing the other not as unique, but -- the example is Stirner's -- as merely a thief or prostitute or Jew, and as nothing but the same.
     Egoism is as antithetical to fascism and other collective hysteria as anything can be. Rather than egoists treating each other as puppets, the point is that this was the gravy train of religion, to tame humanity, to create a species of servants. The masters, of course, remain. Through egoism, on the other hand, men arrive "most easily at a mutual understanding."[13]
     "One always flatters oneself," wrote Stirner, "that one speaks about 'actual, individual' men while one is talking about 'Man'."[14] In the same way, one flatters oneself speaking of the sacred, when something far more pedestrian, bipedal and human, all-too-human is being advanced.

The 'sacred' exists only for the egoist who does not acknowledge himself, for the involuntary egoist who...thinks he is serving a supreme being, who...is infatuated with something higher, in short for the egoist who would like not to be an egoist, and debases himself.... But however much he shudders and castigates himself, in the end he does it all for his own sake, and the odious egoism will not rub off him. For this reason I call him the involuntary egoist (EO, pp. 36-37).

the same pattern: everywhere the hypocrisy, or rather self-deception of an 'unselfish love', an interest in the object for the object's sake.... I owe my property [Eigentum] nothing, and have no duty to it, as little as I might have a duty to my eye; if nevertheless I guard it with the greatest care, I do so on my account.
     Antiquity was lacking in love as little as the Christian era; the love-god is older than the God of Love. But the mystical possessedness belongs to the moderns (EO, pp. 292-294).

If he ever admits any others to the metaphysical status which he claims for himself, the status of the pure Consumer to whom everything is merely pabulum, then manifestly he cannot identify himself as 'The Unique One'. It would, for example, be clearly inconsistent for a total egoist, who his determined to further only his own interests, to encourage others to behave towards him in the conscienceless, predatory ways in which he himself intends to behave towards them...

One would have thought that a conscious egoist looking for associates to 'utilize and consume' would have given his fellow vampires a very wide berth, as being far too devious and knowledgeable for his machiavellian purposes.... The obvious 'associates' for the egoist, therefore, are not his fellow egoists but precisely those innocent and upright men of goodwill whose 'kindness, mercy and pity' Stirner rashly repudiates (NE, p. 270).

     Stirner's rejection of community or 'Gemeinschaft' was quite specific. He describes it as having been "the goal of history until now" (EO, p. 311).
     Egoism is inherently in favor of dealing with current realities, and hostile to putting them off because 'others know better' or for the sake of an afterlife. Egoism rightly understood is antithetical to the vested interests and class society. Egoism is certainly to the advantage of les misérables, because they have a need for it, a world to gain by it, and this theme runs throughout Stirner's writings and in the great literature of the past century and a half.
     The moralist who cloaks his egoism in morality and piety isn't Stirner's invention, unless everyone from Nietzsche, Hugo, Zola, Dickens, D.H. Lawrence, B. Traven, Kafka, Hesse, Sinclair Lewis, Raoul Vaneigem, all of these people would for starters have to be in on the conspiracy. Stirner "ought" to

have said, 'There is no right, only might' [when] he often prefers to say, 'might is right' -- although clearly if the term 'right' has a meaning distinct from that of the term 'might', this statement is almost certainly false, while if the two terms have the same meaning the statement is completely tautologous.

Right collapses into its own nullity when it is swallowed up by might [Gewalt], when one grasps what is meant by 'might precedes right'.... All right then explains itself as privilege [Vorrecht], and privilege itself as power, as -- superior power [Übermacht] (EO, p. 209).

activity of appropriation consists of a finite series of particular confiscations and reinvestments, each of which is specifically designed to preserve and enhance that fluid, finite totality which is simultaneously his 'property' and his extant, concrete identity, his being-in-the-world; and this totality is distinctively preserved as a totality-in-process-of-disintegration. The egoist's property is only insofar as it is a continuous becoming, and it is a 'becoming' only insofar as it is continuously becoming nothing (NE, pp. 281, 283).

The thought of Right is originally my thought, or has its origin in me. But when it has sprung from me, when the 'word' is out, then it has 'become flesh', a fixed idea. Now I no longer get rid of the thought -- however I turn, it stands before me. Thus men have not become masters of this thought, 'Right', which they themselves created. their creature has stampeded them. This is absolute Right, that which is absolved or severed from me. Revering it as absolute, we cannot devour it again, and it takes away our power of creation; the creature is more than the creator, is now 'an und für sich' (EO, p. 205)

Where could one look without meeting victims of self-renunciation? Opposite me there sits a girl who for maybe ten years now has been making bloody sacrifices to her soul. Over the full form droops a deathly-tired head, and pale cheeks betray the slow bleeding away of her youth. Poor child, how often the passions may have beat against your heart, and the rich powers of youth have demanded their right! When your head rolled in the soft pillows, how awakening nature quivered through your limbs, blood swelled your veins, and fiery phastasies poured the gleam of sensual desire [Wollust] in your eyes. Then appeared the ghost of the soul and its bliss.

You were terrified, your hands folded themselves, your tormented eyes turned their glance on high, you -- prayed. The storms of nature were hushed, a calm slipped over the ocean of your appetites.... You fell asleep, to wake in the morning to a new struggle and a new -- prayer. Now the habit of renunciation cools the heat of your desires, and the roses of your youth grow pale in the -- anemia of your blessedness. The soul is saved, the body may perish! Oh Lais, oh Ninon, how right you were to scorn this pale virtue! One free grisette against a thousand virgins grown gray in their virtue (EO, p. 62)!

What in the world does egoism have to do with isolation? Do I as ego become an egoist when I run away from men? I may isolate or seclude myself, naturally, but am not a hair more egoistic in so doing than another who remains among men and rejoices in his association. More likely, I would isolate myself because I can find no more enjoyment in society; if I remain among men, it is since they still have much to offer me....
     The 'exclusivity' of the egoist, which one would like to pass off as 'isolation, detachment, seclusion' is on the contrary total participation in what is interesting [emphasis added] by way of excluding the disinterested and uninteresting.

ENDNOTES to CHAPTER IV

1 Bierce, op. cit., pp. 166, 219 .

2 See the discussion of love and related matters in KS, pp. 262ff.

3 EO, p. 356.

4 See Helms, op. cit., p. 4.

5 See Holz, op. cit., p. 11.

6 An instance of the 'nothing-but' fallacy, which usually manages to be ad hominem as well.

7 See the discussion in EO, pp. 311ff. Paterson does not translate Subjekt as 'subject'.

8 Feuerbach, "Reply to Stirner", trans. F.M. Gordon, Philosophical Forum, 8, No. 2-3-4 (1978), p. 87. It is seldom noticed that Feuerbach's reply probably demonstrated to Marx, who had just written the Feuerbachian "Paris Manuscripts" and "The Holy Family" -- that Feuerbach, despite his humanism, had been doing theology and was still at it.

9 EO, p. 40. 'Negative' perceptivity is still discouraged in education because questioning any type of authority is still going to rankle those who do not know but imagine they do. No one is saying that questioning authority is an end in itself, only that it's a necessary condition for any kind of education unless education is to mean life training as a robot (from Karel Capek, "drudgery"). The fact that we always have to go face to face with prejudices, meanness, fixed ideas and phony egoism is part of the meaning of egoism, and also what makes it a fun contact sport.

10 EO, p. 40. Clearly that which lies behind the sham of hypocrisy include nothing that is not human, all-too-human. Religion is an institution which often mediates the 'evil that men do' as much as the good they also do.

11 J.C.H. Wu, trans., Tao Te Ching (New York: St. John's University Press, 1961) p. 55.

12 EO, p. 330: this association works only in translation, as Stirner used Gattung and Exemplar.

13 EO, p. 248. Perhaps this was God's purpose as Reason has developed as "a book of laws, all enacted against egoism" (p. 331).

14 See the discussion in KS, p. 345.

15 KS, p. 344. Clearly Stirner considered the charge insipid and our author gives us little reason to think otherwise.

16 KS, p. 405. See also EO, p. 55.

17 See EO, p 315: "The poor are to blame for there being rich men." But also p. 321: the enjoyment of life must take upon itself to "crush spiritual and secular poverty, eradicate the ideal and the want of daily bread."

18 See the discussion in KS, p. 385.

19 Authoritarians, emphasizing rationality, are inclined to identify the 'ship' with the bridge, i.e. the command structure, hence the moralizing Queeg-style. Stirner's philosophy spans the bridge and the black crew in the stoke-holds, to borrow from B. Traven (who was familiar with Stirner in Germany, had his own insurrectionary newsletter "The Brickburner" during the Munich uprising and carried out this influence in an original direction in Das Totenschiff, translated as The Death Ship -- an egoistic rant or proletarian Moby Dick -- and his Jungle novels.

as far from the spirit and spirituality of the Christian world as earth from Heaven....
     [The spiritual man's] life is occupation with the spiritual, that is to say -- with thinking. The rest does not bother him; he will busy himself with the spiritual anyhow he can and will, in devotion, in contemplation or in philosophic cognition. He is forever thinking and so Descartes, who had at last seen this, could propose his Cogito. My thinking is my being or life.

It must not be supposed that the ancients were without thoughts.... Rather, they had their thoughts about everything concerning the world, man, the gods and such, and showed themselves keenly active in bringing all this to their consciousness. Yet they did not know 'Thought' as such (EO, pp. 20-21).

This dominion of thoughts awaits its deliverance, awaits like the Sphinx the cryptogram of Œdipos, that it may at last enter unto its death. I am the annihilator [Vernichter] of its continued duration, for in the creator's realm it no longer fashions a realm of its own...but rather is a creature of my creative thoughtlessness [Gedankenlösigkeit]. Only simultaneously with the congealed thinking world can Christendom, Christianity, and religion itself perish....

Totally different from this free-thinking is own-thinking, my thinking which does not guide me but is guided by me, and continued and broken off at my pleasure. And so the distinction of this from free-thinking is similar to that of ownness, in regard to sensuality, which I satisfy in accord with my liking, versus free unruly sensuality, to which I succumb (EO, pp. 338-339)

Who is there who has never noticed that our entire education has the object of producing feelings in us, imparting them to us, instead of leaving their production to us come what may....
     Our equipment consists of 'elevated feelings, exalted thoughts, inspiring maxims, eternal principles', and such. The young are rushed through school to learn the old song, and when they have learned it by heart they are pronounced of age -- they are of age, that is, once they can twitter like the old (EO, pp. 65-66).

If I were a dogmatist I should place at the top a dogma, a thought, idea or principle, 'systematize' this into a system or structure of thought.... But I am the champion neither of a thought nor of thinking; for I, from whom I start, am not a thought nor do I consist in thinking. Against me, the unnameable, the realm of thoughts, thinking and mind is shattered.

break up thoughts by thinking. But I say that only thoughtlessness really saves me from thoughts. It is this and not thinking, or I as the unthinkable, inconceivable [Unbegreifliche] that frees me from possessedness (EO, pp. 147-148).

All that I do, think, express and manifest, is conditioned by what I am. The Jew can will one thing and present himself that way, and the same for the Christian. If you could change over into a Jew or Christian, you would bring out what is Jewish or Christian; but it isn't possible since in the most rigorous conduct you still remain an egoist, a sinner against that concept...

You are indeed more than a Jew, more than a Christian, but you are also more than a human being. Those are all ideas, but you are corporeal [Du aber bist leibhaftig].... Let it be the case that Shmuel is ever so Jewish, a Jew and nothing but a Jew he can never be, just because he is this Jew (EO, pp. 126-127).

Let us renounce every hypocrisy of community [Gemeinschaft] and recognize that if we are equal as men, we are not equal because we are not Men. We are equal only in thought, ...not as we actually and bodily are. I am I and you are I, but I am not this thought-of I.... I am man and you are man, but 'Man' is just a thought, a generality. Neither you nor I are speakable [sagbar], we are unutterable [unaußprechlich] since only thoughts are sayable and consist in speaking (EO, p. 311).

I want to be full of thoughts, yet at the same time be thoughtless and preserve this state for myself, instead of freedom of thought.

What a man is, he makes out of things. 'As you look at the world, so it looks back at you'... One does perceive correctly when one makes of things what one will (by 'things we mean here objects such as God, our fellow man, etc.). And so things and looking at them does not come first, but I do, my will [Willens] does. One will bring thoughts out of things, will discover Reason in the world, will have holiness therein...
     Perceiving the world first as will and only thence as representation, judgment is also "the creature of my will", and therefore egoistically one remembers the source of the representation, so that "all predicates of objects are my statements, judgments, creatures (EO, pp. 336-337).

Otherwise I should fall victim to the stability principle, the proper lifeline of religion, which deals in 'untouchable sanctuaries' and 'eternal truths' -- and thus a 'holiness', depriving you of what is yours.

A shake does me the service of the most careful thinking, a stretch of the limbs shakes off tortuous thoughts. A leap in the air tosses the incubus of the religious world from my chest, a jubilant shout throws off enduring burdens. But the stark significance of a thoughtless shout of joy could not be acknowledged during the long night of Thought and Faith (EO, pp. 334, 148).

Der Einzige expresses nothing: it is a name only and says that you are you.... Thereby you are without predicates, and at the same time undetermined [bestimmungslos], vocationless, lawless, and so on....
     You, the unique! What thought-content is there here? Whoever would derive from uniqueness, as from a concept, a specific content, and who intends thereby to express your nature -- such a person would only prove that he believes in phrases....The 'unique' should be the last, dying expression from you and me, it should be the expression that collapses in its own meaning; a statement that is no more, a mute statement (KS, pp. 348-350).

     Could there be however a chance to do in Stirner by means of the simplest of blunt objects, the tautology?

In Der Einzige Stirner celebrates frivolity, irresponsibility, scepticism, and irreverence towards all things, and he does not seek to exempt himself from the eruption of absurdity over which he presides.... In reducing all things to absurdity, perhaps he implicitly submits his own reductive activity this 'reduction to absurdity'.

he may be playing with his pencil in the distinctive way which produces a 'doodle'" to play with snow may be to build a snowman; to play with a meccano set is to build a model bridge or tower. The complex game which Stirner is playing with and for himself is essentially creative in this sense. It is the private game of an artist whose artistry expresses itself in the form of an imaginative and grandiloquent self-portrait...: the whole project, however, having been originally undertaken from the motives of self-gratification and self-release (NE, pp. 301-302).

     What is Stirner's significance for our time, according to Paterson's concluding remarks? "After a hundred and twenty years", he announces -- describing Der Einzige as if it were Mein Kampf -- "Stirner's voice rings no less urgently, and the grim solution which he describes certainly retains its power to fascinate and to dismay." As a literary phenomenon, Der Einzige

clearly belongs to the nihilistic literature of the 19th century: the notes its strikes are clearly part of that despairing and satanic chord we find in so many 19th century novelists, dramatists, poets, and philosophers....

with the destructive (including the self-destructive), the sinister, and the morally perverted was one aspect of their intense preoccupation with the experience of Nothingness, of the emptiness and meaninglessness of all things (NE, p. 13).

Der Einzige is the most purely personal, the most individualistic of books...., in no way a programme for active revolutionaries, but essentially a poem of metaphysical disenchantment for the cynical and introspective solitary; and thus Stirner's affinities are essentially with the Baudelaires and the Rimbauds rather than with the Nechayevs and the Seyss-Inquarts (NE, p. 314).

To the religious believer,...Stirner's account ought to shed a grim light on the nature and implications of 'sin', conceived as estrangement from God, from the ground and goal of our being; for in his proud self-sufficiency, the Unique One is the archetype of the sinful individual.
     [Thus] to live as a truly radical atheist is to live the life of the nihilistic egoist, to live in deliberately chosen estrangement from God and man. In The Unique One Stirner has attempted to describe someone who has unflinchingly chosen to live in this desolate dimension of total estrangement (NE, pp. 317-318)

What religion calls the 'sinner', humanitarianism calls the 'egoist'. But to say it again...is the 'egoist' -- in whom the humane have borne themselves a newfangled devil -- anything more than a piece of nonsense? The egoist, before whom they shudder, is as much a spook as the Devil is: he exists only as a shrill apparition and phantasmic image in their brain. If they were not occupied in drifting back and forth between the antediluvian opposites of good and evil,...then they would not have needed to freshen up the hoary 'sinner', either, nor put a patch on an old skirt. But they could do no other, for they hold it their task to be 'Men' (EO, p. 359).

1 Chamfort, Products of the Perfected Civilization, trans. W.S. Merwin (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984), p. 157. Chamfort, who would have to be studied in any survey of egoism in the century prior to Stirner, made this telling point about the nature of institutions: "Degrade themselves as they will, institutions (parliaments, academies, assemblies) sustain themselves by sheer bulk, and no one can do anything against them. Dishonor and ridicule slide off them like musket balls off the hide of a boar or crocodile (p. 148)."

2 KS, p. 413: "[I] have had to fight with a language wrecked by philosophers, abused by believers in the State, religion, and sundry other causes, a language thus rendered capable of boundless conceptual chaos." John Carroll, tying Stirner's nihilism into economics, makes an insightful point in his book (pp. 166-167): "Eating may be taken as a paradigm for the consumption process: enjoyment is the flame which lives off the matter it destroys. Again, the moment of rebirth is the moment of annihilation. Wasting is inherent in consuming, as is borne out by the German language, in which verzehren means either 'to consume' or 'to waste'."

3 EO, pp. 336-340. Appropriation or Aneignung is in Hegelian terminology the cancellation of the object and its recreation or redeployment with its context and sense changed and manipulated. In the process the alienating bond is dissolved. Property or Eigentum in this context is what is taken. Of course it was the utopian philosopher Proudhon who declared "all property is theft" and Stirner affirms that conception. All property in principle is up for grabs, which isn't a reproach against society but the core of society. In this discussion Stirner makes utterly clear that there is no question of solipsism and -- that he is an egalitarian egoist not in principle but in practice. He clearly sees no contradiction in affirming that society is at the same time cooperation, and also dog-eat-dog. See esp. EO, pp. 305-310.

4 See EO, esp. p. 141.

5 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1972), p. 211.

6 See the discussion in EO, p. 308.

7 "There is a difference whether my freedom or my ownness is limited by a society. If the former alone is the case, it is a coalition [Vereinigung], an agreement, a union ; but if ruin is threatened to ownness, it is then a power unto itself, a power above me, something unattainable, which I can indeed admire, adore, revere and respect but can never master and consume -- therefore I resign myself before it."

8 "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", in Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (New York: Vintage, 1976), p. 127. Stirner was aware of the disarray within his critics. See KS, p. 409: "I have often observed that [they] have, with great intellectual acumen, gotten their target in their sights and have analyzed it -- but they don't know what to make of Stirner, and they have all been carried away by the various consequences of their misunderstandings, into the most genuine stupidities [Betisen]."

9 See EO, p. 359 esp. Nietzsche made a similar remark in Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft: "Although the shrewdest judges of the witches and even the witches themselves were convinced of the guilt of witchery, this guilt nevertheless did not exist. It is the same with all guilt" (§ 250, trans. Kaufmann).

CHAPTER VI

CAPRICCIO & FINALE

     In light of the above, there can be little doubt that Der Einzige's Stirner cannot be identified with the figure presented in The Nihilistic Egoist: namely, with Paterson's whimsical, metaphysical, infectious Stirner; his emasculating, erupting, inward, frivolous, devious, artificial, motiveless, arbitrary, gratuitous Stirner; his rootless, cynical, solipsistic, sophisticated, desultory, sinister, morally perverted, brutal, piratical Stirner; his vagrant, detached, spectatorial, rancorous, promiscuous, rashly repudiating, mephistophelian, self-abusing Stirner; his disloyal, impugning, solitary, disenchanted, essential, irrational, dissolving, estranged, absurd Stirner; his barren, rapacious, serpentine, passionately self-displaying, evasive, self-gratifying, uncaring, annexing, remote, insular, fickle Stirner; his tediously indifferent, doodling, destructive, rebounding, factitious, callous, explosive Stirner; nor his truculent, turbulent, disembowelling, caressing, abyss-dwelling, sub-arctic, and nocturnally leaping vampire Stirner. Much is asserted in the course of this book, The Nihilistic Egoist, yet the feeling persists that some key points have been missed --for starters, the lot.
     Whether inadvertently or by intent, just such a hermeneutic travesty seems the deliberate project of The Nihilistic Egoist. In blunt terms the book amounts to a befuddled sheaf of accusations by one to whom Stirner and existential philosophy have been toujours haïssable. There seems little apparent cause for a modern philosopher to contort into such embarrassing positions, unless there really is something to the 150 year old book that hits the mark and provokes to apostasy. In this sense periodic 'revivals' of Stirner may be likened to a return of the repressed.
     Not only are most of the objections raised by Paterson pre-answered in Stirner's text, but Paterson's method is little different than the hunter gone sailing who, not having his sealegs and afraid of the water, takes potshots through the hull at an imagined shark. [1]
     There is a popular quip that goes, "just remember that you are unique -- just like everyone else." Stirner seems not to be bothered by this and indeed revels in it, while making his pitch within the energizing matrix of rebellion, comprising as it does disobedience, radical questioning, active resistance, ludic enjoyment, and deconstruction of linguistic tank-traps. Why do some people find it so odious to admit the world needs a little 'wrecking' in certain departments? Intelligent destruction, as Kingsley Widmer once remarked, "is a rigorously discriminating process."[2]
     Like Nietzsche, Stirner was an ambiguous nihilist, or more correctly a nihilism of ambiguity, not in the sense of irrationalism, but substituting 'appropriation' for rationalism, or placing the world as will in the horse's seat pulling the world as representation. Still, the broad coalition to disarm his book of its activist egoism for the pale copy of a shopkeeper's egoism is a strategem to defuse the maieutic of Stirner as educator, and demands some accounting in today's circumstances. The theme of Stirner's irrationality is familiar in the critiques of thinkers such as Berdyaev,[3] Scheler,[4] Marx,[5] Camus,[6] Buber,[7] Helms,[8] and Holz.[9]
     It would seem the minihysteria of Professor Paterson came from bogging down in an impossible project. Paterson's merit may well be that he was profoundly agitated, enough to start drawing a map of how the strange terrain looked, marking all sorts of 'wilde and dangerous beestes' at its edges. However at the same time he has trivialized the matrix of Stirner's thought into nothingness, analyzing it in a vacuum and coming up with a vacuum. This required ignoring how Stirner paved the way for the egoist rants of later writers such as Nietzsche, Hesse and others.[10]
     Of course other broadsides against religion specifically, not requiring the egoism as such have since Swift, Mark Twain and many more been conducted from the standpoints of agnosticism, paganism, pantheism, or Bokononism,[11] though none has driven in the point that religion is a "cult of Society". I have argued that there is no Stalinist atheism in Stirner, and he speaks highly of Jesus Christ as insurgent, as would Nietzsche covering in more depth the same problematic forty years later, and we may add as does anyone who looks skeptically at the institutionalization (i.e., falsification) of Christ. Stirner also praises Catholicism for saving sensuality from Protestant extinction.[12] Protestantism held authority itself as sacred and thus abolished the last ties of religion to sensuality or allegiance to a mortal man (king, pope, etc.).[13] Thus Stirner falls in line as a Hegelian, or using dialectic to the completion of Christianity by cancelling it: "Along with worldly goods, all sacred goods are to be set aside as no longer valuable."[14]
     The critique we find in Stirner is still an impassioned refusal of any model of man as a homunculus, sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought. Indeed more adventurous explorers of the spirit-body dichotomy have always been able to steer around the wreckage of the abandoned deity. Dr. Alex Comfort explains that seekers

have from the Gnostics to Blake attributed [the rule-making activity] not to a God but to a pseudo-God, the projected matter of everything Kant was told before the age of five, in other words, Nobodaddy. It is a fantastic state we have reached when since the middle of the last century ethicists seriously argued that without belief in a legislating deity morality loses all rational sanction and must founder.[15]

You as 'unique' are so only together with what is 'your own'.... Our world and the sacred world -- therein lies the difference between affirmative egoism and self-denying, unconfessed, incognito, sneaking egoism (KS, pp. 354-355).

Our societies and states are, without our making them, are united without our uniting, are predestined and established, have their own independent standing, are indissolubly established against us egoists. The present world struggle is, as one says, directed against the 'established order' [das Bestehende]. Yet one is prone to misunderstand this as if what is now established is to be exchanged for another improved establishment. But war might be declared against the 'established' itself, against the State (status), not as a particular State, or as the mere present condition of the same, not to aim at another (such as a 'people's state'); rather, the aim is towards men's union and uniting, this ever-flowing union of everything standing (EO, p. 223).

The power of the single man [Einzelnen][17] becomes permanent and a right, only through others combining their might with his. Their delusion consists in their believing that they cannot withdraw their might. The same phenomenon over and over: might is separated from me and I cannot take back the power that I gave to the possessor. One thus 'grants power of attorney', has given away his power, has renounced thinking better of the deal (EO, p. 276).
     When men arrive at losing respect for property, then everyone will have property -- as all slaves become free men as soon as they no longer respect their master as master. Unions [Vereine] will then multiply the wherewithal of individuals and secure their assailed property as well (EO, pp. 276, 258).

As to what shall happen once I have become free, the doctrine of freedom is silent -- as our governments let the prisoner go, thrusting him out into abandonment, once his sentence is up.
     ...The cry for freedom rings loudly all around. But does one know and feel just what a granted or chartered freedom must mean? It is not recognized that in the fullest sense of the word, all freedom is essentially -- self-liberation; that I can have only so much freedom as I procure by my ownness. Of what use is it to sheep that no one restricts their freedom of speech? They stick to bleating.

Those who would still give you freedom are simply knaves who give more than they have. For then you have not your own, but stolen wares.
     ...In their knavery they know well that dispensed freedom is no freedom at all, since only the kind one takes for himself -- egoistic freedom -- rides with full sails. Chartered freedom drops sails as soon as there comes a storm -- or calm: it needs a light and moderate breeze.

Even unfree, laid in a thousand fetters, I still am and I am not, as with freedom, extant only in the future and in hope, but even as the most abject slave I am -- present.
     Consider that well and decide if you will place on your banner 'freedom' or the resolve of 'egoism' and 'ownness'. The former is and remains a longing, a romantic plaint, a Christian hope for the otherworldliness and futurity. 'Ownness' is an actuality, which of itself removes just as much unfreedom as obstructs you in your course (EO, pp. 163, 167).

bound the egoist to the pillory, and fanatically sacrificed egoism to each and every straw 'holiness' that has come along, from the domain of thinking and belief. We do not live in an egoistic world, but rather in one lacking all but the most ragged tatters of property, a world that is sacred through and through.

What is it that is called a 'fixed idea'? An idea that has subjected the man to itself.... And is not all the stupid chatter of most of our newspapers the babbling of fools who suffer from the fixed ideas of morality, legality, Christianity and such -- and who only appear to go about freely because the asylum in which they wander takes in so wide a space? Touch the fixed idea of such a fool and you will at once have to guard your back against the malice of these madmen [as they] stealthily assault the one who disturbs their notion. They steal first his weapon from him, then his freely given word, then plunge their nails into him from above.
     Every day now reveals the cowardice and vindictiveness of these maniacs -- and the stupid populace cheers every insane step they take. One must read the dailies of our era, and hear the Philistines talk, to get the terrifying impression that one is shut up in a house of fools (EO, pp. 43-44).

Do I write out of love for man? No, I want to create an existence for my thoughts in the world, and even if I foresaw that these thoughts would wreck your peace and tranquillity, even if I saw bloody wars and the perishing of many generations sprouting from this seed of thought -- I would nevertheless scatter it. Do what you can and will with it, that is your concern and does not trouble me. You will perhaps have only trouble, strife, and death from it; very few will draw joy from it (EO, p. 296).

     "Stirner's maxim of 'get the value from yourself!' is a clever trick, born from impotence," complains Hans Helms, echoing Marx just a hundred pages into his massive exposé of everything to do with Stirner. "On such a basis historical progress is just as definitely impossible as the said-perfect Unique One's social emancipation."[18]
     Here historical progress ostensibly pointed to a rationalist utopia where Marx may fish, work in the fields, and raise cattle. On close inspection, though, the greenery camouflaged the tanks and bulldozers of a heavy-armored, invulnerabilizing discourse of human liberation. The difference between some playful tilling of dried-up ideals and a legitimized scorched-earth policy, is evident here in Helms' materialist-aggressive complement to Paterson's defensive-sentimental critique. In retrospect 'historical progress' and 'social emancipation' have gone the way of all ideals, as shop manuals of human engineering.
     The bankruptcy of bureaucratic statism is one lesson from the betrayal of the working class revolution by Marxist fanatics, which established an ideological hierarchy and another 'cult of society', never shrinking from criminal means as vicious as the strikebreakers of the avaricious capitalist or segregationist governor. This is one way to view Stirner's critics and why another interpretation is called for.
     Still, archetypal 'egoism' remains a strong theme in the contemporary psyche and in pop culture. The hero as nihilist, or the nihilistic anti-hero haunts our literary and cinematic mindscapes as well as MTV. The warrior image of Stirner, like those of Nietzsche and the pagans, can still affirm that "with a smile I lay my shield on the corpses of my thoughts and my faith, and triumph with a grin when I am beaten. Such is the humor of the thing."[19]
     Such an image, borrowing from Homer or the Bhagavad-Gita, is more edifying than instructive. Still I have argued that consigning this brand of egoism to myth, fiction, phantasy or metaphysical masturbation will not work: not just as Stirner's ideas have come to fruition, but because he should get credit where it is due, and also because the book is still powerful.
     My claim here is that rather as scholars trying to fill in Stirner's lacunae -- typical academic interpretation, uncommitted, disinterested and [to coin a Stirnerism] disinteresting -- he can help fill in some of ours. In this light a perspective on Stirner as educator is long overdue, and so I have only tried to sketch an outline.
     Against winds of anomie, overpopulation and the prospect of permanent recession, as many feel we are devolving to a Lonely and underfunded Crowd as we approach century's end, some willful and intelligent 'sharpening of the oppositions' seems called for.[20] In our time, though, erosion of family, church, and state values as electronic substitutes have become available, may have created a vacuum of values and a crisis not of repression but of "technarchy" or what Herbert Marcuse used to call "repressive desublimation." Whether puritan, paranoid or remissive (to paraphrase the title of John Carroll's excellent book) it seems that Stirner's philosophy of education is far from outdated, and this adaptability I would argue is the perennial value of Der Einzige.

The question 'What am I' yields at first "an abyss of unruly and lawless impulses, desires, wishes, passions, -- a chaos without light or guiding star." A circumspect glance inwards reveals that "we nowhere meet with such grievous arbitrariness, such frightful violence, such stupid coercion, as here in the domain of our own free will [Willkür] (EO, pp. 161, 336).

There are who teach only the lessons of peace and safety;
     But I teach lessons of war and death to those I love,
     That they readily meet invasions, when they come.[21]

ENDNOTES to CHAPTER VI

1 EO, p. 216. In his more recent Values, Education and the Adult (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), Paterson is still defending civilization, armed with the clear definition of democracy as "the attempt to institutionalize or give political form to the principle of rationality in the conduct of social relations" (p. 262). He approvingly commends an approach to democratic education given by one F.D. Maurice: "instruction in Logic to our working classes."
     We read that "since the workers speak and think and reason" -- a generous admission -- "they are all logicians in embryo: what they want in this, as in other cases, is to be taught what they are doing, to have their minds set in order about their own operations." Just what the worker needs who has "been used to vagueness" (p. 280)! Less clear to Paterson and Maurice may be the possibility that the workers know quite well what "their own operations" are all about, and that the former pedants could learn from the latter primitives, for instance being told to get a job and do some work rather than spouting nonsense for a living.
     Small wonder the Grim Reaper, in Monty Python's classic film The Meaning of Life could not take any more and though English himself exclaims, "You Englishmen...you're all so f***ing pompous!"
     Stirner of course took a very dim view of educational constipation by calling its bluff, even to the dare that "voice of God and conscience" are the "devil's work". The men of self-published "good will" are "the real seducers and corrupters of youth, who busily sow the tares of self-contempt and reverence for God, who fill young hearts with mud and young heads with stupidity" (EO, p. 162).

2 Kingsley Widmer, The Ways of Nihilism (Los Angeles: California State Colleges, 1979), p. 129.

3 See NE, p. 315. Paterson properly rejects Berdyaev's attempt to rehabilitate Stirner as advocating 'personalism' but in a "distorted form", since by finding there themes ideas which "in other hands and in another context, could bear a noble and lofty interpretation", Berdyaev may have been saying Stirner didn't come close enough to Berdyaev. Clearly 'personalism' could be accused of being just another theory, the 'person' is a transcendent concept, a 'should' or 'ought', as arbitrary a construct as 'Man', because "even the I is abstraction" (EO, p. 339). The pronouns of Der Einzige and the verbs too may have initially skirted this misconception. To his critics Stirner replied that the language terms he had developed were only tools.

4 In his classic Formalism in Ethics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), Scheler's main bone to pick with Stirner is the latter's alleged view that "the individualization of the person" must occur "by virtue of the lived body alone." Indeed his "value-individualism" had "morally vindicated 'living it up' in terms of bodily drives." Here again, self-enjoyment experiences the reductio to the level of self-playmating, a classic moralistic objection. Have we become so desensitized that self-enjoyment, rather than the business of life overall, is no more significant than a wild party? This is ironic as Marx had accused Stirner of being a weenie and a wallflower.
     Scheler says that "theories of Stirner, Kant, and their successors [?] have at bottom the same deficiencies: the disregard of spiritual individualism and the assumption that only the lived body individualizes the person." Separate and unequal facilities, then for Spirit and Body in the Platonic and medieval tradition, then, should be continued. Scheler goes on:
     "Given its presuppositions, [Stirner's] type of egoism must come to forget precisely what it disregards [sic]: namely the inner and outer powers of ordering and uniting human drives (which pertain to what is more or less general in human nature according to universally valid norms of men or the state or a people, and which are effective as consciousness of duty, as state or church authority, as mores, etc.) -- this is what creates the very condition for the liberation of the true seat of individuality, i.e., the spiritual personality of an individual or a people" [emphasis in original, pp. 513-515].
     This exasperated rejoinder falls in the middle of an otherwise sober treatise. Stirner had remarked, "the thinker is blind to the immediacy of things, and incapable of mastering them; he does not eat, does not drink, does not enjoy" (EO, p. 339). In Scheler's case, this reminder is close to home: in Man and People, Ortega y Gasset pointed out that Scheler had died from lack of sleep. We hope it was not over Stirner!

5 The reduction to idiocy carried out in "Sankt Max" -- by far the longest part of Die Deutsche Ideologie -- has prototyped criticism since, from Dietzgen to Helms-Holz. The basic framework was prefigured in Moses Hess' rejoinder, answered by Stirner in his 1845 Reply. It was Hess who came up with the 'Saint or Shopkeeper' angle. "Sankt Max" is perhaps the apex of armor-plated critique. There are some lucid and telling points to be answered, but it remains a cartoon rivalry too boorish to draw us into detailed review here.

6 Camus wrote that rebellion's most "profound logic is not the logic of destruction; it is the logic of creation" (HR p. 285). Still seeking out the sources of fascism tends, even as this seminal work to become tedious and verge towards scapegoating. Stirner aptly noted that "hate runs through entire races merely because the ancestors of one side belonged to the Guelphs, the other to the Ghibellines" (EO, p. 292). The answer to the those who try to query Stirner about Hitler is that the book is clear on the subject as it can be a century in advance, even presaging the issue of ethnic stereotyping.

7 Buber's treatment of Stirner in his "Question to the Unique One" mainly silhouettes his own philosophy of dialogue. We are not astonished to find Stirner admonished as omitting an "essential relation" between egoist and other, since the other has no "primary existence". And we are back on the chain gang of essences, absolutes, and holy relationships of MeWeThee and Thous. Screws loosening themselves on the deck of the ghostly galleon! Buber insists we reserve the idea of a true relation in which "not only I but Thou can be said."
     Feuerbach had argued the same thing, but Buber gets kind of sassy: Stirner, a "pathetic nominalist and unmasker of ideas" has no idea of "the reality of responsibility." He cannot, because "it can only be experienced when one is not closed to the otherness, the ontic and primal otherness of the other." Further, where "no primary address and claim can touch me, for everything is 'my property', responsibility is a phantom" (pp. 41, 45).
     Okay, dad! This use of responsibility seems a bit much, and authority seems to be the real punch line. One can imagine Stirner's reaction to this old wine in a new decanter, to the updated Schwärmerei of the consecrated Thou, to the silly sentiment of Jacobi's nostrum of immediacy, "Herz! Liebe! Gott!" (pp. 211, 213).

8 In Helms' Ideologie, the bibliography alone runs over 100 pages. Every facet of Stirner's influence or presence, every book, pamphlet or speech is noted and catalogued; on every page critical reason, through Helms, passes judgment; court is set up in the bleachers of the morgue to interrogate every moment of the life of the Accused. Published in 1966, just before the advent of the Baader-Meinhof gang, Ideologie is the Panopticon of all Stirneriana.
     Helms' innovation over previous Marxian redactions, we read in the preface, is that Stirner is to be viewed not as a prophet of the petty bourgeoisie, but as the prophet of the "middle classes" in general.
     Since there is "no difficulty in producing a catalogue of parallel passages in Der Einzige and Mein Kampf" -- though Helms leaves this puzzle to the reader -- and even if Hitler cannot be shown to have heard the mere name of Stirner, nevertheless the possibility "can no longer be excluded" that Hitler did receive a dose of Stirnereinfluß. In any case Hitler also "had articulated a specifically middle-class ideology" and to Helms it is obvious that "Stirnerianism and National Socialism are variant forms of the same fascistic Ungeist" (p. 5).
     Mussolini himself, Helms is quick to add, was a redoubtable philosopher of the absurd and an authority on the same concepts as Stirner: "He spoke out in Avanti! in 1914 of a 'marvelous but absurd construction. Even the absurd can be marvelous. One has to think of Stirner's Einzigen'" (pp. 496-497). Il Duce had once referred to Stirner! Quid est demonstrandum! and at what length and depth too!
     Helms is thorough, alright, gathering under one investigative mandate such otherwise unconnected personalities as Gary Cooper, Lou Salomé, Henry Ford, Krishnamurti, Barry Goldwater, Englebert Humperdinck, Artur Rimbaud, John Wayne, General Westmoreland, and Ayn Rand. The latter's book For the New Intellectual "resembles Stirner's ideology to a tee, translating it into modern jargon" (p. 360) -- a revelation that Rand would have found annoying no doubt but which any informed reader finds insipid.
     Why, isn't just the mention of 'egoism' enough? Off with their whiskers! We even have Helms' own description of what Adolf Eichmann would have said to himself if he had read Der Einzige while alive (p. 150)!!
     At the extremes of critical reason, paranoia triumphs over the will and the damnation of Faust is again on Broadway. If this 600-page field day as one-man Bund is guaranteed by the listing of Helms' credentials on the back cover, then he may well have had an insight into Eichmann that we cannot have. Die Ideologie der Anonymen Gesellschaft is a work, then to be souvenired off like the other bits of the Berlin Wall.

9 Ibid. for Holz who joined in to address the "pure, metaphysical egoism" we are now used to: "This particular saint Johann Kaspar Schmidt was a sort of sly tipster. One of course made light of him, but was deeply impressed by him all the same, and embraced his principles completely. There are acquaintances that one does not gladly encounter strolling under den Linden, but preferably in secluded places and back rooms. That the congregations of Stirnerians in that time were not scanty, may be clarified from the fact that Marx and Engels deemed it necessary to destroy the brain-phantoms of the Berlin prophet with bitter irony and polemic." Well, with Stirnerites under every bed, Marx and Engels had no choice, did they? The phenomenon lingered their in the back rooms, finally to :"blossom into its heyday as the foundation of National Socialism -- as has been shown in Hans Helms' exhaustive analysis..." (op. cit., p. 11).
     This novel redoing of history, without the least shred of support but bearing the infinite innuendo of the Order of Tar and Featherweight, is not something I am making up, but a clue to how stalinism and modern, hip Marxism never got a clue to their "identity within opposition" with the Other. They recast themselves in iron as a totemic class ideology, despite the tunic of historical materialism, now at last discredited.
     In any totalitarian mindset, everything and anything is confirmation of the guilt of the Accused. The virtue of this kind of interpretation is to neatly dispense with the ambiguities and paradoxes of intellectual life, as noted by Kafka, who understood the ins and outs and the 'uncanniness' of the sacred, with uncanny accuracy (see his parable of "The Rejection").
     Propagandists have seized on Stirner over the decades, probably because he had the nerve to slap their fixed ideological cosmologies right in the orbs especially chez Marxisme. Inadvertently, then Helms and Holz pay an enormous compliment to Stirner's nihilism and egoism.

10 Hermann Hesse's definition of the "age of the feuilleton", i.e., trivialization through media, is boosted by Paterson, who contrasts Stirner and other 19th century figures with no real effort. "Ibsen, certainly, and Mallarmé almost certainly, were familiar with the ideas of Der Einzige" (NE, p. 313). No loss of detail is provided if we replace Ibsen and Mallarmé here with Epsom and Marmelade. This illustrates the curious bent of critics noted so far, Paterson only in the lead, to trivialize as well as expunge.

11 Commenting on a draft of this paper, Professor Sherwood Nelson remarked that "agnosticism would work as well as atheism for Stirner: the chief thing is the refusal of absolutes."

12 For the insurgency of Christ, see EO, pp. 317-318. On the Jesuit abetting of egoism, pp. 90ff.

13 See the discussion in EO, pp. 90-92.

14 Ibid., p. 347.

15 Alex Comfort, I and That: Notes on the Biology of Religion (New York: Crown, 1979), p. 128.

16 See the discussion in EO, pp. 223, 305ff.

17 See EO, pp. 248-257. Stirner never refers to the 'individual' as his concept, but always der Einzelne or der Einzige. Whether in armor-plated individualism, as with Ayn Rand, or more lightly equipped thinkers, the adoption of individualism by laissez-faire ideologists owes little to Stirner, and has settled into another middle-class ideology more as a response to post-1960s cults grounded in pop economic malaise or curmudgeonism than with philosophy or education. As noted elsewhere, 'the individual', once hoisted to an ideal or transcendent concept, is for Stirner a fiction and often a snare.

18 Helms, op. cit., pp. 108-109.

19 EO, p. 358. Hero images in Der Einzige is tangential, but we can note that millions of people who have never heard of Stirner flock to spectacles of vicarious egoism, from talk shows to Clint Eastwood movies.

20 EO, p. 208. "As Jew and Christian, you are in too slight an opposition, and are contending only about religion, as if it were the Emperor's beard, about a fiddlestick's end." Far from shunning confrontation, egoism is set to embrace it in most circumstances.

21 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass: Reader's Comprehensive Edition, ed. Harold Blodgett and Sculley Bradley (New York: New York University Press, 1965), p. 614.