From the archives of The Memory Hole |
The following article was published in an issue of Freedom magazine, published in the UK ca the late 1960's. It is a fair introduction to Max Stirner's major contribution to philosophical egoism.
By Shirley F. Frederick
Out of the cauldron of revolution struggled a new age. Hesitantly, falteringly, but with hope born of romanticism, men fought desperately to retain a hold on the familiar ideas of the past or turned loose of the old ideas to grasp for new patterns of thought. A staggering number of separate, but intricately related ideologies grew and competed for support. this ideological fervour that dominated nineteenth century European thought produced anarchism, undoubtedly the most paradoxical of the "isms." Around a core of commonalities clustered at least eight identifiable varieties of anarchism by 1870. But anarchists, no matter what their ilk, shared certain propositions. From these emerged the paradox--complete individual freedom and a strong sense of social responsibility. This meant that the anarchist's major concern remained the age-old question of man in relation to his society. It did not mean he gave the question an age-old answer.
To achieve individual freedom, anarchists denied authority in any guise, which of course meant that they criticized, unmercifully, the existing society. Depending on the character of their anarchist espousal, they might actively undertake to destroy what they condemned. But whether militant or pacifistic, their method was always social rebellion. Such an attitude of "austere idealism" or "apocalyptic passion" very often created saints and assassins. But it must not be thought that anarchism can equated with nihilism or terrorism. They are not necessarily synonymous. Anarchy is not malign chaos as is so often the pedestrian interpretation. To view Tolstoy, Thoreau, Kropotkin or Godwin as prophets of chaos is to make Hegel the creator of Nazism. Needless to say, such an attitude, almost of necessity, demands a belief in the natural goodness of man; and if not natural goodness, at least the natural sociability of man and an individualistic view of man's nature.
While the academician searches out this relatively orderly definition, anarchism, by its very nature, denies such neatness. Suffice it to say, anarchists rejected dogma in a deliberate attempt to avoid the rigidity that a systematic statement imposes. The anarchist believed in a freedom of choice--in a possession of one's selfness and in the primacy of the individual's ability to judge the best for that selfness. Anarchists were motivated by a consuming desire to achieve the release of the total potential of men. This would be achieved through the use of reason. Above all, anarchists were optimists.
When one understands this, the stereotype impression of the anarchist as only the bearded, bomb-throwing fanatic seems quite strange. George Woodcock suggested that people readily accepted a derogatory image of anarchism because of their fear of its doctrines, that "fear of freedom" enunciated by Erich Fromm. Perhaps also one might attribute the general fear of anarchism to Freud's idea of suppressed guilt coming from the desire to kill one's father--to kill all authority, which of course the anarchist is intent on doing. No matter what the merit of anarchism, by the very nature of its principles it could not missionize. The role of the anarchist was to enlighten by example, it was not to lead people. Certainly Max Stirner, who epitomized individualist anarchism, never suggested any desire to :mount the barricades."
Max Stirner, the unassuming German school teacher and one of the Berlin collection of Young Hegelians, helped Godwin and Proudhon lay the theoretical foundations of anarchist thought.
The idea of the extreme importance of the freedom of the individual in anarchist theory came from Stirner's contribution. Stirner wrote The Ego and His Own as a direct assault on those things in society which he felt prevented this freedom. But the book is more than a polemic. It also details the nature of human freedom and what must be done to attain it. The intent here, then, is to describe how men arrived in bondage in the nineteenth century, how that bondage could be broken, the character of a free individual, and finally to suggest some areas that might reflect the continuing influence of Stirner's ideas.
The tyrannies which prevent the freedom of men evolve out of Stirner's theory of history. While Stirner did not agree with Hegel's conclusions about the nature of history, he used Hegel's dialectic in drawing his own theory.
Stirner divided the history of men into three major epochs--the Ancients, the Moderns and the new men. The Ancients, in the "childhood" of human history, concerned themselves with the natural world, with objects, with experience, with the material. But in their efforts to understand this "world of things, the order of the world , the world as a whole" they asked questions which predicated the end of the very meaning they had achieved. The Ancients asked what was the meaning behind their world and sought to break free from the bound of things. They decided that only be becoming spirit, could they hope to end their relationship with the world. In their search for freedom from the material world--"to get back of the world and above it"--the Ancients created the world of the spirit "and this is the result of the gigantic work of the ancients; that man knows himself as a being without relations and without a world, as spirit." Only the Jews of the ancient people never accepted the spiritual world. The Ancients sought to idealize the real and gave to the West the "holy ghost"--Christianity--the second of the tyrannies.
With the advent of Christianity, man entered into the "youth" of mankind, into the Modern Age. Things spiritual, things of the mind, reason, abstractions, ideals, causes dominated the concern of the Moderns. Men tried to get behind the ideal to understand it. They attempted to make real, the ideal. Hence they produced the absolute spirit in a material body--"and the Word became flesh"--Christ.
From this point on, Christians tried to spiritualize the whole material realm, a task completed by the Reformation when men no longer needed the consecration of the sacraments of the Catholic Church because they had succeeded in putting some of the divine in all things.
Lutheranism...tries to bring spirit into all things as far as possible, to recognize the holy spirit as essence in everything, and so to hallow everything worldly....Hence it was that the Lutheran Hegel was completely successful in carrying the idea through everything. In everything there is reason, holy spirit, or "real is rational."
But who, then, will dissolve the spirit into its nothing? He who by means of the spirit set forth nature as the null, finite, transitory, he alone can bring down the spirit too to like nullity. I can; each one among you can, who does his will as an absolute I; in a word, the egoist can.
But to you the whole world is spiritualized, and has become an enigmatical 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, naught" or a "semblance"? Are we not all ghosts, uncanny beings that wait for "deliverance"--to wit, "spirits"?
The essence of man is man's supreme being; now by religion, to be sure, the supreme being is called God and regarded as an objective essence, but in truth it is only man's own essence; and therefore the turning point of the world's history is that henceforth no longer God, but man, is to appear to man as God.
With the strength of despair Feuerbach clutches at the total substance of Christianity, not to throw it away, no, to drag it to himself, to draw it, the long-yearned-for, ever-distant, out of its heaven with a last effort, and keep it by him forever. Is not that a clutch of the uttermost despair, a clutch for life or death, and is it not at the same time the Christian yearning and hungering for the other world?
The supreme being is indeed the essence of man but, just because it is his essence and not he himself, it remains quite immaterial whether we see it outside him and view it as "God," or find it in him and call it "Essence of Man" or "Man." I am neither God nor Man, neither the supreme essence nor my essence, and therefore it is all one in the main whether I think of the essence as in me or outside of me.
To Man belongs the lordship (the "power" or dynamis); therefore no individual may be lord, but Man is the lord of individuals;--Man's is the kingdom, the world, consequently the individual is not to be proprietor, but Man, "all," command the world as property--to Man is due renown, glorification or "glory" (doxa) from all, for Man or humanity is the individual's end, for which he labours, thinks, lives, and for whose glorification he must become "man."
So then the separate interests and personalities had been scared away, and sacrifice for the State had become the shibboleth. One must give up himself, and live only for the State. Hereby the latter has become the true person before whom the individual personality vanishes; not I live, but it lives in me. Therefore, in comparison with the former self-seeking, this was unselfishness and impersonality itself. Before this god--State--all egoism vanished, and before it all were equal; they were without any other distinction--men, nothing but men.
But at the same time the labourer, in his consciousness that the essential thing in him is "the Labourer," holds himself aloof from egoism and subjects himself to the supremacy of a society of labourers....People think again that society gives what we need, and we are under obligations to it on that account, owe it everything. They are still at the point of wanting to serve a "supreme giver of all good."
I on my part start from a presupposition in presupposing myself; but my presupposition does not struggle for its perfection like "Man struggling for his perfection," but only serves me to enjoy it and consume it. I consume my presupposition, and nothing else, and exist only in consuming it. But that presupposition is therefore not a presupposition at all: for, as I am the Unique, I know nothing of the duality of a presupposing and a presupposed ego (an "incomplete" and a "complete" ego or man); but this, that I consume my self, means only that I am. I do not presuppose my self, because I am every moment just positing or creating my self, and am I only by being not presupposed but posited, and, again, posited only in the moment when I posit myself; that is, I am creator and creature in one.
Soon that church will embrace the whole world, and you be driven out to the extreme edge; another step, and the world of the sacred has conquered: you sink into the abyss. Therefore take courage while it is yet time, wander about no longer in the profane where now it is dry feeding, dare the leap, and rush in through the gates into the sanctuary itself. If you devour the sacred, you have made it your own! Digest the sacramental wafer, and you are rid of it!
This tearing apart of man into "natural impulse" and "conscience" (inner populace and inner police) is what constitutes the Protestant. The spy and eavesdropper, "conscience," watches over every motion of the mind, and all thought and action is for it a "matter of conscience," that is, police business.
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