Max stirner biography
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These more familiar forms of property rest on notions of right, and involve claims to exclusivity or constraints on use, which Stirner rejects. It is membership of society, and not individual isolation, Stirner suggests, which is humankind’s “state of nature” (271); that is, an early and problematic stage of development whose inadequacies are, in due course, outgrown.
Not least, Stirner’s book appears to have been decisive: in motivating Marx’s break with the work of Feuerbach (whose considerable influence on many of Marx’s earlier writings is readily apparent); in making Marx reconsider the role that concepts of human nature should play in social and political philosophy; and in forcing Marx to think much more clearly about whether, and in what ways, communism should be individualistic.
Third, and finally, Stirner’s best-known work later became one of the founding texts of the political tradition of individualist anarchism.
Stirner’s Life and Work
Stirner was born Johann Caspar Schmidt on 25 October 1806, the only child of lower middle class Lutheran parents living in Bayreuth. Consequently, the rejection of God as a transcendental subject leaves the essential character and failing of religion intact. The bulk of Stirner’s genealogical account is devoted to the modern epoch, and the ancient world is only discussed insofar as it contributes to the genesis of modernity.
The book also generated responses from many of its left-Hegelian targets; Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872), Moses Hess (1812–1875), Arnold Ruge (1802–1880), and others, all ventured into print in order to defend their own views against Stirner’s polemic.
Edward” as Max Stirner is plausible but not incontrovertible.)
Second, Stirner’s work played a related and significant role in the evolution of the thought of Karl Marx.
Max Stirner
Johann Caspar Schmidt (25 October 1806 – 25 June 1856), better known by his pseudonym Max Stirner, was a German philosopher and educator associated with the Young Hegelian circle around Bruno Bauer.[1]
Stirner is chiefly recognized for his 1844 treatise Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum, rendered in English as The Ego and Its Own, which propounds egoism as the assertion of the unique individual's absolute sovereignty, dismissing abstractions like morality, religion, and the state as illusory "spooks" that alienate the self from its own power.[1]
His radical critique of liberalism, humanism, and communism drew vehement opposition from contemporaries including Karl Marx, who devoted substantial portions of The German Ideology to refuting him, yet Stirner's emphasis on individual autonomy later informed strains of individualist anarchism despite his obscurity and impoverished later years.[1]
Biography
Early Life and Family Background
Johann Kaspar Schmidt, who later adopted the pseudonym Max Stirner, was born on October 25, 1806, in Bayreuth, Bavaria, as the only child of the lower-middle-class Lutheran couple Albert Christian Heinrich Schmidt and Sophia Eleonora, née Reinlein.[1][2] His father worked as a wind instrument maker.[2]The family moved to Erlangen the year after his birth, where Albert Schmidt died of tuberculosis in 1807.[3][4] Sophia Eleonora subsequently remarried the pharmacist Heinrich Ballerstedt, but the union proved unhappy and ended in separation after several years.[3][2]Following the marital dissolution, the young Schmidt was sent to live with his godfather in Bayreuth.[3] Details of his early childhood remain sparse, though it occurred amid modest economic conditions in a post-Napoleonic German context.[5][1]Education and Formative Influences
Johann Kaspar Schmidt, who later adopted the pseudonym Max Stirner, was born on October 25, 1806, in Bayreuth, Bavaria, to lower-middle-class Lutheran parents; his father died when he was six months old, after which he was raised primarily by his mother and an aunt to facilitate his continued schooling.[1] In 1819, at age 13, Schmidt returned to Bayreuth to live with his aunt and entered the Gymnasium illustre, a prestigious classical secondary school, following preparatory tutoring by a gymnasium student named Imhof; he skipped initial lower classes and spent the next eight years there, consistently ranking in the upper percentiles of his class.[6]In 1826, Schmidt began undergraduate studies in philosophy at the University of Berlin, attending three lecture series by G.W.F.From the perspective of the individual as the center of the universe, Stirner logically denies the concepts of duty and obligation. During the 1848 revolution, Stirner did not participate and gradually faded from the literary scene. However, this characterisation of Stirner’s position can be questioned. The central feature of the resulting “union of egoists” is that it does not involve the subordination of the individual.
The latter, in particular, adumbrates some of the themes of Stirner’s own later work; for example, contrasting the training of individuals to an alien calling, on the one hand, with the cultivation of the predisposition to become “sovereign characters”, on the other. In this respect, it stands at some distance from Stirner’s account of egoistic love.
The popular but doubtful description of Stirner as a “nihilist” is encouraged by his explicit rejection of morality. First, he values “ownness” not as one good amongst many, but as the most important good, a good which trumps all others. Stirner's work continues to be studied and discussed in the context of the 19th-century philosophical landscape.
Even the pathos of Stirner’s death is said to reflect the egoist’s refusal to love life, or fear death, excessively (Mackay 1914: 212). He warned that collectivism's insistence on permanence and universality stifles the ego's creative power, reducing persons to interchangeable parts of a machine-like whole.
Communists, he argued, combat egoism not by abolishing all hierarchies but by instituting a new one under the banner of universal brotherhood, wherein the individual's might yields to the collective's moral imperative.Central to Stirner's dismantling of collectivism was his rejection of property as a communal abstraction. In his reply to “Stirner’s Critics”, he imagines two pleasingly familiar street scenes to illustrate this model of egoistic union: in the first, children happen upon each other and spontaneously engage in the “comradeship of play [Spielkameradschaft]”; and, in the second, Moses Hess (one of the critics in question) bumps into friends before all decide to adjourn for a drink, not out of loyalty, but in the expectation of pleasure (Stirner 1914: 295–6).
Stirner sometimes seems torn as how best to elucidate this basic account of egoistic social relations.
In this context, Stirner has plausibly been understood as offering both a provocation and a knowing attempt at humour, utilising a dialectical structure in order to advance his own anti-Hegelian position (De Ridder: 2008). There is, as a result, no inconsistency in Stirner’s frequent use of an explicitly evaluative vocabulary, as when, for example, he praises the egoist for having the “courage” (265) to lie, or condemns the “weakness” (197) of the individual who succumbs to pressure from their family.
Two features of Stirner’s position emerge as fundamental.