Strange that neither of these philosophers of individuality,
Nietzsche or Stirner, ever took the trouble to investigate what an
individual is! Stirner halts before this most momentous question
of his world-conception, and so he overlooks that his ego, his own
individuality, this supreme sovereign standing beyond right and wrong,
the ultimate authority of everything, is a hazy, fluctuating, uncertain
thing which differs from day to day and Anally disappears.
The individuality of any man is the product of communal life. No one
of us could exist as a rational personality were he not a member
of a social group from which he has imbibed his ideas as well as
his language. Every word is a product of his intercourse with his
fellow-beings. His entire existence consists in his relations toward
others and finds expression in his attitude toward social institutions.
We may criticize existent institutions but we can never do without any.
A denial of either their existence or their significance proves an
utter lack of insight into the nature of personality.
We insert here a few characteristic sentences of Stirner's views, and
in order to be fair we follow the condensation of John Henry Mackay
(pp. 135-192) than whom certainly we could find no more sympathetic or
intelligent student of this individualistic philosophy.
Here are Stirner's arguments:
The ancients arrived at the conclusion that man was spirit. They
created a world of spirit, and in this world of spirit Christianity
begins. But what is spirit? Spirit has originated from nothing. It
is its own creation and man makes it the center of the world. The
injunction was given, Thou shalt not live to thyself but to thy spirit,
to thy ideas. Spirit is the God, the ego and the spirit are in constant
conflict. Spirit dwells beyond the earth. It is in vain to force the
divine into service here for I am neither God nor man, neither the
highest being nor my being. The spirit is like a ghost whom no one has
seen, but of whom there are innumerable creditable witnesses, such as
grandmother can give account of. The whole world that surrounds thee
is filled with spooks of thy imagination. The holiness of truth which
hallows thee is a strange element. It is not thine own and strangeness
is a characteristic of holiness. The specter is truly only in thine
ownhood..... Right is a spleen conferred by a spook; might, that is
myself. I am the mighty one and the owner of might.... Right is the
royal will of society. Every right which exists is created right. I am
expected to honor it where I find it and subject myself to it. But what
to me is the right of society, the right of all? What do I care for
equality of right, for the struggle for right, for inalienable rights?
Right becomes word in law. The dominant will is the preserver of the
states. My own will shall upset them. Every state is a despotism.
All right and all power is claimed to belong to the community of the
people. I, however, shall not allow myself to be bound by it, for I
recognize no duty even though the state may call crime in me what
it considers right for itself. My relation to the state is not the
relation of one ego to another ego. It is the relation of the sinner
to the saint, but the saint is a mere fixed idea from which crimes
originate (Mackay, pages 154-5).
It will sometimes be difficult to translate Stirner's declarations in
their true meaning; for instance: "I am the owner of mankind, I am
mankind and shall do nothing for the benefit of another mankind. The
property of mankind is mine. I do not respect the property of mankind.
Poverty originates when I can not utilize my own self as I want to. It
is the state which hinders men from entering into a direct relation
with others. On the mercy of right my private property depends. Only
within prescribed limits am I allowed to compete. Only the medium of
exchange, the money which the state makes, am I allowed to use. The
forms of the state may change, the purpose of the state always remains
the same. My property, however, is what I empower myself to. Let
violence decide, I expect all from my own.
"You shall not lure me with love, nor catch me with the promise of
communion of possessions, but the question of property will be solved
only through a war of all against all, and what a slave will do as
soon as he has broken his fetters we shall have to see. I know no law
of love. As every one of my sentiments is my property, so also is
love. I give it, I donate it, I squander it merely because it makes me
happy. Earn it if you believe you have a right to it. The measure of
my sentiments can not be prescribed to me, nor the aim of my feelings
determined. We and the world have only one relation toward each other,
that of usefulness. Yea, I use the world and men." (Pp. 156-157.)
As to promises made and confidence solicited Stirner would not allow
a limitation of freedom. He says: "In itself an oath is no more
sacred than a lie is contemptible." Stirner opposes the idea of
communism. "The community of man creates laws for society. Communism
is a communion in equality." Says Stirner, "I prefer to depend on the
egotism of men rather than on their compassion." He feels himself
swelled into a temporary, transient, puny deity. No man expresses him
rightly, no concept defines him; he, the ego, is perfect. Stirner
concludes his book: "Owner I am of my own power and I am such only when
I know myself as the only one. In the only one even the owner returns
into his creative nothingness from which he was born. Any higher being
above, be it God or man, detracts from the feeling of my uniqueness and
it pales before the sun of this consciousness. If I place my trust in
myself, the only one, it will stand upon a transient mortal creator of
himself, who feeds upon himself, and I can say,
"_Ich hab mein Sach' auf nichts gestellt._"
"My trust in nothingness is placed.'"
We call attention to Stirner's book, "The Only One and His Ownhood,"
not because we are strongly impressed by the profundity of his thought
but because we believe that here is a man who ought to be answered,
whose world-conception deserves a careful analysis which finally would
lead to a justification of society, the state and the ideals of right
and truth.
Society is not, as Stirner imagines, an artificial product of men who
band themselves together in order to produce a state for the benefit of
a clique. Society and state, as well as their foundation the family,
are of a natural growth. All the several social institutions (kind of
spiritual organisms) are as much organisms as are plants and animals.
The co-operation of the state with religious, legal, civic and other
institutions, are as much realities as are individuals, and any one who
would undertake to struggle against them or treat them as nonentities
will be implicated in innumerable struggles.
Stirner is the philosopher of individualism. To him the individual,
this complicated and fluctuant being, is a reality, indeed the only
true reality, while other combinations, institutions and social
units are deemed to be mere nonentities. If from this standpoint the
individualism of Stirner were revised, the student would come to
radically different conclusions, and these conclusions would show that
not without good reasons has the individual developed as a by-product
of society, and all the possessions, intellectual as well as material,
which exist are held by individuals only through the assistance and
with the permission of the whole society or its dominant factors.
Both socialism and its opposite, individualism, which is ultimately
the same as anarchism, are extremes that are based upon an erroneous
interpretation of communal life. Socialists make society, and
anarchists the individual their ultimate principle of human existence.
Neither socialism nor anarchism are principles; both are factors, and
both factors are needed for preserving the health of society as well
as comprehending the nature of mankind. By neglecting either of these
factors, we can only be led astray and arrive at wrong conclusions.
Poor Stirner wanted to exalt the ego, the sovereign individual, not
only to the exclusion of a transcendent God and of the state or any
other power, divine or social, but even to the exclusion of his
own ideals, be it truth or anything spiritual; and yet he himself
sacrificed his life for a propaganda of the ego as a unique and
sovereign being. He died in misery and the recognition of his labors
has slowly, very slowly, followed after his death. Yea, even after his
death a rival individualist, Friedrich Nietzsche, stole his thunder and
reaped the fame which Stirner had earned. Certainly this noble-minded,
modest, altruistic egotist was paid in his own coin.
Did Stirner live up to his principle of ego sovereignty? In one sense
he did; he recognized the right of every one to be himself, even when
others infringed upon his own well-being. His wife fell out with him
but he respected her sovereignty and justified her irregularities.
Apparently he said to himself, "She has as much right to her own
personality as I have to mine." But in another sense, so far as he
himself was concerned, he did not. What became of his own rights, his
ownhood, and the sweeping claim that the world was his property, that
he was entitled to use or misuse the world and all mankind as he saw
fit; that no other human being could expect recognition, nay not even
on the basis of contracts, or promises, or for the sake of love, or
humaneness and compassion? Did Stirner in his poverty ever act on the
principle that he was the owner of the world, that there was no tie of
morality binding on him, no principle which he had to respect? Nothing
of the kind. He lived and died in peace with all the world, and the
belief in the great ego sovereignty with its bold renunciation of all
morality was a mere Platonic idea, a tame theory which had not the
slightest influence upon his practical life.
Men of Stirner's type do not fare well in a world where the ego has
come into its own. They will be trampled under foot, they will be
bruised and starved, and they will die by the wayside. No, men of
Stirner's type had better live in the protective shadow of a state; the
worst and most despotic state will be better than none, for no state
means mob rule or the tyranny of the bulldozer, the ruffian, the brutal
and unprincipled self-seeker.
Here Friedrich Nietzsche comes in. Like Stirner, Nietzsche was a
peaceful man; but unlike Stirner, Nietzsche had a hankering for power.
Being pathological himself, without energy, without strength and
without a healthy appetite and a good stomach, Nietzsche longed to play
the part of a bulldozer among a herd of submissive human creatures whom
he would control and command. This is Nietzsche's ideal, and he calls
it the "overman." Here Nietzsche modified and added his own notion to
Stirner's philosophy.
Individualistic philosophies are therefore based on an obvious error
by misunderstanding the nature of the individual man, by forgetting
the reality of society and its continued significance for the
individual life. A careful investigation of the nature of the state
as well as of our personality would have taught Stirner that both
the state and the individual are realities. The state and society
exist as much as the individuals of which they are composed,[1] and
no individual can ignore in his maxims of life the rules of conduct,
the moral principles, or whatever you may call that something which
constitutes the conditions of his existence, of his physical and
social surroundings. The dignity and divinity of personality does not
exclude the significance of super-personalities; indeed, the two, super
personal presences with their moral obligations and concrete human
persons with their rights and duties, co-operate with each other and
produce thereby all the higher values of life.
Stirner is onesided but, within the field of his onesided view,
consistent. Nietzsche spurns consistency but accepts the field
of notions created by Stirner, and, glorying in the same extreme
individualism, proclaims the gospel of that individual who on the basis
of Stirner's philosophy would make the best of a disorganized state
of society, who by taking upon himself the functions of the state
would utilize the advantages thus gained for the suppression of his
fellow beings; and this kind of individual is dignified with the title
"overman."
Nietzsche has been blamed for appropriating Stirner's thoughts and
twisting them out of shape from the self-assertion of every ego
consciousness into the autocracy of the unprincipled man of power; but
we must concede that the common rules of literary ethics can not apply
to individualists who deny all and any moral authority. Why should
Nietzsche give credit to the author from whom he drew his inspiration
if neither acknowledges any rule which he feels obliged to observe?
Nietzsche uses Stirner as Stirner declares that it is the good right of
every ego to use his fellows, and Nietzsche shows us what the result
would be--the rise of a political boss, a brute in human shape, the
overman.
Nietzsche is a poet, not a philosopher, not even a thinker, but as a
poet he exercises a peculiar fascination upon many people who would
never think of agreeing with him. Most admirers of Nietzsche belong to
the class which Nietzsche calls the "herd animals," people who have no
chance of ever asserting themselves, and become hungry for power as a
sick man longs for health.
Individualism and anarchism continue to denounce the state, when they
ought to reform it and improve its institutions. In the meantime the
world wags on. The state exists, society exists, and innumerable social
institutions exist. The individual grows under the influence of other
individuals, his ideas--mere spooks of his brain--yet the factors of
his life, right or wrong, guide him and determine his fate. There are
as rare exceptions a few lawless societies in the wild West where a few
outlaws meet by chance, revolver in hand, but even among them the state
of anarchy does not last long, for by habit and precedent certain rules
are established, and wherever man meets man, wherever they offer and
accept one another's help, they co-operate or compete, they join hands
or fight, they make contracts, form alliances, and establish rules, the
result of which is society, the state, with all the institutions of the
state, the administration, the legislature, the judiciary, with all the
intricate machinery that regulates the interrelations of man to man.
The truth is that man develops into a rational, human and humane being
through society by his intercourse with other men. Man is not really an
individual in the sense of Stirner and Nietzsche, a being by himself
and for himself, having no obligations to his fellows. Man is a part
of the society through which he originated and to which he belongs and
to overlook, to neglect and to ignore his relations to society, not to
recognize definite obligations or rules of conduct which we formulate
as duties is the grossest mistake philosophers can make, and this
becomes obvious if we consider the nature of man as a social being as
Aristotle has defined it.
[1] See the author's _The Nature of the State_, 1894, and
_Personality_, 1911.