The Existential Question

If the examination of the relationship between Stirner and political and moral nihilism has thrown up little more than inconclusive answers, the current chapter, which looks at the most familiar form of nihilism in modern parlance, existential nihilism, offers the opportunity to come down decisively on one side of the argument or the other. Although Stirner has rarely been accused explicitly of being an existential nihilist, it is the sense behind most of the examples of his association with nihilism since World War II. During this time, Stirner has been described as an existentialist far more frequently than as an existential nihilist, but the link between his supposed existentialist characteristics and his nihilistic tendencies is often at least implied.

Carr defines existential nihilism as “the feeling of emptiness and pointlessness that follows from the judgment, ‘Life has no meaning.’” This understanding of nihilism has become so prevalent that Gertz, in his recent book on the subject, barely discusses it in any other sense. Although he recognizes nihilism's complexity and diversity, all definitions, in his analysis, ultimately revolve around the absence of meaning: “Nihilism is not merely the denial that life is inherently meaningful, as nihilism can instead be seen as a particular way of responding to the anxiety caused by the discovery of life's inherent meaninglessness.” The predominance of existential nihilism over all other types of nihilism has been attested to by numerous modern commentators. Crosby attributes its primacy to its widespread use, its ability to subsume other forms, such as moral, epistemological, and cosmic nihilism, and its broad relevance to life in general rather than to a specific discipline. Thus, he concludes that “existential nihilism is the most basic and inclusive, and therefore the most important, form of nihilism.” Carr likewise recognizes existential nihilism as “probably the most commonplace sense of the word,” noting its significance in modern literature (citing Dostoevsky and Camus) and observing that Nietzsche was “preoccupied with this form,” although it might be more accurate to say he invented it.

Existential nihilism can be considered not just the heir to, but also the fulfillment of Nietzsche's infamous prophecy: “What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what is inevitable: the rise of nihilism.”

Max the Obscure

Stirner is commonly regarded as no more than an insignificant, but nonetheless irksome, footnote in the history of German philosophy, a perception, I shall argue, that deserves reconsideration. His influence on subsequent thinkers can often only be surmised, leading at least one observer to suspect a clandestine conspiracy to keep him firmly in the shadows. There are many possible reasons for Stirner's disrepute, not least of which is the explosive nature of his iconoclastic message, which is too unconventional for some and too dangerous for others. Another is that, unlike many of his German predecessors, he makes no attempt to construct a grand philosophical system, but instead articulates the great majority of his ideas in a single work, leading perhaps to their appearing less weighty or significant. Or, equally, it could be because Der Einzige is written in a style that is far from the abstruse complexity found in the work of his predecessor, Hegel, on the one hand, and equally far from the rich, expressive lyricism of his successor, Nietzsche, on the other. In other words, his writing may appear too pellucid to those used to reading Hegel and too dull for admirers of Nietzsche. Whatever the reason, or combination of reasons, for his unpopularity—an issue that will be addressed in more detail in the course of this study—the fact is that Stirner is largely unknown or ignored outside a relatively small circle of anarchists, postanarchists, Marxists, and scholars of (anti-)Hegelianism.

Stirner's lack of prominence is curious when one considers that, even for a time of such intellectual upheaval as the post-Hegelian Vormärz (pre-March period) from 1831 to 1848, Der Einzige is a remarkably radical work. It explicitly rejects as hegemonic myths and fictions (or, in Stirner's terminology, spooks [Spuke] and idées fixes) all the man-made causes to which humans commonly devote themselves, be they institutionalized systems like religion, communism, nationalism, and monarchy, or abstract principles like goodness, truth, freedom, and justice. Rarely, if ever, in the history of ideas has there been such a comprehensive assault on man's convictions and beliefs. Individually, Stirner's Young Hegelian colleagues confronted different elements of the prevailing ideology, as did Feuerbach, for instance, with Christianity and Marx with capitalism, but Stirner assails the entire edifice of human dogma.

The Meaning and History of Political Nihilism

There is little dispute about the meaning of political nihilism. Although the term can be, and has been, used in other contexts, in the history of ideas it is generally considered synonymous with the nineteenth-century phenomenon of Russian nihilism. In other words, political nihilism is the generalized form of Russian nihilism, from which it derives its essential properties. This is evidently the sense in which it is meant by Biedermann when he speaks of Stirner's Der Einzige as a literary version of nihilism, “which … allowed none but the sovereign ego to celebrate its triumphs on the ruins of society.” Likewise for Masaryk when he declares that, in Der Einzige, he “was already advocating political nihilism; … for Stirner, a republic was no longer enough: the state as such is to be abolished.” Perhaps the most colorful instance of Stirner's association with political nihilism is Heman's description of Stirner as an anarchist and nihilist “whose followers want, with dagger, revolver, and bombs, to make themselves owners of the whole world.”

It is significant that all of these comments were written in the quarter century following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 when the memory of this and other acts of violence committed by Russian nihilists was still fresh in the mind. Nonetheless, however negative Stirner's critics meant the association to be, these crimes, shocking though they were, especially in an age where monarchical government was the rule, were carried out as part of an escalating response to the brutal repressiveness of the Russian imperial regime, which was characterized by countless atrocities in the form of indiscriminate massacres, public executions, and mass deportations to Siberia of perceived enemies of the state, be they rebellious Poles or revolting peasants. The Russian nihilists were not, as a rule, unprincipled thugs who practiced violence for its own sake. As the eminent Russianist, Eugene Lampert, writes: “They were rebels because they felt man's inhumanity to man…. They were the conscience of Russia.”

The effective equivalence of political and Russian nihilism is borne out in general usage. In the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, one finds the following definition: “Political nihilism calls for the complete destruction of existing political institutions, along with their supporting outlooks and social structures, but has no positive message of what should be put in their place.”

The Definition of Moral Nihilism

Moral nihilism is defined, simply, as the denial of absolute values and is the type of nihilism which, since the first publication of Der Einzige, has been most frequently used by Stirner's critics to discredit him. Laska goes so far as to view it as the fulcrum of Stirner defamation and demonization: “Whoever labeled Stirner the most extreme, radical, systematic advocate of atheism, immoralism, subjectivism, individualism, egoism, solipsism or the like, meant, even if he did not say so explicitly, that vague concept of ethical nihilism, to which belongs essentially, as already with Jacobi, Hegel, and Rosenkranz, the horror vision of the destructive and apocalyptic, the evil, demonic and satanic.” The justification for the accusation of moral nihilism is to be sought, naturally enough, in Stirner's numerous pronouncements on morality, ethicality, and good and evil (Moral, Sittlichkeit, gut und böse), but before proceeding with their evaluation, it is necessary, once again, to address the familiar issue of terminological ambiguity. Unlike with Russian nihilism, there are no historical figures who readily confess to being moral nihilists, which makes it all the more difficult to identify the term's full range of meanings and connotations.

There is both the implicit and explicit imputation of moral nihilism in much of the censure of Stirner described in chapter 4 above. It is implicit in Bernstein's distinguishing of Stirner's nihilism from Russian nihilism and in Keben's concept of the nihilistic hangover that Stirner's philosophy allegedly engenders. A more recent reference to Stirner's moral decadence (though without mention of the word nihilism), can be found in Helms's Marxist critique of Stirner as a petty-bourgeois proto-fascist. The explicit association of Stirner with ethical nihilism first appeared in Karl Rosenkranz's diary entry concerning the recently published Der Einzige, which included the line: “Theoretically, such nihilism in relation to all ethical pathos cannot develop into anything.” Similar declarations have appeared ever since, as in Laas's description of Stirner's thought as “this nihilistic-Promethean abandonment of all that is moral”; Ströbel's assessment of “Stirner's moral nihilism”; and Schröder's remark about Stirner's “outspoken moral nihilism.”

Philosophy, in attempting to extend the boundaries of human thought, is inevitably divisive, but few philosophers have polarized opinion as much as Max Stirner (1806–1856). This might be thought remarkable considering the fact that he only published one original fulllength work, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, but this singular book is so explosive in terms of both its style and substance that the strong reactions it has evoked ever since its publication in 1844 are hardly surprising. More so, perhaps, is how little known it remains despite the interest it has attracted from admirers like Max Ernst, Herbert Read, and Benjamin Tucker, as well as from detractors like Marx and Engels, Martin Buber, and Albert Camus. For his supporters, Stirner's lack of standing has often been a matter of bemusement, a disturbing example of the wasted talent in human intellectual evolution, that has been the lot of so many thinkers in history who, like Stirner, swam against what was, or would become, the prevailing tide. Among other things, this study aims to explain some of the factors that have inhibited the popularity of Stirner's ideas, although, it should be pointed out for those who have followed this discussion in more recent times, the emphasis here is on the incompatibility of those ideas with the broad patterns of human development rather than on advancing a theory of coordinated marginalization.

There has been a recurrent tendency in Stirner criticism over the years to view his thought from the contextual perspective of the commentator rather than of Stirner himself. This applies particularly to the time between 1880 and 1914 that encompassed both the flowering of anarchism and Nietzsche's initial, enthusiastic reception in Germany and beyond, as well as to the broad periods of post–World War II existentialism and late twentieth-century postmodernism. This inquiry, conversely, endeavors to assess the staunchly unpartisan Stirner, as far as is possible, on his own terms and in the light of his own historical and sociocultural environment. It is not, however, a general account of Stirner's life and work, but tackles instead the specific question of the relationship between Stirner's thought and nihilism.

There are several reasons for adopting this particular focus.

Definitions and Interpretations of Nihilism

The vagueness inherent in nihilism's nonspecificity presents the first obstacle to assessing its relevance to Stirner's thought. Although the word has, since its invention, been in increasingly common usage, there is a remarkable amount of confusion about what nihilism actually means, and only a few of Stirner's accusers on the subject make their definitions clear. Instead, many of them seem to treat its meaning as a given, which only serves to deepen the confusion and misunderstanding. Indeed, far from leading to a reduction in occurrence, the general uncertainty around the interpretation of nihilism has resulted in its liberal and, at times, almost indiscriminate use, thus increasing both the number of possible definitions and their ambiguity. Unless this complex web of meanings is untangled, it is impossible to determine whether Stirner can reasonably be called a nihilist, a task which is made no easier by the fact that standard textbooks on nihilism fail to reach a consensus view on the question of the term's definition. In the absence of clarity, both about nihilism generally and about how it applies to Stirner, it is imperative that this study provide a comprehensive, if relatively brief, account of the history of nihilism, against which Stirner's thought can be measured.

The next two chapters will therefore be concerned with the etymology of nihilism, examining its various definitions, and tracing its development as a concept over time. The focus will be on two central and closely connected themes around which the discussion about Stirner and nihilism often revolves, namely, the relationship between atheism and nothingness on the one hand, and Nietzsche's conception of nihilism on the other. The current chapter will commence with an overview of the interpretations and connotations of nihilism and proceed to an assessment of the evolution of the concept of nihilism from its origins as a polemical term used for the excoriation of irreligion, up until Nietzsche's assimilation of the word into his philosophical project. The following chapter will then concentrate on the formation and development of Nietzschean nihilism and examine the possibility that Stirner's ideas contributed to its genesis. Armed with this knowledge, it will be possible in the following chapters to gain an insight into the different historical perspectives of Stirner's accusers and to understand the implications, and judge the veracity, of their accusations.

Nietzsche's Uncanny Guest

In order to understand the relevance of nihilism to Stirner's thought, there is no more important definition of the term than the one fashioned by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) in the course of his last nine years of lucidity, from 1880 to 1889. In the nearly two and a half centuries of nihilism's semantic evolution up to the present day, Nietzsche plays the pivotal role; the concept of nihilism that bears his name has colored, to a greater or lesser degree, all but the first fifty years of the discussion around Stirner and nihilism. Nietzsche took a word that had recently undergone rapid development, both in its prevalence and complexity, and transformed it into a radical new concept that encapsulated the crisis of Western modernity. Ever since, the common perception of nihilism has been based to a large extent on Nietzsche's diagnosis, not least because of the extraordinary influence he has had on subsequent generations of thinkers, artists, and writers. As Gillespie says: “When it comes to our understanding of nihilism, we are almost all Nietzscheans.”

It is, in a sense, Stirner's misfortune to have been so closely linked to Nietzsche at the time of the decisive, so-called first Stirner renaissance, which was largely brought about by the coincidence of three events: firstly, Hartmann's attack on Nietzsche in 1891 (discussed in more detail below), in which he employed Stirner as a weapon; secondly, the publication of Lauterbach's new edition of Der Einzige in 1893 in Reclam's low-priced, high-circulation Universal-Bibliothek, where he compares the two philosophers in his short introduction; and, thirdly, Nietzsche's meteoric rise to fame in the last decade of the nineteenth century, which inadvertently shone a light on Stirner. One of the abiding outcomes of this concurrence is the assumption that Nietzsche's thought and Stirner's share characteristics and concerns, including those relating to nihilism, a belief that is reinforced by apparent similarities in their writings.

The question that arises from this supposed association is not simply whether there is a fundamental similarity between Nietzschean nihilism and Stirner's thought, but whether such an affinity derives from Nietzsche having known Stirner's writings, and then used, or even plagiarized, them as a component in or an inspiration for his description of the sinister cultural condition that he believed to be engulfing European civilization.

Max Stirner is seen as occupying a minor position in the history of ideas, somewhere between an enfant terrible and the invisible man. This book has attempted to demonstrate that, at least from an unpartisan viewpoint, his ideas constitute an original and valuable contribution to philosophical inquiry and reveal new perspectives in an age of unparalleled skepticism and uncertainty, where the search for an answer to the ancient problem of how to live well is more frenetic than ever. The issue of Stirner's relationship to nihilism is key to an appraisal of his legacy because the orthodox labeling of Stirner as a nihilist, which is so widespread as to have become almost axiomatic, exposes both the crucial themes of his philosophical project and the ideological backdrop to his polarized reception. If, as this study has sought to establish, Stirner's status as a nihilist is doubtful at worst and partial at best, it underlines, among other things, the importance of reevaluating his standing as a thinker and reassessing the substance and significance of his thought.

One of the key findings to come out of this investigation is that Nietzschean or existential nihilism occupies a prominent position in the common (mis-)understanding of Stirner as a nihilist. While Stirner had a limited effect on the development of Russian nihilism, and while moral nihilism may adequately describe Stirner's ethical outlook but not his philosophy as a whole, it is the assumption that he is expounding a doctrine of emptiness, in the sense of meaninglessness, that has continually dogged the debate about Stirner and nihilism, especially since World War II. Stirner's critics in this regard have invariably ignored the fact that his version of nothingness, insofar as the concept plays any significant role in his thought, is meonic, in the form of the “creative nothing” of a transitory individual's life. The equating of Stirner's meonic nothingness with the empty void of existential nihilism is a recurrent misconception in Stirner criticism and one which must be rectified before a coherent picture of his thought can emerge.

Stirner's detractors have also tended to disregard the fact that the central themes of pessimism, like the pernicious effects of the passage of time or the absurdity of human existence, which are a fundamental part of existential nihilism, are entirely absent from Stirner's writings.

Allegations and Denials: The First Hundred Years

Since the first examples of the polemical use of the term nihilism in reference to Stirner following the publication of Der Einzige—namely by Karl Rosenkranz in late 1844 or early 1845, and by an anonymous journalist in 1847—the echoing voices have been both numerous and at times venomous, at least once the hiatus of almost half a century of Stirner's near total obscurity had passed. From the time of the first Stirner renaissance in the 1890s until the present day, the accusations of nihilism have been relentless, to the point where the alleged connection has arguably become a self-perpetuating truism. In this period, there have been at least half a dozen published examples in German alone per decade of Stirner and his ideas being linked to nihilism, and sometimes more than double that. It is not only the prevalence of the accusations of nihilism against Stirner that is remarkable but also the changing usage of the term over time in the relevant books, dissertations, and articles.

That Stirner did not disappear entirely from intellectual memory in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions is evidenced by his brief appearance in two important philosophical works of the 1860s, Lange's Geschichte des Materialismus and Hartmann's Philosophie des Unbewussten. However, as Laska remarks, the few references to Stirner in this period are terse and evasive. One such mention can be found in Karl Grün's 1874 edition of Feuerbach's correspondence and posthumous writings. In his introduction, Grün puts the word nihilism into Feuerbach's mouth: “Thus Max Stirner called him a ‘pious atheist’ and claimed: ‘Feuerbach fled from faith into love.’ … Feuerbach's initial response to Stirner was that his nihilism was also dogmatic.” Feuerbach does use the word Nihilismus in 1860 to describe the ideas of Schopenhauer, but neither in the essay by Feuerbach to which Grün is alluding, which was written fifteen years earlier in 1845, nor elsewhere in his published writings does Feuerbach connect Stirner with nihilism. One can only assume that Grün (1817–1887), who was a Young Hegelian journalist, political theorist, and socialist politician, was applying the increasingly popular term with a combination of poetic license and the benefits of hindsight.