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Updated: May 19, 2025
There is, in fact, a whole literature of masculine babbling, ranging from Machiavelli's appalling confession of political theory to the egoistic confidences of such men as Nietzsche, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Casanova, Max Stirner, Benvenuto Cellini, Napoleon Bonaparte and Lord Chesterfield.
The distinction between Saint Augustine and L. Feuerbach is for him purely a superficial and not an essential one; for the "man" of the latter is as foreign to him as the "God" of the former. And so Stirner carries his disinclination to politics, as being inimical to the philosophy of his time, almost to disgust, being herein a genuine son of his country and of his period.
The fight between these two was carried on under a philosophical disguise, as a battle of mind with matter; the question whether the marvellous stories of the gospel came into being through an unconscious myth-creation in the womb of society, or whether they were individually invented by the evangelists broadened into the question whether in the history of the race, mind or matter carried the real weight, and lastly came Stirner, the prophet of modern anarchism Bakunine has taken very much from him and overtopped the sovereign power of consciousness with his sovereign power of the individual.
For a man who only acknowledges one dimension, and only operates with one, considering everything not contained therein as non-existing, cannot form any of the combinations of which life consists, without coming into hopeless conflict with his principles. This Stirner has done, in spite of the vague and imaginary nature of his "union of egoists."
Kropotkin, is regarded everywhere as the father of "Anarchist Communism," which is, to some extent, directly opposed both to the collectivist and evolutionist Anarchism of Proudhon and to the other philosophic and individual Anarchism of Stirner.
That Frederick von Kammacher's new intellectual companion was Max Stirner, was the result of a profound disillusionment. He had been disillusioned in his deep-seated altruism, which until now had completely dominated him. Dense darkness closed in around the tender. The lights of the harbour disappeared completely, and the little cockle-shell with the glass pavilion began to roll considerably.
It is so, if one regards only that which is absolute as entitled to exist; but Stirner would drive everything absolute from its very last positions. And does it follow further from the circumstance that one of these factors has lost its controlling influence over mankind that all the others, because they too are not absolute, should be denied all practical significance?
The dominion of the idea, whether it is religious or humanitarian or moral, is for Stirner mere priest-craft; philanthropy is merely a heavenly, spiritual, but priest-imagined love. Man must be restored, and in doing so we poor wretches have ruined ourselves.
But can it be believed that Stirner has set up an "absolute freedom" all of his own making, to place it in contrast with individuality. In other words, freedom is merely the possibility of living one's individuality, of being an "individual" in Stirner's sense.
In fact, when we analyze ambition and the horror of Minderwertigkeit that goes with it, we shall doubtless find this factor is never entirely absent, while if we were to apply the same pertinacity and subtlety that Jung in his "Wandlungen" has brought to bear in working over the treacherous material of mythology, we might prove with no less verisimilitude than he has shown the primacy of the libido that in the beginning was anger, and that not Anaxagoras' love or the strife of Heraclitus was the fons et origo of all things, that the Ichtrieb is basal, and that the fondest and most comprehensive of all motives is that to excel others, not merely to survive, but to win a larger place in the sun, and that there is some connection between the Darwinian psychogenesis and Max Stirner and Nietzsche, which Adler has best evaluated.
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