56. An Unknown Essay by Max Stirner

Preliminary remarks

It is to John Henry Mackay's credit that he rescued Max Stirner from oblivion, into which the laziness and cowardice of thought had allowed this bold and free spirit to sink for almost half a century. John Henry Mackay's biography of Stirner, “Max Stirner. Sein Leben und sein Werk” (Berlin 1898, Schuster & Loeffler) and its edition “Max Stirner's Smaller Writings” (ibid.) have been honored in detail in this journal. Mackay has devoted a part of his own life to giving contemporaries and posterity an idea of the personality whose greatness he first recognized. Those who wish to gain an idea of the effort that preceded the publication of Mackay's work should read the introduction to his book on Stirner, in which he recounts the story of his ten-year work (1888-1897). Since he pointed out the great thinker, philosophical and unphilosophical prolific writers have exploited the fruits of his labor, usually without showing where their wisdom came from.

I am pleased to be able to present the following columns to John Henry Mackay, which reproduce an essay by Max Stirner that escaped him despite all the effort he put into it, and which Dr. Heinrich H. Houben found during his preliminary work on a comprehensive study of Gutzkow. The reprint is hereby dedicated to the rediscoverer of Stirner.

The essay is contained in the “Telegraph für Deutschland” (No. 6-8, January 1842), edited by Karl Gutzkow. It appears to be a highly valuable document for the development of this thinker. It is an earlier work by Stirner than the essays reprinted by John Henry Mackay in his edition of the “Smaller Writings” (Berlin 1898, Schuster and Loeffler Publishers). The first work by Stirner that Mackay included in this edition is about “The Untrue Principle in Our Education, or Humanism and Realism”. It appeared in the issues of April 10, 12, 14 and 19, 1842 of the “Rheinische Zeitung”. The present review of Bruno Bauer's “Posaune des jüngsten Gerichts” was thus printed about three months before the first of the Stirner works found by Mackay. It cannot have been written much earlier either, because Bruno Bauer's anonymous book, to which it refers, the “Posaune des jüngsten Gerichts über Hegel den Atheisten und An 374

the Christians» was published in 1841. If you read the two essays in succession, you will notice how quickly Stirner progressed on his intellectual journey, especially in these months. In the January essay, Stirner presents himself as a philosopher who is still deeply steeped in Hegelian ideas; in the April essay, we encounter in every sentence the independent views that were to be fully developed in 1844 in The Ego and Its Own. From Hegelian philosophy, which sees the origin of all being in the general world reason and only recognizes the “I” of the individual human being to the extent that it participates and merges into this eternal reason, Stirner must have progressed in this period to his view of the sovereignty of the “I”, the development of which brought his life's work three years later. A few sentences from the essay quoted here already reveal Stirner's own ideas, as in: “But the security against God had been lost to them in the loss of themselves, and the fear of God took root in their contrite minds. They have found themselves again and conquered the shivers of fear; for they have found the word that henceforth can no longer be destroyed, that is eternal, however much they themselves may still struggle and fight against it, until each one of them becomes aware of it. A truly German man - securus adversus deum - has spoken the liberating word, the self-sufficiency, the autarky of the free man” -; or: ”The German alone and he alone manifests the world-historical calling of radicalism, only he alone is radical and he alone is so - without wrong. No one is as relentless and ruthless as he is; for he does not just overthrow the existing world in order to remain standing himself; he overthrows - himself... For the German, destruction is creation and the crushing of the temporal - his eternity.» Such sentences are proof of Stirner's authorship, which is also confirmed by the fact that the essay, like the four essays republished by Mackay: “On the False Principle of Our Education”, “Art and Religion”, “Königsberger Skizzen von Karl Rosenkranz”, “Einiges Vorläufiges vom Liebesstaat” is signed with “Stirner”. The essay reveals that Stirner, through his criticism of Hegel's All-Mind, has gained the idea of the individual ego by recognizing that only the latter can be attributed to what Hegel has attributed to the former. If Hegel's world reason is allowed to become the human ego, then Hegel's world of ideas becomes Stirner's. This transformation was apparently carried out by Stirner in the first few months of 1842. The essay [reproduced below] justifies regarding these months as the most important period in Stirner's development.