Radical worldviews

What Feuerbach declared to be the highest essence of man, which Bruno Bauer claimed had only been found through criticism as a worldview: to view “man” completely impartially and without preconditions, is the task that Max Stirner (1806-1856) set himself in his book “The Ego and Its Own,” published in 1845. In this man, thinking has borne one of its ripest fruits. He was thus able to truly attain freedom through thought, because he had the courage and strength to fight to the end against the illusions that had made man dependent. Through Stirner, who was truly a free thinker, one can see how great man's tendency is to throw himself into the arms of some power or other. Does Bruno Bauer, for example, not believe that he can completely liberate man by wanting to make him a thinking human being? But does he not thereby make him dependent again, namely on thinking? Man should not be a slave to religion, law, state, legislation, etc.; he should not even produce a certain structure of thought through his thinking, so that he is not dependent on it. But they should surrender themselves unreservedly to thinking, make themselves slaves to it. To Stirner, anyone who surrenders to a power, who allows themselves to be determined by it, appears to be possessed. And it is quite irrelevant whether people are possessed by an infinite divine primordial being or by the being they have created as their own. Stirner finds: "With the power of despair, Feuerbach grasps the entire content of Christianity, not to throw it away, no, to seize it, to pull it, the long-awaited, ever-elusive, from heaven with a final effort and keep it with him forever. Is this not a grasp of last-ditch desperation, a grasp of life and death, and is it not at the same time the Christian longing and desire for the hereafter?