Stirner: Two Essential Sources

 

Max Stirner accused the socialist atheist Ludwig Feuerbach of being half-baked: he replaced belief in God with a new idol, a belief in sacred humanism or man, therefore, in Stirner’s view, replacing one form of abstract idol worship of a fictional object, with but another ideology for people to worship, enslave themselves too and alienate them from themselves in service of an essentialist spook.

 

On Page 21 of the Byington translation of Max Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own, this contrast is presented: “To this we reply: The supreme being is indeed the essence of man, but, just because it is his essence and not he himself, it remains quite immaterial whether we see it outside him and view it as ‘God,’ or find it in him and call it ‘Essence of Man.’”

 

Here Stirner is objecting to the spiritual reliance on essentialist philosophizing by secular humanist Feurerbachn that rejects religion but not the worship of sacred isms, replacing the empty, external abstraction, God, with a putatively internal abstraction, Man or mankind.

 

Let us look at these same sentences in the Landstreicher translation of Max Stirner’s The Unique And His Property, Page 29: “To this we reply: The highest essence may be the human essence, but precisely because it is his essence and not he himself, it doesn’t matter at all whether we see it outside him and view it as God, or find it in him and call it ‘human essence’ or the ‘human being.’”

 

Note that Stirner the anti-essentialist declares that a claim that humans have essence does not belong to he (the individual) himself, the concrete existing person. If human essence is aligned to God outside the particular person, or attributed by Feuerbach or others as inherent to the nature of each human, both are spooks, to be discarded and ignored.