Max Stirner
In 1845, the German philosopher Max Stirner published The Ego and Its Own, a work that would attach his name permanently to the currents of individualism, ethical egoism, and egoist anarchism.
Born on 25 October 1806 in Bayreuth, a citizen of the Kingdom of Bavaria, Stirner pursued an education that took him across several institutions — the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and the University of Königsberg. He worked in the German language throughout his career, occupying himself as a philosopher, writer, translator, and teacher at a Gymnasium. During his years in Berlin he moved among the Young Hegelians, the loose circle of thinkers who gathered around and then pushed beyond the philosophy of Hegel. His associations with individualism and solipsism, alongside ethical egoism and egoist anarchism, mark the intellectual territory he chose to inhabit, one defined by a radical centering of the self against collective claims of state, religion, and society.
Stirner died in Berlin, with the date recorded variously as 25 or 26 June 1856. He left behind The Ego and Its Own as the primary document of his thought — a text that, in associating him with egoist anarchism and the broader tradition of individualist philosophy, continued to draw readers and provoke argument long after his death in the German capital at the age of forty-nine.
Quotes by Max Stirner
Max Stirner's insights on:
Yes, yes, children must early be made to practise piety, godliness, and propriety; a person of good breeding is one into whom 'good maxims' have been instilled and impressed, poured in through a funnel, thrashed in and preached in.
Christianity has aimed to deliver us from a life determined by nature, from the appetites as actuating us, and so has meant that man should not let himself be determined by appetites.
The divine is God's concern; the human, man's. My concern is neither the divine nor the human, not the true, good, just, free, etc., but solely what is 'mine,' and it is not a general one, but is - 'unique,' as I am unique. Nothing is more to me than myself!
What else was Diogenes of Sinope seeking for than the true enjoyment of life, which he discovered in having the least possible wants?
When one is anxious only to live, he easily, in this solicitude, forgets the enjoyment of life. If his only concern is for life, and he thinks “if I only have my dear life,” he does not apply his full strength to using, i. e., enjoying, life.
I do not step shyly back from your property, but look upon it always as my property, in which I respect nothing. Pray do the like with what you call my property!