All Things Are Nothing to Me

by Jacob Blumenfeld

  Another difference with this sequence is that all the terms of the triad already exist, in fact, they coexist in the present. There is no resolution in the final term, no future reconciliation to come. Political, social and humane liberalism are all plagued by the same error, and only their entire dissolution will get us beyond them. Political liberalism is tied to the republicanism of the French Revolution (e.g., Rousseau, Kant, Robespierre); social liberalism is Stirner’s phrase for the new ideologies of socialism and communism (that is, before Marx, more related to Proudhon and the utopian socialism of Weitling); finally, humane liberalism is the name Stirner gives to the “critical criticism” of the young Hegelians, especially their form of secular critique which elevates man while lowering God and state (e.g., Feuerbach, Bauer). Remarkable about this political topography is that all three views are not only present, but still influential today. Political liberalism has been renamed “democracy”, and is the key banner around which most political claims are justified; social liberalism, or socialism, still animates the desire for alternatives to capitalism; and humane liberalism, or humanism, is the basic framework for international human rights law and discourse.

  Political liberalism seeks a free state where citizens unite together as a nation under the ideal of political freedom.30 The overthrow of absolute monarchy, the installing of a sovereign republic, the granting of inalienable rights—these are its tropes. Freedom from arbitrary masters—that is its cry. This theory posits a social contract in which individuals agree to give up their power to an authoritative body that governs through representation and is bound by law. Although a republic can be brought about by revolution, the end result is by no means revolutionary. As Stirner argues, “The revolution was not directed against the established, but against the establishment in question, against a particular establishment. It did away with this ruler, not with the ruler.”31 This new ruler or “mundane god”—the state—bestows political liberty on its subjects.32 But as Stirner will later claim, freedom can never be given, only taken.33 Political liberalism fools us into thinking that freedom is a gift. With spite and flare, Stirner indicts this fantasy:

  ‘Political freedom’, what are we to understand by this? Perhaps the individual’s freedom from the state and its laws? No; on the contrary, the individual’s bondage in the state and to the state’s laws. But why ‘freedom’? Because one is no longer separated from the state by intermediaries, but stands in direct and immediate relation to it; because one is a––citizen, not the subject of another… Political freedom, this fundamental doctrine of liberalism, is nothing but a second phase of—Protestantism… Political freedom means that the polis, the state, is free; freedom of religion that religion is free, as freedom of conscience signifies that conscience is free; not, therefore, that I am free from the state, from religion, from conscience, or that I am rid of them. It does not mean my freedom, but the freedom of a power that rules and subjugates me; it means that one of my oppressors, like state, religion, conscience, is free. State, religion, conscience, these oppressors, make me a slave, and their freedom is my slavery.34

  At first glance, Stirner’s critique of political freedom resembles Marx’s criticism of political emancipation from his essay, On the Jewish Question, published the same year, and definitely read by Stirner.35 For both, the “political” sphere does not liberate me but rather separates me from my own particularity, splitting me into a public “citizen” and a private “bourgeois.” In the state, I am only a citizen, never my concrete self, with needs, desires, and interests. For Marx, the state is the alienated social power of human beings. For Stirner, however, the freedom of the state does not derive from some abstraction called “human species-being”, but from me, and the more freedom the state has, the less do I.

  Social liberalism pierces through this veneer of freedom, but goes no farther in rectifying it. In the state of political liberalism, people are all equally “free” in relation to the law (i.e., free from arbitrary masters), but they are not equally free in terms of other aspects of their life, like property or wealth. Although “persons have become equal, their possessions have not.”36 This disparity of possessions creates a new kind of subjection, class domination. For Stirner, such material inequality creates a system of mutual dependency: “The poor need the rich, the rich the poor, the former the rich man’s money, the latter the poor man’s labor. So no one needs another as a person, but as a giver, and thus as one who has something to give, as holder or possessor. So what he has, makes the man. And in having, or in ‘possessions,’ people are unequal.”37

  The social inequality of individuals in a bourgeois state is not due to greed or chance, according to Stirner, but to the basic framework of political liberalism which disregards material possessions when formally accounting for equal freedom before the law. The poor and the rich are unequally dependent on each other not as citizens of right, but as sellers and buyers of possessions, whether that be labor or money. In such a system, the vast majority of individuals are forced to work for others in order to satisfy their needs. Such labor—even in a ‘free’ society—is nothing but a modification of slavery. Stirner uses Adam Smith’s classic pin factory example, as did Hegel, in order to emphasize how workers are subjugated through their own alienated activity:

  Condemning a man to machine-like labor amounts to the same thing as slavery. If a factory worker must tire himself to death twelve hours and more, he is cut off from becoming a human being. He who in a pin-factory only puts on the heads, only draws the wire, works, as it were, mechanically, like a machine. his labor cannot satisfy him, it can only fatigue him. His labor is nothing by itself, has no object in itself, is nothing complete in itself; he labors only into another’s hands, and is used (exploited) by this other.38

  Used and exploited by another, cut off from becoming fully human, performing deadening machine-like work—Stirner’s descriptions are eerily close to Marx’s 1844 Paris manuscripts, unpublished at the time. This makes sense, since both were reading the same sources and listening to the same communist criticisms. For Stirner, however, these communists criticize the unfreedom, inequality and alienation of bourgeois society from a deficient standpoint: the standpoint of labor.39 Recognizing the lies of the bourgeoisie, communists posit labor as the new ground of equality. The standpoint of labor thus becomes the standpoint of critique, and not the object of critique: “This is our equality, or herein we are equal, in that we, I as well as you, and you and all of you, are active or ‘labor’ each one for the rest; in that each of us is a worker. It is labor that constitutes our dignity and our—equality. Labor is our sole value all the same: that we are workers is the best thing about us. All workers (workers, of course, in the sense of workers ‘for the common good’, that is, communistic workers) are equal.”40

  The critique of exploitation and the unmasking of inequality are both positive developments, but they turn problematic once labor is taken to be the “new” essence of man. To Stirner, individuals are always more than any one of their particular properties, including the property of labor-power. Labor-power may be a necessary condition of existence, but its elevation into metaphysical status negates one’s other properties and powers. The identification of the essence of human beings with their ability to work is thus to mistake the historically specific, functional reduction of individuals to mere labor-power in capitalism with a timeless thesis of philosophical anthropology. This critique of the standpoint of labor, written four years before the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels, is now considered a contemporary development.41 Both in this criticism and in his only direct reference to Marx (in which he criticizes the concept of species-being), Stirner is then already our contemporary.42

  The second fault in the communist perspective occurs at the level of political strategy. If possessions are what make people unequal, then an equalizing measure would be to abolish all possessions. No more private property! Where would the property go? Since our intrinsic equality lies in o
ur labor, and since all labor is inherently social, all property should go to society. Society displaces the state as the fundamental sovereign, becoming that by which equality and freedom is recognized, and that from which authority and rights are granted. Another change of masters, Stirner notes, another wheel in the head. “Society, from which we have everything, is a new master, a new spook, a new ‘supreme being’, which ‘takes us into its service and duty!”43 Giving all our property to a new master makes us neither free nor equal, but precisely propertyless. “Let us then do away with personal property. Let no one have anything any longer, let every one be a—bum [Lump]. Let property be impersonal, let it belong to—society.”44 In bourgeois society, we at least have some property to cushion our subjection; in this version of “communism”, we would not even have that.

  With political liberalism, freedom was based on the equal subjection of everyone to the law. With social liberalism, freedom was based on the equal reduction of all to their status as workers. With humane liberalism, the third and final political ideology that Stirner criticizes, freedom is based on the universal humanity of man. Humane liberalism, or humanism, is the movement to humanize all aspects of life, to make life more humane. We are all human beings, and so our humanity should be the criteria for all things.

  If communism was right in wanting to change the exploitation of labor, it did not go far enough in terms of the actual content of labor. Factory labor, farm labor, service work—these are all done only for the end result, the wage. The point of such work is leisure, escape. This is too egoistical, the humanists proclaim, this is only a “worker’s consciousness [Arbeiter-bewusstsein].”45 Instead, we need humanist labor and a humane consciousness. What is the basis of our humanity, according to this view? Self-consciousness, the ability to reason and think: “The restless mind is the true laborer.”46 No prejudice shall be unquestioned, no object unexamined, no limit respected. “The humane liberal wants that labor of the mind which works up all material; he wants the mind, that leaves no thing quiet or in its existing condition, that acquiesces in nothing, analyses everything, criticizes anew every result that has been gained.”47 The critical, reasoning mind becomes the new criteria for humanity. Labor is no longer to be done for egoistical ends, but for the sake of progress and humanity.

  But I am not just human, Stirner responds, I am un-human. Humanity is merely one of my properties, it does not define me, rule me. In fact, no one is a generic human being, “only the unman is an actual human being.”48 To flip an old saying, everything human is alien to me:

  Human beings that are not human beings, what should they be but ghosts? Every actual human being, because he does not correspond to the concept ‘human being’, or because he is not a ‘generic human being’, is a spook. But do I still remain an unman even if I reduced humanity—which towered above me and remained other-worldly to me only as my ideal, my task, my essence or concept—to my own inherent property in me; so that the human being is nothing else than my humanity, my human existence, and everything that I do is human precisely because I do it, but not because it corresponds to the concept ‘human being’? I am actually human and un-human in one; for I am human and at the same time more than human; I am I of this, my mere property.49

  Humane liberalism accomplishes what political and social liberalism began: the eradication of individuality. First, individual authority was displaced onto the state as law; then, individual property was given to society through labor; now, individual self-determination is given to humanity through reason. The end result is a generic working, thinking, human citizen; that is what I must be in order to count in society, to be a part of the whole. Without these basic conditions met, I do not even exist. Together, they let me appear and grant me freedom.

  This freedom, however, is not mine, since it is based on renouncing myself. For Stirner, anything which fixes me in a single identity, property, or essence can never make me free. Political liberalism, rooted in political liberty, made the state free. Social liberalism, grounded in the desire for social equality, made society free. Humane liberalism, seeking a world of human equality, made humanity free. State, society, humanity—a change of masters. What we give up in all cases is our ownness, the power to uniquely determine our own non-identity. Egoists!—the liberals shout. But that too is their spook.

  Notes

  1. A more literal translation of this central phrase would be “I have set my affair on nothing” or “I have based my cause on nothing.” However, the more lyrical “All things are nothing to me” better expresses Stirner’s meaning, which is that nothing alien should rule me—whether that be a cause, concern, affair, object, relation, idea, or anything at all.

  2. EO, 294

  3. EO, 262

  4. See Stepelevich, “Max Stirner as Hegelian” (1985).

  5. EO, 192. Allgemeinheit can also be translated as “universality”, which would fit better with Hegel. However, I stick to the standard translation here to emphasize Stirner’s unique use of the term.

  6. EO, 212: “By this cement [law] the total of the state is held together.” Without it: “… anarchy and lawlessness.”

  7. EO, 192

  8. EO, 59: “A fixed idea may also be perceived as ‘maxim’, ‘principle’, ‘standpoint’ and the like.” See also EO, 200: “the state is the ruling principle.”

  9. EO, 68

  10. This statement sounds extreme, but only if one reads it as implying that such dominion has been completely accomplished. For Stirner, that is impossible.

  11. “Alles Heilige ist ein Band, eine Fessel.” EO, 192

  12. EO, 165

  13. EO, 181

  14. For Alcibiades, Lysander, Luther, see EO, 190–192. For Christ “the insurgent”, see EO, 280–281. For “perverters of the law”, see EO, 192.

  15. Stirner criticizes Proudhon’s theory of property for being too “compassionate”, since he blames others for robbing us, instead of faulting us for not robbing the rich. Stirner concludes that the real problem is not property as such, but propertylessness, or its alienation: “In general, no one grows indignant at his, but at alien property. They do not in truth attack property, but the alienation of property. They want to be able to call more, not less, theirs; they want to call everything theirs. They are fighting, therefore, against alienness [Fremdheit], or, to form a word similar to property [Eigentum], against alienty [Fremdentum].” EO, 279

  16. See EO, Part I, “A Human Life,” 13–18, where Stirner outlines the psychological development of human beings in three stages: the realist child, the idealist youth, and the egoist adult. This life sequence was appropriated from Hegel, e.g. §396 of Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind (1971). On the similarities and differences between Hegel and Stirner’s developmental schemas, see Stepelevich, “Ein Menschenleben: Hegel and Stirner” in Moggach, The New Hegelians (2006), 166–175.

  17. EO, 36: “Yes, the whole world is haunted! Only is haunted? Indeed, it itself haunts, it is uncanny through and through, it is the wandering seeming-body [Scheinleib] of a spirit, it is a spook. What else is a ghost other than an apparent body, but a real spirit? Well, the world is ‘vain,’ is ‘nothing’, is only dazzling ‘semblance’ [Schein]; its truth is only the spirit; it is the seeming-body of a spirit.”

  18. See Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 1, Section 4, MECW 35.

  19. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, MECW 5: 192

  20. See the opening to Der Einzige: “What is not supposed to be my concern! First and foremost the good cause, then God’s cause, the cause of mankind, of truth, of freedom, of humanity, of justice; further, the cause of my people, my prince, my fatherland; finally, even the cause of mind and a thousand other causes. Only my cause is never to be my concern.” EO, 5

  21. August von Cieszkowski, an even earlier young Hegelian critic, already did this in his Prolegomena Zur Historiosophie (1838), partially translated in The Young Hegelians: An Anthology, ed. Stepelevich.

  22. On psychology, EO 13–18
; on philosophy, EO 19–62; on history, EO 62–89; on politics, EO 89–135.

  23. EO, 220

  24. Hegel (1977), Phenomenology of Spirit, paragraph 33, page 19–20, italics mine. Here is the full quote: “In modern times, however, the individual finds the abstract form ready-made; the effort to grasp and appropriate it is more the direct driving-forth of what is within and the truncated generation of the universal than it is the emergence of the latter from the concrete variety of existence. Hence the task nowadays consists not so much in purging the individual of an immediate, sensuous mode of apprehension, and making him into a substance that is an object of thought and that thinks, but rather in just the opposite, in freeing determinate thoughts from their fixity so as to give actuality to the universal, and impart to it a spiritual life. But it is far harder to bring fixed thoughts into a fluid state than to do so with sensuous existence. The reason for this was given above: fixed thoughts have the ‘I’, the power of the negative, or pure actuality, for the substance and element of their existence, whereas sensuous determinations have only powerless, abstract immediacy, or being as such. Thoughts become fluid when pure thinking, this inner immediacy, recognizes itself as a moment, or when the pure certainty of self abstracts from itself––not by leaving itself out, or setting itself aside, but by giving up the fixity of its self-positing, by giving up not only the fixity of the pure concrete, which the ‘I’ itself is, in contract with its differentiated content, but also the fixity of the differentiated moments which, posited in the element of pure thinking, share the unconditioned nature of the ‘I’. Through this movement the pure thoughts become Notions, and are only now what they are in truth, self-movements, circles, spiritual essences, which is what their substance is.” Hegel (1977), 19–20