Max Stirner Archive

A collection of works by and on the subject of philosopher Max Stirner.

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When one looks to the bottom of anything, i.e. searches out its essence, one often discovers something quite other than what it seems to be; honeyed speech and a lying heart, pompous words and beggarly thoughts, etc. By bringing the essence into prominence one degrades the hitherto misapprehended appearance to a bare semblance, a deception.

Max Stirner: The Ego and It’s Own (1844)

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It is easily understood that the conflict over what is revered as the highest essence can be significant only so long as even the most embittered opponents concede to each other the main point — that there is a highest essence to which worship or service is due. If one should smile compassionately at the whole struggle over a highest essence, as a Christian might at the war of words between a Shiite and a Sunnite or between a Brahman and a Buddhist, then the hypothesis of a highest essence would be null in his eyes, and the conflict on this basis an idle play. Whether then the one God or the three in one. whether the Lutheran God or the Être suprême or not God at all, but “Man,” may represent the highest essence, that makes no difference at all for him who denies the highest essence itself, for in his eyes those servants of a highest essence are one and all-pious people, the most raging atheist not less than the most faith-filled Christian.

Max Stirner: The Ego and It’s Own (1844)

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Max Stirner and Me - Bunker Magazine

It was a rather odd moment I encountered the other day when I found myself arguing with a poster on an internet forum about Julius Evola, the obscure Italian traditionalist writer, and using the philosophy...

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The State has always one purpose: to limit, control, subordinate the individual and subject him to the general purpose… Through its censorship, its supervision, and its police the State tries to obstruct all free activity and sees this repression as its duty, because the instinct of self-preservation demands it. The State does not permit me to use my thoughts to their full value and communicate them to other men… unless they are its own… Otherwise it shuts me up.

Max Stirner (1806-1856), German philosopher (via indizombie)