/lit/ - Literature

>In his study of Nietzsche, Ludwig Klages was prompted to commemorate the author Stirner as a "sheer demoniacal dialectician." He concedes to him that his thinking, in comparison to Nietzsche's, is "often more radical, less circumlocutory, analytically more exact", and that he "gives ultimate conclusions, for the most part, with more conciseness." Klages regards Stirner as that "antipode of Nietzsche, who in any case should be taken seriously." Stirner, he says, is the reason why Nietzsche is of paramount importance, because "the day on which Stirner's program becomes the will-guiding conviction of all, this alone would suffice for it to be the 'doomsday' of mankind."

>A philosopher of completely different intellectual background, the Marxist Hans Heinz Holz, expressed a quite similar view. He warned that "Stirner's egoism, if practically realized, would lead to the self-destruction of mankind." The ex-Marxist Leszek Kolakowski develops a similar apocalyptic vision when confronted by 'The Ego'. The "destruction of alienation", that Stirner aims for, he says, amounts to "the return to authenticity", and this would be "nothing else than the destruction of culture, the return to animality [...] the return to the pre-human status." Even Nietzsche appears, according to Kolakowski, "weak and inconsistent compared to him [Stirner]." And Roberto Calasso, laureate of the "Premio Nietzsche" of 1989, writes: "From certain quarters is to be heard, that it goes without saying that a professional philosopher does not deal with such a matter as Stirner [...] from the realm of culture Stirner still remains sequestered [...] Stirner's presence is particularly perceptible [...] in authors who are completely silent about him or who talk about him in unpublished texts, which is to say, in Nietzsche and Marx." Calasso too regards Stirner's "Egoist" or rather "Owner" as an "artificial barbarian", an "anthropological monster" etc.. 'The Egoist' is the "writing on the wall", signalling the doom of occidental culture.

>Edmund Husserl does not name him in any of his texts, letters etc.; this, however, not on grounds that he did not know Stirner's ideas or that he considered them insignificant. No, the intrinsic reason, which was passed down probably by accident, was that he wanted to protect his students (and perhaps himself?) against their "temptational power". Another case is that of Carl Schmitt, who was ready to disclose something of his secretive relationship to Stirner, kept since his youth, only after being detained in 1946 in a prison of the Allies (which he experienced as an existential affliction). Theodor Adorno once admitted to his inner circle that it was Stirner alone who had "let the cat out of the bag". However, he took care to avoid arguing such ideas or even mentioning Stirner's name.

http://www.lsr-projekt.de/poly/ennietzsche.html