Relationship Between Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Stirner - Arguments For Influence

Arguments For Influence

Anselm Ruest: Anselm Ruest reviewed the Nietzsche controversy in his 1906 biography of Stirner and came to the conclusion "that Nietzsche had read Stirner, but withheld mention of him in his writings because he feared that while it was 'a positive philosophy which yearned for life', it was apt to be 'misused by many readers as a justification for petty crimes and cowardly misdeeds.'"

Paul Carus wrote the following in 1914 about their relationship:

Nietzsche has been blamed for appropriating Stirner’s thoughts and twisting them out of shape from the self-assertion of every ego consciousness into the autocracy of the unprincipled man of power; but we must concede that the common rules of literary ethics cannot apply to individualists who deny all and any moral authority. Why should Nietzsche give credit to the author from whom he drew his inspiration if neither acknowledges any rule which he feels obliged to observe? Nietzsche uses Stirner and Stirner declares that it is the good right of every ego to use his fellows, and Nietzsche shows us what the result would be-the rise of the political boss, a brute in human shape, the overman. Nietzsche and other exponents of individualism (1914)

Gilles Deleuze: Gilles Deleuze suggests that Stirner was a critically important negative influence on Nietzsche. From this perspective Stirner's egoism was answered by Nietzsche's self-overcoming and "the theory of the higher man".

We have every reason to suppose that Nietzsche had a profound knowledge of the Hegelian movement, from Hegel to Stirner himself. The philosophical learning of an author is not assessed by the number of quotations, nor by the always fanciful and conjectural check lists of libraries, but by the apologetic or polemical directions of his work itself. We will misunderstand the whole of Nietzsche's work if we do not see 'against whom' its principal concepts are directed. Hegelian themes are present in this work as the enemy against which it fights. Nietzsche never stops attacking the theological and Christian character of German philosophy (the 'Tubingen seminary') - the powerlessness of this philosophy to extricate itself from the nihilistic perspective (Hegel's negative nihilism, Feuerbach's reactive nihilism, Stirner's extreme nihilism) - the incapacity of this philosophy to end in anything but the ego, man or phantasms of the human (the Nietzschean overman against the dialectic) - the mystifying character of so-called dialectical transformations (transvaluation against reappropriation and abstract permutations). It is clear that Stirner plays the revelatory role in all this. It is he who pushes the dialectic to its final consequences, showing what its motor and end results are. But precisely because Stirner still sees things like a dialectician, because he does not extricate himself from the categories of property, alienation and its suppression, he throws himself into the nothingness which he hollows out beneath the steps of the dialectic. He makes use of the question 'which one?' but only in order to dissolve the dialectic in the nothingness of the ego. He is incapable of posing this question in anything but the human perspective, under any conditions but those of nihilism. He cannot let this question develop for itself or pose it in another element which would give it an affirmative response. He lacks a method, a typological method which would correspond to the question. Nietzsche's positive task is twofold: the Overman and Transvaluation. Not 'who is man?' but 'who overcomes man?' 'The most cautious peoples ask today: "How may man still be preserved?" Zarathustra, however, asks as the sole and first one to do so: "How shall man be overcome?" The overman lies close to my heart, he is my paramount and sole concern - and not man: not the nearest, not the poorest, not the most suffering, not the best' (Z IV 'Of the Higher Man', 3, p297) - the allusion to Stirner is obvious).

—Deleuze, Gilles, Nietzsche and Philosophy pp 153-154