Winckelmann was the originator of the classical Greek ideal in Western art and aesthetics, the arguable founder of modern art history whose History of the Art of Antiquity (1764) was published to wide acclaim and established him as one of the most celebrated intellectuals of his time. He was stabbed to death by a piece of rough trade in a hotel room in Trieste.
Although he left Germany to pursue a long and highly successful career in Rome as librarian and president of antiquities at the Vatican, he decided to return home for the first time in 1768. However, having reached Munich, he suddenly broke off his journey and seems to have experienced a mental breakdown. Leaving the company of his travelling party, Winckelmann returned incognito to Italy, arriving at Trieste in July. He lodged at the city's largest inn and began an affair with a certain Francesco Arcangeli. After several nights of passion, Arcangeli was desirous not of Winckel-mann's person but his medals and finery. He strangled Winckelmann and stabbed him repeatedly in the genitals. Arcangeli was later apprehended and executed by being broken on the wheel.
The life of the philosopher is often that of the neurotically obsessive. This is particularly true of Kant. At 4:55 a.m. Kant's footman, Lampe, would march into his master's room and cry, “Herr Professor, the time is come.” Kant would be seated at his breakfast table by the time the clock struck five. He drank several cups of tea, smoked his only pipe of the day, and began to prepare his morning lecture.
Kant would go downstairs to his lecture room and teach from seven until nine and then return upstairs in order to write. At precisely 12:45, Kant would call to his cook, “It has struck three-quarters,” which meant that lunch was to be served. After taking what he referred to as a “dram,” he would begin lunch at precisely one o'clock. Kant eagerly anticipated lunch, both because it was his only real meal of the day and, his being gregarious, it was an occasion for conversation. Indeed, Kant believed—and I think he is right— that conversation aided digestion. He followed Lord Chesterfield's rule, which meant that the number of guests should never be fewer than the graces or more than the muses and was usually between four and eight. Kant never talked philosophy and women were never invited.
After the meal was over, Kant would take his famous walk, by which the good wives of Königsberg would be able to tell the time (the one time he missed his walk was when he was too absorbed in the reading of Rousseau's Émile). Kant walked alone so that he could breathe through the mouth, which he thought healthier. He was disgusted by perspiration, and during summer walks would stand perfectly still in the shade until he dried off. He also never wore garters, for fear of blocking the circulation of the blood.
After an evening of reading, writing and reverie, he would go to bed at exactly ten o'clock. Kant would then proceed to enswathe himself in the bedclothes in a very exact manner, like a silkworm in its cocoon, and repeat the name “Cicero” several times. He slept extremely well.
Kant's decline was slow and harrowing and is described in powerful, poignant if slightly plodding detail by his former student and servant Wasianski. The latter's memoir was translated with interpolations by Thomas de Quincey as The Last Days of Immanuel Kant.
Kant had suffered from a stomach affliction for many years, which eventually robbed him of all appetite except for bread and butter with English
cheese. He suffered from frequent and dreadful nightmares with the constant apparition of murderers at his bedside. What was worse, Kant was fully cognizant of his decline and had little desire to see friends and enjoy the pleasures of company.
On his last day, Kant was speechless and Wasianski gave him a tiny quantity of water mixed with sweet wine in a spoon until he whispered his last word, “Sufficit” (“It is enough”). Against his wishes for a simple funeral, Kant lay in state for sixteen days and the lavish funeral procession was attended by thousands. Kant fever continued to spread across the German-speaking world and the rest of Europe.
Although at times a great stylist, the body of Kant's philosophy is too often clothed in the rather elaborate formal academic dress of its time. Kant was the first major modern philosopher to make his living as a professional teacher of the subject in a way that would be followed by Fichte, Hegel and others (although Kant also taught a dazzling range of other subjects: geography, physics, astronomy, geology and natural history). Sadly, this professional deformation makes much of what Kant says appear unduly abstruse.
If one were forced to try to summarize Kant's mature philosophy in a sentence, one could do worse than follow the great Kant scholar W. H. Walsh in saying, “He wished to insist on the authority of science and yet preserve the autonomy of morals.” This is the gigantic task that still faces us: how are we to reconcile the disenchantment of the universe brought about by the Copernican and Newtonian revolution in natural science with the human experience of a world infused with moral, aesthetic, cultural and religious value? Is such reconciliation possible or are science and morals doomed to drift apart into a general nihilism? Such is still, I believe, our question. Hölderlin, the great German poet, called Kant the “Moses of our nation.” One wonders which of his many successors fancy themselves as Christ.
The artist Joseph Farington writes rather flatly of the death of Burke,
He died of an atrophy and suffered little pain. He had spit blood and wasted away.
The probable cause was tuberculosis of the stomach and reports suggest that Burke was lucid until the end, being read to in his final hours. By contrast, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke's description of the death of Marie Antoinette positively oozes sentimentality and a florid nostalgia. Burke describes her as the most “delightful vision” who ever “lighted on this orb,” which “she hardly seemed to touch.” Burke goes on, melodramatically, in classical Tory fashion,
The age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.
It is precisely such sentimentality and veneration of tradition and the status quo against which Mary Wollstonecraft would rail in A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790). She wrote the latter as a direct reply to what she saw as Burke's shallow emotionalism and support for social inequality. Wollstonecraft followed it up with A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), arguably the most important work in feminist moral and political philosophy.
Wollstonecraft's overriding concern was to show that women are self-governing, autonomous moral beings who can attain political equality through the use of reason and the availability of education. Burke's Tory sentimentality simply reinforces women's submissive position in society and justifies what Wollstonecraft saw as the legal prostitution of conventional marriage, where the wife was effectively the husband's chattel. The root of women's oppression lies in the belief that they are morally inferior to men. Therefore, the declaration of the rights of man in the French Revolution requires a second declaration of the rights of women and the radical reform of society that will allow for total sexual equality.
Wollstonecraft did more than anyone else to show that the personal is political and vice versa, and she led a turbulent personal life. Leaving England in 1792, she spent two years in France, and had a child out of wedlock in Paris with Gilbert Imlay, an American speculator. After being abandoned by Imlay, Wollstonecraft tried to commit suicide twice, once using laudanum and the second time throwing herself into the River Thames.
A couple of years later, Wollstonecraft became the lover of William Godwin, the first philosopher of anarchism. To the amusement of their friends, the couple got married and had a daughter, also called Mary, the future author of Frankenstein and wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Tragically, the placenta did not come away during childbirth and Wollstonecraft died of a fever eight days later.
In the years after the French Revolution in 1789, political power was divided between the Girondins, a more moderate faction, and the radical Jacobins, whose leader was Robespierre.
Although an enthusiastic and active supporter of the French Revolution, becoming secretary to the Legislative Assembly and representative for Paris, Condorcet spoke against the execution of King Louis XVI. From that time, he was considered a Girondist. In October 1793, a warrant was issued for Condorcet's arrest and the great mathematician went into hiding for five months. It was during this clandestine existence that he wrote his most influential book, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, which argued in classical Enlightenment fashion for the progress of human beings towards an ultimate perfection. However, Condorcet became convinced that the hiding place was imperfect and decided to flee Paris. Two days later, he was apprehended outside the city and two days after that he was found dead in his prison cell. Some people believe that Condorcet poisoned himself, while others insist that he was murdered by his Jacobin opponents.
In the South Junction at the south end of the main building of University College London on Gower Street, the body of Jeremy Bentham sits upright inside a wooden cabinet with glass windows, a little like an antique telephone box.
In a text called Auto-Icon: or, Farther uses of the dead to the living, Bentham gave careful instructions for the treatment of his corpse and its presentation after his demise. If an icon is an object of devotion employed in religious ritual, then Ben-tham's “Auto-Icon” was conceived in a spirit of irreligious jocularity. The “Auto-Icon” is a godless human being preserved in their own image for the small benefit of posterity. Bentham writes that he planned the “Auto-Icon”
to the intent and with the desire that mankind may reap some small benefit in and by my decease, having hitherto had small opportunities to contribute thereto while living.
As such, Bentham's body is a posthumous protest against the religious taboos surrounding the dead and embodies the founding spirit of University College London, which was established in 1828 as the first place of higher education in England free from the grip of the Anglican Church.
Bentham's body was dissected and his skeleton picked clean and stuffed with straw. He was dressed in a favourite suit of clothes, complete with his favorite stick, “Dapple,” in his hand.
Bentham requested that his body be seated in a chair, “in the attitude in which I am sitting when engaged in thought.” Bentham was greatly interested in the reports he had read from New Zealand about the islanders’ way of mummifying heads and wished for his own head to be so treated. Indeed, in the last ten years of his life Bentham used to carry around the glass eyes that were to adorn his dead head. Sadly, the mummification process went badly wrong and a wax head was used as a replacement. The original, rotting and blackened head used to be kept on the floor of the wooden box between Bentham's feet. However, the head became a frequent target for student pranks, being used on one occasion for football practice in the front quadrangle. In 1975, some students stole the head and demanded that a ransom be paid to the charity Shelter. After the ransom demand was reduced from 100 pounds to 10, the head was discovered in a locker at Aberdeen railway station in Scotland. The original head is now refrigerated in the vaults of University College London. It is reported that the “Auto-Icon” attends meetings of the College Council and that its presence is recorded with the words “Jeremy Bentham—present but not voting.”
Goethe thought it
entirely impossible for a thinking being to think of its own non-existence, of the termination of its thinking and life.
True enough, one might concur. However, the inference that Goethe drew from the inconceivability of death in the mind of the living was personal immortality. That is, if we cannot conceive of the end of our life, then our life has no end. This would seem to be confirmed by Goethe's famous last words, “Mehr Licht” (“More light”).
However, there is another interpretation of Goethe's last words. Thomas Bernhard tells a story about a man from Augsburg in Germany who was committed to a lunatic asylum for insisting at every opportunity that Goethe's final words were not “Mehr Licht,” but “Mehr Mcht” (“No more”). Although six doctors refused to commit the man to the madhouse, a seventh finally agreed under severe pressure from the good burghers of Augsburg. Some time later, the doctor was awarded the Goethe badge of the City of Frankfurt, the great poet's birthplace.
Apparently, in 1805 Goethe was filled with foreboding that either he or Schiller would die that year. By January, they were both struck down with a serious illness. Goethe eventually recovered, although convalescence took several months. Schiller, his body weakened by the effects of the pneumonia and pleurisy with which he had struggled since 1791, was not so lucky. On 1 May he contracted double pneumonia and drifted in and out of delirium.
His last words were full of doubt: “Ist das euer Himmel, ist das euer Hölle?” (“Is that your heaven, is that your hell?”)
Goethe and Schiller were buried next to each other in Weimar.
The great philosopher of the Ego became Non-Ego at the age of fifty-two. Fichte contracted typhoid from his wife, who was tending wounded soldiers during the Wars of Liberation that raged from 1813 to 1815, when Prussia was trying to rid itself of the occupying French forces.
It was a suitably patriotic death for the philosopher whose last major work, Addresses to the German Nation (a book which has been through fifty editions in German alone), exhorted the German people to expel their Napoleonic invaders and restore national unity and moral purpose. He writes,
All death in nature is birth, and in dying the intensification of life straightaway becomes visible. Death does not kill. On the contrary, behind the old obscurities, enlivening life begins and develops. Death and birth are only the struggle of life with itself, in order that life may forever appear transfigured.
Fichte is buried next to Hegel in the Dorotheenkirche in Berlin.
For Hegel, death is what he calls “the labour of the negative.” In this light, it might appear that Hegel's entire work is a philosophy of death insofar as the method that he calls “dialectic” is a relentless movement of negation that spans all areas of existence.
Experience itself is understood by Hegel as the annulment of an old object and the emergence of a new object for consciousness, an object that itself will be negated. Experience, then, might seem like a long death march. However, crucially, the via dolorosa of negation does not lead to a dead end but to what Hegel calls “the negation of the negation,” which is how he understands what he calls “Spirit.” The latter is nothing other than the movement of life itself. So, what looks like a philosophy of death might more accurately be described as an attempt to understand life in its experiential and historical unfolding.
In this sense, what Hegel says about Christ's death is indicative and fascinating. Christianity, for Hegel, is the highest form of religion because in its central act the universal God takes on a particular human form in the incarnation. Christ is the God-man who is exposed to mortality in the painful death of crucifixion. In the language of the Trinity, the first person of God the Father becomes the second person of God the Son.
However, matters do not end there, for the consequence of the “death of God” (and Hegel anticipates Nietzsche's famous words by nearly a century, although his meaning is quite different) is the third person of the Trinity: Spirit. But the notion of Spirit tends to cause confusion. Hegel did not believe in anything like disembodied spirits or the immortality of the soul. For Hegel, Spirit does not live narrowly in the life of the Church, as in Catholicism, but in the life of the community itself. Spirit, then, is simply a living community which knows itself and determines itself freely. Interpreted in this way, and freed from its mystical shell, one can see how closely Hegel's idea of Spirit resembles what might appear to be its materialist inversion in Marx's communism. Although Marx famously said that it was necessary to stand Hegel's philosophy on its head in order to see its rational kernel, he always professed himself “the pupil of that mighty thinker.” But that, as they say, is another story.
As for Hegel's own death, it was less than Christ-like. At the end of August 1831, a cholera epidemic swept across Germany from the east. The so-called “Asiatic cholera” had first been detected among British soldiers in India in 1817 and had reached Russia by 1823. In 1832, 800 people died of the disease in the impoverished East End of London. The cause was usually bad drinking water.
In Berlin, between August and the end of the epidemic in January 1832, there were 2,500 cases of cholera. It would appear that Hegel was one of its victims. His body betrayed signs of the infection, such as ice-cold blue face, hands and feet. After his death, Hegel's wife protested that he had died because of complications due to a stomach ailment from which the philosopher had been suffering since a trip to Paris in 1827.
Many of Hegel's biographers sympathize with his wife and have accepted her version of events. However, the evidence assembled by Dr. Helmut Döll in “Hegels Tod” seems to point in the opposite direction. His wife's insistence that “Mein seliger, geliebter Mann” (“my blessed and beloved husband,” as she puts it in a letter written after Hegel's death) had not died from cholera was probably due to the stigma surrounding the burial of cholera victims. Like lepers, they were usually buried at night, without ceremony, and in a separate graveyard.
What is the connection between Hegel and the Brooklyn Bridge? In the year of Hegel's death, favourite student and protégé Johann August Röbling—who was rumoured to have written a 2000-page thesis on Hegel's concept of the universe—left Prussia for the USA. After developing a revolutionary technique of bridge-building using wire rope and a truss system, Röbling was awarded the commission for the Brooklyn Bridge and began work in 1867. Sadly, his foot was badly damaged in a ferryboat accident and Röbling died from tetanus infection sixteen days later, even though his injured toes had been amputated.
Vast, heavy, gothic and incredibly solid, the Brooklyn Bridge spans and reconciles two opposed shores in a way that still appears to defy the laws of gravity. Like Hegel's system, at the time of its opening the Brooklyn Bridge was by far the largest and most impressive work of its kind in the world. Like the Brooklyn Bridge, the vast architecture of Hegel's system rests on sand.
In 1806, as Hegel was writing his monumental Phenomenology of Spirit, Hölderlin, his close friend and former fellow student, was forcibly sent to a clinic for the mentally ill in Tübingen, southern Germany. He was placed in the care of the celebrated Dr. Autenrieth, inventor of a face mask that he applied to his patients to stop them screaming. Medical articles on Hölderlin tend to agree that he was suffering from catatonic schizophrenia. Judged incurable and given a maximum of three years to live, Hölderlin was released from the clinic into the care of a humble artisan, Ernst Zimmer, with whom he stayed for the remaining thirty-one years of Zimmer's life. Hölderlin died from pleurisy some years later, aged seventy-three.
Shortly before his death, he was presented with a new edition of his poems by Christoph Schwab. After leafing through the pages, apparently Hölderlin said,
Yes, the poems are genuine, they are from me, but the title is false; never in my life was I called Hölderlin, but rather Scardanelli or Salvator Rosa or the like.
“Hölderlin” also liked to call himself “Buonarroti” and “Killalusimeno.”
Schelling was a roommate with Hegel and Hölderlin at the Theological Seminary in Tübingen, to which he had been admitted at the unusually tender age of fifteen and a half. Unlike Hegel, whom Schelling called “the old man” and who had great difficulty in obtaining a university position, Schelling was appointed to a prestigious professorship at Jena when he was twenty-three.
Between 1795 and 1809, Schelling produced an astonishing range of philosophical work that seemed to keep changing year by year. There is a story of an English student of his from the early 1800s called Henry Crabb Robinson. Apparently, Schelling asked Robinson whether the serpent was not characteristic of English philosophy. Robinson replied that he thought it emblematically German, as, like Schelling, it shed its skin every year. Schelling riposted that the English only see the skin and not what lies beneath.
In 1841, the elderly Schelling was appointed Professor of Philosophy at the University of Berlin. He was brought in by the authorities to try to eradicate the fever of Hegelianism that some people thought was sweeping across German intellectual life like cholera. His eagerly awaited inaugural lecture was attended by a vast crowd, including Kierkegaard, Engels and Bakunin. Although the cure for Hegelianism was not discovered, Schelling died peacefully in Switzerland in his eightieth year.
Along with Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis is the quintessential Romantic philosopher. Deeply influenced by Fichte's concept of the Ego defined by the activity of endless striving, Novalis writes,
Inward goes the mysterious path. In us or nowhere is eternity with its worlds, the past and future.
He espoused what he called “magic idealism,” which begins from the premise that “the world is animated by me,” and claims that language is that magical medium for shaping the world. However, in a move that would influence contemporary deconstructive thinking, Novalis did not believe that language was adequate as a way of giving voice to the eternity within us. To put this in other terms, because the human being is finite, the infinite will always escape us. The name that the Romantics gave to this gap between the finite and the infinite was irony, and Friedrich Schlegel writes that “Philosophy is the real homeland of irony.” For the German Romantics, the most appropriate medium for the expression of this ironic failure is the fragment or the witty aphorism. To this end, in the late 1790s, Novalis and Schlegel published collections of fragments in their hugely influential journal, the Athenaeum. They famously compare the fragment to a hedgehog:
A fragment, like a miniature work of art, has to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a hedgehog.
Against a systematic philosopher like Hegel, they write,
It is equally fatal to the spirit to have a system and not to have a system. It will simply have to combine the two.
In the condition that the Romantics saw as the homeless-ness of modern human beings, it is only the poet who can lead humanity home, a theme that is reiterated in much English Romanticism.
Novalis is the only thinker in this book who studied mining (apart from Leibniz). He worked in the administration of the Saxon salt works in Weissenfels until his premature death in his twenty-ninth year. After a period of deteriorating health and having suffered a stroke, Novalis sent for his friends. On 25 March 1801 he fell asleep as Friedrich Schlegel sat beside him, listening to his brother Karl playing the piano. He never woke up.
At the end of his peculiar yet powerful short essay, “On the Puppet Theatre,” Kleist ponders the nature of grace. Given the restless nature of human consciousness, Kleist concludes that grace will only appear in bodily form in a being that
has either no consciousness at all or an infinite one, which is to say, either in the puppet or a god.
On the afternoon of 21 November 1811, in a suicide pact, Kleist shot his friend Henriette Vogel through the chest and then emptied the pistol in his mouth. Apparently they had a table and some coffee brought from a nearby café to enjoy the view before they topped themselves. Both were buried the following day at the precise spot where they had died. Suicide is therefore a return to a state of grace. The essay on the puppet theatre concludes, “This is the final chapter in the history of the world.”
With savage historical irony, the location of Kleist's and Henriette's suicide—on the shore of the Wahnsee in southwest Berlin—was the place where the murder of the European Jews was decided some 130 years later.
Schopenhauer is perhaps the modern philosopher who said most about death and whose unrelenting pessimism exerted a vast influence that can be felt in Freud and existentialism, and continues to be felt in writers such as John Gray.
Schopenhauer is the Eeyore of Continental philosophy, insisting that existence is really some sort of mistake and “life is an expiation of the crime of being born.” That said, Schopenhauer does have a point: if the purpose of human life is not suffering, then human beings are ill adapted to its true purpose. Affliction, pain, illness and woe are everywhere. Human life is a sheer restlessness for Schopenhauer, a constant inconstancy that shows itself most clearly in the tragi-comedy of sexual desire. He writes,
We begin in the madness of carnal desire and the transport of voluptuousness, we end in the dissolution of all our parts and the musty stench of corpses.
Schopenhauer was a notorious misogynist. He wrote that “marrying means, to grasp blindfold into a sack hoping to find out an eel in an assembly of snakes.” In 1820, he was found guilty of a charge of battery brought against him by a seamstress. The philosopher was particularly sensitive to noise and had become so enraged by the loud talking of the seamstress on the landing outside his room that he pushed her down a flight of stairs. He was obliged to pay her a monthly allowance until her death. When she finally expired, some twenty years later, Schopenhauer wrote, “Obit anus, abit onus” (“The old woman dies, the burden is lifted”).
For Schopenhauer, death is the reason for philosophizing and life is a constant dying in a state of suffering. The human being is an animal metaphysicum and our metaphysical need has its root in trying to stand face-to-face with mortality. Life, then, is literally a mortgage, a contract with death:
Life is to be regarded as a loan received from death, with sleep as the daily interest on this loan.
The problem of suicide haunts Schopenhauer. His father killed himself in 1805. But if life is as imperfect as Schopenhauer insists, then why not kill oneself? What possible reason can there be to live? As Dale Jacquette rightly argues, it would appear that Schopenhauer positions himself for an enthusiastic defence of suicide. However, he insists that suicide is a cowardly act. Why?
The answer lies in his metaphysics. The basic argument of Schopenhauer's greatest philosophical work, The World as Will and Representation, is that the world is simply a series of fleeting appearances. Behind these appearances there lies a vast, irrational, impenetrable and merciless Will. Therefore, and this thought finds its home in Freud, we do not really will but are willed by an unconscious agency over which we have no power. The problem with suicide, then, is that it maintains the illusion of wilfulness. For Schopenhauer, the only permissible suicide is the self-starvation of the ascetic, which we will see below with the example of Simone Weil.
Schopenhauer's view of the Will has a peculiar corollary: the possibility of an afterlife. If it is true that we are willed by an implacable and immortal Will, if all material things, ourselves included, are but effects of such a Will, then the life of that Will cannot be said to end with our death. Thus, death is not total annihilation, but the decomposition and reconstruction of individual beings into new forms.
This is what Schopenhauer calls—in a way that echoes the Stoics and Daoists—palingenesis (rebirth). Therefore, little bits of Schopenhauer or anybody else (even the loathed seamstress) might be lurking in your pencil, your jacket or your breakfast cereal. Schopenhauer's material appearance underwent palingenesis after a second heart attack and lung infection. He was found dead sitting in his chair on 21 September 1860.
Heine's writing and wit were always closer to Diderot or Laurence Sterne than his German contemporaries. He once remarked that if a fish in water were asked how it felt, it would reply, “Like Heine in Paris.” Appropriately, he died there, probably from syphilis. His final words were, “God will pardon me. It's his métier.”
The young Karl Marx wrote in a note to himself,
There is no other road for you to truth and freedom except that leading through the brook of fire [Feuerbach]. Feuerbach is the purgatory of the present times.
Although now best known as a precursor to Marx, Feuerbach was the most widely read and controversial philosopher in Germany in the late 1830s and 1840s. Because of his radical views, he never received a university professorship and was obliged to live on the profits of his wife's share in a porcelain factory in Bruckberg, Germany. When the porcelain business cracked and went bankrupt in 1859, Feuerbach and his wife lived in straitened circumstances. The money for Feuerbach's medical care after the stroke that led to his death had to be raised by contributions from supporters of the newly founded German Social Democratic Party.
After having simply denied the possibility of personal immortality in “Thoughts on Death and Immortality,” written when he was only twenty-six, Feuerbach radicalized his critique of Christianity in his later work. Christianity is essentially the elevation and objectification of an ideal of human perfection into divine form: the person of Christ. Human beings then proceed to alienate themselves from this perfection. What Christians worship when they kneel is nothing other than themselves in an alienated, idealized form. The philosophical cure consists in overcoming alienation, demystifying Christianity and bringing human beings towards a true self-understanding. For Feuerbach, this means that philosophy becomes anthropology, the science of humanity. In a diary entry from 1836, he writes,
Away with lamentations over the brevity of life! It is a trick of the deity to make an inroad into our mind and heart in order to tap the best of our sap for the benefit of others.
Stirner didn't think that Feuerbach was nearly radical enough in his critique of religion. In The Ego and Its Own (1845), he rejects all religious concepts, moral norms and social conventions. It remains the classic statement of individualistic anarchic egotism and is a terrific read. Stirner writes,
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.
The Ego and Its Own attracted a great deal of critical attention, and evidence of its influence can be found in the fact that Marx and Engels spend several hundred pages of The German Ideology picking apart “Saint Max” line by line.
But Stirner's success was short-lived and the remainder of his life was dismal. His later books had no success, and his second wife left him, saying later that he was a sly and unpleasant man. He fell into severe poverty and was imprisoned on two occasions.
On 25 June 1856, Stirner was stung on the neck by a flying insect and died a month later from the resulting fever.
