Untimely Meditations 125knowledge? Nietzsche provided the answer in the sequel to the sentence
just cited: "knowledge must turn the goad back onto itself" (1,306; HL
§8).
Nietzsche once confessed to a friend that he would have liked to live
in the 1840s. At that time, one author in particular had taken a stand
against the machinists of historical and naturalist logic. Max Stirner, the
author in question, wrote that the free and lively spirit "knows that peo-
ple stand in a religious or believing attitude not only toward God, but
toward other ideas as well, like right, the State, law; he recognizes posses-
sion in all places. So he wants to break up thoughts by thinking" (Stirner
148). Stirner was a philosophical agitator who experimented with the
notion of inversion years before Nietzsche did. This philosopher
expressed his anarchic protest against the supposedly ironclad logic of
nature, history, and society in a work that was published in the year of
Nietzsche's birth. Under the pseudonym Max Stirner, Johann Caspar
Schmidt, who was a teacher at the Educational Institution for Young
Ladies in Berlin, published his book Der Einige und sein Eigentum (The
Ego and His Own, 1844), which caused quite a sensation at the time and,
owing to its individualist and anarchist radicalism, was officially dismissed
by the juste-milieu of philosophy, as well as by dissidents, as scandalous
or crazy. Privately, however, many readers were mesmerized by this
author. Marx was prevailed upon to write a critique of this work. His cri-
tique grew longer than the book under discussion, and in the end he did
not publish it Ludwig Feuerbach wrote his brother that Stirner was "the
most brilliant and open writer I have ever encountered" (Laska 49); how-
ever, he said nothing about this writer in public This secrecy surround-
ing Stirner persisted later as well. Edmund Husserl once referred to the
"tempting power" of Stirner, but failed to mention Stirner in his own
works. Carl Schmitt was deeply impressed by Stirner as a young man and
was again "haunted" by him in 1947 in his jail cell. Georg Simmel refused
to have anything to do with this "strange type of individualism."
There seems to have been a remarkable silence on Nietzsche's part as
well. At no point in his works did he mention the name Stirner; just a few