Untimely Meditations 127of Klinger lying in our living room Oh/ he said, Ί was really fooled
by Klinger. He was a philistine; no, I do not feel drawn to him, but to
Stirner, yes indeed!' A solemn expression spread over his face. While I
gazed at him intendy, his countenance changed again. He made some-
thing like a shooing-away, defensive movement with his hand and said in
a whisper: 'Now I have told you, and I did not want to mention it. Forget
what I said. People will claim that I am a plagiarist, but you will not do
that; I know it' " (Bernoulli 238). According to Ida Overbeck, Nietzsche
described Stirner's work to his student Baumgartner "as the boldest and
most consequential since Hobbes." Nietzsche, as we know, was not a
patient reader, but he was quite thorough. He rarely read books from
cover to cover, but he read through them with an unerring instinct for
the aspects that were revealing and stimulating. As Ida Overbeck
reported: "He told me that when reading an author he was always struck
by short sentences; he would attach his own thoughts to them and build
a new structure on the existing pillars that presented themselves in this
way" (Bernoulli 240).
What was it that made Stirner such a pariah in philosophy, yet at the
same time so attractive to Nietzsche? Perhaps Nietzsche saw his own
philosophy confirmed in Stirner's. Later he flirted with the aura of
depravity on his own; in Stirner's work, he could preview his own enter-
prise through the lens of the ostracized.
In the philosophy of the nineteenth century prior to Nietzsche,
Stirner was without doubt the most radical nominalist. The consistency
with which he pursued nominalist destruction might appear foolish even
today, particularly to the philosophical establishment, but it was nothing
short of brilliant. Stirner concurred with medieval nominalists who des-
ignated general concepts, especially those pertaining to God, as nothing
more than breath devoid of reality. He discovered a creative power in the
essence of man that creates phantoms, then winds up oppressed by its
own creations. Ludwig Feuerbach had already developed this idea in his
critique of religion, and Marx had applied this structure of productiv-
ity—which becomes a prison for the producer—to work and society. To