Definitions and Interpretations of Nihilism

The vagueness inherent in nihilism's nonspecificity presents the first obstacle to assessing its relevance to Stirner's thought. Although the word has, since its invention, been in increasingly common usage, there is a remarkable amount of confusion about what nihilism actually means, and only a few of Stirner's accusers on the subject make their definitions clear. Instead, many of them seem to treat its meaning as a given, which only serves to deepen the confusion and misunderstanding. Indeed, far from leading to a reduction in occurrence, the general uncertainty around the interpretation of nihilism has resulted in its liberal and, at times, almost indiscriminate use, thus increasing both the number of possible definitions and their ambiguity. Unless this complex web of meanings is untangled, it is impossible to determine whether Stirner can reasonably be called a nihilist, a task which is made no easier by the fact that standard textbooks on nihilism fail to reach a consensus view on the question of the term's definition. In the absence of clarity, both about nihilism generally and about how it applies to Stirner, it is imperative that this study provide a comprehensive, if relatively brief, account of the history of nihilism, against which Stirner's thought can be measured.

The next two chapters will therefore be concerned with the etymology of nihilism, examining its various definitions, and tracing its development as a concept over time. The focus will be on two central and closely connected themes around which the discussion about Stirner and nihilism often revolves, namely, the relationship between atheism and nothingness on the one hand, and Nietzsche's conception of nihilism on the other. The current chapter will commence with an overview of the interpretations and connotations of nihilism and proceed to an assessment of the evolution of the concept of nihilism from its origins as a polemical term used for the excoriation of irreligion, up until Nietzsche's assimilation of the word into his philosophical project. The following chapter will then concentrate on the formation and development of Nietzschean nihilism and examine the possibility that Stirner's ideas contributed to its genesis. Armed with this knowledge, it will be possible in the following chapters to gain an insight into the different historical perspectives of Stirner's accusers and to understand the implications, and judge the veracity, of their accusations.

Nietzsche's Uncanny Guest

In order to understand the relevance of nihilism to Stirner's thought, there is no more important definition of the term than the one fashioned by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) in the course of his last nine years of lucidity, from 1880 to 1889. In the nearly two and a half centuries of nihilism's semantic evolution up to the present day, Nietzsche plays the pivotal role; the concept of nihilism that bears his name has colored, to a greater or lesser degree, all but the first fifty years of the discussion around Stirner and nihilism. Nietzsche took a word that had recently undergone rapid development, both in its prevalence and complexity, and transformed it into a radical new concept that encapsulated the crisis of Western modernity. Ever since, the common perception of nihilism has been based to a large extent on Nietzsche's diagnosis, not least because of the extraordinary influence he has had on subsequent generations of thinkers, artists, and writers. As Gillespie says: “When it comes to our understanding of nihilism, we are almost all Nietzscheans.”

It is, in a sense, Stirner's misfortune to have been so closely linked to Nietzsche at the time of the decisive, so-called first Stirner renaissance, which was largely brought about by the coincidence of three events: firstly, Hartmann's attack on Nietzsche in 1891 (discussed in more detail below), in which he employed Stirner as a weapon; secondly, the publication of Lauterbach's new edition of Der Einzige in 1893 in Reclam's low-priced, high-circulation Universal-Bibliothek, where he compares the two philosophers in his short introduction; and, thirdly, Nietzsche's meteoric rise to fame in the last decade of the nineteenth century, which inadvertently shone a light on Stirner. One of the abiding outcomes of this concurrence is the assumption that Nietzsche's thought and Stirner's share characteristics and concerns, including those relating to nihilism, a belief that is reinforced by apparent similarities in their writings.

The question that arises from this supposed association is not simply whether there is a fundamental similarity between Nietzschean nihilism and Stirner's thought, but whether such an affinity derives from Nietzsche having known Stirner's writings, and then used, or even plagiarized, them as a component in or an inspiration for his description of the sinister cultural condition that he believed to be engulfing European civilization.

Max Stirner is seen as occupying a minor position in the history of ideas, somewhere between an enfant terrible and the invisible man. This book has attempted to demonstrate that, at least from an unpartisan viewpoint, his ideas constitute an original and valuable contribution to philosophical inquiry and reveal new perspectives in an age of unparalleled skepticism and uncertainty, where the search for an answer to the ancient problem of how to live well is more frenetic than ever. The issue of Stirner's relationship to nihilism is key to an appraisal of his legacy because the orthodox labeling of Stirner as a nihilist, which is so widespread as to have become almost axiomatic, exposes both the crucial themes of his philosophical project and the ideological backdrop to his polarized reception. If, as this study has sought to establish, Stirner's status as a nihilist is doubtful at worst and partial at best, it underlines, among other things, the importance of reevaluating his standing as a thinker and reassessing the substance and significance of his thought.

One of the key findings to come out of this investigation is that Nietzschean or existential nihilism occupies a prominent position in the common (mis-)understanding of Stirner as a nihilist. While Stirner had a limited effect on the development of Russian nihilism, and while moral nihilism may adequately describe Stirner's ethical outlook but not his philosophy as a whole, it is the assumption that he is expounding a doctrine of emptiness, in the sense of meaninglessness, that has continually dogged the debate about Stirner and nihilism, especially since World War II. Stirner's critics in this regard have invariably ignored the fact that his version of nothingness, insofar as the concept plays any significant role in his thought, is meonic, in the form of the “creative nothing” of a transitory individual's life. The equating of Stirner's meonic nothingness with the empty void of existential nihilism is a recurrent misconception in Stirner criticism and one which must be rectified before a coherent picture of his thought can emerge.

Stirner's detractors have also tended to disregard the fact that the central themes of pessimism, like the pernicious effects of the passage of time or the absurdity of human existence, which are a fundamental part of existential nihilism, are entirely absent from Stirner's writings.

Allegations and Denials: The First Hundred Years

Since the first examples of the polemical use of the term nihilism in reference to Stirner following the publication of Der Einzige—namely by Karl Rosenkranz in late 1844 or early 1845, and by an anonymous journalist in 1847—the echoing voices have been both numerous and at times venomous, at least once the hiatus of almost half a century of Stirner's near total obscurity had passed. From the time of the first Stirner renaissance in the 1890s until the present day, the accusations of nihilism have been relentless, to the point where the alleged connection has arguably become a self-perpetuating truism. In this period, there have been at least half a dozen published examples in German alone per decade of Stirner and his ideas being linked to nihilism, and sometimes more than double that. It is not only the prevalence of the accusations of nihilism against Stirner that is remarkable but also the changing usage of the term over time in the relevant books, dissertations, and articles.

That Stirner did not disappear entirely from intellectual memory in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions is evidenced by his brief appearance in two important philosophical works of the 1860s, Lange's Geschichte des Materialismus and Hartmann's Philosophie des Unbewussten. However, as Laska remarks, the few references to Stirner in this period are terse and evasive. One such mention can be found in Karl Grün's 1874 edition of Feuerbach's correspondence and posthumous writings. In his introduction, Grün puts the word nihilism into Feuerbach's mouth: “Thus Max Stirner called him a ‘pious atheist’ and claimed: ‘Feuerbach fled from faith into love.’ … Feuerbach's initial response to Stirner was that his nihilism was also dogmatic.” Feuerbach does use the word Nihilismus in 1860 to describe the ideas of Schopenhauer, but neither in the essay by Feuerbach to which Grün is alluding, which was written fifteen years earlier in 1845, nor elsewhere in his published writings does Feuerbach connect Stirner with nihilism. One can only assume that Grün (1817–1887), who was a Young Hegelian journalist, political theorist, and socialist politician, was applying the increasingly popular term with a combination of poetic license and the benefits of hindsight.

In ‘The Stoics on Conceptions and Concepts’, Katerina Ierodiakonou offers an account of the Stoics’ distinction between ennoiai and ennoēmata (‘conceptions’ and ‘concepts’), and also of the distinctions suggested by the standard Stoic terminology of concepts also mentioned above: notably, prolēpseis (‘preconceptions’), phusikai ennoiai (‘natural conceptions’), and koinai ennoiai (‘common conceptions’). All these terms appear intended to point to general notions that play a central role in the acquisition of human knowledge, but it remains puzzling how exactly the Stoics understood them or why they introduced them into their doctrine in the first place. Ierodiakonou addresses these issues, as well as further questions debated in the secondary literature. These include whether all human beings necessarily possess concepts or just have the ability to possess them, what is the content of conceptions and how it is determined, what is the ontological status of conceptions and concepts, and what are their epistemological functions.

Experience is the cornerstone of Epicurean philosophy and nowhere is this more apparent than in the Epicurean views about the nature, formation, and application of concepts. ‘The Epicureans on Preconceptions and Other Concepts’ by Gábor Betegh and Voula Tsouna aims to piece together the approach to concepts suggested by Epicurus and his early associates, trace its historical development over a period of approximately five centuries, compare it with competing views, and highlight the philosophical value of the Epicurean account on that subject. It is not clear whether, properly speaking, the Epicureans can be claimed to have a theory about concepts. However, an in-depth discussion of the relevant questions will show that the Epicureans advance a coherent if elliptical explanation of the nature and formation of concepts and of their epistemological and ethical role. Also, the chapter establishes that, although the core of the Epicurean account remains fundamentally unaffected, there are shifts of emphasis and new developments marking the passage from one generation of Epicureans to another and from one era to the next.

The chapter ‘Concepts in Greek Mathematics’ by Reviel Netz problematises a set of assumptions commonly encountered in the literature on Greek mathematics, which typically derive from a supposedly objective, a-historical conception of mathematical theory and practice. In sharp opposition to that tradition, Netz raises the possibility that the purpose of engaging with mathematical concepts may have been different in antiquity than what it has been taken to be. He asks central questions afresh, for instance: why do mathematical texts begin with definitions, and what is the purpose of mathematical definitions and of axioms. In connection to these issues, he highlights new aspects of the relationship between Greek mathematics and Greek philosophy, between engaging with mathematical concepts and philosophical thinking. He also advances the thesis that the relations between mathematics and philosophy changed through the various eras of antiquity, as did mathematical concepts and the role of mathematical definitions. We should seriously entertain the idea that even mathematical concepts need to be viewed within a given historical and cultural context.

In ‘The Emergence of the Concept in Early Greek philosophy’, André Laks argues that we can trace the first inklings of thinking about concepts by paying close attention to early Greek answers to the following three questions: how is perceptual information reached and processed by the mind, what is the relationship between perception and thinking, and how do the early Greek philosophers account for name-giving? First, Laks discusses whether the explanations of sensory mechanisms offered by the early Greek philosophers as well as by the medical authors might have prepared the ground for later theories of concept formation. Second, he argues that we should resist the Aristotelian report according to which the early Greek philosophers identified thinking with perceiving. In fact, we have good reasons to assume that early Greek philosophers attempted to offer an account of the process of thinking. The final section of the chapter turns to the question of the relationship between giving names to things, and forming and grasping the corresponding concept.

Lesley Brown’s chapter ‘Do Forms Play the Role of Concepts in Late Plato?’ starts by noting a major issue of controversy concerning the Forms in the Middle Dialogues, namely whether Forms are explanatory properties whose role is to account for why things are the way they are and are therefore the objects of philosophical inquiry and knowledge, or whether Forms are concepts whose role is to explain everyday thinking and discourse. On the assumption that the former option best captures the role of Forms in Plato’s so-called Middle Dialogues, Brown addresses the question whether Plato’s later dialogues manifest a shift in emphasis such that the latter interpretation gains greater prominence. In her view, even though Plato’s later dialogues show increasing interest in matters of language and meaning, and hence may perhaps be taken to show a somewhat greater interest in the role Forms or Kinds play in our everyday thinking and discourse, nonetheless the prominence of the method of division in these works underscores that the Forms are primarily properties discoverable by philosophical inquiry, not everyday concepts or meanings.

Péter Lautner’s chapter ‘Concepts in the Neoplatonist Tradition’ expands the scope of the enquiry by discussing Platonist theories of concept formation in Late Antiquity. Generally speaking, the philosophers belonging to the so-called schools of Athens and Alexandria believe that the articulation of our rational capacity and the acquisition of knowledge somehow derives from the senses as well as the intellect, and they mostly agree that some elements of concept formation, notably generalisation, occur on the basis of sense-perception. They disagree, however, as to whether or not such generalisations are full-blown concepts. While all the philosophers under consideration endorse some version of the view that the main source of concepts is our intellect, which essentially contains fully fledged concepts, their accounts vary in respect of the intellect’s ability to project concepts onto the lower cognitive faculties. The problem of how the two kinds of concepts mentioned above are related to each other occupies the Platonists through the entire period under examination and constitutes the focus of Lautner’s analysis.

‘Contested Concepts: Plutarch’s On Common Conceptions’ by Thomas Bénatouïl addresses the question of how ordinary concepts, for instance a layman’s concept of a spider, intersect with a zoologist’s concept of that insect. While from the epistemological point of view the latter’s concept should be allowed to prevail, from the point of view of semantics and the philosophy of mind it is not at all obvious that the scientific concept of spider should be allowed to rule over the corresponding lay concept, nor is it obvious that there is only one concept of spider whose content can be fixed for every context. Clearly, the Academics and the Stoics were aware of the importance of this and related problems. Plutarch’s dialogue On Common Conceptions, subtitled Against the Stoics, is a representative text of these schools’ respective stances, and its study by Thomas Bénatouïl aims to bring out both its historical significance and systematic interest.

In ‘Aristotle on the Stages of Cognitive Development’, Thomas Kjeller Johansen examines Aristotle’s contributions to our thinking about concepts from a different perspective, namely in connection to Aristotle’s psychology. He revisits Aristotle’s account of how we acquire universal concepts mainly on the basis of Metaphysics A.1, Posterior Analytics 1.31 and 2.19, and the De Anima. The chapter begins by articulating the following puzzle. On the one hand, Aristotle points out (An. Post. 1.31, 2.19) that we perceive the universal in the particular. On the other, he suggests (Metaph. A.1) that it is only when we have craft and science that we grasp the universal, while perception, memory, and experience all are concerned with the particular. Building on the widespread view that, according to Aristotle, the universal grasped in craft and science is the universal cause, Johansen argues that we should understand perception, memory, and experience teleologically, as stages in the ordering of perceptual information that allows this causal concept to emerge.

In ‘Platonist Notions and Forms’, Mauro Bonazzi explores an aspect of the Platonists’ engagement with Stoic epistemology, namely the Platonists’ appropriation of the Stoic ennoiai, conceptions or notions, to show that Plato’s doctrine can provide a satisfactory answer to the problem of the foundation of knowledge, which Stoicism has proved unable to solve. The Stoic ennoiai, (conceptions) or phusikai ennoiai (natural conceptions) are notions naturally arising in the human mind and constituting the basic elements of human reason. They are ‘natural’ in the sense that humans are naturally disposed to acquire them, and they are koinai (common) in the sense that all humans have them or are disposed to have them. They are also invariably true and therefore can serve as criteria in order to increase knowledge, promote scientific understanding and contribute to the good life. It is these ennoiai that the Platonists integrate in their own reinvention of Plato’s epistemology and employ in their polemics against their principal rivals.