The Philosophical Review/Volume 1/Review: Schellwien - Max Stirner und Friedrich Nietzsche

by Ernest Albee

Max Stirner und Friedrich Nietzsche, Erscheinungen des modernen Geistes, und das Wesen des Menschen. Von Robert Schellwien. Leipzig, C. E. M. Pfeffer, 1892.—pp. 117.

The author's fundamental assumption is that modern thought is essentially individualistic. The first two chapters of the book are on Max Stirner and on Friedrich Nietzsche respectively, two notable exponents of absolute individualism, whose views are presented as being the best, because the most consequent, examples of this individualistic tendency, which the author finds so alarmingly prevalent. The chapter on Stirner is wholly expository; that on Nietzsche, critical as well. Nietzsche is commended for holding that Darwinism is through and through individualistic (p. 34), that it is incompatible with Naturgesetzlichkeit, and for rejecting the latter on adopting the former. Darwinism, says the author (p. 35), lets things become what they are not, and supposes that by means of a merely external causality new species arise. The new development constantly begins from a purely individual point of departure. Space forbids criticism on this point; but it seems to me that the author's contention that Darwinism is incompatible with 'laws of nature,' as ordinarily understood, is decidedly weak, and that it hardly indicates a competent knowledge of recent biological theory. Of the views of Stirner and Nietzsche, it is enough to say that they alike tend to nihilism, and that they are presented here mainly as a warning against the dangerous tendency of the principle of individualism, though the author believes that both philosophers are quite right in maintaining that the words 'state,' 'people,' etc., as often used, stand for nothing but personified abstractions.

The longest, perhaps the most important, and certainly the most obscure chapter in the book is that which comes next, the one on "Truth." In the first part of the chapter (p. 47), the author states most emphatically that being and knowledge are the same. The starting-point cannot be assumed as outside knowledge or before knowledge. But we are speedily told (p. 55) that unconsciousness and consciousness are two distinct functions of mine. As unconscious, I am an individual among individuals; as conscious, I am subject and object in one. Knowledge, again (p. 56), is constantly arising from that which was not knowledge. But knowledge and volition are the same (p. 64), only regarded from different sides, and thus is solved the "Weltknoten" which Schopenhauer called "unerklärlich" and "das Wunder κατ'ἐξοχήν," namely, the identity of the knowing and the willing subject. It is more than difficult to see how the author has proved this. He seems rather to make will, as distinct from cognition, antecedent to the latter and the cause of it.

The book closes with a chapter on "Ethics" and one on "Law." The fundamental thought here is that our views in each sphere suffer from the prevalent dualism, for which, it is claimed, Christianity is largely responsible. If man recognized himself as both subject and object, if he knew that there was really nothing external to him as conscious, morality would cease to be regarded as a thing imposed by external authority, whether human or divine; it would be recognized, not as the abridgment of freedom, but as its realization. A unitary life of Hellenic, more than Hellenic, freedom and beauty will first begin for man, when he shall have attained a knowledge of his own nature. This is the part of the book which is least original, and also that which is least calculated to excite opposition, though of course only those will sympathize with the views expressed whose ethics are founded upon absolute idealism, and even of this class there are many who will vigorously deny that Christianity is hopelessly dualistic in the sense that the author claims.

Ernest Albee.