Relationship between Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Stirner

The ideas of the 19th century German philosophers Max Stirner (dead in 1856) and Friedrich Nietzsche (born in 1844) have been compared frequently.

[1] In Germany, during the early years of Nietzsche's emergence as a well-known figure, the only thinker who discussed his ideas more often than Stirner was Arthur Schopenhauer.

[4] Yet, as soon as Nietzsche's work began to reach a wider audience, the question of whether or not he owed a debt of influence to Stirner was raised.

As early as 1891 (while Nietzsche was still alive, though incapacitated by mental illness), Eduard von Hartmann went so far as to suggest that he had plagiarized Stirner.

[8] By the middle of the 20th century, if Stirner was mentioned at all in works on Nietzsche, the idea of influence was repeatedly dismissed outright or abandoned as unanswerable.

[10] In any case, the most prominent problems with the theory of possible Stirner influence on Nietzsche are not limited to the difficulty in establishing whether one man knew of or read the other.

[11] The origin of the debate surrounding whether or not Nietzsche had read Stirner's work—and if so, whether he had been influenced by him—seems to lie in apparent similarities between the ideas of the two men as expressed in their writing.

These similarities were recognized early and led many, for a variety of reasons, to attempt to determine the precise nature of any possible relationship.

Nietzsche is also known to have read Lange's History of Materialism, where Stirner's book The Ego and Its Own is referred to briefly as "the most extreme, that we have knowledge of".

Lauterbach was a close friend of Heinrich Köselitz (Peter Gast, who was for many years a kind of private secretary for Nietzsche).

[15] Franz Overbeck's wife Ida reported that during the period from 1880 to 1883 Nietzsche lived with the couple at several points and that he mentioned Stirner directly.

In addition to similarities and reports by Nietzsche's close friend that he felt an affinity for Stirner, there exist three other circumstantial details which perhaps deserve mention.

August Röckel was known to have introduced Wagner to Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and all three men were involved in the Dresden insurrection in May 1849.

In any case, he did not break off all contact with von Bülow as we know that Nietzsche sent him a complimentary copy of the first part of Zarathustra in late summer or early fall of 1883.

[31] Superficial similarities in the expressed ideas of the two men again seem to have played a key role in this association, both writers appropriated by radicals.

[38] However, one researcher (who incidentally feels that Nietzsche was most likely not influenced by Stirner) said it was impossible to prove that someone has not read something and that it's more a matter of probability.

[39] Levy also dealt very briefly with the fact that Nietzsche must have been aware of Stirner through the works of Hartmann and Lange (discussed above).

[40] Oskar Ewald suggested that Nietzsche's philosophy was not egocentric or bound to any one reality, unlike Stirner's individualism.

[43] Steiner's view appears to be that the similarities between the two writers are significant and substantial, but he accounts for this with the suggestion that Nietzsche arrived at a "Stirner-like world conception" on his own.

Steiner makes no mention of any of the arguments then current suggesting the possibility or likelihood that Nietzsche was familiar with Stirner's work.

He finds Stirner's prose more repetitive, with stilted metaphors compared to what he considered Nietzsche's more successful technique.