Omar Khayyam and Max Stirner

2) The Inexpressible

b)

Now he is sitting there like someone coming from nowhere, hiding his pain behind his laughter, he is smiling at mankind. He knows how to conceal his pain behind bold, cold and calculated words, “If I solely rely on myself, the unique ego, then I rely on something transcient, the mortal creator of himself, who consumes himself.”[1] The concept of transciency and mortality pervades Stirner´s entire work. But it seems as if he would proclaim transciency while laughing coldly. I think his laughter conceals a deep-seated melancholy. The knowledge of the fading away of physical and mental energy, of the creative unique ego´s end, of the decline of all its creations and creativity – this knowledge causes a mysterious pain, which finds its expression in his laughing coldly. This, however, is not the only reason. We must focus on transciency, too, because Stirner experiences it as something mystical, too. I´d like to quote Rolf Engert here, who already explained Stirner´s mystiscism rudimentarily in 1931,

“It is a mysticism of a personalized inner experience, which is caused by the fact that I am creator and creation to Myself and that my Ego can only comprehend the creator in Me, who never fully appears on the scene and will not fully manifest itself in his creations, and can only be experienced in an exceptional situation and can only be grasped by means of the concept of the ‘creative nothing’ ”[2] Following Mauthner´s example Engert tries to line Stirner up with the mystic Master Eckhart and “the vast religious eastern world”, but he does not explain his views. We will have to inquire into this  to find out if it holds true, but I would like to restrict my inquiries to the problem of “godless mysticism”. The question how godless and religious mysticism, which may only be a semi-mysticism, can be combined with each other will be the subject-matter of another study.(In his “Dictionary of Philosophy” Mauthner, by the way, assembles a great many mystics under the heading of mysticism. There he speaks of “philosophical” respectively of “sceptical” mysticism. Thus he makes the inexpressible a subject-matter of philosophy in order to be able to communicate it.)

Well, the “creative nothing” as a concept, which we have shortly explained above, experiences its limitations and therefore an unknown type of existence, i.e. in an “earthly and heavenly sphere” (Engert) man experiences new creative “possibilities to enjoy his life”. Stirner´s egoism respectively the creation of his ego experiences a dissolution of the ego when faced with its limitations and the concept of “nothing”, whereby Stirner conceives himself as “ a transcient, mortal creator who consumes himself.”

Stirner´s mysticism is neither a total negation of everyday life nor does it imply that the unique ego is reducible to its earthly existence. He does not negate the world and the mundane. Stirner does not attempt to reach God or the truth, he does not try to become part of God either, he is God and the truth: God on earth and God in heaven! For only the unique ego is the origin of his creation and mortality. God is the unknown quantity, silence, quietness, origin, creation, perfection, the unnamed. All this applies to Stirner, the unique ego. “No concept expresses what I am”[3]