Abnormal events were brewing in the inner recesses of history: a “new migration,” no longer of barbarians toward the spirit, but of the spirit toward the barbarities of nature, eager for deliverance. A dark process, “announcing itself with a fermentation, and indeed in part with a putrefaction” (and don’t Marx and Engels speak shortly after about “the putrefaction of the Hegelian philosophy”?).^{523, 524} At the end of this alchemical process, coniunctio shines brightly once more: in this case it is the abrogation of Trennung, of that odious “separation” that had brought so much suffering to Lessing, and to all the cruel and tender souls of romanticism after him. “Thus absolute peace is celebrated between interiority and exteriority and this assures the appearance, outside and inside, of that mutual victory of theirs, which removes tangible appearance from the contempt in which it was held.”⁵²⁵ Cieszkowski’s tangled arguments enmesh what will soon be contending powers of thought. Marx (who claims in a letter of 1882 not to have read Cieszkowski, but this is difficult to believe), Nietzsche, and Stirner are still waiting, hidden in the dream of that unreal peace, to spring forth, split company, and clash.

The Artificial Barbarian

“… we who do not think and talk aphoristically but live aphoristically; we who live aphorisménoi and segregati, as aphorisms in life, without association with men, having no share in their grief and their joy; we who are not consonants in the clamor of life but are solitary birds in the stillness of night.”⁵²⁶

Stirner is one of many signs that point to the end of education. Cast out of the classroom into the Absolute Spirit, as the master Hegel had wished, he could acquire none of those quiet manners, none of those slight inflections of voice that had made civilization, and which in the end, out of discretion, claimed to be no more than minuscule remnants of Taste. For him, all that was left now was the obsessive rosary of the idea, or the roar, or aphasia, to which he eventually gave vent: the hammering of the silence (as in the brain) that yawns behind the emptied idea.

Stirner speaks continually of specters and ghosts. And, as he speaks, everything becomes caught up in that leaden spell that his shrill, insolent, relentless voice hoped to dissolve away—or to ridicule. But no one is more spectral than Stirner. It is easier to meet him among specters than among philosophers. As someone would inevitably observe, it must be supposed that Stirner is no subject for any respectable philosopher. If you touch his words, then wash your hands. Even the author’s name can hardly be taken seriously—it conjures the picture of a magician in top hat and cloak, rather than that of a dignified thinker. Stirner remains expunged from culture, despite the hundreds of books written about him.