Max Stirner (1847)
A Response to Kuno Fischer’s “The Modern Sophists”[1]
A prolific painter, working in his studio, was called to lunch by his wife. He answered: “Wait just a moment; I only have twelve life-size apostles, a Christ and a Madonna to paint.” Such is the way of the philosophical reactionary Kuno Fischer — I chose this phrase, because one must not appear in the drawing room of philosophy without the tailcoat [2] of a philosophical phrase — he deals with the difficult titan’s work of modern criticism, which had to storm the philosophical heaven, the last heaven under the heavens, in broad brushstrokes. He depicts one after the other. It is a joy to see. Strauss, Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, Stirner, the Greek sophists, the Jesuits, the sophists of romanticism, all get depicted using the same stencil.