2. Saint Bruno's Views on the Struggle between Feuerbach and Stirner
"The critic pursues his path irresistibly, confident of victory, and victorious. He is slandered — he smiles. He is called a heretic — he smiles. The old world starts a crusade against him — he smiles."
Saint Bruno — this is thus established—-pursues his path but he does not pursue it like other people, he follows a critical course, he accomplishes this important action with a smile.
"He does smile his face into more lines than are in the new map, with the augmentation of the Indies. I know my lady will strike him: if she do, he'll smile and take't for a great art"(1)—like Shakespeare's Malvolio.
Saint Bruno himself does not lift a finger to refute his two opponents, he knows a better way of ridding himself of them, he leaves them—divide et impera—to their own quarrel. He confronts Stirner with Feuerbach's man (p. 124), and Feuerbach with Stirner's unique (p. 126 et seq.); he knows that they are as incensed against each other as the two Kilkenny cats in Ireland, which so completely devoured each other that finally only their tails remained.[43] And Saint Bruno passes sentence on these tails, declaring that they are "substance" and, consequently, condemned to eternal damnation.
In confronting Feuerbach with Stirner he repeats what Hegel said of Spinoza and Fichte, where, as we know, the punctiform ego is represented as one, and moreover the most stable, aspect of substance. However much Bruno formerly raged against egoism, which he even considered the odor specificus of the masses, on page 129 he accepts egoism from Stirner — only this should be "not that of Max Stirner', but, of course, that of Bruno Bauer. He brands Stirner's egoism as having the moral defect "that his ego for the support of its egoism requires hypocrisy, deception, external violence". For the rest, he believes (see p. 124) in the critical miracles of Saint Max and sees in the latter's struggle (p. 126) "a real effort to radically destroy substance". Instead of dealing with Stirner's criticism of Bauer's "pure criticism", he asserts on p. 124 that Stirner's criticism could affect him just as little as any other, "because he himself is the critic'".
Finally Saint Bruno refutes both of them, Saint Max and Feuerbach, applying almost literally to Feuerbach and Stirner the antithesis drawn by Stirner between the critic Bruno Bauer and the dogmatist.
Wigand, p. 138: "Feuerbach puts himself in opposition to, and thereby" (!) "stands in opposition to, the unique. He is a communist and wants to be one. The unique is an egoist and has to be one; he is the holy one, the other the profane one, he is the good one, the other the evil one, he is God, the other is man. Both are dogmatists."
The point is, therefore, that he accuses both of dogmatism.
Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum, p. 194: "The critic is afraid of becoming dogmatic or of putting forward dogmas. Obviously, he would then become the opposite of a critic, a dogmatist; he who as a critic was good, would now become evil, or from being unselfish" (a Communist) "would become an egoist, etc. Not a single dogma!—that is his dogma."
Endnotes
[43] The expression "to fight like Kilkenny cats" originated at the end of the 18th century. During the Irish uprising of 1798 the town of Kilkenny was occupied by Hessian mercenaries serving in the British army, who used to amuse themselves by watching fights between cats with their tails tied together. One day, a soldier, seeing an officer approaching, cut off the cats' tails with his sword and the cats ran away. The officer was told that the cats had eaten each other and only their tails remained.