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INTELLECTUAL INTEGRITY IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF BRUNO BAUER AND MAX STIRNER

H. De Vriese

Abstract

The concern for intellectual integrity appears to be a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of the West. Not ranked among the cardinal virtues of Greek and Christian thought, in spite of some noteworthy prefigurations, it is generally regarded as a modern virtue that belongs to Western history after the dominance of Christianity: it reveals a restructured value system that extends beyond Christianity and its Kantian legacies. Generally, intellectual integrity is defined as a consistent, wholehearted and uncompromising commitment to pursuing the truth, requiring, in addition to a theoretical openness to other’s ideas and criticisms, a permanent attitude of merciless reflection and self-reflection. This implies a willingness to rethink previously held ideas, beliefs, and values, even in the face of great practical obstacles and dire personal and social consequences, and even rebelling against a sense of loyalty and attachment. In this respect, hypocrisy, self-deception and intellectual laziness are considered to be the most fundamental instances of lack of intellectual integrity. More specifically, the conception of intellectual integrity as a new intellectual virtue is intimately related to the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche describes intellectual integrity as “one of the youngest virtues”, as “something in the becoming”, “neither to be found among the Socratic nor the Christian virtues”. At the heart of this interpretation is Nietzsche’s critique of the unconditional will to truth, “the will to truth at any price”, which in his analysis rests on a strong moral commitment: the time-honored moral convention not to lie or deceive. Nietzsche prides himself on being the first thinker in the history of philosophy to question the supreme value of truth. Intellectual integrity is the virtue of truth-seeking that is no longer bound by a moral commitment to the value of truth: it is truthfulness in the extramoral sense. This means emancipation from the normative restrictions of the will to truth, and immunity to the implicit obligations resulting from once-held truth claims. Using the concepts of ‘Redlichkeit’ and ‘Wahrhaftigkeit’ often as synonyms, Nietzsche portrays Zarathustra as the incarnation of this new virtue: “Zarathustra is more truthful than any other thinker. His doctrine, and his alone, posits truthfulness as the highest virtue”. While Nietzsche’s concern for intellectual integrity is notorious and has meticulously been described and analyzed in contemporary philosophy, there has been virtually no research on the importance of this virtue among the philosophers who he considered to be “the pedagogues of the nineteenth century”: the Young Hegelians. This paper aims to fill this gap. It seeks to understand the philosophical development of two of Hegel’s younger disciples, Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner, as marked by an entirely new view of the philosophical quest for truth, thereby stimulating the emergence of a revised conception of intellectual integrity.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/SGEMSOCIAL2017/HB21/S06.035

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