Mr. Self-Destrukt: Rehabilitating Max Stirner

[ArcturusMengsk]

This is rough draft for my first 'political' essay, intended to give a very generalized overview of the political thinking of Max Stirner and, more specifically, his relationship to liberalism and humanism. I know it's rough, so any helpful commentary would be greatly appreciated.

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There is a tendency among leftist radicals, en vogue since Marx's publication of The German Ideology, to shy away from the writings of Max Stirner, the fierce and enigmatic egoist whose works both smashed the intellectual underpinnings of the liberal conception of property while at the same time predicting the totalizing influence of Hegel's philosophy on the left. This unfortunate turn of events has left Stirner's work vulnerable to misinterpretation and misappropriation by reactionaries of all stripes - Randians, quasi-radical libertarians, 'free-market individualists', and their ilk (always so quick to hide behind their neo-liberal masters and growl at the first sign of socialist or anarchist activity) - and has led to their claiming him as one of their own.

The obvious question is: why? The notion of 'doctrinal purity' ought to be less than meaningless to a pluralistic worldview such as ours. And yet it seems the majority of socialists are dumbfounded when the question of what to make of Stirner arises. He is obviously no friend of liberalism or nationalism, dismissing both as "spooks", Holy Ghosts of language with no correlative outside of that language; at the same time he anticipates the horrors of Communist totalitarianism and declares it his mortal enemy. This ambiguity has unfortunately served to prevent Stirner's application as one of the most potent weapons available to the radical in his war against the system.

It is of the utmost importance that a reappraisal of Stirner's philosophy should occur. Marxism has been discredited in the eyes of the masses, and utopian socialism is no more possible now than in 1849. That the radical left has been in a perpetual rut for eighteen years - left without an overriding ideology for guidance and only pragmatic, immediate action with limited results for practice - is unfortunate. More unfortunate still is its inability to accept the pluralism it claims to endorse and voluntarily escape the Marxist confines within which it has imprisoned itself. And so I take it upon myself to re-appropriate Stirner.

To understand Stirner is to understand Hegel in reverse. For Hegel, all things move towards the transcendent Absolute, the thing-in-itself, in a dialectical dance towards the divine; for Stirner, it is the concept of the Absolute which must be gotten rid of, and, to this end Stirner employs a type of anti-dialectic, reducing the universal to mere phantasies of the mind. Stirner's stated goal is to bring the particular, the individual, the isolated atom of existence, back into repute. Stirner's philosophical position, really a sort of radical nominalism, requires him to subvert all traditional idées fixes, which he terms 'spooks', poking fun at the geist-haunted world of Hegelian philosophy. "Have you ever seen a spirit?" Stirner asks in the opening paragraph of the second section of his book, The Ego and Its Own. "No, not I," replies the reader, "but my grandmother." Stirner responds, "Now, you see, it's just so with me too; I myself haven't seen any, but my grandmother had them running between her feet all sorts of ways, and out of confidence in our grandmothers' honesty we believe in the existence of spirits."

And so Stirner begins his task of inquiring into the origins of the metaphysical world, adopting an attitude frightening in its joviality. We see in his attitude towards his work a sort of grinning half-madness that seems to herald the Die fröhliche Wissenschaft that so enamored Nietzsche (and on this point we must be clear, since there is no end in sight to comparisons between the two: while there are a number of similarities in their work and methodology, there is no indication that Nietzsche was more than passingly aware of Stirner's work, and Nietzsche himself, if inspired at all by Stirner, took his ideas further, drawing them to their final futile conclusion), but he is exceedingly serious in regard to the importance of his work. "Away, then, with every concern that is not altogether my concern! You think at least the "good cause" must be my concern? What's good, what's bad? Why, I myself am my concern, and I am neither good nor bad. Neither has any meaning for me."

The most immediate 'spooks' which Stirner sets out to exorcize - and the easiest - are "God, Emperor, Pope, Fatherland, etc." These targets are obvious, and almost hardly worth writing about. More interesting are Stirner's attacks against a secondary spiritual realm, a triad that he unsubtly calls the 'liberalisms', political, social, and humane. The first is traditional liberalism; the second, utopian socialism; the third, the quasi-religious essentialism of Feuerbach and his followers. The first and third interest me the most, as the criticisms contained therein are as applicable today as in 1844. Stirner reserves his most potent vitriol for the practitioners of Feuerbachian 'atheism':

"But, even granted that doubts, raised in the course of time against the tenets of the Christian faith, have long since robbed you of faith in the immortality of your spirit, you have nevertheless left one tenet undisturbed, and still ingenuously adhere to the one truth, that the spirit is your better part, and that the spiritual has greater claims on you than anything else. Despise all your atheism, in zeal against egoism you concur with the believers in immortality."

Stirner sets out to demolish 'humane liberalism' in the fourth section of The Ego and Its Own, titled The Owner. In this section Stirner proves himself the first (and heretofore most radical of) the anti-essentialists, and turns his intellectual cannons against what today might be considered a prototypical 'secular humanism'. Stirner begins thusly -

"Therefore the liberal too revolves in the same circle as the Christian. Because the spirit of mankind, Man, dwells in you, you are a man, as when the spirit of Christ dwells in you you are a Christian; but, because it dwells in you only as a second ego, even though it be as your proper or "better" ego, it remains otherworldly to you, and you have to strive to become wholly man. A striving just as fruitless as the Christian's to become wholly a blessed spirit!

The HUMAN religion is only the last metamorphosis of the Christian religion. For liberalism is a religion because it separates my essence from me and sets it above me, because it exalts "Man" to the same extent as any other religion does its God or idol, because it makes what is mine into something otherworldly, because in general it makes out of what is mine, out of my qualities and my property, something alien - to wit, an "essence"; in short, "vocation." But liberalism declares itself a religion in form too when it demands for this supreme being, Man, a zeal of faith..."

And again:

"It is well that Feuerbach brings sensuousness to honor, but the only thing he is able to do with it is to clothe the materialism of his "new philosophy" with what had hitherto been the property of idealism, the "absolute philosophy." As little as people let it be talked into them that one can live on the "spiritual" alone without bread, so little will they believe his word that as a sensuous being one is already everything, and so spiritual, full of thoughts, etc."

As we can plainly see, Stirner's atheism is something wholly different from the 'atheism' professed by his contemporaries in Feuerbach and Bauer, and certainly nothing like the cerebral, placid, complacent liberal humanism espoused by Dawkins and Russell. They wish to rid themselves of God while retaining all the contents and nicities of religious morality and metaphysics; Stirner desires to rid himself of religious morality and metaphysics to rid himself of God. This 'backdoor Christianity' is an excuse for all manner of obnoxious bourgeois reaction, and generally leads to a deification of the abstraction Man over the particular man. For Stirner, then, the Church of Man is a rather unholy place to be.

But we must not see in all this a mere defense - radical though it may be - of traditional petty individualism. 'The I', for Stirner, is as much a fiction as every other abstraction; he is not interested in the sort of pious, quiet self-serving that belongs to the middle-class, and all of Marx's protestations to the contrary in Ideology will not make it so. This distinguishes Stirner from petty individualists like Ayn Rand, who see in the egoistic lifestyle a higher, universal calling - Stirner, unlike Rand, passes no judgment over those who he terms 'involuntary egoists', who enslave themselves to an abstract cause out of hidden egoistic concerns. And. unlike Rand, he refuses to argue for his position out of nature, explicitly rejecting 'natural law' and 'property rights'. In this he is quite distinct from the individualist anarchist as well, who halts before 'the I' in his criticisms of established society.

One of the 'spooks' Stirner confronts is that of identity, and, in classical liberal theory, its corollary, rights (including, but not limited to, property rights). Consider, for example, Stirner's take on parental rights, in contrast to Locke's as stated in the latter's Two Treatises of Government, written in response to Robert Filmer's religious-patriarchal concept of regal sovereignty, in the chapter entitled Of Adam's Title to Sovereingty by Fatherhood:

"I agree with our author that the title to this honour is vested in the parents by nature, (the 'title' here being the right to sovereignty - B.), and is a right which accrues to them by their having begotten their children, and God by many positive declarations has confirmed it to them: I also allow our author's rule, "that in grants and gits, that have their original from God and nature, as the power of the father," (let me add "and mother," for whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder) "no inferior power of men can limit, nor make any law of prescription against them..."

Locke solidifies his position in the next chapter, Of Fatherhood and Property considered altogether as Fountains of Sovereignty:

"Let us then suppose Adam made, "by God's donation," lord and sole proprietor of the whole earth, in as large and ample a manner as sir Robert could wish; let us suppose him also, "by right of fatherhood," absolute ruler over his children with an unlimited supremacy; I ask then, upon Adam's death, what becomes of both his natural and private domination? and I doubt it not it will be answered, that they descended to his next heir, as our author tells us in several places. But this way, it is plain, cannot possible convey both his natural and private dominion to the same person: for should we allow that all the property, all the estate of the father, ought to descend to the eldest son, (which will need some proof to establish it) and so he has by that title all the private dominion of the father, yet the father's natural dominion, the paternal power, cannot descend to him by inheritance: for it being a right that accrues to a man only by begetting, no man can have this natural dominion over any one he does not beget; unless it can be supposed that a man can have a right to any thing, without doing that upon which that right is solely founded: for if a father by begetting, and no other title, has natural dominion over his children, he that does not beget them cannot have this natural dominion over them..."

Herein lies the thrust of Locke's position: whereas Filmer understands property, sovereignty, and patriarchy to be fundamentally related and passed down in orders of lineage from father to eldest son (basing this interpretation on a literalist account of the Bible), Locke rejects the association and holds that the right of sovereignty and the right to property are fundamentally distinct, related only in their causation (the right to property as the result of physical labour, the right to parential sovereignty as accquired through the act of siring - always the worker, our Mr. Locke recognizes parential authority as being derived only through the physical act of conception). Both conceptions, however, are paternalistic insofar as they acknowledge that the father has some 'right' over the child through the sole virtue of parenthood. As against this Stirner writes (in the context of speaking to the Communists of his day):

"Communism, which assumes that men "have equal rights by nature," contradicts its own proposition till it comes to this, that men have no right at all by nature. For it is not willing to recognize, e. g., that parents have "by nature" rights as against their children, or the children as against the parents: it abolishes the family. Nature gives parents, brothers, etc., no right at all. Altogether, this entire revolutionary or Babouvist principle rests on a religious, i. e., false, view of things. Who can ask after "right" if he does not occupy the religious standpoint himself? Is not "right" a religious concept, i.e. something sacred? Why, "equality of rights", as the Revolution propounded it, is only another name for "Christian equality," the "equality of the brethren," "of God's children," "of Christians"; in short, fraternité."

And again:

"Because I am "by nature" a man I have an equal right to the enjoyment of all goods, says Babeuf. Must he not also say: because I am "by nature" a first-born prince I have a right to the throne? The rights of man and the "well-earned rights" come to the same thing in the end, i.e. to nature, which gives me a right, i. e. to birth (and, further, inheritance, etc.). "I am born as a man" is equal to "I am born as a king's son." The natural man has only a natural right (because he has only a natural power) and natural claims: he has right of birth and claims of birth. But nature cannot entitle me, i.e. give me capacity or might, to that to which only my act entitles me. That the king's child sets himself above other children, even this is his act, which secures to him the precedence; and that the other children approve and recognize this act is their act, which makes them worthy to be -- subjects."

Stirner, unlike the individualist anarchist, does not recognize 'by nature' any right of the individual to appropriate to himself property, or to claim a thing external to himself as 'his own'. All too often we find that the assumption 'human nature!' is little more than the assumption 'original sin!' And neither does he hold with the monarchist, who believes that, by virtue of the king's identity as the king, he has the right to exercize royal sovereignty. For Stirner it is only the act of appropriation itself which exists. "What then is my property? Nothing but what is in my power! To what property am I entitled? To every property to which I - empower myself."

Stirner will go to great pains to refute the concept of a coherent identity-construct - that 'A is A' and 'I is I' - thus forever distinguishing himself from the later individualists and Objectivists. It is not the individual consciousness that Stirner is interested in, but the Ego, that which he takes to be prior to and thus more fundamental than the consciousness. In objecting to Descarte's famous formula he anticipates Nietzsche's declaration of the self a "grammatical fiction". What had previously been taken as the starting point of all philosophy - the rational, crystalline consciousness - was in Stirner reduced to the afteraffect of the Ego.

"If I am free as "rational I," then the rational in me, or reason, is free; and this freedom of reason, or freedom of the thought, was the ideal of the Christian world from of old. They wanted to make thinking -- and, as aforesaid, faith is also thinking, as thinking is faith -- free; the thinkers, i.e. the believers as well as the rational, were to be free; for the rest freedom was impossible. But the freedom of thinkers is the "freedom of the children of God," and at the same time the most merciless --hierarchy or dominion of the thought; for I succumb to the thought. If thoughts are free, I am their slave; I have no power over them, and am dominated by them. But I want to have the thought, want to be full of thoughts, but at the same time I want to be thoughtless, and, instead of freedom of thought, I preserve for myself thoughtlessness."

"They say of God, "Names name thee not." That holds good of me: no concept expresses me, nothing that is designated as my essence exhausts me; they are only names. Likewise they say of God that he is perfect and has no calling to strive after perfection. That holds good of me too."

No essence, no label can ever fully capture the totality of Stirner's Unique One. Just as one says 'cat' and forgets that the cat he refers to is white with black spots - unlike another cat, which is brown and gold - Stirner denied that 'Man' captured fully the traits of the individual 'man'. And even the very name Johann Kaspar Schmidt could not fully express the reality of Johann Kaspar Schmidt, thus necessitating the adoption of the Max Stirner identity.

The question having been answered, a new one asserts itself: now that we know what to make of Stirner, why should we use him? Certainly his espousal of unbridled, furious egoism seems, at least, to be bourgeois, and his anti-essentialism and basic post-structuralism would seem to lend Al Gore's claim that we're simply nihilistic and narcissistic. And it certainly holds little appeal for those leftists still motivated by Christian virtues.

But adopting Stirnerian means does not necessitate adopting Stirnerian ends. Let us recall Stirner's criticism of the utopian socialism prevalent in his day, in the section on 'social liberalism' in "Men of the Old Time and The New":

" Who is this person that you call "All"? -- It is "society"! -- But is it corporeal, then? -- We are its body! -- You? Why, you are not a body yourselves -- you, sir, are corporeal to be sure, you too, and you, but you all together are only bodies, not a body. Accordingly the united society may indeed have bodies at its service, but no one body of its own. Like the "nation of the politicians", it will turn out to be nothing but a "spirit," its body only semblance....

This is the second robbery of the "personal" in the interest of "humanity." Neither command nor property is left to the individual; the State took the former, society the latter."

Here Stirner turns his hawkish eyes toward the utopian socialist dream: the utopian socialist evaluates the impersonal machinery of the collective above the personal and private welfare of the individual proletarian; the socialist exalts the collective into a priviledged position of transcendence, again denying the reality of the immanent and human. This leads Stirner to conclude:

"Society, from which we have everything, is a new master, a new spook, a new "supreme being," which "takes us into its service and allegiance!"

Stirner's criticism of socialism is, indeed, quite accurate - it establishes new 'spooks', hierarchical in their relation to the man over whom they are positioned, which enslave him as surely as the Christian-bourgeois ghasts. 'Proletarian essence' replaces 'soul' in this new order of concepts, created by 'labour' instead of divine fiat and central to a teleology in which 'Communism' replaces 'the New Jerusalem', and the angelic host of the underclass do battle against the devilish capitalists in a war which will culminate in an Armageddon-like revolution.

But this criticism does not extend to all anti-capitalist positions. Stirner himself was an anti-capitalist, although for reasons he never fully elucidated. The lack of an overarching ideology I lamented above is as much a blessing as a curse: it rids us of transcendental principles to enslave ourselves to. Both the Toryist history-worship of the Marxist, which exalts to universally divine status the tribulations of Western Proletarians and pretends to have some deep insight into the workings of the material world, and the utopian dreams of the common socialist, who simply transposes the spiritual world onto the material world and does away with critical thought, have been abolished. In their stead exists an immanent worldview of immediate action without concern for a tomorrow that will never come. The Stirnerist opens himself to the world of sensation, returns to a state of being that Georges Bataille described as "water within water"; he no longer recognizes a distinction between himself and you.

Stirner's doubt, however, is not complete: he still accepts the existence of 'the I' in some form, and this informs his insurrectionary tendencies. Against this I suggest a revolutionary praxis aimed towards the abolition of the self within the euphoria of violence directed against the hierarchical apparatus. For, just as separate flames become one within a mighty conflagration, so too do distinct ego-identities join in unison when directed against a common target. Within the Bacchanalia the bonds of personal identity are shattered for a moment and the waters which had previously been held back by the damming effects of the ego are released to flood across the land and join together with other streams in a great ocean of feeling. This 'loss of self' is what motivates war-hawk and revolutionary alike, and it alone is responsible for the appeal of juvenile forms of rebellion. But this has a name for it already - this is Dionysian.

[Melchior]

whose works both smashed the intellectual underpinnings of the liberal conception of property

This seems to imply that his arguments were sound... which as far as I can remember from my admittedly superficial study of Schmidt, isn't arguably the case. Are you supposed give a critical overview or to canonize him?

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Oh wow, someone who manages to insult Hegel and uphold useless postmodernist bullshit at the same time, and while doing so even succeeded in putting some golden mean sprinkles on top! How charmingly suitable for being HOSed, since it yields nothing to the board except fodder for an argument, and literally attacks all rational principles, and, indeed, the rational mind.

Greek philosophers and German idealists alike were at least working reasonably within the limits of the prevailing knowledge of the era, and had good ideas with that proviso. People like you, Arcturus, consciously have chosen to ignore the available knowledge of our era and construct your system of belief in direct opposition to it. That takes some genuine true idiocy to achieve.

[DPDarkPrimus]

Duchess, who says it is his own personal views in the paper? He could be writing this for a class.

[Darth Wong]

Duchess, who says it is his own personal views in the paper? He could be writing this for a class.

Given his retarded statements about the inferiority of the "hyper-objectivity" of science in the homeschooling thread, I'd say that his spirited opposition to rational thinking is genuine. We're talking about a guy who honestly thinks you can't really understand physics unless you study ancient Greek philosophy (something it doesn't appear he's actually studied either, apart from learning enough to drop names at opportune moments), and who has actually tried to argue that the pursuit of knowledge is worthless.

Having said that, I think that looking at his arguments has given me new insights into the pseudoscientist mind, thus leading to the formulation of a new definition of the pseudoscientist: the pseudoscientist is very good at memorizing the names, authors, and descriptions of scientific theories, but he has no clue how to actually apply them.

[DPDarkPrimus]

Duchess, who says it is his own personal views in the paper? He could be writing this for a class.

Given his retarded statements about the inferiority of the "hyper-objectivity" of science in the homeschooling thread, I'd say that his spirited opposition to rational thinking is genuine. We're talking about a guy who honestly thinks you can't really understand physics unless you study ancient Greek philosophy (something it doesn't appear he's actually studied either, apart from learning enough to drop names at opportune moments), and who has actually tried to argue that the pursuit of knowledge is worthless.

I haven't been following that thread. Perhaps I should look over it tonight for a laugh.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

What I want to get is how exactly logical deduction has failed according to him? It seems a quite reasonable way of coming up with ideas about things that we do not have the evidence to develop empirical theories about.

And for that matter can't logical deduction be a useful and indeed vital part of what we do with empirical evidence? If the empirical evidence indicates that logically something must follow from it, isn't that a useful working understanding of something in lieu of the expansion of our empirical knowledge?

So how, exactly, has the logical deduction of the German Idealists been refuted or eliminated from modern discourse? Hasn't it simply become a part of it, to be employed when empirical evidence alone does not provide us with enough data to make independent conclusions? Surely the Kantian demonstration through logic that morality can exist independent of God is as useful to the development of our society and consciousness as is the empirical evidence that no omnipotent, omniscent God exists.

[Patrick Degan]

Seems a valid worldview —if you are willing to ignore the basic fact that "society" and all its associated prerogatives exist as a necessary group-survival strategy.

[K. A. Pital]

Um...

"Society, from which we have everything, is a new master, a new spook, a new "supreme being," which "takes us into its service and allegiance!"

And this is the truth. A human has everything from society; without it - just try it The existence and circumstance shape much of the conscious human.

And yes, it's only natural for society to take one into service.

[Redleader34]

Its ironic, because the video game Bioshock stars this kind of civilization of Post modernstic Libeteran leaning people. I thought: Is this a Co-incidence? But then as SDN shows, this psudeo-science is all over.

[Melchior]

Surely the Kantian demonstration through logic that morality can exist independent of God is as useful to the development of our society and consciousness as is the empirical evidence that no omnipotent, omniscent God exists.

While it is certainly true that morality can exist without supreme beings, wasn't Kantian formalist morality (evil is not being coherent with our innate tension to fully be a subject, IRC and hoping that my English Kantian terminology is not completely ridiculous ) quite untenable?

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Surely the Kantian demonstration through logic that morality can exist independent of God is as useful to the development of our society and consciousness as is the empirical evidence that no omnipotent, omniscent God exists.

While it is certainly true that morality can exist without supreme beings, wasn't Kantian formalist morality (evil is not being coherent with our innate tension to fully be a subject, IRC and hoping that my English Kantian terminology is not completely ridiculous ) quite untenable?

Give it to me in your native language, please; I'll be able to figure it out much more easily that way, I assure you.

[Surlethe]

Hmm. The prose is dense and pompous, and I can boil the first five paragraphs down into four sentences:

"Left-wing politics have no underlying ideology corresponding to right-wing Christianity. They need one. They should use Stirner. Stirner employs a sort of anti-logic."

I really don't have the time to waste reading the rest of it right now, but I may go through it later tonight and play the "let's see what he's really saying" game.

[Darth Wong]

From what I read, the article makes no real attempt to argue the logical merits of any given position on its own, but instead gives descriptions of what this philosopher or that philosopher was trying to argue, as if the validity of any conclusion boils down to the strength of the man who originally made it.

I've never understood that style of "analysis", although I understand it's common among postmodernists.

[Darth Holbytlan]

I feel stupider for having read that. All I got out of it was "condemn concept X on the basis of poor analogy to religious dogma" and "condemn abstraction X (such as society) because it isn't 'corporeal' (read: real)". In other words, strawmanning and red herrings.

[ArcturusMengsk]

I feel stupider for having read that. All I got out of it was "condemn concept X on the basis of poor analogy to religious dogma" and "condemn abstraction X (such as society) because it isn't 'corporeal' (read: real)". In other words, strawmanning and red herrings.

Except that's not what Stirner's getting at.

Take, for instance, the American concept of the 'legal person'; i.e., a corporation, which can act, claim property, possess rights, etc. The corporation is taken under law to be a 'person', and yet it clearly is not a person; it is not corporeal, it is not sentient, etc. The corporation is real, and is, according to liberalistic legal theory, a 'personage', but it is not a person insofar as any reasonable individual understands the concept.

Or consider the Schiavo debacle of several years ago. So much energy and effort was expended by a group of black-robed theocrats to divine whether or not she, as a comatose invalid, retained human 'rights' which, according to the liberal definition of the term, accrue to sentience, that it would have been just as simple for them to have sacrificed a hen and gazed at its innards as it was to consult the Constitution and other religious documents.

What it boils down to is this: that the notion of 'human rights' is not grounded in any sort of reality; that it is a legalistic fiction (albiet a useful one) created out of political need rather than some vague Enlightenment; and that to regard them as objectively extant is to indulge in a sort of moralistic form of religiosity. This does not mean that I endorse a "might makes right" perspective, but that instead I propose that one treat all legal and political ideologies as symbolic constructs which are not grounded in reason or logic but in narrative.

And Duchess, you should know better. Kant's categorical imperative is untenable for a number of reasons:

1. It rests on a false metaphysic (there is no thing-in-itself; if there were, it could be made known, as Schopenhauer had demonstrated; it would therefore not be transcendental, as Nietzsche had shown; and it would thus not be immutable - it would not be a thing-in-itself).

2. It presupposes the universality of Man in the abstract as a rule; it is thus teleological insofar as it supposes itself. "Pure practical reason" is meaningless outside of a perspectival schemata which takes into account the particular characteristics of a given situation, from whence its "practicality" is derived. This is not to say that a universal system of morality is impossible; rather, it means that, to postulate such a formulation, one would be required to analyze all possible combinations of given scenarios which a man or woman might find themselves in and derive from there systems of conduct corresponding to each conceivable situation. Such is quite clearly beyond the scope of human reasoning. All moral reasoning must therefore be piecemeal and gradual, constantly repositioning itself like a ship without a compass. In this I'm explicitly opposed to Kant: one cannot abstract from a given position without having direct access to a God's-eye view of things. One can impose normative 'rules of engagement' within a particular situation, but, until one occupies the situation of his neighbor, cannot do the same for him.

Consider the Hippocratic Oath: all doctors swear by it, and, insofar as it is a normative 'rulebook' for their particular occupation, are normatively bound to the rules therein. I, however, who am not a doctor and have never taken the Oath (but still rudimentary possess medical knowledge enough to be helpful in times of need, e.g. CPR, making a tourniquet, etc.) am not bound by the Oath when applying my knowledge in a given situation. If a doctor and myself were placed in exactly the same situation - such as applying a tourniquet to the exact same individual in precisely the same time, 'side-by-side', so to speak, with exactly the same outcome in both instances if we acted identically - he would be ethically obliged to follow the Oath. I would not, however, even though we're doing exactly the same thing.

3. It insists that man's will is outside the causal chain of things, that the will is free and undetermined by anything save itself. But we know this to be untrue: there is at least one thing which precedes the conscious will and has a direct impact upon it - one's facticality, or the circumstances of existence which exist before the birth of an individual, from his genetic structure to the social system into which he will be born. Furthermore, the Cartesian position of the will determining itself is rather hard to defend: hoe can a thing substantially alter itself? Kant was never able to disprove Hume's assertion that free will is illusory, despite all his pretentions contrariwise. We seem to exert self-control, but there are so many variables in play in a given instant (normative societal mandates, the threat of retributive violence, pre-reflective instincts, etc.) that consciousness seems at times more like a battlefield than a 'thing with such-and-such properties'.

[drachefly]

there is no thing-in-itself; if there were, it could be made known, as Schopenhauer had demonstrated

Okay, red flag. That's some highly suspect epistemology you've got going on there.

it would thus not be immutable - it would not be a thing-in-itself

I don't see that as a necessary property of the thing-in-itself that it cannot change over time.

This is not to say that a universal system of morality is impossible; rather, it means that, to postulate such a formulation, one would be required to analyze all possible combinations of given scenarios which a man or woman might find themselves in and derive from there systems of conduct corresponding to each conceivable situation. Such is quite clearly beyond the scope of human reasoning.

Okay, so it's impractical to apply the principle. Does that make it wrong?

3. It insists that man's will is outside the causal chain of things, that the will is free and undetermined by anything save itself.

No, it doesn't. Distinguish between that actual assumption, and the useful approximation that we, being limited in information, can treat free will as being partly inexplicable by us.

[Turin]

This is rough draft for my first 'political' essay, intended to give a very generalized overview of the political thinking of Max Stirner and, more specifically, his relationship to liberalism and humanism. I know it's rough, so any helpful commentary would be greatly appreciated.

My helpful commentary: maybe you should try to, you know, actually say something in all this garbage. Instead of leaning precariously on the "work" of the Postmodernist idiots who came before you.

There is a tendency among leftist radicals, en vogue since Marx's publication of The German Ideology, to shy away from the writings of Max Stirner, the fierce and enigmatic egoist whose works both smashed the intellectual underpinnings of the liberal conception of property while at the same time predicting the totalizing influence of Hegel's philosophy on the left. This unfortunate turn of events has left Stirner's work vulnerable to misinterpretation and misappropriation by reactionaries of all stripes - Randians, quasi-radical libertarians, 'free-market individualists', and their ilk (always so quick to hide behind their neo-liberal masters and growl at the first sign of socialist or anarchist activity) - and has led to their claiming him as one of their own.

Some academic liberals (who I'm not going to bother naming so no one can actually address this claim) don't like this really cool guy Stirner. And now a bunch of jerks claim his vaguely defined theories match their own, just as I'm about to do below.

The obvious question is: why? The notion of 'doctrinal purity' ought to be less than meaningless to a pluralistic worldview such as ours. And yet it seems the majority of socialists are dumbfounded when the question of what to make of Stirner arises. He is obviously no friend of liberalism or nationalism, dismissing both as "spooks", Holy Ghosts of language with no correlative outside of that language; at the same time he anticipates the horrors of Communist totalitarianism and declares it his mortal enemy. This ambiguity has unfortunately served to prevent Stirner's application as one of the most potent weapons available to the radical in his war against the system.

<sniff> Nobody really gets Stirner the way that I'm going to claim I do.

It is of the utmost importance that a reappraisal of Stirner's philosophy should occur. Marxism has been discredited in the eyes of the masses, and utopian socialism is no more possible now than in 1849. That the radical left has been in a perpetual rut for eighteen years - left without an overriding ideology for guidance and only pragmatic, immediate action with limited results for practice - is unfortunate. More unfortunate still is its inability to accept the pluralism it claims to endorse and voluntarily escape the Marxist confines within which it has imprisoned itself. And so I take it upon myself to re-appropriate Stirner.

The radical left is a fucking mess and has turned inward on itself (Ed: holy shit, something remotely true!) I think they could use a dose of Stirner jizz.

To understand Stirner is to understand Hegel in reverse. For Hegel, all things move towards the transcendent Absolute, the thing-in-itself, in a dialectical dance towards the divine; for Stirner, it is the concept of the Absolute which must be gotten rid of, and, to this end Stirner employs a type of anti-dialectic, reducing the universal to mere phantasies of the mind. Stirner's stated goal is to bring the particular, the individual, the isolated atom of existence, back into repute. Stirner's philosophical position, really a sort of radical nominalism, requires him to subvert all traditional idées fixes, which he terms 'spooks', poking fun at the geist-haunted world of Hegelian philosophy. "Have you ever seen a spirit?" Stirner asks in the opening paragraph of the second section of his book, The Ego and Its Own. "No, not I," replies the reader, "but my grandmother." Stirner responds, "Now, you see, it's just so with me too; I myself haven't seen any, but my grandmother had them running between her feet all sorts of ways, and out of confidence in our grandmothers' honesty we believe in the existence of spirits."

"There is no spoon."

And so Stirner begins his task of inquiring into the origins of the metaphysical world, adopting an attitude frightening in its joviality. We see in his attitude towards his work a sort of grinning half-madness that seems to herald the Die fröhliche Wissenschaft that so enamored Nietzsche (and on this point we must be clear, since there is no end in sight to comparisons between the two: while there are a number of similarities in their work and methodology, there is no indication that Nietzsche was more than passingly aware of Stirner's work, and Nietzsche himself, if inspired at all by Stirner, took his ideas further, drawing them to their final futile conclusion), but he is exceedingly serious in regard to the importance of his work. "Away, then, with every concern that is not altogether my concern! You think at least the "good cause" must be my concern? What's good, what's bad? Why, I myself am my concern, and I am neither good nor bad. Neither has any meaning for me."

Stirner, who really is quite like Neitzche, this other cool guy everyone's heard of, writes like he's being funny, but really he's really profound. (Ed: holy shit, that yellow part is all one fucking sentence!)

Stirner reserves his most potent vitriol for the practitioners of Feuerbachian 'atheism':

"But, even granted that doubts, raised in the course of time against the tenets of the Christian faith, have long since robbed you of faith in the immortality of your spirit, you have nevertheless left one tenet undisturbed, and still ingenuously adhere to the one truth, that the spirit is your better part, and that the spiritual has greater claims on you than anything else. Despise all your atheism, in zeal against egoism you concur with the believers in immortality."

I'll admit, I have no idea what the hell Feuerbachian atheism is. But seeing how much crap the rest of this is, I'm assuming this is either a philosophy no one actually espouses (and thus a strawman of anyone's real position) or a strawman of Feuerbach.

Stirner sets out to demolish 'humane liberalism' in the fourth section of The Ego and Its Own, titled The Owner. In this section Stirner proves himself the first (and heretofore most radical of) the anti-essentialists, and turns his intellectual cannons against what today might be considered a prototypical 'secular humanism'. Stirner begins thusly -

"Therefore the liberal too revolves in the same circle as the Christian. Because the spirit of mankind, Man, dwells in you, you are a man, as when the spirit of Christ dwells in you you are a Christian; but, because it dwells in you only as a second ego, even though it be as your proper or "better" ego, it remains otherworldly to you, and you have to strive to become wholly man. A striving just as fruitless as the Christian's to become wholly a blessed spirit!

Humanism is the abstract worship of mankind in the same way that Christianity is the worship of Christ. Because... uh... because!

The HUMAN[/i] religion is only the last metamorphosis of the Christian religion. For liberalism is a religion because it separates my essence from me and sets it above me, because it exalts "Man" to the same extent as any other religion does its God or idol, because it makes what is mine into something otherworldly, because in general it makes out of what is mine, out of my qualities and my property, something alien - to wit, an "essence"; in short, "vocation." But liberalism declares itself a religion in form too when it demands for this supreme being, Man, a zeal of faith..."

I'm going to completely strawman the essential concepts of secular humanism so as to distort them into a religion.

They wish to rid themselves of God while retaining all the contents and nicities of religious morality and metaphysics; Stirner desires to rid himself of religious morality and metaphysics to rid himself of God.

Morality is always abstract. Because... well, because.

Okay, I'm getting a little bored because this is mostly repetitive, but I'll hit some of the "highlights" from here on out.

But we must not see in all this a mere defense - radical though it may be - of traditional petty individualism. <snip lengthy repetition of the same>

I'm not going to actually support this in any way, of course, but Stirner isn't talking about petty individualism. To "support" this, I'm going to go on a total tangent about the nature of the individual.

One of the 'spooks' Stirner confronts is that of identity, and, in classical liberal theory, its corollary, rights (including, but not limited to, property rights). <blahblahblah> Stirner, unlike the individualist anarchist, does not recognize 'by nature' any right of the individual to appropriate to himself property, or to claim a thing external to himself as 'his own'. <blahblahblah> Stirner will go to great pains to refute the concept of a coherent identity-construct - that 'A is A' and 'I is I' - thus forever distinguishing himself from the later individualists and Objectivists. <blahblahblah> It is not the individual consciousness that Stirner is interested in, but the Ego, that which he takes to be prior to and thus more fundamental than the consciousness.

What the fuck does this actually mean? You've created some bullshit distinction between the label for something and the reality of it, and then constructed an entire bullshit argument around it.

No essence, no label can ever fully capture the totality of Stirner's Unique One. Just as one says 'cat' and forgets that the cat he refers to is white with black spots - unlike another cat, which is brown and gold - Stirner denied that 'Man' captured fully the traits of the individual 'man'. And even the very name Johann Kaspar Schmidt could not fully express the reality of Johann Kaspar Schmidt, thus necessitating the adoption of the Max Stirner identity.

Wow, words only can define that which they're meant to define. Heavy stuff, man. <takes a hit on the bong> Worthless drivel.

The question having been answered

Ha!

Okay, I can't take that any more. Sorry, I really thought I could make it all the way through.

Continuing on to the arguments afterwards...

Except that's not what Stirner's getting at.

Here's a fucking idea. Why don't you tell us what you're getting at instead of just mealy-mouthing around a bunch of post-modernist "there is no spoon" crap?

Or consider the Schiavo debacle of several years ago. So much energy and effort was expended by a group of black-robed theocrats to divine whether or not she, as a comatose invalid, retained human 'rights' which, according to the liberal definition of the term, accrue to sentience, that it would have been just as simple for them to have sacrificed a hen and gazed at its innards as it was to consult the Constitution and other religious documents.

Or maybe a whole bunch of fucking idiots did attempt to pin down religious meaning to human rights while actual humanists said quite easily "she's dead, Jim." Of course, you can just strawman the hell out of everyone, so what do you care?

What it boils down to is this: that the notion of 'human rights' is not grounded in any sort of reality; that it is a legalistic fiction (albiet a useful one) created out of political need rather than some vague Enlightenment; and that to regard them as objectively extant is to indulge in a sort of moralistic form of religiosity.

Utter bullshit. Humanist morality is based on reduction of suffering. This isn't some abstract nonsense about separation of individual and ego. It's based in the really-real world.

2. It presupposes the universality of Man in the abstract as a rule; it is thus teleological insofar as it supposes itself. "Pure practical reason" is meaningless outside of a perspectival schemata which takes into account the particular characteristics of a given situation, from whence its "practicality" is derived. This is not to say that a universal system of morality is impossible; rather, it means that, to postulate such a formulation, one would be required to analyze all possible combinations of given scenarios which a man or woman might find themselves in and derive from there systems of conduct corresponding to each conceivable situation. Such is quite clearly beyond the scope of human reasoning. All moral reasoning must therefore be piecemeal and gradual, constantly repositioning itself like a ship without a compass. In this I'm explicitly opposed to Kant: one cannot abstract from a given position without having direct access to a God's-eye view of things. One can impose normative 'rules of engagement' within a particular situation, but, until one occupies the situation of his neighbor, cannot do the same for him.

Whatever Kant may say on the subject aside, you don't have to have a God's Eye view to reason from a given position. You don't need to know the sum of all possible outcomes. This is a false-dilemma fallacy of the worst kind (actually very similar to ID-proponent's criticism of science); you don't have absolute knowledge, so therefore you don't have any knowledge. This is simply untrue. You just need empathy and reasoning capacity to arrive at a universal system of morality -- one based on consequences rather than absolutes.

Your Hippocratic Oath example is nonsense. You both are following a universal moral path when giving aid; one based on empathy.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

And Duchess, you should know better. Kant's categorical imperative is untenable for a number of reasons:

Time to take the boy to school....

1. It rests on a false metaphysic (there is no thing-in-itself; if there were, it could be made known, as Schopenhauer had demonstrated; it would therefore not be transcendental, as Nietzsche had shown; and it would thus not be immutable - it would not be a thing-in-itself).

The Kantian argument which Schopenhauer tried to critique--emphasis on "tried"--is that empirical knowledge requires thought. If we do not think about empirical data, no knowledge remains. Now, this should be a self-obvious propisition. Mere sensory perception is utterly useless to the human brain unless it is accompanied by mental processing, by evaluation and thought. No knowledge is gained from perceptions unless we think about them. In, short, concrete knowledge only comes from our mental processing of external, empirical data. Thought therefore is the mechanism of Truth, and the only really real or really true thing is Thought, as it is the critical component in making all other knowledge comprehensible to human reason.

The transcendental issue that you raise with the Ding am Sich is an equally silly objection. Schopenhauer tries to critique Kant's argument that the understanding of an object comes from both reason and sense. This is, however, as I've noted above, simply the truth, and Schopenhauer's issues with this subject absurd. One cannot understand anything without mental processing; one cannot process something which has not been sensed. Therefore understanding comes from a dialectic process of sense and reason. That is not precisely Kantian per se but the basic theory he presented is intact.

The process of transcending is to use reason to understand things--to mentally process sense--as far as Kant is concerned. Now, your argument that the Ding am Sich cannot exist because if it did, it could be made known, is ludicrous. We never know the precise, exact details of any object or thing. There is always error of measurement. Machines have limits on how accurately they can process data (try to find pi on your calculator), and the human body also has errors: Colour-blindness, for example. These examples serve to reinforce the fact that the absolute truth of the nature of particular things is unknowable. You are playing the creationist's game by asserting that Theory is not fact; it is technically true but practically irrelevant. The actual matter at hand is that through a combination of sense and reason we can create a transcendental understanding of an object--a functional understanding of an object--without knowing the absolute values of that object. Which leads us to the answering of point two...

2. It presupposes the universality of Man in the abstract as a rule; it is thus teleological insofar as it supposes itself. "Pure practical reason" is meaningless outside of a perspectival schemata which takes into account the particular characteristics of a given situation, from whence its "practicality" is derived. This is not to say that a universal system of morality is impossible; rather, it means that, to postulate such a formulation, one would be required to analyze all possible combinations of given scenarios which a man or woman might find themselves in and derive from there systems of conduct corresponding to each conceivable situation. Such is quite clearly beyond the scope of human reasoning. All moral reasoning must therefore be piecemeal and gradual, constantly repositioning itself like a ship without a compass. In this I'm explicitly opposed to Kant: one cannot abstract from a given position without having direct access to a God's-eye view of things. One can impose normative 'rules of engagement' within a particular situation, but, until one occupies the situation of his neighbor, cannot do the same for him.

There is no need whatsoever. We just need to consider the bounds of the human capacity to determine a formulation of a universal system of morality. I do not need to list every number from 1 to 5 billion, in short; I just need to specify the range. That range allows us to make broad moral conclusions about the human condition, which may then be applied through the appropriate cultural lense to create a functional system of ethics for that society. One can abstract from a given position by evaluating the universal limits of human intelligence, because Thought allows us to process empirical data demonstrating that there are in fact quantifiable limits to human intelligence and capacity. No, we do not know the perfect instructions of human morality, nor do we; we can find workable constraints on human morality through observation and deductive reasoning based upon that observation; then we may apply those constraints to the cultures we live in to develop systems of morality which will work in those particular circumstances while still adhering to the understood absolute limits of morality. We do not need to make the details of a system of morality perfect to refer it to an absolute standard; we must simply make the limits of that system perfect, and limits can be known.

<snip example rendered unnecessary >

3. It insists that man's will is outside the causal chain of things, that the will is free and undetermined by anything save itself. But we know this to be untrue: there is at least one thing which precedes the conscious will and has a direct impact upon it - one's facticality, or the circumstances of existence which exist before the birth of an individual, from his genetic structure to the social system into which he will be born. Furthermore, the Cartesian position of the will determining itself is rather hard to defend: hoe can a thing substantially alter itself? Kant was never able to disprove Hume's assertion that free will is illusory, despite all his pretentions contrariwise. We seem to exert self-control, but there are so many variables in play in a given instant (normative societal mandates, the threat of retributive violence, pre-reflective instincts, etc.) that consciousness seems at times more like a battlefield than a 'thing with such-and-such properties'.

This argument reverses itself. While being in a facile form technically correct, it ignores the fact that objects, events, can only be truly known through Reason, as I have demonstrated above. If you take that into fact, then the basic posit of free will becomes reasonable, as it is human reason, rational mental processes which are logically sound (and therefore absolute) which are used to properly process sense-perception. Therefore, while sense-perception is something we cannot control on its influence to our lives, including the biological makeup of our bodies, we do control how we understand it--and therefore we are making a continuous input into those perceptions which make up our lives. We cannot eliminate them, but through interaction with our reasoning minds, we influence them, and so are indeed capable of influencing ourselves; our thoughts, our desires, and our understanding of perceptual reality. And in doing so we establish free will for ourselves as an absolute (For we always influence everything we see), even if in practice this capacity is little exercised by the average human.

[Darth Holbytlan]

Turin has mostly covered this already, so I'll just add a few points.

I feel stupider for having read that. All I got out of it was "condemn concept X on the basis of poor analogy to religious dogma" and "condemn abstraction X (such as society) because it isn't 'corporeal' (read: real)". In other words, strawmanning and red herrings.

Except that's not what Stirner's getting at.

Then your essay sucks at explaining him, because that's what it looks like you're saying.

What it boils down to is this: that the notion of 'human rights' is not grounded in any sort of reality; that it is a legalistic fiction (albiet a useful one) created out of political need rather than some vague Enlightenment; and that to regard them as objectively extant is to indulge in a sort of moralistic form of religiosity.

Politics is just how these rights were brought to a place they could be enforced. Don't confuse that with their underlying justification in reduction of suffering, which is an objective standard.

This does not mean that I endorse a "might makes right" perspective, but that instead I propose that one treat all legal and political ideologies as symbolic constructs which are not grounded in reason or logic but in narrative.

Bullshit. Just because they are abstractions in no way means they aren't grounded in reality, as morality is in reduction of suffering.