Stirner

That's a picture of some other guy. If you google Max Stirner you'll find a few pictures falsely labelled as him. Englels' questionable memory is the best we've got.

He's popular because he allows people to be apolitical liberals whilst at the same time deluding themselves that they aren't actually apolitical liberals. Classic example of having your cake and eating it too.

This is true.

What was it like?

The time before Veeky Forums.

That looks like Jung tho

He just allows people to dismiss any arguments by saying that they're concepts.

Well Stirner himself doesent really dismiss everything as concepts. Its just meme posters who dont understand Stirner that dismiss everything.

Can you elaborate?

He was the Stefan Molyneux of the XIX century.

Why don't you read his damn book and find out? Seriously, it's only one book and couple other stuff, he's like the most concise philosophy you'll see discussed, you're not going to have to spend years studying like the other wordy fucks.

>this is what people actually believe nowadays

For the longest time I thought he was some racist guy because I thought it was the nigger definition of spook.

Popularity is a spook

he's Nietzsche lite

hardly, Stefan is pushing for a form of objective morality

What the fuck? Stefan Molyneux would be laughed at by Stirner. He basically fetishizes private property.

Well I believe he meant to say that the concepts of good and bad, e.g morality, are things that only exist inside our heads, spooks of the mind if you will. There's no such thing as karma, and you won't get judged in some afterlife on the basis of how good you have been. You can do whatever you can get away with, because there's no such thing as good or bad.

I've actually read his works and used to be on Veeky Forums so I'll list up all the reasons for anyone who doesn't understand.

He's obscure, his prose is hilarious while simultaneously serious and flawless in logic, and his stances are hilarious while simultaneously serious and flawless in logic.

As it's been said many times, there's a reason Marx wrote a buttmad responsive essay that's longer than The Ego and His Own. That shit would make anyone with a sense of objective utilitarianism's blood boil. It's really fucking funny, and egoism is based.

Egoism is very much so a phenomenological stance based on decision making regarding your first-person perception of reality. In short, basically everything exists to be acquired, and if you have the ability to acquire something you may acquire it, which is true.

"Spooks" are just socio-political-moral constructions that people use as reasoning to do or not do things(i.e. religion, utilitarianism, "killing is wrong", etc). The analogy is that they may as well be regarded or disregarded as a make-believe creature.

Quick preface, Stirner was arguing against the seemingly religious and secular modes of thought of his time. This is when Hegelianism was hot-hot-hot, and thought was very lofty and unconcerned with the material.

So, the bedrock of Stirner's thought can be pretty simply summed up as 'people act in their self interest'.
As such, there are two modes of life, in which we are either consciously of this, or act on it unconsciously.
While people may argue that in moments of altruism or sacrifice, we are not acting in our own self interest, Stirner counters that we are taking the moralistic/ethical course of action which we hold to be good, right, or true.
Further, Stirner argues that above beliefs of sacrifice, altruism and other moralistic goods are fixed ideas, or in meme parlance, "Spooks".

A "Spook" is at best an assumption about reality reinforced by cultural, religious or philosophical thought (i.e. Familial honor, Christian repentance, the categorical imperative, Rand saying homosexuality is bad and so on).
While we may be able to find compelling rationalizations to think such things, Stirner claims that if we were to look closer, in reality, these thoughts are merely products of our own mind.
Stirner held that truths are material, and thus,
The Individual is above concept.

As such, another large proponent of Stirner's thought is revealed.
"I do not step shyly back from your property, but look upon it always as my property, in which I respect nothing. Pray do the like with what you call my property!"
He also critiques rights and property, rejecting the powers of authority, whether State, Divine, or other Individuals.

At this point, some people may come to understand him.

When considered, it seems that he has done away with a great deal of philosophic thought, and has left nothing but an Ockham's Razor of reality. Few assumptions are made beyond the material.
Sometimes called an end of philosophy, it is rather a new beginning.
(1/2)

As you may recall, Stirner was most concerned with us following our self interest. But, what is our self interest?
An Objectivist would perhaps parrot Aristotle and say Happiness (I know it's a moral thing in Objectivism, but let me make my point),
but when considered, how could it be that another person could tell you what your self interest was?
Now is when "Spooks" are to be considered, for what is your self interest? I could not tell you, nor Stirner.

However, you could find out yourself by carefully considering your thoughts for underlying Dogma.
Explore your Being by rejecting that cannot be part of your Self. This is not a form of solipsism, as the world (existence) is not to be denied, but the the stressors which claim to be of the world or beyond.

Stirner's rejection of rights and property are not so you can push down a child and take his chocolate bar, it's so you would realize
that you needn't concern yourself. Such things only serve to distract.

Lastly, let us touch on Stirner's Self, or Creative Nothing. This Creative Nothing is the Logos. A void from which life springs.
The Self created its own being. What is meant by this cannot be said. It must be understood rather.
In any case, I hope this clarifies a bit of his thought.

TL;DR: Read his book.
(2/2)

So he's an essentially a well-spoken 4 year old.

>Gimme that Mommy, it's mine!
No, it's not
>Why

Fucking mobile adding words when I type

If you consider that the lack of social conditioning that a 4 year old has can be projected into by a person with an adult mind and concerns, sure.

But that would mean you'd be hiding a lot of mental mileage to have such a reduced paraphrase. And it's pretty doubtful you'd be trying that hard to come to an understanding of what that user said. Otherwise you would have read the book instead of begging to be spoonfed so that you can act like a pedant.

Max Stirner was a Left-Hegelian philosopher who wrote a rather mean-spirited but really funny satire of Hegelian philosophy titled "The Unique and It's Property" (The Ego and It's Own is an awful translation). This book, understood by Stirner to be a critique of all religious forms of thinking that still existed in the nominally secular West, pushed for a radically anti-essentialist metaphysics: Starting from the idea that the human mind is an ever shifting, irreducibly unique "creative nothing" that is composed of pure actuality (this is vaguely existentialist, Kierkgaardian stuff), he concludes that all higher "essences" that put themselves above the unique individual are simply put lies designed to get you to alienate your sovereignty in order to serve something that doesn't exist. Stirner states these "essences" are "spooks of the mind", or ghosts which haunt our thinking and led us to limit ourselves.

This idea brings a lot of different philosophical conclusions at once: Staunch atheism, individualist anarchism (real kind not "capitalist" kind), anti-humanism, moral anti-realism, anti-nationalism, either existential nihilism or absurdism, etc. The unique individual is the ultimate sovereign over his own life and can only act in it's own interest, whenever it claims to be acting in the name of an interest alien to itself (such as "God's will" or whatever) it is simply acting in bad faith. Instead of acting in the name of a non-existing higher ideal, the individual should understand that they are the ultimate ruler of their own fate and act with "Eigenheit" or "Ownness" (a form of radical autonomy).

Stirner's anarchism rejects political authority and private property, holding them to be simply a spook: They are alienated power, people obey authority and respect property because they think it is a legitimate power when in reality it is simply empty title. If soldiers act with ownness and refuse to obey the General, he immediately becomes powerless.

The immediate aftermath of the publication of The Unique and It's Property was an uproar in 19th century Prussia, Stirner's "immoralism" shocked the Prussian nobility and clergy and their secular humanist philosophers alike. His polemic against Left-Hegelians, just like Marx's own polemics, ultimately helped to cause the decline in influence of that school of thought.

Marx and Engels initially had a positive view of Stirner (Engels claimed he was "the most talented of the Young-Hegelians" and commented that Stirner's Egoistic man is "so egoist he should become a communist out of sheer egoism"), but eventually came to see him as a political opponent in his individualistic anarchism so they wrote a really, really poor critique of Stirner in the last section of The German Ideology that to their luck was never published in their lifetime.

Stirner's influence waned quite quickly after that, his wife left him and converted to Catholicism, he wasted all of his money trying to set up a co-operative milk shop, he spent all of his life moving around and changing names to avoid paying his rent and debts and eventually died of an infected insect bite. His work was a major influence on many European nihilists and anarchists (Engels specially described Bakunin's anarchism as "a mix of Proudhon and Stirner") and foreshadowed post-structuralism and existentialism, but today professional philosophers (with the exception of scholars of Hegel and Anarchism) aren't particularly interested in Stirner and see him as a bit of a historical oddity.

He is popular because it is very easy to make memes about cartoon man decrying concepts to be "spooks" for the absurdity of it all, and because his radical anti-essentialism, nihilism and satirical style appeal to the Veeky Forums crowd.

Or, I'm at work, and wanna refute someone briefly

Brevity, wit, etc

Right, you're too impatient to think about it instead of too lazy.

>He's obscure, his prose is hilarious while simultaneously serious and flawless in logic, and his stances are hilarious while simultaneously serious and flawless in logic.

Yeah, that's probably my favorite thing from The Eho and Its Own. He mocks Hegel with subtle nonchalance. It adds quite a feel of new sincerity to it.

And people complain that there's only shitposts here. Thanks for the insights. I'm definitely reading his work now.

Alright.

Stirner's logic is indeed flawless, but his assumptions about humanity are flawed. We may act in self interest but this doesn't explain culture, altruism or courtship behavior. These can't be mere "spooks", they are a part of every society no matter how primitive, no matter if there's some kind of heirachy or not, and in the case of altruism it exists in almost every pack animal. Stirner is right only when all his assumptions are based in his anal cavity rather than reality.

Any modern middle schooler realizes that power is an illusion, that it is freely given rather than enforced. So his long list of admirers and critics (whom the most notable assumed EVERY SINGLE CONFLICT IN HISTORY as a "class conflict", how very 19th century) were, in my opinion, getting their panties in a twist not because of the profundity of his assertions but rather because of the threat he posed to their success.

Therefore, when presented with what we today acknowledge as fact (the need to socialize, the bizarre need to court in order to reproduce, the fact people do good arbitrarily), it's obvious Stirner either did not know or chose to ignore that people will always act outside their own interest as an individual beast because we are not beasts being deceived, but as a human being

Tldr yes we get it, we're individuals, but we're not selfish animals

I should warn that one of the reasons why his work is unknown and mostly only read by modern anarchists and Hegel/Marx scholars is because the only available English translation is fucking terrible.

There is this anarchist dude that writes under the pen names "Wolfi Landstreicher" and "Apio Ludd" that is working on a better translation called "The Unique and It's Property" and who has translated Stirner's reply to his critics (conveniently called "Stirner's Critics"). I think the new translation is partially available somewhere on the internet and afaik it's mostly finished but needs to be edited.

>altruism
Read
the fucking
book

Read my post. Stirner assumes his love is his own; it's not. It's an evolved trait, it belongs to his millions of years of ancestors.

Again, Stirner's egoism is flawed.

>It's an evolved trait, it belongs to his millions of years of ancestors.
Literally a spook.

What makes the translations so terrible?

The dude who translated it in 1907 just didn't do a good job and got many phrases wrong. For example, the first section of the book titled after a Goethe quote that reads "I have stated my case on nothing" or "I have based my affair on nothing". The current translation reads as "All things are nothing to me".

For the original meaning: Stirner discusses how all those "causes" we are supposed to serve such as "God", "Country" and etc do not themselves serve any alien cause and thus have "based their cause on nothing but themselves", and half-jokingly suggest that the individual should likewise "base their cause on nothing". So a mistranslation changed a pretty essential statement about Stirner's philosophy - the refusal to alienate one's sovereignity to an external cause - into high school level nihilism.

The Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy entry for Max Stirner is pretty good though, i suggest taking a look at it.

So basically the only way I could actually get a good understanding until a better translation comes out would be to read it in German? Shiiiiiiieeeeet. I'll definitely take a look at the Stanford page.

The Wolfi translation is nearly finished, i found it here:
>sites.google.com/site/vagabondtheorist/stirner/the-unique-and-its-own

I am waiting for it to be finished before reading it thoroughly too but you can read this and fill in the gaps with the current translation. Some of his other works such as "Stirner's Critics" and "The False Principle of Our Education" has good translations, too.

>Stirner discusses how all those "causes" we are supposed to serve such as "God", "Country" and etc do not themselves serve any alien cause and thus have "based their cause on nothing but themselves", and half-jokingly suggest that the individual should likewise "base their cause on nothing". So a mistranslation changed a pretty essential statement about Stirner's philosophy - the refusal to alienate one's sovereignity to an external cause - into high school level nihilism.
That's the exact meaning ı derived from the old traslation.

"All things are nothing to me" is a rather different statement than "I have stated my case on nothing [but myself]". The former is a nihilist statement where even one's OWN cause can be understood to be "worthless" (and shifts the focus away from one's "cause" entirely), the latter is a statement about not serving higher beings. The first statement can be read correctly but can also be read in a "pseudo-Nietzsche lite" way, and i have met tons of people who interpreted it in that wrong manner.

You can successfully derive the same meaning from the old translation if you can follow Stirner's logic. The two translations aren't entirely foreign to one another, and i probably overstated the issues in the Byington translation, but it's still kind of bad.

>science
>a spook

Read the book

Are Stirner's spooks related to memes in the science of memetics sense?

>"All things are nothing to me" is a rather different statement than "I have stated my case on nothing [but myself]".
Well, the translation is supposed to be poetic (as it's from a poem), there's a footnote with the literal translation. Still, looking up to the new translation as a reason to reread the book.

I think what he meant is the "belonging" to the ancestors rather than to the self. It does not matter if the trait was derrived from one's own genetic makeup if the self wills it and desires it.

That's Otto Weininger.

Don't be obtuse. "I'm doing it because grandmother did it" is the textbook definition of spook. Stirner doesn't give a shit if we "evolved" to love each other, because he's interested in actually loving people and not labelling them as correct or incorrect beings according to whether they love or not. If people are instinctually compelled to love, that is also not a concern to him--if they so wish to they can, if they don't wish to, they can too, if they fail to get over the thing it's a matter of their might and nothing else.

>science of memetics
Literally just meme.

Bump

>We may act in self interest but this doesn't explain culture, altruism or courtship behavior. These can't be mere "spooks",

Why is courtship behaviour incompatible with acting in self-interest? Not even to ask what you mean by the boundless wor d 'culture'

So what differentiates him from a true nihilist or, say, from Nietzsche? Isn't the basic tenet of do whatever you wish and can achieve the same? That all morals are fictional social constructs and can this be ignored?

Is it that fact that Nietzsche encourages the individual to craft a new personal set of morals, where Stirner dismisses morals outright?

A true nihilist wouldn't care about anything at all

Someone who agrees with Stirner probably care about himself

One of the best quality threads I've seen in a long time.

checked

>mother sacrifices herself for her child's life
>lol mom u just got spooked xD
This is why Stirner is bullshit, apparently instincts aren't a thing

Memes

Did Stirner practice what he preached though? or was a he bitch that let people push him around.

That mother was still acting in her self interest 2bh.

*farts on u*

>self interest
How does that work? Stirner would have to consider her offspring to be an extension of herself, which idk how he would argue that. Otherwise mr. unique one would have to be considered below something else (offspring), something I doubt Stirner would argue for. Also how could the sacrifice be considered just the mom doing what she "wants", why can't she be acting on her insticts like a dumb animal?

It's about choosing to act on the instinct.

On the subject, what is the deal with Hegel? My highschool only cared about the greeks and Marx(only heard about Hegel in college) so I am seriously lacking on this part of philosophy.

He's just extremely memetic because of that caricature and the word spooks

Fuck Stirner, even Thoreau left society and lived in Walden by himself for two years, what has this german faggot ever done?
Bakunin > Every other anarchist

Is it bad that the first few lines of the first post already makes me want to punch the cunt?

Today I met with my undergraduate advisor to discuss my major, or lackthereof. I still haven't declared anything. For the past two and a half years I've taken six courses per semester across a wide variety of fields. Mathematics, thermodynamics, film analysis, fiction writing, philosophy, middle eastern history, native american history, linguistics, german language, cognitive psychology. Whatever seemed interesting I'd take it. I aced every class that I didn't drop, always for being too boring.

My professor said, "What the hell do you want to do, though?"

I said, "I don't know. Go to the woods. Write stories and paint. I like animals. Maybe I'll adopt a raccoon or something."

"But realistically," he said, "What do you see yourself doing five years from now?"

"I don't know. Why would I care about that? If there were something I wanted to do five years from now, why don't I just start doing it now?"

"That's exactly my point. You need to find something to focus on, and start focusing on it now. With a job market like this, you need at least a year's worth of internship to get hired at any decent company."

"I refuse to work for any company."

"What?"

"I will not work any job where a manager dictates what I may do and how I may do it, and I refuse to take any managerial position. I work alone, on my own terms, at my own pace."

"The real world doesn't work like that."

"Fine. I have no interest in the real world anyways. I think I'll go into the woods after all."

Dumb spook could barely even speak. Not that I would have cared what he had to say. I was already writing my manuscript in my head while filling out the forms to drop out of that spookhouse.

From Nietzsche's perspective Stirner was just a nihilist, while from Stirner's perspective Nietzsche was just a pious atheist who was searching for a new God to worship.

Nietzsche not only encouraged the individual to craft a new set of morals but created this ideal for humanity to emulate (the Ubermensch) and praised ancient Greek virtues/values. Stirner would have none of that, the unique individual has no reason to sacrifice themselves to model themselves after an "Ubermensch" and has no need to craft new sets of morals.

>How does that work? Stirner would have to consider her offspring to be an extension of herself, which idk how he would argue that.

Everything which you cherish and make it your property is an extension of yourself and of your egoistic interest.

>But just look at the Sultan who so lovingly cares for “his own.” Isn’t he pure selflessness itself, and doesn’t he sacrifice himself hour after hour for his own? Yes, of course, for “his own.” Try just once to show yourself not as his own, but as your own; for escaping his egoism, you will take a trip to his jail. The sultan has based his affair on nothing but himself; he is for himself the all in all and the only one [der Einzige], and tolerates no one who dares not to be his own.

now this is shitposting

Mostly because the picture of him is very exploitable for memes and "spook" is a bulletproof way to shutdown anything at any time.

>Because he disagreed with Marx
Marx wasn't particularly popular in contemporary mainstream academia either, as a matter of fact none of the young Hegelians were.

Additionally he didn't even disagree with Marx that much.

Nah, Nietzsche is the less radical and more status-quo friendly of the two.

>He doesn't know about the milk shop.

>calling him a kid
>a witty refutation

Really faggot?

>No, it's not
Says who? Says you?

>"kid"

child.
this is an aussie forum

YANKS STOP IMPERIALISATION, GET OUT

whats the difference between existential nihilism and absurdism?

No you dummy. That's the sort of thing that Ayn Rand would say.

Stirner is a Ayn Rand that is actually consistent. He doesn't say you ought to want to preserve your life, or seek happiness. He just says, as a matter of fact, that people only ever do what they want to do.

It's a perfect meme philosophy because it makes no predictions or recommendations, but still manages to make everyone else look stupid.

Existential Nihilism is the (often pessimistic) view that there is no intrinsic meaning to life and that it is also pointless to construct our own as a substitute.

Absurdism is the view that the search for meaning is inherently absurd in the first place, and that you shouldn't really bother with this, and instead should accept and enjoy life as it is anyway.

They differ in that Nihilism is somewhat preoccupied with the search for meaning, whereas Absurdism rejects the entire search in the first place.

Seems like a philosophical dead end to me. Egoism in of itself is pretty boring and pointless.

He's not popular. He's a meme.

but if nihilism already accepts there is no intrinsic meaning, then doesn't that fundamentally reject the search too? btw, what's the absurdist view on constructing own meanings?

But expands into the greater question of what is both the Self and what true self interest is, which may only be decided individually.

It's not a philosophical dead end, it's the exit.

Personally I like him because he was a fantastic philosopher with a rock-solid philosophy.

It's not really. Egoism provides an excellent bedrock from which to build sincerely held values.

Now I understand it.

>Egoism in of itself is pretty boring and pointless.
But the genius of Sterner isn't that he recommends egoism, it's that he analyses all human behaviour as purely egoism, disguised by reference to spooks. If egoism is boring and pointless, then so is life.

Quick question.

How would a world that followed Stirner's philosophy look like?

communist

spooky

how similar to you think the union of egoists is to kropotkin's idea of mutual aid?

If Stirner is right, it would look just like this one, except that people would tell the truth.

Instead of "defending Christianity", people would just say "I want all gay people out of my sight, they make me feel bad".

Instead of "being a socialist", they would just say "we have all decided to stop working and steal from the cash register!"