I was reading his book and it was pretentious as hell...

I was reading his book and it was pretentious as hell, it was essentially just him projecting his own personal life upon other people without real arguments as to why we should. According to his book I should act upon my desires, my desire was to close the book and never read it again. Was this his plan all along?

I was going to tell you off for not getting it but arguments are a spook.

>he doesn't realize that desires are a spook

Just do whatever you want dude.

Arguments are a spook. Lick my feet. that's a command.

What if my desire is to uphold social constructs such as the state, the nation and the government?

>it was essentially just him projecting his own personal life upon other people

What gave you that idea? He says almost nothing about his personal life.

>without real arguments as to why we should

His argument was simply that people have interests separate to those of ideologies and other similar constructs and that their claims are just as good as any.

>According to his book I should act upon my desires

Stirner isn't prescriptive in his book, indeed its kind of the opposite to the point he even wrote a poem about it.

>my desire was to close the book and never read it again

Thats unfortunate

>Was this his plan all along?
Lets ask Stirner

>Let us choose another convenient example. I see how men are fretted in dark superstition by a swarm of ghosts. If to the extent of my powers I let a bit of daylight fall in on the nocturnal spookery, is it perchance because love to you inspires this in me? Do I write out of love to men? No, I write because I want to procure for my thoughts an existence in the world; and, even if I foresaw that these thoughts would deprive you of your rest and your peace, even if I saw the bloodiest wars and the fall of many generations springing up from this seed of thought — I would nevertheless scatter it.

>Do with it what you will and can, that is your affair and does not trouble me.

then do it out of your own self interest instead of being duped by ghosts to sacrifice your effort in the service of someone else

Entirely non spooky if you are acting on your desires and interests.

Entirely spooky if you place those social constructs above your desires.

Spookiness has more to do with how you treat or relate to something than what something is

Stirner was full of shit.

That's the thing with Stirner. You're either on board with him or your not. Arguments aren't really necessary or warranted.

Well, ask yourself: Is upholding the state and private property really in your interest? Unless you are some politician or millionaire, I'd say no.

The problem is the finality of his philosohy. If you truly are a Stirnerite, you may as well declare the end of philosohy.

Why would you base your belief system on what Stirner believed as if he was some authority on the subject? Stirner's philosophy is just a cheap justification for selfishness and acting solely in one's own self interest. I would dare say that many things he considered a "spook" are good things and necessary for a society to function.

>what is a union of egoists

what are these things and why do you consider them to be "good"? If you're saying that it's ultimately in our self-interest to form a society with certain rules and regulations on everyone I wouldn't disagree.

>you may as well declare the end of philosohy.
Ethics is only a small part of philosophy so he hardly has much of an impact.

>justification for selfishness and acting solely in one's own self interest.

See

>good things and necessary for a society to function.

Self interest and desire necessitates those things user - Stirner does not advocate for everyone to be some ruggard randian individual who dont need no community.

Im saving money so my parents will never have to live in a nursing home, I do not do it out of a spooky obligation to the family but because I dearly love them - indeed I would do this even if the whole world would hate me for it.

Yes

What's the difference? If you want to sacrifice your effort in the service of someone else, and do so, is that acting in your own interest? How does being "duped" into doing so differ from this?

"duped" probably is misleading. it's more about recognizing the reason why you do something. helping people can make you feel good and if you aren't a sociopath committing a gruesome murder can haunt you

lick my asshole instead property

Is it really that hard to understand? You sacrifice something for someone else because you love them, not because some abstract concept of "duty" that you have as a citizen of a state or a follower of a religion.

You might argue that love in itself is just a spook as well, as it's just chemical reactions in your brain which you might as long experience when you worship a cross or sing your countries national anthem. However, the person you love is real: Stirner is not a Solipsist. It's not a spook unlike something like a "country". Show me what a country is, it doesn't really exist.

>imagines loli stirner spreading her ectoplasm-cover ass cheeks

>How does being "duped" into doing so differ from this?

In one instance you are conscious of your desires and needs in the other you are blind to them at best and repress them at worst.

Being conscious of your own interests greatly helps in living a happy life, aides in communication, and avoids the constantly fumbling and dissonance that comes from placing the interests of an ideological construct ahead of your own.

Compare for instance the woman who becomes a homemaker because she genuinley wants to play that role in her children's life to the woman who becomes a home maker only because thats what society tells her a good mother should do.

stirnerfags can't prove the ego is any more relevant than any other input to the human experience, including the duties and responsibilities to other men they so despise and regard as "spook". in their attempts to avoid becoming slaves to externals they've become nothing more than slaves to their transient desires and call it acting in accordance with their own. Unfortunately, 'their own' is not the greatest slave driver and the stirnerite's biggest role in society invariably ends up devolving into convincing others of the virtues of stirnerism.

You should also look into the work of the late Ernst Juenger, who was heavily influenced by Stirner.

>stirnerfags can't prove the ego is any more relevant than any other input to the human experience
Wtf did I just read

Every input materializes itself inside your ego

There is nothing else which you feel except your ego

>stirnerfags can't prove the ego is any more relevant than any other input to the human experience, including the duties and responsibilities to other men they so despise
Why would they despise others? The point is that there is no imperative of duty. There is nothing to compel you. The imperative is the spook. You may choose to do your duty but you may also choose not to - and there is nothing to keep you from not doing it (or at least making the attempt).

I have literally never heard anyone mention this dude outside of Veeky Forums. I suspect that he's popular here only because he is obscure, not for any other reason. It's the usual Veeky Forums hipsterism.

Read the pseudo-introduction and 1st chapter of Kojeve's Introduction to Reading Hegel and you'll understand why your worldview is completely wrong.

Oh look its another idiot who either hasn't read him or can't understand the very basic fundamentals of his work.

>implying
Oh please Striner is nothing like Rand

...

Spot the newfag who thinks Veeky Forums is a free speech right wing activist site and doesn't know the real meaning of 'for the lulz'

If cancer patients really wanted their cancer cured, they would trade being turned into dinosaurs for the cure to their cancer. Why should he be forced to cure their cancer against his will?

Why shouldn't you force him?

Just looking at the quality of the posters that endorse him makes me desire to not even give him the benefit of the doubt and never read a paragraph he wrote.

>I am not going to read Striner coz strinerfags hurt my feelings ;_;
This has to be the lamest slight against spookposting yet

You should force him. He shouldn't force himself.

KEK

Considering how much butthurt these threads produce i imagine Stirners not going to go anywhere for a long time.

stirner posters spook the shit out of me.

Y-yes Loli Spuk Führer

Because they make you see the spooks that follow you

>it's just chemical reactions in your brain
I fucking hate that argument, and the fact that is brough up by rick &morty tier redditors doesnt help either. Your entire perception can be boield down to "just chemical reactions". Is the world around you just a chemical reaction too?

what is your point? Our entire percepiton *is* just neurological activity.

So is the argument to be aware of why you do what you do. And and as result if your own personal reasons for doing something are not good enough to yourself then you shouldn't do it

The fact that its just any material interaction doesn't give any insight into its meaning or relation to the human experience. Its like saying inflating a balloon for a celebration is just putting air into a stretchy air-holder that strongly presents color stimulus given its size and wavelength of reflected light; you can talk about HOW something is what it is but it doesn't answer for the meaning we put onto it or the ontology thereof

And you would be objectively wrong. Which is why I am not a big fan of letting everybody vote

Extremely poorly written at the very least

>If you're saying that it's ultimately in our self-interest
Why would you only do things solely because they are in your self interest?

>Only politicians and millionaires benefit from running water and supply lines, a healthy economy, or a police force with enough monopoly of power that you don't get shot during drug wars or power struggles between militias

Yeah dude, fuck the system. Burn down the flag my man. Cops are just another word for fascists.

>should

Part of that may be the translation. Apparently it's not very good, and he's such an obscure philosopher nobody has bothered to do a new one.

Though he definitely inherits his prose from Hegel, and Hegelian prose is just awful.

He was the only true hegelian left after hegel, and he pushed the logic of dialectics to their ultimate conclusion.

originally the young hegellians wanted to flip Hegel's idealism on its head by using his own theory of historicism, meaning that the next step in criticizing morality and idealism was shifting to materialism and "social beings". Marx was quite happy to sit around those waters, as was as fuerbach who was arguing that god was simply man's own self-image and replacement of divine with humanism.

Marx was not happy to stay at that level, he had to go further and used dialectics against his own fellow young hegellians. "Social being" and "society" was nothing but the thesis to the "anarchist" antithesis, and the true synthesis therefore was egoism.

And marx hated him for him. Spent 200 pages writing a blog called "saint max" trying to lambast Stirner for pointing out that Marx was being spooked by his economic determinism and classism theories.

There is no society, there is only the self.

But that's wrong. Marx and Feuerbach were idealists. It was until after Stirner utterly trashed left-Hegelian idealism that Marx became a materialist.

You're correct actually, just did a bit of brushing up on the subject and. They were humanists beforehand, but marx was already flirting with materialism at that point due to his developing interest in economics. I do agree it is Stirner that pushed him further towards developing his communist theory. It has been a while since I've read about stirner and Marx though, so forgive me if I get the chronology a bit muddled up. Stirner still perceived Marx as a moralist of some sort, even after Marx doubled down on materialism as constituted economic determinism as real evidence (not spooks), so it was okay to push for his pro-society argument. Whereas Stirner simply viewed society as a spook and assessed Marx's presuppositions about the "future stages" of historical materialism (read here: socialism and communism) as scientifically baseless and therefore just more circular reasoning on the part of Marx.

I do agree that Stirner had a very formative impact on Marx though, and probably will always be more remembered for that than anything. As to which one I think was right...I think both were full of shit tbqh.