/stirner general/

Okay il/lit/erati, I am a resident Stirnerfag and I decided to make this general because I'm seeing multiple Stirnerthread at the same time and I don't want to repost my answer, so here goes the answer to 70% of your questions:

>why is X not a spook?
X doesn't meet the formal requirements: spook doesn't simply mean "not true" or "made up", but specifically a concept that exerts authority over the internal desires of the individual. The concept of "free will" does not seem to be capable of doing this.

>mfw avoiding self-sacrifice at all costs is a spook

Is consumerism a spook?

are you saying that if a concept agrees with the internal desires of the individual it is not a spook? or is it just a spook you are using to your advantage?

yeah Stirner actually mentions the possibility of sacrificing himself but only, like, if he really wants too... not really one of his strong moments.

>tfw biology is a spook
F-free will, r-right guys?

no the criterion is not whether what the spook makes you do coincides with your 'intrinsic' desires, the question is whether you use a concept as a tool (and feel free to discard it if it's useless to you) or whether you have reverence for the concept (you believe it has value of itself, like when normies talk about 'human rights').

Anyone read Max Stirner's Dialectical Egoism: A New Interpretation by Welsh?

I've been thinking of acquiring it.

I.e. what if candidacy for spook-hood itself is a spook? Thats dangerous thinking user. Dangerously edgy thinking.

literally yesterday...

>Did he ever touch on free will and whether or not that was a spook?
He didn't and he probably wouldn't have considered it a spook since a) it doesn't meet the formal requirements: spook doesn't simply mean "not true" or "made up", but specifically a concept that exerts authority over the internal desires of the individual. The concept of "free will" does not seem to be capable of doing this.

b) On the contrary, getting rid of spooks doesn't really make sense if you argue against free will, because you need it in order to pursue your desires after getting un-spooked. Actually, arguing against free will doesn't really do anything because there is no practical way of 'acting upon the insight that free will doesn't exist'. Also Stirner wrote about will more explicitly in The Untrue Principle of Our Education, if you want to check that out. [as for "no free will", even people who explicitly deny free will spend the rest of their work tacitly treating humans as agents who make choices, see la Mettrie and Nietzsche for example]

I skimmed it, nothing super-surprising desu.

that literally does not meet Stirner's formal definition of a spook, which I just outlined... you can call it a QUAZOOM or whatever you want, but it's not what Stirner calls a spook.

>exerts authority over the internal desires of an individual

Thats a pretty vague definition user. I think with that definition just about anything could fit the definition of spook. What exerts authority over my internal desires has purely subjective content to me. Free will conceptually raised as the banner of some political movement which I personally have an involvement, for instance, could cause me to have the experience of an authority exerting control over my desires.

If I think Stirner himself has suspect motives, maybe just because I'm paranoid, then I imagine his concept of a spook to exert undue precedence over my own thinking - i.e. it exerts authority - and can qualify for spookhood. I see nothing wrong with my analysis.

I'm glad there are other Egoists on my meme board.

>Free will conceptually raised as the banner of some political movement which I personally have an involvement
I don't understand how that would work at all

>I imagine his concept of a spook to exert undue precedence over my own thinking - i.e. it exerts authority - and can qualify for spookhood

This sounds just like a 'regular' mental illness. Stirner uses his concept of spook more for the analysis of heteronormative value systems. You can compare this to the Super-Ego, in which rules are inserted not through the reasoning of the individual themselves but through irrational means ('education' for example where parents use their authority to create irrational responses of fear an anguish in the children when confronted with morality).

Now it's theoretically possible that the concept of spooks works as a spook for you, but that would be due to an individual psychopathology of yours, not because of the concept as such.

>concept as such
this some kind of objectivist ideology?

I've never read any Rand, so no. I'm just trying to put Stirner in as plain a vocabulary as I can think of.

Is it even possible to be a "Stirnerfag"?

On one hand the idea of following someone else's philosophy is against everything he stood for, but on the other hand it seems like his philosophy is the absence of philosophy in a way.

That just leads me back to the original question. It's like other philosophy are illnesses and he is the cure, but the cure is something you only take once and you don't "have a cure" in the same way you "have an illness."

>"free will" does not seem to be capable of doing this
That's because it is a very powerful spook that is utterly intoxicating in its authority over you.

>other philosophies are spooky diseases! stirner's philosophy is the one true cure!
Is there any reason to believe this? I don't think I've ever seen a good argument for any of stirner's main controversial claims.

Well that is how he saw it. The spook was the idea that manifested itself in the physical word by manipulated the mind of the person it inhabited.

All philosophies and ideologies are this and only serve themselves.


Whether or not you agree is irrelevant to the question though. He saw it this way and so it follows that his philosophy would have to be the absence of that.

That's why I wonder if it is possible to be a follower of his or if that is fundamentally impossible. Is it different because his is not a philosophy or does that too make it impossible to follow?


It has nothing to do with agreeing with.

Summarize Stirner's philosophy in five sentences.

Bonus points if you do it without using the term "spook".

Thanks Professor Newman

Lalala I'm right and you're irrelevant! Ego. I. Me. Myself.

Acting in your own interests are just as legitimate as acting in those that are external to you so why not?

Is that Sidgwick?

...

Yes, that is based Sidgwick. Good eye, user. Which reminds me.

PSA: Sidgwick develops a much deeper and subtler egoism than Stirner. Also makes real arguments. Pretty dry writing style, though, and much less edgy, so only check him out if you care about the content and are interested in whether egoism is correct.

what is stirner-core

like what should i read to not look like as large of a bumpkin as i did making this post

Why don't you stop being a pretentious egoist faggot and just read based Althusser instead?

>french
>marxist

Kant would make Stirner look like a babbling babe.

I'm not Newman, though I've met him. I have argued against his reading of Stirner, too.