If Stirner's philosophy worth anything it is for btfoing Atheists

oh that makes sense now.
>muh transcendentals
embarrassing.

>t. brainlet
Nihilists "believe in" something, that thing is called "nothing." To nihilists, nothing itself is the sacred thing, or the fixed idea. Stirner was not a nihilist. The duped egoists (You) are the only ones who saw people "must" believe in something, because that very appeal to prescriptive morality points up their self denial.
>"lol you are just as bad as us we are the best"
What the fuck do you mean by this?

Describes the spooks carried with the ideas of God, Man, Humanism, making clear it's ideologies all the same but with different robes. This reveals the hypocrisy of Atheists renouncing one ideology for one of their own, of beleafs of how things must be, even when they aren't too sure themselves what those ideas are, what is comical.

He doesn't push his own belief. He makes note of how others try to push their own ideology. He isn't saying if it is good or bad.

I think it I best for btfoing the left. Even though left anarchists love him (because they are idiot philistine cultist selective readers) he spends the last section of the first part of the ego and its own pissing and shitting all over liberalism and its retarded children.

He basically shows how humanists and liberals and socialists just replace worshipping God with some other fixed idea they place above themselves.

They still worship, just a different idol, and often not as consciously as a Christian would. They mistake a new master for freedom. or as Stirner would call it, ownership.

k
>to nihilists nothing is the sacred thing
moot point. elaborate.
>what did you mean by this
the only thing a religious person could try to get out of this argument.
no but the religious people who use this do.

Religious people might as well be described as anyone who conscribes to a set of morals and ideals. So called atheist people by simply acknowledging the disparity between their beliefs and other's conscribes to some set of morals.

If you want me to elaborate, the point isn't "moot," but I'll humor you. Nihilism is commonly characterized as a denial of all sacred things. So what does this, strictly speaking, mean? The nihilist says, "Nothing is sacred." The logical inverse of this statement is, "All things are profane." The nihilist is the person stuck in nonage against god, who finds the perfect world lacking in perfection but cannot see that "perfection" itself is merely an idea in the mind: it is not factual. The nihilist complains about the profanity of all physical things when compared against the Nothing, which is their god.
>the only thing a religious person could try to get out of this argument.
This statement doesn't make the former garbled mess any clearer. If you're indeed meaningfully religious, I'd give Tolstoy and this guy as examples of how a religious person can still be egoistic. The last line of Anna Karenina (Edmonds translation):
>But my life now, my whole life, independently of anything that can happen to me, every minute of it is no longer meaningless as it was before, but has a positive meaning of goodness with which I have the power to invest it.
>with which I have the power to invest it.
What is this if not an egoistic self-affirmation?

>"Nothing is sacred." The logical inverse of this statement is, "All things are profane."
the law of the excluded middle doesn't always hold

I recognize that there are potentially infinite variations of nihilism dependent on the individual who adheres to it. I can only criticize a hypothetical nihilism until I am confronted by an actual nihilist. This is the most general form of the argument.

calling people who have some set of morals 'religious' is some messed up semantics really
For this you have to assume that perfection or his idea of perfection is what the nihilist desired but never got/ would never get according to him and that this is the foundation of his nihilism.
and atheists can perfectly be egoists so all a 'religious egoist' could try to get out of the argument against them is the same.

the issue here is that sanctity, if you're figuring it as a general sense, takes upon a metaphysical quality (ethical cognitivism) to which profanity is not the inverse; profanity also requires an ethical cognitivism if you're going to figure it as colloquial rather than philosophical. I've always found attempts to show that nihilism, atheism, radical skepticism or similar positions somehow self-detonate as sophistic for similar reasons.

I love to disconsider logic too

If something is perfect, it's by definition impossible to achieve. Nihilists are spooked by this.

I know atheists *are* egoists, everyone is an egoist, it's just that some of them martyr themselves to Humanity or Progress while deriding such martyrdom when it's done in the "name of God."

You're still not making clear what you meant by "lol you are just as bad as us we are the best."

How is profanity not the inverse of sanctity, even in cases where people ascribe truth-values to these propositions?

this sentence is false

Yeah well I wanted to add "or [which the nihilist] at least desires to be greater than the nothing" but I was busy buying a brownie.
It's just that you could only try to get halfway in arguing against atheism with this only making atheism as spooked as the religious person but not necessarily more. Also I'm not atheist btw, rather I'm agnostic.

profanity and sanctity are different ways to make normative claims. If you say there are no normative standards - for whatever reason - it holds that nothing is sacred, and also that nothing is profane.
When you invert nothing is sacred as nothing is profane, you forget that any nihilist or antirealist is already non-cognitivist, so no moral proposition is truth-apt.
So it's not that things aren't sacred because what you thought the definition of sanctity is was in err, but because propositions about sanctity generally don't make sense.

Why do they have to be "more spooked" for it to be a "full argument"? A fearful person is a fearful person, the only observable degrees are in real, observable people. Some atheists will be less spooked than some catholics, some muslims will be less spooked than some SJWs, and so on.

Not all nihilists are non-cognitivists.

I agree that propositions about general sanctity don't necessarily "make sense," since although they can be eminently logical they have no basis in lived reality. But to say that "Nothing is sacred and profane" is also what Christians say about their God, e.g. that although he is the perfect author of the universe, he wrote pain and suffering into that work, but only for our benefit, which we can't know because we are not perfect, like god. I'm just saying that nihilism, like any idea (however logical or useful), has the potential to become fixed after a person has lost interest in it. A nihilist can be an affirmative egoist or a duped egoist, like any person. It's a matter of how interesting and useful the idea is to that person.

If we accept the argument accepting it still doesn't make atheism a weaker position than being religious.

I think you've misinterpreted the OP. He's not saying it's "better" or "worse," "weaker" or "stronger" a position than religion, which you have unnecessarily opposed to it, he's saying that it can lead to absurd conclusions, like any idea taken to too far an extremity. The implication of his post seems to be that, since religion has been hacked to death so many times, it's about time for the same to happen to atheism, since in many cases it's not fundamentally any different from a religion. Of course, I only think it's "about time" because I've run across a lot of moralizing, sanctimonious, platitudinous, pseudo-leftist culture warriors and meeting a genuine catholic would be thoroughly refreshing for me.

>Not all nihilists are non-cognitivist
that's true I guess, but an error theorist would not be able to say things were profane either

>But to say that "Nothing is sacred and profane" is also what Christians say about their God
is it? I don't think your general characterisation of theological explanations of evil/apologetics really follows clearly that christians say nothing is sacred or profane. A Christian must agree with normative propositions by definition, and that's how I think we can get out of these muddy waters, because what we're doing is making prescriptions about the psychological character of persons. This should be irrespective of their self-identification as Christians or nihilists (i.e. it should be analytical), but whether they meet criteria for inclusion in either category if it's true that 'this person believes X'
Then you don't have to worry about the psychological variance of your chosen person apart from what you suppose a belief in X implies.

I'm not saying that Christians say this (nothing is sacred and nothing is profane) about the notion "nothing" itself, I'm saying that they substitute "God" for "nothing" (God is everything, and since profanity and sanctity "exist," God is sacred and profane).

You can only be properly analytic about what categories a person fits into if you've got an actual person to discuss. I agree that a person's psychology is prior to their self-identifications (this is why Tolstoy's strong egoism comes through in spite of his devout Christianity). Also, to say that "there are no meaningful normative propositions or standards" is itself a grammatically normative proposition in that it makes a linguistic behavioral prescription, so non-cognitivism opens itself up to criticism on that basis as well. It's essentially the same contradiction as to say "there is no absolute truth," because even though "absolute truth" is not a real, objective thing, to express that proposition makes an appeal to the notion of absolutes without which it couldn't exist.

well I specifically said that 'this is the only thing religious could try to get out of the argument' which has the implication that they are using it for religious interests(defending religiousness against atheism, making atheism look dumb) rather than other interests.
But I agree that atheists can easily be as spooked as religious people or even more spooked, like the 'New Atheists'

I'm confused as to how you figure christians propose god is profane

>'Also, to say that "there are no meaningful normative propositions or standards" is itself a grammatically normative proposition in that it makes a linguistic behavioral prescription'
I disagree, because a 'linguistic behavioral prescription' is conventional+empirical, not normative

removing this conflation can save us from the supposed self detonation of your example phrase, 'there are no absolutes'; absolute truth/logical entailment statements or absolute normative statements.

But such a phrase can't be strictly empirical and conventional, because it makes an appeal to the idea of "meaning" in the negation of this term, and the notion of "meaning" has no empirical basis.

...

OP here

Realizing Atheism is just another spook, a word that works in semantics as opposite but proceeds to carry ideological weight as a description of an individual, you can now realize that there are no real atheists. The word exists as a semantic tool in closed context. Every action taken by an individual, an established identity, is a religious action; one, conscious or not, on any level of predisposition, that fixes and so has fixed a state above themselves they follow by.

well if we accept the argument how does that support the existence of a God? In Dutch this is considered a given. We call it 'levensbeschouwing' which roughly translates to 'way of life'.

that every action taken by an individual, an established identity, is a religious action in some way falls under 'levensbeschouwing' but really it's a broader term than religion, and I feel religion is too narrow of a term to be used like you use it.*
Still how would the argument support the existence of any God?

It has God as a fixed beyond, as a necessary rule, in the same vein we have many words serving the same purpose named as Morality, Progress, Man, etc.

explain.

it does. If I say to someone 'get me some wood' it's both convention (what the word wood semiotically refers to in a shared language) and observation (when I ask for wood I get the same result consistently)

Both of those instances rest on the idea of meaning, neither of them prove its existence. And the way you're using the word "convention" seems to be a pretty close approximation of grammatical normativity.

in what way do they 'rest' on the 'idea' of meaning?
We're trying to deconflate concepts, and I use normative in the philosophical-ethical sense; existential meaning and linguistic meaning are distinct.
Unless you're a radical skeptic about knowledge, the latter is also demonstrable.

For someone to understand what you mean when you say "get me the wood," linguistic prescription is necessary to a certain degree. You both must agree on this particular standard meaning of the word "wood" so that the other person gives you the piece of a tree rather than his erect cock (although a joke could obviously be made during the event, so the prescription necessary here is obviously very loose). Also, the linguistic sense of normativity and the philosophical sense of normativity are inextricably linked, because all ethical propositions must be expressed to another person in language. The degree of one's grasp of language will inform one's morality. Even the statement "there are no sensible ethical normative propositions" refers to both linguistic and philosophical normativity.

agreeing on the meaning is convention. There's no moral value judgement, the distinction is between desirability and accuracy

That they are linked doesn't really advance a case, such as the case that instances of language use don't prove semiotic meanings.
The way I see it, claims about linguistic meanings are truth-apt, but moral claims are (probably) not.

That you would choose desirability over accuracy or vice-a-versa is a moral judgement, since to my mind, all things meaningfully called "moral" must also refer to practical necessity. I agree that most moral statements (moral statements that refer to a spooky, general morality) have no truth aptitude. But to want to tell another person to "get the wood" is a moral act, that is, it's an act that refers to an agreement about a potential future state to be worked towards.

what that means isn't a choice between desirability and accuracy, it's that moral questions are questions of desirability, and linguistic questions are questions of accuracy. Here you can have an odd moral dialogue about whether accuracy is desirable, but that's not our dialogue, and it wouldn't imply linguistic propositions were moral.

>But to want to tell another person to "get the wood" is a moral act, that is, it's an act that refers to an agreement about a potential future state to be worked towards.
Since there's no value judgement in your account there, I don't think it constitutes a moral act. Further, there's a distinction between the proposition 'get the wood' in your account, and the desire to tell someone to get it; but we are concerned with the moral content of the proposition, not the desire to utter it. Finally, the closest thing to this account is probably some kind of sentimentalist, but most would agree that desire is not sufficient to constitute moral content; you need some variant of approbation or disapprobation.

>how can you live without believing in anything
this right here is a spook

Good thing it's not.

>The nihilist says, "Nothing is sacred." The logical inverse of this statement is, "All things are profane."
No it's not, you idiot.

Is that because the words "profane" and "sacred" have no meaning/power for the nihilist?

No, it's because that's not how logical inverses work. "Nothing is sacred" isn't really a conditional, but you could try to write it as one by making it "If x is a thing, x is not sacred." The inverse of that is "If x is not a thing, x is sacred," which makes no sense and is not equivalent to "All things are profane."

not that guy, but a nihilist claims nothing is sacredness because they require things like moral truths which don't exist. Profanity also requires moral truths.

but moreover, all things are black isn't the inverse of all things aren't white

Friendly reminder that spooks are the only things that make people do shit. Nothing great has ever come out of pure self-interest.

stirner's philosophy was and is brilliantly simple: it's a nominalist, phenomenological criticism leveled at everything outside of himself - there's really no re-covering for the spooks once their found, but some of them are pretty well hidden.

remember though, throwing off your spooks is just the first step - the killing of your father. now you have to delve into the unique aspects of your own psyche and fuck your mother.

>greatness
Nice spook.

>Friendly reminder that spooks are the only things that make people do shit.

how can you type something so wrong?

>Nothing great has ever come out of pure self-interest.

i hope you dont think this is some type of rebuttal of stirnman. read the book. if you have, maybe re-roll the dice on your life pal and kys

I knew this would come.

Enjoy rolling around in the dirt I guess. Civilization is a product of spooks.

>lol ur wrong

Start making a qualified rebuttal any time.

He is right and wrong. Read

>otherwise
and if the person is not an egoist(or uses the argument for religious reasons)
still no explanation, I'm asking for it because it seems like a non sequitur

have you read the book? from your original post, i can tell that you've used 'self-interest' in the traditional sense, something that would be well within the bounds of stirner's criticism.

your goal, greatness, is embarrassing. you've linked two spooks with a logical fallacy as evidence that a philosophy advocating for the examination of spooks is somehow 'worse.' you're a fucking retard mate. shouldntve written this post.

that is not correct. have you listened to david foster wallace's this is water speech one too many times? not everyone 'worships.' constant and indefinite self-creation out of nothing - living outside the bounds of spooks and even your own heuristics, that is the alternative. what you do will come from inside you, from the ego. not as actions directed toward some goal created outside yourself, but as an authentic act of becoming.

Yeah, I read the fucking book. In German, too.

Stop harping on about my choice of words. Yes, 'greatness' is a spook. Still spooks like 'greatness', 'liberty', 'progress', 'order' are the only things that create and maintain civilisation.

Yes, 'civilisation' is a spook, too. If you want to live in a Hobbesian state of nature go ahead.

other guy but Stirner is off because living only in your self interest can be self destructive.
It leads to the world spitting you out as you're trying to take as much as you can from the world in the most efficient way possible, sooner or later retaliation follows because you grow too detached from the world and its spooks and what they actually mean(and why it would often be interesting to abide by them) to act intelligently in your self interest(and thus not optimally in your self interest) causing you to eventually reap the whirlwind.

You see spooks often have actual purpose. A great example is ettiquette. It allows you to be polite by simply memorizing a pattern rather than having to assess every situation individually to be polite. A good egoist would know this. But having to understand all major spooks like some anthropologist to make use of them will have you make mistakes.

you don't understand 'living in self interest.' that doesn't mean 'be selfish and steal money.'

the example you give of etiquette is a good one for me to explain some misconceptions about this guy.

etiquette is a spook if you act simply out of a desire to fulfill your own alignment with some ethereal concept of 'etiquette.' etiquette is no longer a spook if it is simply a nominal description of the actions you take to make your life more simple in modern society.

>in german, too
>maintain civilization
are you saying that if you examined the spooks you lived by that we would begin living in a hobbesian state of nature? or are you judging a philosophy by the hypothetical practical impacts it would have if EVERYONE misunderstood what he was saying?

>are you saying that if you examined the spooks you lived by that we would begin living in a hobbesian state of nature?

That's exactly what I'm saying. The whole union of egoist thing is pure bullshit. I know Stirnerites claim hurting others is against your interest, because you're effectively hurting your own property, but good luck getting everyone to agree with that.

either you didn't read my whole post, or you are hung up on the political implications of philosophy. you should be much more concerned with the personal implications.

i agree with you re: the union of egoists and hate that most stirner support comes from anarchists in love with his defense of the concept. i think it is a betrayal of his ideas in many ways. but you can separate his ideas about a union of egoists from what is profound in his philosophy - a way of living for the individual. dont let a hypothetical situation stop you from doing that.

I know what self interest means and in the end you are still trying to navigate the world as efficiently as possible for gain in your self interest. That doesn't necessarily mean money, or fame or whatever but what you yourself consider gain.
Rather you take advantage of the others and their spooks, that motion is never really appreciated, and it is also not appreciated by any egoist also acting in their self interest, with whom a zero sum game will ensue. I'm just saying that everyone makes mistakes and that mistakes can be particularly dangerous for an egoist. As society is too complex to understand it perfectly enough to ALWAYS act in your self interest.
I suppose the ettiquette part wasn't necessarily intended at me.

you see everything as taking, not as giving

>As society is too complex to understand it perfectly enough to ALWAYS act in your self interest.

do you mean that outcomes are unpredictable? what does that have to do with stirner?

I'm trying to say that egoists need to accept that they can't always act in their self interest. Even when acting egoistically. In fact egoists are more in danger of isolating themselves as they are one step removed from society and its spooks. It's a pipe dream.

you are using 'self interest' in an impossible way. you think youve somehow quantified or characterized it, but it's not an actual thing. it's just a description of a person's actions, not a goal to be directed towards.

understanding that living by dietary proscriptions is an ambition imposed on me from outside is easy for most people to understand. categorizing wealth and status the same way is only a little more difficult. ideas like liberalism are even harder. but all of the above are just objects of traditional criticism. stirner wants to 'get back' of all things that could ever be criticized, once and for all.

what makes him unique is his solution. most critics dismiss one particular source of values and then replace it with something else that's also outside themselves; think of someone disparaging christian values, but replacing them with the just-as-spooky values of liberal humanism. stirner says the way to get back of spooks once and for all is to take motivation from only one place, from inside yourself: from the ego. nietzsche has a great description of how someone can start to live like this in thus spoke zarathustra when he describes the camel, lion and child. try to understand what he's really getting at it in the ego and its own, which is pretty revolutionary once the subtleties are understood, before you listen to how people have applied his reasoning to moral theory, political theory, etc. don't try to argue with his anecdotes or anything like that, they are just stand-ins for what he's trying to do, and can be replaced with whatever you'd like.

the notion of 'self interest' itself, in stirner's philosophy, is just a stand-in. it's not real in any empirical sense, not even as a pattern of behavior.

I'm using it more in the 'avoidance of being spooked' sense. But you have to be able to work with spooks so you need to understand them, without being spooked. This is difficult, and makes your life more difficult.

in the sense that it requires self-reflection, yes - it is more 'difficult.' is that enough for you to throw your hands up and decide it's better to live a life of naivety? would you prefer to go through the rest of your life as a happy retard or child? some people would earnestly say yes. are you one of them, or do you tell yourself you've found some happy middle ground?

Then why ego moves or is perveived as moving? That is why I say as soon as action is taken worshipping occurs, because it means identity is established, a constriction out of infinite, and duality occurs between identity and all it identifies by. There wouldn't be any reason for the ego to move if it was complete, the self-creation out of nothing assumes nothing as the unknown beyond it draws its purpose from to be created.

>all things are flux
>language cannot represent things as they are
>the structures of language are the limits of thought
>this limit approached through negation
>conceptions must battle and subjugate negations to bring the next conception, closer to the thing as it is, into being
>all things outside the ego are negations
>we must continuously destroy that which is outside ourselves to be re-born as our true selves, ready to fight again

It is ok to sometimes be spooked, as you can navigate society more easily then, egoism should be used as a tool at your disposal. So you still have an edge over the rest.

i agree with you, that at a metaphysical level, stirner's philosophy begins to break down. just like i agreed with you that it is not appropriate at a societal level. what it should be taken for is its implications for the individual.

yes ,i think stirner is more hegelian than people who just read stirner really get a taste for.

this might be your own mantra, and i hope it's working for you, but it's a mis-characterization of what stirner is saying.

What are you implying

"true self" is the stand of that fixed beyond I was talking, it acts as God self tries to act by.

a will toward true self is categorically different than any other spook. it is indescribable and self-creating

Well it's not necessarily the conclusion, rather an implication of the conclusion that was already reached. i.e. Making life more difficult is very undesirable in egoism. Egoism can make life more difficult. So it is self defeating in that sense.

True self is as much out of reach as Human from humanist's reach. Any individual draws power out of creative nothing to achieve a furthering towards the beyond they have fixed above themselves. It doesn't matter at what level this occurs.

you have a misconception of what egoism is - it seems like you think it is what would be traditionally described as 'selfishness.'

>making life more difficult is very undesirable in egoism.
yes, in the sense that the word 'difficult' is pejorative, i guess it is by definition undesirable. but what is and is not 'difficult', and the desire to avoid those situations, is different from person to person.

'difficulty' and 'undesirability' are not things that can be used to describe the motivations of the individual ego.

>Egoism can make life more difficult. So it is self defeating in that sense.

what life?

>It doesn't matter at what level this occurs.
not true. one is stationary, the other is not.

this->one is negated and like every other spook, it does not react to negation.

the other is a dynamic, infinite, self-changing and self-created becoming.

'difficult' also means that you can get a distorted view of the world causing you to respond to it poorly, making you spooked in a way.

What is stirners relationship with Hegels thought?

>eternal return
In the work of a virtual machine nothing is negated but affirmed to be its part at the present present moment of its one convulsion. Like I said, it constantly establishes itself with its goal in the action.

>tfw mommy is your property

nice gold metal in mental gymnastics you got there OP

So if you admit that moral questions are those of desirability, it seems like you'd have to admit that "get the wood" is a moral proposition since uttering the phrase implies a desire for and implicit positive association with the object, and complying with the directive implies like wants and associations.

"Civilization" is a spook, my dude.

Enjoy civilising in your civilisation. I'm sure that's working well for you.

'get the wood' is an imperative
a moral proposition would be 'getting wood is good'

what you think is implicit or implied is both extrinsic to the utterance and irrelevant to morale desirability (even, most of the time, if you are a sentimentalist)