The Ego and Its Own
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The Ego and Its Own (German: Der Einzige und sein Eigentum; also translated as The Individual and His Property; a literal translation would read The Sole One and His Property) is the main work by German philosopher Max Stirner, published in 1844.
Main ideas
According to Lawrence Stepelewich the book is largely modelled on the work Phenomenology of Spirit by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who became a great source of inspiration and dispute among the Young Hegelians, a group of Berlin intellectuals with whom Stirner associated.
Max Stirner's philosophy is outlined in more detail in the article on Stirner. In short, the book portrays the life of a human individual as dominated by authoritarian concepts ('fixed ideas' or 'spooks'), which must be shaken and undermined by each individual's self-interest in order for her to act freely. These include primarily religion and ideology, and the institutions claiming authority over the individual. The primary implication of undermining these concepts and institutions is for Stirner an ethical egoism, which can be said to transcend language. According to him, not only God is an alienating ideal, as Feuerbach had shown in The Essence of Christianity (1841), but Humanity itself, nationalism and all such ideologies are alienating for the individual. Stirner lead Hegel's dialectics to its extreme, Nothing. According to Stirner, individuals should only pass temporary contracts between themselves, agreeing in mutual aid and cooperation for a period of time, but such contracts are only passed in each individual's interest (it might be compared to a pre-theory on cooperative games):
"In the time of spirits thoughts grew till they overtopped my head, whose offspring they yet were; they hovered about me and convulsed me like fever-phantasies -- an awful power. The thoughts had become corporeal on their own account, were ghosts, e. g. God, Emperor, Pope, Fatherland, etc. If I destroy their corporeity, then I take them back into mine, and say: "I alone am corporeal." And now I take the world as what it is to me, as mine, as my property; I refer all to myself." p.15
Stirner himself does claim his own "doctrine" of self-interest to be a universal truth or established viewpoint, and likens his book to a ladder you throw away after climbing, a sort of self-therapy. (The same mental image of a ladder to be thrown away after climbing is used by Ludwig Wittgenstein in section 6.54 of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, it has been claimed that this phrase was originally coined by Arthur Schopenhauer in 1844.)
Style
The book is a bit hard to access for contemporary readers, much due to the fact that Stirner was not trying to create a classic; rather he was writing for his peers.
For this reason Stirner repeatedly quotes Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller and Bruno Bauer as if the reader was immediately familiar with all their works and the most famous poems in their German language original. He also paraphrases and makes word-plays and in-jokes on formulations found in Hegel's works as well as in the works of his contemporaries such as Ludwig Feuerbach, simply because he assumes that everyone who reads his book will have read them as well.
Editions
- The original German edition (1845) appeared in Oct. 1844 in Leipzig.
- The English-language edition available today (ed. David Leopold, 1995) is a revised version of the translation by Steven T. Byington (1907), an American individualist anarchist.
- French ("L'unique at sa propriété", 1900),
- Danish ("Den Eneste og hans Ejendom", 1901),
- Spanish ("El único y su propriedad", 1901),
- Italian ("L'unico", 1902),
- Russian ("Edinstvennyj i ego dostojanie", 1906),
- Dutch ("De Eenige en z'n Eigendom", 1907),
- Swedish ("Den ende och hans egendom", 1910),
- Japanese ("Yuiitsusha to sono shoyû", 1920),
- Greek ("O μοναδικός και το δικό του", 2002),
- Portuguese ("O Único e a sua propriedade", 2004).
Influences
"The Ego" often has been read as the first radical and unsurpassable text of nihilism. Therefore its influence, mostly on German philosophers and political thinkers, was often negative and not acknowledged, as a repulsion of nihilism. Young Marx abandoned Feuerbachianism and developed his concept of historical materialism as a direct answer to the challenge of Stirner's book; Stirner was harshly criticized in The German Ideology (written in 1845 but published in the 1930s). Young Nietzsche most probably received the decisive impulse to turn to Schopenhauer and to become an original philosopher from an encounter with Stirner's book. Many other thinkers had a similar momentous experience with Stirner in their young years: from Rudolf Steiner, Gustav Landauer, Carl Schmitt up to Jürgen Habermas. As a curiosity may be noted that Ernst Jünger at age 80 wrote a book Eumeswil, wherein he created the character of the "Anarch", designed after Stirner's "Eigner."References
- [Electronic text versions of the book]
- [The Ego and Its Own] HTML
- [Stirner's Critics] - Stirner's reply to his critics, bilingual (addendum to "The Ego")
- R W K Paterson: The Nihilistic Egoist Max Stirner. London: Oxford UP 1971, reprint 1993 (Part Two)
- Ernie Thomson: The Discovery of the Materialist Conception of History in the Writings of the Young Karl Marx. 2004
- [Bernd A Laska: Nietzsche's initial crisis] 2002
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