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Mr. Self-Destruct: Rehabilitating

by Benjamin Ingram
There is a tendency among leftist radicals, en vogue since Marx's publication of The German Ideology, to shy away from the writings of Max Stirner, the fierce and enigmatic egoist whose works both smashed the intellectual underpinnings of the liberal conception of property while at the same time predicting the totalizing influence of Hegel's philosophy on the left. This unfortunate turn of events has left Stirner's work vulnerable to misinterpretation and misappropriation by reactionaries of all stripes - Randians, quasi-radical libertarians, 'free-market individualists', and their ilk (always so quick to hide behind their neo-liberal masters and growl at the first sign of socialist or anarchist activity) - and has led to their claiming him as one of their own. The obvious question is: why? The notion of 'doctrinal purity' ought to be less than meaningless to a pluralistic worldview such as ours. And yet it seems the majority of socialists are dumbfounded when the question of what to make of Stirner arises. He is obviously no friend of liberalism or nationalism, dismissing both as 'spooks', Holy Ghosts of language with no correlative outside of that language; at the same time, he anticipates the horrors of Communist totalitarianism and declares it his mortal enemy. This ambiguity has unfortunately served to prevent Stirner's application as one of the most potent weapons available to the radical in his war against the system. It is of the utmost importance that a reappraisal of Stirner's philosophy should occur. Marxism has

Max Stirner
been discredited in the eyes of the masses, and utopian socialism is no more possible now than in 1849. That the radical left has been in a perpetual rut for eighteen years - left without an overriding ideology for guidance and only pragmatic, immediate action with limited results for practice is unfortunate. More unfortunate still is its inability to accept the pluralism it claims to endorse and voluntarily escape the Marxist confines within which it has imprisoned itself. And so I take it upon myself to re-appropriate Stirner. To understand Stirner is to understand Hegel in reverse. For Hegel, all things move towards the transcendent Absolute, the thing-in-itself, in a dialectical dance towards the divine; for Stirner, it is the concept of the Absolute which must be gotten rid of, and, to this end Stirner employs a type of antidialectic, reducing the universal to mere phantasies of the mind. Stirner's stated goal is to bring the particular, the individual, the isolated atom of existence, back into repute. Stirner's philosophical position, really a sort of radical nominalism, requires him to subvert all traditional ides fixes, which he terms 'spooks', poking fun at the geist-haunted world of Hegelian philosophy. "Have you ever seen a spirit?" Stirner asks in the opening paragraph of the second section of his book,
The Ego and Its Own. "No, not I," replies the reader, "but my grandmother." Stirner responds, "Now, you see, it's just so with me too; I myself haven't seen any, but my grandmother had them running between her feet all sorts of ways, and out of confidence in our grandmothers' honesty we believe in the existence of spirits."

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And so Stirner begins his task of inquiring into the origins of the metaphysical world, adopting an attitude frightening in its joviality. We see in his attitude towards his work a sort of grinning halfmadness that seems to herald the Die frhliche Wissenschaft that so enamored Nietzsche (and on this point we must be clear, since there is no end in sight to comparisons between the two: while there are a number of similarities in their work and methodology, there is no indication that Nietzsche was more than passingly aware of Stirner's work, and Nietzsche himself, if inspired at all by Stirner, took his ideas further, drawing them to their final futile conclusion), but he is exceedingly serious in regard to the importance of his work. "Away, then, with every concern that is not altogether my concern! You think at least the "good cause" must be my concern? What's good, what's bad? Why, I myself am my concern, and I am neither good nor bad. Neither has any meaning for me." The most immediate 'spooks' which Stirner sets out to exorcize - and the easiest - are "God, Emperor, Pope, Fatherland, etc." These targets are obvious, and almost hardly worth writing about. More interesting are Stirner's attacks against a secondary spiritual realm, a triad that he unsubtly calls the 'liberalisms', political, social, and humane. The first is traditional liberalism; the second, utopian socialism; the third, the quasi-religious essentialism of Feuerbach and his followers. The first and third interest me the most, as the criticisms contained therein are as applicable today as in 1844. Stirner reserves his most potent vitriol for the practitioners of Feuerbachian 'atheism': "But, even granted that doubts, raised in the course of time against the tenets of the Christian faith, have long since robbed you of faith in the immortality of your spirit, you have nevertheless left one tenet undisturbed, and still ingenuously adhere to the one truth, that the spirit is your better part, and that the spiritual has greater claims on you than anything else. Despise all your atheism, in zeal against egoism you concur with the believers in immortality." Stirner sets out to demolish 'humane liberalism' in the fourth section of The Ego and Its Own, titled The Owner. In this section Stirner proves himself the first (and heretofore most radical of) the anti2

essentialists, and turns his intellectual cannons against what today might be considered a prototypical 'secular humanism'. Stirner begins thusly "Therefore the liberal too revolves in the same circle as the Christian. Because the spirit of mankind, Man, dwells in you, you are a man, as when the spirit of Christ dwells in you you are a Christian; but, because it dwells in you only as a second ego, even though it be as your proper or "better" ego, it remains otherworldly to you, and you have to strive to become wholly man. A striving just as fruitless as the Christian's to become wholly a blessed spirit! The HUMAN religion is only the last metamorphosis of the Christian religion. For liberalism is a religion because it separates my essence from me and sets it above me, because it exalts "Man" to the same extent as any other religion does its God or idol, because it makes what is mine into something otherworldly, because in general it makes out of what is mine, out of my qualities and my property, something alien - to wit, an "essence"; in short, "vocation." But liberalism declares itself a religion in form too when it demands for this supreme being, Man, a zeal of faith..." And again: "It is well that Feuerbach brings sensuousness to honor, but the only thing he is able to do with it is to clothe the materialism of his "new philosophy" with what had hitherto been the property of idealism, the "absolute philosophy." As little as people let it be talked into them that one can live on the "spiritual" alone without bread, so little will they believe his word that as a sensuous being one is already everything, and so spiritual, full of thoughts, etc." As we can plainly see, Stirner's atheism is something wholly different from the 'atheism' professed by his contemporaries in Feuerbach and Bauer, and certainly nothing like the cerebral, placid, complacent liberal humanism espoused by Dawkins and Russell. They wish to rid themselves of God while retaining all the contents and nicities of religious morality and metaphysics; Stirner desires to rid himself of religious morality and metaphysics to rid himself of God.
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This 'backdoor Christianity' is an excuse for all manner of obnoxious bourgeois reaction, and generally leads to a deification of the abstraction Man over the particular man. For Stirner, then, the Church of Man is a rather unholy place to be. But we must not see in all this a mere defense radical though it may be - of traditional petty individualism. 'The I', for Stirner, is as much a fiction as every other abstraction; he is not interested in the sort of pious, quiet self-serving that belongs to the middle-class, and all of Marx's protestations to the contrary in Ideology will not make it so. This distinguishes Stirner from petty individualists like Ayn Rand, who see in the egoistic lifestyle a higher, universal calling - Stirner, unlike Rand, passes no judgment over those who he terms 'involuntary egoists', who enslave themselves to an abstract cause out of hidden egoistic concerns. And. unlike Rand, he refuses to argue for his position out of nature, explicitly rejecting 'natural law' and 'property rights'. In this he is quite distinct from the individualist anarchist as well, who halts before 'the I' in his criticisms of established society. One of the 'spooks' Stirner confronts is that of identity, and, in classical liberal theory, its corollary, rights (including, but not limited to, property rights). Consider, for example, Stirner's take on parental rights, in contrast to Locke's as stated in the latter's Two Treatises of Government, written in response to Robert Filmer's religious-patriarchal concept of regal sovereignty, in the chapter entitled Of Adam's Title to Sovereingty by Fatherhood:
"I agree with our author that the title to this honour is vested in the parents by nature, (the 'title' here being the right to sovereignty - B.), and is a right which accrues to them by their having begotten their children, and God by many positive declarations has confirmed it to them: I also allow our author's rule, "that in grants and gits, that have their original from God and nature, as the power of the father," (let me add "and mother," for whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder) "no inferior power of men can limit, nor make any law of prescription against them..."

Fountains of Sovereignty: "Let us then suppose Adam made, "by God's donation," lord and sole proprietor of the whole earth, in as large and ample a manner as sir Robert could wish; let us suppose him also, "by right of fatherhood," absolute ruler over his children with an unlimited supremacy; I ask then, upon Adam's death, what becomes of both his natural and private domination? and I doubt it not it will be answered, that they descended to his next heir, as our author tells us in several places. But this way, it is plain, cannot possible convey both his natural and private dominion to the same person: for should we allow that all the property, all the estate of the father, ought to descend to the eldest son, (which will need some proof to establish it) and so he has by that title all the private dominion of the father, yet the father's natural dominion, the paternal power, cannot descend to him by inheritance: for it being a right that accrues to a man only by begetting, no man can have this natural dominion over any one he does not beget; unless it can be supposed that a man can have a right to any thing, without doing that upon which that right is solely founded: for if a father by begetting, and no other title, has natural dominion over his children, he that does not beget them cannot have this natural dominion over them..." Herein lies the thrust of Locke's position: whereas Filmer understands property, sovereignty, and patriarchy to be fundamentally related and passed down in orders of lineage from father to eldest son (basing this interpretation on a literalist account of the Bible), Locke rejects the association and holds that the right of sovereignty and the right to property are fundamentally distinct, related only in their causation (the right to property as the result of physical labour, the right to parential sovereignty as accquired through the act of siring - always the worker, our Mr. Locke recognizes parential authority as being derived only through the physical act of conception). Both conceptions, however, are paternalistic insofar as they acknowledge that the father has some 'right' over the child through the sole virtue of parenthood. As against this Stirner writes (in the context of speaking to the Communists of his day):

Locke solidifies his position in the next chapter, Of Fatherhood and Property considered altogether as
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"Communism, which assumes that men "have equal rights by nature," contradicts its own proposition till it comes to this, that men have no right at all by nature. For it is not willing to recognize, e. g., that parents have "by nature" rights as against their children, or the children as against the parents: it abolishes the family. Nature gives parents, brothers, etc., no right at all. Altogether, this entire revolutionary or Babouvist principle rests on a religious, i. e., false, view of things. Who can ask after "right" if he does not occupy the religious standpoint himself? Is not "right" a religious concept, i.e. something sacred? Why, "equality of rights", as the Revolution propounded it, is only another name for "Christian equality," the "equality of the brethren," "of God's children," "of Christians"; in short, fraternit." And again: "Because I am "by nature" a man I have an equal right to the enjoyment of all goods, says Babeuf. Must he not also say: because I am "by nature" a first-born prince I have a right to the throne? The rights of man and the "well-earned rights" come to the same thing in the end, i.e. to nature, which gives me a right, i. e. to birth (and, further, inheritance, etc.). "I am born as a man" is equal to "I am born as a king's son." The natural man has only a natural right (because he has only a natural power) and natural claims: he has right of birth and claims of birth. But nature cannot entitle me, i.e. give me capacity or might, to that to which only my act entitles me. That the king's child sets himself above other children, even this is his act, which secures to him the precedence; and that the other children approve and recognize this act is their act, which makes them worthy to be -- subjects." Stirner, unlike the individualist anarchist, does not recognize 'by nature' any right of the individual to appropriate to himself property, or to claim a thing external to himself as 'his own'. All too often we find that the assumption 'human nature!' is little more than the assumption 'original sin!' And neither does he hold with the monarchist, who believes that, by virtue of the king's identity as the king, he has the right to exercize royal sovereignty. For Stirner it is only the act of appropriation itself which exists.
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"What then is my property? Nothing but what is in my power! To what property am I entitled? To every property to which I - empower myself." Stirner will go to great pains to refute the concept of a coherent identity-construct - that 'A is A' and 'I is I' - thus forever distinguishing himself from the later individualists and Objectivists. It is not the individual consciousness that Stirner is interested in, but the Ego, that which he takes to be prior to and thus more fundamental than the consciousness. In objecting to Descarte's famous formula he anticipates Nietzsche's declaration of the self a "grammatical fiction". What had previously been taken as the starting point of all philosophy - the rational, crystalline consciousness - was in Stirner reduced to the afteraffect of the Ego. "If I am free as "rational I," then the rational in me, or reason, is free; and this freedom of reason, or freedom of the thought, was the ideal of the Christian world from of old. They wanted to make thinking -- and, as aforesaid, faith is also thinking, as thinking is faith -- free; the thinkers, i.e. the believers as well as the rational, were to be free; for the rest freedom was impossible. But the freedom of thinkers is the "freedom of the children of God," and at the same time the most merciless --hierarchy or dominion of the thought; for I succumb to the thought. If thoughts are free, I am their slave; I have no power over them, and am dominated by them. But I want to have the thought, want to be full of thoughts, but at the same time I want to be thoughtless, and, instead of freedom of thought, I preserve for myself thoughtlessness." "They say of God, "Names name thee not." That holds good of me: no concept expresses me, nothing that is designated as my essence exhausts me; they are only names. Likewise they say of God that he is perfect and has no calling to strive after perfection. That holds good of me too." No essence, no label can ever fully capture the totality of Stirner's Unique One. Just as one says 'cat' and forgets that the cat he refers to is white with black spots - unlike another cat, which is brown and gold - Stirner denied that 'Man' captured fully the traits of the individual 'man'. And even the very name Johann Kaspar Schmidt could not fully
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the traits of the individual 'man'. And even the very name Johann Kaspar Schmidt could not fully express the reality of Johann Kaspar Schmidt, thus necessitating the adoption of the Max Stirner identity. The question having been answered, a new one asserts itself: now that we know what to make of Stirner, why should we use him? Certainly his espousal of unbridled, furious egoism seems, at least, to be bourgeois, and his anti-essentialism and basic post-structuralism would seem to lend Al Gore's claim that we're simply nihilistic and narcissistic. And it certainly holds little appeal for those leftists still motivated by Christian virtues. But adopting Stirnerian means does not necessitate adopting Stirnerian ends. Let us recall Stirner's criticism of the utopian socialism prevalent in his day, in the section on 'social liberalism' in "Men of the Old Time and The New": " Who is this person that you call "All"? -- It is "society"! -- But is it corporeal, then? -- We are its body! -- You? Why, you are not a body yourselves -you, sir, are corporeal to be sure, you too, and you, but you all together are only bodies, not a body. Accordingly the united society may indeed have bodies at its service, but no one body of its own. Like the "nation of the politicians", it will turn out to be nothing but a "spirit," its body only semblance.... This is the second robbery of the "personal" in the interest of "humanity." Neither command nor property is left to the individual; the State took the former, society the latter." Here Stirner turns his hawkish eyes toward the utopian socialist dream: the utopian socialist evaluates the impersonal machinery of the collective above the personal and private welfare of the individual proletarian; the socialist exalts the "Society, from which we have everything, is a new master, a new spook, a new "supreme being," which "takes us into its service and allegiance!"
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collective into a priviledged position of transcendence, again denying the reality of the immanent and human. This leads Stirner to conclude: Stirner's criticism of socialism is, indeed, quite accurate - it establishes new 'spooks', hierarchical in their relation to the man over whom they are positioned, which enslave him as surely as the Christian-bourgeois ghasts. 'Proletarian essence' replaces 'soul' in this new order of concepts, created by 'labour' instead of divine fiat and central to a teleology in which 'Communism' replaces 'the New Jerusalem', and the angelic host of the underclass do battle against the devilish capitalists in a war which will culminate in an Armageddon-like revolution. But this criticism does not extend to all anticapitalist positions. Stirner himself was an anticapitalist, although for reasons he never fully elucidated. The lack of an overarching ideology I lamented above is as much a blessing as a curse: it rids us of transcendental principles to enslave ourselves to. Both the Toryist history-worship of the Marxist, which exalts to universally divine status the tribulations of Western Proletarians and pretends to have some deep insight into the workings of the material world, and the utopian dreams of the common socialist, who simply transposes the spiritual world onto the material world and does away with critical thought, have been abolished. In their stead exists an immanent worldview of immediate action without concern for a tomorrow that will never come. The Stirnerist opens himself to the world of sensation, returns to a state of being that Georges Bataille described as "water within water"; he no longer recognizes a distinction between himself and you. Stirner's doubt, however, is not complete: he still accepts the existence of 'the I' in some form, and this informs his insurrectionary tendencies. Against this I suggest a revolutionary praxis aimed towards the abolition of the self within the euphoria of violence directed against the hierarchical apparatus. For, just as separate flames become one within a mighty conflagration, so too do distinct ego-identities join in unison when directed against a common target. Within the Bacchanalia the bonds of personal identity are shattered for a moment and the waters which had previously been held back by the damming effects of the ego are released to flood
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across the land and join together with other streams in a great ocean of feeling. This 'loss of self' is what motivates war-hawk and revolutionary alike, and it alone is responsible for the appeal of juvenile forms of rebellion. But this has a name for it already - this is Dionysian.

by Dionysus Wed Jul 25, 2007 5:01 am at http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=158627

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