/lit/ - Literature

>>11819833
Liberty granted by any external authority, either "the rule of law" or goodwill, is worse than coercion from a perspective of genuine autonomy. Meaning itself doesn't have any sort of autonomous reality, it's just created by actual real living thinkers. Liberalism provides the promise of "freedom from" but "freedom to" must be taken with force with actual real material power. Stirner's just articulating an edgy reaction against Feuerbachs humanism.

Excerpts from "The Nihilistic Egoist: Max Stirner":
>Like Hegel, in the first chapter of Da Einzige Stimer illustrates this dialectical movement from the span of a human life, the child being the 'realist', the youth the 'idealist', and the grown man the mature egoist. Also like Hegel (although with considerably less erudition and historical sophistication), he applies the triadic scheme to human history: the world-outlook of the Ancients disintegrates and yields to the cultures, religions, and philosophies of the Moderns, including and culminating in the Young Hegelians, themselves eventually to be superseded by the egoistic consciousness which, as an entirely new mode of being, transfigures and dominates all those which have gone before. Whereas for Hegel the terminus and consummation of history is signified by the self fulfillment of sovereign Spirit in absolute freedom, for Stirner it is the self-realization of The Unique One in and through his property which constitutes the natural denouement of philosophical thought.

>Stirner criticizes the Critics for having elevated 'Criticism', in the form of pure thought. to the quasi-religious status of a transcendent absolute, and to it he opposes the concrete, incommensurable reality of The Unique One, ceaselessly perishing and re-emerging from the 'creative nothingness' in which it is rootlessly rooted. From Bauer's Criticism he is determined to eradicate the last vestiges of idealistic substance, or of any kind of identification of being with thought, and to re-appropriate, in face of this last desperate attempt at his alienation, the self-centered and therefore indefeasible being of the private, solitary individual in all his self-justifying immanence. As in Hegel's idealism, so in Bauer's Criticism, it is ultimately a deified consciousness which waits to be revealed as the omnipresent and indefatigable enemy of the self. But The Unique One needs no gods, and his very existence is thus an affront to any candidate for Olympus, even indeed particularly-when his campaign, like Bauer's, is based on a critical exposure of all the other candidates. Stirner was prepared to side with Bauer in the joyful work of deposing the gods, but he would not hesitate to destroy him the moment he aspired to usurp their vacant throne.

>>11820035
>Stirner clearly saw in Feuerbach's declaration that 'man is to man the supreme being' yet another attempt to reincarnate God under the pretence of evicting him. In declaring man to be divine, Feuerbach was in fact resurrecting the dead God and seeking to clothe him in human flesh, for 'the essence of Christianity' was that it indeed lived on in the allegedly atheistic humanism of Feuerbach. By submitting Feuerbach's 'anthropology' to the ruthless dissection which he himself had practiced on theology, Stirner showed the ideal of a perfected humanity to have all the alien characteristics which its apostle had successfully diagnosed in the concept of transcendent divinity.

>Stirner's achievement was to carry Feuerbach's religious critique to its logical conclusion by demonstrating all religion, whether theological or anthropological, to be essentially a dispossession of the only reality there is-the reality of the private, unique self, who is indefinable because he is without an 'essence' of any kind.

spooked

>>11820035
read the landstreicher translation faggot

>>11819833
>Stirner seems wholeheartedly committed to egoism, ideologically so

egoism is a label stirner used for his rejection of all valuations except the ever changing subjective experience. he wasn't committed to anything. that was the point. at one point stirner says that if a judge wanted to convict him and the only way he could get out of it was by lying or something and temporarily aligning to a certain authority, he was more than willing to do that

>That sort of commitment is generally a red flag for other existentialists, like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche

im not familiiar with kirkegaard but nietzche is seriously overrated and imo pales in comparison to stirner. stirner was an actual genuine radical who wanted to bring everything down and understood that nothing should be put in its place. nietzche goes full retard and instead of being content with the end of the old order instead imposes his own order and makes valuations between a "worthy" life and a non worthy one, what one should do to attain this, etc. he was just another modernist at the end of the day. stirner was a true radical

In the spring of 1845, Max Stirner gambled away all of his wife's inheritance on a centralized milk distribution business. Supposedly he wanted to use the business to both prove his ideas would work in practice, and to set him up for life, so he wouldn't have to worry about money and could just write. Well, the business failed almost immediately, because he had trouble finding customers, possibly because of his inability to relate to his customers, his inexperience in business, and him alienating people with his strange egoistic anarchist politics (details are scarce, so it is mostly speculation). He was made fun of ruthlessly by his contemporary intellectuals, and his wife of two years left after he blew all of their money. For the rest of his life he lived in hell off the very meager income he got from writing. In 1856 he died of a fever that resulted from an insect bite.

we're stirners property and have no right to tell him not to find meaning

If something is logically correct there's no reason not to whole heartedly believe it. Fear of seeming like a philosophical extremist and the need to withhold into that academic detachment is a spook in itself.