/lit/ - Literature

Don't be a hispter. Call it the ego and its own

>>20569050
I just thought it was the accurate translation. /lit/ told me.

>>20569059
It is, don't listen to that cuntface.

>>20569050
Fuck off.

>>20569048
>How to understand Stirner
You read his works.

>>20569146
That's what I'm asking, how to.

>>20569146
Well, he's based, but his philosophy and writing isn't dense or complicated, just focus a lil bit more anon.

>>20569050
How's it being a hipster?

>>20569048
You have to read hegel first. Retards like to pretend he only parodies Hegel's writing style and structure, but it's pretty clear he genuinely wants to build upon and draw the consequences of a Hegelian understanding of subject as determinate void.
You can probably just read Phenomenology of Spirit and go from there.

>>20569060
Imagine falling for a meme translation made by a leftist fag and thinking it's more accurate just because it uses a literal translation of the word "Einzige" instead of one that befits Stirner's intentions better.

>>20569534
>Phenomenology of Spirit
I thought Hegel was to read, you can start with him just like that?

>>20569598
Realistically, you'll get stuck trying to unravel Hegel for at least a year before any of it starts to make sense, especially if you're on your own. But there is good secondary literature to help you along (logic of desire especially, if you're looking for an approachable commentary on the PoS), and you can proceed from Hegel to the thinkers and problems he's responding to, rather than absolutely having to work your way forward starting from the pre-socratics. But I do think that you can get a fairly good understanding of Hegel if you actually engage with his writing, at least potentially, whereas Stirner will be totally incomprehensible on his own.

>>20569647
Thanks. Which translation of PoS is the best?

>>20569697
I'm German, so I haven't actually read any translations in full, but Terry Pinkard's choice of terminology and phrasing seemed the strongest from what I've seen of it.
On that note, I can confirm that Unique and its Property is definitely a much stronger translation for der Einzige und sein Eigentum than Ego and its Own. You could also say "The Singular One and what is Properly His" or something like that. There's a lot of playful subtext in the choice of wording, how terms are used in everyday language and how they might be read literally.

>>20569647
Lieber Herr, kennen Sie sich zufällig auch mit Kojeves Hegel-Vorlesungen aus? Kann ich die vor dem Lesen von Hegel lesen oder wäre das eher suboptimal? Ich bin aktuell mehr an Kojeves Hegel-Interpretation interessiert als an Hegel an sich. (Vorwissen meinerseits ist nicht wirklich vorhanden.)

>>20569534
>PoS
Never began for OP

>>20569647
>Stirner will be totally incomprehensible on his own.
Not OP, but I read Stirner before Hegel, and I would say that, even though I didn't understand the entire background for Stirner's work, I could follow along with much of it by seeing The Ego and His Own as a historical narrative of developments in untruth and false consciousness fighting against the Ego's nature, similar to Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals and M&E's The Communist Manifesto (both of which I'd read as a teenager, knowing absolutely nothing about Hegel except for the some vague notion of him as an early 19th century idealist philosopher from Germany who believed that humanity had undergone a progression in stages guided by a world spirit). After reading the Phenomenology of Spirit, I did come to understand how many things in The Ego and His Own were a relfexion of Hegel's own thought, but I would say Stirner is not exactly following right behind the footsteps of Hegel, but rather making a work in imitation of Hegel.
Taking into account the literal meaning of "ego" in Latin, which is "I", I would say that "der Einzige" isn't too badly translated by it, because it conveys Stirner's conception of it as something identifiably separate from the world, that has a capacity of thinking and interacting with what is not itself. Unlike Heidegger, who placed being in general at the forefront and set down a world down for existing beings to be in, for Hegel and Stirner, the individual consciousness (or "man", as Stirner concretely expresses it at the beginning of his work), rather than the world around it, is the primordial principle for investigation.
As far as I understand it, philosophers from Kant onwards never made use of the Cartesian cogito ergo sum to prove that the world exists, but there is a difference between the ones who acknowledge the world as existing, but who believe that the consciousness is what there is first and comes into an understanding of the world around it, and others who take knowledge of the exterior world as an immediately known fact that comes together with merely interacting with it.
I'm not a native German speaker, which is why most of what I've read has come through works translated into English, which I may have not understood all that well, so I don't think any of what I have to say might be right nor do I believe that the way I have approached these works is the best one. Nevertheless, I hope that someone else might be able to clear up on misunderstandings I have expressed here.

>>20570155
huh

>>20570155
LOL what??

>>20570195
I want to fuck them so bad

It's been years and no anon has ever been able to explain, what "ego" or "unique" is, and what's it's property? What "spook" is, and why "ego" can't be a "spook"?

>>20570195
SAUCE NOW!!!

>>20569748
Thanks. Would say a person can wholly grasp what's being said from the translations, or is it better to just learn German and read it in it's original language?

>>20570872
You're not going to grasp German at the kind of deep, intuitive leven where it would make a difference.

>>20569647
>Realistically, you'll get stuck trying to unravel Hegel for at least a year before any of it starts to make sense
Wow who fucking cares? Philosophy really is a waste of time.

>>20569048
It helps to already share his thoughts before reading his work

>>20569048
He's not difficult to understand at all. He's just repeating the same arguments made by Callicles, Protagoras and Thrasymachus. Max Stirner on the Path of Doubt by Stepelevich is a good book that breaks down Stirner's arguments. If you want something that's much shorter, you can read Stepelevich's Stirner and the Last Man and ax Stirner and the Alternative to the Collective Human Project by Simon.

>>20569647
You are retarded and probably haven’t read Stirner or Hegel. OP, all you need is some understanding of Greek and existential philosophy.

>>20569551
Its just cosmic nihilism. Nietzsche says it best in the Twilight of Idols.
>"What then, alone, can our teaching be?—That no one gives man his qualities, neither God, society, his parents, his ancestors, nor himself (—this non-sensical idea which is at last refuted here, was taught as “intelligible freedom” by Kant, and perhaps even as early as Plato himself). No one is responsible for the fact that he exists at all, that he is constituted as he is, and that he happens to be in certain circumstances and in a particular environment. The fatality of his being cannot be divorced from the fatality of all that which has been and will be. This is not the result of an individual intention, of a will, of an aim, there is no attempt at attaining to any “ideal man,” or “ideal happiness” or “ideal morality” with him,—it is absurd to wish him to be careering towards some sort of purpose. We invented the concept “purpose”; in reality purpose is altogether lacking."
Its the acceptance that our fate is already determined before we are born. Our genetics, our environment will largely determine what will happen to us, in our lives, and too many idiotic philosophers like Kant and Marx are idealistic when they purpose universalist systems of human organization that can not account for these factors that will create different interests and drive conflict. There isn't ever going to be a uniform method of social organization that satisfies everyone. Life is the endless war against all. Like the Stoics said, life is a military campaign - you have learn how to fight and survive. You can't be weak, and complain, about your problems all the time like various liberal moralists and socialists do. You must come to accept life has suffering, and you have to stop purposing schemes to save everyone when humans don't have the ability to know the best possible recourse for everyone. You must have the courage to face your problems in life and accept the risks.

>>20571911
Perseverance and toughness are spooks.

>>20571911
Destiny and fate are spooks.

>>20570329
A person defines their essence. The unique is devoid of content in itself and can be created or destroyed as a person sees fit. It isn’t a spook because it is not a higher essence defining you but your essence that you can do whatever you want with. You create yourself, basically.

>>20569048
Everything is a spook

>>20572105
Partially, but it's not quite that simple.
Stirner devotes a lot of space to the notion of 'getting behind things', beyond them, and how this is a process that transforms the self and gives it new content, content which then becomes something new to be overcome in itself. The 'unique' is the void that drives this process of negation. The resisting world and the particular 'I' that emerge in the face of the void are what's unique, eigen-tümlich, personal, and also mine, something proper to me, something of which I have ownership. Stirner thinks Hegelian dialectics in a radically individualistic sense (not in the bad way of being particular, but as localized universality that can not be translated into a 'scientific standpoint' because it is the very thing that escapes objectivization, hence why his philosophy made Marx seethe like you wouldn't believe), and intersubjectivity from that radical personal perspectivity (the way true individuals can interact with each other freely and remain individuals, deepen both their individuality and their universality). Stirners subject is still a historical and localized creature, and though it is always escaping from circumstance into itself, into negation, it is also at every point of this process real and meaningful, not a finger pointing at the noumenal moon, but the very determinate void itself in its full reality.
>The true human being doesn't lie in the future, an object of longing, but rather it lies in the present, existing and actual. However and whoever I may be, joyful and sorrowful, a child or an old man, in confidence or doubt, asleep or awake, I am it. I am the true human being.
All this is already implicit in Hegel's philosophy imo, but Stirner really brings it into focus.

>>20572245
>The 'unique' is the void that drives this process of negation.
It’s not because it only is what is for me, i.e., unique. I really don’t feel like responding to the rest of your Hegelian schizophrenia.

>>20572291
He's right tho

>>20572440
No, he just interpreted Stirner as a Hegelian. The unique isn’t a void or principle but an endpoint of language, something devoid of content and given content from out of my creative nothing. I am not a dialectic or process but simply what I see myself as because I am the measure of all things; I measure myself and the rest of the world (my property).

>>20572511
I think Protagoras is the philosopher you're looking for

>>20572511
>endpoint of language
That's something even spookier than calling the "Unique" an existing being or a conscious human. To call the Unique an endpoint of language presupposes a telelology and language as something more than an arbitrary, but recurrently appearing collection of sounds. Assigning Stirner's Unique, which holds the same position within his small philosophical system as that consciousness does in Hegel's work, would be to raise language up to the state of something that can raise things into being and that has a defined course within itself. It would be almost as if language were the forces of the world in a certain way.
Stirner's Unique is not explicitly dialectic (if by dialectic we mean something that is ruled over by the Fichtean triad), but it does repeatedly come across many spooks, both of its own creation and of other men like itself. Hegel's consciousness does not likewise undergo true transformations through dialectic, but instead goes away from discarding one belief and one type of analysis for another, as it encounters things which contradict its own current form of belief, even though it remains the same being in essence.

>>20572679
>To call the Unique an endpoint of language presupposes a telelology and language as something more than an arbitrary, but recurrently appearing collection of sounds.
It doesn’t. Language is property and meaningless in itself just like the unique.

>>20572708
Property cannot have the Unique as its own endpoint, seeing as it belongs to the Unique, else the Unique would be subject to what the Unique has as its own, meaning that the Unique would not be independent, but only be able to be simply because it has property.

>>20572730
The unique is merely a word. Either way, I don’t care to argue logical positions with you, simply what Stirner himself thought.

>>20572738
If the Unique were a word, then either the Unique would have to be self-generating, or words would only be words that express nothing true on their own and have no referential content.
If you can quote relevant passages from his work, please do so.

>>20572752
>self-generating
Yes, this is what Stirner himself thought.

>>20572763
Please post a relevant quote from any of Stirner's works if you may.

>>20572768
>If God, if humanity, as you affirm, have enough content in themselves to be all in all to themselves, then I feel that I would lack it even less, and that I would have no complaint to make about my “emptiness.” I am not nothing in the sense of emptiness, but am the creative nothing, the nothing out of which I myself create everything as creator.
There are also passages in Stirner’s Critics where he goes into more detail about the unique but I don’t feel like digging them up.

>>20572778
That makes no reference to language or words at all. It instead has the "I" as the primordial principle, who creates all and by which all things, including both property and spooks, are. "I" must seek through spooks "I" make, and appropriate some and discard others, so that "I" may have something of "my" "own".

>>20572790
>"I" as the primordial principle
Read the work. He didn’t think there was an inherent “I” but that a person defined themselves. He’s pretty much just stating what the existentialists stated.

>>20572790
>"I" must seek through spooks "I" make, and appropriate some and discard others, so that "I" may have something of "my" "own".
>that a person defined themselves
How are these two statements substantially different?

He truly was the F. Gardner of his time.

>>20572778
>quotes what is, for all intent and purposes, the preface of ego and its own
>doesn't get it, projects his own retarded particularist reading onto it
Stirner is arguing that he (and (you) as well), as an individual, a subject, is a place of 'emptiness', of negation, a creative nothing in the Hegelian sense. Specifically, he's responding to the right and left Hegelians, which respectively treated God and Humanity as the 'place' where spirit voids itself, placing the Absolute in the radical past (the prussian state is perfect, trust god and be a good worker drone) and the radical future (proto-communist notions of what a new man, a new social structure, a new humanity freed from the chains of history might look like), countering these ridiculous notions that go against everything Hegel ever wrote by returning to the individual as the place where creative nothingness occurs.

Realistically, since you people clearly haven't read the PoS, I have no confidence that you can grasp what I'm trying to get at. But on the bright side, it's still better that you be particularists/subjectivists/nihilists than that you end up placing the absolute either in the radical past or in the radical future, which would make you either nazis or communists.

Remember: what Stirner is getting at is something ridiculously mundane, which is why it's so easy to miss. His point is simply that, to quote Monty Python, you're all individual and you've all got to work it out for yourselves.

>Realistically, since you people clearly haven't read the PoS, I have no confidence that you can grasp what I'm trying to get at. But on the bright side, it's still better that you be particularists/subjectivists/nihilists than that you end up placing the absolute either in the radical past or in the radical future, which would make you either nazis or communists.

>>20572949
kkkk

>>20573092
Eu vivi pra ver um macaco desse nível no fodendo /lit/.

>>20572933
>It is pure indeterminateness and emptiness. There is nothing to be intuited in it, if one can speak here of intuiting; or, it is only this pure intuiting itself.
Taking this quote from Hegel's Science of Logic as the basis for the definition of Being, couldn't we say that "creative nothingness" is a lack of determinateness that, by uniting itself with Being, it becomes something else? By the means of having creativity does man realize his potential to change himself and other things and bring about something that is for himself. For all is true by the means of the Unique, but never without it. The Unique is not a shoddy imitation of God, but rather is a God for himself.

>>20570336
bottom left panel

>>20573218
huh?

So, what's the consensus, can you or can you not read The Ego without reading any other book first?

>>20572933
>PoS
>er hat die Phänomenologie des Geistes auf Englisch gelesen
>glaubt jemandem sagen zu können dass er Hegel nicht gelesen hat

>>20569551
>leftist fag
Landstreicher is anything but leftist. Senile, yes, but leftist, no. His "Why I Am Not a Communist" is pretty telling.

>>20574826
Lmao. Glückwunsch, du hast's geschafft dich mit einem einzigen kurzen Post als kompletter Schwachkopf zu outen.

This is an American website. Speak English.

>>20576220
Holy spooked

>>20574213
I wouldn’t suggest reading it if you have not touched philosophy at all. Get a foundation in the Greeks and the history of philosophy then jump into whatever you want. Or just jump into it, might take a lot of googling but you’ll eventually figure it out.

>>20569551
>>20574857
Wasn't he a pedoapologist?>>20574857

>>20572944
/thread

Best summary of Stirner I've ever read.

>>20577001
Holy american

>>20575158
Being a türk doesn't count, Cem

Why would I’m read these meme authors (stirner, Hegel) when I could just read rothbard and mises whose ideas about ethics are practical and not based on some cosmic world spirit bullshit?

>>20572944
t. didn't read the book or didn't understand it

>>20578365
Stirner wasn’t cosmic or spiritual or even historical in an objective sense.

>>20572933
How did they counter Hegel's notions when he basically thought the Prussian state was the pinnacle of political development, from Philosophy of Right? The Right Hegelians were continuing his actual legacy, the Left Hegelians were breaking off.

>>20578400
You can get that impression if you read a few cherry-picked passages in isolation, but if you look at Hegel's notion of what philosophy is and what it can and can't do, and what he means by absolute knowing, you pretty much have all the proof you need that he didn't believe nor was arguing that Prussia was the perfect state. Philosophy of Right does argue that it's the most 'complete' of the modern states in a certain structural sense, but that's nothing more than an account of a certain moment in time, and it certainly isn't the same as proclaiming it perfect and eternal.

>>20572944
>>20577012
>>20578375
Which is it?

>>20577243
>W-WHAT??? YOU DON'T WANT TO FUCK KIDS.
>YOU MUST BE A-AMERICAN.

>>20577001
that's a strange way to spell "based"

Truly, the Card of his time.

>>20580382
>did that 18-year-old just have sex with a 17-year-old?
>AAAAAA NOOOOOOO I’M GOING INSANEEEEEEE

>>20581204
Is this supposed to be an argument against Stirner?

>>20581208
Yes

>>20581097
He was taking about 12 yr olds.

>>20576220
No.

>>20583644
12 used to be the minimum age of marriage for girls according to church canonical law. don't get hysterical about shit that was normal for 99.9% of history and only became a "sickness" when feminists decided it should be

>>20569048
Trying to read and understand Stirner is an exercise in futility. Egoism is a wholly sincere, reconstructive version of 'I do whatever the fuck I want because I want to'. Listening to Max Sitrner the man is letting another "person"'s bullshit ideas control you. He spends his entire book telling you to do what YOU want, but another man telling you to be free can never free you

>>20584254
Being sentenced to death for blasphemy and other petty things was normal too back then. Middle east might suit you, if that's what you want.

>>20569048
Read Junger.

>>20584767
How's he related to Stirner's philosophy?

bump.

>>20569050
fpbp

>>20584759
>Being sentenced to death for blasphemy and other petty things was normal too back then.
This still happens today. The only difference is that it’s crueler and less publicized.

>>20585666
Jünger was Stirner’s warrior aspect.

>>20584413
It unlocks the key to a recursive door.

>>20569048
he is pretty much breaking down all values and rules written in stone to make you understand that all ideologies are inherently subjugating and used to control you, he is trying to teach "radical" anarchism that is freedom from other peoples control
the reason he tears it all down is because even the most benevolent subjugation is still subjugation, no matter how "good" an idea / rule is it can be used against you (check laws and legal system)
with that in mind read him again, see why he wants you to be free and understand the end result is not kicking puppies in the face it is just you as you were but without chains

>>20589221
But isn't having a thought itself, means that you're being controlled. Since all thoughts are influenced by the environment and genetic makeup. Does Stirner consider Instincts to be spooks too? If so what are "you" supposed to be then?

>>20590082
Stirner didn’t think there was any model (genetic, environmental, brain structure, etc.) for a person. He also thought that the world someone perceived was unique and private. Since thoughts are meaningless in themselves and lack any objective content, he is their proprietor and master. They only are what they are for him. He’s not against the instincts but he is against being mastered by them and having no power over oneself like a coomer. But he also writes against self-denial and how people cover up self-denial in the name of freedom. Freedom is less important than ownness for him.