Introduction.

The purpose of this essay is to provide a study of Max Stirner and his philosophy of egoism from the perspective of radical empiricism and pragmatism. There are three parts to discussion:

• How egoism implies a form of embodied phenomenology.
• The pragmatic nature of egoist ethics.
• Egoism as a political philosophy.

Egoism and the Embodied Phenomenology of the Unique.

In the preface to The Ego and His Own, entitled All Things are Nothing to Me, Stirner remarks that the “divine is God’s concern; the human, man’s” (EHO, pxxiii). By contrast, he has no concern for abstract concepts such goodness, truth, justice, or liberty, “but solely what is mine” (Ibid, his emphasis). That is, he is only concerned with the individual as a singular concrete existential subject.

It is here that Stirner establishes the two primordial tenets of his egoism. These are:

1. That only an individual subject can exercise intentionality and agency.
2. The individual subject cannot be defined or determined by anything outside the intentionality of their being. That is, as the one and unique (der Einzige/einzig).

Akin to Kierkegaard’s dialectical reversal of Hegel, where is individual led away from the absolute to the absurd, Stirner performs a similar exercise with his Young Hegelian nemesis, Ludwig Feuerbach. In The Essence of Christianity, the latter Feuerbach devolved attributes of God and accredited them to humanity. But as far as Stirner is concerned, from the perspective of the individual, Feuerbach merely “accomplishes only a transposition of subject and predicate, giving preference to the latter” (EHO, p51). This is merely a “change of masters” (EHO, p50, his emphasis). For Stirner, attributes and predicates exist on a separate ontological plane from the concrete individual subject. No common property or general definition can ever account for the inviolable uniqueness of the one. This is because “you yourself with your essence are valuable to me, for your essence is not a higher one, is not higher and more general than you, is unique like you yourself, because it is you” (EHO, p35, his emphasis). Stirner’s full inversion of Feuerbach can be seen in the following passage:

The sentence “God has become man” is now followed by the other, “Man has become I.” This is the human I. But we invert it and say: I was not able to find myself so long as I sought myself as Man. But, now that it appears that Man is aspiring to become I and to gain a corporeity in me, I note that, after all, everything depends on me, and Man is lost without me. But I do not care to give myself up to be the shrine of this most holy thing, and shall not ask henceforward whether I am man or un-man in what I set about; let this spirit keep off my neck! (EHO, p127–128).

For the egoist, no abstraction or ideal can ever exhaust the lived experience of an embodied subject. Furthermore, they are incapable of expressing the differences between concrete individuals. This why Stirner states that if the “individual is the whole of nature, so he is the whole of the species too” (EHO, p169).

When Stirner makes the accusation that “(o)ur atheists are pious people” (EHO, p171), he is not attacking his fellow Young Hegelians for their religious faith, but their belief in determinants. This is because to “know and acknowledge essences alone and nothing but essences, that is religion; its realm is a realm of essences, spooks, and ghosts” (EHO, p34). What constitutes religion, for Stirner, is any mode of thought predicated upon transcendentals. He is abrasive to any philosophical or moral doctrine which seeks to arrest the potential of the concrete individual in their becoming, as well as any political agenda which intends the perfectibility of the human being. Thus “(w)hether the church, the Bible, or reason…the sacred authority makes no difference in essentials” (EHO, p323, his emphasis). No matter how subtle or innocuous, every philosophical traditional, ethical code, religious doctrine, or political agenda has a prescriptive or normative substructure which obliges the unique subject to cultivate or enact. As such, they are what Stirner terms: vocational. He develops this line of thought in the following passage:

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, because it sets me beneath Man, and thereby creates for me a “vocation.” (EHO, p162, his emphasis)

Much of Young Hegelian social and political discourse fluctuates around questions of property, more specifically, private property. In his Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel argued that “the right to things is the right of personality as such…A person must translate his freedom into an external sphere in order to exist as Idea” (OPR, p57, hid emphasis). For him, property possession is the primary means by which an individual projects their selfhood into the world as an objective buttress.

Stirner is concerned less with the possession and use of property by an individual and more with the relations between the two. That is, how property is utilized by the unique in the process of living. His concept of property is not limited to physical objects but also ideas. These are what he terms spiritual goods (EHO, p261). Stirner is acutely aware of how one’s personal property, whether physical possessions or metaphysical beliefs, can come to dominate and define the individual. True personality comes not through the ability to acquire entertain ideas and acquire things but occupy and use them without attachment. Thus, to state the world is open to ownership is not a claim right and entitlement but an assertion of possibility, a consideration of the unique’ s own boundaries.

Radical empiricism implies an embodied phenomenology to the extent that it deems configures consciousness as emergent from, and parasitic upon, more elementary forms of experience. As a subject which interacts adaptively, dynamically, and responsively to its lived environment, the consciousness of a human being is enacted through an active process encompassing mind, body, and world.

The human subject is enveloped in a dialectical relationship with its lived environment where the structure and content of consciousness is predicated upon interactivity with the world. At the same time, this activity informs how the world is presented and disclose to consciousness. Intentional consciousness, with its conceptual and volitional faculties, is dependent upon perceptual and sensorimotor activity as a relational ground of the subject. In short, somatic activity determines cognitive activity.

The genius of selfhood is to integrate and present the dichotomies of subject and object in a complimentary manner. Primarily, the self is orientated from a subjective perspective, recognising and enacting possibilities from the perspective of the body. But in other instances, the embodied mind can perceive itself as object of attention, action, or effect. Technology, language, art, and culture all provide platforms from which the embodied subject can extend the self meaningfully beyond its cranial and epidermal limitations. Thus, each individual consciousness can be said to exist with a unique framework of reference significant to it as a subject. Culture and society are nothing but the cumulative exchange and relation of these individual frameworks in their interactivity with the lived environment. What constitutes the world is a constant feedback loop whereby an individual subject interprets the given environment from their own unique perspective and transforms it into a new complex of social, cultural, and political relations. History is nothing but this productive activity.

At the root of Stirner’s egoism is a defence of the embodied subject in its primordial relationality with the lived environment. Beyond language, concepts, and logic there is an unthinkable and unsayable uniqueness of interconnectivity with world which cannot be expressed linguistically or captured conceptually. It is the absolute givenness of pure experience.

By trading in identity and representation, the inviolable uniqueness of individual lived experience is sullied and misrepresented by conceptual content and material dependency. It is this impossible singularity Stirner is driving at when he states that “I am not nothing in the sense of emptiness, but I am the creative nothing, the nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything” (EHO, pxxiii). For Stirner, the self is an indeterminate space of possibility, pure becoming. By returning to the body as the locus of relationality and worldly engagement, the one can disentangle itself from various webs of determination and attachment, reclaiming the self from what it is not. Even in the simple act of physically stretching one’s muscles, Stirner finds an opportunity to functionally break from conceptual determination. As he explains:

A jerk does me the service of the most anxious thinking, a stretching of the limbs shakes off the torment of thoughts, a leap upward hurls from my breast the nightmare of the religious world, a jubilant Hoopla throws off year-long burdens. But the monstrous significance of unthinking jubilation could not be recognized in the long night of thinking and believing. (EHO, p137)

Inverting religious and spiritual doctrines which advocate disciplining the body in the pursuit of higher truths, Stirner proclaims that “it is only through the “flesh” that I can break tyranny of mind; for it is only when a man hears his flesh along with the rest of him that he hears himself wholly” (EHO, p56). Thus, the body is the means the hold of determinants and attachments can be broken. The body is an effective bulwark against the self-negating process of sublation onto a higher plain, questing the potency and efficacy of the sacred goods which vitiate the incomprehensible depth and complexity of individual lived experience.

The Pragmatic Ethics of Egoism.

When Stirner states in The Ego and His Own, that the objective for the egoist is not to “Know thyself” but to “Get the value out of thyself!” (EHO, p295, his emphasis), this is not a moral imperative but an ethical inquest. Deterrents such as telling a child it will go hungry for rejecting food do not constitute what Stirner terms: moral influence. Rather “(m)oral influence takes it start where humiliation begins” (EHO, p73, his emphasis). It is self-abasement to something higher. Something that is “instilled and impressed” (Ibid, his emphasis). Moral influence is imposed and inculcated into the individual through the socialisation process.

In speaking of love, Stiner states that “(e)very love to which there clings but the smallest speck of obligation is an unselfish love, and, so far as this speck reaches, a possessedness. He who believes that he owes the object of his love anything loves romantically or religiously” (EHO, p274, his emphasis). He includes both religious and sensuous love as unselfish, for they carry the threat of captivation or enchantment with an idea or attachment. Where love is obligated or undermines the integrity of the individual, then it “cuts no better figure than any other passion that I obey blindly” (EHO, p271). Lust is perhaps the most heinous example of unselfish love, when all desire is orientated to possessing something or someone to the extent that it evokes emotional turmoil. Love in this instance is not subjectively willed or internally evoked by the individual but apprehends their desire from the outside. Thus, egoist love is not narcissistic but cautious. It is attentive to whether the object of desire should be valorised for reasons that do not undermine the integrity of the individual as a unique subject. In short, the one is not above the trite romantic concern that a person should be loved for who they really are, rather than an idealised image.

From this study of love the motivating factor of egoist morality becomes apparent. What is at issue for the unique is whether feelings, thoughts, and actions are provoked at the behest of the individual or imposed or obligated from without. That the one is moved by moral virtue is no failure will. But what does undermine the integrity of the unique is allowing oneself to be determined, conditioned, or motivated by affections impressed externally. Ethics, for the egoist, is a matter of relationality, of positioning the self relative to the determinations and attachments produced by lived existence.

Stirner affirms that “(u)nconsciously and involuntarily we all strive toward ownness…after every victory over a faith I become again the prisoner (possessed) of a faith which then takes my whole self anew into its service” (EHO, p335–336, his emphasis). Thus, an individual can never be truly emancipated from determinations and attachments. The challenge then, is to interpose as much distance as possible between the self and external determinations and attachments. In short, the achieving of ownness is the rendering of all interactions and obligations to a purely casual and voluntary basis. Only when there is an option and opportunity of withdrawal is there freedom, anything less is tyranny.

Yet altruistic action is not beyond the unique’s scope, for as Stirner tells us, the one “can with sacrifice to him numberless enjoyments, I can deny myself numberless things for the enhancement of his pleasure” (EHO, p271, his emphasis). Him and his meaning the generalised other with whom the one interacts. As such, voluntary self-sacrifice is a noble activity for the egoist. As is any action which seeks to preserve and enhance the fruition, welfare, and liberty of the unique. Furthermore, an individual can also become a threat to themselves by becoming possessed by their own needs, wants, and desires. That is, unable to dissociate from their own egotism, selfishness, and vanity. Thus, ownness is not merely the ability to act, but also, the ability to refrain from acting. A life lived solely in the pursuit of pleasure and self-gratification with a low-time preference is no life at all. As Stirner informs us:

The ambitious man, who is carried away by ambition and remains deaf to every warning that a calm moment begets in him, has let this passion grow up into a despot against whom he abandons all power of dissolution: he has given up himself, because he cannot dissolve himself, and consequently cannot absolve himself from the passion: he is possessed. (EHO, p271–272, his emphasis)

Given that determinations and attachments of lived existence cannot be avoided, simply circumvented, or held at a distance, ownness has a character playfulness, novelty, and creativity. It is the capacity to navigate freely in life through experimentation and education without the baggage of determination and attachment. Therefore, the battle for ownness is not just waged against society and world, but the one’s own self. As we see in the following passage, directives promulgated by an individual’s own willpower are as much threat to the self as any dictate issued from an external authority:

People are at pains to distinguish law from arbitrary orders, from an ordinance: the former comes from a duly entitled authority. But a law over human action (ethical law, State law, etc.) is always a declaration of will, and so an order. Yes, even if I myself gave myself the law, it would yet be only my order, to which in the next moment I can refuse obedience. (EHO, p180, his emphasis)

The egoist, for Stirner, is not a self-obsessed and pleasure-seeking libertine. But a self-conscious actor capable of growth and change. They are a pragmatic, learning from experience what is good, useful, and practical. They are freethinking, unbeholden to authority, tradition, or dogma. Finally, they are ascetic, disciplined in abstinence and renunciation from pleasure and desire.

Egoism as a Political Philosophy.

Given the emphasis of egoism upon experimentation and education, discipline and creativity, personal freedom and individual liberty are naturally of the highest value. However, provided that freedom and liberty can be considered abstract concepts, Stirner is necessarily wary. Particularly freedom encapsulated in the form of rights and responsibilities. There are three reasons for this:

1. There is a disjunction between bearing a set of rights and responsibility and exercising them volitionally.
2. By assuming the authority to the grant and uphold rights, a state is positing itself above the individual.
3. An individual should not have to seek or request the authority to exercise a set of rights, nor feel obliged to fulfil any responsibilities with which it has not voluntarily consented to accepting.

This is the sentiment behind the following statement in The Ego and His Own that:

If they nevertheless give you freedom, they are simply knaves who give more than they have. For then they give you nothing of their own, but stolen wares: they give you your own freedom, the freedom that you must take for yourselves; and they give it to you only that you may not take it and call the thieves and cheats to an account to boot. (EHO, p155, his emphasis)

It is here that Stirner draws the distinction between self-liberation and emancipation (Ibid). The former being a positive assertion of one’s ownness and the latter entailing a negative compromise akin to “a dog dragging a piece of chain with him…an unfree man in a garment of freedom, like the ass in the lion’s skin” (Ibid). To this extent, rights-based freedom poses two dangers for the egoist:

1. A capricious and revocable freedom determined by the other.
2. A pacification of radical subjectivity and subjugation of individual volition.

Freedom is not value that should need to be desired or granted. It is a prerequisite of being, the natural state of affairs. For Stirner, to be unique is not just to be free but also assert ownership of one’s own self. As he tells us:

I have no objection to freedom, but I wish more than freedom for you: you should not merely be rid of what you do not want; you should not only be a “freeman,” you should be an “owner” too. (EHO, p144, his emphasis)

State, Emperor, Church, and God: The Persuasive Power of Political Authority.

By asserting that everyone should be an owner, Stirner does not simply stop at the mind, but also includes the body and its projectable capacities. By delegating or surrendering an aspect of the self to an external authority, the one may have certain guarantees of freedom, but they cannot be said to have full possession of their uniqueness. In exchange for their contractual freedom, the individual must accept certain determinations and attachments which they may not find desirable. This could include a sense of duty or service towards family, community, and country, as well as the social, cultural, historical, and political trappings that come with them.

Thus, in approaching the question of political authority, Stirner is not ignorant of how economic, or material conditions reproduce an individual, but his concern is directed more towards the impression of the state upon internal subjective life. That is, the state as an ideological edifice and inculcator of consciousness. Given that customs, traditions, and institutions arise from the sedimentation and ossification of embodied needs, wants, and desires over time, the state exists to secure and maintain the norms, meanings, and values of given society. The very existence of political organisation and social hierarchy is a clear sign of pacified and emasculated subjectivity; a mind given up to routine, convention, and habit rather than enthused with adventure, experimentation, and creativity.

While “State, emperor, church, God, morality, order, are such thoughts or spirits, that exist only for the mind” (EHO, p65–66), this is not to say they are without real effects. A state cannot function by coercion alone, it must cultivate some form of affiliation or deference. Or, as Stirner himself explains in this long but worthy passage:

A State exists even without my co-operation: I am born in it, brought up in it, under obligations to it, and must “do it homage.” It takes me up into its “favor,” and I live by its “grace.” Thus the independent establishment of the State founds my lack of independence; its condition as a “natural growth,” its organism, demands that my nature do not grow freely, but be cut to fit it. That it may be able to unfold in natural growth, it applies to me the shears of “civilization”; it gives me an education and culture adapted to it, not to me, and teaches me e.g. to respect the laws, to refrain from injury to State property (i.e. private property), to reverence divine and earthly highness, etc.; in short, it teaches me to be — unpunishable, “sacrificing” my ownness to “sacredness” (everything possible is sacred; e.g. property, others’ life, etc.). In this consists the sort of civilization and culture that the State is able to give me: it brings me up to be a “serviceable instrument,” a “serviceable member of society.” (EHO, p208, his emphasis)

The basic operation of the state is the confiscation of the mental, physical, and projectable properties of an individual and the return of them as a reward for compliance. What is insidious about political authority is that it creates a necessity for itself within individual subjectivity. The one is made to think and feel that the state is imperative for their reproduction as a self. As an external force, the state makes room for itself within the internal processes of the unique like an unwanted parasite. The deviousness of the state lies in the subtlety of persuasion, not the crudeness of coercion.

Just as the political authority expresses itself in and through individual subjectivity, so too must resistance come in and through the unique. A such, the one must posit their own will against the state and its prerogatives. Or, as Stirner explains in this lengthy passage:

States last only so long as there is a ruling will and this ruling will is looked upon as tantamount to the own will. The lord’s will is — law. What do your laws amount to if no one obeys them? What your orders, if nobody lets himself be ordered? The State cannot forbear the claim to determine the individual’s will, to speculate and count on this. For the State it is indispensable that nobody have an own will ; if one had, the State would have to exclude (lock up, banish, etc.) this one; if all had, they would do away with the State. The State is not thinkable without lordship and servitude (subjection); for the State must will to be the lord of all that it embraces, and this will is called the “will of the State.” (EHO, p180–181, his emphasis).

The state is not a monolithic edifice but a structure of relations operating within and between individuals. This is the significance of the following paragraph:

What is called a State is a tissue and plexus of dependence and adherence; it is a belonging together, a holding together, in which those who are placed together fit themselves to each other, or, in short, mutually depend on each other: it is the order of this dependence. Suppose the king, whose authority lends authority to all down to the beadle, should vanish: still all in whom the will for order was awake would keep order erect against the disorders of bestiality. If disorder were victorious, the State would be at an end. (EHO, p207, his emphasis)

The genius of political authority is its ability to inculcate individuals, so they perform repressive and coercive acts in its name and evoke its spirit. In essence, society is a penal colony whose prisoners are both guard and convict. As such, this reality complicates the question of insurrectionary or revolutionary action. For in having overturned one set of politically structured relations, another constellation arises in its place. And, as history has demonstrated, the result of revolutionary action often produces outcomes which are worth than those preceding them.

Make Yourself Count: Voluntary Association as a Remedy for Political Authority.

In place of the state, Stirner proposes a union of egos. While he is skimpy on the details of what this arrangement entails, there are three discernible tenets:

1. An openness to possibility.
2. An affirmation of ownness.
3. Resistance to coercion and oppression.

Positing the union of egos in opposition to society, Stiner provides the following description of the agreement:

You bring into a union your whole power, your competence, and make yourself count; in a society you are employed, with your working power; in the former you live egoistically, in the latter humanly, i.e. religiously, as a “member in the body of this Lord”; to a society you owe what you have, and are in duty bound to it, are — possessed by “social duties”; a union you utilize, and give it up undutifully and unfaithfully when you see no way to use it further. If a society is more than you, then it is more to you than yourself; a union is only your instrument, or the sword with which you sharpen and increase your natural force; the union exists for you and through you, the society conversely lays claim to you for itself and exists even without you, in short, the society is sacred, the union your own; consumes you, you consume the union. (EHO, p293, his emphasis)

Given that it is not bound by contracts or instituted by customs or conventions, the union of egos is best characterised as an “ever-fluid uniting of everything standing” (EHO, p208). Or, in other words, a marriage of convenience for achieving certain agreed upon objectives for the members involved. Should a union no longer be fit for purpose, achieve its objective, or degenerate into coercion or oppression, it can be dissolved undutifully and unfaithfully. A clear sign that a union is failing is if fealty to the agreement gains prevalence over the interests of the members involved. As such, a union of egos is differentiated from a political party, which Stirner describes as “a dead union, an idea that has become fixed” (EHO, p220).

For intents and purposes, a union functions as a gymnasium offering a practical space for mental education, experimentation, training, and discipline. On the one hand it provides opportunities for expression, communication, and learning. While on the other, it requires formality, prudence, and restraint to prevent the union from deteriorating into a repressive convention of repressive attachments, expectations, and obligations. While all this may sound impossibly intellectual, examples of primitive egoistic unions abound in quotidian everyday life. This can include campaign groups, self-help organizations, friendly societies, or community assemblies. In short, any act of individual collaboration where association is voluntarily enacted, mutually agreed, and temporally enduring.

Sources and References.

~(EHO) The Ego and His Own: The Case of the Individual Against Authority (Verso, 2014) by Max Stirner.

~(OPR) Outlines of the Philosophy of Right (OUP, 2008) by G.W.F. Hegel.