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=                        The_Ego_and_Its_Own                         =
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                            Introduction
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'The Ego and Its Own' (), also known as 'The Unique and Its Property',
is an 1844 work by German philosopher Max Stirner. It presents a
post-Hegelian critique of Christianity and traditional morality on one
hand; and on the other, humanism, utilitarianism, liberalism, and much
of the then-burgeoning socialist movement, advocating instead an
amoral (although importantly not inherently immoral or antisocial)
egoism. It is considered a major influence on the development of
anarchism, existentialism, nihilism, and postmodernism.

In 2010, John F. Welsh coined the term 'dialectical egoism' for the
thoughts of Stirner expressed in this work, in order to emphasize the
distinction from the negative and pejorative connotations from the
common everyday use of 'egoism' in the sense of egotism.


                              Content
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The material that follows is based on the first known English
translation, by Steven T. Byington, first published in 1907.


Part One
==========
The first part of the text begins by setting out a tripartite
dialectical structure based on an individual's stages of life
(Childhood, Youth and Adulthood).


In the first 'realistic' stage, children are restricted by external
material forces. Upon reaching the stage of youth, they begin to learn
how to overcome these restrictions by what Stirner calls the
"self-discovery of mind". However, in the 'idealistic' stage, a youth
now becomes enslaved by internal forces such as conscience, reason and
other "spooks" or "fixed ideas" of the mind (including religion,
nationalism and other ideologies). The final stage, "egoism", is the
second self-discovery, in which one becomes self-conscious of oneself
as more than his mind or body.

Throughout the book, Stirner applies this dialectical structure to
human history. Part one is a sustained critique of the first two
periods of human history and especially of the failure of the modern
world to escape from religious modes of thinking. Stirner's analysis
is opposed to the belief that modern individuals are progressively
more free than their predecessors. Stirner sees moderns as being
possessed by ideological forces such as Christianity and the
ideologies of the modern nation state.

Stirner's critique of modernity is centred on the Protestant
Reformation. According to Stirner, Reformation theology extended
religious domination over individuals by blurring the distinction
between the sensual and the spiritual (thus allowing priests to marry
for example). The Reformation also strengthened and intensified
religious belief and made it more personal, creating an internal
conflict between natural desires and religious conscience. Thus the
Reformation only served to further enslave Europeans under spiritual
ideology.

Stirner's critique of a progressive view of history is part of his
attack on the philosophies of the left-Hegelians, especially that of
Ludwig Feuerbach. Stirner sees Feuerbach's philosophy as merely a
continuation of religious ways of thinking. Feuerbach had argued that
Christianity was mistaken in taking human qualities and projecting
them into a transcendent God. But according to Stirner, Feuerbach's
philosophy, while rejecting a God, left the Christian qualities
intact. Feuerbach had taken a set of human qualities and deified them,
making them the only prescriptive view of humanity. This became just
another religion for Stirner, a "change of masters" over the
individual. Stirner criticizes other left-Hegelians for setting a
conception of essential human nature as a goal to be striven for
instead of one which is already achieved. So while liberals like
Arnold Ruge found the essence of the human in citizenship, and social
liberals like Moses Hess found it in labor, all of them made a similar
error of ossifying an "essence" of the human and deifying it. For
Stirner, "human nature" cannot provide any prescriptions on how one
ought to live as one doesn't need to become his nature, but instead he
already is ("Your nature is, once and for all, a human one; you are
human natures, human beings. But, just because you already are so, you
do not still need to become so").


Part Two
==========
Part two is centered on the possibility of freedom from current
ideological ways of thinking through a robust philosophical egoism.
Stirner's egoism is centered on what he calls 'Eigenheit' ('Ownness'
or autonomy). This 'Ownness' is a feature of a more advanced stage of
human personal and historical development. It is the groundwork for
our world-view.

Stirner's Egoism is a descriptive psychological egoist, though he
differentiates between conscious and involuntary egoism. Stirner does
not advocate narrow selfishness of a "sensual man":
Selfishness [...] in the Christian sense, means something like this:
I look only to see whether anything is of use to me as a sensual man.
But is sensuality then the whole of my ownness? Am I in my own senses
when I am given up to sensuality?

Stirner's conception of Ownness is a type of self-description:
Ownness includes in itself everything own, and brings to honor again
what Christian language dishonored. But ownness has not any alien
standard either, as it is not in any sense an idea like freedom,
morality, humanity, etc.: it is only a description of the -- owner.

In Part II, Stirner discards the concept of freedom, as being of
limited value, and replaces it with power and property. In Chapter "My
Power", Stirner explores the concept of human rights and their
subsequent inherent separation from the self: "The right of 'all' is
to go before my right."

In the chapter "My Self-Enjoyment" Stirner discusses longing and "true
life", discarding both of them preferring a "non-seeking" man: "Not
till I am certain of myself, and no longer seeking for myself, am I
really my property; I have myself, therefore I use and enjoy myself."
"A man is 'called' to nothing, and has no 'calling', no 'destiny', as
little as a plant or a beast has a 'calling'". Further he argues that
"[t]he true man does not lie in the future, an object of longing, but
lies, existent and real, in the present".

In Part III of Part II, "The Unique One", Stirner gives a summary of
the book and its ideas, and ends it as it began: "all things are
nothing to me".


                        Style and structure
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Stirner repeatedly quotes Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich
Schiller and Bruno Bauer assuming that readers will be familiar with
their works. 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. This can make the book more
demanding for contemporary readers.


                      Reception and influence
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Initially, 'The Unique and Its Property' received much attention,
though most reviews were negative critiques by left Hegelians such as
Ludwig Feuerbach and Moses Hess. Feuerbach's critique, "'The Essence
of Christianity' in Relation to 'The Ego and Its Own'", called the
work "ingenious" and "intelligent" but also criticizes it as
"eccentric, one-sided and falsely defined". Stirner responded to these
critiques in an 1845 essay titled "Stirner's Critics".

'The Unique and Its Property' also had a profound impact on Marx and
Engels. In 1844 Engels sent a letter to Marx praising "the noble
Stirner" and suggesting that his dialectical egoism can serve as a
point of departure for communism:  It is certainly true that we must
first make a cause our own, egoistic cause, before we can do anything
to further it. . . . [W]e are communists out of egoism also, and it is
out of egoism that we wish to be human beings, not mere individuals...

However, Marx and Engels would later collaborate on a lengthy
criticism of Stirner's book in 'The German Ideology' (1845, published
1932). The critique is a polemical tirade filled with 'ad hominem'
attacks and insults against Stirner (Marx calls him a "petty bourgeois
individualist intellectual").

The argument in 'The German Ideology' critiquing 'The Unique and Its
Property' is that Stirner's central concept is the same kind of
"ghost" that Stirner argues does not exist. For Marx and Engels,
Stirner's "egoism" simply presented a modern religiosity that,
according to L. Dallman, "stands in a privileged relationship to
non-conceptual reality". Marx and Engels would therefore derisively
and repetitively refer to Stirner as "Saint Max".

Stirner also had a lasting influence in the tradition of individualist
anarchism. American individualist Benjamin R. Tucker, editor of the
journal 'Liberty', adopted Stirner's egoism in 1886 while rejecting
conceptions of natural rights. This led to a bitter split in American
individualist anarchism between egoists such as James L. Walker and
John Beverly Robinson, and the proponents of natural rights anarchism
such as that of Lysander Spooner. Other individualist anarchists
influenced by Stirner include Lev Chernyi, Adolf Brand, Renzo
Novatore, John Henry Mackay, Enrico Arrigoni, Miguel Giménez Igualada,
and Émile Armand.

Although initially influenced by American individualist anarchist,
S.E.P. was influenced more by European individualists and eventually
by Dora Marsden, which led to him discarding anarchism, as did Dora
Marsden some 70 years before him, which would go on to influence
others associated with him. Other egoists who rejected anarchism
include Stephen Marletta, William J. Boyer, Ragnar Redbeard, Malfew
Seklew and
[https://web.archive.org/web/20160408143140/http://i-studies.com/
Svein Olav Nyberg], among others.

Recently, Stirner has been an influential source for post-left
anarchist thinkers such as Jason McQuinn, Bob Black and Hakim Bey.


      {{anchor|Confusion of the censors}} Publication attempts
======================================================================
'He who destroyes a good Booke, kills reason it selfe', a 1955
exhibition by University of Kansas Library, noted the following
regarding the book's initial publication:


                              See also
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* 'Geschichte des Materialismus'
* Solipsism


                             References
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* .
* .
* ; engl. trans. [http://www.lsr-projekt.de/poly/ennietzsche.html
'Nietzsche's Initial Crisis'].


                           External links
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* 'The Ego and His Own' at Project Gutenberg
*
*
'[https://archive.org/details/StirnerTheEgoAndItsOwn/mode/2up?view=theater
The Ego and Its Own] Cambridge Texts in the History of Political
Thought edition' (Cambridge University Press, 1995) ed. D. Leopold.
*
'[https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stirner/ego-and-its-own.htm
The Ego and Its Own]' from the Marxists Internet Archive.
*
[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/max-stirner-stirner-s-critics
'Stirner's Critics']. Stirner's reply to his critics, (addendum to
'The Unique').
*[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/max-stirner-the-unique-and-its-property
'The Unique and Its Property'].


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