The first half of Der Einzige exhibits many failed attempts at positing an essence of the I. Stirner’s position is that no matter how far (God) or close (man), how honorable (freedom) or righteous (justice), how abstract (truth) or material (labor), any separation of myself from myself which would determine me as such is categorically equivalent: it is absolutely other—alien. For Stirner, the category of man or human being (Mensch) is not sublated by I; it is not resolved, understood, fixed, or reformed. The humanity of “Man” is annihilated by the I which annihilates itself along with it. Even the category of the “world” is not safe, for as Stirner remarks, “I annihilate it as I annihilate myself; I dissolve it.”3
Stirner was no philosophical dilettante. He was indeed quite familiar with Hegel’s philosophy, having been the only young Hegelian (besides Feuerbach) to have seen him lecture in Berlin.4 Hegel’s influence over Stirner is strong, and present. This can be seen by merely looking at the triplets and sub-triplets that make up the structure of his book, similar to Hegel’s triplet and sub-triplet (and sub-sub-triplet) structure in the Science of Logic. The syllogistic structure of Hegel’s dialectical method (i.e., the self-negating movement of universal, particular, and individual) grounds this practice, and we see it all over Stirner.
The beginning and ending of Stirner’s book are both unique, not only in their brevity but in their comprehensive aim. Both are sealed with the declaration of “nothing”, and both aim at justifying the Einzige as the only one capable of grasping this. “All things are nothing to me… The Unique One”—it is between these two points that the drama unfolds.
Stirner’s Logic
The first half of Der Einzige tells the same story in different guises, different triplets, different allegories. No matter the setting or characters, what is repeatedly iterated across psychological, sociological, historical, and philosophical planes is the story of how an idea or relation becomes a thing, and either a) how that thing becomes more real than the thinker who thought it in the first place or b) how the relations between individuals become separate from the individuals themselves. Once this thing is “fixed”, it almost gravitationally pulls individuals into a more general “subjection”, one which empties their uniqueness and individuality out of them, replacing it with the staleness of a generalized equivalent, a “generality” [Allgemeinheit].5 The general equivalent is the ideological chain that binds the individual to the coherence of the social whole; it is the “cement” of society and the state.6
In relation to ideas, the inversion of subject and object occurs when a thought, as generality, is elevated and sanctified, thus flattering the individual. The consecration of thought, according to Stirner, degrades and abases the individual into a position of submission to that sacred object. “Everything sacred is a tie, a fetter.”7 Flattered by the exaltation of one’s ideas beyond oneself, one willingly submits to its new form as “ruling principle.”8 This structure reveals itself as “the meaning of hierarchy”, or the “dominion of thoughts.”9 Such dominion is only accomplished with the total eradication of individuality and uniqueness.10 Only the unique one is capable of puncturing the generality of the sacred tie, thus rupturing the stability of the social whole. Because of this threat, any incommensurable difference, i.e., the singularity of a unique individual, must be either outlawed, killed, or colonized. One who wants to maintain their individuality within this order must necessarily become an enemy, a criminal, a desecrator—all laudable categories for Stirner. “The individual is the irreconcilable enemy of every generality, every tie, every fetter.”11 “Nothing is holy to him.”12 “An own I cannot desist from being a criminal, that crime is his life.”13 More than that, one might have to bring down an empire in order to raise oneself up. This requires one to become a “perverter of law” [Rechtsverdreher]—like Alcibiades, Lysander, Christ, and Luther—for “everything sacred is and must be perverted by perverters of the law.”14
How could the inversion of thinking and thought lead to the downfall of empires? This sounds suspiciously idealist. The problem is that the dialectic of thinker/thought/thing is too narrow to account for what Stirner seeks; the content exceeds the form, and hence the form should be revised. The previous formula did not consider the actual meaning of the relations between such categories. Stirner interprets this relation through a mutilated dialectical grid stitched to an inverted Proudhonian view of property. This process of subjection can be better formalized as the relation between an owner and property in which the property transforms into something alien to the owner, an “alienty” [Fremdentum].15 The thinker is just one type of owner, the thought is just one kind of property, and the generality, sacred tie, and ruling principle are manifestations of the same logic of alienation. The owner and their property are bound to each other such that the property is determined by the power of the owner. It can be formalized like this: Owner(property)—i.e., property is dependent on the owner. Crucial here is the fact that the property at hand does not exhaust the individuality of the owner, their unicity. Alienation occurs when the dependency relation is broken, when property becomes independent of the owner’s power. It can be written like this: Property(owner)—i.e., the owner is now defined by its relation to the property. This form of property determines the owner, yet it is not determined by the owner. However, the property is still the property of the owner. When one’s own property becomes independent of one’s own power, it is alienated property or alienty. This can be formulated as such:
A. [Owner(property)→Property(owner)]→Alienty
This symbolizes the domination of one’s property over and through the owner itself.
It is important to note that this phenomenon does not define or express all human relations, nor is it universally valid for all times. Human beings are engaged and entangled in innumerable projects with their manifold desires, and in no way are they just thinking, positing, owning, submitting, resisting beings. To Stirner, before we are idealist youths searching for essences behind things, we are realistic children playing with things as they appear. Growing up, for Stirner, is precisely the loss of “realism” and the descent into “idealism”, which can only be overcome by “egoism.”16
Stirner’s quasi-dialectic of alienation has three moments: Owning, Alienating, and Reifying. Owned property (one’s power over an idea, relation, thing, x) becomes alienated from its creator (inversion of subject and object), and, ultimately, reified into an objective thing (independence of the object from oneself). In the first two moments, the owner and the property are still defined in terms of each other; in the third moment, however, a separate essence is granted to the property in itself. Reification is the proper term for the final moment, since it is a modification of alienation in which the separation of the property from the owner leads one to treat it as an independent thing, with its own self-determined meaning and power. The “seeming-body” [Scheinleib] of property thus becomes an actual body.17 This process can be formalized like this:
B. [x(y)→y(x)]→z
Stirner populates this formula with different terms and concepts. For x, he uses self, I, corporeal, thing, and creator; for y, spirit, own, ghost, idea, creature; for z, specter (spook), alien, corporeal ghost, fixed idea, and creator again. They can be written as such:
C. [Self(spirit)→Spirit(self)]→Specter (spook)
D. [I(own)→Own(I)]→Alien
E. [Corporeal(ghost)→Ghost(corporeal)]→Corporeal ghost
F. [Thing(idea)→Idea(thing)]→Fixed Idea
G. [Creator(creature)→Creature(creator)]→Creator
For all the venom Marx spewed on Stirner, he used a similar logic in Capital when describing the fetish character of the commodity. For Marx, labor under conditions of capitalism is both concrete and abstract, and the value of the commodity one produces requires a specific form in which to express itself. Ultimately, for Marx, this form is money, and its power obscures the social relations which produce value, leading human beings to treat it as the agent itsel
f. In other words, my labor produces a commodity whose ‘value’ I treat separately from my own activity. It becomes a fetish, dominating me in turn.18 Thus:
H. [Labor(commodity)→Commodity(labor)]→Commodity-Fetish
Is reification a necessary consequence of alienation, or is there some room for contingency between the two? In other words, can property become alienated without necessarily leading to its independent power? It would seem at least intuitively possible that this could occur. For example, I can grant the idea of love dominance over me, while still maintaining that love is, in the end, still my idea. For Stirner, any break in my control over property opens the door to its domination over me. Whether or not this is necessary, the very possibility is dangerous enough to warrant its indiscriminate foreclosure. With that said, any and every relation to property is necessarily ambiguous, for it is both something I seek for my consumption and something I fight against for my own independence.
Stirner’s Allegories
Given this background, where does Stirner begin his analysis? From this subject, I, that which I call my own: the living, actual individual being that I am. What exactly constitutes the “actuality” of this corporeal being is purposely left undetermined, for to fix it in any way would open up the door to the problem that Stirner is explicitly trying to avoid: the problem of essence. But by leaving it so vague, he allows Marx and others to charge that it is not “actual” actuality that characterizes this being but ideal actuality, actuality seen from the standpoint of thought. In The German Ideology, Marx makes this accusation: “This ‘I’ of Stirner’s which is the final outcome of the hitherto existing world is, therefore, not a ‘corporeal individual’ but a category constructed on the Hegelian method.”19 The true standpoint, according to Marx, is to see the “I” from the perspective of “living, material labor.” And since living, material labor is more actual than this individual “creative nothing” that Stirner describes, we must reject Stirner as all too metaphysical. The accusation of being “too metaphysical”, which plagued much of 20th century philosophy, can be seen in nuce right there in Marx’s early polemic with Stirner.
What, then, is this I? As individual and corporeal, finite and intentional, it thinks, desires, and acts. Most importantly, it has the capacity to be self-determining, as well as to be determined by others. One property of this “I” is its ability to think and create thought-entities, immaterial realities, spirits. Let’s call these objects “x.” Now some of these thought-things can become separated from this I, and hold power over it, such as God, the good, truth, humanity, justice, nation, and freedom.20 Let’s call these special thought-things X. X names a spiritual idea that becomes so exalted as to determine the nature of the I. The basic structure for this process was laid out in formulas A and B. To restate it here with these new terms: [I(x)→X(I)]→X.
How does this work in reality? In Part I of The Ego and Its Own, Stirner gives four different accounts of how this logic of separation unfolds. They are outlined in terms of developmental psychology, philosophy, history, and politics. Now these accounts are provocative at best, racist and specious at worst. All these sequences, except the political one, are appropriated from Hegel’s lectures on history and philosophy, which Stirner knew quite well. Stirner organized them in a tri-partite sequence instead of a quadratic scheme, probably because he thought it was more dialectical.21 The first three—psychology, philosophy, and history—place “our” time within the center term, on the cusp between it and the next term, the future to come. In Stirner’s framework, we are currently youthful, idealist, mongoloid, Christians in the process of becoming adult, egoist, Caucasian atheists. The first category represents our dependence on the things of material world, the middle moment expresses the dominance of mind, ideas and spirit, whereas the third is the future of the self-owning I.22
What is Stirner doing here exactly? At face value, these stories are laughable and offensive. And not only that, but “copied” from Hegel, as Marx repeatedly complains. They do not quite match the earlier logic outlined, although there is similarity in the number of terms used. More properly dialectical, each moment here is a negation of the previous one. Given these facts, what should we do with them? As empirical “proofs” of his theory, we should obviously reject them, not only because they are wrong, but also because they are idiotic and racist. But are they meant to be empirically accurate? One should rather ask another question: What is Stirner’s relation to the material he is presenting? Is it serious or parody? The material is obviously not his own, but who owns history, anyway? Who has the right to use and abuse a theory? They are not his “property” per se, but they are the “material” from which his thinking occurs. Here one needs to look at how Stirner thinks one should relate to other people’s property. In one of his critiques of the liberal theory of property—property as a sacred, inviolable right—he asserts his position on the page, loud and clear: “I do not shyly step back from your property, but look upon it always as my property, in which I need to ‘respect’ nothing. Pray do the same with what you call my property.”23
If we read Stirner as he asks to be read, as someone making his own property out of whatever material is in his power to consume, then we should read the aforementioned cases as nothing but allegories for his underlying purpose. Making property out of something else, appropriating it, making sense of it to oneself and for oneself—that is what Stirner does. To make sense of the material he is given, he manipulates certain symbols into recognizable forms within his own language; he allegorizes and parodies.
Stirner’s purpose is to dislodge fixed ideas by any means necessary. Where does this desire to demolish such fixity arise from? If we consider Stirner as still Hegelian, then we can see him as following through on Hegel’s call to liberate thinking from its fixity. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes this modern task of philosophy:
Hence the task nowadays consists not so much in purging the individual of an immediate, sensuous mode of apprehension, and making him into a substance that is an object of thought and that thinks, but rather in just the opposite, in freeing determinate thoughts from their fixity so as to give actuality to the universal, and impart to it a spiritual life.24
Stirner recognizes this, and has his work cut out for him, since the fixity of thought does not simply go away. Fixed ideas are deceptive because their presence is itself denied by those who possess them. One could say that such people are in bad faith, self-deceived, possessed. And we all know that “possessed [Besessene] people are set [versessen] in their opinions.”25 If that is the case, then a simple injunction to abolish them is not enough. One has to first bring them to the surface, to make them present and not merely spectral. Like the analyst does for the analysand, one must conjure them, make them conscious to the bearer, so that they can be recognized in thought and reabsorbed in practice.
Conjuring tricks!—the materialist philosopher cries. Where is the history, empiricity? This question, however, misses the motivation and goal for the conjuring; it ignores the ethical drive. People must first realize the ghosts or fixed ideas at work in order to expose the “wheels in the head”.26 Second, if the goal is to exorcise ghosts, to abolish them, reappropriate, consume, and dissolve them, then who cares how we get there? By facts or affects, nothing should be precluded. To break through the veil of bad faith and expose the spooks for what they are, Stirner tells a story about how they appeared in the first place, the story of subjection. He gives an account of how and why it is that “subjects vegetate in subjection”.27 This is the reason for his reappropriation of Hegel’s historical schemas: they are not dialectical per se, but rather allegories of dialectical transitions, parodies of “historical” thinking in which the present is always the best outcome of the past. This seems to be the only way to justify their presence.
The only real creativity that Stirner shows in terms of the allegories is the last one, still relevant today: the so-called ‘dialectic’ of liberalism. It can be f
ormulated as such:
Political Liberalism→Social Liberalism (Communism)→Humane Liberalism (Humanism, Criticism)
This section, following the ancients and the moderns, is called “The Free.” Named after the group of Stirner’s proto-Bohemian, intellectual, revolutionary, young Hegelian comrades in Berlin (of whom Marx, Engels, Ruge, and Bruno Bauer were fellow travelers at one point or another), Stirner’s attack was directed towards them, a gift they must have truly enjoyed. The “Free” are not distinct from the moderns, but are rather only the “more modern and most modern among the ‘moderns’ and are put in a separate division merely because they belong to the present, and what is present, above all, claims our attention here.”28 This theoretical move is similar to what a century and a half later would happen with the term “postmodern”—that which is not beyond the modern, but only the most contemporary form of modernity, the present.29
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