Has anyone here ever read Stirner’s works cover to cover? Do you think they suffer from mistranslation? I became an egoist anarchist when I was 18. But I do not read German very well and found that I got confused by a lot of the writing. The strangest was not being able to parse the writing because of its poetic nature. Take this as an example:
>Where could one look without meeting victims of self-renunciation? There sits a girl opposite me, who perhaps has been making bloody sacrifices to her soul for ten years already. Over the buxom form droops a deathly-tired head, and pale cheeks betray the slow bleeding away of her youth. Poor child, how often the passions may have beaten at your heart, and the rich powers of youth have demanded their right! When your head rolled in the soft pillow, how awakening nature quivered through your limbs, the blood swelled your veins, and fiery fancies poured the gleam of voluptuousness into your eyes! Then appeared the ghost of the soul and its eternal bliss. You were terrified, your hands folded themselves, your tormented eye turned its look upward, you—prayed. The storms of nature were hushed, a calm glided over the ocean of your appetites. Slowly the weary eyelids sank over the life extinguished under them, the tension crept out unperceived from the rounded limbs, the boisterous waves dried up in the heart, the folded hands themselves rested a powerless weight on the unresisting bosom, one last faint "Oh dear!" moaned itself away, and—the soul was at rest. You fell asleep, to awake in the morning to a new combat and a new—prayer. Now the habit of renunciation cools the heat of your desire, and the roses of your youth are growing pale in the—chlorosis of your heavenliness. The soul is saved, the body may perish! O Lais, O Ninon, how well you did to scorn this pale virtue! One free grisette against a thousand virgins grown gray in virtue!
The first time I read it, I thought it was about Stirner perving on a teen girl.
>>2510613Only trccns read it.
(USER WAS WARNED FOR THIS POST) >>2510615While On the Origin of Species (1859) provided the scientific bedrock for understanding humans as part of the natural, evolving world, Stirner's work (1844) belongs to a philosophical trend that was already embracing naturalism as a response to religious and idealist thought.
Stirner's denunciation of virtue is deeply rooted in this pre-Darwinian intellectual context:
• Philosophical Naturalism: Stirner was a Left-Hegelian who followed Ludwig Feuerbach's idea of philosophical inversion, which argued that "God" was merely the projection of human qualities. Stirner extended this, arguing that all abstract ideas—including morality, law, and even "humanity"—are "spooks" that oppress the real, material, living individual (the Unique One).
• The Body as the Ego: When Stirner praises the "buxom form" and condemns the "slow bleeding away of her youth" for the sake of the "soul," he is making a fiercely materialist and egoistic defense of the body's integrity and its natural functions. He sees the girl's sexual drives as part of her "Ownness" (Eigenheit), which morality demands she sacrifice.
• The Clash: The passage perfectly encapsulates the clash between the Ideal (the soul, virtue) and the Material (the body, youth, desire). Stirner's argument is that the individual should assert their self-will against these spiritual demands, making the body's natural state the only moral authority.
>>2510613He was writing about morning masturbation and how people dont do it because they are afraid of hell.
>>2510613Stirner wrote all that to justify his gooning habits and to be at ease.
LOBANOV WAS A COLD-BLOODED WRECKER AND TRAITOR WARRING AGAINST THE SU
>>2510666Why would an egoist feel any guilt over a normal, organic process like masturbation?
>>2510693He wasnt always an egoist. He had to come up with it
>when all of them have gone your way, humanity will be buried, and on its tomb I, sole master of myself at last, I, heir to all the human race, will shout with laughter
Anyone attempting to read Stirner without being familiar with Hegel is a genuine retard. And I don't mean that in the usual sense where people say you must read X before reading Y. No, the Ego and Its Own is an extremely Hegelian work. Stirner only associated with other Hegelians at the time and whether or not he accepted Hegel's major premises, and to what extent the work is satire, don't stop it from having a very similar form to how Hegel poses his philosophy. This is why everything is divided into triads, among other things
>>2510720 (me)
Babel event done, starting where I left off on E&HO and yeah I think I'll start back from the beginning.
If the only way to observe an object is to have a beam of light hit the object and bounce off of its electrical field and collide with your eye, and light always moves at a constant immutable speed limit, then it is impossible to observe any object as it truly exists now; we can only ever observe a snapshot from the past. Our perception of reality can never be anything more than a time-delayed reconstruction of the actual events.
>>2510613>Has anyone here ever read Stirner’s works cover to cover?i have and i sorta think the conspiracy that engels made him up is plausible. even if its not true its sort of an elaborate troll that arrives at communism from the reverse premise of marx based on individual selfishness, that its in your own best interest to lift other people up. i summarize it as the "competency of rivals". say you like basketball, the sport as a whole would be improved by improving the material conditions of all of humanity because then competition would solely be determined by natural talent which would elevate the sport to new levels. the same for making friends or business generally and everything else.
>>2511289>Anyone attempting to read Stirner without being familiar with Hegel is a genuine retardyeah tru, hes basically like zizek "aha but what if the opposite" exercise that secretly reasserts hegel
>>2527726This is an interpretation I favoured for some time, but I think it is unlikely that Stirner was entirely anti-Hegelian. Stirner still defends his work after the fact, even in the text you pull that quote from, including its structure and logic.
It doesn't really make much sense to suggest that Stirner wrote the entire work, some 340 pages in my copy, just to show that philosophy is a trick that can prove anything. He believes most of what is said
>>2527726>This monotonousness and abstract universality are maintained to be the Absolute. This formalism insists that to be dissatisfied therewith argues an incapacity to grasp the standpoint of the Absolute, and keep a firm hold on it. If it was once the case that the bare possibility of thinking of something in some other fashion was sufficient to refute a given idea, and the naked possibility, the bare general thought, possessed and passed for the entire substantive value of actual knowledge; similarly we find here all the value ascribed to the general idea in this bare form without concrete realisation; and we see here, too, the style and method of speculative contemplation identified with dissipating and, resolving what is determinate and distinct, or rather with hurling it down, without more ado and without any justification, into the abyss of vacuity. To consider any specific fact as it is in the Absolute, consists here in nothing else than saying about it that, while it is now doubtless spoken of as something specific, yet in the Absolute, in the abstract identity A = A, there is no such thing at all, for everything is there all one. To pit this single assertion, that “in the Absolute all is one”, against the organised whole of determinate and complete knowledge, or of knowledge which at least aims at and demands complete development – to give out its Absolute as the night in which, as we say, all cows are black – that is the very naïveté of emptiness of knowledge.
>The formalism which has been deprecated and despised by recent philosophy, and which has arisen once more in philosophy itself, will not disappear from science, even though its inadequacy is known and felt, till the knowledge of absolute reality has become quite clear as to what its own true nature consists in. Having in mind that the general idea of what is to be done, if it precedes the attempt to carry it out, facilitates the comprehension of this process, it is worth while to indicate here some rough idea of it, with the hope at the same time that this will give us the opportunity to set aside certain forms whose habitual presence is a hindrance in the way of speculative knowledge.https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phprefac.htm >>2510613I would say its about toiling for these so-called spooks (like religion for example) instead for yourself.
>>2527791>hates monochromatic formalism<proceeds to create a form of philosophy that’s parroted by the most banal fat reactionaries on twitter, clout chasing college girls, and sniffling coke heads defending the Ukrainian war.Curious
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