Ep. 358: Max Stirner's Egoism (Part One)

Summary

Episode Summary: Ep. 358: Max Stirner's Egoism (Part One)
The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
Release Date: January 6, 2025

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I. Introduction

In Episode 358, The Partially Examined Life delves into the provocative philosophy of Max Stirner, focusing on his seminal work, The Ego and Its Own (originally titled The Eagerness and Its Own), published in 1844. The hosts—Wes Alwan, Seth Paskin, Dylan Casey, and Mark Linsenmayer—explore Stirner's radical egoism, examining its critiques of morality, freedom, and societal constructs.

II. Max Stirner: Context and Influence

Stirner's philosophy, though less celebrated than contemporaries like Nietzsche, significantly influenced key thinkers. Mark Linsenmayer notes, “Stirner constitutes the most radical rejection thus far of what's come before in the young Hegelians” (01:32). His ideas not only shaped Marx—who famously critiqued Stirner in his German Ideology—but also left an imprint on anarchist thought and laid groundwork for Nietzsche's concept of the Übermensch.

III. Stirner's Egoism: Core Concepts

A. Comparison to Ayn Rand and Anarchism

Wes Alwan draws parallels between Stirner and Ayn Rand, stating, “It ends up sounding like a 19th-century Ayn Rand, because a lot of this is just about might makes right, and all I care about is myself” (02:45). Dylan Casey concurs, adding, “It sounds a little bit more like anarchy” (03:26). Stirner's egoism emphasizes self-interest and individual power, resonating with both libertarian and anarchist ideologies.

B. Freedom vs. Ownness

Stirner challenges traditional notions of freedom. He critiques negative liberty—freedom from external constraints—suggesting it leads to mere passivity. Instead, he advocates for ownness, a concept centered on self-possession and active power:

• Critique of Negative Liberty: Wes Alwan explains, “He says freedom, what you really mean is obedience” (26:47). Stirner argues that conventional freedom is simply being free from something, which is inherently passive.

• Concept of Ownness: Mark Linsenmayer reflects, “Freedom only means something as if you've taken it by might, if you've taken it by virtue of your own power” (45:34). Stirner redefines freedom as active ownership over oneself and one’s actions, aligning closely with Nietzsche's will to power.

An illustrative example discussed is the slave enduring the whip. Stirner posits that while the slave may be physically constrained, their ownness remains intact through the experience of pain, underscoring the indomitable self (04:17).

C. Morality and External Standards

Stirner is vocally critical of morality and societal constructs, viewing them as alien impositions:

• Critique of Morality: Wes Alwan summarizes Stirner’s stance: “There's no argument here to the effect that there's no such thing as human nature” (26:41). Instead, Stirner sees morality and rights as external standards that alienate individuals from their true selves.

• Rejection of External Ideals: Stirner dismisses any overarching moral standards, whether rooted in Christianity, socialism, or human nature, advocating instead for a purely individualistic approach devoid of collective or transcendent ideals. Dylan Casey captures this sentiment: “Morality is bunk” (41:23).

IV. Philosophical Implications and Critiques

The hosts grapple with the implications of Stirner’s egoism, particularly its lack of a positive vision for social organization:

• Absence of Normative Framework: Mark Linsenmayer points out the challenge in Stirner’s philosophy: “It's just the exercise of power” (16:43). Without a normative framework, Stirner’s ownness is reduced to mere power without evaluative depth.

• Potential for Anarchistic Order: While Stirner hints at an emergent social order based on egoistic interactions, the hosts debate its feasibility. Wes Alwan suggests, “It sounds nihilistic and amoral on the face of it” (38:38), highlighting the lack of a structured, cooperative framework among individuals.

• Comparison with Stoicism and Hegelianism: Stirner critiques Stoic concepts of inner freedom, arguing that true freedom is about self-possession rather than control over one’s thoughts. He also opposes Hegelian and Feuerbachian ideals, positioning himself as a rebel against established philosophical norms (10:00).

V. Notable Quotes

• Mark Linsenmayer (01:57): “Thou doth protest too much.”
• Wes Alwan (02:47): “It ends up sounding like a 19th-century Ayn Rand, because a lot of this is just about might makes right, and all I care about is myself.”
• Dylan Casey (03:26): “It sounds a little bit more like anarchy.”
• Mark Linsenmayer (16:43): “It's just the exercise of power.”
• Dylan Casey (41:23): “Morality is bunk.”

VI. Conclusion and Anticipation for Part Two

The episode concludes with an acknowledgment of Stirner's deeply controversial and amoral stance. The hosts express intrigue and skepticism about the practicality and ethical implications of his egoism. They tease further exploration in Part Two, inviting listeners to continue unraveling Stirner’s philosophy and its impact on modern thought.

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For more insights and to listen to the continuation of this discussion, subscribe to The Partially Examined Life on Apple Podcasts, Patreon, or directly through their website partiallyexaminedlife.com.

Transcript

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[Wes Alwan]

Early ct mobile.com Today's episode of the.

[Seth Baskin]

Partially Examined Life is sponsored by GiveWell. Maximize the power of your charitable [e-mail].

[Wes Alwan]

You'Re listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 358 is something like Is morality bunk? And we read parts of Max Stirner's The Eagerness and Its Own from 1844. For more information about the text and the podcast, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Wes Alwan asserting my humanity against every restrictive specification in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

[Dylan Casey]

This is Seth Baskin, the unfree son of the wilderness in Austin, Texas.

[Mark Linsenmayer]

This is Dylan Casey standing in front of the Odorous Castle kitchen, and my palate is tasting the savory dishes therein in Madison, Wisconsin.

[Wes Alwan]

So Mark can't be here today. He's the one who suggested this reading, and I think he suggested it because I think someone suggested it to him, maybe a fan, because it's known to have influenced Marx, although Marx spends 300 pages in the German ideology absolutely savaging Stirner, which is not surprising.

[Mark Linsenmayer]

Thou doth protest too much.

[Wes Alwan]

Yeah, it's not surprising because he savaged basically every influence of his, many of them young Hegelians and even Sterner, in a way, who constitutes the most radical rejection thus far of what's come before in the young Hegelians. So I think the influence involves we recently read Marx's 1844 manuscripts, where he sounds quite a bit feuerbachian in the sense that he's thinking of what human society ought to be in terms of human nature. I think arguably one could say that, and I think what we get in Stirner is a rejection, even of that idea. The rejection of humanity or man maybe with a capital M, some ideal towards which we should strive. But it ends up sounding like a 19th century Ayn Rand, because a lot of this is just about might makes right, and all I care about is myself. So I'm curious to know what you guys thought of that.

[Dylan Casey]

I certainly had the same thought about the Ayn Randians. And when I was so many people were asking me what I was reading and I was describing it to them, they were like, oh, that's kind of like libertarianism. I was like, eh, I don't know, it sounds a little bit more like anarchy.

[Mark Linsenmayer]

There are some famous anarchists and he.

[Wes Alwan]

Was a big influence on anarchism.

[Dylan Casey]

So it's a little disconcerting. And it's easy to understand the influence on Marx. It's easy to see echoes or shadows of Nietzsche in this. He talks a lot about Hegel, obviously. He talks a lot about Christianity, he talks about socialism, all of which are going to fall short or be fatally flawed for some particular reason. But his ultimate goal feels very ubermenschy and it's uncomfortable and he's not afraid to go there. So I don't think we're misreading or potentially being uncharitable. If we say that he's. If we start saying things like might makes right and things like that, I don't think that will be out of line.

[Wes Alwan]

I think he says it pretty clearly himself and he's not being ironic. And I don't know if we'll find a more subtle way of interpreting it than just taking it completely literally. I don't think I found another way except to take him seriously on that might makes right. Seth? Yeah, you're pointing to the fact that he's kind of also evocative of Nietzsche. Stylistically. He sounds like Nietzsche. I think he was an influence on Nietzsche, obviously, and what he calls the own man, the man who's focused on ownness, on egoism, really is reminiscent of Nietzsche's Ubermensch or Superman. It seems like it must be the precursor to that. And. And the more I've read of what we've been doing really as work that's preparatory for Marx in a way. We're doing prequels in a way, going backwards a little bit to these figures that influence Marx. It's also very clearly influential on Nietzsche and it's kind of enlightening about the kind of climate that he was addressing. Ultimately, it seems very unlike Nietzsche, though, quite. Well, one might argue that it's quite nihilistic. It's Sort of like the thing that you could think Dostoevsky is on about when he's hating on socialists and nihilists in the Brothers Karamazov. And you read Stern and you're like, okay, this is the sort of thing that he was reacting to.

[Mark Linsenmayer]

He's far more nihilistic than Nietzsche ever was in that when he starts pointing to things like, well, what is your freedom for? His answer ends up being something like, whatever I want it to be, to maximize myself in whatever way I want. Whereas Nietzsche has a little bit more of the life is literature kind of fashioning of something grand. So there's that tension with him about, you know, there is a thing like a noble life or a great life that persists in Nietzsche that clearly isn't there in Stirner. I found it very challenging to read. I didn't find him nearly as enjoyable to read as Nietzsche. He felt like kind of a whiny, bitchy Nietzsche. Not an actual.

[Dylan Casey]

A repetitive, whiny, bitchy Nietzsche.

[Mark Linsenmayer]

Yeah, no, I just snipey. And he is overly repetitive and goes on and on. So part of my reaction was to, on the one hand be like, okay, I get why this guy is not on the A list of. I hadn't even heard of him except in the context of all of those hundreds of pages of the German ideology that I didn't read. Now, in the sort of more generous take of reading through him, I found his playing out of idealism as another form of Christianity and taking to task his sort of historical account about what philosophy has been doing, which ends up being, like you said, very Forbachian, that philosophy is an extension of theology or they run in parallel lines. And that him leveling a criticism about what we're aimed at, at philosophy and idealism, and basically saying, idealism is a kind of Christianity, effectively on that. Interesting. So basically saying it doesn't escape the problems of. That it was purporting to solve. So that's a standard attack in philosophy, saying, well, you don't think you're not doing what you think you're doing kind of thing. I found the freedom analysis unique. And maybe this is because I haven't read very much anarchism, but the notion of. Of freedom, I think that he has. And his idea of the limitations of freedom and that the whole criticism of freedom is not being the thing that's worth going after, but openness is. I found that actually provocative and interesting. And we're talking about. Yeah, I'll be interested to hear what.

[Dylan Casey]

You guys have to say about it very interesting. Yeah.

[Mark Linsenmayer]

Yeah. I also found the notion of turning on its head political philosophy in a kind of deep way of a Denying the notion that we're political animals, like Aristotle would say, so that our fundamental nature is somehow deeply social. And this is tied up with his criticism of idealism and Christianity, where he seems to basically deny the notion that we are fundamentally social beings. But then also he does this kind of inversion where state of nature kinds of arguments would sort of build up the social human being saying, well, sort of were the free particles in our past and it was coming together that we solved all these problems of being in the state of nature and resolved and became fully human by being together. So he basically plays out that argument and says, that's wrong. We actually start with being fundamentally social creatures. That is not the full realization of us as human beings and saying that, you know, you know, we're born into families, all that stuff, and that what we're trying to do is constantly escape that. That is the actual trajectory of our greatness is to escape those connections. So that was also interesting and kind of inverted from what I've read before.

[Wes Alwan]

Just by way of a little bit more background, we can remind the listeners that Vorbach had a critique of Hegel that involved theology in general, but then also Hegel and what he called the speculative philosophy. And the idea is that ultimately God represents this alien standard that hovers above us, a standard to which we have to live up in a way. And Feuerbach wants to replace that with man as an ideal, and even says that God's qualities really are projections of our own qualities or the qualities of our species. Right. In their ideal form. And the criticism here from Stirner is going to be that, well, we are in a way, still in the thrall of Christianity when we do that. Feuerbach calls himself an atheist, but as long we replace the God with spirit or with man or whatever you want to call it, and call ourselves liberals and secular and atheists and all those things, we are still, in a way, crypto Christians. We're really still carrying out the project of Christianity. And this concept of man with a capital M is just as alien a standard. And Stirner wants to instead point us back to human individuality in the radical sense, not in the liberal sense. Right. Political liberalism and what he calls humane liberalism and communism and all the rest of it. That all comes up for critique here. That's not good enough for him. So, yeah, maybe it seemed like you guys were pointing us to this section on maybe we should start with that section on freedom versus Onus. It's the section called onus in the second part of this.

[Dylan Casey]

Yeah, let's do it.

[Wes Alwan]

This is on page 141. So he really gives a strong critique of the concept of freedom here. It's going to be part of a larger critique of things that I think we generally associate with liberalism, like the concept of right. And what he wants to say is that really we want something more fundamental than freedom. That when we treat freedom as absolute, in a way, we are just submitting ourselves to the law. In a way, this concept of freedom is derivative of right and the sorts of obligations and demands a society can make on us. So the alternative for him is this concept of ownness, which really seems to be. Will come down to might makes right.

[Dylan Casey]

I want to ask. Generally speaking, I think we have two conceptions of freedom. Freedom from and freedom to. Like, I have the freedom to do X or be X or say X. And then I have freedom from oppression, freedom from physical violence, freedom from whatever. And at least initially, he seems to be focusing on freedom from. And because he's. I can't remember the order of things if he's already talked about rights, natural rights and state rights.

[Mark Linsenmayer]

Rights comes after freedom.

[Dylan Casey]

Okay. So, I mean, there's some very clear and interesting. I have a number of quotes from this section. Right. But. So this is 142. I have no objection to freedom, but I wish more than freedom for you. You should not be merely rid of what you do not want. You should not be only a free man. You should be an owner, too. And he says being free from anything means only being clear or rid as.

[Wes Alwan]

Being rid of a headache or rid of one's prejudices.

[Dylan Casey]

Correct. Like free from. And Dylan, you touched on this in your introduction. It's a really interesting thing here because he's essentially equating freedom with a kind of passivity, essentially saying, freedom's great, and maybe it's precursor or a prerequisite for living a fulfilling life or doing something. But you can't just be free. You have to actually own that freedom. You have to do something with it. And so in a certain way, he kind of sets out the ownness principle as kind of like the active principle. And that's how it read to me.

[Wes Alwan]

Yeah, he's thinking a lot about what we would call negative liberty here. Right. So freedom from the impositions of a slave master, freedom from the impositions of the state, freedom from the impositions of other citizens. Right. I have rights to not be interfered with in certain ways. It sounds like he wants a more positive vision of freedom as something grounded in ownness. So he will say, he'll give the example for instance of the slave is inevitably subject to the whip. There's nothing that a slave can do about that. And the Stoics would say something like, well, they still have inner freedom. This is something that Stirner critiques. I think he wants to say, well really what they have is ownness. So when they're being whipped, it's their body that's experiencing the pain. This is almost like Descartes, I think, therefore I am argument except with regard. I feel pain, therefore I possess the thing that's in pain. It's about possession in this circumstance it's my body that experienced the pain. You can take my freedom, but you can't take my minus my self possession. And if I'm enduring the whip, then I am doing that he says, for my own benefit, which is to say I'm biding my time until I can become free of the master, if that's possible. And I do that because of my egoism. This is all sort of grounded in my self concern and egoism. So it's not negative liberty I want per se. At bottom I think Stirner is saying it's possession of some sort that I want. Really it's power. He'll use the word power at the very end of the book and I don't know where else he uses it. That's where he sounds most Nietzsche. And I think that's. If we want to translate this. Power is the word that we talk about, ownness. It's going to sound strange to listeners, but what he's really talking about is power and will to power.

[Dylan Casey]

Yeah, yeah.

[Mark Linsenmayer]

I think you're pointing Seth, in particular to the notion of that there's a category of activity that's involved with freedom. And what I struggle to clarify with Stirner is that I usually would associate the discussion of the activity associated with Freedom, the Freedom 2 or the Freedom 4 and is a direction of our powers. And then talking about, well there's a. The moral question like what ought we be doing with those powers? This goes to the morality is bunk question. And what does a. I don't know what the word is other than like what is the, the flourishing of our freedom, our active freedom. All of those are sort of normative or maybe just evaluative terms. And that's what's sort of missing from Stirner is yeah, ownness is a A power, but it seems to be a feature that there's no evaluation of that power in terms of. Or gradation or understanding. It's just raw power. And the only gradation would be you might have a gradation on what extent that you had more power or exercise more power than another. And there might be a kind of greater and lesser associated with that. That's not even completely clear. There's just the exercise of power.

[Wes Alwan]

Yeah. On page 143, he'll say ownness, on the contrary, that is, in contrast to freedom, is my whole being in existence. It is I myself. I am free from what I am rid of, owner of what I have in my power, or what I control. Yes, there's an implicit, again, criticism of Stoicism here with the whole inward freedom and slave and whip example. And the Stoic is right. But this sounds oddly reminiscent of the Stoic argument, which is that the thing that I have power over and that I can control is my own thoughts and therefore virtue. In a way, human virtue is my domain of total power. No matter what happens to me, no matter what external thing in life, no matter what misfortune I suffer, even if I am like Epictetus, a slave, I still have that. And that's the most important thing. But that's not what he's saying. It's not about power over my own thoughts or my own virtue. And in fact, virtue ethics imply this standard of humanness that he's going to repudiate entirely. So then the question is what kind of power. We get intimations that it's about doing what he wants and being a criminal, or at least that's what he says. I don't know how seriously we're supposed to take that, but that seems to be. That is explicitly what he says is that the egoist is the criminal and the enemy of the state and does what he wants and doesn't have a concern for other people's rights. I'm pretty radical.

[Dylan Casey]

Well, so before we get to that level of conversation about his position, I do think there's something intriguing about what he's saying that maybe will neutralize the normative repulsion a little bit. So insofar as freedom is freedom from something, or at least in this context it is, it's ultimately freedom from something external to myself. Could be the state, could be another person, could be nature, I don't know. But the idea is that freedom is freedom from something that's exposed externally, imposed externally from an external source. And it is also can only be granted by someone other than myself. On that same page, right after what you read, Wes, he says, I can't will freedom. I can only wish for it. I can only hope that it's granted to me. But. And so again, it's back to this question of agency in the sense that he wants to say, what's important about human existence, or what's important about being a human being is your active power. What can you actually do? What can you actually accomplish? And regardless of what can you actually do? And what can you actually accomplish? And that has to come from within you. It has to be according to your own capabilities, your strengths, your desires and so forth. And this long exposition about the history of philosophy and Christianity and all that is about these institutions setting up external ideals that we're supposed to aspire to that really aren't ours. And he wants to be free from the world of the Christian spirit, right, or the Reformation ideal human being, or the socialist laborer, because these are not me. They're just external, transcendent concepts.

[Mark Linsenmayer]

Well, I was going to say part of what is sort of unifying here is, you would say, well, for Epictetus, part of what he's doing is talking about what makes me me, and what makes an individual such that I can identify it. And also talk about, again, there's. There. You inevitably get a kind of evaluative component. Well, what ends up being good? What does good look like? Maybe that's related to trying to understand what the quintessential specimen is, or what we're aiming at, or how we choose one apple from another apple. Maybe that's where that's all coming from. But that's one way to understood Epictetus. And it's also one way to understand a whole bunch of. The thread of philosophy is. And even the thread on freedom is actualizing individual human beings. And so his take on it is to say, on one hand, agree, but with that kind of individual actualization, but come down on this notion that its ownness, it's sort of a particular understanding of activity. But what's absent of it, as far as I can tell, is is there anything more to that, any more unifying notion of what it would mean to be me, put aside, be a human being, just mean to be me, other than the pile of things that I happen to be doing? And that's what's there in Epictetus, right? That idea of virtue or whatever you pick it, you are honing in on a clarification of what that pile of activities are to render me being me, me being a identity that isn't just a pile of activity. And Stirner seems to think that that's good enough. That's all we are. We don't need to say anything more about the pile of activities of a human being other than it's just somehow the record of it, the fact of it, it doesn't come together in any way at all such that you would recognize me as me and now a.

[Seth Baskin]

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[Wes Alwan]

There'S no argument here to the effect that there's no such thing as human nature, right?

[Mark Linsenmayer]

Yes.

[Wes Alwan]

He doesn't argue in some airtight way that there's no such thing as human nature. What he says is that, hey, when you say freedom, what you really mean is obedience. And he's right, in a sense. Right. In the context of a liberal society, what we mean by freedom is that we have to obey the law and not infringe on each other's rights. Right. We're restricted from doing a lot of different things. And then the larger point is that we are beholden to some moral concept. This is why I thought the most general way to describe Stirner's position in a question for the episode was to say that morality is bunk and the concept of right is bunk. But we are ultimately beholden to God or feeling or conscience or duty or the approval of others. We're beholden and subordinate to some external, alienated, alien standard. In other words, we are. This brings us back to the concept of alienation in Marx. We remain ever alienated from ourselves as long as we are beholden to this external idea, even if the idea is man or is human nature. So again, it's not really. We don't get a straightforward argument against the existence of something called human nature. We're just told about its negative implications. And someone might say, well, that's just the way of things, right? Yes, we're limited. We're constrained by the state. We're not free. We're not completely free. And that's not even possible if we are going to flourish, if we're going to have a good life. In the sections that we read, we don't get a lot about, well, what about. What is it? Is it just anarchy and we're all going to be killing each other? He hints at this section and he just says, well, look, animals don't need the law. They do everything by instinct and it's not chaos. So we get a little hint of the anarchist position in which order would kind of be emergent upon natural instinctual human activity. And if that's right, then we could take the edge off some of his claims and say, well, the stuff about being a criminal is just a bit of a joke. He thinks that left to our instincts, that there will be some sort of emergent order.

[Dylan Casey]

That, yeah, it's.

[Wes Alwan]

Yeah, I want to say that's better for us than the state. But even If I say better for us, it seems like I'm not observing his rules because there's no us, there's just me. It's better for Wes or it's better for Dylan.

[Dylan Casey]

Yeah, well he does lay it in the text somewhere. He says he calls it like a commonwealth of egoistic something or others are. But what if I characterize it like this? Look, the reality of the situation is we live in this situation of egoism. In his sense, we're all just in a position where we act out of our own self interest and we do as much as we're capable of doing without regard to others. But for the purposes of flourishing, we have to come together in some kind of civil organization. And when that happens, and this is the social contract kind of view, you start having to give up rights or give up, you start sacrificing your freedom. And he says okay, fine, but let's just be honest about it because really what's happened is we have this history of intellectual thought in the west that's trying to come up with some excuse for why the order as it is and is the way it is and why the state is the way it is and why you should be obedient. And he's like, it's all just made up and we reify it and we pretend like it's something more than it is, which is just fairy tale, it's just a fiction in order to keep people controlled and not exercising their freedom. What if we just acknowledge this and then we didn't admit of any kind of overarching transcendent concept that we should aspire to that justifies our moral order and obligations and duties and so forth. And let's have less suppression and slavery or bondage and more ownness. And yeah, there'll be some rough edges.

[Wes Alwan]

But a few broken eggs. A few broken eggs, yeah, as Lenin.

[Dylan Casey]

Put it, a few broken skulls maybe. I can see him making that argument and again in some ways saying, well look, I don't know what it would be like for a society of egoists to come together and how they would. Would it be just might makes right or would there be negotiation based on advantage? Now the market economy, according to Adam Smith, right, is just simply a mechanism for people to act on their own self interests and things like pricing and supply and demand and capital all function to make that a well oiled machine. And we see capitalism is a much better system for interaction and exchange if you're an egoist than democracy is and those tensions exist. So Stirner was kind Of a proto. Like we say, we call him a proto libertarian, a proto Nietzsche and a proto.

[Wes Alwan]

But, well, maybe anarchist is the word.

[Mark Linsenmayer]

Yeah. The way you're formulating it, I get it. When I'm reading Stirner, I would say that move to, well, what structures do we have? Do we need to have in place so that the most people can maximize their freedom? That's the liberal position. Right. That's liberalism where you put aside most judgments about what people would want to be doing. You know, the conceit is we want everybody to be flourishing however they want to, but that condition ends up generating certain kinds of constraints on individuals and it becomes a kind of optimization problem about how to do that. And Stirner, maybe. Well, Wes, you brought up the idea that. Well, maybe Stirner's pointing to animals is saying, well, there's a kind of emergent set of constraints that'll happen naturally. And maybe that makes it more like a kind of Adam Smith kind of invisible hand economic argument that these things will just work the way they are. They're kind of individual fundamental forces and there's a quote unquote natural way in which things will get arranged and that will be better for everyone because that will be the optimal solution. And if I read it that way, it becomes a kind of naturalist about the world that anarchy is the most natural solution. Everything else is artificially imposed upon a natural system. And then, you know, we say, well, we all know the natural system is by far the most preferred system would be how the argument goes. I guess I don't see him doing things that very many things that make me think he goes in that direction. It feels more like just the individual freedom thing. Yeah.

[Wes Alwan]

I mean, in what we read, we don't.

[Mark Linsenmayer]

Yeah.

[Wes Alwan]

Get a positive vision and we don't get the sense that he's concerned about society as a whole. I mean, the part that I was referring to, he has someone who objects and they say, what will I do without God's commandments or with conscience or something else to guide me? Will I just be left with this abyss of lawless and unregulated impulses, desires, wishes, passions, a chaos without light or guiding star? So we're worried, he says, that we'll do forgiven, overdo our impulses, then we'll just do senseless things. But he'll say on page 147, well, animals do just fine. Let's see, how does he put it? He'll say, sorry, it's the bottom 146 where he says, so far as he is Unconcerned about religion, he only deemed himself a beast. He would easily find that the beast, which does follow only its impulse, as it were, its advice, does not advise and impel itself to do the most senseless things, but takes very correct steps. But the habit of the religious way of thinking has biased our mind so grievously that we are terrified of ourselves. In our nakedness and naturalness. It has degraded us that we deem ourselves depraved by nature. Born devils. Of course, it comes into your head at once that your calling requires you to do the good, the moral, the right. Now, if you ask yourselves what is to be done, how can the right voice sound forth from you, the voice which points the way of the good, the right and the true? So anyway, when I suggest that there's a hint of an emergent order and anarchism there, I'm really reading into that. Right. I mean, it is there, but he doesn't go into it. He doesn't give us a positive vision. And it would be, again, against his rules. We're not supposed to care about others.

[Mark Linsenmayer]

Is he pointing to an emergent form of the good and the just out of this unconstrained action so that, like, the part that he doesn't engage with that is part of the history of philosophy that jumps out to me is the idea that we don't even always do the things that we most want to be doing ourselves. So that there's a kind of dysregulation. There's a misalignment of our desires and actions. There's an activity that we have to engage in as human beings, as individuals, to shape our activity, even along the lines of what we most want to be doing. Putting aside. And then there comes a question. Well, if I'm going to choose what I want to be doing, what does that mean? What is the right thing to choose? But there's a kind of. Is just the observation there can be a disorderedness with respect to what I want to be doing and what I am doing, and that there's choices to be made. And maybe his alignment with animals is the same. Well, they're clearly not making choices. Well, the animals just do whatever they're going to be doing. And therefore human beings ought to sort of do whatever they're going to be doing. It just seems like kind of a big empty space. So it makes it hard for me to take him seriously. You know, when I wanted to delve in, continue to delve into the freedom stuff and the things I mentioned at the beginning, the things that he fails to engage with that are in the family of the things that he is engaging with. It makes it hard to avoid.

[Wes Alwan]

Here's One of the page 149, 50, bottom of 149 into 150 is where you get some of the stuff that sounds very dark where he's saying, conscience is for weaklings. I can do what I want. So here's the way it goes. I secure my freedom with regard to the world and the degree that I make the world my own, gain it and take possession of it for myself by whatever might, by that of persuasion, of petition, categorical demand. Yes. Even by hypocrisy, cheating, etc. I imagine that in that, et cetera. Right, is violence. For the means that I use for it are determined by what I am. If I am weak, I have only weak means, like the aforesaid, which yet are good enough for a considerable part of the world. Right. The weak means being the. I think the cheating in hypocrisy, besides cheating, hypocrisy, lying, look worse than what they are. Who has not cheated? The police, the law? Well, it depends on what you're talking about. Who has not quickly taken on the air of an honorable loyalty before the sheriff's officer who meets him in order to conceal an illegality that may have been committed. He who has not done it has simply let violence be done to him. He was a weakling from conscience. I know that my freedom is diminished even by not being able to carry out my will on another object, be this other something without will, like a rock, or something with will, like a government, an individual. I deny my ownness when in the presence of another, I give myself up, give way, desist, submit, therefore, by loyalty, submission. So anyway, I just wanted to give the full flavor of that for listeners so they would know the extreme to which he goes. It sounds nihilistic and amoral on the face of it. So if. If we're reading emergence and an anarchistic emergence of some social order into it, we're doing a lot, I think. Yeah, yeah.

[Mark Linsenmayer]

Do you think that he. In pointing out to the rock, or how does he consider the constraint of nature? He doesn't talk about this. I'm just wondering if we can. Is there an interpretation we can have of what the constraint of the physical world is on him? Because when he says that things about the rock, it makes me think anything about the physical world as going against what he might want to do is a constraining of his ownness which is a weird kind of way to view it. I mean, it's kind of a Habian trying to conquer nature or whatever. But it's a strange kind of point of view. It seems to recognize that.

[Wes Alwan]

Yeah. I mean, we are obviously limited in many ways, and we're limited by the physical world. I can't pick up any rock I want. There's lots of things I can't do. But I'm also limited by my own natural capacities. Life is nothing but limitation. Even before you get to the government.

[Mark Linsenmayer]

Yes.

[Wes Alwan]

What the government isn't allowing you to do so. Yeah, I think that's a good question.

[Dylan Casey]

Yeah. It is egoistic to ascribe to no thing, a value of its own, an absolute value. But to seek its value in me onus has not any alien standard, not any sense of an idea like freedom, morality, humanity, and the like. It is only a description of the owner. And in fact, morality is incompatible with egoism.

[Mark Linsenmayer]

Morality's bunk.

[Dylan Casey]

Mm. Therefore, we, too, the state and I, are enemies. I do not have at heart the welfare of this human society. I sacrifice nothing to it. I only utilize it. But to be able to utilize it completely, I transform it, rather, into my property and my creature. That is, I annihilate it and form in its place. The union of egoist. There's the phrase I was looking for. Yeah. So actually, that's maybe an interesting thing to bring up is the concept of property.

[Wes Alwan]

Well, before we do, I just want to say it's really funny that this book was so popular. It made such a big splash. Right.

[Mark Linsenmayer]

Yeah.

[Wes Alwan]

That's why I refer to it as the Ayn Rand of its day. I mean, it really. Well, I say it was popular. I don't think it was commercially successful. But he did induce all the major intellectuals of the day, including Marx and I think Vorbach himself, maybe. Anyway, it stimulated a lot of intellectual engagement from others, and I find that fascinating that it would be taken so.

[Dylan Casey]

Seriously, particularly because it's just a polemic screed. It's not really an argument.

[Wes Alwan]

And then from Marx himself, again, the rejection of human nature. And I think this amoral strain actually does. And as we get further into Marx in our future episodes, I think we will. Maybe we can get into some of this. But this rejection of the concept of right actually sticks with Marxism and communism. It sticks around and is. Even if you look at the conversations of contemporary socialists, they're very uncomfortable with the concept of right. I think, in a way, this is a too cool for school position right there is something fishy about morality. I think we all understand the appeal of what analytic philosophers would call error theory, the idea that morality can't be naturalistically grounded. It's just kind of a fiction that we make up. Ultimately most of us don't go whole hog into that because we don't like the consequences of that. Our moral intuitions are too strong. We don't want to give up the claim, right that the cold blooded murder of an innocent is wrong. We don't want to stop using the word wrong. But I think this is partly written in that spirit of someone who sees through, sees morality for what it is, which is a kind of fiction. I think with Nietzsche the argument right is also a big critique of morality, but it's a bit more subtle. I mean, in many ways he wants to reduce it to the concept of power and there are elements of that here in Stirner, but I don't think right, the normative doesn't simply go away with Nietzsche. He admits that he wants to bring a. You know, he's still working with a system of valuation even if it's something derivative of the ancients premoral valuation, right excellence and Arete and all that stuff. Nietzsche knows that he can't critique morality except from the standpoint of some other like Christian morality, except from the standpoint of some other system of values. It's not apparent to me that what is Stirner's standpoint for critique except that I don't, I Stirner don't like it and that's fine. He says, that's just. It's me, I don't like it. And here's the book.

[Mark Linsenmayer]

Should we engage the question of right in part two?

[Wes Alwan]

Yeah, sure. There are some interesting things he says about the kind of the worthlessness of the kinds of freedom and the rights that are given to you by the state, which is to say you're a master. Freedom isn't really worth anything. This is on 151 to 152 unless you've earned it, right. If you've just been emancipated as a serf or if your rights are given to you in a way you're a dog dragging a chain. Freedom only means something as if you've taken it by might, if you've taken it by virtue of your own power. It's not that there isn't anything to that idea. Right? It's not. I think we all understand that in a way.

[Mark Linsenmayer]

It also makes me think of all kinds of sort of cultural tropes we have with regards to rule breakers and criminals or people who are. Yeah, I'll say just say rule breakers. People who are doing. Our fantasy about the vigilante and people who are going against the norm is there is something culturally that is aligned with the notion that that person is manifesting a kind of greatness because they are manifesting their ownness. If I use Stirner's language, that there's something admirable about the not being constrained by the petty strictures of society and rules and law and stuff like that. There's a huge strain of that.

[Dylan Casey]

Yeah, absolutely. And we use terms like courage. Right. And I think it's. The implication is, or at least the suggestion is that this. Something that exists to some degree in everyone in a ordered society, this yearning to express themselves or to be able to be more or do more than is permitted legally, morally, or even maybe socially. Right. Or politically.

[Wes Alwan]

Yeah. I think legitimately there are many costs to morality. Morality is very costly. And in fact, it turns a lot of people, as he would say, into hypocrites. They talk the talk, but they don't walk the walk. It's one of the reasons, Right. Why Nietzsche says untruth is a kind of condition of life. It's a condition of the social. We engage in a lot of deception above and beyond that. I think there's a yearning here for transcendence of alienation. It's on that same track as Hegel and then Feuerbach in their own way. For Hegel, right. The transcendence of alienation involved God, this otherwise alien standard becoming concrete in the world through human self consciousness. For Forbakh, that was too alien. So we appeal to man in general. If you look at the very end of this section on page 154, this word alien comes up again and he says that ownness includes in itself everything own and brings to honor against the Christian Lang 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 and the like. It is only a description of the owner. All right. I think, Seth, you had already jumped ahead and read that. Now I see that it's worth repeating. But the point that you were highlighting the description, part of it I wanted to highlight is this yearning for some standard that is not alien, which is to say it's a yearning for authenticity. And we'll see this yearning kind of grow right within the existentialist tradition. You could treat this as proto existentialist as well. And I think it's reasonable to point out that these external standards, whether it's Christianity or humane liberal morality in general, do come into conflict with authenticity. There is a natural desire to transcend them. Although he would not like the word.

[Dylan Casey]

Natural, right, might not like the word transcend either or any event.

[Wes Alwan]

Basically any widow said okay, that's the end of part one. You can listen to part two right away if you're a paid subscriber, you can do that on Apple or Patreon or directly on our website partiallyexaminedlife.com otherwise you'll have to wait a week for the next part. Thank you.

[Mark Linsenmayer]

Thank you.

[Dylan Casey]

Thanks.

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