The Ethics of Stirner

Thoughts on an amoralist hypothesis.

The Skeptical “Stirner”

Max Stirner has a bad reputation. Though he has been misunderstood and diminished ever since his notorious polemic, The Unique and its Property, was published, we can attribute his poor stature in the present day to his self-appointed acolyte, the contemporary egoist, who combines playful skepticism (“You believe that? Pfft, spooked.”) with timorous casuistry (“Well, yes, that too, but it pleases my ego to believe that!”) with a self-righteous moralism of the sort they claim to abhor (“No, I would never do that—just because I don’t believe in ethics, that doesn’t mean I’m a degenerate . . .”)—so this is a skepticism which retains truth, values, meaning, for itself, even as it denies them to the other, then? ‘Indeed,’ this skepticism replies, ‘for you ought not to believe such ridiculous things, ought not to let these phantasms infest your mind, but we self-conscious egoists, by manner of our self-consciousness, may retain our phantasms, for they serve us, and we may use them to condemn whatever we please.’

Just don’t call it morality.

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While it is certainly cute, nobody ought to be compelled by this. One is reminded of Hegel’s description of the skeptical consciousness in the Phenomenology [bold text added for emphasis]:

“It speaks about absolute disappearance, but that “speaking about” itself is, and this consciousness is the disappearance spoken about. It speaks about the nullity of seeing, hearing, and so on, and it itself sees, hears, and so on. It speaks about the nullity of ethical essentialities, and then it makes those essentialities themselves into the powers governing its actions. Its acts and its words always contradict each other, and it itself has the doubled contradictory consciousness of unchangeableness and equality combined with that of utter contingency and inequality with itself. . . . Its talk is indeed like that of a squabble among stubborn children, one of whom says A when the other says B, and then says B when the other says A. By being in contradiction with himself , each of them purchases the delight of remaining in contradiction with each other.”

G W F Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. T. Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 122 (§205).

The question arises—how can such a state of mind be tenable? Hegel tells us, bluntly, that it isn’t—“However, this consciousness, instead of being a self-equal consciousness, is in fact therein only an utterly contingent disarray, the vertigo of a perpetually self-creating disorder.” (PhG §205) And it is no surprise (I say this from purely anecdotal observations, mind you) that egoists quickly find themselves disillusioned with their egoism. A skepticism which jurisprudentially denies itself the right to some Zero even as it necessarily instantiates itself on one is, in any reasonable sense of the word, a skepticism which necessarily leads to madness, or evacuation under unbearable strain.

And yet, is Stirner to blame for this? That is, have the egoists read him right? Is this all Stirner was advocating for? After all, Stirner had read his Hegel, and it would be quite incredible if his masterwork was nothing more than an elaborate articulation of a worldview Hegel had already mockingly discredited. This is an important fact to bear in mind. The Unique and its Property is nothing if not a deeply Hegelian work, though nonetheless written as a negation. The dialectic is vulgarised, bastardised, turned against itself—in Stirner’s Critics, a clarification of his philosophy in response to criticisms which had missed the mark, Stirner writes: “Do you philosophers actually have an inkling that you have been beaten with your own weapons? Nothing but an inkling. What retort can you hearty fellows make against it, when I again dialectically demolish what you have just dialectically put up?” This does appear, indeed, to be the activity of the skeptic, the one who institutes a vertiginous disintegration of truth through a nihilistic use of reason. Nevertheless, we might discern a base from which Stirner launches his attacks, one which does not undermine its own base, that is, slip into the “insensible claptrap” (PhG §205) of the skeptical consciousness. For when Stirner invokes the great facts of “modern natural research” that neither he nor his philosophical opponents can cancel with mere language, as he does in Stirner’s Critics, it is clear that there must be some truth to which Stirner is happy to refer as a ground, not merely provisionally, sophistically, as the contemporary “egoist” does.

So what is this ground?

The Nietzschean “Stirner”

Before we address this, a quasi-digression. Stirner has come into an unfortunate association with the far more (in)famous Friedrich Nietzsche. We have the philosopher Eduard von Hartmann at least partly to thank for that. The problem with seeing Stirner as a Nietzschean precursor is that it’s bullshit. It would be boring, and not within the scope of this essay, to catalogue all of their differences, but to cover just two:

1. Teleology: Nietzscheanism is an attempt to arrogate to humanity the right to believe in destiny. Individuals are called upon to make sacrifices for the production of the superman, a new human being whose existence can justify all the suffering and decay of our time, who can find new frontiers, who does not step back shyly from power, who is free of ressentiment and slavish morality. In the end, Nietzscheanism is an anti-individualist philosophy, except for those few beautiful flowers which grow out of the wretched muck of the human race and who, in their abundance and will-to-power, seize upon the human race as material for great works. This, to Stirner, would be yet another phantasm, yet another abstraction hanging over the heads of humankind (Would Nietzsche deny this?) and ultimately another attempt to domesticate the individual and have them serve an idea instead of serving their unique self. This is no small distinction, for while Nietzsche seeks to escape nihilism through a justifying thought, Stirner is the one who says that “only thoughtlessness really saves me from thoughts. It isn't thinking, but my thoughtlessness, or I, the unthinkable, inconceivable, that frees me from possession.” Where Nietzsche sets himself to the revolutionary task of burrowing through, Stirner is defined by insurrectionary escape.

2. Ethics: Whatever they may have said themselves, neither Nietzsche nor Stirner were immoralists per se. And in their approaches to ethics, they differ in important ways. Nietzsche, again, is interested in a justifying thought, a law table, and the test of a value-system’s validity is its ability to preserve that which seeks power in humankind. The “last man” of Nietzschean thought is a human being so debased that they no longer even seek power. The relation of all judgments back to the question of power, vitality, force, informs Nietzsche’s ethical thought—he is no nihlist. Stirner has little concern for power as a justifying ethical principle—though he, rightly, recognises that right (that is, morality) is always a question of might—rather his value-system is grounded in an ontology that allows one to speak of goodness as being ultimately derived from authenticity. To understand this, we must leave Nietzsche and turn to another German philosopher, the notorious and obscure thinker of Being, Martin Heidegger.

The Heideggerian Stirner

You will notice the lack of scare quotes in this heading, and that is because we are finally ready to talk about what Stirner is. Or at least, what the Unique One who called itself Stirner “believed”, that is to say, the remnants of that Stirnerian Zero which one can excavate and investigate simply by opening The Unique and its Property and actually reading it. Any similarity with Nietzsche is ultimately superficial, but with Heidegger, Stirner shares much of note.

In Being and Time, Heidegger advances a relatively straightforward thesis. There is no individual per se, not in the sense invoked by the Cartesian theatre of subject-object, theatregoer-stage, individual-world. Rather, the human being, rechristened by Heidegger as Dasein, is constituted by the very fact that it is always-already in-the-world. That is to say, there is not a self who happens, accidentally, to be in the world. Dasein just is Being-in-the-world, just is Being-with (defined by its relationship to other Daseins in-the-world), just is deeply intertwined in a social universe full of significances and meanings, full of ideas. A hammer is not just a weighted head attached to a long handle—in fact, one has to withdraw in a fundamental way just to view it like that. A hammer is a tool, ready-to-hand, becomes a part of us as we swing it, exists in a universe of items and beings with which we are immediately and intimately familiar for most of our lives, without need of reflection. We tend towards a sense of being at home in the world. We are not isolated subjects who reach out into the world to learn about it or interact with it, we, in a certain sense, are worlds.

This profound insight is identical to Stirner’s conception of the Unique and his understanding of “property”. For The Unique and its Property refers not to some individual and the things “they” own, but to a Being-in-the-world whose properties—attributes—are everything in the universe that shows up for it, that creates it. If you are my property, it is because you show up for me in the first place, in my world, the world generated by simple virtue of the fact that it is my brain, my body, this Unique, that “I” occupy, and not any “one” else’s. “I” am not “you”, and that is enough to say that we are Unique, and not only that, but that once we presumed to speak of categorisations which suit us both, that is, once we have submitted to the imperialism of language, of identification, of meaning, we are alienated from the Uniques that we are. We become, as Heidegger might say, inauthentic. We forget what we are. And it is no surprise that talking about this is difficult, for the very language that requires us to forget the Unique is one which is not programmed to discuss it. Hence, perhaps, the deep confusion with which both Stirner and Heidegger are often received.

For Heidegger, what ultimately defines Dasein is the fact that it is mortal. It has to die, and when it dies, it dies alone. Death is our ownmost potentiality-for-being, nonrelational, and not to be outstripped. That is to say, I die, nobody else can die for me, and my death is inevitable. We say with Epicurus and Lucretius, yes, that where death is, I am not. And even if we should all die at the same time, as if a meteorite were to strike the Earth and blast us away to our very bones and further on to ashes, it would still ultimately be my death, and not yours, which ends the Dasein that I am.

Undoubtedly the question of death mattered to Stirner also, as it must have done as he died alone, broke, unknown, from an insect bite, but it does not form the cornerstone of his thinking in The Unique and its Property. The Unique is not defined morbidly, in its relationship to death, but rather in a circular fashion, in its relation to itself. The Unique just is the body that I am. This ownness (the body is never anything other than itself) “justifies” a certain ethical relationship to the fixed idea, phantasm, spook, meme, whatever you must call it. We certainly cannot condemn the fixed ideas as “evil”, but we can recognise this: (1) The Unique knows nothing of ideas. Ideas are not something sitting out there in nature, they are products of our imagination. (2) In so far as ideas can only acquire power over us via symbolic communication, itself a system of abstraction which alienates the Unique in exchangeable units of thought, any idea with power over us is essentially a terroristic power, one which produces a false view of the Unique (as a “self”, as a “human being”, as a “moral agent”, etc.) in order to propagate itself. Being possessed by an idea is not “bad” because ideas are untrue or because they undermine our supposed autonomy defined in the liberal sense, but because they produce a subject who can only ever be the idea’s slave, and because slavishness is ultimately metaphysical self-denial, a fortiori unethical, because we are compelled to live falsely. That is to say, the Unique is all there is, and the subject of the idea is illusory from its standpoint, very real from ours (“You” and “I” are not the Unique, for “you” and “I” are not the whole body).

In the end, Stirner’s ethical maxim is this: “Live as if you are the Unique which you are not, but which your body is.” For while “you” remain, there is something added to the Unique which is incompatible with its nature. The self remembers, the self has plans, thoughts, relationships, ideas. But in flow, in moments of joy, in moments of deep concentration, do you not forget yourself? Perhaps you forgot yourself even as you read this essay, and perhaps you are only now once again reminded that there are eyes through which you read these words, a hand with which you scroll, a body which supports a beating heart and breathing lungs, but a body to which “you” are ultimately a lodger, a welcome stranger. Stirner’s ethics invites us to consider whether it is right that we should inauthentically and uncritically take up any phantasm which comes our way. Though he knows that critique is not enough to free oneself of possession, can never be enough, for critique still takes place within thought, and it is thought which is ultimately the problem.

Perhaps this is the true problem with the egoist who has not understood Stirner but claims to be following his system—they remain critical. For Stirner only ever criticised, over ever polemicised, as a game, as an exercise in self-amusement, in demonstrating that the dialectic could not, in fact, terminate, could always find a new ground, would always collapse back into skepticism, unable to seize for itself the final and ultimate right to say, “This Zero is the last one we will ever need.” For as long as one remains a critic, one will only ever read Stirner as a skeptic, but not as the joyous insurrectionary that he was, the mouthpiece of that which cannot speak, the Unique one who, of course, is not failed by our limits, but tends always to the disintegration of them, and who remains long after the contingent selves that we are from moment to moment have disappeared in sleep, in the passage of time and, at last, in death.

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You will have to excuse both the gap between this essay and the last and the hasty, somewhat scrappy nature of this instalment. I am currently working on my second monograph, Neoleviathan: Political Blueprints for the Post-Collapse, is taking up much of my time. Irregularity will not be a permanent state of affairs on this newsletter but, for now, I’m opting not to run myself ragged with writing.

With that said, I should have something on Hobbes for paying subscribers up in the next few days. The next few essays as they somewhat sporadically come out are unlikely to cover ecopessimism directly, as I’m already doing enough of that for Neoleviathan and I’m only so tough.

Thanks for reading!