The Ego and Its Own
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The Ego and Its Own (German: Der Einzige und sein Eigentum; also translated as The Individual and His Property; a literal translation would read The Sole One and His Property) is the main work by German philosopher Max Stirner, published in 1844.
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[edit] Main ideas
According to Lawrence Stepelewich the book is largely modelled on the work Phenomenology of Spirit by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who became a great source of inspiration and dispute among the Young Hegelians, a group of Berlin intellectuals with whom Stirner associated.
Max Stirner's philosophy is outlined in more detail in the article on Stirner. In short, the book portrays the life of a human individual as dominated by authoritarian concepts ('fixed ideas' or 'spooks'), which must be shaken and undermined by each individual's self-interest in order for that person to act freely. These include primarily religion and ideology, and the institutions claiming authority over the individual. The primary implication of undermining these concepts and institutions is for Stirner an ethical egoism, which can be said to transcend language. According to him, not only God is an alienating ideal, as Feuerbach had shown in The Essence of Christianity (1841), but Humanity itself, nationalism and all such ideologies are alienating for the individual. Stirner lead Hegel's dialectics to its extreme, Nothing. According to Stirner, individuals should only pass temporary contracts between themselves, agreeing in mutual aid and cooperation for a period of time, but such contracts are only passed in each individual's interest (it might be compared to a pre-theory on cooperative games):
"In the time of spirits thoughts grew till they overtopped my head, whose offspring they yet were; they hovered about me and convulsed me like fever-phantasies -- an awful power. The thoughts had become corporeal on their own account, were ghosts, e. g. God, Emperor, Pope, Fatherland, etc. If I destroy their corporeity, then I take them back into mine, and say: "I alone am corporeal." And now I take the world as what it is to me, as mine, as my property; I refer all to myself." p.15
Stirner himself does claim his own "doctrine" of self-interest to be a universal truth or established viewpoint, and likens his book to a ladder you throw away after climbing, a sort of self-therapy. (The same mental image of a ladder to be thrown away after climbing is used by Ludwig Wittgenstein in section 6.54 of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, it has been claimed that this phrase was originally coined by Arthur Schopenhauer in 1844.)
However, for the man who studies to gain insight, books and studies are merely rungs of the ladder on which he climbs to the summit of knowledge. As soon as a rung has raised him up one step, he leaves it behind. On the other hand, the many who study in order to fill their memory do not use the rungs of the ladder for climbing, but take them off and load themselves with them to take away, rejoicing at the increasing weight of the burden. They remain below forever, because they bear what should have bourne them.
—Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. II, Chapter VII
Do I write out of love to men? No, I write because I want to procure for my thoughts an existence in the world; and, even if I foresaw that these thoughts would deprive you of your rest and your peace, even if I saw the bloodiest wars and the fall of many generations springing up from this seed of thought — I would nevertheless scatter it. Do with it what you will and can, that is your affair and does not trouble me. You will perhaps have only trouble, combat, and death from it, very few will draw joy from it.
If your weal lay at my heart, I should act as the church did in withholding the Bible from the laity, or Christian governments, which make it a sacred duty for themselves to 'protect the common people from bad books'. But not only not for your sake, not even for truth's sake either do I speak out what I think. No —
I sing as the bird sings
That on the bough alights;
The song that from me springs
Is pay that well requitesI sing because — I am a singer. But I use you for it because I — need ears
—Max Stirner, 'The Ego and his Own, p.394
[edit] Style
Stirner repeatedly quotes Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller and Bruno Bauer assuming the that the readers will be familiar with all 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.
[edit] First Edition (1844)
[edit] First editions in other languages (chronologically):
- French ("L'unique at sa propriété", 1900),
- Danish ("Den Eneste og hans Ejendom", 1901),
- Spanish ("El único y su propriedad", 1901),
- Italian ("L'unico", 1902),
- Russian ("Edinstvennyj i ego dostojanie", 1906),
- Dutch ("De Eenige en z'n Eigendom", 1907),
- Swedish ("Den ende och hans egendom", 1910),
- Japanese ("Yuiitsusha to sono shoyû", 1920),
- Greek ("O μοναδικός και το δικό του", 2002),
- Portuguese ("O Único e a sua propriedade", 2004).
[edit] English Editions
[edit] First Edition (1907)
- The first English Language Edition appeared in 1907,it was a translation by the American individualist anarchist, Steven T. Byington with an introduction by James L. Walker. The Publisher was Benjamin R. Tucker, New York.(This edition was reprinted several times by several publishers in New York and London up to 1931)
[edit] Libertarian Book Club edition (1963)
- the 1963 Libertarian Book Club edition is a re-print of a 1907 translation by Steven T. Byington. Edited by James J. Martin and with a cover by the son of Rudolf Rocker, the edition revived interest in Stirner as an influence on anarchism and other far-left ideologies and brought Max Stirner to a wider audience in the English speaking world.(This edition was reprinted several times by several publishers in the U.S.A. and U.K. up to 1993, sometimes with pref. by Sidney E. Parker)
[edit] Harper & Row - Readings in Fascist, Racist and Elitist Ideology (1971)
- An abridged English edition: The Ego and His Own, trans. Steven T. Byington, revised, selected and annotated by John Carroll. New York / London: Harper & Row 1971. 266 pp. The book appeared in a series "Roots of the Right. Readings in Fascist, Racist and Elitist Ideology", together with writings by Gobineau, Rosenberg, de Maistre, Maurras. The text consists of a mix of about a hundred quotations from "The Ego" (and some from Stirner's Minor Writings), reducing the volume to about a half.
[edit] Rebel Press Edition (1993)
- the 1993 the Rebel Press, London edition is an unabridged republication of the 1963 re-print of the 1907 Steven T. Byington original by the Libertarian Book Club. The Rebel Press, London edition has a cover design from anarchist artist and Cartoonist, Clifford Harper and a preface by Sidney E. Parker.
[edit] Cambridge University press edition (1995)
- TheCambridge University press edition (ed. David Leopold, 1995) is a revised version of the original translation by Steven T. Byington (1907), an American individualist anarchist. With a new introduction by David Leopold. David Leopold changed the title (His to Its) "not out of ahistorical considerations of 'political correctness' but because Stirner clearly identifies the egoistic subject as prior to gender" (p. xl). He accepted the Steven T. Byington translation ("an heroic attempt to convey the readable yet idiosyncratic prose of Stirner's original") but "made a number of amendments, such as removing infelicities and archaisms, replacing the occasional missing sentence, and restoring some of the original paragraph and sections breaks." (p. xxxix)
[edit] David Leopold's Introduction.
Turning to the introduction to the Cambridge University Press edition of The Ego and its Own(Ibidem, pg. xxxi), the interpretation we find provided by David Leopold is overall pessimistic.
... [W]hen Stirner talks of the egoist being 'owner' of the world it seems simply to indicate the absence of obligations on the egoist --a bleak and uncompromising vision that he captures in an appropriately alimentary image:
"Where the world comes in my way -- and it comes in my way everywhere -- I consume it to the quiet hunger of my egoism. For me you are nothing but -- my food, even as I too am fed upon and turned to use by you. We have only one relation to each other, that of usableness, of utility, of use. We owe each other nothing. (p. 263)"
The "bleak and uncompromising vision" that he alludes to on p263 is in fact a description of a bird singing in a tree for the sheer joy of creating its own song. Stirner's words immediately preceding the quotation provided by David Leopold are as follows:
But not only not [sic.] for your sake, not even for the truth's sake either do I speak out what I think. No: I sing as the bird sings, That on the bough alights; The song that from me springs Is pay that well requites. I sing because -- I am a singer. But I use [gebrauche] you for it because I -- need [brauche] ears. [Ibidem, 263]
Stirner's intended meaning for the word 'use' [gebrauche] in this excerpt is established in the context of the metaphor of the singing bird. By taking the quote out of context,David Leopold imposes a possibly unintended meaning upon the verb "use" [gebrauche] as implying "instrumental treatment" (p. xxxi). This pessimistic representation of the source text is further demonstrated when we consider Stirner's words immediately following the quotation selected by Leopold:
We owe each other nothing, for what I seem to owe you I owe at most to myself. If I show you a cheerful air in order to cheer you likewise, then your cheerfulness is of consequence to me, and my air serves my wish... [Ibidem]
David Leopold ends his quotation with "We owe each other nothing" full stop,without providing an ellipsis to indicate that he is breaking off Stirner in mid-sentence, the subject stirner discusses is not included in the quotation, a major faux pas for an Academic.
[edit] References
- Electronic text versions of the book
- The Ego and Its Own HTML
- Stirner's Critics - Stirner's reply to his critics, bilingual (addendum to "The Ego")
Re influences
- R W K Paterson: The Nihilistic Egoist Max Stirner. London: Oxford UP 1971, reprint 1993 (Part Two)
- Ernie Thomson: The Discovery of the Materialist Conception of History in the Writings of the Young Karl Marx. 2004
- Bernd A Laska: Nietzsche's initial crisis 2002
