stirner this, stirner that

From Center for a Stateless Society by Ash P. Morgans

Bloody Rule and a Cannibal Order! Part III

This final essay began as a few scattered notes meant originally for the Egoist and the Anarchist which I’ve worked to develop into something of their own piece. My aim here is to challenge what I see as a problematic line of thinking present all throughout this symposium and unfortunately because of that, it has to deal with one of Stirner’s most important, and therefore most difficult, challenges: the problem of language.

There’s a certain image that comes to mind when we say a word like “egoism.” The term carries drastically different definitions across wildly different contexts while the components of the word itself can bake assumptions into its meaning. The result is that, whether it’s some muscular Randian Individual or proud Nietzschean Übermensch, the word “egoism” seems to conceive for us an “ego” that we are and an “ism” that we ought to do. In the face of a character like Stirner, then, it begins to make sense why the first point of contention so many detractors put forward is against his “ego,” whatever they happen to think it is. It also goes to explain why, at gatherings like these, Stirner, the subject of the conversation, always seems a bit absent from it.

In many cases, Stirner himself revels in this problem, juggling dictionaries of meaning behind seemingly simple words like “property”, “right”, and, in our case, “nothing.” But the problem really presents itself when we realize that the point Stirner was trying to direct us toward doesn’t rest in the words themselves or the concepts they represent, “what he says is not the meaning, and what he means cannot be said.” What we will deal with in this essay is not a concept, instead, think of the words I’m describing as markers “pointing” to something that is wholly indescribable, but nevertheless something specific, something you can experience.

The Indescribable

When Fichte says, “the I is all,” this seems to harmonize perfectly with my statements. But it’s not that the I is all, but the I destroys all, and only the self-dissolving I, the never-being I, the—finite I is actually I. Fichte speaks of the “absolute” I, but I speak of me, the transient I.

In order to approach a critique of Stirner, his critics and commentators have all hoped to understand his “ego,” to find its definition and so understand what it is that Stirner thought we ought to do or be. But in doing so those very critics and commentators have lost any sight of what it is that Stirner actually argued. The Unique, that grinning figure in the mist, eludes simple capture. Like a shadow or impression, we seem to get most of our understanding of one less by who they are and more by what it is they’ve left behind (how it is they’re talked about). The (in)conceptual is easily obscured by the violence of language.

All throughout this symposium we see this tendency appear as a kind of ego-hunting. Evan Pierce’s The Eco- and our Home combats “discrete, individual egos” as “fragile phantasm[s] utterly dependent” on their relationship to their ecosystem; Andrew Kemle’s Egoism, Morality, and Anarchism Under Complexity tackles a similar amoral egoist “metaphysical groundwork … that the ‘self’ in ‘self-interest’ is cleanly delimitated from other selves;” at the same time, Alexander Craig and Joseph Parampathu, in Christianity and Egoism and The Ego and his Cross respectively, discuss the “egoism” of a belief which, as Craig puts it, entails a clear “theme of ‘death to self.’” For Craig, the egoist “​​can be exalted, yes, but only through letting their ego die – and being born anew in Christ.” 

Quite a lot ends up being said in these short statements, quite a lot more than their authors intended, but not all that much about their intended subject matter. Let’s take Pierce as an example: From the perspective of a Stirnerian defense, The Eco- and our Home is difficult to approach. Despite the author’s reference to “uniqueness [as] something egoists apparently value,” or his essay title’s play on the Byington translation of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, I’m not sure if the piece is even critiquing Stirner at all. I find few connections with the “[normative] egoism” he presents, with its “expansive or enlightened self-interest,” and the ideas we see in Stirner. All the less do I see Stirnerian ideas being counter to his own “value in identifying with and empathizing with radically different lifeforms.” My self-interest is surely “expansive,” expanding over anything I’m interested in, so why does Pierce oppose it to an interest in lifeforms apart from myself?

The reason is that Pierce has assumed that in Stirner’s “egoism” we see the existence of an “ego” that I ought to be interested in as opposed to anything else — and it’s not just him. Each of these authors conceives of their own idea of what the Unique is and does, i.e. how they think Stirner believes a person like myself might/should be. Each has, in line with “a long history of surprisingly similar critiques,” run aground against the indescribable. In them we only find conceptions of the Unique, actually attributing to Stirner the very alienation he sought to uproot!

Where do these conceptions of my self — self-conceptions — come from other than descriptions of myself? Descriptions that attempt to describe me in my entirety and then predict (declare) what I ‘ought’ to do and be like? But each of these self-conceptions relies on a self to be conceived, a self which exists before conception, which exists outside of its description (which does not correlate 1:1 with how it’s described). Like Byas’ morals, I presuppose my concepts. I am not the words I speak or the ideas others have of me. Literally! Those are ideas and words and I — while full of them — am not ideas and words; ideas and words cannot represent me in my fullness (I am always more than them). Each of these thoughts is only an impression of me, what I impress on others — a phantom image, like the sensation of a missing limb — but is the dent a hammer leaves in sheet metal the hammer itself? I am incapable of being assumed beforehand, self-conceptions break against me who am not conceptual.

“The Unique,” in being a word meant for me, cannot (and is not meant to) capture me. What I mean is that the word “unique” lacks thought-content; like a name, it is a thoroughly empty word (the word “Max” does not refer to the general idea of “Maxness,” but rather a specific person who is the content of that word “Max;” this person is not a thought). If you were to take “Max” in their forties and expect they be as they were in their twenties, you would not understand “Max” as they really are — as they are in that very moment — you would only have the idea of “Max” that you treat as real. This “Max” now is not the same as that “Max” before. You say I am a “person?” Then I am only this person, my personhood is incomparable to any other person because I am not that other person. What we share, hands or legs perhaps, are always our hands or legs for which we are the content of. To say we have the same hands is to put up a concept, to give the word “hand” only thought-content. But I am the content of myself! I may be similar to others, but all that we are comparibally are abstractions of what we have actually.

I am never assumed by ideas, ideas assume me; when I realize this, I see only myself as their content. Without me, my concepts do not exist, I am their reality; in their alienation from me, their abstraction above me, only they are lost. I am the content of my own, I am my own, am my love, my anarchism, my property and power; I am what realizes them, what creates, defines, and fills them. Without me, they are not. Put another way, mine is all that is, and only is because I first am. In me, all things dissolve (become particular to me). Not the Human Being but this human being, not the World but my world — it is my power, my property, power and property particular to me, the only one of me, the Unique.

So what is the Unique? Whatever the Unique is! I am that I am, the all that I am — the (my) world, the (my) spirit, dissolves in me. I am not something, some fixed, understandable thing; I am no thing, nothing, nothing but myself! Nothing, not “in the sense of emptiness, but [the] creative nothing, the nothing out of which I myself create everything as creator.” I am the material out of which I all is constantly remade; I am my material and all materials are me (mine). I too, dissolve in me; each moment that I am is a moment I am using myself, dissolving myself, literally rearranging the atoms that make me up; each moment I am not what I was the moment prior; each moment I present myself for the first time, I dissolve again as I dissolve all things. I am not just the creative Nothing, but the all-consuming Nothing, the self-dissolving Nothing. I am all in all and so all things are nothing to me!

In my nothing, I appear as the content of myself. In it, I include as me all parts of me: my property, myself in my widest meaning. It is on this nothing which my affair is based, this nothing which I am interested. That is to say that my interest excludes nothing on any ground other than my interest in it! It is only the exclusion of the uninteresting. Daring to look it in the eye, the actual Stirnerian challenge against alienation is a far more radical, more savage proposition than the domesticated “amoralism” we left Byas with. No concept, abstract or concrete, real or illusory, true or untrue, is interesting in itself. Truth can never command me nor reality ever confuse me; they are nothing to me, are mine, are consumed and enjoyed by me as my property, a property of me. My property is that which I am (have) and I have (am) whatever I am capable. What would this atomistic individual that the critics fear actually be other than my assumed separation from the world, from my property (my material)? That too is a concept to be broken, dissolved in my living embeddedness, my nothingness. Without me to animate it, that mere idea is powerless, dead. The individual is my corpse!

It seems to me that all this “running-aground” has happened quite close to the rocks on which Byas’ own ship sank. There is a surf of sharp stones somewhere along the coast of this seemingly new land we appear eager to explore and these examples of “moralist egoists” or “sacred selves” provide excellent landmarks of just what it is we might want to avoid as we start to come ashore…

Onward then! The raging fire of the Unique is set to burn the whole Ivory Tower of Thought to the ground. Never again will my thinking appear alien to me; never again can my thoughts be presented against me; never will I be the property of thought, but thought the property of me! Any concept I am told I am is something less than me; any description or abstraction is a tool for me to enjoy. Let’s see then, how the “critics” of the Stirnerian stand up to the Unique in all its naked horror!

Saint Max

His effort and care to get away from himself are nothing but the misunderstood drive for self-dissolution … This is why, beyond each moment of your existence, a fresh moment of the future beckons to you, and developing yourself, you get away “from yourself,” i.e., from your current self.

In a symposium featuring Stirner, the hiss and roar of moralism should really come of no surprise. But the addition of two Christian authors — Alexander Craig and Joseph Parampathu — drawing out what I can only describe as a kind of theological egoism? Or better yet, linking this theology to Stirner? Now that is a little more brow-raising. 

Such an egoism by itself is nothing to be afraid of. After all, the notion of a religious egoist tends to flutter around Stirnerian circles now and again (and really, the idea seems to put more pressure on the theology than the egoism). But if that were the only point being put forward, I wouldn’t be writing this. Personally, I haven’t had much interest in creating a God for myself for a while and don’t believe I’ll have much interest in doing so going forward. Is there anything more to say? But we should be careful not to overlook the subtleties in a case like this. I wasn’t kidding when I said that the critics of Stirner seem to attribute to him the very alienation he critiqued and nowhere is this more pertinent than in the work of the Christians.

Now, in Craig’s defense, he never specifically mentions Stirner, only an unspecified “egoism” which could really mean just about anything. Parampathu, though, is much more explicit. His work, The Ego and its Cross, develops further the notion of “ego-death” put forward in Craig’s Christianity and Egoism and in it he is very clear on how he believes “Stirner’s egoism and Christian teaching are compatible, even complementary.”

I mean, should we really be surprised that the theological egoist, like their moral cousin, has come to “speak to us in our own voice?” Of course not, but it’s the way he goes about doing it which I find really fascinating. Parampathu is bold! Who else could come into my house, look me dead in the eyes, and proceed to shovel my own silverware into their pockets!

The use of phrases like “spooks,” the “Unique,” “ego,” or “egoism,” all feature heavily as supposedly Stirnerian terms that Parampathu mobilizes to prove his point. The way they are used, too, gives us the sense that we’re all talking about the same things: He admits that “Egoism  … does not prescribe a path, so much as reject that an ideal (i.e., morality, equality, spirituality) can claim precedence over the individual’s authority to invest the ideal with its meaning”; he argues for a similar ‘living’ Unique, where “even being just one man (of many men), he is also himself, an individual (a Unique),” which like “any sheep or dog (or even a flower)  ‘realizes itself in living’”; we even see this “egoism” presented as a conclusion where “all things are subordinate to the Unique.” But the Stirner he describes, while certainly sounding like our own J. Kaspar Schmidt, is really another figure entirely; Like Byas, Parampathu seems poised for a bait-and-switch. “Spooks,” for example, he treats not as fixed-ideas, but “self-deceptions like rationality, spirituality, or legality.” And not just spooks, but every Stirnerian term that Parampathu uses has taken on a slightly different meaning! Like a saint who (by pure coincidence, I’m sure) shares a name with a heathen god, the ego-dead Unique we’re presented  with here is an ideal in denial, a teal/black puppet stuffed with Christian theology hoping to convince us poor sinners that the light was inside us all along.

See here then: Parampathu says one thing, a denial of ideals, and does another, puts forward an ideal! His fulfilled Unique, fulfilled by the absence of “spooks,” is not nothing — my nothing — but in reality is a very particular something. Let’s look at it more closely:

Ego-death, in Stirner’s egoism, is not so much a path to transcend the ego, but rather to fulfill it. To do otherwise would be to deny the Unique, and farcically, require a self-deception through creating a spook. Egoistic self-denial is ‘the negation of what we imagine we desire’ …

The Christian idea of agape love (from the Greek translation, as opposed to other Greek biblical love-words like eros or philos) mirrors this egoistic idea of the fulfilled Unique …  While the unfulfilled Unique (a person living encumbered by spooks), may quite rationally practice eros and philos, their spooks (self-deceptions like rationality, spirituality, or legality) prevent them from practicing agape love … They are unable to love something unconditionally … unable to, as the sheep or dog, realize their own life through living. They are unable to take up their life by throwing it away; blinded by the spook of idealizing an ego, they cannot experience the ego-death within egoism.

Because Parampathu has obscured his meaning behind a Stirnerian façade, let’s piece together some proper definitions by how he’s using these terms in context: “Egoism”, here, is the fulfillment of the Unique, which is unfulfilled when encumbered by “spooks”; “spooks” themselves are self-deceptions, lies, among which is rationalism; the absence of rationalism, irrationalism, also has its own meaning here: “agape,” or unconditional christian love; “realizing our lives by living” means living unencumbered with “throwing [our] life away” itself meaning to act in martyrdom, throwing our life in unconditional service to irrational love. 

Now everything is clear! If we are to be truly Unique, “fulfilled” Uniques, we are to be no longer encumbered, encumbered by lies, and what better way to get rid of lies than to abandon them entirely! Parampathu’s Unique is unique in their freedom, their poverty.

See, Parampathu has read that “Stirner criticizes a life preoccupied with self-preservation” — and criticize, too, has its own meaning: to negate — and “condemns reason as a false guiding principle,” therefore he presents Stirner as wanting us to be self-sacrificing and unreasonable! The entire project is obvious: we’re being spoken to in our own voice, our language twisted around and spat back out. Hark! The herald angel sings! Saint Max critiques reason and surely that means he abandons reason, and agape is the definition of unreason, and so is the fulfillment of the Unique! The fulfilled Unique, a christian Unique rid of spooks, is a Unique rid of reason.

So what do we actually find in the Stirnerian tradition? Well, phantasms — spooks — are not self-deceptions; while deceptions may be phantasmic, it’s really an affair of squares and rectangles. Neither are phantasms sins we must be free from, i.e. rid of. Rather, a phantasm is a fixed-idea, an idea alienated from me, one which appears as outside of my power (as not my property). Their dissolution, then, is not losing them, but having them! A phantasm vanishes when I take it as my property, when it dissolves into my nothing. That Stirner criticizes reason doesn’t mean that I must abandon reason (practice agape), it means that absolute reason is only ever the alienation of my reason. My reason is my own: a tool I enjoy, a thing I consume. If I am ever rid of reason, it will be because it was first my reason. My being rid of it comes only through my prior power over it. I must be rid of nothing, I am the devourer of everything!

It is another thing entirely, then, when Parampathu says that “all things are subordinate to the Unique” because I am included in this subordination! Parampathu’s Unique is a what, not a who (and a what to be “fulfilled”, at that!). I must be free of spooks and being free of spooks means being free of rationalism, i.e. practicing agape, but what is this other than trading one spook, rationalism, for another, irrationalism? What is this freedom other than servitude? Not toward myself or rationalism, but toward irrationalism (and a specific irrationalism above all others). Posited as a goal, Parampathu has made a reason of unreason!

In this we see how Parampathu has gotten Stirner’s analogy of the dog and the flower backwards! A dog doesn’t bark in service to a cause, nor a flower bloom, it only “applies all its forces to enjoy and consume the world as best it can, i.e., it sucks in as much of the earth’s juices, as much of the ether’s air, as much of the sun’s light, as it can get and accommodate.” The flower simply is — simply is itself, unscrupulously and in self-validation. Do my lungs breathe in service of a cause? No! My heart beating or my lungs breathing is my use of them that occurs irregardless of whatever cause is attributed to it. I have no calling, I simply “disperse [myself] as time disperses everything. The dispersal is not [my] ‘destiny,’ because it is present.” Parampathu’s attempt to define ego-death is nothing less than an attempt to alienate my own self-dissolution. My heart simply beats, not because God commands it, but because I am using, dissolving, squandering it. It is effortless, thoughtless self-dissolution — self-consumption. That I breathe means that at least one part of me is always my own, originating in my power. My self-dissolution, my self-use, what he and Craig have alienated into “ego-death,” is nothing less than what I always do all of the time: it is my living!

In the Unique — an empty word without thought-content — I see myself for what I always am: complete. I have nothing to develop into, because each change in me brings me only into … myself. I am that I am — my nothing. Does it not occur to Parampathu that in order to “realize myself through living” all I would have to do is live? If I am unfulfilled then I am personally dissatisfied, but never am I incomplete (how he treats the word fulfillment). My satisfaction always comes from my interest; if I lose interest, then I am satisfied — sated if only for now.

Sure, Parampathu is not technically wrong when he claims that “the egoist Christian can live in accordance with an idealized spirit,” An egoist can certainly still believe in a Christian reality; did I not say, after all, that spooks aren’t self-deceptions? But do I truly come into myself and my own through exaltation? Really, if one is actually, consciously egoistic, I’d argue that any degree of self-awareness poses some problems for this egoist’s Christendom.

We see an amusing attempt to avoid this conclusion back in Andrew Craig’s Christianity and Egoism, where he puts forward a (what I actually believe might be sacrilegious) theology by positing loving the Christian God as “the highest fulfillment available to any human being,” that by engaging in Christian ego-death, following the Christian path, “we will be in perfect harmony with the nature of the Good, the foundation of all that exists, God Himself. We will lose the things we think are our own but are merely the things we have picked up contrary to our nature … the egoist can be exalted, yes, but only through letting their ego die – and being born anew in Christ.” But in this exaltation all that we’re faced with is either the loss of the egoist — in which case Craig is wrong, the egoist cannot be exalted, as should they be, they would no longer be an egoist — or the admittedly hilarious quandary that such an own Christianity would put us in the awkward position of claiming God as our property, over which we express the fullness of our power. Following Craig’s pursuit of “the highest fulfillment”, would I not be sinfully loving what I am, or am to be, under God rather than God himself? Yes, I can find the Christian good to be good for me, but coming at it in this way seems to make it not quite Christian anymore.

Even ignoring this, do I get far enough in Craig’s egoism to “be in perfect harmony with the nature of the Good?” In “the emptying out of [my] self” — my baptism — do I truly lose myself? If I were to kowtow before the divine light, it would be through my power that I bend. It, like everything I do, is a product of me and I — not exaltation — am always the content of it. No matter how empty I become, how clear I am, no matter how much of the divine light shines through me, I remain. Exaltation always remains a dream of tomorrow, ruined today. I am that through which the divine light shines — that who shines it (as it is powerless, originating in me) — I am that which gives it its hue! No matter how deeply I bow, I am always the bower, the product of my ownness; however total my service, I am only ever a sinner. Before the divine good, I must always degrade myself, hope to escape myself. But I can never get away from myself! I am my creator! My world began at my beginning and will end at my end; it is from me that my world and thoughts come into being, that they develop and dissolve. What a horror to learn that God is not my maker, I am his!

I can never be rid of what I “think [is my] own”, if I have something, it is mine! How can I go against my own nature in this? My “nature” is what I am, but I am all that I am and am only myself in this all. I will never be in harmony with “the Good,” that is, Craig’s good, his divine, spiritual — i.e. theoretical, conceptual — good, but what a pale thought that is compared to my good, the only good which is, and which only is because I first am. With my good, what is good for me — the nothing into which “the Good” dissolves — I am always in harmony. This nothings has no criterion outside of itself, no right not owned by itself, and no cause alien from itself; that is, I am myself unjudgeable, always right by myself, and always in myself all in all — perfect, fully developed — all that I can be in that instant and with no need to be anything else. In the Christian, I am given freedom, i.e. shackled in service, lacking utterly in content; in the Unique, who is who they are, I am always in harmony, always myself in my fullness.  

The Moral Community

Without a doubt, I am similar to others; however, this holds good only for comparison or reflection; in fact, I am incomparable, unique. My flesh is not their flesh, my mind is not their mind … “flesh, mind,” those are your thoughts, which have nothing to do with my flesh, my mind.

The Unique is who they are, how redundant is that? But what else can I say except that I am that I am, the all that I am, my property! I am that which I own, use, consume, and dissolve; I am my others and relations. Byas’ failing (one of them at least) was attributing to the Union of Egoists — that being my union, my communion with others — the same flippancy as he assigned my self-interest. But if I act socially (and clearly, I do) that only means that I have sociality. That I am a social being is not the same as the construction of some necessary social community.

Andrew Kemle is just this kind of communitarian. In his essay, Egoism, Morality, and Anarchism Under Complexity, he means to build on two previous authors, Chris Matthew Sciabarra and Jason Lee Byas, by using his view of “complexity and complex adaptive systems (CAS)” to argue that “self-interest and caring for the well-being of others need not be separate concerns.” For him, “self-interest [is] embedded within morality … [and] morality (taken here to mean a general concern for the interests of others) is embedded within self-interest.” But rather than just repeating their points, Kemle hopes to go above and beyond these forerunners by taking on “the metaphysical groundwork that amoralists utilize” in a critique of an atomistic self; it’s a notion where “the ‘self’ in ‘self-interest’ is cleanly delimitated from other selves” and, he argues, is an assumption “many immoralists take … to automatically entail that they can disregard the interests of others.” For Kemle, “it’s rational, in other words, to care enough about other people to respect them as autonomous agents … given the nature of complexity, [we’ll] find that even a thinly rational person ought to be acting in the way Byas and Sciabarra delineate.”

All in all, Kemle sets a disappointingly awkward critique against the “metaphysical groundwork that amoralists utilize,” mainly because he leaves it unclear as to what exactly he means by “amoralist” (a term he funnily shifts to “immoralist” halfway through that particular paragraph before ceasing to use either word entirely). One might assume he means Stirnerians, given his praise of Byas’s “interesting (and effective) challenge to Max Stirner’s critique of morality,” but he also praises Matthew Sciabarra’s approach to Ayn Rand in the same way. That is, Kemle doesn’t seem to demonstrate that he actually knows the difference — or even that there is a difference — between Stirner and Rand; they are both simply “egoists” to him. So, when Kemle argues that, through his theory, “the very concept of ‘egoism’ becomes incoherent,” I can only say “of course!” because no coherent egoism was challenged in the first place. Whatever his “egoism” is, as a critique of the Stirnerian, his focus against “rational actors” or for a more dynamic or interwoven view of the self is a critique of a “metaphysical position” that we do not largely abide by, or in the case of the latter, actually argue for ourselves!

Like with Parampathu, the situation becomes a lot clearer once we start paying attention to how Kemle uses these terms in context. His piece opens with a claim of critiquing “amoralism” or “egoism”, but what Kemle actually ends up challenging are theories of “thin rationalism”, the “Homo Economicus”, or a bourgeois view where “inequalities in wealth can be justified on the basis of incentives.” His moralism is meant to strike “a deathblow against the notion that a society is best served by catering to the already rich and powerful.” That is, in understanding his morality through the lens of complexity, his “general concern” is really a particular complex concern, a distinctly anarchist social interest; through this juxtaposition, then, his undefined “amoralism” or “egoism” takes on the meaning of ‘not moralism’.

See here how the moralists turn “black into white and white into black!” If moralism carries the meaning of a complex concern, what else does any position labeled “amoral” become other than a lack of this concern (i.e. antisociality, domination)? It doesn’t matter what these positions are, that they are ‘not morality’ means that they are labeled immoral,  i.e. are understood only as whatever morality isn’t. If morality is sociality, amorality is antisociality, if the former is freedom, the latter is domination, etc. Kemle hasn’t actually engaged with any of his supposed opponents, he has simply drawn his line in the sand and claimed that anyone outside is his opposite!

I also need to make clear that Kemle’s working definition of morality — “a general concern for the interests of others”  —  is drastically different from the writers whose ideas he’s attempting to develop further, a change which, apart from confusing how his moralism relates to these others, presents a major tension in his approach. We have, on the one hand complexity, generally speaking a theory of free association, but on the other hand morality, a theory of rule. As a tactic, this obviously puts me in an awkward position: If I challenge his morality, then I’m challenging anarchy, because after all, isn’t that just what morality means? It’s a rhetorical hostage situation: if you challenge the “moral,” that means you want to dominate. Take that, immoralists! But this tension might actually be useful to parse out, because it means that Kemle has approached anarchy as a moral order (and so has fallen prey to the same mistake as Byas).  

Moralities and their Reactionaries

With Kemle we verge on articulating anarchy only to take a huge leap backward; our language and mindset rests firmly in the realm of authority. His project is not a simple description of the world but a challenge to the immoral, i.e. the irrational — those who take their false self-perceptions “to automatically entail that they can disregard the interests of others.” As if the patently immoral need to satisfy moral criteria to justify their immorality? I thought the terrifying problem of amoralism was that it didn’t need external justification? Ironically, given his theory’s attack on domination, his argument orbits not around how people act, but how they ought to be acting.

Insofar as his project is moral, it is itself reactionary. It sets a revolutionary charge forward to describe our reality, but after coming to its conclusion, his morality presents itself as a reaction against any further description. That is, he has made a claim of how we ought to act and acting contrary to that claim he levels as irrational (invalid). But in describing the world, Kemle has come no closer to regulating it than at his outset; that he is attacking the “immoral” means there are people who simply aren’t acting the way his description claims they ought to be. If, in his own paradigm, people are acting irrationally, then it is Kemle who is wrong, Kemle’s description which has failed to describe reality. After all, it doesn’t really get us very far in analyzing society when all we do with our analysis is label society as “bad”. If, in Kemle’s model, the dominant mode of social organization today is labeled as wholly irrational, does that not force us to question his presumption of rationality in the first place? If, in our social model, we assume that people are rational and they act irrationally, either we remove the assumption of rationality (and morality with it), or we remove the model, and morality remains indefensible.

To be clear, I don’t even necessarily disagree with Kemle. As a model for articulating a kind of free association his perspective has very obvious merits. But in staying so firm-footed in the swamp of moralism, we come no closer to articulating anarchy than we did with Byas. All that really means, though, is that the problem may be one we’ve already tackled; like with Byas’ “stable commitment,” if I am to have social interests — Kemle’s “general concern” — it need only stem from my sociality

A General Concern for the Interests of Others

Is there ever a time in my life in which I am not in some way “concerned for the interests of others”? That is, do I really need morality to convince myself to be social? Like with Byas’ moral virtue, Kemle’s social virtue assumes my own social interest; without this interest I would have no means to see it as a virtue in the first place.

This is perhaps the greatest weakness of the moralist approach: the assumption that my self-interest is somehow of no interest to me! Moralists like Byas and Kemle seem to work under the assumption that the lack of sanctity implies a lack of interest, but in reality, sanctity is the alienation of my interest into a fixed-interest, an absolute interest. At every moment of my life I have been a social being. In each instance, no matter how far away I was from others, I was still situated in relation to them. I have only ever changed my social involvement relatively, never absolutely. Moralism, as usual, has it backward: I must not be convinced to be social by morality, I must first have social interests in order to be able to see sociality as sacred!

Where Kemle goes wrong is that he has seemingly resigned himself to ignoring what it really means to overlap with one another. He leaves my others purely abstract, my relations wholly theoretical. My self overlaps with other selves, just as my self overlaps with my world, but this reciprocality implies not just harmonious comradery but in equal parts inherent contradiction. However connected I am with others, I am still not them and our interests are not identical. We are a far cry from a situation where “acting against the interests of others is identical to acting against your own interests.” The presentation of an abstract “other” in which we should be interested assumes a homogeneity that doesn’t exist. Who are these others? Are they my fellow human beings? And do we thus share a human interest? A class interest? Kemle seems to argue that we share a kind of ‘complex interest’, but this doesn’t actually clarify anything as regards the (concrete) contradictory systems we actually find ourselves embedded in. Surely I as a good, upstanding Anarchist wouldn’t act in the interests of the oppressors and Kemle seems to agree. As he puts it, “the nature of CAS means that any agent that seeks to create a highly rigid social system will be actively restricting their ability to accomplish their goals.” But this raises more questions than it answers! Kemle seems to be working under the assumption that social hierarchies form due to the machinations of powerful individual agents, and so like those agents, his understanding of domination becomes equally abstract.

All Societies are My Societies 

If my interests are not categorically the same as my others, does this mean that I am categorically separate from them? No! Because Kemle really is asking the right questions! He provides us new conceptual tools to understand ourselves and others, to question why we might be interested in what we are interested in. But his questions lead us not to moralism, but to a greater, more terrible and vibrant conclusion: It’s not that my interests are isolated from others because we are not the same, but rather that my interests erupt from them — rest always in relation to them — because they are my property!

I cannot be isolated from those around me, clearly not when their emotions spark the same emotions in myself; emotions, too, which are property, a property (attribute) of me. What is their pain, their rage, other than my pain, my rage. I am not homogenous! I feel the nausea in my stomach through a medium of couplinked neurons leading into my tangle of a brain; pain, nausea, anger are signals and responses, what are these phenomena in others but signals and responses through a different medium? I am no alien to the others in my world and all the less from the world itself. Kemle’s problems comes into play wherever his lack of a clear understanding of Stirner becomes unbearably obvious. He argues, for example, that if “the boundaries of the self are inherently fuzzy, then the very concept of ‘egoism’ becomes incoherent”; as if, by acknowledging the existence of others, I disappear? I am, with them, through them, myself, but that doesn’t stop me from seeing the world from my own two eyes, from being not those other selves. I am no more my others than I am my arm, they are a part of me, structure me, but they are not me.

That I am “through others” doesn’t challenge my uniqueness at all, it simply structures the way that I am unique. If my borders with these others are blurry, it means only that I am larger, greater, than I had previously realized. But it does not follow from this that I or my interests are wholly indistinguishable from them. While we can use this approach to explore how my interests are connected with others, catalyzed by them, we cannot conclude what my interests ‘ought’ to be anymore than we can declare the nonexistence of my egoism. These others, like all of my property, dissolve in me; as they constitute me, I relate to each of them as I will. As they are my own, I use and enjoy them as they use and enjoy me.

In reality, the issue from the moralist perspective is not that I am not social, but that the relations I hold are not sacred for me, that they are my own! This isn’t to say that I am all powerful, but rather that I am the content of my power, that what is mine is what I have in my power; my relation to an external power is different when I make it mine (am its definer). What are relations that overpower me, degrade and brutalize me, other than my opponents? My degradation, my being overpowered, is a product of my lack of power over those social relations — capital, familial, governmental, etc. — that degrade me; they appear alien to me, outside of and above me. But the creation of morality is nothing but the internalization of this alienness. I must not only be overpowered, but revere that overpower. If not capital or state, then the community, the people, or any other phantasm.

In me, all societies dissolve into my social relations. They are owned by me, defined by me, i.e. exist only for me, for my self-consumption, satisfaction, and enjoyment. In my own sociality I do not express the interests of others but rather myself more fully. We see not my service of them, but our mutual catalyzing; ours are those relations which, reciprocally, are negotiated and renegotiated as antagonisms erupt and heal. My others dissolve into my nothing, as I into theirs; my relations are my own, as theirs are their own. It is the overlapping — mutual self-dissolution — of our power which makes the resulting union ours, serving only ourselves. If we do not ignore this vibrancy — this incivility — a proper anarchy is that order which emerges from our reciprocality, the balancing of powers; it entails a breakdown and reorganization of the very systems Kemle is attempting to describe. It’s in these systems being our own, consumed by and shaped between us, that we begin to see in them a sense of what we might call anarchy.

The Stirnerian Challenge

As the world as property has become a material with which I start to do what I want, so spirit as property must also sink down to a material, before which I hold no more sacred awe.

So here we return to the argument first articulated by Pierce: that “one’s eco-system should be at least as important as one’s ego system — perhaps moreso, considering the latter utterly depends on the former.” His view is one of wonder at our world, at our improbability, our mutual uniqueness and simultaneous being; more, it is a call against the goliath of industrialized “ecocide” threatening that world. It’s a view I have a great deal of respect for. I, myself, am one to gaze up at stars and lose myself in dancing snowflakes; I tend to embers of my own radical ecology. In his perspective, Pierce is the closest author we’ve looked at to stand up to the actual Stirnerian Challenge, but insofar as Pierce contrasts his wonder to the Stirnerian, he has come no closer than Kemle or Byas; he remains firmly rooted in the moral swamp.

It was Pierce for whom my “ego is a fragile phantasm,” a petty blip “utterly dependent on the continued functioning of critical external systems.” But if we quickly dissolve this rhetorical distinction between my “ego” and I, all Pierce has said with this is that I am my property! Without it, I am not. But am I subordinated by this? Sure, I am “utterly dependent” on my property just as Pierce is “utterly dependent” on a continuous stream of oxygen and the beating of his heart, just as the mightiest rivers are “utterly dependent” on rainfall, or our world’s dry land is “utterly dependent” on the motion of tectonic plates. If I am what he calls a “phantasm” then so is Eurasia, just on a different timescale — and why should I be compared to a continent?

Yes, I am my property, my material; I am indeed dependent on myself for my continued living. I am dependent on my every gasp of air and gulp of water, and I only am through the uncountable others I share them with. I am dependent on them and they on me; the air in my lungs is the same as the air in theirs. But it is because of this that I am my own! It is my taking of the air and water, of my others, of the world, that I am. I only exist through my power, I am only in the world by taking the world as my own.

In Byas we saw all thought dissolve into nothing, in Kemle society, now with Pierce the world follows in hot pursuit! But like our own anarchism or sociality, a thoroughly ecological ownness might seem unnerving, if not downright uncomfortable. We are not talking of a hierarchical reverence for the world. Rather, an ecological ownness would have us learning and exploring the world as a part of ourselves, taking in its beauty as something enjoyed (used). This mutual taking — self-enjoyment — is the structuring of our relations with each other and the world, an integrating of us with this world. I am in the world, am experiencing the world, am myself only through the world; that is, the world is mine, the world dissolves in me, the world is only through me!

Pierce is correct when he argues that we “can shape our changing selves and we can shape our changing world,” that we can strive beyond “the narrow confines of our human egos.” But what Pierce, like Kemle, seems to miss is that through this only my “ego” — that self-conception — is lost, dissolved, while I am expanded! His thought, wonder for what lies beyond our “narrow confines,” finds its conclusion in my creative nothing. In it, I spill out of my narrow self into my wider self, my property. As he argues, “‘to think of oneself’ accurately [one] should carefully consider how one relates to the physical reality we all inhabit.” I breathe out into the clouds, my veins pour into the rivers; in every blade of grass I see only my self, my nothing, that I enjoy (consume, experience). I am myself only in my self-consumption, in my fullness.

In every drop of dew and flake of mica, I have a world to explore, and in this world, my world beyond my narrowness, Pierce is right in hinting that I ought to lose sight of my self. In my world, I forget my self — sweet self-forgetfulness — as my focus shifts away from my “narrow confines” into the new object of my attention. I realize at last that all that I have “is still itself its own at the same time, i.e., it has its own existence; it is the unique the same as [I].” It is my togetherness with powers as much their own as they are mine, which are themselves unique. I do not simply act upon the world but interact within it; it acts on me, dissolves me as I dissolve it. And am I any less for this? Just the opposite! Would the eyes of a loved one have any power if they did not stare back at me? My nothingness is not my separation from the world, but rather my full engagement in it!

To go any further, though, I’d argue we need to develop our vocabularies a lot more than what we have time for here. I’ll end with this: My main hope with each of these essays has been to articulate the now ages-old Stirnerian Challenge for a new audience. To show that not only can this line of thought explore truly radical notions of society, ecology, or anarchy, it is very well fit to do so. But it is unfortunately a challenge, I argue, against which its opposition here has yet to put up an adequate response and, if I’m speaking bluntly, I don’t think they can.

Of the thinkers, dogmatists can only put forward ruling thoughts and phrases I must revere, while critics can only replace old rulers with new ones; but neither can challenge the hierarchy of thinking, of ruling thoughts and phrases. But what, then, can they put forward against such a challenger? What can they create that I cannot dissolve again? What can they build that can even stand under its own weight? What can they present that is not already mine? They are helpless. Against me, the inconceivable, “the realm of thoughts, thinking, and spirit shatters;” of me, the Unique, is “the last possible phrase, capable of bringing the whole regiment of phrases to a halt;” and if, before me, all ideas “sink down to a material,” never again can I be made to serve them. 

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