r/DebateCommunism 16d ago

🍵 Discussion Any thoughts on "egoism"?

For those who are familiar with the works of Johan Kaspar Schmidt (aka Max Stirner), I'd like to learn the differences between his philosophy and Marx's. Or maybe, I guess I'd like to hear a critique of his work from a Marxist perspective. I guess sometimes it's easier to find the right answer than the right question, so please bear with me here.

I may or may not answer to your comments, but I will likely read most if not all comments posted, but I'd like to open the floor for all of you guys. Honestly, I'm not very well versed on either, but I know both were "post Hegel" philosophers and both somewhat of the same "lineage" if that makes any sense at all. The best I can gather is both used a dialectical approach, Marx was more associated with the materialist perspective and I believe "Stirner" may have leaned a little more towards the idealistic?

Thank you guys much and have a great day!

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u/A_Philosophical_Cat 16d ago

Stirner didn't promote dialectics. This is commonly misunderstood about him, since "The Unique and Its Property" features them frequently, however, it's important to recognize that significant chunks of TUaIP are satirical: his primary audience was a bunch his drinking buddies who were fellow students of Hegel, including notably including Engels. The humor in his work has been largely lost on Anglosphere readers, because for a long time the only translation available was "The Ego and Its own" by Steven T. Byington, which utterly failed to translate the humor, in some places leaving it out entirely. It is unclear whether this was an editorial choice, or if it simply went over the translator's head. For this reason, I recommend the Wolfi Landstriecher translation, entitled "The Unique and Its Property", which is far more accurate, or reading it in the original German if feasible.

Stirner's philosophy (though he didn't like that description), "egoism", is basically an explanation of why people do things. Stirner was a staunch believer in free will: people do things because they choose to do them. But that raises the question of why so many people act in direct opposition to their own interests. Stirner's proposed answer was the concept of the "fixed idea", which is an idea that someone has, but chooses to believe has power over them, leading them to choose to sacrifice their own interests in support of the idea. He lists a lot of these, notably God, The State, and "Man-In-General", criticizing Monarchists, Liberals, and early Socialists/Communists/"Humanists" respectively.

He describes most people as "unconscious egoists", meaning that they unknowingly engage in this world of fixed ideas, subconsciously choosing fixed ideas to believe in, and not knowing that the ideas themselves are actually powerless. His ethical framework (in the most academic sense, "what ought one do") is focused on becoming a "conscious egoist", consciously choosing to acquire ideas, beliefs, etc., and recognizing that they are your property, to possess, change, or dispose of at your own fancy.

This has lead him to being labeled an Anarchist in many circles, because pretty much all power structures are based on fixed ideas. But it is important to recognize that Stirner himself didn't really care to explore the political ramifications of following his belief system, merely arguing that people should consciously choose to engage in whatever systems they like, being aware that doing so is a choice.

There are revolutionary undertones to that, of course, in that, as he argued, there is little reason for workers who are paid a pittance compared to the value they produce not to overthrow their bosses. He argues the reason revolutions don't happen more is that people complacently believe in the fixed ideas that justify their own oppression.

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u/DashtheRed 14d ago edited 14d ago

Hitherto men have constantly made up for themselves false conceptions about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relationships according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The phantoms of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations. Let us liberate them from the chimeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings under the yoke of which they are pining away. Let us revolt against the rule of thoughts. Let us teach men, says one, to exchange these imaginations for thoughts which correspond to the essence of man; says the second, to take up a critical attitude to them; says the third, to knock them out of their heads; and -- existing reality will collapse.

These innocent and childlike fancies are the kernel of the modern Young-Hegelian philosophy, which not only is received by the German public with horror and awe, but is announced by our philosophic heroes with the solemn consciousness of its cataclysmic dangerousness and criminal ruthlessness. The first volume of the present publication has the aim of uncloaking these sheep, who take themselves and are taken for wolves; of showing how their bleating merely imitates in a philosophic form the conceptions of the German middle class; how the boasting of these philosophic commentators only mirrors the wretchedness of the real conditions in Germany. It is its aim to debunk and discredit the philosophic struggle with the shadows of reality, which appeals to the dreamy and muddled German nation.

Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity. If they were to knock this notion out of their heads, say by stating it to be a superstition, a religious concept, they would be sublimely proof against any danger from water. His whole life long he fought against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful results all statistics brought him new and manifold evidence. This valiant fellow was the type of the new revolutionary philosophers in Germany.

...

Since the Young Hegelians consider conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in fact all the products of consciousness, to which they attribute an independent existence, as the real chains of men (just as the Old Hegelians declared them the true bonds of human society) it is evident that the Young Hegelians have to fight only against these illusions of consciousness. Since, according to their fantasy, the relationships of men, all their doings, their chains and their limitations are products of their consciousness, the Young Hegelians logically put to men the moral postulate of exchanging their present consciousness for human, critical or egoistic consciousness, and thus of removing their limitations. This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret reality in another way, i.e. to recognise it by means of another interpretation. The Young-Hegelian ideologists, in spite of their allegedly “world-shattering" statements, are the staunchest conservatives. The most recent of them have found the correct expression for their activity when they declare they are only fighting against “phrases.” They forget, however, that to these phrases they themselves are only opposing other phrases, and that they are in no way combating the real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of this world. The only results which this philosophic criticism could achieve were a few (and at that thoroughly one-sided) elucidations of Christianity from the point of view of religious history; all the rest of their assertions are only further embellishments of their claim to have furnished, in these unimportant elucidations, discoveries of universal importance.

It has not occurred to any one of these philosophers to inquire into the connection of German philosophy with German reality, the relation of their criticism to their own material surroundings.

-Marx and Engels, The German Ideology

edit: OP, just read The German Ideology

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u/TerraValentine 13d ago

reading "saint max" from the german ideology now, which is an extensive criticism of stirner. ill come back to this when im finished but for now ill say marx is not a fan, to the point of regularly mocking stirner as "sancho panza" for taking at face value bourgeois illusions about themselves etc, & you are right about their different approaches and the background