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.
Contents |
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 her 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.
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.)
Style
The book is a bit hard to access for contemporary readers, much due to the fact that Stirner was not trying to create a classic; rather he was writing for his peers.
For this reason Stirner repeatedly quotes Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller and Bruno Bauer as if the reader was immediately familiar with all their works and the most famous poems in their German language original. 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, simply because he assumes that everyone who reads his book will have read them as well.
Editions
Although the book has a history of mistranslation and politically-motivated revisionism, the standard English-language edition available today is by the late Steven T. Byington, an American individualist anarchist and egoist. Editions have appeared in Danish (Den Eneste og hans Ejendom, publ. 1901, translated by Axel Garde, and with a preface by Georg Brandes), Swedish (Den ende och hans egendom, publ. 1910, translated by Albert Jensen), and Japanese (translated by Jun Tsuji).
Influences
The book has been very influential, and is regarded as a classic of existentialism, though it was not recognized as such for a long time.
External links
- Electronic text versions of the book
- The Ego and Its Own HTML
- Stirner's Critics - Stirner's reply to his critics, bilingualde:Der Einzige und sein Eigentum