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The Ego and His Own
The Ego and His Own
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erality, but "this transitory ego of flesh and blood." It is not as a generality that you and I differ, but as a couple of facts which are not to be reasoned into one. "I" is somewise Hartmann, and thus Hartmann is "I"; but I am not Hartmann, and Hartmann is not--I. Neither am I the "I" of Stirner; only Stirner himself was Stirner's "I." Note how comparatively indifferent a matter it is with Stirner that one is an ego, but how all-important it is that one be a self-conscious ego,--a self-conscious, self-willed person.
Those not self-conscious and self-willed are constantly acting from self-interested motives, but clothing these in various garbs. Watch those people closely in the light of Stirner's teaching, and they seem to be hypocrites, they have so many good moral and religious plans of which self-interest is at the end and bottom; but they, we may believe, do not know that this is more than a coincidence.
In Stirner we have the philosophical foundation for political liberty. His interest in
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First published in 1844, DER EINZIGE UND SEIN EIGENTUM,was re-published in 1892, but since that time has never been out of print. It has been published in dozens of editions (the latest English edition, in 1995, was published by Cambridge U. Press), and it has been translated into over a dozen languages (the latest, in 2008, being the second Dutch translation -- There is even a a Yiddish translation!). Check out the web on all of this.
The EGO continues to be of great interest not only to those interested in a philosophy of radical individualism, but for anyone wishing to know the reason for the vitriolic attack upon THE EGO by Marx and Engels. In 1845, just one year after the EGO appeared, they wrote THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY. It directed more pages critical of the EGO than were in the work itself.
Stirner's masterpiece is indeed one of the most logical and lucid defenses ever made in the cause of individual liberty.
The EGO continues to be of great interest not only to those interested in a philosophy of radical individualism, but for anyone wishing to know the reason for the vitriolic attack upon THE EGO by Marx and Engels. In 1845, just one year after the EGO appeared, they wrote THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY. It directed more pages critical of the EGO than were in the work itself.
Stirner's masterpiece is indeed one of the most logical and lucid defenses ever made in the cause of individual liberty.
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