Selfish Avatar; Ego in the Philosophies of Stirner and Von Hartmann

Selfish Avatar; Ego in the Philosophies of Stirner and Von Hartmann

The present world-conditions may make anything apart from expressions of justifiable anger and sadness seem mockingly superfluous. To write anything that puts into question the reality of that world of suffering which surrounds and seems to buoy us up, may appear with all the taste and propriety of the gallows-prattle of an insane tricoteuse. Nevertheless, the world of phenomena, and the phenomenon of the self are just that; appearance. Appearances that seem to envelope everything of being, to exhaust the whole of reality in themselves, and thus to demand of us recognition that they are absolute. But they are not, and we are not; not as we are wont to constitute ourselves, namely as the part of us which operates out of the belief that there is a fundamental separation between our individual persons, the world, and each other. That is the same part of ourselves that is also apt to ignore it’s really very ephemeral nature, even with respect to the body that projects it, and whatever grounds and projects the body.

‘Me’, Ross, for example, flashes or winks in and out of presence within a constantly cycling system of unconsciousness to consciousness, and even then, only partially, or as a provisional centre in self-reflection. Most of what goes on, even within our own bodies in waking consciousness, is unconscious. That body itself, even as a mere phenomenon or appearance, belongs to the same world we consider to be the outside. It breathes in air, drinks, eats and in terms of apparent material, is one with the world. That is how it appears to the knowing subject in self-reflection. That subject (really only a fragment of subjectivity) seems to hover in the eye of the hurricane looking outward with dread, bitterness, and everything else that arises with the sense of alienation and frustration that is inherent in the ego, or I-ness, the self of self-reflection.

Max Stirner, 25 October 1806 – 26 June 1856, was a student of the Hegelian philosophy popular in Germany in the early 19th century. His book, “The Ego and it’s Own”, takes- broadly – the same understanding of the ego as above, but attempts to make of that condition itself something heroic, even absolute. Stirners’s ‘ego’ is manifest in the avatar of the egomaniac, or contrarian, which character is so prevalent and visible today among us. It can be seen and heard in the desperate, and pathetic in the proper sense of that term, ranter against all the world for not recognising their undoubted worthiness, and which lack of recognition can therefore only be explained by sinister forces and their very personal, individual agenda against the heroic ego in question. It shows itself as the character who both despises the world, wants out, and yet craves to dominate it. It is the incoherent, impotent despite it's fulminating, and pitiable wreck that is left by a social, political, economic system which idolising the ‘great self-maker, entrepreneur’ (meaning in actuality, the rich) demonises anything resembling the common welfare, and non-individual or collective action (unless of course, that collective is one’s workforce or staff)

But Stirner, if that’s what he really believed, is simply carrying a line of thinking so far and then, arbitrarily, shutting it down. Stirner’s quest was to free the ego of the constraining ideals (in his day, such social buzzwords and shibboleths as “honour, freedom, right”) which impede the ego’s natural and absolute sovereignty (to use a once again trendy buzzword).

What he fails to see, according to Eduard Von Hartmann (still my favourite philosopher, despite my widening palette) is that ego itself is of the very same ontological status as these so-called constraining ideals that society shackles It with. It appears as a phantom within consciousness, and consciousness is prior to ego, which is merely a mode of or in consciousness.

I can give no better elucidation of this than to quote at length from Von Hartmann’s “Philosophy of the Unconscious”;

“..had Stirner approached the direct philosophical investigation of the Idea of the Ego, he would have seen that this is just as unsubstantial and brain-created a phantom as, for instance, the Idea of honour or of right, and the only Being which answers to the idea of the inner cause of my activity is something non-individual, the Only Unconscious which therefore answers just as well to Peter’s idea of his ego as Paul’s idea of his ego....If one has firmly and thoughtfully made this cognition his own, that one and the same Being feels my and thy pain, my and thy pleasure m only accidentally through the intervention of different brains, then is the exclusive egoism radically broken...”¹

Though the world of phenomena is only a conditioned appearance in any subjective consciousness, nevertheless that subjective consciousness is inseparable from the phenomena it deems objective. Whatever the absolute, or real ground of the world and the self is, it is neither of these coordinates. It must be rather the identity of absolute subjectivity and objectivity.

“I” only appear with the world, and with the world disappears the I ( it actually works visa versa too, but maybe that’s a bit unsettling so I won’t pursue it here. If anyone wants to investigate that line of thinking further, then I can only recommend Arthur Schopenhauer as a writer of great clarity, whose prose is extremely accessible).

The world is only appearance, but so too is the ego. That which is not appearance, that which is in-itself reality, and which therefore constitutes our true selves or inner nature, is also non-individual. We are bound together at our very root, invisible though it necessarily is. That is the ground for any ethics.

1. “Philosophy of the Unconscious, volume 3” Eduard Von Hartmann, 1884