Work · Life & Existential Philosophy
The Ego and Its Own
Setting one’s cause on nothing: against God, humanity and every fixed idea.
Introduction
Stirner’s only major book appeared in Leipzig in late 1844, dated 1845, and briefly caused a stir among the Berlin Young Hegelians. Its first and last sentence borrows a line from Goethe’s poem “Vanitas! Vanitatum vanitas!”. The first part, “Man”, tells the history of the mind as a series of possessions by ideas, from antiquity and Christianity to liberals, socialists and Feuerbach’s “humanity”. The second part, “I”, develops ownness (Eigenheit), the unique one and the “union of egoists”, a free association that individuals use and leave at will. Marx and Engels answered with hundreds of pages in The German Ideology. In the 1890s John Henry Mackay rediscovered the book for individualist anarchism.
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Connections
Criticizes
- The Essence of Christianity1841 · Ludwig Feuerbach
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