Ep. 358: Max Stirner’s Egoism (Part Two)

0:07 Wes: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life. Welcome to part two of our discussion of Max Stirner's the Ego and its own from 1844. Last time we talked about the section of the book called Ownness, and in particular his critique of freedom and the concept of rights. And in this episode, we're going to start with section in the second part of the book called the Owner, and maybe we'll get into a subsection of that called My Power. In this introduction to this section called the Owner, the argument is that Ownness is not consistent with liberalism.

Liberalism. And he's thinking in particular here of the concept of equality, where your equality under liberalism is recognized insofar as you are man with a capital M, right, Insofar as you are human. But it doesn't really recognize you as unique or real or bodily or as a particular individual. It just treats you as a concept or as the species. That's the general essence of humanity. That's what's equal between different human individuals. And that, he says, makes brotherly love very easy, because it's not. You don't have to love Seth in particular to be a good Christian.

You just have to love the man in Seth, the human essence in Seth. And so you can see how that Christian idea, if it's accurately being accurately represented, becomes a basis for liberalism, right? The kind of. The thing that we extend to people when we give them rights, we do it not out of, you know, because we like that person in particular or love that person in particular. We just do it because that's what, as a human being, they deserve.

2:08 Dylan: It is interesting. So in that way of framing it, you know, the problem with liberalism is it's another kind of religion and is it's denying the particularity in any individual as a great flaw from Stirner's point of view. And so what we were talking about earlier as a hallmark of liberalism is that liberalism is designed or intended at least to maximize individual flourishing. At least that's the conceit by maximizing the conditions for people to exercise their freedom. And Stirner, as you were saying, Wes, just considers that just another set of constraints that are not living up to the goal of ownness. They're just. They're merely more constraints.

2:57 Wes: He has this funny section where he kind of says, liberalism marries me for the sake of one of my qualities. Like it objectifies me, right? In the same way you might marry someone for their body as opposed to their mind. All Christianity cares about is my spirit. And what he wants to say is, well, I'm not my spirit, I'm not humanity in general. I'm me. And there should be some place for that, there should be some respect for that. It's a very thin tribute for me to be given something because of this universal quality that's shared between people, and in particular this so called essence, man should really just be treated as like any other accidental quality or property.

It's mine and it shouldn't be something that's superior to me and stands over me, that hovers over me as an ideal that I have to live up to, right? I'm not really human because I'm not being good, right? All the problems that we have with conscience, it can become not liberating, but a form of torment. So he wants to see spirit, right, reduced to being the property of the ego, to being one aspect of ownness.

4:16 Seth: Well, I have the quote you're talking about just in case anybody's interested. So he's talking about Feuerbach and he says Feuerbach thinks if he humanizes the divine, he's found the truth. No, if God has given us pain, man is capable of pinching us still more torturingly. The long and the short of it is this, we are men. That we are men is the slightest thing about us and has significance only insofar as it is one of our qualities, Eigenschaften, or our property. I am indeed other things a man, as I am a living being, therefore an animal, or a European or a Berliner and the like.

But he who chooses to have regard for me only as a man or as a Berliner would pay me a regard that would be very unimportant to me. And why? Because he would have regard only for one of my qualities, not for me. There's a lot in here that I like, even though there's a lot that's odious. Because, you know, he's saying, if you regard me in a mediated way, through a concept, a class, a type, an adjective, whatever, then you don't really have any regard for me because you're not really thinking about me, the individual, particular, practical, embodied, historical, concrete person.

You're just saying, oh, well, you have this attribute, and I have some idea about what that attribute means. And so I make a judgment about you. And I think that's very powerful because you know how I feel about the notion of ideas and the ability to abstract from the individual. And it makes it easier to do violence to people. And I think it's really a call, not so much for authenticity, although I'm sure there is some of the 20th century philosophers of authenticity, like Heidegger and all that, probably pick some stuff up here, but he's basically, you know, it's like a cry, like, look at me, talk to me.

What do you think about me, this collection of things that I am, this concrete embodied individual that I am. Don't just think of me as this or that, think of me as me, you know, me in myself. And I'm sympathetic to that.

6:30 Dylan: Why doesn't the corporality that Feuerbach points to more work for Stirner? Because this question about the distancing by the problem of the abstract and species man and the problem of idealism, that's something that Feuerbach is engaged with and part of what he's going after is materialism and.

6:56 Wes: But he still believes in human nature.

6:58 Dylan: Yeah, so. So I guess my. So the corporality doesn't go far enough for Stirner because it still maintains restriction on freedom, on ownness that is born out of the notion of human nature. Or is it because Stirner would say we have to align with human nature. The stricture that Stirner is presenting is my ownness is manifest in my activity, whatever it is. And there's no structure or constraint on that. It's other than the heap of activity that it is, that's me in whatever way I happen to be presenting it. And there's nothing more to say about it other than that, you know, I'm going to present myself and I'm going to get.

And that recognition is going to be the validation of me, whatever it is. Maybe it's not. Maybe there's not even that right. It's its own self validation because it's just intrinsic action, activity of its own in its own way, but with no structure, no purported or coherence to it. Human nature would be a constriction on that. I guess that's right.

8:12 Seth: I don't know. I'm not sure that the issue between Stirner and Feuerbach is about there being a fixed human nature or not, or the idea of a human nature or not. A little further on he's comparing and contrasting liberalism and Christianity and he says what page we're on 157. So just a little further on from what I read like one paragraph down. Hence we have in liberalism only the continuation of the old Christian depreciation of the I, the bodily Hans, Hans being the name Hans. Instead of taking me as I am, one looks solely at my property, my qualities and enters into marriage bonds with me only for the Sake of my possessions. One marries, as it were, what I have, not what I am. The Christian takes hold of my spirit, the liberal of my humanity.

9:02 Wes: Yeah, that's the funny part I was talking about.

9:05 Seth: Yeah. So honestly I couldn't concisely sum up Feuerbach right in this minute, but the materiality of Feuerbach, did it have with it this notion of particularity and like anti transcendence? I'm trying to go back in my

9:22 Dylan: head, but I guess I think it does in the sense of pointing to a this and the importance of the this being something existent in a material form. But it does sound right that Feuerbach has something like human nature as you know, because there's still a commonality of that corporealness as really being an instance of us as participating species. Feuerbach doesn't completely distance himself from these larger notions of humankind.

9:55 Wes: Yeah, I think the thing with Feuerbach, right, is that he, that what we've called the criticism is that what we've called hitherto called God is really just a projection of our human essence, of properties that belong to our essence. And we say, oh, look at all these great things and they are alien and outside of us really. They are just part of our species essence. Right. Remember that Feuerbach phrase, species essence. And this is part of what Stirner is doing and what Marx famously picks up on is saying, well, that talk about a species essence, that talk about human nature is in and of itself still a vestige of Christianity and religious thinking.

You haven't really transcended it. You know, if you just replacing God with human essence or species essence is not good enough. You haven't really gone beyond God. And here I, Stirner, am gonna do that. We have to liberate ourselves entirely. So and the other part of this that Stirner criticizes, you know, he says that this, this liberalism and he's thinking of, I think Feuerbach explicitly, but it carries forward the Christian task of completing man right of this kind of self improvement project. We're going to live in a better society. And so communism is included under this concept of liberalism.

By the way, listeners shouldn't think in terms of oh, there's liberalism and there's communism. Communism is an extension of liberalism for Stirner. So this whole task of hey, we're going to develop a perfect society, although Marx himself would defend himself against that claim. He was very anti utopian, he was too cool for school, did not want to be accused of that. But in general that does seem to be the tenor for most crude communists that Marx also was criticizing at the time. We're going to continue to perfect ourselves, right? This whole Hegelian project where mind, the absolute, finds itself in our self consciousness as a philosophical or theological project that's supposed to become a political project with communists.

And Stirner is rejecting that project altogether. It's not really about developing a society, it's just about me.

12:25 Seth: Yes, well, yes, in fact. So Feuerbach is quite explicit about. I don't think Feuerbach would deny that he's in the legacy of Christianity. In some sense this is from our Feuerbach reading. The characteristic human mode of being as distinct from that of the animal is not only the basis but also the object of religion. But religion is the consciousness of the infinite. Hence it is and cannot be anything other than man's consciousness of his own essential nature of understood not as finite or limited, but as an infinite nature. So, and what Stirner is saying is quite the opposite.

We are not infinite beings. We do not have consciousness of the infinite infinity itself. The whole notion of an infinity, whether it's consciousness or God or what have you as any kind of basis for, you know, morality or rights or what have you just simply as a fiction, as is these things like Berliner, German Rhinelander, soccer player. Whatever these categories are, they don't capture the essential individual, particular person, the limited, the finite person and beyond that.

13:42 Wes: Again, I think the theme here is about alienation and setting up an alienated essence over and above us, so. And exalting that like a God or an idol. So here's the top of page 158. This is a great little section that is very reminiscent of Nietzsche. He calls liberalism the human religion. The human religion is only the last metamorphosis of the Christian religion. For liberalism is a religion because it separates my essence from me and sets it above me. Because it exalts man to the same extent as any other religion does its God or idol. So this is a direct critique of Feuerbach.

Because it makes what is mine into something otherworldly. Because in general it makes some of what is mine out of my qualities and my property something alien, namely, in essence, in short, because it sets me beneath man and thereby creates for me a vocation, right ficta, vocation of man. The vocation is to become men. We are men in essence, but we are not men in actuality. The vocation is to actualize ourselves, to complete our potentiality. So this, well, I say he criticizes Feuerbach. It's the same critique that Feuerbach is making of Hegel.

And in a way, it's the same. It's a critique present in Hegel. They're all critics of alienation, but no one seems to be good enough for the next. So I'm sure if we were to read what Marx has to say when he rails against Stirner, it might be something of the same extent, the same sort, which is that he doesn't go far, far enough. But anyway, in the case of this critique, Feuerbach, the critique is, yes, Feuerbach was on about alienation and wanted to say that God is just this projection and that we got to stop. We got to make the move from God to man, capital M to society.

But Stirner is saying, no, that's still alienated. So if you have this ideal of a perfect utopian society or a completed human essence, or however you want to put it, then you're still living a lie. And the only way out of the lie is to be honest. We're all egoists. We are all in it for ourselves. And again, we should be honest about that. How does that fit in with Marx? I mean, hopefully we'll find out as we read more. Because how do you square the communist desire for a society of true equality with Stirner's individualism? I don't quite know how you do that, but somehow this rejection of human nature is going to become important.

All right, that was the topic. 158. And then he'll go on to say, liberalism is the state religion of free states. And then the other criticism he has here is kind of reminiscent of Sandel and Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Is that okay? Yes, there's pluralism, and we say, okay, you can be Christian, you can be Jewish and so on and so forth. You can be Muslim. We'll just treat that as your own little private follies, he calls them. That's quaint. That's cute. Go ahead and do that. We're not going to oppress you, but we're not going to take you seriously either.

What we take seriously is freedom and rights and all the other things associated with liberalism. And Stirner doesn't seem to like that, that condescension.

17:09 Dylan: Yeah, I mean, I guess it's just an aspect that's absent here. And it makes sense on reflection that there's nothing of the reflection of the other in terms of helping us determine ourselves in Stirner. So that sort of foundational Hegelian notion is the pleasure absent, as far as I can tell, at least I mean in what we've read.

17:33 Seth: I'm not sure about that.

17:34 Dylan: Okay, so help me out with it, because what I'm seeing is there. The ownness is pure activity with no structure and no validation through reflection of the other to me. Because I wouldn't take any of that to reflect any constraint on me at all for helping me understand myself.

17:59 Seth: Okay, I see what you're saying. I have a citation in my notes accordingly. Because each thing cares for itself and at the same time comes into constant collision with other things. The combat of self assertion is unavoidable. Victory and defeat between the two alternatives. The fate of the combat wavers. The victor becomes the Lord, the vanquished one the subject. The former exercises supremacy and of supremacy the latter fulfills in awe and deference the duties of a subject. And he talks about them lying in wait, waiting for each other's weakness. So you definitely still have the struggle. You definitely still have the other. It's not idealism in the sense that there's no other subjectivities. It's just we're in a marketplace of competing self assertions.

18:53 Wes: Sounds an awful lot like the state of nature.

18:56 Dylan: Yeah, it does. It does. It sounds an awful lot.

18:59 Wes: Yeah. I don't know if it's in what we haven't read, but. Right. I doubt it is. But he's not going to make a serious attempt to defend himself against those sorts of accusations. The one defense that he made I already read about, well, animals get along just fine. But what do you do without morality? What do you do without rights and freedom and all those ideals? And if you look at the history of the 20th century, including nominally Marxist societies, the results are not good. Did not work out very well. But whether you attribute that to the rejection of the concept of right or to sort of totalitarian implications of certain aspects of communism, however you want to think about that.

There seems to be seeds of that here in Stirner, and I don't, because he's not giving us an argument. I don't know what you say to it. You kind of nod your head and say, okay, everyone's in it for themselves. Might makes right. You're going to be thrasymachus here. What's the upshot? I mean, there's lots of interesting stuff, right, about the sort of the limits of liberalism, again, to use that phrase, that state is supposed to be tolerant, but it doesn't tolerate the quote, unquote, unman, the part of us that doesn't correspond to the universal human nature.

And really, Stirner will Say this is on page 158 to 159. But we are really all unmen in this sense. You know, we are unmen in the sense that we are a cauldron of instinctual impulses that do not line up with what religion and conscience and morality demand of us. And those things are necessarily suppressed by the social order. And I think, and this is right. Part of the Nietzsche critique as well, and it's worth pointing to. There are big implications for that. It's worth drawing attention to it. And I think one has to confront it if you want to think about what a good society is.

But I think most of us would say, yeah, well, that's an unfortunate. That's a tension. But it doesn't mean we get rid of authority. It doesn't mean. Right. Freud wrote, if you go back and listen to our episode on civilization and its discontents, what is Freud on about? Similar sort of thing. Civilization causes a lot of misery through suppression of the instinctual. And Nietzsche says the same thing in the Genealogy of Morality. Right. We could have sort of turn all these instincts inward. We do violence to ourselves. But neither Freud nor Nietzsche would say, well, that means we have to get rid of that means we have to repudiate the state altogether or civilization altogether.

Right. Nietzsche is going to explicitly reject this idea of going backwards. We can't go backwards. We have to go forwards in some sense. And that means that involves the aesthetic. So he has a certain way forward. I don't see. Again, we don't get that in Stirner. What does this mean explicitly? What does it mean to embrace egoism? What is the practical upshot of that? Spell it out for us. Stirner, as he. Are you saying what you really seem to be saying? He doesn't. I don't think he tells us.

22:07 Dylan: Yeah, you make me want to go to the. My power section and just go a little bit over this right. Stuff. Yeah, one page 166. Right. Where he starts. Because I think this goes along with what you're saying. Right is the spirit of society. If society has a will, the will is simply right. Society exists only through right, but as it endures only exercising a sovereignty over individuals. Right is. Is it sovereign will? Aristotle says justice is the advantage of society and then all existing right is foreign law. Someone makes me out to be in the right, does right by me.

He goes on. So he's taking what we would usually think of in rights as a way of delineating our individuality and making. And delineating the. The boundary of constraint such that you can have a space to maximize flourishing and freedom. That's the idea about rights is to in fact carve out the space explicitly for individuals to be individuals as opposed to being, strictly speaking members of society. He's reading it as that boundary is really the cage bars of society in being that boundary. That's what right is.

23:28 Wes: He says a really interesting thing on page 167 to 168, which is that I am to reverence sultanic law in the Sultanate, popular law in republics, canon law in Catholic communities. To these laws I am to subordinate myself. I am to regard them as sacred. A quote unquote sense of right and. And law abiding mind of such a sort is so firmly planted in people's heads that the most revolutionary persons of our days want to subject us to a new sacred law, the law of society, the law of mankind, the right of all and the like. The right of all is to go before my right as a right of all.

It would indeed be my right among the rest, since I with the rest am included in all. But that it is at the same time a right of others, or even of all others, does not move me to its upholding. Not as my right of all will I defend it, but as my right. And then every other may see to it how he shall likewise maintain it for himself. Again, state of nature type, you know, if you have a right to what you have the power to. He'll explicitly repeat that over and over again. So there's something about. Again, this critique of rights is a lot like the critique of freedom.

You call it a right, but it's really an imposition because it's everyone's right. And as Mill pointed out on liberty, every right corresponds to a restriction.

24:57 Dylan: Yep.

24:58 Seth: Yeah. And in consideration of the right, the question is always asked what or who gives me the right to it? God, Love, Reason, Nature, Humanity? Nope. Only your might. Your power gives you the right. Your reason therefore may give it to you.

25:17 Dylan: Yeah, he on page 169, partly because it just gives me more of his sort of extremism. He says right sort of 2/3 of the way down in characterizing right. And he's saying like when the revolution stamped equality as a right, it took flight into religious domain, into the region of the sacred, of the ideal. He goes on to say that people that let themselves keep. Be kept in nonage have no rights to the condition of the majority. If they ceased to be in nonage, they would. Would have. Then only they would have the right to be of age. This means nothing other than this.

What you have the power to be, you have the right to. I derive all right and all warrant from me. I'm entitled to everything that I have in my power. I am entitled to overthrow Zeus, Jehovah, God, if I can. If I cannot, then these gods will always remain in the right and empower as against me. And what I do will be to fear their right and their power, and in important God fearingness, to keep their commandments and believe that I did right in everything and I do according to their right. Just as the Russian border guards think themselves rightfully entitled to shoot dead, the suspicious persons who are escaping says they murder by superior authority with right.

But I am entitled by myself to murder if I myself and do not forbid it to myself, if I myself have not fear murder as a wrong.

26:56 Wes: What do you got to say to that? Seth, I want you to defend Stirner here.

27:03 Seth: Well, I think there's an admission to some extent later on that the. The notion of entitlement to everything that's within my power ultimately is going to run into things that you may think are within your power may ultimately not be, or you may be that power that you had may be taken away from you. You know, it's sort of wild westy, frontiery. But he says I'm entitled by myself to murder if I myself do not forbid it to myself if I don't view it as wrong. But do we think that that's how the vast majority of people view it? Like we are always inclined to go this direction of, oh, well, there is no God, everything is permitted.

But he's also talking about rights here, not about what constitutes smart or constructive or social building. He's just essentially making the point that there's the idea that somebody is forbidding me to commit a crime in the name of a society, in the name of social stability, in the name of mankind or whatever just makes me want

28:20 Wes: to murder even more?

28:21 Seth: No, it doesn't make you want to murder anymore. He's just basically saying, like, look, you're the ultimate arbiter over whether a thing is right or wrong. It doesn't mean that judgment is completely uninformed, but it means you have to own it. If you think that murder is okay, well, you got to step up and own it. And if you murder somebody, you better expect to deal with the ramifications of that action.

28:47 Dylan: Well, I don't think he'd put it that way. I would think that it. Wes called it a State of nature vision in which there is no right or wrong. There's just power and lords and subjects. So in this respect, murder. I mean, I would say murder as the notion of wrongful killing doesn't even exist in this universe. There's no such thing as murder. There's just killing or not killing in that respect. And so that could be the outcome of my interaction. Me having my oneness. You know, I could end up killing somebody. And there's no structure to talk about it being right or wrong on purpose, because there isn't the structure for that. It's just a. You know, just like when, you know, two chimpanzees are. Are going at it, is one right or wrong who ends up winning the conflict? Or if, you know, when the lion takes down the antelope, is the lion right or is the antelope wrong in

29:57 Wes: general, I think we would see antelope escapes. It's right if the lion exactly escapes.

30:04 Dylan: Is that. And that framework, we would generally say doesn't admit of those interactions. And I think that's what he's saying, is that that state of nature is the best. Anything other than that is a perversion of what human beings are. And in fact, the most flourishing human being, if I use that word, is the one that is maximizing that freedom in that way. And that the only way you would say you would make that ranking is the closest thing you'd be, is whoever's dominating everybody else. As many people as possible. Whoever's the most. Lord, that would be the closest you got to it.

30:47 Wes: And he addresses communism specifically on pages 170 to 171. Thus, the Communists say equal labor entitles man to equal enjoyment. This is at the bottom of page 170. And then a little farther on. No, equal labor does not entitle you to it, but equal enjoyment alone entitles you to equal enjoyment. Enjoy, then you are entitled to enjoyment. But if you have labored and let the enjoyment be taken from you, then it serves you right. And then on 171, very similar, the communists will say, your work kind of creates a right to the product of your work. And Stirner will say, no, it belongs to whoever can take it or knows how to keep it. Basically knows how to defend it. And that's what he calls. I think he uses the phrase egoistic. Right. It's right for me.

31:39 Dylan: Yep. He goes on to rail against the notion of natural, of born right or birthright.

31:45 Wes: Yeah, the tiger. So he uses a tiger example. I'm in the right to Defend myself, but do not thereby defend my right. So I think, you know, part of the objection is you'll say human right is always something given, conceded by men to each other. And he doesn't want to be given anything. In a way, he wants a pure concept of right so one can understand the motivation for this. Is it up to you, the state to tell me what my rights are? And someone will say, well no, it's a natural right or it's a God given right. And then he wants to say, is it up to you, nature? Is it up to you, God to tell me what rights I have? No, I say what my rights are because they're in me. It's that kind of idea.

32:31 Seth: Well, he's not wrong to point out that the notion of rights is confused, that there's many different types of rights or justifications for rights as we use it. And he's also not wrong to point out that ultimately what lies behind right is violence.

32:47 Dylan: It reminds me also of, and it wouldn't be the only place it was said, but one of my favorite movies, Knight's Tale, Heath Ledger movie.

32:57 Seth: Oh yeah.

32:58 Dylan: And one of the comments that is made is early on is how did the knights and the kings become kings? Because they took it.

33:09 Wes: Yeah. So states are arise through foundational violence and the state has a monopoly on violence. And that's how it preserves order and the state. So even if we read the point, reach the point of having a liberal society, or maybe the best, whatever the best possible society is from a genealogical standpoint, it is constructed out of a history of violence and there's no way to get rid of that original sin. And we can't find any society where that original sin doesn't exist. But that's a descriptive, psychological or psychosocial observation. It doesn't tell us about what's right. It's not right that it's that way. It's just that it is that way.

33:55 Seth: Yeah. Are we maybe looking to get more out of him than he's willing to give? Is he more basically Rousseau, you know, then society is corrupting, society is a despotism. Right. All states are despotisms of one sort or another.

34:11 Wes: But Rousseau would tell us that men got along better, human beings got along better in a state of nature. They were naturally disposed to be kind to each other. And that implies that that's his standard. There is no standard for Stirner except for ownness.

34:29 Seth: Yeah, well, he's made no positive assertion about how people are disposed to act in the state of nature. It's a lot of violent. Yeah, it's a lot of violent language. He says, I have a right to murder if I don't think it's wrong. But he never says footnote.

34:43 Wes: But I wouldn't really. It's all in the footnotes.

34:47 Seth: He hasn't made any claims about how most people think. And in fact, he says, I don't care really. What he's doing here is just opening the kimono and giving us a. Flashing us his own pathology or whatever. Anyway, the point being that you can see in this particular section the strong pull towards anarchism. Now, if you're looking for a coherent and coordinated account of what an anarchistic society would look like, you're going to look a long time.

35:18 Dylan: You're not going to find it, at least in what we read.

35:20 Seth: Well, and I mean, in general, you're going to be very disappointed.

35:23 Wes: An anarchist argues that there will be an emergent order that is ultimately better for human beings. It's a better society than we can have by the imposition from top down. And so it implies a standard of the collective good. And I don't see how you can assimilate anything. Like, I don't think Stirner is consistent with any conception of the collective good, at least as far as he tells us. Yeah, you can't make any appeal to a collective good. This is radically individualistic. And even if you make an appeal, you know, so if it's all about Stirner's good.

Right, let's just say that this is. Can you even make an appeal to Stirner's good? Is there a Stirner essence? Which reminds me, that's not his real name. It was his nickname because he had a big forehead. Talk about objectifying or reifying or essentializing someone. But is there a Stirner essence? If he went to enough psychotherapy, could he figure out, okay, this is what's good for Stirner, even if it involves murdering other people? That's just the way I'm constructed and constituted. Sorry, everyone, that's the kind of creature I am. Or is he even more radical than that?

There's not even a Stirner nature. There's not even a good for Stirner. There just is what I will in the moment. And he even says things like that. He says, you can't bind me to some promise that I made yesterday, because that was me yesterday. I've changed. So me yesterday is not the same as me today. So I think this all just goes to say, once again that we don't get enough of a Positive vision here to know what the implications are. Right. Does he really think it would be, you know, murder is okay and all that. It's provocative, but where are we supposed to go with that?

I'm not sure. And that's my closing. I think it's time for us all to give our closings here.

37:23 Seth: Yeah. Very much on board with the criticism of the transcendent ideas and the way in which they underwrite oppression and violence against the individual, the particular individual. Big fan of concretization, historicity. Individuals over ideas definitely slots in. There are people that have more interesting constructive approaches. I'm still looking for an answer to this problem. In a developed society. Can be not particularly fun to read. Not hard to read, but not very fun to read either. Little repetitive. Big axe to grind with Christianity. I don't think I'll read all 300 pages of Marx's critique of Stirner. But I'm very interested to know what Marx took away from him.

38:11 Wes: Dylan?

38:12 Dylan: Yeah, I found a number of things provocative and we're thinking about. And because there's so little about what one builds from it, it feels more like some interesting, partially interesting observations. But I find the things that are missing challenge to get over. I didn't enjoy his writing at all. When I read people comparing him to Nietzsche or something like that, I thought, oh well, maybe I'll get into it. And even the prologue, the beginning about the translation made me think, oh, wow, maybe this will be super interesting writing. I didn't find it that way myself.

38:51 Wes: Okay, so next time we are going to read more Marx. We're going to be jumping around quite a bit. We're going to read the Theses on Feuerbach. We are going to read the introduction to his Grundrisse and also the famous fragment on machines from the Grundrisse. And then we're going to do a bit of capital preface to the German edition, the afterward to the second in German edition, and chapter one with a focus on section four on fetishism. Please follow us on social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. You can find more information and subscribe at the partiallyexaminedlife.com or on Patreon or on Apple podcasts directly.

39:38 Seth: Good night.

39:38 Wes: Good night.