Saturday, October 28, 2017

quote of the day


"When Fichte says, 'the I is all,' this seems to harmonize perfectly with my statements. But it's not that the I is all, but the I destroys all, and only the self-dissolving I, the never-being I, the -finite I is actually I. Fichte speaks of the 'absolute' I, but I speak of me, the becoming I."

"I am not nothing in the sense of emptiness, but am the creative nothing, the nothing out of which I myself create as creator."

- Max Stirner, The Unique and Its Property 

Also translated as The Ego and Its Own or sometimes most adequately as The Unique One and Its Own, Stirner's text is probably the one I turn to most often when I can tolerate reading political texts (I do not have much interest in the political, save for any ontology undergirding it). Plato's Republic, though, is another "political text" I enjoy, but to me that text is more axiological if not outright ethical.

Ernst Juenger's The Forest Passage is yet another - should I say "quasi-political" text, where again, like Stirner, things are more apolitical than political, if we are speaking ontology first. Nevertheless Stirner's book is quite amazing.

Apparently Stirner's philosophy and subsequent criticism of Feuerbach forced Marx to publish hundreds of pages in response. So there is certainly something there. I myself picked up Stirner due to Ernst Juenger referring to him as "Saint Max."

A highly recommended book.