Why is he so Underrated?
>>8089106
>Why is he so Underrated?
Underrated isn't a proper noun, it's a verb
also did you really have to include that? You already know people will hate you for that, and if you don't then you clearly aren't very underrated.
>>8089113
Why are you trying so hard to be intellectual?
>>8089106
He isn't underrated, he is widely credited for his influence on different "isms" and also on subsequent philosophers.
If you mean underrated in the sense that there is not as wide of an interest in him by the general population as there is with others or that there is not a consensus among academics that he was a more important philosopher then others then its because he isn't really as unique or original as many people on /lit/ seem to think he his.
His ideas were just the latest iteration of a branch within philosophy that had been present since the Greek skeptics (whom Stirner cites in his book) and who many people before him had touched upon. I understand that on /lit/ there tends to be a glorification of him that somewhat idolizes and mystifies him but his ideas are less impressive when you understand that they are basically just a new take on something which had already been addressed a dozen times. Its not as though he came up with entirely original ideas and insights on his own. He was aware of previous Greek and modern skeptic and skeptic-like philosophers and incorporated what he knew about them into his own version of skepticism.
Stirner is definitely worth reading but its not as though he towers above the other major philosophers from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.
>>8089106
Misreadings, denial, too radical for people to stomach.
>>8089199
>widely credited for his influence on different "isms" and also on subsequent philosophers
not really. You get this impression if you read up on Stirner, but if in general intellectual culture, there's zero awareness of this. There is the basic "Stirner is the guy who was destroyed by Marx" or people who know the title of the book he wrote and maybe that he was a radical egoist (which in this formulation is basically wrong). Even leftists have mostly no idea what his actual thought is ('class struggle anarchists' think he is an individualist (cf. Black Flame), and some Leftists in Germany feel compelled to mention Stirner as a proto Fascist (which is hilarious bullshit) even in works that have nothing to do with either (like an introduction to the SI), because of some Marxist cranks who popularized the idea in the 60s).
>>8089302
>dude like nothing but urself is real lmao
>whoa I can't handle this its too radical wtf what do I do!
>>8089199
>Its not as though he came up with entirely original ideas and insights on his own. He was aware of previous Greek and modern skeptic and skeptic-like philosophers and incorporated what he knew about them into his own version of skepticism.
I'm sorry but you didn't understand Stirner. Your insistence on the Greek connection also makes it sound like you read the first 50 pages, at most. You should try to read Stirner's Critics and also consider his work as a radical attack on the Super-Ego, the reading espoused by Bernd Laska.
Can someone explain to me why Stirner gets so much love on here but Ayn Rand doesn't? Philosophy is admittedly not my domain of expertise, so if anyone could illuminate the differences at a higher level between Rand and Stirner it would be appreciated. I've read Rand's major works, and based on the small amount of info I've read on Stirner both here and elsewhere egoism and objectivism seem pretty similar.
Yes, I'm serious; this is not bait.
>>8089335
read this: http://www.lsr-projekt.de/poly/eninnuce.html
>>8089315
From reading academic papers and textbooks/books usually my impression has been that he is fairly cited and his contributions named but I don't really involve myself much in the leftist-marxist etc sphere and its publications so I didn't really know what they thought of it. The more academic stuff and the books by experts is the stuff that lasts and is read by people in the future though so in the area where it actually matters he is treated fairly which is good.
Linking Stirner to Fascism is silly. Its funny though that people like Mussolini claimed they were influenced by reading him.
>>8089351
>Its funny though that people like Mussolini claimed they were influenced by reading him.
iirc he said something about the "highest peaks of german thought" and mentioned a handful of people, one one whom was Stirner. It really doesn't say a lot except for "I have heard that he is radical and not too mainstream, so I will namedrop him". Foucault did the same (in his enumeration, Stirner was mentioned along the Western Church Fathers and other unrelated 'cool references').>>8089351
>From reading academic papers and textbooks/books usually my impression has been that he is fairly cited and his contributions named
What textbooks are those? His influence on Marxism is probably not mentioned in an intro to Marxism. His similarity to certain post-structuralist ideas (at least according to Saul Newman et al., though even Wolfgang Essbach has jumped on this train) doesn't mean that he is mentioned in introductions to post-structuralist thought afaik (would be interesting to know if I'm wrong). Existentialism maybe, I don't know. What kinds of topics did you read about where Stirner was mentioned?
>>8089335
Both are trash tier philosophers, but Rand isn't a relativist, is ugly and has no meme value.
>>8089335
Rand is entirely spooked.
Because "argument by pun" is not the sort of thing academic philosophy is generally in to.
>>8089335
Rand was a moral realist, Stirner was not.
>>8089332
I didn't mean to imply that Stirner was purposely trying to base his theories on the Greeks or viewed his as the extension of theirs, I just meant to bring up that he was aware of other people who had spoke about things that were very similar to the ideas Stirner ended up proposing. There was a current of skepticism (using the term broadly) that entered western philosophy when Pyrrho traveled east with Alexander and met Buddhists or Jainists and came back to Greece and spoke about them. A group of Skeptic philosophers eventually developed in Greece and made it into the historical record with their texts available for future philosophers.
Throughout much of later western philosophy especially during and after the enlightenment many of the great and most influential philosophers took a skeptic (again, using the term broadly) approach to certain issues. Examples of this include Hume and Kant. Even the major ones who didn't agree with the skeptic approach to certain things felt as though it was important enough that they had to argue against it such as Hegel or Descartes.
The question of skepticism in general or skepticism about certain things was one of the major questions being addressed by philosophers at the time. Stirner would have been aware of all of this and would have had a large amount of material on it to read and think about from the Greeks onwards to modern philosophers.
Stirner's thesis can be simplified to being that we believe in things like ethics or morals that exist as some sort of external/objective reality but according to him they are in fact spooks and are illusionary and imaginary. That in itself isn't that unique or ground-breaking.
Yes his ideas went beyond that and included stuff about how spooks constrain the freedom of people who believe them and that instead we should do what we want etc but the core of Stirner's idea is the concept of spooks. There had been many other people before him who had dealt with the central issue he was addressing and what made Stirner different is that he stepped back and applied the skeptic approach to the whole thing and then wrote about how one could act once they have that knowledge. The core concept of Stirner's thesis though isn't unique and leaving aside the "do want you want/follow self-interest" stuff its barely different from Pyrrho and the other Greek skeptics.
>>8089368
In college a few years ago I wrote a number of papers on modern art, modernism/POMO, nihilism, existentialism, and to a lesser extent anarchism and related topics. I don't remember the titles but I do remember reading a lot of academic articles and books/textbooks and his name would come up pretty often. The authors usually didn't feel the need to mention him in the first few pages but in the parts where the development/history of the thing that the book was about was detailed usually he would be mentioned as being important for it.
>>8089113
>trying to look smart
>not knowing about participles
>>8089506
>the core of Stirner's idea is the concept of spooks
I strongly disagree. If you reduce Stirner's thought to this, you have greatly impoverished it. This would mean that Stirner only showed the contuity of the structural domination of individuals by reified concepts between religion and humanism (this alone would be quite important, most likely not something that the Pyrrhonists anticipated, but I'll read up on them and report back). As concerns terminology, the Einziger is surely as important, if not more so, as it shows Stirner's way out of the predicament of philosophical language turning into a yoke for its users (by inventing a phrase without intensional content, pure reference/extension). Aside from this, Stirner has a relatively unique position on the big dualisms of mind/body and idealism/materialism, in that he shows that individual experience precedes either side of these devides (Stirner's critics is the most important thing here) and instead of these 'dividing binaries' he creates the 'unifying binary' of Einziger and Sein Eigentum (this has almost entirely been ignored in Stirner reception). He also describes how the way spooks are entrenched in the individual mind latches onto the libidinal economy, something quite ahead of his times in its anticipation of psychoanalytical investigations.
