Me Before You

A Short Critique of Stirner’s Owness

By Samiha Ashfaq

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Power is the ability to dictate the range of someone’s available actions1. To exhibit power over one’s person, to be one’s own, is to maintain a self-governed range of available actions, untroubled by social morality. Stirner categorises the ways power expresses in human identity through three main developmental stages: realism, idealism and egoism. It would be remiss not to note Stirner’s implication of the existence of a later, terminal stage for the elderly man; however, this hypothetical stage will not be further mentioned in this exploration due to Stirner’s withholding of a position on what this stage may be. Overall, I conclude that Stirner’s anarcho-egoism does not account for the heterogeneity of human drives, rendering it internally inconsistent.

Stage 1 – Realism

An individual is concerned with objects and events in the world and fulfilling their appetite. Stirner posits this attitude as the approach of young children who lack the capacity to identify that which is distinctive of their self from that which is from their external influences. Young children live without conviction, limited by their lack of material power and self-discipline.

Stage 2 – Idealism

The individual is ruled by ‘spooks’ (ideas) and ‘now in everything he proposes, he is met with an objection of the mind, of reason, of his own conscience2’. Stirner assigns this attitude to adolescents and young adults who submit to a thought-based structure despite conquering their desires.

Stage 3 – Egoism

The individual both rejects the idealist’s submission to principles and the realist’s subservience to appetite, appealing to their true nature. Stirner suggests this is the attitude of matured adults, only carrying out actions that are solely in their best interest.

Through this narrative, Stirner concludes that the most logical position for one to have is egoism, characterised by unmitigated self-ownership. The egoist does not prescribe to moralising actions (i.e, deeming acts as right, wrong, just, unjust) for it facilitates the tyranny of ideas in society. To live via moralising terms is to live a life deluded and alienated from self-sovereignty.

In practicality, this logic fails under its premise of ownness. If the egoist acts solely according to their self-determined best interest, then any form of ‘spook’ that is freely chosen can qualify as egoistic action. This means that an egoist may choose to follow a religion, such as Christianity which Stirner deems the apotheosis of idealism. This collapses the mutual exclusivity between egoism and idealism. If Stirner categorises this act as egoistic, the action contradicts the requirement that an egoist submits power to none but themself. If Stirner does not, then it seems that egoism follows objectives prescribed by Stirner, restricting the individual’s power in deciding what is best for themself.

Consequently, Stirner’s anarcho-egoism cannot be coherently applied to human populations as his model assumes a monolith of human motivation.

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1 Taylor, M. (1983). Community, anarchy, and liberty. Cambridge Cambridgeshire ; New York: Cambridge University Press.

2 Stirner, M. (2010). The Ego And Its Own. Gloucester, Gloucestershire, United Kingdom: Dodo Press.