You know...we all have the drunken nights or acid trips or epiphany moments where we start questioning the fabric of reality.
I know you do too.
Everyone does.
But then the next day we go to work and it just disappears.
It seems so irrelevant and unimportant but it's really not.
Don't get me wrong. Both Marx and Hegel, with their individual dialectics, present valid aspects of phenomonology. And aside from being totally different, theyre not that different. Both acknowledge that material and thought-based contradictions exist. Both have come up with approaches to the elimination of said contradictions. Both are concerned with some kind of 'root' cause of phenomena, movements, transformations, etc. But...couldnt both be equally right and/or equally wrong? Depending on where ever youre standing, couldnt they be equally valid and are simply missing the central connecting point.
Max Stirner's main premise is a negation of dialectical materialism (matter and material conditions and hierarchies dictate reality) as well as dialectical idealism (mind and ideas come before and produce material conditions). Stirner negates both in that he combines the two and sets the relationship of immaterial self with material self as a foundation for, both, material reality and thought (including representation). Whereas materialists believe that change is made through direct material action, idealists believe that ideas have to be changed first. Stirner's dialectical egoism claims that change is only possible through individual ownness and power. So the concept is literally completely separate from the external world. Stirner sees the world as a kind of playground of inconsequential and indifferent interactions unless agency is claimed as fully owned and indestructible.
While this is a radically individualist conceptualization of self, it does not adhere to objectivist notions like Ayn Rand's hierarchical object world in which agency is twisted and bent into this crack house of wish fulfillment where individualism means radical self concern. Stirner's individualism acknowledges the interconnectedness between self and other as being the foundation of one another.
In this way, Simone de Beauvoir developed Stirner's thought in her text 'The Ethics of Ambiguity.' She says that freedom is necessarily connected to an ethical system which acknowledges the limitations of radical self-concern and I believe that it's the same with Stirner, which I think can be exemplified by his radical focus on self (or ego) as central, not trying to objectivize reality or other AT ALL. He made no claims that would indicate that he sees himself as an authority over anyone or anything and acknowledged that all power and ownness stemmed from agency. His works did not even touch the position of other as it isn't relevant to his ownness.
Therefore, by using individual power and asserting agency, the individual can affect both ideas as well as material conditions (see also Nietzsche's will to power).
This is a difficult position to have in a world (ran by individuals) that seeks to externalize responsibility out of fear of breaking our massive dependence on comfort which has taken decades to build a perfect IKEA catalogue world around where we are not only comfortable but also virtuous and "hot as fuck" for it (claim: neoliberalism is a program for sexual status acquisition (see Wilhelm Reich), where the current standard is that the most progressive and virtuous is the most sexually appealing).
This is exactly what makes Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis and the distinction between reactionary and revolutionary meaning-processing of capitalism a relevant movement of thought, in my opinion. However, I dont interpret Anti-Oedipus as fundamentally materist. It directly acknowledges the massive outcomes of self-interest in non-agent perception and how agent perception can be produced through schizoanalysis. Instead of looking at the world as something produced through unconscious mechanisms such as repression and sublimation, it shows that the "human" and its information-processing through familial structuring is a flawed claim and not as relevant to historical movements as much of enlightenment philosophy made it out to be. Instead, they promote the idea that the desiring-machine is produced through capitalism and subjectivation.
In context to Stirner I find this relevant because Stirner saw individual power and ownness as influenced by three stages of development, almost like a liminal process of the development of agency which included several rites of passage before arrivinhg at agency through the acknowledgement of the irrelevance of fixed concepts such as morality. This is not about psychology. It almost separates psychology from social meaning-making and conformity needs. Subjectivities are produced through subjectivation.
I mean...ask Foucault. The more you look at the historical developments the more you can find continuously adapted, invasive methods to counterbalance ownness and power - for example, by changing the meaning of spiritual as transcendental and sensual (body focused). What Stirner calls a spook in relation to the body, like a twisting of our mental capacity to differentiate between spiritual and sensual, is a non-objective individualist answer to the body-without-organs (Deleuze and Guattari's conceptualization of the body (and by proxy unconscious and conscious processes) as unregulated potential).
It is really difficult for me to differentiate between materialism and idealism because I feel they are in flux and connected as a condition for one another. Idk if that makes sense but I most align with dialectical egoism and a negation and simultaneous acknowledgement of the interrelated existence of both.
Stirner is an individualist. But like, the O.G. individualist. Let's please just forget that Ayn Rand was ever put in the same Wikipedia article and move on, redefining 'individualism' as centering around experience (agency vs. sensuality). I feel like, in a time where everyone is screaming to have their identity validated by power structures and empowerment movements are warped and twisted to support denial, cognitive dissonance and virtuosity, logically based in morality (and other spooks), this dude needs to make a comeback.
And Im determined to help with that!