Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️ (anarchopunk_girl@kolektiva.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Oct-2023 03:28:24 JST novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️

   Continuing to be the only person seemingly in this entire town that consistently masks (KN95) even in leftist spaces is the most egoist thing I've ever done lol

   • Embed this notice
     novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️ (anarchopunk_girl@kolektiva.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Oct-2023 03:43:04 JST novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     Tell me the guy who wrote this was ending being an egocentric asshole who doesn't care about anyone lol,

     "I also love human beings, not just a few individuals,[358] but every one. But I love them with the awareness of egoism; I love them because love makes me happy, I love because love is natural to me, it pleases me. I know no “commandment of love.” I have fellow-feeling with every feeling being, and their torment torments me, their refreshment refreshes me too"

     Hell, he kind of sounds a bit vegan lol

   • Embed this notice
     novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️ (anarchopunk_girl@kolektiva.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Oct-2023 06:48:12 JST novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • Victor Gijsbers

     @victorgijsbers he's not expressing it as an ontological fact of all beings or anything, but only for himself — he's speaking personally. The point he is making is simply that caring only about your own causes and values and desires (in the sense of the things you *actually do* care about, desire, or value, not things that simply request those things from you) doesn't necessarily have to cut you off from everyone else. Also, he goes on in the next paragraphs to caveat this a little, saying that the fact that he cares about everyone's suffering and joy sort of by default doesn't mean there aren't exceptions to this, because there is no fact of his necessarily loving everyone or any commandment.

   • Embed this notice
     Victor Gijsbers (victorgijsbers@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Oct-2023 06:48:13 JST Victor Gijsbers

     in reply to

     @anarchopunk_girl This is a possibly naive question, because I have not read Stirner. (This is Stirner, right?) I get the claim that there is no command to love. But the last sentence gets pretty close to endorsing a universality of love not as a commandment, but as an ontological fact. If I love universally, and if love involves identity, then the universe is, in some sense, universal love; reality is love. Pretty platonic, and it's unclear where the ego has gone. How should I see this?

   • Embed this notice
     novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️ (anarchopunk_girl@kolektiva.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Oct-2023 06:50:47 JST novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • Victor Gijsbers

     @victorgijsbers

     "Now, how does anyone or anything that I do not love, have a right to be loved by me? Is my love first or is his right first? Parents, relatives, fatherland, people, hometown, etc., and finally fellow human beings in general (“brothers, brotherhood”) claim to have a right to my love and lay claim to it without further ado. They look upon it as their property, and upon me, if I don’t respect it, as a robber who deprives them of what is due to them and is theirs. I am supposed to love. If love is a commandment and a law, then I must be educated for it, trained in it, and if I violate it, punished. People will therefore exercise the strongest “moral influence” possible on me, to bring me to love. And there’s no doubt that one can titillate and seduce human beings to love as to other passions, for example, to hatred as well. Hatred runs through whole generations simply because the ancestors of one belonged to the Guelphs, those of the other to the Ghibellines.[363]

     But love is not a commandment, but rather, like each of my feelings, my property. Acquire... my property, and then I will give it up to you. I don’t need to love a church, a people, a fatherland, a family, etc., that don’t know how to acquire my love, and I set the purchase price of my love thoroughly to my pleasure." (Not here that he's thoroughly anticapitalist, so this is just an analogy)

   • Embed this notice
     novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️ (anarchopunk_girl@kolektiva.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Oct-2023 06:53:30 JST novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • Victor Gijsbers

     @victorgijsbers sort of in the same way someone can have general compassion for everyone they see/meet/interact with, but none for peoplw who are so odious or evil that they forfeit that. Those people don't know how to make themselves worth compassion.

   • Embed this notice
     novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️ (anarchopunk_girl@kolektiva.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Oct-2023 06:54:34 JST novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • Victor Gijsbers

     @victorgijsbers e.g. I'd do a surprising amount to help any random stranger on the street. But fuck white supremacists or terfs or whatever, I wouldn't piss on them if they were on fire

   • Embed this notice
     novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️ (anarchopunk_girl@kolektiva.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Oct-2023 06:58:01 JST novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • Victor Gijsbers

     @victorgijsbers oh one last thing: "egoism" is a bit of a misnomer. It's not about a rigid proscribed "ego" and specific "self interest" in the way you think. Stirner's philosophy has more in common with stuff like Daoism than Randian Objectivism or whatever. It's a bit hard to explain though

   • Embed this notice
     novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️ (anarchopunk_girl@kolektiva.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Oct-2023 07:03:48 JST novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • Victor Gijsbers

     @victorgijsbers oh good god. Good luck! I've heard he's very difficult and in the original German uses extensive amounts of wordplay and alliteration. IIRC, the translator for the best version of the book (https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/max-stirner-the-unique-and-its-property) mentions that he manages to get an entire paragraph of alliteration

   • Embed this notice
     Victor Gijsbers (victorgijsbers@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Oct-2023 07:03:49 JST Victor Gijsbers

     in reply to

     @anarchopunk_girl I have a really lovely little old hardback edition of Stirner's book, but it'll take some courage to tackle 429 pages in tiny German Fraktur. 😅

   • Embed this notice
     novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️ (anarchopunk_girl@kolektiva.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Oct-2023 07:08:16 JST novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • Victor Gijsbers

     @victorgijsbers understandable. 😁 But I do recommend reading the book at some point because even if you don't end up agreeing with it I think most people would find it enlightening and interesting. Like WD-40 for the mind. You probably already know this, but he very forcefully questions a lot of received wisdom and assumed ideas in philosophy (he's considered a proto-post structuralist iirc) but has fun with it. He speaks in sarcasm, jokes, exaggeration, or pretends to take up his opponent's positions in order to do reductios on them a lot so you have to be very careful what you take his word for and what you don't! :D in keeping with his sort of jovial refusal to take any Traditions or Serious Philosophies seriously he writes very loosely. Hell, the first part of the book is purely just a satire of Hegel!

   • Embed this notice
     Victor Gijsbers (victorgijsbers@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Oct-2023 07:08:18 JST Victor Gijsbers

     in reply to

     @anarchopunk_girl Haha, okay, possibly I need to reconsider... (It's anyway not something I can tackle very soon, I've got to read a bunch of other philosophy books for projects I'm working on.)