Discover rare photographic glimpses of pioneering egoists such as Dora Marsden and Benjamin R. Tucker, and delve into the visionary project to produce a Braille edition of Max Stirner’s magnum opus for the indomitable Helen Keller. Unearth a plethora of fascinating artifacts pertaining to Malfew Seklew, and be riveted by the astonishing revelation of Ragnar Redbeard’s brief yet impactful foray as a Canadian Socialist Provocateur.

This sixth issue of Der Geist is sure to delight and offend, but most of all, serve as an essential philosophical reference work for centuries to come.

DER GEIST: The Journal of Egoism from 1845 – 1945 | ISSUE 6 | Winter 2023
Paperback, 212 pages, $15
ISBN 978-1-944651-29-9, ISSN 2639-5339

Der Geist, (Trevor Blake, editor; Kevin I. Slaughter, co-editor) is an English-language journal for an international audience, publishing original scholarship on the philosophy of egoism. The journal is descriptive of the first century of egoism in print (from the 1845 publication of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum by Max Stirner to the end of 1945), not prescriptive in advocacy of egoism.

CONTENTS

Introduction by the Editor  2

1. Max Stirner   7

Max Stirner’s Anarchist Gospel | A Dutch Review of Stirner’s Work | Anarchist Black Dragon | Max Stirner vs. Wahrheit-Sucher | “Celine Adele Marillier” | Pity and the Future | Max Stirner and the Grisette | Steven T. Byington’s Triple Score

2. Malfew Seklew  29

On “Bérnard’s Tour” | Minister Mocks Malfew  | Stern Critique of Christian Socialist  | Seklew Asks: Nietzsche to Blame?  | Social Aristocrat Socialist Secretary | A Freak Among Reformers  | No Guide for Anybody | Proletarians in Purgatory | No Justice for Malfew Seklew  | “We’re All More or Less Nutty” | Not Seeking Work  | Seklew Scolds Simpoleons, Supplies Sample Shilling Sericine Silk Set | No Detail Too Small!

3. Ragnar Redbeard   51

Redbeard in Canada | Desmond Selling George  | Give the New Hand a Show! | A.D. in the O.E.D.  | A Bogus Book | Australian Socialist Drinking Club | Redbeard’s Rough Stuff |“We Understand the Redbeard Philosophy” | Voima On Oikeus | Etc.

4. Dora Marsden  95

Dora Marsden for the Prosecution | The Freewomen of New York | Dora Marsden, unser aller Mutter  | Dora Marsden Ephemera | Rare Portraits

5. Benjamin DeCasseres   107

Emmeline Pankhurst | Pyrrhonism and Acatalepsy | Balzac | The Borrowed Mirror

6. Friedrich Nietzsche   117

Nietzsche and a Braille Stirner for Hellen Keller | “Will Nietzsche Come Into Vogue…” | The Works of Friedrich Nietzsche | Alexander Tille Reads Egoism

7. Enzo Martucci   135

A Sketch of Martucci | An Excerpt from The Red Sect | Martucci on Stirner

8. Free Spirits  159

Peter Lamborn Wilson Has Passed  | Hakim Bey: Real and Unreal | Vox Populi Vox Dei | Thompson at Rudolf Steiner Hall | Speakers’ Corner Anthology | Among the Anarchists | The True Comarade | Is This What You Call “Living?” | The Thirteenth Paragraph | Greeves Fisher, A Sketch | Dominance vs. Egoism | More Individualism | Individualism and Property | Why I am a Right-Wing Anarchist | Opening and Closing the Dil Pickle | Christmas a Joke! | “I” a poem  | “I GO” a poem| A Letter to the Editors of Freedom | Enrico Arrigoni Bibliography | Photo of Benjamin R. Tucker | About the Editors

An interview with Svein Olav Nyberg

Mr. Nyberg, could you briefly tell us your definition of Egoism? What authors have inspired your writing?

My direct inspirations have been few. Perhaps only Max Stirner should be mentioned, since I more or less considered myself a disciple of his in my active years. But there have been other minor inspirations, and some of them even by contradiction. It is, for instance, very hard to get past Ayn Rand when you mention “egoism” in our time, and she has of sorts inspired me, but very much via negativa, by that I honed my own understanding of the word in contrast to hers. Not that I am all in disagreement, either, but where we had our differences is perhaps where I was most clarified. Other than that, smaller inspirations from popular psychology and even eastern culture (chuang tzu) have of course had their say. And much in the way of Rand, so have also Nietzsche and Socrates been useful.

My definition? As an old acolyte for Stirner, I have of course not just one. Stirner uses the term “egoist” in at least two ways, so I think I am guilty of at least three. So let me give you three simple ones: 1) The egoist as the moral philosophical disproof, the ad absurdum, is the man who does not act “as man” according to the moral philosopher, and who therefore ends up being the paradoxical “man who is not a man”. Of course, it is the philosophy that dies as a result of this contradiction, not the man. 2) “The creative nothing”. This is what Stirner’s definitions boil down to, and is perhaps the most alluring statement of egoism. It also borders on mysticism, which is another one of my long-time interests. 3) A man whose actions follow from his own interest. This leaves the word “interest” inherently undefined, and for my part at least, an examination of this leads to #2. But I notice others examine it differently and end up with egoisms much closer to the common derogatory term of someone who cares shit about others.

When did you become interested in Egoism?

In my mid teens, after a bit of a philosophical crisis. I had hoped that ethics was somehow logically provable, and of course preferably that these ethics equalled the ones I subscribed to at the time. But the more I tried, the farther away that goal became, until I discovered what all young thinkers discover sooner or later: that we cannot think so hard that we manage to materialize a bridge to “ought”. Not from “is”, but nor from anywhere else we might feel comfortably safe to start. That was when I discovered the trio of Stirner, Nietzsche and Rand, and in the former I found a positive spin on what had seemed like doom.

You have written about what egoism is not, misconceptions of what Egoism is. Could you tell us about this?

That’s an interesting question, and as you saw above, even a single person such as myself often work with several conceptions of that single word. So I won’t go the route of Rand who defines the word, and then everyone else are wrong – by definition.

What is common to most understandings of egoisms, though, is that it is an “ism” of the self, so it means to be “for yourself” in some way. I think where it goes wrong is when someone imposes an external constraint on the meaning. Say, for instance, that they insist that all of existence is a power struggle. With that constraint, being “for yourself” automatically implies “being against the other”. You see where this is going? Other pathways may also end up precisely there, equating being for yourself with somehow wanting ill fortune for others or preying on them. If that was all there was to egoism, then egoists would shun each other’s company! In essence, these people have defined the “egoist” as a predatory character, a near synonym for a “sociopath”. And aside from Sherlock Holmes in the new TV series, not many would defend that. I would not, and Stirner would not. But the sociopath *does* serve one philosophical function: that of being a counter-example to the ethical theorist’s “man”.

But yet, I meet people who argue that philosophical egoists are simply sociopaths in philosophical clothing. This is usually based on a sample of zero persons.

So perhaps just as important as clarifying what egoism is not, is to clarify what self-professed egoists in practice are not. The ones I have met have interestingly enough been very kind people, and open and generous to boot. Quite opposite of the stereotype people have of the reclusive miser scheming others’ misfortune. They actively care about people in their surroundings, and they profess philosophical egoism because they think it will help these others.

At this point, someone may well interject “But what about the non-philosophical egoists, the ones who don’t use the word but who simply act the way we mean when we say ‘egoist’?” And to that, is there really anything to answer? They have already defined “egoist” to mean what they mean, and are thus using the word in the rather common but unreflected and stereotypical way. They really want to reserve that word as a synonym for the predatory and the sociopath. Well, that’s fine too, but they do limit their understandings of the world if they insist that theirs is the only meaning, being dark mirror images of Ayn Rand, in my world.

For those who may not know, could you tell us who Max Stirner was, and why his writing is important in discussing Egoism?

Interesting question. While you could always look him up in some encyclopaedia, the entry writers seem to at best rely on second hand sources, which means they are often off-target by a near 180˚. You may also wonder how it is possible to confuse ethical egoism with epistemological solipsism without a decent dose of absinthe.

Anyway, Max himself. His lived in Germany in the first half of the 1800s, and was a student of Hegel’s. But of course, the name of the teacher does not say it all. What matters at least as much is what the student himself brings into the equation, and Max seems to have had a particularly strong individualist streak. So the short version of who Max Stirner was, was that he was the one to breathe individualism onto Hegelianism – or possibly Hegelianism into individualism.

The result of mixing the Hegelian toolcase with individualism was a very potent kind of individualism that not only asserted the individual in its nakedness, but which also used the intellectual aikido of Hegelianism to swing its oppositions arguments around and against them. This is what Stirner did so successfully: the ethical philosophers of his time tried to subdue real humans by labelling them inhuman, or “un-man”, if they did not do what the ethical theory commanded. Stirner turned that very “un-man” as a club against the philosophies themselves. A dialectical turn, an intellectual aikido, which broke his opponents.

And break his opponents he did. The Young Hegelian club from which Stirner sprang did indeed wither, and I say much as a result of his attacks. One particular weed from that club escaped, though. Not intellectually, for it was nothing but Feuerbachianism (Feuerbach was a prominent Young Hegelian) expounded with lots of gusto. But that gusto let it survive, even though its gardener Karl Marx had to let off steam against Stirner through a few hundred pages of ad hominem attacks on Stirner in The German Ideology.

And that is perhaps the most important reason why Stirner still is important: Marx and Stirner were opposites, and Stirner had the stronger case. Marx won through back then because he had the stronger personality and financial backing. But Stirner still has the stronger case. To anyone wanting to promote egoism – or any other reasonable stripe of individualism – using Stirner’s appropriation of Hegel’s toolbox will prove very valuable.

And it might even be as Hegelian philosopher Lawrence Stepelevich has suggested, that Stirner not only appropriated Hegel’s toolbox for individualism, but even did his philosophical aikido so thoroughly that he showed that Hegel’s toolbox really belonged to Stirner all the time. Stirner was the ultimate Hegelian.

A note on Ernst Jünger’s Eumeswil

By Sid Parker

Ernst Jünger (1895-1998) was one of the most controversial figures in twentieth-century Germany.

At eighteen he ran away from home and joined the Foreign Legion.

Brought back by his father, at nineteen he became an infantry officer at the outbreak of the first World War. He was wounded several times and was awarded Pour le Mérite, Germany’s highest medal for bravery.

After the war ended he wrote several books about his battle experiences in which he glorified the warrior as the new elite.

He became a “conservative revolutionary,” was active in the nationalist movement and was invited by Adolf Hitler (who greatly admired his war books) to join the National Socialists. Jünger refused.

When the National Socialists came to power he withdrew from politics, maintaining a detached attitude as an “internal emigrant.”

In 1939 he wrote his perhaps most famous work On Marble Cliffs, an allegorical story of the triumph of barbarism. It became a bestseller before the National Socialists, much alarmed, suppressed it. Jünger, however, remained unharmed due, it is said, to Hitler’s explicit instructions.

The second World War saw him back in the army with the rank of captain. He took part in the invasion of France, won another Iron Cross and spent most of his time as a staff officer in occupied Paris. Here he met many of the literary figures of the time.

Although he took no part in the plot to kill Hitler in 1944, he was on friendly terms with some of the conspirators. For this he was dismissed from the army.

When Germany fell to the victorious Allies he was regarded with suspicion by the British occupying powers and his books were banned. Undeterred he continued to write and refused to appear before a de-Nazification tribunal on the grounds that he had never been a Nazi.

Once the ban on the publication of his works was lifted, he produced a steady stream of novels, essays and journals.

By now he had evolved far beyond his erstwhile political militancy, becoming more and more content to be an observer.

At eighty-five he wrote one of his last major works: Eumeswil. Although described as a novel it is difficult to fit into this category.

It is set in an unspecified future. Nations have disappeared, giving way to world government. This in turn has collapsed and been replaced by empires and city state.

Eumeswil is one of the city states and is ruled by a benevolent tyrant called the Condor. Its narrator is a young historian named Martin Venator who is also night steward at the tyrant’s citadel, the Casbah. Here he records the observations of the tyrant and his entourage and develops them into reflections upon power and history.

Venator embodies Jünger’s concept of “the anarch”, whom he carefully differentiated from “the anarchist.” The anarch is a self-owner, who is liberated from all ideologies, and intent on protecting himself from their blandishments.

Throughout the book there are echoes, varying in strength, of Max Stirner’s The Ego and His Own, together with some sometimes puzzling attempts by the author to distinguish his views from those of Stirner. “Puzzling” because these take the form of criticisms he does not clarify.

Several pages of Eumeswil are devoted to Stirner himself, and here Jünger displays a rather curious ambivalence. He writes, for example, that Stirner’s life “was banal … misspent in profession and business, a failed marriage, debts, a regular tavern table with the standard blabber preceding the German revolution, a high-level philistine – the usual stuff.”

Yet he remarked about Marx and Engels labelling him “Saint Max” “all derision contains a speck of truth … the characteristic feature of great saints – of whom there are very few – is that they get to the very heart of the matter. The most obvious things are concealed in human beings, nothing is harder to evince than what is self-evident, Once it is uncovered or rediscovered it develops explosive strength. Saint Anthony recognized the power of the solitary man, Saint Francis the power of the poor man, Stirner that of the man alone. At bottom everyone is ‘solitary’, ‘poor’ and ‘alone’ in the world.”

And: “the discoverer has his delights – what had touched me so deeply?”

As a work of art, as a philosophical meditation, as a reaction to the “explosive power” of The Ego and His Own, Eumeswil is well worth reading.

S.E. Parker