Nietzsche – Union Of Egoists

Announcing “Der Geist” journal Issue 5, Spring 2022

Kevin I. Slaughter — Thu, 17 Feb 2022 20:10:52 +0000

Der Geist issue 5 is now available! That creates a total of 930 pages of egoism from 1845 to 1945, with “lost” works reprinted, new or lost translations in every issue, rare photos and images, and new research and writing.

Available from: Underworld Amusements | Amazon.com | Amazon.UK | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop.org

DER GEIST issue five features the first publication of original research, and archival materials thought lost. Steven T. Byington (first English translation of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum by Max Stirner); Thomas Common (first English translation of Friedrich Nietzsche); Georgia Replogle (first English-language journal on egoism); Malfew Seklew (the Laughing Philosopher); Arthur Desmond (author of a notorious book); Dora Marsden, S. E. Parker and more.

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.

DER GEIST, The Journal of Egoism from 1845 – 1945
ISSUE 5
Spring 2022
Paperback, 206 pages, fifteen dollars
ISBN 978-1944651244
ISSN 2639-5339

Introduction by the Editor

1. Steven T. Byington

A Proofreader Looks Back | The Human Cutworm | Photo of Steven T. Byington | Biographical Note | Selected Bibliography

2. Thomas Common

Review of Survival of the Fittest | The Silent Isle: Finding the Gravesite of Thomas Common | A Memorial | Selected Bibliography

3. Ragnar Redbeard

4. Max Stirner / The Ego And His Own

Donald Rooum’s “Eigenheit” | An Early Literary Portrait of Max Stirner

5. Dora Marsden

Brainy Beauties | Private Places | Lover of Freedom

6. Malfew Seklew

7. Free Spirits

The New Age – Marginalia

Httpswwwunionofegoistscom — Mon, 03 Jun 2019 14:11:35 +0000

The British literary journal The New Age became an important venue for those promoting Nietzschean ideas, and Nietzsche’s work itself. The editor A.R.Orage bought the paper in 1907 and published writing by many of the early advocates of Nietzsche including Thomas Common, A. Ludovici and Oscar Levy. Orage himself had already written and published one of the few books on Nietzsche to exist in English a year earlier. This is important because Nietzsche’s work had not gone over well with the British public, and he had very few advocates in the Anglosphere. In the United States. The one other journal that was solidly Nietzschean (and the first to be so) was The Eagle and The Serpent (1898) which had already folded by he time Orage came about.

This little sweep through the culture that The New Age dabbled in explicitly connects Nietzsche, Stirner and Ragnar Redbeard into the same intellectual milieu at the beginning of the 20th century.

The New Age
No. 671 New Series. Vol.1. No.12
Thursday, July 18, 1907, P.188

MARGINALIA.
Now that Nietzsche has entered the sphere of general discussion it is natural that publishers should find a growing demand for works dealing with the philosophy of Egoism, and Mr. Fifield is doing a service by issuing a translation of Max Stirner’s “The Ego and His Own.” This is the first translation of Stirner to be published in England. Will the next move on these lines be the issue of some of the works of Ragnar Redbeard?
*
Max Stirner is of course pre-Nietzschean, the above-mentioned work having first appeared in his native country, Germany, about sixty years ago. English readers, however, have had an opportunity in recent years of making acquaintance with his views by means of translations issued in America, where there always seems to be a public for ideas which are just off the beaten track.
*
It is not generally known’ that there is quite a literature Egoism in the States. True, it is not always of the best order, but it is quite good at its best and genuinely amusing at its worst. Some of the periodicals devoted to its study are fearfully and wonderfully made; one of these was called “I,” but whether it still asserts itself, or whether it has gone the way of many inferior sheets I do not know.
*
England has had but one consciously and deliberately egoistic journal. ”The Eagle and the Serpent,” and it led a chequered and fitful career in the later eighteen-nineties and the early nineteen-hundreds. Its sixteen octavo pages sometimes appeared in the conventional typographical form, ” justified” at each side, at others the right-hand side of the page tailed off like type-writing, giving the print the appearance of blank verse. It was in these pages, however, that many English people first learned of Nietzsche, for, besides freely quoting and discussing this philosopher, one number contained Thomas Common’s translation of the “Prefatory Discourse” of Zarathustra.
*
“The Eagle and the Serpent” was always fortunate in its correspondence. It had eminent readers and a valuable trick of beguiling them into its controversies. In this way, it managed to print letters from many of the leading modern thinkers, among whom may be mentioned Alfred Russel Wallace, Bernard Shaw, W. H. Mallock, Ernest Newman, E. H. Crosby, Benjamin Kidd, and Morrison Davidson. These letters were dealt with under the heading “Benedictions and Maledictions,” and with the numerous and excellent quotations from Nietzsche, Stirner, Rochefoucauld, Montaigne, Thoreau, and others, which formed a liberal part of the paper, “The Eagle and the Serpent ” was well worth the threepence asked for it.
*

Placing Stirner among Nordau’s “Degenerates” due to his “might is right” philosophy…

Httpswwwunionofegoistscom — Fri, 24 May 2019 14:42:27 +0000

The following article is from the Australian newspaper Labor Call (Melbourne, Vic. : 1906 – 1953), from Thursday 12 May 1910, page 5. An English translation of Max Nordau’s book Degeneration was a bombshell and did a great deal to stifle the growing readership of Nietzsche in the Anglosphere. Nordau’s theory is this, in a nutshell:

In the fin-de-siècle disposition, in the tendencies of contemporary art and poetry, in the life and conduct of men who write mystic, symbolic and ‘decadent’ works and the attitude taken by their admirers in the tastes and aesthetic instincts of fashionable society, the confluence of two well-defined conditions of disease, with which he [the physician] is quite familiar, viz. degeneration and hysteria of which the minor stages are designated as neurasthenia.

Oscar Wilde, Henrik Ibsen, Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche are all examples of his theory of degeneration, and the essay below makes the case that our man Stirner should also have been targetted. Indeed, Nordau DOES mention Stirner, and here is the most substantive excerpt:

Nietzsche’s ‘individualism’ is an exact reproduction of Max Stirner, a crazy Hegelian, who fifty years ago exaggerated and involuntarily turned into ridicule the critical idealism of his master to the extent of monstrously inflating the importance—even the grossly empirical importance—of the ‘I’; whom, even in his own day, no one took seriously, and who since then had fallen into well-merited profound oblivion, from which at the present time a few anarchists and philosophical ‘fops’—for the hysteria of the time has created such beings—seek to disinter him.

Of interest is that the article draws attention to Stirner’s “might is right… the heretical law of UNmorality.” This philosophy was developed into a book by that name by Ragnar Redbeard. While Redbeard had not read Stirner when writing the book, there is an incredible overlap in the views presented in it, and some stark divergences.

Schmidt (Stirner) and his Egoistic Anarchism

I cannot remember whether Max Nordau has included Schmidt among the imaginative monstrosities of his “Degeneration;” but if ever a person earnt an epitaph from that atrabilious Philistine, that person was Johann Kaspar Schmidt, pseudonymously known as Max Stirner. Stirner—I shall henceforth call him Stirner—was the expounder of an Anarchism so harsh and intolerant to little men, that it seems the glum gaiety of a megalomaniac. In my opinion, there is nothing quite like it in all the categories of vain crazes and enormous fads, for Stirner’s Anarchism is Egoism militant; Egoism all Egoism—Egoism raging to turn titans out of tuck-pointers or supermen out of grooms.

Purely endemonistic in aim, this Egoism recognises nothing but the elevation of the individual by the might which is right. Turn we to Stirner’s truly remarkable book, “The Ego and His Own” (English translation), and we find a glorification of might, involving a rejection of all bourgeois omnipotence’s like the policeman on the corner—or The Policeman in The Clouds. Says Stirner with almost splenetic vigor: —

“What you have the might to be you have the right to be. I deduce all right and entitlement from myself; I am entitled to everything that I have might over. I am entitled to overthrow Zeus Jehovah, God, etc., if I can; if I cannot, then these gods will remain in the right and in the might as against me.”

In holding that might is right, Stirner not only sets up the lawless law of Will, but the heretical law of UNmorality. Things are to him neither “good” nor “bad,” for he ignores the arbitrary values of “good” and “bad.” Therein one might perceive an affinity with Nietzsche, the transvaluator of all values, and might suspect a philosophical relationship in this somewhat striking passage:—

“Away, then, with every business that is not altogether my business! You think, at least, the “good cause” must be my business? What good, what bad? Why, I myself am my business, and I am neither good nor bad. Neither has meaning for me. What is divine is God’s business, what is human “Man’s.” My business is neither what is divine nor what is human, it is not what is true, good, right, free, etc., but only what is mine; and it is no general business, but it is—unique, as I am unique. Nothing is more to me than myself.”

The inevitable conclusion of Stirner’s teaching is, of course, an abrogation of the legal institutions of the State, law, and property, and the substitution in their stead of a “union of conscious egoists.” But in “union of egoists,” one scents a hint of paradoxical altruism, until one comes to consider that altruism itself might be a paradox. In the bald collectivism of every herd, for instance, one might behold the noble sense of helping others; but when one remarks that the instinct of collectivism might be the instinct of self-preservation, one might be beholding the utilitarian sense of helping oneself. Hence Stirner seems to have some biological basis for the proposed union of egoists, and, in fact, convinces one that he has some practical basis, when, in answer to critics, he cites familiar examples of egoistic unions. Children at play is a particular example of his, and it requires no ostentatious show of reasoning to assure one that their union for pleasure is for the pleasure of the unit. Take again a couple in the drawing-room when the lights are low, and note that a personal felicity is the underlying motive of their mutual embraces.. But, after all, Stirner’s union” has no place for the orthodox sentimentalities of friendship, comradeship, good will, and so forth. On the contrary, he plainly points out that his union is a selfish agreement, only, so far as it increases the power of his implacable ego. If I can exploit my fellowmen, then in Stirner’s own words:—

“I am likely to come to an understanding and unite myself with them, in order to strengthen my power by the agreement, and to do more by joint force than individual force could accomplish. In this joinder I see nothing at all else than a multiplication of my strength, and only so long as it is my multiplied strength do I retain it.”

But union involves another idea—the idea of a State in the germ, and, since an agreement suggests obedience to as extent, and. therefore, law to an extent, one might wonder vaguely whether Stirner absolutely renounces the State and law in their entirety. Union, moreover, might also become a union for mutual defence, as well as for individual power, and, since defence ipso facto argues the defensible, what should be more defensible than the institution of property? Stirner, indeed, implies a union for defence of the property, acquired, be it noted, by his amiable law of force majeure:—

“Property, therefore, should not and cannot be done away with; rather, It must be torn from ghostly hands and become my property; then will the erroneous consciousness that I cannot entitle myself to as much as I want vanish—’But what cannot a man want?’ Well, he who wants much, and knows how to get it, has in all times taken it to him, as Napoleon did the continent, and the French Algeria. Therefore, the only point is that the respectful ‘lower classes’ should, at length, learn to take to themselves what they want. If they reach their hands too far for you, why defend yourselves.”

Altogether Stirner’s book is an original contribution to the literature of rebellion, and, as an intellectual recreation, is a change from leaderettes on obstetric evils, or from the gusty farce of a Kiplingesque, ode. True, it is not a respectable book, but no revolutionist ever writes a respectable book. Yet, if one cannot applaud it, one would be cheap to despise it. In philosophical value, it appears to be not inferior to anything that Nietzsche ever conceived, though it lack the literary lightning of the later Teuton.

Also Stirner’s faith is not a respectable faith. It is a creed more suited to the needs of “free spirits” than to the frugal necessities of law-abiding, modern men. It is a creed that abjures weakness for strength, pessimism for optimism, and preaches hope just as surely as Nietzsche preached it with the dramatic promise of his UEBERMENSCH. For that reason Stirner is worth a little attentive exploration, although I fear that he never will become a popular idol. Still, unpopularity should add a subtler distinction to his name. For nobody who is anybody is popular!

JEAN SIBI.

SA1065 | The Cynic’s Breviary | Nicolas Chamfort

Kevin I. Slaughter — Wed, 04 Apr 2018 14:00:16 +0000

All new typesetting of the witty, barbed and insightful egoistic maxims of Nicolas Chamfort. Featuring an afterword by Friedrich Nietzsche.

18th issue of the egoist journal “Stand Alone”.
The Cynic’s Breviary
by Nicolas Chamfort
preface by William G. Hutchison
afterword by Friedrich Nietzsche
5.5″ x 8.5″, Saddle-stitched
Limited to 66 copies.

Order: Underworld Amusements

“Nature has not said to me: Be not poor; still less: Be rich.
But she cries out to me: Be independent.”

Thus begins a collection of wonderful quips and barbs from this revered French writer whose birth name was Sébastien-Roch Nicolas (1741 – 1794). Frequently quoted by the egoist journal The Eagle and The Serpent and admired by Malfew Seklew, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, John Stuart Mill and others. A radical that would skewer whatever reigning powers that be, was one of the first to storm the Bastille, but would also be imprisoned for his criticisms of the Jacobins. After release, when he was threatened with arrest once more, he instead locked himself in a room and shot himself in the face. Failing to kill himself, he stabbed himself in the neck and chest with a paper cutter. Still failing to finish the job, he dictated the following to those who came to arrest him:

“I, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort, hereby declare my wish to die a free man rather than to continue to live as a slave in a prison”.

This he signed in his own blood.

Antichrist – The Eagle and the Serpent (1898) in The New Humanist

Kevin I. Slaughter — Thu, 21 Jul 2016 16:30:53 +0000

Jonathan Rée wrote an article titled “Antichrist” for The New Humanist in November 2010. In it is one of the few modern references to The Eagle and the Serpent (1898) and some of our egoists, such as John Basil Barnhill.

The young Nietzcheans did not hesitate to identify Nietzsche himself with the Übermensch – or the “beyond-man”, as the first translator of Zarathustra put it – and they dreamed of a day when they too might be acclaimed as pioneers of post-humanity. The main vehicle for their project was a little magazine called The Eagle and the Serpent: A Journal of Egoistic Philosophy, started in 1898 by a young Londoner by the name of John Erwin McCall. Its policy was summed up in two defiant slogans: “a race of altruists is necessarily a race of slaves” and “a race of freemen is necessarily a race of egoists”, and the first issue called for the creation of a network of “Egoist Coteries” to serve as centres of resistance to all kinds of religion – or rather to all except for McCall’s fresh new creed, known as “the Religion of Hate”.

McCall and his fellow haters were passionate about social change, but they wanted nothing to do with the progressive politics of the past. Their aim was not social justice but self-emancipation, and “the realisation of a higher type of human being … a being as much superior to man as man is superior to the ape.” But where Nietzsche might have expected the dictatorship of the Übermensch to be the work of a cultural aristocracy, his followers at The Eagle and the Serpent looked to a revolutionary workers’ movement based in what they called “class-consciousness” or “class-selfism”. They also amended Nietzsche’s attitude to Darwin, claiming that the “master morality” of the future was “synonymous with … the modern doctrine of evolution”. But in spite of their appeals to mass movements and natural science, they still conducted themselves like an exclusive sect. The principles of the Übermensch (or the “overman” – a term they preferred to “beyond-man”) were “not for boys, nor for old women, nor for dreamers either,” they declared: “they are the ethics for full-grown men, for noble, strong, wide-awake men, who shape the world’s destiny.”

Radical Nietzscheanism was probably the first philosophical movement to pride itself on the raw extravagance of youth rather than the mature wisdom of experience. Bernard Shaw, now in his forties, found it made him feel old; but he offered the egoist teenagers his support, hoping they might re-invigorate the socialist movement by “bringing Individualism round again on a higher plane”. He also broke the translation logjam over the Übermensch with his all-conquering neologism “superman”, and gave the journal an endorsement that its editor could brandish with pride: “it promises,” he said, “to be foolish enough to make people think.”

In 1900, The Eagle and the Serpent was taken over by Charles Watts, tireless printer-publisher to the Rationalist Press Association. But this arrangement – which makes it a precursor and stable-mate of the New Humanist – did not last long. In spite of dropping its explicit hostility to altruism and changing its subtitle to “the journal of wit, wisdom and wickedness” and “a journal for free spirits”, it remained an eccentric and unpredictable publication, and in 1902, after spluttering through eighteen issues, it expired.