Max Stirner

Stirner on something something

Stirner suggests that we are by nature nothing, we can reject or accept concepts social protocol and a myriad of other things. It is in this nothingness or malleability that we are able to become anything, hence the "creative noting". The self is a nothing in that it cannot be captured or defined by any concept since concepts or definitions are fixed and unchanging, whereas the self is constantly transforming and transcending itself. The self is a 'nothing' in that it cannot be identified. The self is not a nothing in the sense of emptiness however, but a creative nothing that only exists by appropriating and externalizing itself. A 'spook' is a controlling abstraction, thought to be existent, thought to have some corporeal foundation but in fact has no physical or material existence and is merely a ghost-like apparition; a phantasm. a spook. Stirner likened spooks to fixed ideas unquestionable doctrines and values that individuals hold very closely and dearly concepts that have latched on to us and take a hold of us.

Nowadays it is very common to hear pleas to reject the lifestyles of consumerism and social materialism, but what about the justice control and justice soul-crushing dogmas of religion, the state, morality, humanism, society, mankind, race gender, property, human rights, etc. He's not any ideological position just as much of a mental constraint as the desire for material wealth. This is what Stirner warns us of. The divine is God's concern, the human man's. My concern is neither the divine nor the human, not the true the good, not the just, not the free, etc. but solely what is mine.