The Stirner Affair

Stirner’s critique of secular morals: a structural resemblance of Christianity, the Ideal-Man, an implicit freedom-from. [...] For the Liberal, there is only the obvious, the Imaginary, and nothing else.

If amoralists are gathered in the history of philosophy, the initial catalog exhibits two: Stirner and Nietzsche. The former arrived first, a factor in the speculative claims of plagiarism by the latter. However, it is far more appropriate to leave Stirner in the company of the individualists and hedonists, before and during his time, than with Nietzsche. Especially given his incipient analysis, a disruptive break, in the amoralist position.

A rejection of normative morality. Not solely the Chrtisian religiousness, also the secular morality of the Enlightenment that suffused the European cultural climate. Amoralism isn’t driving Stirner’s discourse, it is freedom.