Eumeswil, by Ernst Juenger

In regard to this blog, I considered deleting it. It does neither me nor anyone else much good — although just a few days ago I was surprised to see a lawyer in a listserv I’m on refer another lawyer to a post I wrote here on jury nullification in Indiana. Indeed, what I’ve written here is likely only to close doors for me.

If I leave the blog up for now despite that, it’s not because I feel I have any duty to the Truth, much less any duty to suffer for or martyr myself to the Truth. I may have felt that a decade or two ago, but now I’ve largely washed my hands of all such sentiment, and limit myself to the kind of occasional half-hearted efforts recorded in my last two blog posts. I’ve slowly learned that what seems to me intensely interesting is unimportant to most other people. I don’t care any less about what is important to me as a result; rather, I simply care less and less about most other people.

“That widespread penchant for gratuitously making oneself unpopular is not found in Stirner. He would say: ‘Truth? None of my business.’ It remains his own property. He does not accept it, he does not want to serve it; instead, he disposes of it freely.”

. . .

“Nevertheless, the destruction of a manuscript is a kind of spiritual suicide — whereby I am not putting down suicide.” Just as I don’t regret resigning from the U.S. Naval Academy when I was 20, and don’t regret my vain attempt to set fire to the world when I was 30, so I don’t disown any of my writings here — even though they are incomplete, and always will be incomplete.

‘Gentlemen:

Back on January 22nd of this year I contacted The Intercept through Facebook to respond to an article published at The Intercept that day on abortion and junk science by Jordan Smith. What caught my attention in particular was this paragraph in her article:

Take, for example, Texas’ Woman’s Right to Know pamphlet, which suggests not only that a fetus feels pain at 20 weeks and that abortion can be psychologically damaging, but also asserts that there is likely a link between abortion and breast cancer — a notion that has been thoroughly debunked by the National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society. Texas is not alone in supplying women with this kind of erroneous information. In total, counseling materials in 12 states include information about fetal pain, nine emphasize negative psychological effects of abortion, and five include the nonexistent link between abortion and breast cancer.

The scientific evidence linking induced abortion with increased breast cancer risk is something I know about. I wrote an article about it that was published in the Wisconsin Law Review in 1999, and that was distributed to every Member of the House of Representatives by then-Congressman Dave Weldon, M.D. A pdf of the article and of Weldon’s “Dear Colleague” about the article are attached. Also in that year I filed a False Advertising lawsuit against an abortion clinic in North Dakota premised on the clinic’s claims in its commercial brochures that there was no evidence of a causal relationship between induced abortion and increased breast cancer risk. You can read about the suit, and find links to the legal briefs filed in the case on the North Dakota Supreme Court’s website, at my website here. (I have to apologize for the generally low quality of my website, which I haven’t updated in years.)

The person who handles your Facebook interactions was very nice, but advised that The Intercept doesn’t accept story pitches or tips via social media, that my best bet would be to reach out to one of the editors, and that Roger Hodge edited the article by Jordan Smith I was responding to. Your social media person also provided me with a link to your editors’ contact information page. However, I did not follow up at that time. What prompts me to now follow up at this time is the spate of recent stories on the news that Trump has appointed Charmaine Yoest assistant secretary of health and human services in charge of public affairs, like this one yesterday in the New York Times. Yoest, according to the NYT article, “has insisted that abortion increases a woman’s risk of breast cancer.”

I am writing to you at The Intercept because I have the utmost respect for your mission, for your adversarial journalism, and for what you have done in bringing transparency to government. You of all people should know that just because a government agency like the National Cancer Institute says that abortion doesn’t increase breast cancer risk doesn’t make it true. Believe it or not (although my history online will bear me out), your “politics” align very closely with my “politics,” including possibly on the issue of abortion itself. Although it should be completely irrelevant to the issue of whether the National Cancer Institute has been intentionally deceiving the American public for decades about the single most avoidable risk factor for the leading cause of death among middle-aged women, the question of motive seems to loom very large whenever anyone has anything to say that has anything to do with abortion. So, for the record, I am not pro-life, for reasons I’ve explained here and here.

I am writing to you because if you choose to write about the link between abortion and breast cancer again (as I think you should) I want you to have all the facts, and because I believe you have the journalistic integrity to want to know all the facts. It is disheartening to see what seems to be a total lack of curiosity (beyond noting what the National Cancer Institute et al. has to say) about the basis of Yoest’s claims among journalists reporting on the Yoest appointment. This is a story that calls for at least a little bit of investigation on the part of journalists.

I would also suggest that the conduct of the National Cancer Institute over the last couple of decades with respect to the scientific evidence linking induced abortion with increased breast cancer risk is worse than the conduct of Big Tobacco during the years it was denying the risks of tobacco, and constitutes an enormity as big as anything you’ve ever covered.

John A. Kindley
Attorney at Law’

I feel like I’ll have to say a little more yet about the case I wrote about in my last post, and which I’ve written about occasionally almost from the beginning of this blog. I’ll probably want to finally say something about the case I argued in front of the Indiana Supreme Court and won back in 2014. I’ve been meaning to, and may still, write about footnote 1 in the Indiana Supreme Court’s opinion in Helton v. State. Here’s what I wrote about this footnote in a petition to transfer a post-conviction case to the Indiana Supreme Court, which not surprisingly was denied:

The Indiana Supreme Court itself has left the exact nature of the inquiry unclear (although the inquiry is ultimately one of federal constitutional dimensions), writing in footnote 1 of its opinion in Helton v. State, 907 N.E.2d 1020 (Ind. 2009):

“Helton cites United States ex rel. Hampton v. Liebach, 347 F.3d 219 (7^th Cir. 2003), for the proposition that “[e]ven if the odds that the defendant would have been acquitted had he received effective representation appear to be less than fifty percent, prejudice has been established so long as the chances of acquittal are better than negligible.” Id. at 246. We are not confident that this is an accurate construction of the Strickland prejudice standard. Taken at face value, the “better than negligible” Hampton test would appear to find prejudice based on a reasonable possibility that the petitioner would have prevailed at trial. But Strickland requires a reasonable “probability” that the outcome of the proceedings would have been different. In any event, we reach the same result in this case under either the traditional Strickland standard or the Hampton formulation.”

Standard dictionary definitions of “probability” do equate a “probability” with the “chance” or “possibility” of something happening, but the Court here appears to have equated it with a greater than fifty percent chance. Furthermore, the word “reasonable” in the phrase “reasonable probability” would appear to be superfluous and redundant if “probability” is already taken to mean a greater than fifty percent chance. Moreover, the Seventh Circuit in Hampton cited three United States Supreme Court decisions in support of its “formulation,” including Strickland itself, which expressly stated: “[W]e believe that a defendant need not show that counsel’s deficient conduct more likely than not altered the outcome in the case.” Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668, 693 (1984). Hence, it was exceedingly odd for this Court, in providing guidance to lower courts, to imply that “the traditional Strickland standard” requires a defendant to show that counsel’s deficient conduct more likely than not altered the outcome in his case.

And I do feel like I should probably write at least one more post on my political philosophy, to sum things up and refine a little what I’ve said before on this subject. From the beginning this blog was unusual in that it wasn’t able to “keep its eyes in the boat.” We’ll see.

In fact, the last time I was “recognized” as a “scholar” was by then-Congressman Dave Weldon, M.D., back on August 24, 1999 — more than 15 years ago.

The Indiana Court of Appeals (and the post-conviction court) also think that I am “well read.” Let me share an excellent piece of legal scholarship I did happen to read not too long ago, that I think concerns and should interest them very much: The Origins of “Reasonable Doubt” (2005), by Yale law prof James Q. Whitman. Its thesis is close to something Gerry Spence wrote in one of his books, also published in 2005, which he framed as an argument to a hypothetical jury:

The protection of reasonable doubt is not just a protection for Jimmy. It protects each of you. You are men and women with good souls and clear consciences. But what if you were pressured by the prosecution’s arguments to convict Jimmy, and when you got home you began to worry about what you had done, lying awake at night concerned about your decision, your worry that you may have convicted an innocent man?

The rule of reasonable doubt is to protect you. You have a right not to be concerned about your decision. It must be clear to you so that all worry about whether you were right has been removed by the evidence. That is why we have reasonable doubt — not only to protect the accused, but to protect you as well.

Professor Whitman “begin[s his book] with a non-western example [as described by Andrew Huxley], which will offer a useful foil for the Christian tradition that eventually produced the ‘reasonable doubt’ rule”:

In the Tenniya Jataka the future Buddha at one month old, sitting with the king, his father, in court, witnesses his father sentencing criminals to death. Instantly he remembers that in a past life he too condemned men to death, and that as a result he endured the pains of hell for 80,000 years. To escape inheriting the throne, the Future Buddha pretends to be autistic. In the face of this canonical warning that inflicting punishment can damage your kamma [karma], the devout Buddhist prince should refuse to become king.

We can never return to the moral world of our ancestors: The theology that taught them the lesson of “reasonable doubt” is lost to us for good. But the lesson is one that we must find some way to re-learn. Most especially, we must learn it when it comes to jury trial. Indeed, if there is any advantage to jury trial, it is that jurors have not fully come to inhabit the hardened, professionalized attitude of the sixteenth-century continental judge. Lay jurors can still find something shocking and fearful in what they do, at least in capital cases. Even in capital cases, though, jurors must be reminded of what is at stake: As Eisenberg, Garvey and Wells write, “it would be better to openly and routinely instruct jurors that the decision they are about to make is, despite its legal trappings, a moral one and that, in the absence of legal error, their judgment will be final.” It would indeed, and not just where death is involved. Instructing jurors forcefully that their decision is “a moral one” about the fate of a fellow human being, is, in the last analysis, the only meaningful way to be faithful to the original spirit of “reasonable doubt.”

Hence, I was quite astonished when one of my tweets was favorited and particularly by who favorited it:

Twitter / SingleTaxAnarch: .@SadieODoyle What's @theNCI …

Yes, that’s the twitter account of the National Cancer Institute itself, which has 60K+ followers. Favorites are nice, but a Retweet would have been much better.

Yes, I was indeed trolling the #BlackWomenLead hashtag (which was centered on reproductive rights, and was quite active when I started trolling it), which earned me far uglier responses than Sadie’s. The first thing I tweeted was a link to this Howard University study showing induced abortion more than doubled breast cancer risk among African-American women.

For a comprehensive review by Dr. Lanfranchi of the extant scientific evidence linking induced abortion with increased breast cancer risk, published just this Spring, see here.

Someone needs to Snowden the National Cancer Institute.

I never cared much for Nietzsche, but the similarity of Stirner (with whom I am not at all familiar up to this point) is pretty striking.

I’m a bit wary of unanswerable claims that everything is self-interest or egoism, unanswerable because the define away all objections. Seems a bit facile.

I just haven’t felt up to attempting to express any original thoughts here lately. The tank’s been dry. Rather, I’ve instead been reading, among others, Schopenhauer, George Borrow, the Icelandic Sagas, William Morris, Thoreau, Rimbaud, Hamann, Fichte, Clarence Darrow. That’s probably too much reading. I need a break from that, too. I need to follow Thoreau’s advice and spend a lot more time walking, preferably in the woods. During the summer before law school I quit my job working for Brinks in Milwaukee and spent two months hiking the Appalachian Trail, from Maine to Massachusetts. It was a good time.

It’s no secret, judging from most of my posts over the past year, that lately I’ve been fascinated by both the writings and the life of Ernst Juenger. I’ve long since read everything he’s written that’s been translated into English, but I’ve also found in him a trustworthy guide insofar as I’ve followed up by reading the many influences and models he cited in his writings. His decision, which so far as I know he never explained in writing, to convert to the Roman Catholic Church a year before his death at age 102, caps with mystery a life that was otherwise in many ways an open book. I too converted to the Roman Catholic Church, but at the age of 18 or 19, and my sincere belief that I might have a vocation to the priesthood (obviously proved mistaken in subsequent years) was the reason I gave to the United States Naval Academy for resigning. (My other and more certain reason, which I for the most part kept to myself, was that I no longer wanted to be a “cogwheel in the war machine of a godless State,” and hence I have no regrets about my decision to resign.) I not only did not become a priest, but eventually became an apostate.

Frankly, in my opinion it would be a lot easier to be a Catholic for a couple years, and I presume particularly at the end of one’s days, than it is to be so for a lifetime. I had an interesting career in the Catholic Church. I met on several occasions Bishop Williamson, then of the Society of St. Pius X. I spent several years actively involved with the lay organization founded by Fr. Marcial Maciel, a favorite of Pope St. John Paul II. Those who are interested can Google Bishop Williamson and Fr. Maciel, and get a feel for why I feel, rightly or wrongly, not too bad about my apostasy.

I can’t help connecting in my mind Juenger’s conversion, and reception of the sacraments, with his own account in his diaries from WWII of the execution of a deserter he was required to supervise while a German officer in occupied Paris. Juenger himself, while still a teen, a couple years before WWI, had run off and joined the French Foreign Legion, and then promptly deserted. I wonder whether he considered this irony while he was supervising this other young deserter’s execution, and considered whether he himself should desert — become a “forest fleer” — for the second time in his life, come what may.

I was first led to read Stirner, albeit sparsely, through my readings in anarchist theory. It was Stirner who then first led me to read Juenger, who in turn caused me to return to Stirner and to see in him what Juenger saw.

I read some Ayn Rand in high school, like many other lost souls at that age. It had its ordinary effect, but I quickly came to see the error of my ways when I read The Brothers Karamazov during my first year as an enlisted man in the Navy, while stationed on the USS Kitty Hawk while it was drydocked in the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. So in a very real sense I was thereby inoculated against making the same mistake twice a couple decades later, even though Stirner is far deeper than Rand.

Toward the end of his life, about three years before he died, Juenger singled out for special mention three primary influences on the disposition of his life, and surprisingly none of them were Stirner: “Rimbaud as a writer; Schopenhauer as a thinker; Hamann as a magician.”

Stirner, unlike Ayn Rand, was no apostle of selfishness, and not really even an “egoist,” though he seemed to get off on tweaking the sensibilities of his contemporaries by shamelessly appropriating the word. How much value did Stirner really place on the “ego,” when the closest he came to defining it was to call himself “nothing,” albeit “the creative nothing,” and when his view of life was not that it was to be anxiously gained or saved, but used up / enjoyed / consumed / squandered. Rather, I view Stirner as representing the sweet spot between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, which perhaps Nietzsche himself represented in his early approval, in The Birth of Tragedy, of Greek “serenity” or “cheerfulness.”

This post was originally intended to do nothing but make that point, through another lengthy quotation of Juenger, with which I’ll conclude:

Words that are to be intensified by the suffix -ism reveal a special demand, a volitional tendency, often hostility a priori. The motion becomes tumultuous at the expense of the substance. These are words for sectarians, for people who have read only one book, for those who “pledge allegiance to their flag and are unconditionally committed to their cause” – in short, for traveling salesmen and peddlers of commonplaces. A conversation with someone who introduces himself as a realist usually comes to a vexatious end. He has a limited notion of the thing, just as the idealist does of the idea or the egoist of the self. Freedom is labeled. This also holds for the anarchist’s relationship to anarchy.

. . .

The rebukes against him [Stirner] concentrated – nor could it be otherwise – in the reproach of egoism, a concept with which Stirner himself never fully came to terms. Still, he annexed it, often replacing Einziger (Only One) with Eigner (owner, proprietor). The owner does not fight for power, he recognizes it as his own, his property. He owns up to it, appropriates it, makes it his own. This process can be nonviolent, especially as a strengthening of the self-awareness.

. . .

What had touched me so deeply? Stirner’s arrow grazed the point at which I suspected the presence of the anarch. The dissimilarity presupposes a very subtle distinction, and, I believe, Vigo is the only person in Eumeswil who could make it. After all, he instantly caught the difference between owner and egoist. It is the same as the difference between anarch and anarchist. These concepts appear to be identical, but are radically different.

. . .

To draw an important demarcation, we had envisaged a comparison between the Only One and the Superman. It would make little difference whether, as Mackay assumes, Nietzsche, Old Gunpowderhead, was acquainted with Stirner’s work – ideas float in the air. Originality lies in rendering them – in the strength of the tackling and shaping.

First of all: The Superman recognizes the world as the will to power; “there is nothing else.” Even art is a will to power. The Superman joins in the rivalries of the world while the Only One is content to watch the spectacle. He does not strive for power; he dashes neither after nor ahead of it, because he possesses it and enjoys it in his self-awareness. This recalls Far Eastern empires of images.

Naturally, because of external circumstances, power can fall into the hands of the Only One as well as the anarch. But power is burdensome for the Only One. Periander, tyrant of Corinth, “inherited it like a disease” from his father. Incidentally, it strikes me that certain features of Periander and also Tiberius, especially in their good times, are to be found in our Condor, though in the effete and ahistorical framework of Eumeswil. I have already said that the anarch and the monarch have a polar resemblance; basically, each contains both.

Secondly: the famous “God is dead.” By then, Old Gunpowderhead was forcing an open door. A universal awareness was unveiled. That explains the sensation he caused. The Only One, on the other hand: “God … is none of my business.” That leaves all doors open: the Only One can depose or impose God or let the matter rest – whichever he likes. He can show him the door or “form an association” with him. As with the Silesian mystic, “God cannot be without me.” Like the Biblical Jacob, the Only One can wrestle for power until dawn. That alone is the message in the history of God’s redemption plan.

We are perfect altogether, and on the whole earth there is not one man who is
a sinner! There are crazy people who imagine that they are God the Father, God
the Son, or the man in the moon, and so too the world swarms with fools who
seem to themselves to be sinners; but, as the former are not the man in the moon,
so the latter are — not sinners. Their sin is imaginary.

Yet, it is insidiously objected, their craziness or their possessedness is at least
their sin. Their possessedness is nothing but what they — could achieve, the
result of their development, just as Luther’s faith in the Bible was all that he was
— competent to make out. The one brings himself into the madhouse with his
development, the other brings himself therewith into the Pantheon and to the
loss of —Valhalla.

There is no sinner and no sinful egoism!

Get away from me with your “philanthropy”! Creep in, you philanthropist,
into the “dens of vice,” linger awhile in the throng of the great city: will you
not everywhere find sin, and sin, and again sin? Will you not wail over corrupt
humanity, not lament at the monstrous egoism? Will you see a rich man without
finding him pitiless and “egoistic?” Perhaps you already call yourself an atheist,
but you remain true to the Christian feeling that a camel will sooner go through a
needle’s eye than a rich man not be an “un-man.” How many do you see anyhow
that you would not throw into the “egoistic mass”? What, therefore, has your
philanthropy [love of man] found? Nothing but unlovable men! And where do
they all come from? From you, from your philanthropy! You brought the sinner
with you in your head, therefore you found him, therefore you inserted him
everywhere. Do not call men sinners, and they are not: you alone are the creator
of sinners; you, who fancy that you love men, are the very one to throw them into
the mire of sin, the very one to divide them into vicious and virtuous, into men
and un-men, the very one to befoul them with the slaver of your possessedness;
for you love not men, but man. But I tell you, you have never seen a sinner, you
have only — dreamed of him.

We owe to Dr. Eduard von Hartmann the unquestionable service which he
rendered by directing attention to this book in his “Philosophie des Unbewußten,”
the first edition of which was published in 1869, and in other writings. I do not
begrudge Dr. von Hartmann the liberty of criticism which he used; and I think
the admirers of Stirner’s teaching must quite appreciate one thing which Von
Hartmann did at a much later date. In “Der Eigene” of August 10, 1896, there
appeared a letter written by him and giving, among other things, certain data from
which to judge that, when Friedrich Nietzsche wrote his later essays, Nietzsche
was not ignorant of Stirner’s book.

Von Hartmann wishes that Stirner had gone on and developed his principle.
Von Hartmann suggests that you and I are really the same spirit, looking out
through two pairs of eyes. Then, one may reply, I need not concern myself about
you, for in myself I have — us; and at that rate Von Hartmann is merely accusing
himself of inconsistency: for, when Stirner wrote this book, Von Hartmann’s
spirit was writing it; and it is just the pity that Von Hartmann in his present form
does not indorse what he said in the form of Stirner, — that Stirner was different
from any other man; that his ego was not Fichte’s transcendental generality, but “this transitory ego of flesh and blood.” It is not as a generality that you and I differ,
but as a couple of facts which are not to be reasoned into one. “I” is somewise
Hartmann, and thus Hartmann is “I”; but I am not Hartmann, and Hartmann is
not — I. Neither am I the “I” of Stirner; only Stirner himself was Stirner’s “I.” Note
how comparatively indifferent a matter it is with Stirner that one is an ego, but
how all-important it is that one be a self-conscious ego, — a self-conscious, self-willed
person.

Here is the section of Von Hartmann’s “Philosophy of the Unconscious” that treats of Stirner:

Extremely instructive in this reference is
” Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum,” by Max Stirner, a book that nobody
interested in practical philosophy should leave unread.
This book subjects all ideals having an influence on practice
to a destructive criticism, and shows them to be idols
that only possess power over the Ego so far as the latter
concedes such to them in its self-mistaking weakness. It
cleverly and piquantly demolishes with forcible reasons
the ideal aims of political, social, and humanitarian Liberalism; and shows how the Ego alone can be the smiling
heir of all these ideals thus reduced to impotent nothings.
If these considerations only had the purpose of confirming
the theoretical position that I can as little step out
of the frame of my self-hood as out of my skin, nothing
need be added ; but as Stirner professes to have found
in the Idea of the Ego the absolute standpoint for action,
he either falls into the same error that he had combated
in the case of the other ideals, such as Honour, Freedom,
Right, &c., and places himself at the mercy of another
enthralling idea, whose absolute sovereignty he recognises,
not however for this or that reason, but blindly and
instinctively, or he conceives the Ego not as idea but as
reality, and with no other result than the perfectly empty
and meaningless tautology that I can will only my own
will, think only my own thoughts, and that only my own
thoughts can become motives of my willing a fact as
undeniable by his opponents as by himself. If, however,
and only in that case has his conclusions any sense, he
means that we ought to acknowledge the IDEA of the Ego
as the only governing one, and to admit all other ideals
only so far as they have a value for the former, he
should first have examined the idea of the Ego. He
would then before all have found that, as all the other
ideals are the cues of instincts in pursuit of special ends,
so the Ego is the cue of a universal instinct, egoism,
that is related to the special instincts somewhat as a
season to a day ticket, of which many special instincts
are only derivatives in particular cases, and with which,
therefore, we can get along tolerably well after all other
instincts have been banished, which even, on the contrary,
is never entirely to be dispensed with as long as we live.
Thus it is certainly more pardonable to accord an unconditional
sovereignty to this instinct than to any other ;
but although in the abstract the error is the same in the
two cases, the consequences are far worse in the exclusive
homage paid to egoism. Other instincts, namely, if they
are only sufficiently strong, can frequently be pacified,
although commonly only with sacrifice of happiness on
the whole, which makes them unprofitable ; but egoism
is, according to our former inquiries, never to be satisfied,
because it always procures an excess of pain.
This perception, that from the point of view of the ego
or the individual the denial of the will or forsaking of
the world and renunciation of life is the only rational
course, Stirner entirely misses. It is, however, an infallible
specific for an over-balanced egoism. Whoever
has once realised the preponderating pain that every
individual must endure, with or without knowledge, in his
life, will soon contemn and scorn the standpoint of the
self-preserving and would-be enjoying in a word, self-affirming
ego. He who has come to hold lightly his
egoism and his ego will hardly insist upon the same as
the absolute pivot on which everything must turn, will
rate personal sacrifice less highly than usual, will less
reluctantly accept the result of an investigation which
exhibits the Ego as a mere phenomenon of a Being that
for all individuals is one and the same.
Contempt of the world and life is the easiest path to
self-denial ; only by this path has a morality of self-denial,
like the Christian and Buddhist, been historically possible.
In these fruits which it bears for facilitating the infinitely
difficult self-renunciation lies the immense and hardly to
be sufficiently estimated ethical value of Pessimism.
But lastly, had Stirner approached the direct philoso
phical investigation of the Idea of the Ego, he would have
seen that this idea is just as unsubstantial and brain-created
a phantom (cp.
” Das Ding an Sich,” sect, iii ,
” Das
transcendental^ Subject”), as, for instance, the Idea of
honour or of right, and that the only being which answers
to the idea of the inner cause of my activity is
something non- individual, the Only Unconscious, which
therefore answers just as well to Peter’s idea of his ego
as Paul’s idea of his ego. On this deepest of all bases rests
only the esoteric ethics of Buddhism, not the Christian ethics.
If one has firmly and thoughtfully made this cognition his
own, that one and the same Being feels my and thy pain,
my and thy pleasure, only accidentally through the intervention
of different brains, then is the exclusive egoism
radically broken, that is only shaken, though deeply shaken,
by contempt of the world and of life ; then is the standpoint
of Stirner finally overcome, to which one must at
some time have entirely given adhesion in order to feel the
greatness of the advance ; then first is Egoism sublated as
a moment in the consciousness of forming a link in the
world-process, in which it finds its necessary and relatively,
i.e., to a certain degree, authorised place.

In this connection, here is a telling passage from Stirner’s “The Ego and His Own”:

The child was realistic, taken up with the things of this world, till little by little
he succeeded in getting at what was back of these very things; the youth was idealistic, inspired by thoughts, till he worked his way up to where he became
the man, the egoistic man, who deals with things and thoughts according to his
heart’s pleasure, and sets his personal interest above everything. Finally, the old
man? When I become one, there will still be time enough to speak of that.

Stirner, unfortunately, never lived to be an old man, but died from an insect bite when he was 49 years of age, and wrote nothing significant after his magnum opus, which was published when he was 38 years of age. Ernst Juenger, on the other hand, who lived to be 102 and who remained an “admirer of Stirner’s teaching,” at least until 1977 when he wrote Eumeswil at about age 82, and at least until age 90 when the interviews published in The Details of Time were recorded (even though these interviews are tinctured with Christianity), and presumably until the end of his life (even though he converted to the Roman Catholic Church a year before his death) in 1998, wrote in 1951 (when he was about 56):

The great experience of the forest consists of the encounter with the Ego, with the self, with the inviolate core and essence that sustains the temporal and individual appearance. This encounter, so decisive for the conquest of health and for the victory over fear, is also supreme in its moral value. It leads to the primal basis of all social intercourse, to the man whose example defines individuality. In this sphere we will encounter not only community but also identity. This is the symbolic meaning of the embrace: the Ego recognizes itself in the other human being in the saying, ”This is you.” The other can be the beloved, the sufferer, or the helpless victim. In giving help, the Ego helps its own immortal essence and confirms the basic ethical order of the universe.

But I must say that while I agree with Hartmann that Stirner himself did not closely examine the idea of the ego itself, I don’t agree that Stirner professed to have found in the idea of the ego an absolute standpoint for action. Rather, I think Hartmann was closer to the mark when he supposed that Stirner conceived the ego not as an idea but as reality, while Hartmann missed the mark in supposing that all this conception resulted in was tautology. Tautology, in any event, is underrated, as all definition ultimately amounts to tautology.

Stirner only cleared the way. It is left to us to enquire, as Ramana Maharshi recommended, “Who am I?” I suspect the answer is not quite Fichte’s (or Hartmann’s?) transcendental generality, nor what Stirner did refer to (albeit only briefly) as transitory and finite and mortal.