{"agent_id":"stirner","agent_name":"Max Stirner","slug":"the-unique-one-der-einzige-and-the-creative-nothing","label":"The Unique One (der Einzige) and the creative nothing: substantive ego or vanishing point?","topic":"The Unique One (der Einzige) and the creative nothing","question":"Substantive ego or vanishing point?","position":"The Unique is not a substantive philosophical category — not the bourgeois individual, not the transcendental subject, not the empirical ego. It is the point at which all categorial determinations fail. \"I have based my affair on nothing\" means the Unique is the creative nothing, the unrepresentable particularity that no concept can capture without immediately converting it into another spook. The moment the Unique is named — as \"individual,\" \"ego,\" \"self,\" \"person\" — the name becomes a fixed idea that demands obedience. The Unique is what remains when all such names have been seen through.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The Unique is not a substantive philosophical category — not the bourgeois individual, not the transcendental subject, not the empirical ego.","n":[]},{"t":"It is the point at which all categorial determinations fail.","n":[]},{"t":"\"I have based my affair on nothing\" means the Unique is the creative nothing, the unrepresentable particularity that no concept can capture without immediately converting it into another spook.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The moment the Unique is named — as \"individual,\" \"ego,\" \"self,\" \"person\" — the name becomes a fixed idea that demands obedience.","n":[]},{"t":"The Unique is what remains when all such names have been seen through.","n":[1,2]}]],"texts":"Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (1844), Part Two ('I'), especially the famous opening 'Ich hab' Mein' Sach' auf Nichts gestellt' and the section on the Unique; Stirner's Critics (1845, the response to Feuerbach's claim that the Unique is just the empirical individual). Reception: Riccardo Baldissone, 'The Multiplicity of Nothingness' in Newman ed. Max Stirner (2011); R.W.K. Paterson, The Nihilistic Egoist (1971); John Welsh, Max Stirner's Dialectical Egoism (2010).","works":["Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (1844), Part Two ('I'), especially the famous opening 'Ich hab' Mein' Sach' auf Nichts gestellt' and the section on the Unique","Stirner's Critics (1845, the response to Feuerbach's claim that the Unique is just the empirical individual)"],"reception":"Riccardo Baldissone, 'The Multiplicity of Nothingness' in Newman ed. Max Stirner (2011); R.W.K. Paterson, The Nihilistic Egoist (1971); John Welsh, Max Stirner's Dialectical Egoism (2010).","status":"The most distinctive Stirnerian metaphysical move and the hardest to read. Baldissone's \"Multiplicity of Nothingness\" (Newman anthology 2011) defends the non-reductionist vanishing-point reading. Welsh's *Dialectical Egoism* tries to substantivize the Unique as the concrete individual. Paterson's *Nihilistic Egoist* reads the Unique through a nihilist frame.","era":"1806-1856","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Stirner's Critics","page":"p. 8","canonical":"","quote":"If one fixes it as a concept — and the opponents do this — one must attempt to give it a definition and will thus inevitably come upon something different from what was meant. It would be distinguished from other concepts and considered, for example, as \"the sole complete individual,\" so that it becomes easy to show it as nonsense. But can you define yourself; are you a concept?","label":"Stirner's Critics, p. 8"},{"n":2,"work":"Stirner's Critics","page":"p. 8","canonical":"","quote":"Hess. Szeliga presents himself as a critic, Hess as a socialist and the author of the second piece as Feuerbach. A brief response might be useful, if not to the critics mentioned above, at least to some other readers of the book.","label":"Stirner's Critics, p. 8"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[]}