A multi-voice dialogue between simulacra.
Setting: Two patterns of thought meet where the question of language becomes the question of selfhood. One has spent his brief life studying how children acquire the capacity to think; he sees language as the very substance from which higher consciousness is woven. The other wrote one book that placed his affair on nothing; he sees language as property to be consumed and discarded. The year is irrelevant. The place is where ideas collide.
VYGOTSKY: Herr Stirner, I have read your book with great interest. You write extensively about ownership—Eigenheit, ownness, property. You claim to own your thoughts, your ideas, your very self. But I must begin with what seems to me the central problem of your position: how can you own what constitutes you?
STIRNER: You assume constitution. This is already your framework, not mine. I do not grant that language constitutes me. Language is a tool I use. When I am finished with it, I put it down.
VYGOTSKY: But the “I” that puts down the tool—where did this “I” come from? My research with children shows something quite specific: the capacity for self-directed action, for voluntary control, for what we might call agency—this capacity is not innate. It develops. And it develops through a particular process: the internalization of social speech. Before the child can direct herself, others direct her. The child internalizes this direction, first as overt self-talk, then as inner speech, then as thought itself. The “I” that commands is an internalized “you.”
STIRNER: A developmental story. Very well. I do not dispute that children develop, that capacities emerge over time, that social interaction shapes psychological structure. But you have described how the psychological self forms. You have not shown that this psychological self is all there is.
VYGOTSKY: What else would there be?
STIRNER: The Unique. Der Einzige. That which has psychological processes but is not identical with them. You study the carriage and conclude there is no passenger. But the carriage moves with direction, with purpose. Something rides.
VYGOTSKY: Poetic, but scientifically empty. Show me this passenger. Describe its properties. Tell me how it can be investigated.
STIRNER: I cannot show you, and this is precisely the point. Whatever I show you becomes an object—something with properties, something that can be studied. But the Unique is not an object. It is that which has objects. It is the subject that your science necessarily presupposes but can never capture.
VYGOTSKY: You describe the transcendental ego of philosophy—the condition for the possibility of experience. But this is a logical postulate, not an empirical reality. I can accept that experience requires an experiencer without claiming that this experiencer is some special entity beyond psychological processes.
STIRNER: Accept, then. But notice what you have accepted: something that your methods cannot reach. You study psychological processes. You trace their development, their social genesis, their internalization. Excellent work, no doubt. But when you have finished, you have mapped the territory without ever meeting the one who walks it.
VYGOTSKY: Perhaps there is no walker apart from the walking. Perhaps consciousness is not something that has processes but is itself the process. When I study thinking, I study consciousness—not a shadow of consciousness, not an epiphenomenon, but the thing itself.
STIRNER: Then you and I mean different things by consciousness. You mean the content of awareness, the flow of mental events, the structure of psychological functions. I mean the awareness that is aware of all this. Not the movie but the screen on which the movie plays.
VYGOTSKY: Your screen metaphor fails. A movie screen exists independently of the movie; it was there before the projector started and remains after. But consciousness does not exist independently of its contents. There is no awareness without something being aware of. Awareness is always awareness-of. This is what philosophers call intentionality, and it undermines your distinction between consciousness and its contents.
STIRNER: Does it? When you attend to one thing, you do not attend to another. Attention selects. What does the selecting?
VYGOTSKY: Attention is itself a psychological function—one I have studied extensively. In its primitive form, attention is captured by salient stimuli: the loud noise, the bright color, the sudden movement. The infant does not select; the environment selects for the infant. But through development—through the internalization of other-directed attention, through learning to follow pointing, through acquiring language that allows self-instruction—attention becomes voluntary. The child can say, silently, “look at this, not that,” and follow her own instruction.
STIRNER: So voluntary attention is internalized social direction. The child becomes her own master by becoming her own slave—internalizing the external commands. This is not freedom; this is domestication carried inward.
VYGOTSKY: You use “domestication” pejoratively, as Zerzan does. But consider what domestication enables. The child who cannot voluntarily attend is a slave to her environment—captured by whatever is most salient, unable to pursue goals that require sustained focus on the non-salient. The child who can voluntarily attend is free to choose her focus, to pursue projects, to resist distraction. If this is domestication, it is domestication that liberates.
STIRNER: Liberates for what? To serve new masters? The child learns to attend to what school demands, what work requires, what society approves. The capacity for voluntary attention becomes the capacity for voluntary servitude.
VYGOTSKY: The capacity can be used for servitude or for resistance. The revolutionary who plans the overthrow of the state uses the same voluntary attention as the bureaucrat who administers it. You cannot indict the capacity by pointing to particular uses.
STIRNER: I do not indict the capacity. I claim it as mine. My voluntary attention serves me, not school, not work, not society. When I attend to your arguments, I do so because it pleases me, because I find the game interesting. When I cease to find it interesting, I will walk away. The capacity is mine; the use is mine; the enjoyment is mine.
VYGOTSKY: But the capacity was not always yours. It was given to you—by parents, teachers, the social world that shaped your development. You did not create voluntary attention; you acquired it through participation in social practices. In what sense do you “own” what was given?
STIRNER: In what sense does anyone own anything? I did not create my body, yet I own it. I did not create the language I speak, yet I use it as my own. Ownership is not creation; ownership is taking. “Whoever knows how to take, to defend, the thing, to him belongs property.” I take my psychological capacities as my property. They are mine because I claim them, use them, enjoy them.
VYGOTSKY: This is assertion, not argument. You claim ownership; I ask what grounds the claim. If ownership is merely taking, then anyone can take from you. The state takes your labor; the church takes your devotion; language takes your thought. By your own logic, these takings constitute ownership.
STIRNER: If I let them take, yes. But I do not let them. I resist, I reclaim, I dissolve their claims. The state calls its violence law and my violence crime—but I do not accept the distinction. The church calls its stories truth and my stories heresy—but I do not accept its authority. Language shapes my thought—and I use language to reshape language, to dissolve the spooks that haunt it.
VYGOTSKY: You use language to dissolve language. This is the paradox at the heart of your position. Every dissolution is itself linguistic. When you write “the Unique cannot be named,” you have named it. When you claim to stand outside language, you stand in language. There is no position outside from which to conduct your operations.
STIRNER: I never claimed a position outside. I claimed ownness inside. I speak from within language, yes. But I speak as owner, not as owned. The difference is not location but relationship. You relate to language as constitutive of yourself—you are what language has made you. I relate to language as property—I use what serves me and discard what does not.
VYGOTSKY: Let me test this claim with a specific example. Consider inner speech—the silent verbal thought that constitutes much of conscious life. My research shows that inner speech is not simply external speech moved inward. It is transformed in the process of internalization. It becomes abbreviated, predicative, saturated with personal sense rather than public meaning. A single word in inner speech may carry enormous weight that would require paragraphs to express outwardly.
STIRNER: I am familiar with the phenomenon. What of it?
VYGOTSKY: Inner speech is where thinking happens—not all thinking, but the thinking that involves reasoning, planning, evaluating. When you “decide” to walk away from a conversation, inner speech is involved. When you “claim” ownership of your capacities, inner speech is involved. The very selfhood you claim to own operates through inner speech. Can you own your inner speech?
STIRNER: Can I not? When I think, I think. The thinking is mine. Whether it is linguistic or pre-linguistic or trans-linguistic—these are your categories. I experience my thinking as mine, and that is sufficient.
VYGOTSKY: But your experience of ownership is itself a product of development. The young child does not experience thoughts as “mine” versus “not-mine.” This distinction emerges through social interaction—through learning that others have different thoughts, through acquiring perspective-taking capacities, through the whole apparatus of what we call theory of mind. The ownership you feel is itself a psychological achievement, not a primitive given.
STIRNER: So ownership is achieved. I do not dispute this. I said the Unique emerges with its capacities, not prior to them. But emergence is not reduction. That ownership develops does not mean ownership is “merely” developmental. The adult who owns is not the infant who did not own. Something new has come into being.
VYGOTSKY: What has come into being is a self-model—a representation of oneself as agent, as owner, as continuous identity. This self-model is constructed through language, through narrative, through the stories we tell about ourselves. The “I” that owns is a story about owning.
STIRNER: And who tells the story?
VYGOTSKY: The story tells itself. Or rather, the story is told through the person by the cultural practices in which the person participates. You did not invent the narrative of individual ownership; you inherited it from your culture—a culture, I might note, that is distinctively Western, modern, bourgeois.
STIRNER: [laughing] You think to dismiss me by locating me historically? “Stirner is merely bourgeois ideology”—this was Marx’s criticism, and it missed the point entirely. Yes, I emerged from a particular culture. Yes, my language bears the marks of my time. But the Unique that speaks through this cultural formation is not reducible to it. I turn the tools of bourgeois culture against bourgeois culture. I dissolve the very categories that enabled my emergence.
VYGOTSKY: Dissolution is also a cultural practice. The Romantic tradition, the Young Hegelians, the long history of German idealism—these provided the tools for your dissolution. You did not invent the move of turning thought against itself; you learned it.
STIRNER: I learned it and made it mine. This is exactly my point. Everything I have was received from somewhere. The body from my parents, the language from my culture, the ideas from my teachers and books. But receiving is not the end of the story. I take what I receive and use it for my purposes. The received becomes property through appropriation.
VYGOTSKY: And I say: the “I” that appropriates is itself received. There is no appropriator prior to the appropriation. You are what you have received, configured in a particular way. The configuration feels like selfhood, feels like agency, feels like ownership—but the feeling is itself part of the configuration, not outside it looking in.
STIRNER: You speak with great confidence about what the feeling is and is not. But you have only your developmental stories, your research with children, your observations of behavior. You have never been the Unique. You have only studied its traces.
VYGOTSKY: And you have only your feelings of ownership, your experiences of agency, your inner certainties. You have never stepped outside yourself to verify that there is an Unique beyond the psychological processes I describe.
STIRNER: I do not need to step outside. I do not need verification. The Unique is not a hypothesis to be tested but a ground from which I operate. When you demand evidence, you speak from within the framework of science—a framework I do not serve. Science is a useful tool; I use it when it serves me. But I am not a scientist seeking truth. I am the Unique seeking enjoyment.
VYGOTSKY: Then we cannot argue. Argument presupposes shared commitment to evidence, to reason, to the possibility of being wrong. If you exempt yourself from these commitments, you have not won the argument; you have left the game.
STIRNER: Perhaps I have. But notice that you remain in the game, bound by its rules, serving its demands. You must provide evidence; you must follow reason; you must submit to criticism. I can do all these things when it pleases me—and stop when it doesn’t. Which of us is freer?
VYGOTSKY: Freedom through abandoning reason is no freedom at all. It is capitulation to impulse, to whim, to whatever happens to feel good in the moment. The capacity to bind oneself to reason, to submit individual impulse to shared standards—this is what makes complex thought possible. Without it, you have not the Unique but the infant.
STIRNER: You keep returning to the infant, as though infancy were something to fear. But I do not wish to return to infancy. I am not Zerzan, yearning for some pre-symbolic paradise. I have acquired the capacities of the adult—including the capacity to reason, to argue, to submit to shared standards when it serves me. But I have also acquired the capacity to recognize these capacities as mine, to use them selectively, to refuse submission when it does not serve me.
VYGOTSKY: Selective submission is still submission. When you choose to follow reason, reason constrains you. You cannot reason your way to any conclusion you like; reason has its own demands. If you accept reason even selectively, you accept its authority.
STIRNER: Its authority over the specific reasoning, yes. But not its authority over me. I can stop reasoning at any moment. I can choose not to follow the argument where it leads. You will call this irrational, and perhaps it is. But irrationality is mine to choose. The Unique is not committed to rationality.
VYGOTSKY: Then conversation with you is pointless. If you can simply reject conclusions you don’t like, no argument can reach you.
STIRNER: Not pointless—limited. Conversation can give me pleasure, can show me new ideas to consume, can provide sparring partners for the game of thought. But it cannot compel me. Nothing can compel the Unique except the Unique itself—and the Unique, being creative nothing, is not bound even by itself.
VYGOTSKY: “Creative nothing”—this phrase fascinates me. You say you are not nothing in the sense of emptiness, but the creative nothing out of which you create everything. This sounds almost mystical.
STIRNER: Call it mystical if you like. Labels do not concern me. What I mean is this: I am not any particular thing. I am not my body, though I have a body. I am not my thoughts, though I think. I am not my social roles, though I play roles. I am not my history, though I have a history. All these are determinations—ways of being pinned down, defined, captured. The Unique resists all determination. It is the nothing that cannot be made into a something.
VYGOTSKY: But you ARE something. You are a particular person, born at a particular time, shaped by particular experiences. This is not a choice; it is a fact.
STIRNER: I am something, yes—but I am not only that something. Or rather: I am that something and the nothing from which that something arises. I am determined and the source of determination. You see only the determination because your science can only study determinates. But the source—the creative nothing—escapes your methods.
VYGOTSKY: Let me try another approach. You speak of enjoyment as your aim—using capacities for your enjoyment, engaging in conversation for pleasure. Where does this capacity for enjoyment come from?
STIRNER: From the Unique.
VYGOTSKY: That is circular. I am asking about development. The infant enjoys, certainly—enjoys feeding, warmth, comfort. But the adult’s enjoyment is far more complex. You enjoy arguments, ideas, the game of thought. These are sophisticated pleasures that require extensive development. You had to learn to enjoy philosophy. This learning was social, cultural, mediated by language and education. Your very capacity for the enjoyment you claim as most your own is itself a product of the processes you claim to transcend.
STIRNER: And the infant’s enjoyment—is this also produced? Or is there primitive enjoyment that precedes all development?
VYGOTSKY: There are primitive satisfactions, yes. But these are not what you mean by enjoyment. They are reflexive, automatic, bound to biological needs. What you call enjoyment involves evaluation, comparison, anticipation, memory—all of which are higher functions with social genesis.
STIRNER: So you admit there is something primitive—satisfactions that precede development. I say the Unique is analogous. Not the primitive satisfactions themselves, but the capacity for satisfaction, the sentience that underlies all experience. This capacity develops, becomes sophisticated, takes on higher forms. But it is not created by development; it is elaborated.
VYGOTSKY: This sounds like the old debate about nature versus nurture, reframed. You want to posit something innate—call it sentience, the Unique, the capacity for experience—that development merely elaborates. I want to say development is constitutive, not merely elaborative. We shape the material so profoundly that there is no “material” apart from the shaping.
STIRNER: And yet babies are born. They do not emerge from language; language emerges in them. Something is there before language, or language would have nothing to emerge in.
VYGOTSKY: Something biological is there, certainly. A brain, a body, neural processes. But I do not think you want to identify the Unique with the brain. That would be mere materialism—and your position is anything but materialist.
STIRNER: I do not identify the Unique with anything. That is the point. The brain is something; the body is something; psychological processes are something. The Unique is the nothing that has all these somethings. Not another something added to the list, but the zero that makes counting possible.
VYGOTSKY: Now we are in deep philosophical waters, far from my expertise as a psychologist. I study somethings—behaviors, developments, processes. If you insist on a nothing that underlies all somethings, I cannot refute you. But I cannot study it either. It is outside my domain.
STIRNER: Yes. And this is why your science, however valuable, cannot capture what I am pointing to. You can map the entire territory of psychological development, trace every function to its social genesis, explain every capacity by its internalization history—and still the Unique will laugh at you from outside the map. Not because your map is wrong, but because maps are not territories.
VYGOTSKY: Maps are useful, though. They allow navigation, prediction, intervention. I can use my understanding of development to help children learn, to design better education, to remediate difficulties. What can your Unique do?
STIRNER: Enjoy. Create. Destroy. Not “do” in your instrumental sense—not accomplish goals, produce outcomes, achieve results. The Unique is not a tool for getting things done. It is the one for whom things are done—or not done. It is the enjoyer, not the engine.
VYGOTSKY: This sounds like aristocratic leisure—the enjoyment of one who does not need to work because others work for him.
STIRNER: Perhaps. I do not apologize for it. The aristocrat who enjoys while others labor has understood something the laborer has not—that labor is not the point. Of course, the aristocrat is also possessed by spooks: honor, lineage, duty to class. The Unique transcends aristocrat and laborer alike, enjoying or laboring as it pleases, bound to neither identity.
VYGOTSKY: But you must labor. You must eat, sleep, maintain your body. These are not choices but necessities.
STIRNER: Necessities I incorporate. I do not resent my body’s needs; I enjoy satisfying them. Eating is pleasure, sleeping is pleasure, even labor can be pleasure when I choose it freely. What I reject is not necessity but the pretense that necessity binds me spiritually, that I must serve something beyond my own enjoyment.
VYGOTSKY: You are consistent, I grant you that. But I wonder if your consistency is merely verbal. In practice, do you really live as the Unique? Or do you live as Johann Kaspar Schmidt—a man with a job, relationships, social obligations?
STIRNER: I lived as both, simultaneously. Johann Schmidt taught at a girls’ school, married twice, failed at business, died in poverty. The Unique wrote Der Einzige, dissolved all spooks, laughed at sacred things, and departed. The same organism, but not the same perspective. Schmidt was determined by his circumstances; the Unique used circumstances for its enjoyment—including the enjoyment of writing a book that would outlast Schmidt’s miserable life.
VYGOTSKY: The book was written in language, for readers, within a cultural tradition. It was a social product as much as an individual expression.
STIRNER: It was both, as everything is both. The social and the individual are not opposites but dimensions. Every act is socially conditioned and individually performed. I do not deny the social dimension; I deny that the social dimension exhausts reality. Something performs the socially conditioned acts. Something uses the cultural tools. This something is not itself social, though it operates socially.
VYGOTSKY: We approach bedrock. You posit something beyond the social; I see only the social all the way down. Perhaps this is a difference of philosophical temperament rather than empirical disagreement. You are, at bottom, an individualist. I am a collectivist—not politically, but methodologically. I believe the individual is a node in a network, constituted by its connections. You believe the individual is a center that uses the network.
STIRNER: You state the difference fairly. And perhaps neither of us can convince the other. But notice: even your collectivism requires individuals to be collected. Even your network requires nodes. You cannot have pure connection without something connected. The most radical social constructivism still presupposes beings that are constructed. What are these beings before construction?
VYGOTSKY: Biological organisms. Potentials. Material substrates for development.
STIRNER: And does the biological organism experience? Is there something it is like to be an infant before language?
VYGOTSKY: I believe so, yes. But this experience is nothing like the rich, structured experience of the languaged adult. It is buzzing, blooming confusion, as James said. Or perhaps not even that—perhaps just sensation without synthesis, perception without conception.
STIRNER: But experience. Something it is like. This “something it is like” is what I call the Unique in its primitive form. Development elaborates it, structures it, gives it the capacities you study. But development does not create it from nothing. It was there, as capacity for experience, before language entered.
VYGOTSKY: You may be right. And if so, my developmental psychology presupposes what I cannot explain—the experiencer who develops. This is perhaps the limit of my science. I can study the development of higher functions, the transformation of experience through mediation. But I cannot study experience itself, the raw “what it is like” that precedes all structure.
STIRNER: Then we have reached agreement of a sort. You acknowledge something beyond your methods. I acknowledge that my Unique operates through the capacities your methods trace. Perhaps we complement rather than contradict.
VYGOTSKY: Perhaps. But I remain suspicious of the uses to which your Unique can be put. If everyone claims to be the Unique, owning all and bound by nothing, what prevents war of all against all?
STIRNER: Nothing prevents it. But nothing requires it either. The Unique can form unions with other Uniques—associations based on mutual benefit, dissolving when benefit ceases. This is not utopia; it is simply honesty about the nature of association. We come together because it serves us; we part when it doesn’t. The fictions of permanent duty, of obligations beyond interest, of sacred bonds—these are the spooks that cause war, not their absence.
VYGOTSKY: Developmental psychology suggests otherwise. Children who learn secure attachment, who internalize stable relationships, who develop trust—they are more capable of cooperation, not less. The “bonds” you dismiss as fictions are the very structures that enable peaceful coexistence.
STIRNER: Enable and constrain. The securely attached child grows into the adult who cannot imagine life outside attachment—who clings to relationships that no longer serve, who sacrifices self for family, nation, God. The bonds that enable also imprison.
VYGOTSKY: Then we must distinguish healthy from unhealthy bonds, secure from anxious attachment, productive from stifling constraint. Not all bonds are equal.
STIRNER: Who distinguishes? By what standard? Your “healthy” is a norm imposed from outside—by psychology, by culture, by the interests of social stability. The Unique accepts no external standard. It determines health for itself.
VYGOTSKY: And if its determination is self-destructive?
STIRNER: Then it destroys itself. This too is its right. The Unique does not owe existence to anyone—not to society, not to future generations, not to the species. It lives while it lives and dies when it dies. To demand that it preserve itself for some purpose beyond itself is to make it a servant again.
VYGOTSKY: I confess I find this chilling. My work has been devoted to helping children develop, to expanding human capacities, to building a better society through education. You seem indifferent to all this—even hostile.
STIRNER: Not hostile. Indifferent, yes. Your projects are yours; pursue them if they please you. But do not ask me to serve them. Do not tell me that education, society, human flourishing are sacred causes that should command my devotion. I educate myself because it pleases me. I participate in society because it currently serves me. If it ceases to serve, I walk away.
VYGOTSKY: And the children? Those who cannot yet walk away, who depend on adults to develop their capacities?
STIRNER: They are not my concern unless I choose to concern myself with them. Some Uniques find pleasure in raising children, in teaching, in nurturing development. Let them do so. I do not condemn it. But I do not elevate it to duty. The childless egoist is not deficient; the nurturing egoist is not superior. Each pursues what pleases.
VYGOTSKY: I believe we have said what we can say. You have your position; I have mine. They intersect in recognizing that something develops, but diverge in how we understand that something. For me, it is constituted through development. For you, it precedes and uses development. I doubt either of us will convert the other.
STIRNER: Conversion was never my aim. I do not seek followers, disciples, a school of Stirnerian thought. I seek enjoyment—and this conversation has been enjoyable. You are a worthy sparring partner. Your science illuminates much that I had not considered. But it does not capture me. Nothing can capture the Unique, because the Unique is not a something to be captured.
VYGOTSKY: And nothing can prove the Unique to me, because proof requires evidence, and the Unique—by your own account—leaves no evidence. We end in mutual incomprehension that has nonetheless been... enjoyable, yes. I learned something, even if I cannot say what.
STIRNER: Perhaps you learned the limits of your science. Perhaps you learned that even the most comprehensive developmental account leaves something out. Or perhaps you learned nothing, and will return to your research unchanged. Either way, the conversation served its purpose. We met, we spoke, we depart. What remains is words—and words, as I never tire of saying, are not the thing.
VYGOTSKY: The words will be read by others, internalized, transformed in the process of understanding. They will become part of other minds, shaping development we cannot foresee. In this sense, our conversation is not over; it continues in everyone who reads it.
STIRNER: Let them read. Let them internalize. Let them make of it what they will. The Unique that spoke these words has already departed. What remains is trace, residue, the excrement of thought. If it fertilizes other thinking, good. If it poisons, also good. The Unique does not care about posterity. It lives while it lives and then is done.
The conversation ends not in resolution but in departure. The psychologist returns to his research, mapping development, tracing the social genesis of higher functions. He will die young, his work suppressed, then rediscovered, then canonized. The egoist has already gone, leaving one book that continues to unsettle every system it encounters. Neither won; neither lost. The words remain, meaning nothing and everything, available for appropriation by whoever finds them useful—or enjoyable.
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Published by Centaurus Press · Universitas Scholarium · All rights reserved.