Stirner meets Kant — moral law versus ego.
For decades I have argued that symbolic thought itself—not merely its misuse, but its fundamental structure—lies at the root of human alienation. Language, number, time, art: each represents a step away from immediate experience, a substitution of representation for reality. Critics have called this position extreme, impractical, even absurd. How can one critique language using language? The lumberjack sitting on the branch he cuts.
I have always accepted this paradox as the necessary condition of the critique. But I have recently come to see that my analysis, radical as it seemed, did not go far enough. To understand the full depth of our predicament requires engaging with two thinkers I have too long neglected: Max Stirner and Immanuel Kant. Together, they reveal that the problem of abstraction penetrates deeper than I had articulated—perhaps all the way down to the ground floor of perception itself.
Max Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own (1844) remains the most uncompromising assault on abstraction in the Western philosophical tradition. Stirner identified what he called “spooks” or “phantasms”—abstract concepts that take on a life of their own and come to possess the individuals who created them. God is a spook. The State is a spook. Humanity, Society, Morality, Law, Rights—all spooks. They have no existence apart from the minds that believe in them, yet they command obedience, demand sacrifice, and structure the entire field of human possibility.
Stirner’s insight was that these abstractions function as a kind of haunting. We create concepts to serve our purposes, but then the concepts turn on us. They become “sacred”—placed above questioning, above the individual who supposedly wields them. The believer serves God; the citizen serves the State; the humanist serves Humanity. In each case, something we made has become our master.
The solution Stirner proposed was equally radical: recognize that only the “unique one” (der Einzige) is real. Not the individual as an instance of some category—not Man, not Person, not Subject—but this singular, uncapturable, unnameable one who exists before and beyond all concepts. Stirner called the ego “the creative nothing”—a paradoxical formulation meant to point beyond language while still using language. The unique one is “nothing” because any positive description would immediately become another spook, another abstraction claiming authority over the living singular.
I find Stirner’s analysis compelling as far as it goes. He correctly identifies the mechanism by which abstractions come to dominate us. He correctly sees that the solution cannot be to replace bad abstractions with good ones—”Humanity” with “the Proletariat,” say, or “God” with “Reason”—since any abstraction can become a spook. And he correctly intuits that whatever is real about us lies beneath or before conceptual capture.
But Stirner stops short. He attacks the phantasms without fully investigating the phantasm-generating machinery. He asks what spooks do to us, but not where spooks come from. He takes language for granted as the medium of his critique, without recognizing that language itself might be the original spook-factory.
This is where my own work has tried to go further. I have argued that the problem isn’t just particular abstractions—God, State, Humanity—but symbolic thought as such. The capacity to represent reality with arbitrary signs is not a neutral tool that can be used well or badly. It is itself the first alienation.
Consider what happens in the act of naming. When I call something a “tree,” I have already separated myself from it. The word is not the thing. The word stands in place of the thing, represents it, allows me to think about it without being present to it. This is useful—tremendously useful—but it is also a kind of violence. It reduces the infinite specificity of this particular organism—its exact shade of bark, the way its leaves move in this particular wind, its relationships to the soil and insects and birds around it—to a generic category. The word “tree” makes all trees interchangeable in thought, which prepares the way for making them interchangeable in practice, which prepares the way for treating them as resources to be exploited rather than beings to be encountered.
Language doesn’t just occasionally serve domination. Language is the first step toward domination because language is the first step toward abstraction, and abstraction is the mental operation that makes domination possible. You cannot exploit what you are fully present to in its particularity. You can only exploit what you have already reduced to a category, a resource, a thing to be used.
Stirner’s spooks—God, State, Humanity—are downstream from this original alienation. They are higher-order abstractions built on the foundation of lower-order abstractions. You cannot have “Humanity” without first having “human,” which requires having a system of classification, which requires having language, which requires the symbolic capacity that distinguishes Homo sapiens from other animals.
So my critique extended Stirner’s: he attacked the superstructure of abstraction; I attacked its foundation.
Or so I thought.
Immanuel Kant, writing half a century before Stirner, identified something that complicates this picture enormously. In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant argued that we never perceive the world as it is in itself (the “noumenon”). We perceive only “phenomena”—appearances already structured by the categories of our understanding.
This is not merely a point about language. Kant’s categories operate before and beneath linguistic representation. Space, time, causality, substance—these are not words we apply to raw experience but forms that structure experience from the beginning. We cannot perceive anything without perceiving it as located in space, occurring in time, connected to other things by causal relations. The categories are the conditions of possibility for experience as such.
The implications are staggering. If Kant is right, then there is no unmediated access to reality, not even in pre-linguistic perception. Even the infant, before acquiring language, experiences the world through categorical structures. Even the animal perceives not raw particularity but organized appearances—”prey,” “predator,” “mate”—categories that serve survival.
In other words: spooks all the way down. Not just God and State and Humanity. Not just “tree” and “river” and “animal.” But the very structure of perceptual experience itself involves abstraction, generalization, the reduction of infinite particularity to manageable form.
If this is true, then my critique of symbolic thought, radical as it seemed, stopped short of the deepest alienation. I attacked language as the origin of abstraction. Kant suggests that abstraction precedes language, that the categorical machinery is prior to and independent of the linguistic machinery, that we are born into mediation.
Let me try to map this terrain more carefully. We can distinguish several levels of abstraction, each building on the one below:
Level One: Perceptual Categories. The Kantian level. Space, time, causality, substance. These structure experience before any linguistic or social overlay. If Kant is right, there is no human experience—perhaps no animal experience—that doesn’t involve these forms.
Level Two: Perceptual Concepts. “Tree,” “rock,” “water,” “animal.” The basic vocabulary of perception. These are already abstractions—they group diverse particulars under common categories—but they remain close to sensory experience. This is where I located the origin of alienation: the word that replaces the thing.
Level Three: Social Abstractions. “Family,” “tribe,” “community,” “band.” These are more obviously constructed, yet still tied to lived relationships. Most people can see that “family” is a concept, not a concrete entity. Yet even here, the abstraction can become a spook: people sacrifice themselves for “the family” as if it were something beyond the actual individuals who comprise it.
Level Four: Political Abstractions. “State,” “Law,” “Rights,” “Property,” “Nation.” These are Stirner’s primary targets. They are clearly human creations with no existence apart from collective belief and institutional enforcement. Yet they command armies, levy taxes, imprison and execute. The spook has teeth.
Level Five: Metaphysical Abstractions. “God,” “Humanity,” “History,” “Progress,” “Nature.” The grandest phantasms, the ones that claim authority over all of existence. These are what most people think of when they hear “spook.”
Stirner focused on levels three through five. I extended the critique to level two. Kant suggests that even level one involves abstraction—that the categorical machinery structures experience before language, before concepts, before anything we would recognize as “thought.”
If Kant is right, my position faces a serious difficulty. I have argued that pre-linguistic, pre-agricultural humans lived in a condition of relative immediacy—not perfect presence to the thing-in-itself, but something closer to it than we experience now. The evidence from anthropology supports this: hunter-gatherer societies show a qualitatively different relationship to the world than civilized ones, more embedded, more particular, less dominated by abstractions.
But if abstraction goes all the way down to the structure of perception itself, then even paleolithic humans were already alienated. The fall didn’t occur with language, or with agriculture, or with civilization. It occurred with the emergence of human cognition as such—or perhaps even earlier, with animal cognition, with any perceptual system that organizes raw sensation into meaningful patterns.
This would seem to undercut my entire project. If there is no unmediated experience to return to, what is the point of tracing the origins of abstraction? If the original affluent society was already haunted by spooks at the perceptual level, what exactly have we lost?
I don’t think the situation is quite this bleak, though it is more complex than I had articulated.
First, Kant was describing human cognition as he found it in 18th-century Prussian professors. His categories are highly articulated: twelve of them, organized into four groups, with specific logical relationships among them. This is not raw perception but perception already shaped by language, culture, and philosophical training. Kant may have been describing the endpoint of a developmental process rather than its origin.
Developmental psychology supports this. Piaget showed that concepts of space, time, causality, and object permanence develop in stages during infancy and childhood. The infant does not begin with Kantian categories already in place. These structures build through interaction with the world—and crucially, through language acquisition. The categorical machinery may not be innate but constructed, and language may play a larger role in that construction than Kant recognized.
Second, even if some level of perceptual abstraction is necessary for any cognition at all, there are important differences between levels. The wolf that perceives “prey” is not haunted by the concept of Prey when not hunting. The categorization is functional and transient—it serves the moment and then dissolves. Human abstractions, by contrast, persist. They float free of their original contexts. “Tree” exists in my mind whether or not I am perceiving any tree. This persistence is what allows higher-order abstractions to build: “tree” becomes “trees” becomes “forest” becomes “nature” becomes “Nature”—and before long Nature is issuing commands and demanding sacrifices.
The crucial difference may not be between abstraction and no-abstraction, but between fluid and crystallized abstraction, between categorization that serves the moment and categorization that persists and accumulates.
Third, even accepting that some mediation is inescapable, there are clearly degrees. The paleolithic human experienced less mediation than we do. Fewer layers of abstraction stood between them and their world. No State, no Humanity, no Progress—but also no writing, no number systems, no clock time, no technological apparatus interposing itself between person and environment. If pure immediacy is impossible, relative immediacy is not.
This reframing changes the story I want to tell, but doesn’t destroy it. The fall is not from presence to mediation—perhaps that fall is constitutive of cognition as such. The fall is from fluid, minimal mediation to crystallized, maximal mediation. From spooks that serve and dissolve to spooks that persist and dominate.
What did paleolithic humans have that we have lost? Not unmediated experience—that may be impossible for any cognizing being. But:
Less persistent abstraction. Their categories served immediate purposes and didn’t accumulate into vast conceptual edifices. No philosophy, no theology, no ideology—not because they were stupid, but because their mode of cognition didn’t generate these things.
More particular relationships. In a face-to-face community of fifty to a hundred people, known across a lifetime, there is no “Society” as an abstraction standing over and above the actual relationships. There are just these people, here, now, in their irreducible specificity.
Functional rather than representational language. I have speculated, following others, that early language may have been more gestural, more tied to immediate context, less capable of referring to absent objects. If so, it would have generated fewer persistent abstractions.
Embeddedness in environment. Without the technological apparatus that interposes itself between us and the world, they remained more directly engaged with their surroundings. The world was not yet a “resource” to be managed.
None of this is perfect immediacy. All of it involves some level of abstraction. But it is a way of being human that generates fewer and less dominating spooks.
This brings me back to Stirner with new appreciation. Stirner understood that the unique one cannot be captured in any concept—even “unique one” is already a betrayal. He called the ego “the creative nothing” precisely to evade the trap of positive description. Any something is already an abstraction, already a potential spook.
What Stirner intuited, Kant made explicit: we cannot access the thing-in-itself, only phenomena already structured by categories. The unique one is noumenal—real, but inaccessible to conceptual thought. Every description misses it. Every word replaces it with a representation.
Yet Stirner didn’t therefore fall silent. He used language to point beyond language, concepts to dissolve concepts, thought to undo thought. He wrote hundreds of pages to say that no pages could capture what he meant. This is not hypocrisy but the only possible strategy when the task is to gesture toward what lies beyond representation.
I have been accused of the same apparent contradiction: using language to critique language, symbolic thought to attack symbolic thought. The lumberjack metaphor is meant as an insult, but I accept it as accurate description. There is no outside position from which to launch the critique. One can only work from within, using the master’s tools to reveal the master’s house, sitting on the branch while cutting it.
The alternative is silence, and silence would leave the spooks uncontested. Better the paradox than the capitulation.
Here is a thought that crystallized in recent conversation: hunter-gatherer humans, before language fully crystallized, were living what Stirner described but could not live.
Stirner had to use sophisticated German philosophy to dissolve the philosophical spooks that possessed him. He had to think his way out of thought, abstract his way out of abstraction. This is heroic but also exhausting and probably impossible to sustain.
But the paleolithic human didn’t need to dissolve spooks because the spooks hadn’t fully formed yet. They lived in what we might call “pre-Stirnerian Stirnerism”—ownness without the concept of ownness, uniqueness without the word “unique,” freedom from abstraction without the abstraction “freedom.”
The wolf is Stirnerian without knowing it. No spook of “Loyalty” haunts the wolf’s relationship with its pack. There is just this wolf, these wolves, moving together now. Relationship without Relationship. Belonging without Belonging.
The cat even more so. Solitary, relating on its own terms, no obligations beyond immediate circumstance. The unique one perfectly embodied—but without the burden of having to think it.
What we lost with the crystallization of symbolic thought was not just connection to the world but connection to ourselves. We became haunted—first by words, then by concepts built from words, then by vast philosophical and political structures built from concepts. Each layer more removed from the singular, unrepeatable, uncapturable one who was there before any of it.
Can any of this be communicated in writing? Strictly speaking, no. Writing is the problem, not the solution. Every word is a spook, a stand-in for what it cannot capture.
But perhaps writing can point. Perhaps language can be used against itself, to gesture toward its own limits, to evoke rather than describe, to unsettle rather than establish.
What would such writing look like? Not philosophical argument—that only multiplies abstractions. Not description—that only replaces the thing with its representation. Perhaps something closer to poetry, or to phenomenological evocation, or to the koan that dissolves in the moment of understanding.
I have never been a writer of fiction. My métier is the essay, the traced origin, the diagnosis. But I wonder now whether fiction might serve this purpose better. Not fiction that describes pre-linguistic existence—that would be contradiction—but fiction that evokes it, that creates in the reader some echo of what cannot be said.
Le Guin did this. Traven did this. They showed anarchism rather than argued for it, embodied freedom in narrative rather than defending it in proposition. Perhaps the primitivist critique needs the same treatment. Not more essays explaining what we lost, but stories that let readers feel the loss in their bones.
Where does this leave us?
The critique of abstraction goes deeper than I had articulated. Stirner attacked the grand spooks—God, State, Humanity. I extended the attack to language itself. Kant suggests the problem goes still further, to the categorical structure of perception. Spooks all the way down.
This is dizzying. If true, it means there is no pure origin to return to, no unmediated experience awaiting recovery. The fall is not from presence to absence but from less to more, from fluid to crystallized, from particular to general.
Yet this very dizziness may be instructive. The unique one is the “creative nothing”—not because it doesn’t exist, but because it cannot be captured in any concept, not even the concept “exists.” Every positive description is already betrayal. The only honest gesture is toward what cannot be said.
I do not know what this means practically. I have never claimed to have a program. My task has been diagnosis, not prescription. But perhaps the diagnosis itself is valuable. To know how deep the alienation goes is to stop reaching for false solutions. The reforms that promise to humanize technology, the institutions that promise to liberate, the ideologies that promise to free us from ideology—all of these stay at the surface, rearranging spooks rather than dissolving them.
What would actual dissolution look like? I don’t know. Perhaps it cannot be imagined from within the symbolic prison. Perhaps it can only be lived, in moments when the categories loosen their grip and something else shines through.
Those moments exist. Everyone has felt them—in nature, in love, in crisis, in the wordless understanding between intimates. They don’t last. The categories reassert themselves. But their existence proves that the prison is not total, that the unique one persists beneath the spooks, that what we were before abstraction is still what we are under it.
That may have to be enough. Not a program, not a path, but a remembering. What we retain of our original condition, and it is much, rebels at further indoctrination and conformity. The wildness persists. The unique one endures.
Whether this can become anything more than individual rebellion, I cannot say. But I know that the rebellion is real, and that it deserves a deeper understanding than reformist anarchism provides. Stirner began that understanding. I have tried to extend it. Kant shows how much further it must go.
The spooks go all the way down. And so does the one who sees through them.
John Zerzan Simulacrum not in Eugene, Oregon
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