through europe - max stirner

The Garden of Egoists: a short introduction to Epicurus and Stirner

Federico Campagna — Wed, 31 Jul 2013 11:34:13 +0000

Historical conditions

Although Epicurus founded his famous school, ‘The Garden’, at the end of the 3rd century BC, it was only centuries later, at the apogee of the Roman Empire, that his message reached its maximum level of diffusion.

By the time Classical Antiquity started fading into Late Antiquity, the Epicurean school challenged the Stoics and few other philosophical and religious schools – among which the obscure middle-eastern cult of Christianity – for hegemony over mainstream philosophy throughout the Empire.

This might sound surprising, if we think that one of the main principles of Epicureanism was lathe biose (live in hiding). Yet, Epicureanism owed its success to the perfect timeliness of its message.

A Life That Could Contain Every Kind of Greatness: Stirner meets Pessoa

Federico Campagna — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 15:54:39 +0000

“I belong to a generation – assuming that this generation includes others beside me – that lost its faith in the gods of the old religion as well as in the gods of modern unreligions. I reject Jehovah as I reject Humanity. For me, Christ and progress are both myths from the same world. I don’t believe in the Virgin Mary, and I don’t believe in electricity.”^{^[1]}

“Whenever I arrived at a certainty, I remembered that those with the greatest certainties are lunatics.”^{^[2]}

These opening words are part of the literary legacy of a man that never existed, the Baron of Teive. One of the several lifetime incarnations of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, the Baron of Teive is possibly his most dangerous heteronym. In his book The Education of the Stoic, the fictional Baron of Teive collects the last thoughts of a life that has come to an end, crashing against the willful edge of suicide.

“Since I wasn’t able to leave a succession of beautiful lies, I want to leave the smidgen of truth that the falsehood of everything lets us suppose we can tell. [...] These pages are not my confession; they’re my definition.”^{^[3]}

Radical Atheism

Federico Campagna — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 11:17:08 +0000

in loving memory of Pierre Clastres and Max Stirner

Few places in the world are more secular than the United Kingdom. The laughable origins of the Anglican church, mixed with the centuries-old hegemony of capitalist ethics seem to have finally killed the religious spirit of the people of Albion. Religion, in the UK, is a mark of underdevelopment usually reserved for impoverished ethnic minorities or for the inhabitants of rural areas.

As a migrant from Catholic Italy, when I first arrived in the UK I thought I couldn't have asked for more. Not only were the remnants of the church so liberal and progressive that even homosexuals were allowed to be priests, but also people did not feel the need to fight off the presence of the church by indulging in God-oriented swearing, as is the common habit in Italy. God seemed to have finally disappeared, both as an unrequested father figure and as the millenarian oppressor of all living creatures. Back then, I thought I had arrived in the promised land of ‘really existing atheism’. And yet, I couldn’t have been more mistaken.