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You're listening to the Partially Examine Life, a podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it.

Our question for episode 358 is something like, is Morality Bunk?

And we read parts of Max Sterners, The Ego and Its Own, from 1844.

For more information about the text and the podcast, please see PartiallyExamineLife.com.

This is Wes All One, asserting my humanity against every restrictive specification in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

This is Seth Paskin, the unfree son of the wilderness in Austin, Texas.

This is Dylan Casey standing in front of the odorous castle kitchen, and my palate is

tasting the savory dishes therein in Madison, Wisconsin.

So Mark can't be here today.

He's the one who suggested this reading, and I think he suggested it because I think someone suggested it to him, maybe a fan,

because it's known to have influenced Marx, although Marx spends 300 pages in the German ideology,

absolutely savaging sterner, which is not surprising.

Thou doth protest too much.

Yeah.

It's not surprising because he savaged basically every influence of his, many of them

young Higalians, and even Sturner in a way who constitutes the most radical rejection thus

far of what's come before in the young Higalians.

So I think the influence involves we recently read Marx's 1844 manuscripts where he sounds

quite a bit Feuerbachian in the sense that he's thinking of what human society ought to be in terms of

human nature, I think, arguably one could say that. And I think what we get in sterner is a rejection

...