1 6 S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 5 - 2 Fa l l 2 0 1 9 should serve organization of the society and state (e.g. Nicoló Machiavelli, The Prince, 1513). Similarly, Thomas Hobbes claimed that man is fundamentally an egoist, “a man is a wolf to another man” and every expression of self-sacrifice and care for the other is only a hidden behavior following one’s own profit (Leviathan, 1651). Empiricists and naturalists assert that morality is not a spiritual or rational matter, but it emerges from empirical necessity, mediated by affects and feelings. The task of ethics is to describe these procedures and explain self-keeping and hedonistic mechanisms of human action. Perhaps, the best-known confessor of egoistic ethics was the anarcho-individualist Max Stirner, who attacks all general spiritual norms in a polemic manner in his fundamental workThe Ego and Its Own (1844). State, morality and religion and all forms of sociality, according to him, restrain an individual from their own development. The only criterion of action should be the justification, “because I like it”. Stirner states that his philosophical stream is egoism. “The Unique” (Der Einzige), however, is not a man as such, but an individual, an unrepeatable and irreplaceable being that must not be enslaved by purposes and aims that are not desired by the Unique and that would mean loss of domination over themselves. The Unique is not good, nor bad; they are freed from every evaluation and every structure, they are the center of the world and existence of the other, accept rules of the other only if they consider the rules beneficial for themselves, otherwise they create their own rules. The Unique is really themselves only when they freely limit their own freedom for their own aims, for instance, entering an interaction with the other, which means undergoing certain sacrifice, however, it is focused on a greater own profit that cannot be otherwise reached. According to utilitarianists, every thinking and acting subject calculates advantages and disadvantages of their own actions and acts in order to maximize their own benefit or delight. Already the ancient philosophers of Athens rejected hedonism (morality of searching for delight and avoiding stress) and utilitarianism (morality of increasing one’s own and social benefit) as imperfect forms of life, which do not fulfil human yearning for good. Plato’s Socrates, in the work Republic, describes that part of soul he called “lust”, despite its manifoldness, according to “the biggest and strongest in it. For we called it the desiring part on account of the intensity of the desires concerned with eating, drinking, sex, and all their followers; and so, we also called it the money-loving part, because such desires are most fulfilled by means of money” (Plato 1991, 580e). People focused on themselves and their profits will never rise themselves really “above”, “but like cattle, always looking downward with their heads bent toward the ground and the banquet tables, they feed, fatten, and fornicate. In order to increase their possessions they kick and butt with horns and hoofs of steel and kill each other, insatiable as they are.” (Plato 1991, 586a). Plato, in The Laws, rejects extreme self-love as follows, “but of all faults of soul the gravest is one which is inborn in most men, one which all excuse in themselves and none therefore attempts to avoid that conveyed in the maxim that ‘everyone is naturally his own friend’, and that it is only right and proper that he should be so, whereas, in truth, this same violent attachment to self is the constant source of all manner of misdeeds in every one of us” (Plato 1961, 731e). Rejection of selfishness in favor of generosity can be found at several places in texts where Plato and Aristotle declare the value of friendship. Aristotle highlights unselfish love that “has nothing to do with the example of relationship of debtors and creditors” (that is, reciprocal advantage), because “benefactors love those they have benefited, even if they are of no present or future use to them” (Aristotle 1934, 1168a–b). The contemporary French philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky believes that we are citizens of a contradictory culture, where the principles of modernism and democracy, hedonism and the growing consumption, radical individualism and narcissism are being molded together. Art records changes in the moral code of a society spontaneously. The ethical sovereignty gets into conflict with the absolute duty, while sexual liberalism leads to promiscuity, or put in other words – to Eros with a changeable geometry. “The demand for ethics doesn’t remain limited only by the areas that call for responsibility. It crystallizes in the same manner also in the sphere which embodies the ephemeral and spectacular present time the best – in the media. Just as the demand for ethics of future followed from the new possibilities of techno-science; similarly, the polymerous power of media and extravagances of printing press enlivened the need for the ethics of current affairs.” (Lipovetsky 2011, 309). Lipovetsky sees behind the so-called “honesty” of the postmodern man an acute hedonism (the ideology of sensual lust), which has become, under the influence of mass consumption, the central value of our culture. Postmodernism began at a time, when new forms of unrestrained behavior no longer evoked outrage and any form of the search for sensual stimulation was publicly approved. Postmodernism manifests itself in democratization of hedonism, in general sanctification of novelties, in ending the conflict between the values highly regarded and the values experienced. The process of individualization, which he calls “personalization”, “has fronted personal actualization and the respect to subjective particularity and a unique individuality as a fundamental value…The right to be absolutely yourself and to enjoy as much
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