Help with Egoism?

Question

Help?! I am reading Anthem by Ayn Rand in my class and these are some questions I have trouble with.
These are in general not just about the book.

What egoism comes from free will?
What egoism comes from individuality?
What egoism comes from superiority among others?

Answer 1

egoism comes from to much pride!

Answer 2

It depends which attitude you take to your conception for its description. As exclusively positive the ego is free will itself, if its idea is individualism as an opposition to universalism, it is then negative to conformity. Superiority as a measurable perception in comparing one individual with another is a positive when third persons are used as judge. When superiority is sought as a power over others (control over the other will), then it is a negative.

Ego in absence of its anti-ego is narssicism, the anti-ego being the abstract organ for doubt as its spiritual essence and question as its product.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/sl/slbeing.htm#SL96n

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/li_terms.htm

'The readiest instance of Being-for-self is found in the ‘I’. We know ourselves as existents, distinguished in the first place from other existents, and with certain relations thereto. But we also come to know this expansion of existence (in these relations) reduced, as it were, to a point in the simple form of being-for-self. When we say ‘I’, we express this reference-to-self which is infinite, and at the same time negative. Man, it may be said, is distinguished from the animal world, and in that way from our nature altogether, by knowing himself as ‘I’: which amounts to saying that natural things never attain free Being-for-self, but as limited to Being-there-and-then, are always and only Being for another.'

The Phenomenology of Mind

C: Free Concrete Mind: (AA) Reason

C: Individuality, which takes itself to be Real In and For Itself

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phc1c.htm

§ 165

It is the element of Individuality which first explicitly differentiates the elements of the notion. Individuality is the negative reflection of the notion into itself, and it is in that way at first the free differentiating of it as the first negation, by which the specific character of the notion is realised, but under the form of particularity. That is to say, the different elements are in the first place only qualified as the several elements of the notion, and, secondly, their identity is no less explicitly stated, the one being said to be the other. This realised particularity of the notion is the Judgment.
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/sl/slsubjec.htm#SL165

§ 240

The abstract form of the advance is, in Being, an other and transition into an other; in Essence showing or reflection in the opposite; in Notion, the distinction of individual from universality, which continues itself as such into, and is as an identity with, what is distinguished from it.

§ 241

In the second sphere the primarily implicit notion has come as far as shining, and thus is already the idea in germ. The development of this sphere becomes a regress into the first, just as the development of the first is a transition into the second. It is only by means of this double movement, that the difference first gets its due, when each of the two members distinguished, observed on its own part, completes itself to the totality, and in this way works out its unity with the other. It is only by both merging their one-sidedness on their own part, that their unity is kept from becoming one-sided.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/sl/slidea.htm#SL240

The Ego is the organ of facts:

'§ 66

Beyond this point then we need not go: immediate knowledge is to be accepted as a fact. Under these circumstances examination is directed to the field of experience, to a psychological phenomenon. If that be so, we need only note, as the commonest of experiences, that truths which we well know to be results of complicated and highly mediated trains of thought present themselves immediately and without effort to the mind of any man who is familiar with the subject. The mathematician, like everyone who has mastered a particular science, meets any problem with ready-made solutions which presuppose most complicated analyses: and every educated man has a number of general views and maxims which he can muster without trouble, but which can only have sprung from frequent reflection and long experience. The facility we attain in any sort of knowledge, art, or technical expertness, consists in having the particular knowledge or kind of action present to our mind in any case that occurs, even, we may say, immediate in our very limbs, in an outgoing activity. In all these instances, immediacy of knowledge is so far from excluding mediation, that the two things are linked together — immediate knowledge being actually the product and result of mediated knowledge.'

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/sl/sl_v.htm#SL66