Stirner The Moderate

I am a voluntary moderate: I choose and openly communicate this choice to the world and myself, to posit this as the first moral principle of the universe: that is, the middle way is the way to travel.

An involuntary moderate is one that stumbles into moderation by accident, or is temperate by personality, a lukewarm personality, or is a pragmatist or an opportunistic fence-straddler. Or an involuntary moderate may be so naturally, and, not being self-aware,  is unconsciously moderate in choice and action.

An avowed moderate, as I am, is a moderate averring that the good person steers to the middle of things most of the time, under most circumstances. This is a conscious, deliberate, prescriptive plan of behavior, so it is espousing moderation in the positive sense.

A moderate, in the negative sense, is a moderate in that he intuitively does not like extremes and rebels against them. His rebellion against extreme poses in an instinctive reaction, not a formulated code of response.

Max Stirner is a negative moderate in this way: as a unique self, beholden only to himself, he rejects serving any cause or abstraction, on either the Right or Left, spiritual or secular. He realizes that serving a cause outside of oneself alienates the individual, as he sickens himself by living inauthentically in service of furthering worshiped cause. This true believer is a group creature (note under my moderate ethics, to join and be serve any ism wholly is fanatical, and these are the core elements of an evil existence. Only the moderate individual, individual-living, moderate, temperate and rational can serve a cause without excessive self-sacrifice or unquestioning obedience, or fervent conformity and loyalty felt and demonstrated.)

It would seem safe to me to classify Stirner as an involuntary moderate. He never, officially, proclaimed to the world that the middle is the way. But he did do some famous dialectical balancing of the monarchy as the thesis and liberal, bourgeois democracy and humane liberalism as the antithesis, offering his Romantic worldview, the Unique One and His Property, the anarchist egoist, as the synthesis.

Jeff Riggenbach, Libertarian writer and PhD, is, I believe, the narrator and author of an Youtube video, A Biographical Sketch of Max Stirner (UoE Podcast), put out in 2017. Riggenbach describes how anarchists and academics refuted Stirner's works due to their  absurdity, their nonsense, their self-contradictory, illogical and paradoxical attack on the objective order alleged to constitute the universe created by the Lawgiver.

He is onto something here. An aside first, as an amateur philosopher, there are admitted, maybe fatal gaps in my knowledge, training and technique as a thinker. A sound grounding in formal logic, both scholastic and symbolic, American and analytical would have me better prepared to understand the fuzzy logic of moderate logic, and how paradox fits into this logic. I am 65 years old already and may not have time to sort out how paradoxical writing and thinking play a central role in moderate reasoning and logical argument.

With this deficiency full noted and admitted, I will speculate that Stirner the Western Buddhist writes as a negative moderate, and that his inconsistencies and two-sided stances on everything is why he comes across as nonsensical and absurd, to be discountenanced and disregarded by linear, logical critics.

As a positive moderate, my writing is likely as absurd and paradoxical as Stirner's is, but it is a mistake and a disservice to us to dismiss us out of hand, as a waste of time, and the writers if gibberish.

The moderate worldview is riddled with paradox and absurdity, but these may be our greatest gift to the world, and replete with promising, original ideas originating from them.

Like Stirner, the radical individualist, I likely will die alone and forgotten, perhaps to be rediscovered postmortem. To be individual and moderate is to go against the norm, the popular, which is to run in packs, adopt extreme stances and to service some abstraction and group ideology outside of the self.

Some final thoughts about Stirner the negative and involuntary moderate: Riggenbach, in his Youtube video, explains how Stirner did philosophy like an artist and writer. He made assertions but did not offer smooth, valid logical demonstrations of his tight, closed reasoning. No wonder his reasoning seemed absurd, convoluted, even senseless.

I do philosophy similarly. As a moderate I would recommend to the logical purists that dismiss Stirner as a nihilist (he was one more than he was not) and giberish-writer, that is is the thinker that writes and paints philosophy like the practitioner of fuzzy logic, such as Stirner practiced, are the superior philosophers because they think and write, tapping into all forms of logic in the universe, and they and their thinking will be the most original and productive thinkers. Hoffer the involuntary moderate, notes often that the stretched soul makes the best music, and it is the soulful pulling and tugging between contrary desires in that soul that is the fountainhead of moral and artistic excellence. Do not be too quick to dismiss Stirner.