The Egoism Of Max Stirner

 A I have planned  to write a book on the ethics of such polar opposite egoists, subjective egoist Max Stirner versus objective egoist Ayn Rand, I figured it was about time for me to flesh out initially the egoism of Max Stirner. 

To accomplish this, I need to quote him in his own words, and I think an interpretation of me of his written worldview, a hint of the elusive thinking of this egotist, will come to light. 

I will quote from Stirner's Critics, by Max Stirner, Page 64, the translation by Wolfi Landstreicher: "This self-forgetfulness, this losing of oneself, is for us only a mode of self-enjoyment, it is only pleasure we take in our world, in our property, i.e. world-pleasure.

It is not in this self-forgetfulness, but in forgetting that the world is our world, that unselfishness, i.e., duped egoism, has its basis. You throw yourself down before a 'higher,' absolute world and waste yourself. Unselfishness is not self-forgetfulness in the sense of no longer thinking of oneself and no longer being concerned with oneself, but in the other sense of forgetting that the world is 'ours', of forgetting that one is the center or owner of this world, that is our property. Fear and timidity toward the world as a higher 'world' is cowardly, 'humble' egoism, egoism in its slavish form, which doesn't dare to grumble, which secretly creeps about and 'denies itself'; it is self-denial."

My response: Max Stirner is considered to be a psychological egoist, and I believe he is. He seems to divide people as egoists into two camps. The vast majority of people are duped egoists, self-enslaved to some cause, ism or abstraction, who define their self-interest as serving something, some ideal, abstract spook outside of themselves. Their unfulfilling, dishonest lives are the lives of objective selflessness, selflessly serving an objective cause. They enslave themselves to some vicious abstraction, some spook that does not exist.

Only a few like himself are not-duped egoists, or authentic, free, subjective egoists if I may so characterize his kind of egoism. He, the alert egoist, worships no abstraction: all feelings, all thoughts, all abstractions, all brands of morality, joinerism, lonerism, egoism and socialism are all rationalized fetishes that we are not supposed to worship or serve. They are to be the individudal's property, his source of power, property, ownership and ownness: he makes them and breaks them as he will.

His self-forgetfulness is suggesting to me that the self is consciousness that includes both thought and language, but these tools serve it, its needs, its objectives, its purposes: they are sufficient and necessary aspects of his consciousness but they are not the whole of his consciousness. They neither define him or conceptualize the Unique in a definitive, realistic, scientific way: they only distort an authentic revelation of the self to the self and to the world.

Those that I have read on Max Stirner would characterize him as perhaps a normative (though he finds prescriptive rules and character assessments false, oppressive, inaccurate, and offensive) and rational egoist too.

The duped egoist forgets the world is his, and that he is the center of the world and the center of his own world, and this is what being unselfish amounts to.  The cowardly, unselfish duped ego runs from his own power and invests his allegiance and fealty to a thing, world or cause out there which he regards as superior to him, and it is his duty to serve and defend it.

Stirner is an atheist as is Ayn Rand, but he is an amoralist: he is not against moral codes and labels per se, but he believes the Unique and its property are so free, so radically self-editing and self-creating and recreating in a universe, theirs for the taking if they elect to grab the world and make it their own, in the own image. There are no moral labels that apply to the Unique that are accurate, those hurled at the Unique ones as sinners, rebels, and evildoers, but those are Christian labels, not applicable or pertinent denies Stirner.

Ayn Rand, the atheist dogmatist is a normative egoist and a rational egoist. She is an essentialist declaring and averring that human nature is set, permanent, identifiable, assignable and is linguistically describable and morally blameworthy or praiseworthy.

She is an objective egoist with an objective epistemology, and Stirner is a subjective egoist with a most subjectivist epistemology, bordering on pure skepticism and solipsist self-isolation from others.

Still, he does believe in an external world and that there are other authentic Unique Ones that one can form a union of egoists with.