Paul Strathern, in his book, Kierkegaard In 90 Minutes, on Pages 12 and 13, writes about Soren Kierkegaard’s objection to the essentialist bias against personal concerns about the individual’s actual existence and existing. With Kierkegaard this objection is loud and clear. Max Stirner’s existentialist leanings are more implicit than explicit, but Stirner the skeptic and nominalist did object to essentialist philosophy and all its vaunted abstractions.
Here is Strathern’s quote which I will lay out and then respond to: “Now, it was arguable that Plato was the most comprehensive and profound philosophical mind of all time; still, he was capable of overlooking what many consider to be the most important philosophical question of all . . . Despite contemporary opinions to the contrary, there is such a thing as fundamental progress. We know more and more about the world, in almost every field (except perhaps philosophy). But on the level of individual existence—in the same way Kierkegaard spoke of it—we remain the same. Where subjective being is concerned, there appears to be no such thing as progress. We all suffer (or enjoy) the same situation: the human condition. And have done so for time immemorial.
Taking their cue from Plato, ensuing philosophers continued to ignore the human condition. Subjective existence—possibly the one thing we all indisputably have in common—was left to the musings of philosophical simpletons. For almost two millennia the philosophy of Plato and his student Aristotle reigned supreme.”
Plato and Aristotle favored the rational and logical study of people and the objects of the world, but their essentialist bias led them to overlook the human condition, how it feels to the subjective individual as he struggles to cope with life, death, suffering, work and family.
Kierkegaard sought to correct this bias, but Kierkegaard’s bias is too much on the irrationalist, existentialist, subjective side of things, and Stirner shares the same fault.
As a moderate ontologist, I think we should follow Plato most of the time and see the world from an objective, essentialist, rational vantage point. Still, the minority emphasis, the existentialist approach advocated by Kierkegaad and Stirner, must be explored and learned up, applying what we conclude to how we live.
I agree with Strathern in part that we gain in knowledge, contingent or necessary, over the centuries. I disagree with him in part when he claims we all are individuals that share the universal fate, our human condition is brute and permanent across time as we enjoy and react to it or suffer and react to it.
Our subjective existence, that we cannot transcend, is what we all endure. If we know and accept that we are children of God with free will to choose to be morally good and spiritually good, with such rewards in this world and the next, and we realize and acknowledge that we are born fallen, but can rebound as adults of good character as we maverize, then this brute circumstance of subjective existence is a natural fact like our all dying is a unavoidable fact and destination. This brute existence is something, an ontological foundation upon which we can build a self-actualized self in service of the Divine Couple and the Good Spirits. So reacting to our challenging human condition is a path, powerful progress, taking where we were at and then doing something positive with our lives, transcending that sordid past.
Keirkegaard and Stirner both disliked idealists that built their metaphysical castles in the air. They knew and sensed that the life of the concrete, particular individual person was where matters should be dealt with, not in the realm of abstract musing.
Kierkegaard is not a nominalist and skeptic, or less so than is Stirner. Keirkegaard is a subjective idealist or theist that believes in Jesus, in faith, and that God is knowable and a strong if very personal set of values in held by the knight of faith.
Stirner is a subjectivist, but he is a severe skeptic and nominalist, refuting all abstractions. All there is the Unique, his property and his personal lived life.
Stirner the atheist is a subjective materialist and Kierkegaard is a subjective idealist. Kierkegaard believes in God, so as far as the creator of the world is the living word or Logos, the rational principle at work in creating and administrating the designed cosmos through applied natural law, Kierkegaard does accept this rational principle as the Spirit of God, whereas Stirner dismisses it as just one more spook for people to serve and alienate themselves from themselves in the act of worshiping this abstraction.
If one became an expert on Kierkegaard’s philosophy, it would be useful in a compare/contrast exercise against the nominalist philosophy of Stirner.
Since Stirner was so skeptical about the use of values to guide the individual person, it would be difficult to compare that to Kierkegaard’s ethic of blind faith in God’s commands even if some of such a commands seem contradictory, immoral or absurd. Both thinkers reject the notion of objective moral truth ascertainable, as binding upon the individual, so in that sense they both reject values.
Stirner is all about subjective egoism and disinclined much respect for let alone obedience to the State, but, Kierkegaard, while silent about egoism, is a bit akin to Stirner by advocating subjective egoism when his radically independent subjective individual believer flat out worships God independently from the Danish church, its clerisy, its bishops, its hierarchy.
They both are subjective individualists and advocate this as normative and rational.
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