Stirner On Deities

For Max Stirner, to worship a deity, or to serve any cause any abstraction  is to throw one's life away in pursuit of what does not exist. This passionate chase, this pursuit, this rational connection to an ideal out there in objectiv reality is to seek what is not, a phantasm.

I am well aware that Eric Hoffer and Max Stirner are covering some of the same ground. Hoffer repeatedly admonishes that frustrated, unhappy individuals, whose lives are irremediably spoiled, desperately seek to obliterate any consciousness of a self, escaping from freedom into a clique, a cause, a brotherhood that offers them opportunities for self-sacrifice and united action serving an ism that is larger than themselves, granting them identity, pride and the gift of self-forgetfulness. These fanatics, these true believers, are very dangerous. They are most willing to die in the service of their ism which may be a single word, that their demagogue has bestowed with magical properties, now a treasure that they will give all to protect and extend.

Max Stirner repeatedly criticizes duped egoists that deny their self-interest to serve a cause or abstraction, as ruthless, even violent, dangerous enthusiasts, devotees or fanatical followers.

Stirner, the atheist, the subjective egoist, the taoist, the nihilist, the existential nominalist, the anarchist and subjective materialist is a strange kind of negative, epistemological and ethical moderate and skeptic.

The unique, through assertion of his ownness, creates and destroys all abstractions as he will, accepting and rejecting all of these contraries, these rival ideals, even clashing and competing against one another in the mind of the holder, and against similar internal battles of ideas raging in the minds of neighbors through out the community at large.

Stirner's ethics and epistemology seems to allow juxtaposition and coexistence of paradoxical, even contradictory predicates applied to the same person, being or object at the same time in the same place. My positive, epistemological and ethical moderation regarding contrary predicates is a bit like what Stirner is implying. Either the two of us are lunatics babbling and spouting inanities and crazy nonsense, or we are brilliant, original thinkers. I suggest that we can neither know what is the actual truth here, one way or the other, as worldly experiments and mathematical theorems will be unable to affirm or refute our positions.

I am an objective relativist and Stirner is a subjective relativist.