Ayn Rand, The Ultimate Anti-Max Stirner

 Ayn Rand is the ultimate anti-Max Stirner. He is an egoist that is about as skeptical and subjective as they come, and she is an egoist whose metaphysics and epistemology is purely, dogmatically objective. I am planning to write a book on egoist ethics, and Mandeville, Rand and Stirner, and to compare and contrast their forms of ethical egoism, against my Mavellonialist brand of egoism--that is the gist of the book.

I am years away from being ready to write my book, but it is already patently obvious that  Stirner and Rand are polar opposites. 

Still, both are individualists, egoists, atheists and materialists--all there is the material world. Stirner did accept some kind of reality beyond the consciousness of the self when he writes of the Ego (the Self, the Unique, the Subject) and its Property (the Object, the world of objects out there, outside of his head, reality external to his mind,). 

It could also be that Rand's classical liberal stand on politics and economics, with its Libertarian and anarchist leanings, arises from her individualism, just as similarly, does Stirner dislike of  institutions, governments, isms and their parent organizations of any kind. Their rival brands of individualism naturally makes them unintentionally agree about regarding government and centralized seats of power as corrupting and suspect--as I do.

Ayn Rand was a pure ontological realist and she a bit one-dimensional in her totalistic declaration that pure reason and utter consistency are the way to live and operate. Here is what she writes about Reason as a virtue (I quote from her book, from THE VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS, Page 28 and 29): "The virtue of Rationality means the recognition and acceptance of reason as one's only source of knowledge, one's only judge of values and one's only guide to action." 

As an ontologial moderate I would have to agree a bit with Stirner--I like Rand more than Stirner because I am a moderate Objectivist, not a pure, whole Objectivist as Rand was.) that Reason and Objectivism are rationalistic fetishes or spooks that Rand worshiped and also was enslaved by.  Stirner is largely a purist Subjectivist but I am a moderate Subjectivist that accepts that Rand had it right more than Stirner but reason solely cannot bring us to truth--our existing in the world, our experiencing, our hunches, our intuitions and feelings all offer us partial truths adding up to as much truth as we can glean short of Absolute Truth.

Let me quote from Rand a bit more: " . . .--and above all, that one must never seek to get away with contradictions. It means the rejection of any form of mysticism, i.e., and claim to some nonsensory, nonrational, nondefinable, supernatural source of knowledge. It means a commitment to reason, not in sporadic fits or on selected issues or in special emergencies, but as a permanent way of life."

I agree with what Rand wrote and praise her for reintroducing, in this age of postmodernism, skepticism, amorality and nihilism, the liberating power of reasoning, anticipating the rise of Neo-Modernism. She reminded us that modern humans require, and need provided for them a credible Objectivist epistemology and its accompanying correspondence theory of truth and its realist ontology, so that the world makes sense, that humans can find meaning and values again in their empty lives. 

Still Dennis Prager loves reasoning for being moral, less than deciding based on feelings, but he would not go so far as Rand on rejecting any felt or rational insights or reasoning. I am also part existentialist like Max Stirner and Jordan Peterson are, and they will not believe or support Rand as she insists that contradictions must not be lived with (some of which maybe never solved, understood or resolved) or that the nonrational/irrational, the nondefinable, are not sources of knowledge.

I like what she champions but her worldview is too simplistic for reality is complicated, messy, multidimensional, and contradiction must be accounted for, or at least endured as not explainable or dismissible, not denied as existing or utterly without meaning.

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