Max Stirner And His Cause

Max Stirner wrote that all things were nothing to him for he set his cause on nothing but himself. He felt that each person, as an individual, should spend his life pursuing his subjective interests. Therefore, I feel free to define Stirner's brand of egoism as subjective. What this indicates is that for him self-interest is the primary human focus, and that mental effort for him is highly introspective and immediately experiential. All moments, of his psychological experiencing, throughout his life, whether internally applied, or externally operational and commercing in the world, would be centered upon his private concerns, his private interests.

By contrast, I would define the egoism of Ayn Rand as objective egoism. For her self-interest is not only a human's natural and primary focus (psychological egoism), it is morally preferable, or normative egoism. Her egoistic agent would enjoy and experience a rich inner mental life, but this lived experiencing of inner life would always be oriented to constant, reinforcing, lived interacting with, and the self's exporting one's intentions and aims upon the external world, knowable, known, and whose incoming sense data are directly or indirectly intelligible for the agent and perceiver. Stirner would take issue with her radical epistemic optimism that sense data can be rational explained, converted to abstract propositions about the world and our place in it. I appreciate Stirner's corrective epistemic pessimism as a needed corrective for Randian excessive epistemological enthusiasm, but I favor Rand's approach over Stirner.

Returning to Stirner's subjective egoism, his subjective materialism (I do not want to classify him as a subjective idealist because he posits that there is no God, and only the material world exists.) indicates that one lives for a few decades in whatever this world is, and one is to enjoy one's chosen interests and taken from the world and others out there, what contributes to one's enjoyment of what interests one. To worship or dedicate one's life to anything else was to worship a spook, a universal that did not even exist.

He has a point, but God is a cause, the rational principle of Logos, and God's essential nature is perfect or mostly perfect.

We cannot what each human requires--truth, love or spiritual comfort without serving some ism, but we do it as objective egoists, mostly idealistic, not as subjective, materialistic egoists like Stirner.

Still, he did humankind a great favor when he urged that we must not join the mob in worshiping and serving an ism, an empty abstraction.