Nameless Approaches

 

Max Stirner was a non-essentialist, a skeptic, and a nominalist: he dismissed all causes as empty ideas, a figment of imagination that people wasted their lives seeking meaning by sacrificing themselves to this sacred abstraction that did not exist.

 

Below I am going to quote a short paragraph of his where he draws a shrewd connection between being for a cause and being a moralist. Since he denies the existence and efficacy of believing in any cause, let alone being foolishly willing to die for one, it is not a stretch that that he would dismiss the concept of a moral fact as just another spook to toss in the trash.

 

Here is what Stirner wrote in his book, The Ego And Its Own, the Byington translation, Page 9: “Therefore, Socrates says it is not enough for one to use his understanding in all things, but it is a question of what cause one exerts it for. We should now say, one must serve the ‘good cause.’ But serving the good cause is—being moral. Hence, Socrates is the founder of ethics.”

 

Stirner seems fair in attributing to Socrates that the  latter disapproves of Sophist manipulation of intellect, logic and reasoning to win court cases, to gain money and power, but not using rational ability to better the world and oneself.

 

Stirner dismisses all abstractions so he will disbelieve in and dismiss serving a good cause, any cause or any ethicist offering for examination any system of moral values. All of these are mere phantasms, mere illusions to be ignored.

 

Stirner may be amoral rather than intentionally, diabolically immoral, but a world, of depraved humans, running to mobs in service of corrupt social stratification institutions of various kinds, is not a place where humans can thrive without moral dos and don’ts.

 

I am a moderate essentialist and moderate (modest?) foundationalist so I am for moral instruction and codes for people to be instructed in by their parents, their community, their school and their church. Worshipping a good deity helps too.

 

 

I do not appreciate Stirner’s radical refutation of causes as existing separate from the individual brain that invented them, and describing as empty, arbitrary and meaningless the coined a name the coiners employ to describe these causes. While Stirner is wise in warning us not to turn the causes we serve into ideological obsession, thereby making a moral cause a demonic cause, we cannot have morality with good causes to support. We must name and define these good causes to follow and serve, while not radicalizing ourselves to spread them upon unwilling neighbor by the threat of the gun or sword.

 

In open proclamation, we must assert that we are epistemic moderates, that the love of truth and our finely honed sense of epistemic humility compel us to admit and publicly confess that our favorite cause is not the one and only cause to follow, and that we need not claim to know absolute truth about everything. That claim is absurd, and beyond our human understanding, for now and perhaps forever.

 

Now let me quote the same paragraph from Landstreicher’s translation of Stirner’s book, The Unique and Its Property, Page 15: “Therefore Socrates said it was not enough to use the intellect in all things, but it was important to know for which cause one was exerting it. We could now say: one must serve the ‘good cause.’ But to serve the good cause is--to be moral. Thus, Socrates is the founder of ethics.”

 

Several presuppositions are at work if Socrates is correct, and he is: he is asserting that to have a good cause, and to serve it is the moral step to take.

 

First, one cannot serve a cause unless one understands what it means to recognize what a cause is, what use is it, and that it is worth serving.

 

Second, one must use language and concepts to lay out the philosophical underpinnings of a stated cause and all that it implies, and which comes after.

 

Third, the ability to speak, use language and formulate ethical argument requires that the thinker is conscious, wields free will and reasons well as a sovereign individual.

 

Fourth, if the thinker identifies moral goodness, then he can also pick out what is moral evil.

 

Fifth, f goodness and evil exist as ontological entities, then there is a world of ideas and spirits beyond this physical world and mortal humans. If there is such a claim to be such spiritual universals, then there could well be good deities and demonic deities in existence and working wholeheartedly to win the hearts and minds of humans on earth.

 

This last presupposition is what I believe, not what Stirner promoted.