Self-Possession

 

Jason McQuinn does the introduction for Wolfi Landstreicher’s translation of Stirner’s Critics, a book by Max Stirner. McQuinn writes this on Page 19: “Interpretation of Stirner’s perspective on each of these most often founders in this translation of his own words from their particular contexts in his text into the chosen language of each interpreter’s own particular  context of understanding and interpretation and, at the same time, within the more general context  of prevailing social, linguistic and cultural reifications—compulsory presuppositions and prejudices that cannot be questioned with an imagined consensus reality of ubiquitous self-alienaton. This includes the greatest prejudice of all (especially for all those who remain self-enslaved), that of the impossibility of self-creation and self-possession.”

 

My response: I think that I am righter and McQuinn and Stirner are more wrong about egoism. Objective egoism is more rational, more individualistic, more self-creative more self-possessed and their egoism type, that of subjectivism, irrationality, unimaginative or average, group-oriented and collective-enslaving whereas under Ayn Rand’s objective egoism, self-enslavement is shed, and one is self-possessed. One’s relationship with the abstraction that one utilizes on one’s work and philosophy liberate and uplift, not enslave and crib one’s wonder and joy.

 

The immanent, creative nothingness of Stirner’s subjective idealism and subjective materialism is one way to be a egoist and individualist but these traits are much more common among joiners and self-alienated non-individuators.