Words Do Not Capture

 

Max Stirner, the subjective egoist, does not believe that words, reason, concepts, and ideology can capture what is going on and who we are as empirically living Uniques. All we can do is live our own lives, experience everything, and serve only ourselves. We may offer generalizations and theories, but we do not proclaim them as gospel, and nor are we willing to alienate ourselves by serving them as our cause.

 

Here is an excerpt from Pages 21 and 22 of Jason McQuinn’s introduction to the Wolfi Landstreicher’s translation of the Max Stirner book, Stirner’s Critics: “That words and language—explicitly in their conventional usages—are inadequate to fully convey the meaning here is obvious, and is part of the problem of both adequately understanding Stirner and avoiding all the (more or less easy and mor or less consciously intentional) misinterpretations of Stirner’s work. The process of self-alienation—of separating an idea or representation of oneself from one’s living self and then subordinating one’s living self to that image—which Stirner describes and criticizes is so ubiquitous and fundamental to the functioning of modern societies that permeates nearly every aspect of life. 21 Enslaving oneself to a fixed idea or imaginary ideal (or any number of them) is not a simple thing. It requires an immense amount of effort to work itself out in practice. This effort, in large part, it has been the primary function of all religion, philosophy and ideology to facilitate from the earliest days of symbolic communication. This effort also is embodied in a large number of habits, attitudes, modes of thought, and techniques of subordination that must be and have been learned and perfected by the masses of people in contemporary societies. And it is enforced by the sanctions of social, economic, political and military institutions that are constructed and maintained through the same types of self-alienated acts en masse.”

 

My response: There is no doubt that words cannot capture entirely what Stirner recommends for who is and what it means to live as a Unique, that individual. That is so even when his enemies were not trying to deplatform, censor or silence him, and he was banished to a large degree by his detractors, many that loathed him while not understanding him. Stirner is correct in accusing society of nudging egoists to become enslaved and self-alienated, but his recommendation for them being liberated and self-possessed is not constructive. The irrational, lived life of the subjective egoist eventually returns people to groupism, enslavement, hierarchical and group-living. My solution would be objective egoism/subjective egoism. Egoism yes, but along the lines of Ayn Rand’s John Galt.

 

Here is footnote 21: “The process of self-alienation—of separating an idea or representation of oneself from one’s living self and then subordinating one’s living self to that image—is not just the modern life of modernity, it is also the foundation of so-called ‘traditional’ societies, basically from the neolithic age onwards up to modernity. Though it appears that it was precisely not the foundation from the earlier (one would argue more aptly-named ‘traditional’) paleolithic and, later, gathering and hunting societies that are now usually called ‘primitive.’ What distinguishes the non-primitive traditional societies from the modern societies can be characterized as the intensity and ever-wider dispersion of this self-alienation throughout all aspects of life, including every social institution and form of social practice. Although it is proper to call Max Stirner the most radical, coherent and consistent critic of modernity, it would be incorrect to understand him as defending these traditional institutions or life-ways. He is equally a critic of premodern traditional and modern societies. (Given the limits of archeological and anthropological knowledge in his time, it is not surprising  that Stirner never mentions or hazards any guesses regarding what are now called ‘primitive’ societies.”

 

My response: McQuinn captures well Stirner’s definition of self-alienation as the process of separating an idea or representation of oneself from one’s living self and then subordinating one’s living self to that image. The living self is to stay free and autonomous, and stay focused on his own interests and pleasures, not conceive of some idea of the self as its essence, and then subordinate the empirical self to that abstraction. Stiner thinks this self-alienaton is pervasive throughout modern society.

 

One can see that Hegel dismissed the importance of the individual and that his only freedom and purpose was serving the collective and the State as its absolute ruler led the people in a way that contributes to God’s Glory and an apprehension of absolute knowledge. Stirner was profoundly anti-Hegelian while being deeply influenced by Hegel nonetheless.