Professor Jacob Blumenfeld is a young professor and philosopher that teaches in Germany. He is an advocate of Marxism, and he seems to suggest that Max Stirner’s social solution would lead to some sort of collectivist outcome, growing out of the Union of Egoist proposal by Stirner. Now Stirner, was an anarchist, so he was no capitalist, but neither was he a Marxist, or pro-Fascist.
I have not studied Blumenfeld, but I will though I am inclined to ignore him due to his Marxist leanings (but he can teach one a lot about Stirner), but I am a non-violent, conservative anarchist that blends my anarchism with individuating with a free market constitutional republic like America is or was. I am a bit leery of most other anarchist because they seem to favor the spread of Communism, and favor violent revolution to overthrow the capitalist, democratic West.
If they seek to replace it with decentralized, anarcho-communist communities, it is not hard to conceive of how Stirner’s envisioned Union-Of-Egoists, anti-static anarchism could be linked to a kind of anarcho-neo-Marxism proposed by modern anarchists. My skepticism about Marxist revolution is that the unjust status quo will be replaced by a demonic, vicious, state monster ruling ever segment of society, whose functionaries will soul-rape, murder, enslave, torture, exploit, terrorize and oppress all citizens everyday forever. Revolution uses murder to bring about its good, and it sets up hell on earth because radical means corrupt all noble aims. Revolution must be moderate, gradual, nonviolent, reasoned and persuaded to those conservatives that resist it, and noncompliance is to be answered by tolerant coexistence. A revolutionary that is not gentle and endlessly patient, is not a revolutionary, or at least not a loving moral one. We cannot expect perfection from people. Once they wake up and know the ramifications of what is going on, most people, most of the time, will choose wisely, the best means of going forward.
Bottom up, real, lasting reform is slow, one person at a time, as people accept the proposed solution voluntarily, consciously, of their own free will. There are no short cuts. And if the majority in any generation say no, that is it; the radicals and reformers must live with their frustration, not getting their way to remake society, immediately and violently. There is no other way to conduct reform. Reform is first and foremost an individual and personally willed transformation. When and only if that occurs, will this union of liberated, united, willing egoists, liberated and self-possessed, collaborate to change the world: then these millions of self-reforming citizens speak with one voice, ordering their politicians to accept their agenda on how specifically to make the community and the country whole.
Still, Stirner’s bad means on how to live unintendedly contribute to the things he hated most and sought to overthrow, because his severely nominalist view helped create the diabolical, hidden postmodernist cover made popular with the gullible public by Leftist radicals conspiring to lead a Communist takeover of the entire West. They combined the postmodernist rejection of Western, Objective values with Marxism, so, once the masses lose faith in their Modernist narrative, the Progressive gas lighters can panic the fearful, lost, rudderless masses into a Red mass movement overthrowing all that is, ushering in the Great Reset.. The Progressive use the cover of relativism to fool the young and educated into supporting their iron-fisted primary absolutist cause, updated neo-Marxist ideology now on the march everywhere, intersectionalist and disguised Communism, but the Stalinist brand will soon surface as soon as the comrades overthrow the Western culture, its free market economies, and its way of life.
Stirner would be shocked to realize how his irrationalist epistemology and his scorn for objective truth lead to the very collectivist evil, group-living and mass-movementized, true-believing federal hell on earth, to be avoided at all costs. The Marxist mass movement, with its fervent worship of the Communist abstraction, is filled with millions of fanatics that bow down to a sick vision of the collective good reduced to and twisted into deformed, fixed idea, the Red fetish. I am vehemently anti-Marxist and anti-Communist for this wicked ideology has led to over 100 million deaths and inflicted untold suffering on over a billion people in the 20th century. Indeed, 1.4 billion people in China are still brutalized by the Communist Party bent on world domination.
It startles me that a brilliant, earnest young professor like Blumenfeld could push this tried, failed, worn-out but amazingly resilient, bloody, satanic ideology. I am shocked and disappointed as to and why Communism and socialism are not utterly condemned and universally discredited. This resilience is testimony to how the masses worldwide are still gullible sheep believing the Leftist narrative spoon-fed to these brainwashed true believers. People are not basically good, and they are lazy cowards that like to be provided for by the State no matter what they must give up in exchange. They love the elites that rule them that do their thinking for them, telling them how to live—those liars, enslavers, haters, demon-followers, killers, thieves, parasites, deceivers, and robbers.
People like group-living, living in hierarchies, in a class system, enslaved, alienated, miserable and unhappy. It is the fault of the masses that they love being abused, and it is their fault, that they will allow any elite anywhere, in the name of any ism, to interpellate them and nudge the masses to accept their voluntary servitude.
The masses are to blame, not the elites (the elites are to blame a little). God gave each one of the little people a brain, a conscience, free will , a sufficiently powerful intellect and the ability to reason, the spiritual and moral intuition to tell good from bad, to learn the truth, to hate lies and liars, to love love and hate hate, and haters, to love individualism and individuating, to hate groupism, collectivism and group-living, to answer God’s call to maverize as living angels, to serve God as armed soldier for heaven, as individuator-anarchist supercitizens introduced to Mavellonialist principles that they can blend with their own narratives, values and religious beliefs—if they have any.
Now let me get to the heart of this blog entry. Jacob Blumenfeld wrote a book: All Things are Nothing to Me: The Unique Philosophy of Max Stirner. In 2021 an interviewer from Hermitix interviewed Jacob for about one hour on Max Stirner. Jacob seems fair in his treatment of Stirner, and I took lose, rambling, informal notes on the interview and will comment on its content below.
Hermitix: Abstractions often dominate us, but we are to dominate ourselves, Stirner recommends. We are not to worship fixed ideas, no claim, no notion of race, gender, or any other spook to adopt as the identity that we have assigned to this spook now becomes the identity that we don ourselves in, enslave ourselves to, thus alienating ourselves from our authentic selves.
Jacob warns that the egoist must not assume the identity of a concept or group. Despite Stirner’s advocacy of a weak nihilism, he wants people to build their concrete, real lives of a creative nothing. There is even a positive-anti-nihilist future, an anarchist, stateless social order, a union of egoists.
The nominalist egoist is to live for herself, and her pure freedom and creative enjoyment of this subjective life of consumption, living and experiencing each precious moment brings her to her authentic personhood as a singularity. God does not exist. There is only this world, and she is in charge of her life and her will and her power, property and how she will generalize and how she will control what concepts that she abstracts and then takes back into herself. This Ownness will allow her to enjoy the multicultural identities of sundry kind for her purpose, her living and her consumption, but she will allow herself to bow down to none of these abstractions. Only she is alive and real, and she will not give up her freedom and control to inner or outer concepts that take her over and enslave her. No, she says, and no she will always say if she is to continue to run her own affairs as she is determined to do. She gives over her life to herself as a singularity, not subsuming herself permanently to any identity that she may try on for a minute, an hour or for a season.
Jacob notes for Stirner that only the I is real: it is a subjective I, not the objective I of Fichte.
My response: It occurred to me that this gives credence to my labeling Stirner as a subjective egoist, and naming Ayn Rand as an objective egoist. I wonder if she studied Fichte, or if the objective egoism of both is similar or not. I wonder if she knew of or ever studied Max Stirner.
Now Blumenfeld is at his best: he is an expert in German Philosophy, including Hegel, so he offers a way to connect Hegel to Stirner, for opinions are divided as to what degree Stirner is a Hegelian. Stirner was powerfully influenced by Hegel the genius, whether or not he is a conservative Hegelian or not. Hegel the approximate Christian likes absolutism, absolute certainty, collectivism and the all-powerful state that the individual is to serve (Marx the Communist did not move very far from Hegel the Monarchist.), but Stirner the atheist, the anarchist, nominalist, anti-statisat and anti-realist, seems to reject Hegelianism as severely as does Kierkegaard. But Hegel is not as rational as he seems, for his epistemology, like that of Stirner, seems irrationalist and Kantian, doubting or denying that we can ever know the world in itself. If you share an epistemology, perhaps all other philosophical disputes are peripheral in importance and in comparison to this epistemological convergence. Stirner may be more Hegelian than he wanted to admit. Hegel talks of certain knowledge but he is notin favor of Moorean common sense—that the given directly or indirectly gives us actual knowledge about the objects of the world as they really are.
I know little about Hegel so I am going to take a leap and speculate about what Jacob is tying together here when he sets up the relationship between Hegel and Stirner, and how it affects history. Jacob offers that Stirner is putting forth the personal I of each egoist as real, not basing one’s life on some external, universal principle valid historically forever. Stirner definitely is not positing universal principles Max begins where Hegel ends. Hegel ends with his book, The Phenomenology of Spirits, asserting that the Subject and Object are now one, a unity, not separated and thus the subject acquires absolute knowledge. Certainty follows as the subject and object are one. One assumes an identity that organically stems from the concept or principle adopted by the unwilling egoist to object and subjugate himself to.
Max is having none of that. Max bleakly denies that objective knowledge even exists, let alone that it is knowable. Stirner wants the willing egoist to remain liberated and self-possessed by keeping himself, that self-controlling, willingly egoistical, independent self not united with, not one with and therefore not subjugated by the object or any objective principle. As a free, willing egoist and selfish self-living his concrete, very personal life as a creative nothings, sans controlling concepts of any kind, that willing egoist is a singularity whose identity is self-referenced, self-defined and self-described, and self-controlled by the subject in himself for the few, brief years that he exists in this godless, mostly meaningless universe.
Jacob asserts that Max starts with the I that understands and conceptualizes his language, culture, history, and time lived, entirely within his personal ken, comprehension and private concerns and property. The willing egoist shed any preconceptions that would force him to adopt any concept or abstraction from inside or outside of himself, that would bind him and control him.
The very existence of the I is its own presupposition: it presupposes that its existence precedes its essence, a spook too often reified and bowed down to. The I of the first-person perspective will be separated from ruling logical presuppositions, but it will not be separated from its environment. Stirner is not a pure solipsist. Others exist, language is somewhat coherent and meaningful, and the objective world exists but the Unique refuses rationally to categorize that exterior social and natural world, to generalize about it, assuming that such generalizations are objectively true, or permanently binding upon the Unique.
Jacob describes no abstract I for Stirner, not objective I of Fichte but a, subjective I is the Unique. All life starts from and is enjoyable and meaningful (whatever that means) from the lived experience of the concrete individualist. The singular identity is individualistic and anarchist but the identity of a true-believer that has hitched his wagon to the star of a fixed idea is collectivist and ensconced at some lower level of the echelons in the hierarchies of the oppressive, unjust system.
Max wants the I never to identify with any identity representing or epitomizing a universal quality or category.
Max’s non-conceptual concept of the I: This is Owness; the Unique owns his qualities, and his qualities are his property. He will not let himself be alienated as part of an abstract identity, The Unique appropriates qualities to himself so has no identity that is not the I identity, a singularity.
Stirner disciplines the self so it can withstand pressure from external objects and events and internal pressures and impulses, not allowed to control the self, but be controlled by the self.
My response: this seems sensible to me as a moral moderate—that we control ourselves, our thoughts, our trajectory in the world, and how we speak about and respond to inner and outer stimuli so that our instincts, our pleasures, our choices, our actions, and attitudes are what they should be, and in line with what we will as moral agents in charge of ourselves.
Max espouses that we cannot own everything, and would have castigated the modern capitalist egoist and consumer to control his materialist desires and over-consumption. Our core, our creative nothingness as a Unique grows out of us being a living, particular creature that creates who he is, if he is a willing egoist.
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