Max Stirner

 

There is an article, updated on 10/22/2019 in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, on Max Stirner.

 

There are some excerpts here that interest me, and then I will respond to them. The editor is referring to the form and structure of his book, The Ego and Its Own: “This rejection of conventional forms of intellectual discussion is linked to Stirner’s substantive views about language and rationality. His distinctive style reflects a conviction that both language and rationality are human products which have come to constrain and oppress their creators. Stirner maintains that accepted meanings and traditional standards of argumentation are underpinned by a conception of truth as a privileged realm beyond individual control. As a result, individuals who accept this conception are abandoning a potential area of creative self-expression in favour of adopting a subordinate role as servants of truth. In stark contrast, Stirner insists that the only legitimate restriction on the form of our language, or on the structure of our arguments, is that they serve our individual ends . . .”

 

My response: In arguing that language and rationality are but human conventions, not a priori categories nor axiomatic, self-evident concepts, Stirner dismisses them as empty concepts that oppress those that obey them. Expression and truth must be mediated by the self, as the self sees fit, or the language and ideas expressed will not be as personal or creative as they could be.

 

The editor continues: “ . . . all the left-Hegelians are said to have produced the same basic

Feuerbachian error: separating the individual from his human essence, and setting that essence above the individual as something to be striven for. In contrast, Stirner maintains that because it has not universal or prescriptive content, human nature cannot ground any claim about how we ought to live. His own intellectual project—which he describes as an attempt to rehabilitate the prosaic and moral self, the ‘un-man’ (124) for whom the notion of a calling is alien—is intended as a radical break with the work of the contemporaries.”

 

My response: Stirner, the proto-typical existentialist, insists that existence precedes essence so the essence must never be separated from the mortal, concrete, living Unique, but absorbed back into the self, never allowed to be separated and elevated to some objective status above and over the self, for the self to work towards serving and self-perfecting to match his ideal. The Left-Hegelians insist that human nature is universal, essential, it has its prescriptive content, and it grounds how we ought to live, and all of this Stirner rejected wholesale. There is no calling, no goal for the prosaic and mortal self to strive towards: the Unique, the un-man, is a singular, creative nothing, a model for none, and modeling himself after none other.