Owning The World--Stirner

I am pulling lines to comment on from the Philosophy of Max Stirner entry in the 2023 Scholarly Community Encyclopedia: “The Ego and Its Own opens and closes with a quotation from Johan Wolfgang Goethe that reads ‘I have taken up my cause without foundation’, with the unstated next line of the poem being ‘and all the world is mine’. One of Stirner’s central ideas is that in realizing the self is ‘nothing’ one is said to ‘own the world’ because—as the book states in the last line—‘all things are nothing to me . . . “

 

My response: The cause of the concrete, living Unique is without foundation (without logical presuppositions), so Stirner believes this opens endless creative possibilities, so, in effect, one owns the whole world.

 

The world of the subjective egoist is a small, stunted world, and it is much more likely that the world opening for an objective Randian egoist would be much large, open-ended and filled with creative potential for the creative egoist to explore and exploit. Still, the stunted world of Stirner’s egoist does provide a creative and fresh point of view that should not be discounted or ignored.

 

Scholarly continues: “Individual self-realization rest on each individual’s desire to fulfill their egoism. The difference between an unwilling and willing egoist is that the former will be ‘possessed’ by an empty idea and believe they are fulfilling a higher cause, but usually being unaware that they are only fulfilling their own desires to be happy or secure; and the latter, in contrast, will be a person that is able to freely choose it actions, fully aware that they are only fulfilling individual desires.”

 

My response:  The unwilling egoist is actually a willing altruist who could serve a fetish, an empty idea, for altruistically, in the noble and best sense, serve a concept that is for his good and the greater good. As a noble altruist, the unwilling egoist would bring happiness and security to themselves and the world; as a phony altruist, true-believing and serving an ideological concept, this egoist hurts others and himself. The willing egoist, that is not selfish and ruthless, hurt and preying on others.

 

Scholarly continues in a section called Dogma: “What Stirner proposes is that concepts should not rule people, but that people should rule concepts. The ‘nothingness’ of all truth is rooted in the ‘nothingness’ of the self because ego is the criterion of dogmatic truth. Again Stirner seems closely comparable to the skeptics in that his radical epistemology directs us to emphasise empirical experience (the ‘unmediated’ relationship of mind as world and world as mind), but it leaves only a very limited validity to the category of ‘truth’. When we regard the impressions of the senses with detachment, simply for what they are (e.g. neither good or evil), we may still correctly assign truth to them: In place of such a system of beliefs, Stirner presents a detached life of non-dogmatic, open-minded engagement with the world ‘as it is’ (unpolluted by faith of any kind, Christian or humanist), coupled with the awareness that there is no soul, no personal essence of any kind, but that the individual’s uniqueness consists solely in its ‘creative nothingness’ prior to all concepts.”

 

My response: I would argue that subjective egoists like Stirner run the risk of being enslaved to fetishized concepts like fixed ideas. Objective egoists have concepts but regard them moderately and dispassionately, so they rule their concepts, not are ruled by their concepts.

 

Dogmatic truth is partially rooted in the ego or subject, especially when its hunches, intuitions and reasoning are clear, distinct, and unpolluted, and such truth is partially rooted in the world of objects out there in reality that we directly, immediately encounter, or indirectly, or mediately encounter, both manners being realistic and received and interpreted without bias or error.

 

The subject should experience sense impressions from the objects mediatedly and unmediatedly, more as a subject perceiving the object, rather than fusing the subject and object together.

 

We have souls and essential natures, so our interaction with the world as subjective consciousnesses, will influence our take on what the world is sending to us.