Stirner And Hegel

 

I am going through the 2023 Wikipedia article online about the life, thoughts and works of Max Stirner. Here is what is written there about Stirner and Hegel: “ . . . Scholars like Douglas Moggach and Widukind De Ridder have stated that Stirner obviously was a student of Hegel, like his contemporaries Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, but this does not necessarily . . . Contrary to Hegel who considered the given as an inadequate embodiment of the rational, Stirner leaves the given intact by considering it as a mere object, not of transformation, but of enjoyment and consumption (His Own).”

 

My response: To some Stirner seems very selfish and hopelessly self-absorbed. I do not mind his self-obsessing but wish it was for a noble end such as self-realizing as a gift of the selfhood back to the Good Spirits and God. I do nt agree that Stirner is much of a solipsist. He does not doubt that others exist, or assert that he is the only one that exists. He talks of his union of egoists, and his using others for one’s own pleasure and needs. People and their property exist, and are out there in reality, f=ripe for the plucking if one has the will and power to nab them.

 

Hegel may dismiss the given as an inadequate  embodiment of the rational, or a vicious abstraction, or just a subjective illusory state,  but Stirner does not doubt it or quibble about its reality and influence upon us, but it is there for his use and pleasure.

 

Wiki continues: “ According to Moggach, Stirner does not go beyond Hegel but he in fact leaves the domain of philosophy in its entirety stating:

 

Stirner refused to conceptualize the  human self, and rendered it devoid of any reference to rationality or universal standards. The self was moreover  considered a field of action, a ‘never-being I.’ The ‘I’ had no essence to realize and  life itself was a process of self-dissolution. Far from accepting, like the humanist Hegelians, a construal of subjectivity endowed with a universal and ethical mission, Stirner’s notion of ‘the Unique’ (Der Einzige) distances itself from any conceptualization whatsoever: ‘There is no development of the concept of the Unique. No philosophical system can be built out of it, as it can out of Being, or Thinking, or the I. Rather, with it, all development of the concept ceases. The person who views it as a principle thinks that he can treat it philosophically or theoretically and necessarily wastes his breath aruguing against it.”

 

My response: Moggach seems to have captured Stirner’s view. It is almost inconceivable that someone like Stirner can advocate egoism and a life for the self without any applicable concepts, but h tries, thought he mostly does not succeed.