Stirner, By Jason McQuinn

 

On August 12, 2010, an article by Jason McQuinn was retrieved by The Anarchist Library: its title is Max Stirner: the anarchist every ideologue loves to hate.

 

The article is short but important. I wish to quote from is four paragraph long. There is nothing in Paragraph 1 that I need to comment on. In Paragraph 2, McQuinn does report that Max Stirner’s text, The Unique and Its Property, was more radical than any other at the time, and that it dealt a serious blow to Hegelianism and the doctrines of the Left Hegelians. He also reports that Stirner had brief fame and then he disappeared, In part, he was a loner that did not endear himself to anyone, so his work did not become popular. In part, he was misunderstood, and in part there seemed to be a conspiracy to silence him by ignoring him.

 

Let me quote Paragraph 3 completely: “There had certainly been plenty of de facto anarchists before the European milieu began to arise at the end of the 1700s and the beginning of the 1800—most notably throughout prehistory. Max Stirner was not only one of the first to elaborate a consistently anarchist theoretical orientation; he was also the most sophisticated and important anarchist critic of philosophy then and since. Nevertheless, his influence and without the anarchist milieu has always been extremely controversial.”

 

My response: There are varying opinions as to what kind of anarchist Stirner was, but he was one and was likely an individualist anarchist and a nonviolent anarchist. He likely did want to overthrow society by deinstitutionalizing it through insurrection and passive non-cooperation, not violent revolution. He not only criticized all social institutions, but he firmly denied that words and concepts, framed as universals, exist, or obtain, so thus the project of philosophy is stillborn. He is and was controversial.

 

McQuinn continues: “Stirner’s descriptive, phenomenological egoism and absolute refusal of any and all forms of enslavement have been a perennial source of embarrassment for would-be anarchist moralists, ideologues and politicians of all persuasions (especially leftists, but also including individualists and others). By clearly and openly acknowledging  that every unique individual always makes her or his own decisions and cannot avoid the choices of self-possession or self-alienation and enslavement presented at each moment, Stirner scandalously exposes every attempt not only by reactionaries, but by self-proclaimed radicals and alleged anarchists to recuperate rebellion and channel it back into new forms of alienation and enslavement . . .”

 

My response: Mark Levin and Dennis Prager both believe there is God’s objective reality and that we can have knowledge of its, its regulating natural laws and how they apply to our legal system and moral values. Their take, an optimistic and dogmatic one, is what I refer to as a prescriptive, noumenal or noumenological one. My own take on these issues is moderate existentially and epistemologically, a moderate claim of probable certainty. Do not believe that the claim to objective truth asserted by Levin and Prager is provable a priori or empirically, but they are right over all in the claims that they assert.

 

Stirner, the severe nominalist and skeptic, undercut the prescriptive claims of his rivals. As I have pointed out elsewhere, I like that Stirner suggests that the direct, finite, empirical life of the egoist is self-possessing, genuine and liberating, while the unwilling egoists, that align themselves with a belief or ism above and over themselves, are alienated, inauthentic and enslaved. I like his categories and agree that one should seek to be authentic, self-possessed and liberated, but this is achieved by living as an objective egoist-subjective egoist, not as a Stirnerian subjective egoist, or as a objective altruist or objective egoist as Levin and Prager would advise.

 

Stirner worries that dedicating one’s life to a cause or concept outside of oneself and above oneself can lead to the life of a fanatic in the service of an ideology, and that surrender of self-hood is dangerous and destructive for the individual and society, and he has a point.

 

I think we are not fully human and adult unless we dedicate ourselves to a cause, be it the Good Spirits or whomever or whatever, as long as the cause is noble, bigger than ourselves, but we also must live as individuals in the moment, and our allegiance to our cause or causes must be reasonable and dispassionate, not the enthusiastic devotion of a wild-eyed enthusiast.

 

McQuinn continues in Paragraph 4: “Still, (and quite infuriatingly to  anarcho-leftists) there has always been a minority of spirited radicals, including the undomesticated and undisciplined uncontrollable among the anarchists, who have heeded Stirner’s warnings and criticisms, refusing to allow any words, doctrines or institutions to dominate them. As Stirner proclaimed, ‘Noting is more to me than myself. This clearly implies I am only free when I choose how I live my own life.”

 

My respsonse: I want individualists to choose to be free to not be dominated by words, doctrines or institutions, but to heed those inputs while making final choices as to how one will live. Stirner here does seem to me to be a normative ethicist.