Max Stirner obviously disavowed all names and description of the individual and his beliefs, but I am a moderate epistemologist, proclaiming that words, when accurately capturing what is, have meaning, and do grasp the essential nature of people, their views and their situation, with knowledge and clarity, although not perfect knowledge and clarity. If that is not quite dogmatic optimism, it is productive optimism, nonetheless.
I have characterized Stirner as a subjective egoist, a subjective idealist or a subjective materialist He is a severe nominalist and Ayn Rand is a severe realist. He is the anti-essentialist and she is the essentialist. I am essentialist-nonessentialist, realist-nominalist.
I read somewhere that Max Stirner loathed moderation, but his fierce, total rejection of opposing abstractions, on opposite side of any subject, makes him a relativist that borders on being a moderate. Still, let us take him at his word that he is not a moderate.
He does accuse those, that are self-sacrificing, group-oriented, institutionally-living and enslaved to an ideology, of being fanatics, and that seems similar to eric Hoffer’s referring to them as true believers. I think Hoffer was a moral moderate, although he never took on that label that I know of.
Let me write out and interpret a paragraph written by Stirner on Page 27 of his Book, The Unique And His Property, translated by Wolfi Landstreicher: “You are a fanatic against everything that is not spirit, and therefore you rail fanatically against yourself, as you aren’t rid of a non-spiritual remainder. Instead of saying, ‘I am more than spirit,’, you contritely say, ‘I am less than spirit; and I can only think about spirit, pure spirit, or the spirit that is nothing but spirit, but am not this; and since I am not this, it is another, it exists as another, whom I call ‘God’.”
My response: Stirner clearly identifies those, that put an idolized, sacred-status abstraction over themselves and define themselves in line with the essential traits of that adopted abstraction, as fanatics. Eric Hoffer has taught us that a fanatic is wholly enamored with and defends to the death that cause that is completely alien to himself, and yet he is wholly subjugated and addicted to this ism, its maintenance and its extension, its increased popularity, and its acceptance in the world. He fervently favors what he really never wanted, and what will keep him unfulfilled, unhappy, enslaved and self-alienated.
When Stirner identifies the fanatic addicted to the ism as railing against himself, it is not too many steps from there to my take on things that the individual as individuator is moderate, free, in touch with himself and the truth.
Stirner, a pure physicalist, regards the spiritual as nonexistent but rationally fabricated in the minds of mortal humans here in this world. The spiritual is the rational and the rational is the spiritual, and both are but products of thinking within our animal brains. Humans, feeling lowly, lonely and inadequate, Stirner insists, invent the Being God as the awesome source of and end product of,all these rational thoughts. God then is but a social construction.
Only the Unique, that non-spiritual remainder that is more than spirit, is that speaking, biological animal, living and enjoying his personal life and interests here and now, enjoying his own real experience, his concrete interaction with his mental and physical property—on this egoist is authentic, self-affirming and liberated.
I believe the material world and the spiritual world exist a noumenal reality.
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