Stirner: What Is Real

 

Stirner: What Is Real

 

I have been reading a fascinating little book by Paul Strathern on Soren Kierkegaard. The book, Kierkegaard In 90 Minutes, is of much interest. On Page 14 it a paragraph that I wish to quote and then comment on: “It was the German philosopher Kant who eventually devised a suitable dwelling to house this poor defenseless creature. Kant constructed a grand mansion in the form of an all-embracing philosophical system based on reason, which accommodated the subjective ‘I” in magisterial splendor. Kant was followed by Hegel, who built an even more grandiose, all-embracing system based on the notion ‘All that is rational is real, and all that is real is rational.’”

 

My response: The poor defenseless creature that Strathern is referring is the existent individual trying to get by and make sense of everything. Now my quick take is that Strathern typifies Kant and Hegel as rationalists, but that representation though accurate, does not teach us much about reasoning and reasoners. Kant and Hegel deceptively--but likely unintentionally--laid the groundwork for the slow rise of the epistemological, ethical, political, economic, cultural ontological and philosophical revolution so prominent now in the 21^st century, eclipsing Modernism, the Western and American Way.

 

Returning to consideration of Hegel and Kant, they are subjective rationalists or subjective irrationalists. They are what I would refer to as soft rationalists or weak rationalists or subjective rationalists.  Professor Stephen Hicks has satisfied me that these two giant thinkers accept that the world out there as it is cannot be known by the self as subject perceiving an object out there.

 

Kant and Hegel made possible the current skepticism about values and knowing undercutting belief in the potency of reason, individual agency, and the miraculous power of theoretical and applied reasoning. This victorious ascendancy of Postmodernism and Marxism is a refutation of what I refer to as strong rationalists, powerful rationalists, objective rationalists that insist that the world of noumena is directly or indirectly knowable by the perceiver and thinking individual, whose simple apprehension of objective reality gives rise to his internally conceived and named propositions that give us real knowledge about the nature of the world, its inhabitants and their operations in that every day world.

 

I am indebted to Ayn Randian scholar Stephen Hicks for distinguishing Subjective Rationalists like Hegel and Kant from Objective Rationalists like Aristotle, Rand and Hicks himself. I used the descriptive phrases of subjective rationalist and objective rationalist—Hicks did not use those phrases.

 

I must separate our my weird epistemology from the epistemology of Hicks and other Randians who seem to assert that the rule of noncontradiction applies universally to all dimensions of Being: ontologically as well as logically and epistemologically;  that the world is fundamentally internally and externally consistent and coherent, that there are laws that govern all aspects of Being, and that our science and reasoning can make those laws and their operations intelligible and accessible in clear, precise ordinary language. We can come up with a metaphysical account of it that is true, makes sense and is meaningful.

 

My moderate ontology and moderate epistemology roughly amounts to this: humans should apply their powers of objective reasoning more than subjective reasoning, but they should apply both when studying anything, and that they should also gain knowledge of the world through their whims, their feelings and their subjective experiences as existing beings. These pluralistic but cooperative epistemological investigations and interactions with the world, when conducted with scrupulous, impartial honesty and love of truth will give us knowledge of high quality, probably certain knowledge, if not certain knowledge.

 

A bit like Hegel, I believe that the law of contradiction applies in the world ontologically, logically, ethically, spiritually, and epistemologically. I have not the technical words and concepts yet to define precisely what I just said means—and it could be beyond my intellectual capacity or any human ability to apply words and concepts to my axiom of logical, ethical, epistemological, ontological moderation as the core of what the world is.

 

 

My epistemology should inform the perceiver and thinker about what and how the world is. My moderate, pluralistic epistemology should allow any perceiver’s sense impressions of physical objects to describe how those objects are as they are as well a how they appear to us.

 

My epistemology, when applied in a priori or spiritual ways to the immaterial objects of the world, should provide us with expressible knowledge about these immaterial ideas and spirits as they are as well as how they seem to appear to us. I would add that through our reason, internally or externally operating and perceiving, we can when, clear-minded, ascertain the essence of forms, logical truths, and spirits of all kinds.

 

It is obvious that Kant and Hegel are idealists, that reason in the perceiver mind does not capture the essence of objective reality. They both promote reason, but it is within the subjective world of the perceiver’s mind, and he can never get outside of his personal perspective to encounter the world as it is, or other people.

 

Kierkegaard was even more of an anti-realist and anti-essentialist than were Kant and Hegel. He was turned off by the impressive, huge metaphysical structures that these idealists fabricated to house their subjective reasoning and ideals.

 

Keirkegaard, like Max Stirner, were turned off by Hegel’s absolute idealism, so they turned to subjective idealism/theism (Kierkegaard) or subjective materialism (Stirner).

 

I as an ontological moderate cannot agree with Hegel that all that is rational is real or that all that is real is rational.

 

He is more correct than not, but I would say that what is rational (The rational is psychological or are mental operations in our biological brains and is also the reason as a spiritual force, our soul function in our personal consciousness.) in our minds is real more than not. What appears to us phenomenologically in our private minds as sensing, living beings, here in the physical world of appearances, is more illusory than not, but it is objectively accurate about the word out there.