Compared to N, Max Stirner was far less talented a writer but he was also, in a nutshell, far less mad.
He was more consistently a frank amoralist and less - though not quite to no extent - a would-be prophet of a new morality for a new society and even a new humanity.
His egoism was not an ethical egoism.
Nor, for that matter, a rational or economic egoism.
Nor even, strictly, a psychological egoism.
It seems, in the end, he was only defending the sort of egoism to which humans are generally and spontaneously given - the sort I have before referred to as "empirical egoism."
If defending is truly what he was doing.
On the other hand, the anarchist ideal of a society without coercion is an absurd utopia.
Logically or metaphysically possible though it is alleged to be - as the Christian philosophers say a world of humans who in complete and uncoerced freedom always choose to do right is logically or metaphysically possible - belief in it and pursuit of it are even more fantastic than the delusions S attacks.
And equally fantastic is a society without a rich elaboration of pious fraud in reciprocal support with machinery of coercion.
In truth, for normal humans no such world is possible, at all.
No more than a world in which chickens in summertime do Shakespeare in the Park is possible for normal chickens.
But maybe it would be possible for chickens from outer space.
Yes, that was a joke.
No comments:
Post a Comment