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From solan@math.uio.no Fri Jan 14 11:05:29 1994
Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1993 08:56:27 +0100
From: "Svein O.G. Nyberg" <solan@math.uio.no>
To: solan@math.uio.no
Subject: non serviam #12
non serviam #12
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Contents: Editor's Word
Ken Knudson: A Critique of Communism and
The Individualist Alternative (last: 12)
S.E. Parker: On Revisiting "Saint Max"
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Editor's Word
_____________
And so the curse is broken. This issue contains the last part of Ken
Knudson's eminent article "A Critique of Communism and The Individualist
Alternative" which has been carriying the weight of the newsletter since
its conception. As Ken stated to me when we agreed to publish it in Non
Serviam, it had a curse on it in that any magazine which had tried to
publish it in its entirety was discontinued before they managed that.
Not only has the article not brought about the discontinuation of Non
Serviam, but it has also been well received. So I say thank you to Ken
for a job well done.
Svein Olav
____________________________________________________________________
Ken Knudson:
A Critique of Communism
and
The Individualist Alternative
(last chapter)
AN AFTERWORD TO COMMUNIST-ANARCHIST READERS
What generally distinguishes you from your communist
brother in some authoritarian sect is your basic lack of
dogmatism. The state socialist is always towing some party
line. When it comes to creative thinking his brain is in a
mental straitjacket, with no more give and take in his mind
than you will find in the mind of a dog watching a rabbit
hole. You, on the contrary, pride yourself on being "your
own man." Having no leaders, prophets, Messiahs, or Popes to
refer to for divine guidance, you can afford to use YOUR
mind to analyse the facts as YOU see them and come up with
YOUR conclusions. You are, in your fundamental metaphysics,
an agnostic. You are broad minded to a fault...how else
could you have read this far?
But when it comes to economics, your mind suddenly
becomes rigid. You forget your sound anarchist principles
and surrender without a struggle the one thing that makes
you an anarchist: your freedom. You suddenly develop an
enormous capacity for believing and especially for believing
what is palpably not true. By invoking a set of second hand
dogmas (Marxist hand-me-downs) which condemn outright the
free market economy, you smuggle in through the back door
authoritarian ideas which you had barred from the main
entrance. In commendably searching for remedies against
poverty, inequality and injustice, you forsake the doctrine
of freedom for the doctrine of authority and in so doing
come step by step to endorse all the fallacies of Marxist
economics. A few years ago S. E. Parker wrote an open
letter to the editors of "Freedom" in which he said:
"The trouble is that what you call `anarchism' is at best
merely a hodge-podge, halfway position precariously
suspended between socialism and anarchism. You yearn for the
ego-sovereignty, the liberating individualism, that is the
essence of anarchism, but remain captives of the
democratic-proletarian-collectivist myths of socialism.
Until you can cut the umbilical cord that still connects you
to the socialist womb you will never be able to come to your
full power as self-owning individuals. You will still be
lured along the path to the lemonade springs and cigarette
trees of the Big Rock Candy Mountains." [106]
This article was written for you in hopes of relieving
you of your schizophrenic condition. The fact that you call
yourself an anarchist shows that you have an instinctual
"feeling" for freedom. I hope that this article will
encourage you to seek to put that feeling on a sound
foundation. I am confident that when you do, you will
reject your communist half.
-----
REFERENCES
106. S..E. Parker, "Enemies of Society: An Open Letter to
the Editors of Freedom," "Minus One," October-December,
1967, p. 4.
____________________________________________________________________
S.E. Parker:
On Revisiting "Saint Max"
-------------------------
Increasing academic attention to the philosophy of Max Stirner has
not meant any greater accuracy in interpretation. A case in point is
an essay by Kathy E. Ferguson which appeared in a recent issue of
the philosophical review IDEALISTIC STUDIES [1] entitled "Saint Max
revisited". Ms Ferguson makes some perceptive remarks. She writes of
Stirner's view of the self as being "not a substantive thing .... but
rather a process" which cannot be confined within any net of concepts
or categorical imperatives. It is "an unbroken unity of temporal
experience that is ontologically prior to any essence later attributed
to [it] .... or any role, function or belief that [it] .... might
embrace." Stirner, she says, calls "the irreducible, temporal,
concrete individual self .... the Unique One; the Unique One is both
nothing, in the sense of having no predicate affixed to it as a
defining essence, and everything, in that it is the source of the
creative power which endows the whole of reality with meaning."
More's the pity then that these suggestive insights are followed
by a whole series of misinterpretations os Stirner's ideas. Some of
these have their origin in that hoary old spook "the human community
as a whole", others in what appears to be a sheer inability to grasp
what Stirner's egoism is about. Here are a few examples.
Ferguson considers that Stirner was an anarchist. As evidence for
this belief she cites John Carroll's "Break Out From The Crystal
Palace" and John P. Clark's "Max Stirner's Egoism". Carroll's
conception of an anarchist, however, embraces not only Stirner but
also Nietzsche (who called anarchists "decadents" and blood-suckers)
and Dostoyevsky, although he admits that the latter's anarchism is
"equivocal".
As for Clark, he certainly regards Stirner as an anarchist and
claims that Stirner's "ideal society is the union of egoists, in
which peaceful egoistic competition would replace the state and
society" (a piece of doubtful extrapolation). However, he does not
appear to be very convinced by his own claim for he comments that
"Stirner's position is a form of anarchism; yet a greatly inadequate
form" because "he opposes domination of the ego by the state, but
advises people to seek to dominate others in any other way they can
manage. Ultimately, might makes right." Since Clark defines
anarchism as being opposed to _all_ domination of man by man (not to
mention the domination of "nature" by human beings) it is clear that
Stirner's "anarchism" is not "greatly inadequate" but, given his
own definition, _not_anarchism_at_all_.
It can be seen, therefore, that Ferguson's effort to include
Stirner in the anarchist tradition is not very plausible. Stirner
did not claim to be an anarchist. Indeed, the one anarchist
theoretician with whose writings he was familiar, Proudhon, is one
of his favourite critical targets. Undoubtedly, there are some
parallels between certain of Stirner's views and those of the
anarchists, but, as I discovered after many years of trying to make
the two fit, in the last analysis they do not and cannot. Anarchism
is basically a theory of _renunciation_ like Christianity:
domination is _evil_ and for "true" relations between individuals to
prevail such a _sin_ must not be committed. Stirner's philosophy has
nothing against domination of another if that is within my power and
in my interest. There are no "sacred principles" in conscious egoism
- not even anarchist ones ....
Ferguson also falls victim to a common mistake made by
commentators on Stirner: that of confusing the account he gives of
ideas he is opposing with his own views. She writes that Stirner
"speaks with great disdain of .... commodity relations" and gives
as an example a passage in THE EGO AND HIS OWN containing the words
"the poor man _needs_the_rich_, the rich the poor .... So no one
needs another as a person, but needs him as a giver." What she
ignores is that this passage occurs in a chapter in which Stirner is
_describing_ the _socialist_ case before subjecting it to his
piercing criticism. It is not possible, therefore, to deduce from
this passage that it reflects his "disdain" for "commodity
relations", any more than it is possible to deduce from his poetic
description of the argument from design that he believes in a god.
Ferguson claims that Stirner does not recognize the "sociality" of
human being and that "anthropologically and psychologically, it must
be acknowledged that human being are born into groups." But Stirner
quite clearly _does_ acknowledge this fact. "Not isolation", he
writes, "or being alone, but society is man's original state ....
Society is our state of nature." To become one's own it is necessary
to dissolve this original state of society, as the child does when
it prefers the company of its playmates to its former "intimate
conjunction" with its mother. It is not, as Ferguson contends, "our
connection with others" that "provides us with our initial
self-definition", but our awareness of _contrast_ to them, our
consciousness of being _separate_ individuals. In other words,
"self-definition" is a product of _individuation_, not
_socialization_.
Nor is Stirner an advocate of "the solitary" as she implies. Both
in THE EGO AND HIS OWN and his REPLY TO CRITICS he rejects such an
interpretation of his ideas. Nor is he a moralist - he is an
amoralist. Presenting as evidence for his belief in "moral choice"
an erroneous statement by John Carroll will not do. Nor does he
reject "all socially (sic) acquired knowledge" if by that is meant
"culture" (acquired by individuals, not by "society"). On the
contrary, he states "_I_ receive with thanks what the centuries of
culture have acquired for me."
Ferguson questions why the conscious egoist should not "wish to be
free" from ownness. Why not "take a leap of faith into something
like Christianity as did St Augustine or Kierkegaard?" Precisely
because ownness is the _condition_ for what she calls "the ontology
of the self as process" - that is, ownness is _me_ possessing _me_.
Were I to abandon it by committing myself to the nonsense of
Christianity, this would not be _my_ self, but a "redeemed self"
shaped according to an image prescribed by others.
In her concluding remark Ferguson backs away from the challenge of
Stirner's egoism. "Ownness is not a sufficient base for human life,"
she claims, because "authentic individual life requires that we have
ties to others." She admits that such ties can become stifling and
that Stirner sees this danger, but contends that "he does not see
the necessity or possibility of a liberating sociality." She thus
ends up indulging in that half-this and half-that waffle that
Stirner so unerringly dissected 140 years ago. Once one begins to
think in terms of "authentic individual life" then that
"authenticity" has to be distinguished from that "inauthentic". Once
it is defined one is once again subjected to that "rule of concepts"
that Stirner is so "startling acute" in rejecting. "Liberating
sociality" based upon "authenticity" is simply a verbalism
disguising the intent on deciding our lives for us. It is a
philosophical confidence trick for which no conscious egoist will
fall.
[1] Vol XII, No. 3, 1982
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* *
* "You cannot enslave a free man; the most you can do is kill him!" *
* -- Robert A. Heinlein *
* *
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