Max Stirner: Ontology, Ethics, Politics
Max Stirner: Ontology, Ethics, Politics by Deniz Ali Woloshin Guvenc Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree: Master of Arts in Philosophy Supervisor: Dr. Jeffrey Reid Department of Philosophy Faculty of Arts University of Ottawa Ó Deniz Ali Woloshin Guvenc, Ottawa, Canada, 2019 Abstract For all the charges laid against him—sophistry, nihilism, greedy individualism, ego-tism, radical nominalism—I attempt to rescue something affirmative, something joyful in the work of Max Stirner. I argue that there exists another Stirner, one hidden beneath the fiery rhetoric and frenzied prose, a Stirner attentive and responsive to the intricate uncertainty of existence. Not without a hint of irony, I have found in his destructive anarchism a spirited celebration of invention and creation; in his wild anti-humanism, a gentle sympathy for the human life; in his aggressive atheism, an unwavering clemency for the heathen. Yet this other, joyful Stirner is not opposed to the dominant, ruinous image; rather, they are intimately bound up in one another. Stirner’s warm sympathy for those of us who are less than perfect—those of us who fail in our aspirations, who let ourselves down—is not opposed to his rejection of the human as such, but is in fact made possible by it. The rejection and the affirmation exist in and as a single motion, a single strike: this is perhaps the central idea in my reading of Stirner, borne out through analyses of his non-dialectical ontology, his descriptive ethics, and his anarchic politics.
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