Max Stirner in the Presence of the Enslaving Power of Tradition – the Perspective of Anticipation of Indifference

Abstract

Max Stirner, in his book The Ego and Its Own, confronts and criticizes the tradition since antiquity to his contemporaneity. The article presents Stirner’s defiance along with ideas by Nietzsche, Scheler, and Adorno and interprets it in the perspective of making indifference present, a notion developed by the author in other texts. The acts of anticipation of indifference, by invalidating traditional differences, allow to form an individual that gains the sense of self, as well as self-independence from society and tradition. Stirner glorifies the individual and relinquishes the anticipation of indifference, which reinforces power over him that is held by traditional convictions and cultural patterns that had not been recognized by him.