Letter to Sid Parker from David Miller, January 1983. Transcribed and submitted by the author September, 2023.
Dear Sid,
Well, I’ve finally got around to forming a Stirner group.
I took advantage of an offer to use their premises by the Melbourne Anarchist Club. Some of them are vaguely interested in Stirner, and as some of the Free Marketeers are too, I thought I’d take the plunge.
We had about a dozen at the first meeting, and about 25 at the talk on Nietzsche. Nietzsche is a draw-card numbers-wise. It was for this reason I called the group the ‘Nihilists’, as this allowed me to include Nietzsche. I took advantage of RWK Paterson’s labelling of Stirner as a Nihilist, as well as that Nietzsche is often labelled a Nihilist. An additional reason is that I decided that very few would know the word ‘Egoist’, but many would be aware of the word “Nihilist’.
I have finished reading Dr. Robert Miller’s PhD manuscript, “Owness: A Philosophy of Self-Enjoyment”. I would very much like it to be published. He has no idea who would publish it. Who do you think he could approach? A friend of Robert’s in London has a copy, if you’d like to read it.
It seems to me that Robert has taken Paterson’s claim about Stirner’s supposed metaphysical solipsism and pushed it to an extreme where not only the world, but also the self, is a creature of the creative nothing.
Ironically, in an appendix to the manuscript, Robert defends Stirner against Paterson’s claim that he is a metaphysical solipsist; in that Stirner is one thing one moment and something else the next moment, as his whim takes him. So Stirner cannot be said to be this or that.
When Robert gives his talk to the Existentialist Society in March, I hope to get his notes.
Regards,
David