Stirner's Method

 

Jason McQuinn seems to understand Max Stirner quite well, and that is no easy accomplishment. Here is what McQuinn writes about Max Stirner in McQuinn’s introduction to the Wolfi Landstreicher’s translation of Stirner’s book, Stirner’s Criticis, Page 19 and 20: “One way to better understand what Stirner does in The Unique and Its Property is to grasp his effort is an attempt to employ a particular method to all the general cultural phenomena of religion, philosophy, morality, science and ideology. This method was an egoist method, possibly modeled in part on Ludwig Feuerbach’s anthropological method. But whereas Feuerbach was concerned to reduce the imaginary ideals of religion to the supposed reality of ‘Man’ or the ‘Human,’ Stirner had a much more radical concern. His own concern, and by implication each of our own concerns. Instead of reducing imagined ideals into another more supposedly more real conceptual ideal as does Feuerbach, Stirner dissolves every imaginary ideal into himself and suggests that we all choose to do likewise. What ultimately makes Stirner’s critique so powerful and irrefutable, is that it does not, like Feuerbach’s  (or any other possible) critique begin from any fixed-idea or ideal. Not even any conceptual ideal of an ‘I’ or an ego. Instead it begins from his own, and by implication each individual person’s own particular, phenomenal, uniquely lived experience. Thus, Stirner’s egoism and his egoist method do not involve any reference to any other of the usual depictions  (conceptions or representations) of these ‘ego’ words as aiming at self-transcendence (whether ‘egoistic or ‘altruistic’). They resolutely and consistently express a nominalist, or phenomenal—and thus an immanent-understanding. This nominalist or phenomenal or immanent egoist is purely descriptive and empirical, with no normative or metaphysical content in itself.”

 

My response: Stirner rejects all ideals as fixed ideas. Stirner will not allow any universal to lord itself over him, as he dissolves all abstractions into himself. Even the concept of I or the ego are dissolved back into the self. His critique begins from his own particular, phenomenal, uniquely lived experience. He allows no transcendence, either altruistic or egoistic, away from the self. His understanding is always within the individual self, it is phenomenal, nominalist and immanent, and the subjective self remains isolated and unassimilated from absorption into a governing abstraction, above and over the self. This egoist is purely descriptive and empirical, with no normative or metaphysical content in itself. Stirner disallows any moral categorizing at all. I insist that we need abstractions to live and make sense of our lives. Stirner’s nominalist epistemology is a corrective upon modernism, but it is too irrational to be productive or to live or build society. There is too much chaos and nihilism in his worldview.

 

He accuses rationalists of being groupist, but the irrationalist ultimately will more groupist and the rationalist will be more individualistic.