Nominalism In Stirner

 

On Pages 6 and 7 of his introduction to Wolfi Landstreicher’s translation of Max Stirner’s Stirner’s Critics, Jason McQuinn wrote this long footnote which I will quote in full, but nominalism mentioned there Is my primary interest: “I’m not speaking of particular forms of nominalism, phenomenology, or analytical or dialectical logic here, but generically. Stirner is not merely a nominalist with regard to either essences or universals in particular, but as a generic nominalist. Nor is he a phenomenologist in the now predominantly understood sense of Edmund Husserl, nor in the particular philosophical senses in which Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty or others used the term in following decades or in the following century (although certain similarities or resemblances will be inevitable). Remember that Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty followed earlier phenomenologists, including some like Stirner who did not use the term, among those that did use the term like Johann Heinrich Lambert, Kant

Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, G.W.F. Hegel and Franz Brentano. For each of them phenomenology is a method, but for the philosophers—unlike for Stirner—it is always a method determined by presupposed fixed ideas. Stirner is an early, generic practical phenomenologist, developing the project of an empirical investigation without presuppositions (thus nonphilosophically) in an unprecedented manner which has yet to be fully appreciated. Nor—unlike Hegel, or Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels for that matter—does Stirner employ a metaphysical dialectic. Stirner’s analytical

 and dialectical logic remains, like his nominalism and phenomenology, fully self-critical and uncommitted to any fixed metaphysical, epistemological or normative foundation or presupposition. It is merely an empirical method of self-understanding, a development of the lived, practical and conceptual logic of the immanent, phenomenal Unique. (Technically, it would be preferable to forego even the very broad description of the Unique as ‘immanent’, ‘phenomenal’ or even ‘nonconceptual,’ but it is very clear that most readers require these repeated hints or they immediately fall back into their (unthinking) habit of interpreting all names as names of symbolic concepts rather than as possible names of nonconceptual experiences.”

 

My response: McQuinn offers that Stirner’s nominalism, phenomenology and his logics are different from those pursuits by anyone else. It will be due to Stirner’s wholesale rejection that essences, universals, or abstractions exist, except as verbal conveniences, personally applied to the perceiver alone.

 

Stirner, in contrast to the above-mentioned philosopher does his philosophy and conducts his lived empirical investigation with no presuppositions whatsoever. His philosophy, the essence of his psychic effort, if I dare use that word to refer to Stirner’s thinking, is anti-philosophy.

 

Stirner’s investigation into his lived experience each moment, while experiencing incoming and welling-up stimuli, that his conscious is processing and interacting with, this Unique and His Own will nonconceptually create and destroy ideas to conceptually define temporarily what he is living through.

 

I do not know that Stirner is fully self-critical, but perhaps he is but he is committed to no foundation, no presupposition.

 

Without presuppositions, without a philosophical orientation, without abstract concepts, categorizing and preconceptions, Stirner shares his worldview, a world without universals, without philosophy, where definitions are fleeting and disconnected from a web of connecting terms, concepts. arguments and theories. McQuinn is warning the reader that, to understand Stirner at all, we must fight the urge to interpret his enterprise in light of how we think, speak, use language and verbally describe phenomenon experienced. Stirner’s game is not our game, not even a little.