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I have not read Stirner’s book. In Rüdinger Safranski’s Nietzsche–A Philosophical Biography (2002), the intellectual relationship between Stirner and Nietzsche is discussed. The Ego and It’s Own was published in 1844, the year of Nietzsche’s birth.
The book “caused quite a sensation at the time and, owing to its individualist and anarchist radicalism, was officially dismissed by the juste-milieu of philosophy, as well as by dissidents, as scandalous or crazy. Privately, however, many readers were mesmerized by this author. Marx was prevailed upon to write a critique of this work. His critique grew longer than the book under discussion, and in the end he did not publish it. Ludwig Feuerbach wrote his brother that Stirner was 'the most brilliant and open writer I have ever encountered', . . . however, he said nothing about this writer in public. This secrecy surrounding Stirner persisted later as well. Edmund Husserl . . . . Carl Schmitt . . . .
“There seems to have been a remarkable silence on Nietzsche’s part as well. . . .” (125)
A few years before his mental collapse, there was a hot debate about whether Nietzsche plagiarized Stirner, was secretly inspired by Stirner, or what. It was established that Nietzsche had sent a friend to check Stirner’s book for him from the Basel library in 1874. Safranski concludes from further testimony that Nietzsche was indeed attracted to Stirner.
From Safranski I understand that prior to Nietzsche, Stirner was the most radical nominalist in nineteenth-century philosophy. General concepts, especially those pertaining to God, are phantoms created by men, who then become oppressed by their own creations. Actually, Feuerbach had already posed this idea in his critique of religion. (I have always wondered if Steinbeck knew of this Feuerbach idea, when he incorporated his own sunlit version of the idea into East of Eden.) Stirner goes on, according to Safranski, to urge the liberation of people from general and normative concepts such as mankind, humanity, and freedom, in which they have caged themselves. Get back to nameless existence. Boot “the so-called laws of society, and the ideas of humanism, progress, and liberalism” (128).
Think creatively, unbounded, as the Medieval nominalists had unbounded God. It does look like there is much here for Nietzsche to smack his lips over. But Stirner would not let go that bone we call property, and Nietzsche would have seen that as petty bourgeois restraint.
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