The attachment to a rationalistic, teleological notion of progress indicates the absence of true progress; he whose life does not unfold satisfyingly… - John Carroll

Ownership of thought depends on the thinker not subordinating himself to a ‘ruling thought’. This is particularly difficult, argues Stirner, … for language itself is a network of ‘fixed ideas’. Truths emerge only when language is reworked and possessed individually.

Life is more than thought: what a man feels, and what his senses awaken in him, are more indispensable to his life’s fullness than subsequent reflection on their significance. Both Stirner and Nietzsche have elaborated Faust’s opening speech in which he bemoans his wasted years in academia: this speech is Goethe’s own impeachment of Kant and Hegel. Philosophy proceeds always under the risk of making a fetish of thinking.

Stirner and Nietzsche [adopt] a mode of thinking which is personal, introspective, and which while often operating on alternative systems of belief and action does so only as a means of better grasping one dominant goal—the patterns of individual redemption. Stirner and Nietzsche are not primarily interested in critique as such. … Their work is too egoistically compelled for them ever to employ the external world as more than the repository for a series of projections of their own.