The Ego and His Own: The Case of the Individual Against Authority

by Max Stirner

In ruder times than ours it was customary to demand a particular faith, and devotion to a particular sacred essence, and they did not take the gentlest way with those who believed otherwise; since, however, “freedom of belief” spread itself more and more abroad, the “jealous God and sole Lord” gradually melted into a pretty general “supreme being,” and it satisfied humane tolerance if only every one revered “something sacred.” Reduced to the most human expression, this sacred essence is “man himself” and “the human.” With the deceptive semblance as if the human were altogether our own, and free from all the otherworldliness with which the divine is tainted—yes, as if Man were as much as I or you—there may arise even the proud fancy that the talk is no longer of a “sacred essence” and that we now feel ourselves everywhere at home and no longer in the uncanny,278 in the sacred and in sacred awe: in the ecstasy over “Man discovered at last” the egoistic cry of pain passes unheard, and the spook that has become so intimate is taken for our true ego. But “Humanus is the saint’s name” (see Goethe), and the humane is only the most clarified sanctity. The egoist makes the reverse declaration. For this precise reason, because you hold something sacred, I gibe at you; and, even if I respected everything in you, your sanctuary is precisely what I should not respect.