128 Nietzschethis extent, Stirner remained within the tradition of left Hegelianism,
which regarded the emancipation of man as a liberation from subjuga-
tion to self-created phantasms and social circumstances, but he stepped
up the level of critique. Although acknowledging that man had
destroyed the "other world outside of us"—namely God and the moral-
ity that is allegedly based on God, thereby achieving the project of the
Enlightenment—Stirner contended that the evaporation of the "other
world outside of us" had done nothing to undermine the "other world
in us" (Stirner 154). We have pronounced God dead and have recog-
nized that he is a phantom, but now there are even more pertinacious
phantoms to haunt us. Stirner accused the left Hegelians, who had seen
to the vanquishing of God, of resolutely replacing the accustomed
"other world" with an "other wodd in us."
What did Stirner mean by "the other world in us"? On the one hand,
it designates what Freud would call the "superego." In this sense, the
term refers to the heteronomous burden of a past ingrained by family
and society. On the other hand, it connotes the reign of general con-
cepts such as "mankind," "humanity," and "freedom," which are erected
within us. The self that has been awakened into consciousness finds
itself trapped in a network of such concepts, which have normative
power. The self uses these concepts to interpret its nameless, noncon-
ceptual existence. Stirner affirmed the existential principle that existence
comes before essence. It was his impetus to bring the individual back to
nameless existence and to liberate people from essentialist prisons.
First and foremost among these prisons were the religious ones. They
had, however, already been subjected to ample criticism. By contrast, the
hold of other essentialist phantasms had yet to be scrutinized, particu-
larly the alleged 'logic" of history, the so-called laws of society, and the
ideas of humanism, progress, and liberalism. For the nominalist Stirner,
all of those were universals that lack reality, yet when we are obsessed by
them, they can give rise to baneful realities.
Stirner was especially irked by well-intended discussions about
"mankind." There is no such thing as mankind, he insisted; there are