Editing The Ego and Its Own (section)

=== Part One ===
The first part of the text begins by setting out a tripartite [[dialectics|dialectical]] structure based on an individual's stages of life (Childhood, Youth and Adulthood).<ref name=Leopold>Leopold, David, [http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2011/entries/max-stirner/ "Max Stirner"], The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).</ref><ref name="TheEgoAndItsOwn">
{{cite book |last=Stirner |first=Max |url=https://consciousegoism.6te.net/pdfs/stirner/EgoAndHisOwn.pdf |title=The Ego and His Own |date=1844 |editor=Byington |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201027160634/https://consciousegoism.6te.net/pdfs/stirner/EgoAndHisOwn.pdf |archive-date=27 October 2020 |url-status=usurped}}</ref> 

In the first ''realistic'' stage, children are restricted by external material forces. Upon reaching the stage of youth, they begin to learn how to overcome these restrictions by what Stirner calls the "self-discovery of mind". However, in the ''idealistic'' stage, a youth now becomes enslaved by internal forces such as conscience, reason and other "spooks" or "fixed ideas" of the mind (including [[religion]], [[nationalism]] and other ideologies). The final stage, "egoism", is the second self-discovery, in which one becomes self-conscious of oneself as more than his mind or body.

Throughout the book, Stirner applies this dialectical structure to human history. Part one is a sustained critique of the first two periods of human history and especially of the failure of the [[Modernity|modern world]] to escape from religious modes of thinking. Stirner's analysis is opposed to the belief that modern individuals are [[Social progress|progressively]] more free than their predecessors.<ref name=Leopold/> Stirner sees moderns as being possessed by ideological forces such as [[Christianity]] and the ideologies of the modern [[nation state]].

Stirner's critique of [[modernity]] is centred on the [[Protestant Reformation]]. According to Stirner, Reformation theology extended religious domination over individuals by blurring the distinction between the sensual and the spiritual (thus allowing priests to marry for example). The Reformation also strengthened and intensified religious belief and made it more personal, creating an internal conflict between natural desires and religious conscience. Thus the Reformation only served to further enslave Europeans under spiritual ideology.<ref name=Leopold/>

Stirner's critique of a progressive view of history is part of his attack on the philosophies of the [[Young Hegelians|left-Hegelians]], especially that of [[Ludwig Feuerbach]]. Stirner sees Feuerbach's philosophy as merely a continuation of religious ways of thinking. Feuerbach had argued that Christianity was mistaken in taking human qualities and projecting them into a transcendent God. But according to Stirner, Feuerbach's philosophy, while rejecting a God, left the Christian qualities intact. Feuerbach had taken a set of human qualities and deified them, making them the only prescriptive view of humanity. This became just another religion for Stirner, a "change of masters" over the individual.<ref name=Leopold /> Stirner criticizes other left-Hegelians for setting a conception of essential human nature as a goal to be striven for instead of one which is already achieved.<ref name="TheEgoAndItsOwn" /> So while liberals like [[Arnold Ruge]] found the essence of the human in citizenship, and social liberals like [[Moses Hess]] found it in labor, all of them made a similar error of ossifying an "essence" of the human and deifying it. For Stirner, "human nature" cannot provide any prescriptions on how one ought to live as one doesn't need to become his nature, but instead he already is ("Your nature is, once and for all, a human one; you are human natures, human beings. But, just because you already are so, you do not still need to become so").