All Things Are Nothing to Me
Page 9
Ownness
The owner differentiates itself from other individuals through its property. However, as an owner, I am not exhausted by my property, since I can still consume it in full, dissolving everything I own. Because the owner can act upon all its property and yet still maintain itself separate from its property, it necessarily exceeds its property. This excess or surplus of the owner against its property only appears in the process of consumption, in the proof that one is separate from one’s properties. For in consumption the owner negates the property that distinguishes itself from others as unique. If I was only my property, Stirner might say, then I too would be lost in consumption. But I am not; I am non-identical with my property, always more, or less than it. This surplus of being can also be seen as a lack from another point of view. To be more than one’s property means that something is missing in relation to it, something left unexpressed, unrepresented. Stirner’s Einzige is never fully present in its property since it resists determination in any single form. Stirner calls this non-identity of the unique and its property—ownness [Eigenheit]:
Ownness is my whole being and existence, it is I myself. I am free from what I am rid of, owner of what I have in my power or of which I am powerful. I am at all times and under all circumstances my own, if I know how to have myself and do not throw myself away on others. To be free is something that I cannot truly will, because I cannot make it, cannot create it: I can only wish it and—aspire toward it, for it remains an ideal, a spook. The fetters of reality cut the sharpest welts in my flesh at every moment. But I remain my own.60
Ownness, first of all, does not mean self-interest or selfishness, since any conception of the “self” can be as much one’s own as it can be a spook, a socially produced image of what one should be in order to be somebody at all. To be “selfish” is perhaps the most commonplace, banal, and socially acceptable form of behavior there is in capitalist society. The call to “find oneself” or follow one’s “true” self fits perfectly well with the neoliberal demands of our era: to cultivate as much human capital as possible for one’s prostitution on the market as an extremely precarious, but “self-realized” or “self-fulfilled”, wage-slave. To be yourself today almost always means adapting one’s soul to the needs of the market, or to find oneself reflected in a menu of tailored commodities particularly suited to one’s niche identity. All these market-mediated identities are not my own, Stirner would say, I am rather their product. Ownness is the complete destitution of these identities and pseudo-selves.61
The concept of ownness is also not identical with freedom, at least, not negative freedom. To Stirner, freedom is always an external ideal outside my control, never an inner reality starting from my experience. To be free is to be from, while to be one’s own is to have power to. As Stirner suggests in the above quotation, ownness refers to my persistent power to maintain, create, or dissolve my I despite the immensity of constraints, obligations, rules, norms and images pressed upon me. Freedom is always outside my grasp, since there is always one more constraint from which to be free. Ownness is I myself, no matter how deep the “fetters of reality” limit me. To remain my own or to be an owner is to live according to one’s distinct ownness. Ownness thus signifies an almost ontological power of self-control, self-fashioning, and self-determination, somewhat similar to Sartre’s idea of radical freedom.62 The distinction between freedom and ownness is consequently not absolute; I will come back to it shortly.
Often translated (wrongly) as peculiarity, personality, or characteristic, Stirner’s concept of Eigenheit is not a trait or property one has, but a form of life one does. That is, ownness designates the mode of individual existence that resists capture in alien forms of thought, reified practices, and generic relations. Ownness, in short, is the opposite of alienation. It describes how an owner relates to itself across the abyss of its properties, on its own terms, with its own power. For Stirner, ownness is what remains of oneself when everything sacred, static, and alien has been stripped away. It cannot be known in advance what this means for each individual, since every unique one must determine for themselves who they are to be.
“Ownness does not have any alien standard,” Stirner writes, “as it is not in any sense an idea like freedom, morality, humanity, and the like: it is only a description of the—owner.”63 If ownness is not a normative idea like freedom, morality and humanity, but a description of the owner, then what about the owner does ownness describe? Although Stirner is not always so clear, I will attempt a few suggestions: ownness describes an owner’s inner relation to itself; it marks how an owner consumes its own properties without being consumed in turn; it illustrates the singular content of the I—its uniqueness—although there is no essence to it; ownness names the negativity of the owner, its power to dissolve and withdraw from its property at will.
In Hegelian terms, ownness is an infinite relation, since it depends on nothing outside itself to be itself. For Hegel, the most familiar example of the infinite self-relation is the I. “When we say ‘I’, that is the expression of the infinite self-relation that is at the same time negative.”64 To say “I” is to infinitely relate oneself to oneself as a singular being that knows itself as self-relating; and yet, to know oneself as “I” is also to posit a negative relation, since it necessarily entails a distinction from others. This infinite, self-relating negativity of the I—seen not from the third-person perspective of observing consciousness, but from the first-person perspective of experience—is what ownness attempts to describe.
“Ownness,” Stirner asserts, “is the creator of everything.”65 It is the source of self-creation and self-destruction, that which enables one to become unique out of their various properties, and that which allows one to dissolve their properties back into nothing. It is the power to consume that which consumes you, to destroy that which destroys you. An owner can consume its properties, but never its ownness, for the act of self-dissolution is itself a proof of one’s own power. Ownness can never be given by another, like a privilege or a right; it can only be expressed in one’s actions, like a disposition or power.
Stirner’s injunction for those who seek to be their own is to give up all sacred property without falling into a new faith, a new submission. To renounce alien principles, reified relations, and fixed ideas, however, does not mean abandoning principles, relations and ideas as such. Rather, it means making them one’s own, internalizing them, using and abusing them as one’s property, one’s enjoyment. “Ownness permits everything, even apostasy, defection.”66 When individualism and the supremacy of the ego become ruling dogmas, then the greatest act of ownness is perhaps the apostasy of the I itself.
Heidegger
In addition to Hegel and Sartre, Stirner’s concept of ownness resonates across the history of philosophy. For instance, in Being and Time, Heidegger describes a phenomenological condition called mineness [Jemeinigkeit] which, at first glance, appears similar to Stirner’s ownness. Mineness just means that, “the being whose analysis our task is, is always we ourselves. The being of this being is always mine.”67 For any “Dasein” (Heidegger’s jargon for the particular mode of existence for human beings), the question of being always emerges out of one’s concern with their own existence, and not as some indifferently present objective genus, waiting to be investigated. “When we speak of Dasein,” Heidegger notes, “we must always use the personal pronoun along with whatever we say: ‘I am,’ ‘You are.’”68
Stirner would agree with this fundamental “mineness” of our existence, but just because being is first of all mine does not mean that I identify with it, that I own it. However, here too Heidegger would concur. To Heidegger, each Dasein has the choice of whether or not to take up its “ownmost possibility”, to become its own potential, or to lose itself in the indeterminacy of the many. Heidegger creates a new word to describe this proper mode of being, one uncannily close to Stirner’s own neologism of Eigenheit: Eigentlichkeit, usually translated as “authentici
ty”. For Heidegger, an “authentic” being appropriates its own potentiality, and does not let it waste away in average everydayness or inauthenticity. He writes:
Dasein is always its possibility. It does not ‘have’ that possibility only as a mere attribute of something objectively present. And because Dasein is always essentially its possibility, it can ‘choose’ itself in its being, it can win itself, it can lose itself, or it can never and only ‘apparently’ win itself. It can only have lost itself and it can only have not yet gained itself because it is essentially possible as authentic [eigentliches], that is, it belongs to itself. The two kinds of being of authenticity and inauthenticity [Eigentlichkeit und Uneigentlichkeit]—these expressions are terminologically chosen in the strictest sense of the word—are based on the fact that Dasein is in general determined by always being-mine.69
Is Stirner’s Eigenheit the original template for Heidegger’s Eigentlichkeit? If so, then Stirner is in trouble, since authenticity is perhaps the weakest element in Heidegger’s phenomenological edifice, riven with ideological trappings.70 Although they overlap at parts, ownness and authenticity describe different modes of existence. For Heidegger, authenticity refers to Dasein’s own capacity to appropriate its potentiality as a fundamentally temporal being, concerned with its own finitude, and faced with its destiny. Ownness, however, cares little for being-towards-death, as it only describes the persistent power of an I to overcome its alienation through consumption of everything external, fixed and alien to it. Death too is an abstraction to be consumed, like all others, in my own unique way. Stirner’s Einzige does not give a shit about being “authentic” or facing up to its historical destiny; those are just more phantoms in the picture gallery of spirits. If enjoying my life in the cellars and bars of depraved proletarians is somehow inauthentic, then authenticity has no value to me. The joy of ownness overrides the tragedy of history. All things are nothing to me, Stirner writes, even my own destiny.
Foucault
Stirner’s thought does not only speak to 20th century philosophical concerns, but also to those of the 1st century. According to Foucault, Stirner’s philosophy is a modern reprise of the ancient Stoic precept of “caring for the self”. The concept of ownness could then be read as one of the first attempts at reigniting an ethics and aesthetics of the self, a project taken up by many individualist philosophers in the nineteenth-century. For Foucault,
A whole section of nineteenth century thought can be reread as a difficult attempt, a series of difficult attempts, to reconstitute an ethics and an aesthetics of the self. If you take, for example, Stirner, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, dandyism, Baudelaire, anarchy, anarchist thought, etcetera, then you have a series of attempts that are, of course, very different from each other, but which are all more or less obsessed by the question: Is it possible to constitute, or reconstitute, an aesthetics of the self? At what cost and under what conditions?71
What is an “aesthetics of the self” and how does it relate to Stirner’s concept of ownness? Stirner’s text centers around the question of how one relates to oneself. His diagnosis is that we have not treated ourselves well, that we are sick, alienated from ourselves, stuck in fixed thought patterns and petrified forms of practice. Only a series of consumptive practices of ownness will allow us to come to terms with ourselves again, to liberate ourselves from our self-imposed estrangement. For Stirner, these practices are a kind of ownership of the self. Such ownership requires consuming one’s properties so as to bring them back in line with oneself.
Stirner’s ownness highlights the power to master one’s own condition even when one cannot master one’s own fate. Epictetus, the Hellenistic stoic of the 1st century, made a distinction between things that that are “up to us” and things that are not; the former can be controlled, the latter cannot, and freedom lies in knowing the difference.72 Similarly, Stirner separates what is our property from what is not. If something is up to me, under my control, then I can consume it as property, and enjoy myself. If it is not my property, not up to me, then it should not matter to my development; it is nothing to me. However, for Stirner, the difference between what is mine and what is not-mine is not some absolute limit, but rather a historically produced boundary, constantly challenged by my own self-activity. To push that limit is to internalize what appears external, to render artificial what seems natural, to make intelligible the opaque, and reappropriate the product of one’s own power.
In this sense, Stirner’s theory of property is more like a theory of ethical life than a theory of legal rights. It describes the conditions by which one can achieve their own enjoyment. Stirner’s formula is not “know thyself” but own thyself. This is not meant in a legal or economic sense (as a libertarian might say), but in an ethical sense, as a demand to seize a non-alienated form of life. This requires practice and training, “consumption” and “dissolution.” For Foucault, such practices of the self are not simply a kind of self-styling. The relation to oneself is rather the primary register in which contemporary political power operates. To reclaim that power is both indispensable and near impossible. As Foucault says,
I think we may have to suspect that we find it impossible today to constitute an ethic of the self, even though it may be an urgent, fundamental, and politically indispensable task, if it is true after all that there is no first or final point of resistance to political power other than in the relationship one has to oneself.73
Ownness constitutes the fount of self-formation in Stirner. In order to be a unique I, one must resist the tendency towards generality. To Stirner and Foucault, the main mechanism that distributes and imposes generalities on individuals is the state. Therefore, to resist the state and form oneself into a unique I are one and the same thing. This is the meeting point between Foucault and Stirner. But whereas Foucault understands the practices of the self as an ethic of freedom, Stirner’s ethic of ownness displaces freedom from its pedestal and consumes it as one property among others.
Freedom
As mentioned before, Stirner differentiates his idea of radical ownness from the liberal concept of freedom. One way he illustrates this difference is in how each relates to the individual and its property:
Freedom teaches only: get rid of yourselves, get rid of everything annoying; it does not teach you who you yourselves are. Away, away! Thus sounds its battle cry, and you, eagerly heeding its call, even get rid of yourselves, ‘deny yourselves’. But ownness calls you back to yourselves, it says ‘come to yourself.’ Under the aegis of freedom you get rid of many kinds of things, but something new oppresses you again…As own you are actually rid of everything, and what clings to you you have accepted; it is your choice and your pleasure. The own one is the free-born, the one free to begin with; the free one, on the contrary, is only the freedom-addicted, the dreamer and enthusiast.74
For Stirner, freedom is a form of self-denial, a call to get rid of one’s attachments and desires, joys and pains, in hope of one day being free from everything, even oneself. Except, there is always more to get rid of. Like Hegel’s bad infinity, something can always be added to the sequence of oppression. Each oppression creates a new freedom, and each freedom fixes a new identity in order to demand it. One is thus never actually free, only potentially so. Ownness, on the contrary, assumes one’s radical freedom from the very beginning, and builds upon it. Only by starting from yourself, Stirner suggests, from your needs and powers, your pleasures and suffering, can you confront all the external and internal constraints against you. Whereas freedom demands recognition from others, ownness takes it for oneself, and consumes it as nothing. To be one’s own is to even have the power to get rid of oneself, if one so chooses; to wish for freedom is to continuously seek this release from others, like an addict searching for another fix.
Initially, it seems tempting to interpret ownness as a type of freedom, as one way of expressing personal freedom. For Stirner, it is exactly the opposite: freedom is one way of expressing ownness. Freedom can be
granted or taken, imposed or created; it can be formal or material, collective or individual; it can vary according to social, sexual, political, legal, and economic criteria. None of this really matters to Stirner. What matters is whether any particular kind of freedom is one’s own or not. That is, it matters whether freedom is an accomplishment of one’s own activity, and thus a result and expression of ownness, or if it is something alien, a result of another’s power and thus an expression of one’s impotence. In the latter case, freedom appears not as one’s own but as an external ideal, a coercive right, an abstract law, a social norm, a moral value—that is, as something else, separate from me.
Ownness, after all, describes how an individual relates to its own determinations, including freedom. As noted above, it is not a quality or property, but a mode of self-relation. Freedom, on the other hand, is at best a negative relation to external constraints, and at worst, an ideological weapon used to justify any sacrifice of the individual. In a dialogue with himself, Stirner wonders why freedom is a worthy goal at all:
Who is it that is to become free? You, I, we. Free from what? From everything that is not you, not I, not we. I, therefore, am the kernel that is to be delivered from all wrappings and––freed from all cramping shells. What is left when I have been freed from everything that is not I? Only I, and nothing but I. But freedom has nothing to offer to this I itself. As to what is now to happen further after I have become free, freedom is silent—as our governments, when the prisoner’s time is up, merely let him go, thrusting him into abandonment. Now why, if freedom is striven after for love of the I after all, why not choose the I itself as beginning, middle, end?75