Our own body is itself extraneous to us: we can use it, or we can be mysteriously overwhelmed by it—yet we treat it as a multiplicity of extraneous entities. And the mind: can it not perhaps see itself as another thing? Indeed, isn’t this its ineluctable characteristic? What else is that glorious notion of “self-awareness” to which the Spirit aspired, if not the total expansion of such capacity?

Let us take yet another step back: what is ownness? The answer to this question inevitably reveals all the ambitions, all the intentions concealed in thought. We open the Upaniṣads (though no one in Stirner’s time was aware that Schopenhauer had just begun to read them). In the three words of tat tvam asi (“this you are”), ownness declares itself as the discovery of identification: extraneousness is one of the countless fruits of nonknowledge, which prevents the circulation of ownness in the Self. And that Self is everything. Yet nonknowledge remains that which is immediately our own. Paradoxes of a thought teeming with gods. Now, the emancipated reason of Feuerbach had only just appropriated the gods, and moreover in the euphemistic form of the “divine.” It is clear that Feuerbach’s subject had different aims from the subject of the Upaniṣads, with which in any case he was unfamiliar. What ownness was he seeking, then? For Feuerbach, a model of Man that was full of good sentiments and virtues. But Feuerbach is used here as a pretext, and it is certainly not in his moderate reasoning that we will find the answer of a godless age. Reasoning with no premises—every premise is extraneous—has fixed it into the area of inquiry in which it develops its greatest force: that of mathematical logic. Own is a term that belongs to a formalized theory. A formalized theory is a sequence of transparent statements, in the sense that each statement in the sequence is defined in all its elements and can be traced back, through rules of deduction, to a minimum number of initial statements (axioms). The formal system is a multiplicity where everything can only belong. But we know from Gödel’s theorem that for formal theories of some interest (including arithmetic) there is no effective procedure that makes it possible to decide whether a statement belongs to the same theory.