2.1 What is Ownership, What is Steward-Ownership?

A contribution by Armin Steuernagel

Is it domination? Is it a right of use? Is it a form of identification?

Could our concept of ownership embody the very essence of how, in our consciousness, we perceive “I” and “world” and relate them to each other? Ownership as a mirror of our relation to the world?

If we understand ownership as control over something, as the right to use it personally, to take its fruits for ourselves, this already presupposes that we perceive the world outside as “not myself”, as something that can be owned.

World and I must be two different things.

This form of relating to the world, the “subject-object split,” does not begin only with the Enlightenment, 250 years ago, nor merely with Descartes (“Cogito ergo sum”) 400 years ago. If we follow Karl Jaspers and Charles Taylor, it actually begins much earlier, between 800 and 200 BCE. This period is known as the Axial Age, because before and after it, the world was experienced in radically different ways.

Before the Axial Age, Jaspers and Taylor argue, human beings experienced themselves as inseparably bound and embedded in a cosmic order – in nature or tribe. The self was “porous” (Taylor): gods, spirits, and demons could flow in and out of it. The world was alive, mythical, filled with meaning. It was not “objectifiable,” and therefore not ownable in the modern sense. To be an owner meant to care for something, to act as a manager or steward, for the world belonged to God, or was even itself divine.

In the Axial Age, for the first time in human history, religious founders and philosophers arose who explored the inner life of human beings, who distinguished between self and world, and who asked how we stand in relation to God and to the world. “I am not the world, and the world is not me” – subject and object are experienced as separate. From Confucius in China, to the Buddha in North India, Zoroaster in Mesopotamia, Socrates in Greece, and the prophets in Israel: everywhere the divine withdraws from immediate surroundings and becomes transcendent. Thus begins the search for God, and the world as an object. Taylor calls this the “great disembedding.”

“Subdue the earth,” says the Old Testament (written around the 6th century BCE) – an expression of this changed relation to the world, and with it, of a changed understanding of ownership. Fittingly, in the same period, the Roman concept of dominium arose: legally codified, exclusive ownership.

Two thousand years later, with the Enlightenment and the mechanistic-technological worldview that followed, the separation of self and world was pushed even further. The world was made ever more usable, ever more controllable. It became, as Hartmut Rosa puts it, more and more “available.” This way of relating to the world corresponds to an understanding of ownership that prioritizes availability above all else – extending property, for example, even to the patenting of plant DNA codes. Almost everything becomes an object, and therefore ownable. It is – in Rosa’s words – an “aggressive” relation to the world.

Paradoxically, despite – or perhaps precisely because of – this appropriation, the world seems to grow alien to us. It withdraws from us through our own instrumentalization. We live in great cities, physically closer to and surrounded by more people than ever before, and yet lonelier than ever. We know more about nature – in certain respects – than at any time in history, and yet we are increasingly alienated from it, even destroying it. Corporate ownership, made “available” through anonymous stock markets and pension funds, is in principle open to everyone – and yet fewer and fewer people truly identify with the company itself, leading to a succession crisis of enormous proportions. Charles Taylor speaks of alienation; Hartmut Rosa calls it a withdrawal of the world.

To make possible another, resonant way of relating to the world, Rosa argues, we must allow ourselves to be touched by the world – so that, perhaps transformed ourselves, we may respond, and once again assume genuine responsibility for it. In a certain sense, what is needed is a new binding of self and world, a “re-embedding without regression,” as Taylor suggests.

Not in the old sense – before the Axial Age – of mythical fusion, where the self dissolves, but in a new connection that brings the self into resonance with the world. An understanding of ownership that mirrors such a new relationship would likely describe ownership less as a right of use and more as a relationship of care, or stewardship for something, or, precisely, steward-ownership. Such relational, resonant, or steward-ownership would take two principles seriously:

This conception of ownership allows a new perspective on the company, precisely because it renders it, from a pure financial perspective, unavailable – unavailable, for instance, to speculation. One might assume this represents a reduction of freedom. Yet for those whose view of the world is clouded by utility and instrumentalization, the world itself becomes more difficult to reach – and with it, ultimately, the foundation of every free decision. A more resonate relation to the world creates new insight, new knowledge of the world, a foundation for free action. It enables us to act in the spirit of the world – not because we must, compelled by impact assessments, profit pressures, or legal mandates, but because we are in genuine relationship with it.