On Ownness

By:  Johnn Yonko

Originally Published: https://www.stateoftheu.com/2017/4/7/15217106/on-ownness

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Bottom line here is, don't use the word ownness ever in your lifetime.

Why not? Well, just remember the flippant philosophical conundrum: if it walks like a duck, flies like a duck, quacks like a duck and looks like a duck - guess what? Its a duck!

Ownness is such a duck. It looks like an error, feels like an error, it's so vaguely definable that, for practical purposes, it is undefinable, it's pedantic, and it doesn't mean what its homonym onus means. Consequently, ownness is effdup from the gitgo. Don't use it. Especially don't use it if what you mean to say is onus. Such usage is erroneous.

Unless you're a bird.

When a bird arrives back in his nest at the end of a long day filled, perhaps, with dodging cats, eating worms and bugs, intermittently flying and soaring hither and yon, then sitting on telephone wires pondering why humans spend so much time walking, it (the bird in question) is returning to a "miraculous place of safety, of ownness". We humans might, under similar circumstances, say, "ah, it's good to be home..."

I found that "miraculous place of safety, of ownness" for a bird's nest example at wordnik dot com. Wordnik defines ownness as "peculiar to oneself".

Wordnik offers other usage examples for ownness,

including: "God is the heritage of the soul in the ownness of origin"; and quoting Tracy Smith in Charm School 101 for the college student, "Ereignis does designate something like the recurrent event of being, as the giving or granting of ownness or properness".

Wikipedia says

that the term Ereignis appears in the philosopher Heidegger's later works and is not easily summarized.

Clearly, and I use the word with a combination of humor and sarcasm, ownness is a word for which I find attempts to define it more obfuscating than if the word had been left to its apparentness, i.e., something to do with ownership. The problem is that it is not a simple state of ownership that ownness is intended to describe.

Think of it this way:

you're in trouble when you have to explain ownness in terms of a German word Ereignis, and then attempt to explain Ereignis by calling it "enowning", and then explain enowning in connection with things that arise and appear, and then clarifying enowning as things coming into themselves by belonging together...etc. Look up 'Heideggerian Terminology' in Wikipedia if you have nothing better to do.

I repeat for emphasis: don't use the word ownness.

It does not mean 'to assume the burden'; it does not mean 'take on the responsibility'.

Don't even think about using the word ownness.

Instead, use the word onus if the idea of burden or responsibility is what you want to convey. Your readers will thank you and anyway, they don't like Heidegger.

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COMMENTS:

For some, heretofore, unknown reason...