FALKNER.XYZ
∞

Open Autonomy

An open philosophy of radical self-determination

No idea stands above the individual – not even this one.

Preamble

Every era has its sanctities. Once it was God, king and country; today it's often society, progress, efficiency or "the system." The names change, the pattern stays the same: an abstraction is placed above the concrete human being who is meant to serve it.

Open Autonomy works against that pattern. Its starting point is Max Stirner's The Ego and Its Own (1844).1 His critique of fixed ideas is joined here with the scientific-rational tradition of Bertrand Russell, Karl Popper and Carl Sagan.

What results isn't a finished blueprint for society, but a framework that keeps its own premises open to attack.

Stirner's radical ownness lets everyone attack anything. What remains open is what happens when several unique ones meet each other. Open Autonomy tries to work on this social problem without subordinating ownness to some higher morality.

It is therefore a process, not an end state:

Open Autonomy is a framework for the ongoing expansion of real autonomy. The concrete human being should be enabled, as far as possible, to dispose over themselves and their attachments — to examine them, change them, and if need be leave them.

The problem isn't constraint as such, but constraint that is imposed by others and no longer appropriated as one's own.

1. Stirner: ownness instead of abstract freedom

"I have set my affair on nothing."

Stirner's book opens and closes on this line from Goethe's Vanitas! vanitatum vanitas!2 What's meant is the refusal to ground one's own existence in something higher.

Stirner calls such self-sufficient abstractions fixed ideas, spooks, or things people have "a screw loose" about: religion, state, nation, morality, society, humanity, or even "Man" itself. They become a problem the moment it's no longer the human being who uses the idea, but the idea that uses the human being.

Open Autonomy adopts this suspicion. Institutions and communities are tools. Their mere existence grounds no claim on the individual.

For Stirner, even property means more than material possession: actual power of disposal. That's why he distinguishes freedom from ownness.1 Formal freedom stays empty if the individual can't actually do anything with it.

From this follows:

Autonomy is not abstract freedom, but a capacity.

Real human beings are limited, dependent and social. Autonomy therefore can't mean being unattached.

Autonomy means disposing, as far as possible, over one's own attachments.

A voluntarily entered attachment doesn't legitimize itself for all time. Yesterday's will must not turn into a fixed idea that rules over the present individual.

2. The Union: the social problem of the unique one

Stirner sets against the all-absorbing society the union of egoists:1 people cooperate because it serves their purposes, not because some higher "we" demands it.

Communities, companies, cooperatives and commons are thus tools. Their legitimacy doesn't rest on their existence, but on whether they serve those involved and can in principle be left.

A community you cannot leave becomes a shell.

This is where the real problem begins: A may attack anything, and so may B. So they can also attack each other's claims.

Open Autonomy therefore asks how several radically self-owning people can live together without erecting a new, unattackable authority above them.

3. Popper, Russell and Sagan: tools for testing

Stirner establishes radical attackability, but offers no method for testing competing claims against each other.

This is where Karl Popper comes in.3 Social orders aren't final truths but correctable hypotheses. Rather than utopian, all-encompassing blueprints, he favors incremental, testable change.4 Institutions must be able to be criticized and replaced.

Bertrand Russell adds analytical clarity and epistemic modesty.56 What matters are questions like:

  1. What's being claimed?
  2. What reasons support it?
  3. What speaks against it?
  4. How confident can we be?

Carl Sagan turns this skepticism into everyday practice.7 Authority is no substitute for evidence. Skepticism here doesn't mean rejecting everything, but being able to distinguish different degrees of justification. Nobody has to check everything themselves. Hardly anyone has read every line of the Linux kernel. People trust that enough others have checked it, and that anyone could.8 That kind of trust isn't faith in authority — it's trust in an open process of checking.

From this follows:

Nobody can check everything. But everyone must have the possibility of acquiring the capacity to check anything.

Popper, Russell and Sagan don't establish the right to attack — that already follows from Stirner's ownness. What they provide are preferred tools for what comes after:

Attack → counter-critique → testing → evidence → revision or dissent → provisional agreement → renewed testing

Open Autonomy prefers scientific-rational procedures, but keeps them attackable too. Different testing procedures don't need to be epistemically equivalent to remain equally open to criticism.

4. Power analysis and truth-testing

Foucault's analyses of power, knowledge and normalization are valuable to Open Autonomy.910 But the social conditions under which a claim arises don't alone decide its validity.

Power analysis can show why certain statements arise and take hold. Whether they're true still requires a further test.

Power analysis complements truth-testing; it doesn't replace it.

This is also where Open Autonomy departs from Saul Newman's postanarchist continuation of Stirner.1112 Simplified:

Stirner → poststructuralism → postanarchism
Stirner → critical rationalism → Open Autonomy

The first line studies discourse and power in particular. Open Autonomy ties the critique of the fixed more closely to testability, evidence and real possibilities for action.

Related approaches can be found in Proudhon, Thoreau, Hume, Mill, Hayek, Ostrom, and in debates around relational autonomy.13141516171819 None of them becomes the new foundation.

The tools of critique have a genesis of their own, too. The results of earlier analyses can become the starting point for later investigations. In that process, their original premises, uncertainties and historical conditions must not disappear. An earlier conclusion must not turn into an axiom simply through its continued use.

This holds especially for historical power analyses. A power structure demonstrated in an earlier society can offer clues about present conditions, but it doesn't prove their persistence or strength. Likewise, a present-day category may be used to interpret the past, but it must not be confused with the categories and possibilities for action available to people at the time. Every such transfer demands renewed testing.

Finally, if an attack on a starting assumption is explained by that very assumption as an expression of the power being examined, a self-reinforcing explanatory loop threatens to close. That doesn't make the analysis wrong, but it does make it harder to correct.

5. Law from below

If no higher idea stands above the individual, law too must be thought from those involved, not above them.

People can enter into rules voluntarily because doing so expands their capacity. Reliable agreements make cooperation possible. Where such appropriated rules meet within a union, shared law and institutions can emerge.

Individual → insight → appropriation → agreement → law → testing → insight …

This isn't a historical description but a criterion of legitimacy: law stays legitimate to the extent that those affected can appropriate, attack and change it. The circle typically begins within an already open, democratic order and opens it further, step by step. It doesn't have to rebuild society from scratch.

Hume describes rules as conventions, Hayek as spontaneous order, and Ostrom, empirically, as the self-organization of commons.201718 Open Autonomy links these ideas with Stirner's ownness: law is allowed to stay a tool and must not become a sanctity.

Open Autonomy is therefore reform-oriented. Existing institutions aren't rejected simply for existing. They're allowed to persist for as long as their function stays justifiable and they remain, in principle, open to attack and to change. Reform here has no predetermined end state: it can preserve an institution, change it, extend it, replace it, or make it obsolete.

Symmetry of claims

Several unique ones create a symmetry problem.

A holds their own views and their testing procedure P_A; B holds P_B:

(A, P_A) ↔ (B, P_B)

Both procedures can differ from each other and attack one another. No procedure is sacrosanct.

Symmetry doesn't claim that A and B possess equal amounts of real autonomy, or that their procedures are equally good. It states that no individual receives a privileged status merely on the basis of who they are.

Anyone can claim ownness only for themselves — they're free to do so. But in doing so, they leave the symmetry of an order in which several unique ones secure each other's ownness.

Symmetry is not a moral duty of the unique one, but the condition for a shared order without a fundamentally privileged unique one.

Testing and conflict need to be kept distinct here. Argument, evidence and critique test claims. Negotiation, separation, or in the most extreme case force, deal with conflicts. Force proves nothing. Whoever claims it unilaterally for themselves leaves the symmetry — and may run into the combined ownness of the others.

6. Capacity, alternatives and exit

From these foundations follows the operative principle:

Ownness through real capacity and available alternatives.

As a heuristic:

Autonomy rises with capacity and available alternatives, and falls with exit costs imposed by others.

Behind this stands the chain:

Formal freedom → capacity → alternatives → exit → voluntariness → ownness

Being formally allowed to isn't enough. Only capacity opens up real alternatives. Alternatives make exit possible. And only the possibility of exit makes staying genuinely voluntary.

From this follow practical hypotheses:

  • Education expands capacity.
  • Scientific skepticism creates epistemic alternatives.
  • Open source creates technical alternatives.
  • Decentralization creates structural alternatives.
  • Markets and commons can create alternative means of provision.
  • Plurality prevents the appearance that there is no alternative.
  • Minimally functional institutions make exit easier.

Economic systems should be measured against this too. Markets can generate alternatives through distributed knowledge17 and competition, but lose that advantage wherever monopolies form. Open Autonomy therefore doesn't commit itself to any one economic order.

7. Open source and decentralization

Open source is more than a licensing model. It carries the idea of ownness over into technology.

An open system fundamentally makes it possible to understand it, run it yourself, change it, pass it on, and develop alternatives from it.

Openness creates the possibility of exit.

That guarantees no autonomy by itself: openness only helps if people or communities actually have the capacity for it. That's why open source and education belong together.

The same holds for decentralization. Decentralized energy, local manufacturing, open software, global knowledge networks, automation and AI can give small units more independence. Network effects, economies of scale and high capital requirements, on the other hand, can produce new centralization.

Technology, then, is neither automatically liberating nor automatically centralizing. What matters is openness, alternatives and exit costs.

8. Limiting power through alternatives

Open Autonomy doesn't expect a world without power. Differences in knowledge, resources and abilities produce asymmetries.

The decisive question is:

How can power be kept from becoming inescapable?

The most important answer is alternatives. A company holds less structural power where competitors, commons or self-production exist. A platform holds less power where data can be taken elsewhere. Experts hold less epistemic power where their claims stay checkable.

Power is thus limited by plurality, transparency and exit.

Inequality is real. Open Autonomy doesn't promise to abolish it, but to expand everyone's freedom, including from worse starting positions. Open knowledge, free software and accessible education lower exit costs especially for those who can't afford expensive alternatives. Whoever denies another the freedom they claim for themselves leaves the symmetry.

Shared protective institutions are possible too. They don't rest on some higher moral authority, though, but on the combined ownness of those involved. An attacker isn't refuted metaphysically — they run into people who've joined their capacities for their own protection.

Coercion

Open Autonomy doesn't claim it can eliminate all coercion. Coercion, though, stays open to attack and doesn't carry its own justification within itself.

Coercion remains a limit on autonomy rather than becoming its enemy only for as long as the burden of proof lies with whoever coerces, their reasons stay checkable, those affected can object, and avoidable coercion keeps getting reduced.

Long-standing rules are allowed to persist too. But their age or social significance doesn't make them unattackable.

9. Exit costs as the yardstick

The central practical question is:

What does it cost a person to leave a structure?

Exit costs can be technical, financial, social, epistemic, legal, or a matter of time.

The environment belongs in this accounting too, and doesn't need to be personified to matter. People depend on it, and changes to it affect the capacity, alternatives and exit costs of present and future people alike.

Not every exit cost diminishes autonomy. What matters is whether it's appropriated or imposed from outside.

This requires distinguishing between a bond and an irreversible consequence.

A bond continues to act because people, rules or institutions assert an earlier will in the present. It stays one's own for as long as one can leave it.

An irreversible consequence, by contrast, arises from a changed reality. Someone who tears down a house can later change their mind, but that doesn't make the house stand again. Someone who walks onto a field in the rain can decide they no longer want to be standing there; they still have to walk back the way they came.

A decision is allowed to have irreversible consequences. But it must not, purely by virtue of being in the past, become a claim to rule over the present individual.

Open Autonomy requires that one can leave bonds — not that the world be reversible.

Contracts are therefore allowed to create costs for exiting them. What matters is that exit stays possible and its conditions stay transparent.

Hirschman's pairing of exit and voice further shows why exit strengthens even those who stay.21

The higher the exit costs imposed by others, the greater a structure's potential to enforce conditions against the present will of the individual.

10. The minimally functional

Institutions are tools. They're allowed to be complex to the extent their function requires it, but their continued existence is not an end in itself.

As much structure as functionally necessary, as little institutional fixation as possible.

Every institution has to face the question:

What are you still here for?

Minimally functional structures are easier to change, replace or leave. In doing so, they also keep exit costs down.

11. Education toward autonomy

Education isn't one application among others. It's a precondition of the whole approach.

Open software only helps someone who can understand it. Skepticism only protects someone who can weigh reasons. Exit only helps someone who can recognize alternatives.

Education should therefore build capacity: deciding for oneself, learning, testing, learning from mistakes, cooperating, and unlocking knowledge.

That doesn't make the teacher obsolete. Their role shifts: they create the conditions, provide knowledge and tools, and support learners in increasingly doing without them.

Digital tools and AI should be measured by the same standard. A learning companion the learner stays permanently dependent on has missed its point.

Education is the lever; exit costs are the measure.

The education paradox

School is supposed to produce autonomy while itself being a compulsory institution. That's a genuine contradiction.

The decisive question is:

May a person be compelled into education so that they can later decide for themselves?

Open Autonomy has no final answer to this. Someone who can't be educated doesn't lose their symmetric status because of it. Someone who rejects education must not simply be forced "into their freedom." With children, though, a further problem arises: a present unwillingness can produce a later inability.

Here the framework reaches one of its limits.

12. Open Autonomy stays open

Open Autonomy applies its own critique to itself.

Stirner, Popper, Russell, and the principles developed here all stay open to attack. If reality contradicts the theory, the theory has to be tested.

The approach nonetheless has a minimal starting point:

  1. No idea stands above the individual – not even this one.
  2. Autonomy is not abstract freedom, but a capacity.
  3. Nobody can check everything. But everyone must have the possibility of acquiring the capacity to check anything.

These axioms are positions taken, not eternal truths. They may be rejected.

That holds all the way up to voluntary submission. A person is allowed to want to be led, to obey, or to live hierarchically. Autonomy itself must not become a form of coercion.

What remains decisive is the present individual:

"I want to obey." – possible.
"You are no longer allowed to stop obeying." – a loss of ownness.

Nobody may be forced into their own freedom.

Open Autonomy is therefore not a design for a perfect society, but a framework for the ongoing testing of social structures from the standpoint of the concrete individual.

Summary

Open Autonomy begins with Stirner's unique one and that one's right to attack anything. Several unique ones meeting each other creates the social problem that symmetry answers: a shared order without a privileged individual.

Russell, Popper and Sagan supply preferred tools for critique, testing and revision, without themselves becoming unattackable.

Real autonomy arises from capacity and alternatives. Alternatives make exit possible, and exit costs imposed from outside reveal structural dependence.

From this follow open source, decentralization, plurality and minimally functional institutions as practical hypotheses.

At the center stands education, because it builds capacity and can thereby turn formal freedom into ownness.

The goal isn't a perfect society.

The goal is conditions under which people can find their own paths, without their tools, rules and communities turning into unattackable authorities over them.

Terms

Autonomy
The degree of actual disposal one has over oneself and one's own attachments.
Ownness
Freedom that has become one's own capacity.
Capacity
Actual ability: knowledge, skills, means and relationships.
Fixed idea
A self-sufficient abstraction that the human being serves.
Appropriation
Taking on a rule or attachment after examining it for oneself.
Union
Cooperation that serves those involved and can in principle be left.
Symmetry
No individual holds a privileged claim to ownness within a shared order merely because of who they are.
Testing procedure
A procedure for testing claims; itself open to attack.
Conflict procedure
A procedure for handling unresolved conflicts.
Exit
The real possibility of leaving a structure.
Exit costs imposed by others
Costs of such an exit that haven't been appropriated as one's own.
Bond
A social, legal or institutional continuation that shapes present room for action on the basis of an earlier will.
Irreversible consequence
A change in reality that a later change of will cannot undo.
Minimally functional
As much structure as necessary, as little fixation as possible.

References

  1. Stirner, Max (1844): Der Einzige und sein Eigentum. Leipzig: Otto Wigand. ↩
  2. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1806): "Vanitas! vanitatum vanitas!" ↩
  3. Popper, Karl R. (1945): The Open Society and Its Enemies. London: George Routledge & Sons. ↩
  4. Popper, Karl R. (1957): The Poverty of Historicism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ↩
  5. Russell, Bertrand (1945): A History of Western Philosophy. New York: Simon and Schuster. ↩
  6. Russell, Bertrand (1928): Sceptical Essays. London: George Allen & Unwin. ↩
  7. Sagan, Carl (1995): The Demon-Haunted World. New York: Random House. ↩
  8. Raymond, Eric S. (1999): The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Sebastopol: O'Reilly. (There formulated as "Linus's Law": "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.") ↩
  9. Foucault, Michel (1976): Histoire de la sexualité I. Paris: Gallimard. ↩
  10. Foucault, Michel (1975): Surveiller et punir. Paris: Gallimard. ↩
  11. Newman, Saul (2011): The Politics of Postanarchism. Edinburgh University Press. ↩
  12. Newman, Saul (2001): From Bakunin to Lacan. Lexington Books. ↩
  13. Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph (1840): Qu'est-ce que la propriété? ↩
  14. Thoreau, Henry David (1849): "Resistance to Civil Government." ↩
  15. Hume, David (1748): An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. ↩
  16. Mill, John Stuart (1859): On Liberty. ↩
  17. Hayek, Friedrich A. (1945): "The Use of Knowledge in Society." American Economic Review, 35(4), 519–530. ↩
  18. Ostrom, Elinor (1990): Governing the Commons. Cambridge University Press. ↩
  19. Mackenzie, Catriona / Stoljar, Natalie (eds.) (2000): Relational Autonomy. Oxford University Press. ↩
  20. Hume, David (1739–40): A Treatise of Human Nature. ↩
  21. Hirschman, Albert O. (1970): Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Harvard University Press. ↩