Why I am not an atheist

Why I am not an atheist. And also: Why I am not a believer.

An atheist does not believe in the existence of God; s/he denies His existence.

A believer believes in the existence of God; it is a matter of faith.

Both beliefs (or convictions) presuppose somehow the meaning of existence itself. 'To exist' is synonymous with 'to be', but what does 'being' itself mean? Does 'being' have several or even many meanings? And if God were to be, which mode of being would pertain to His being? For a believer or a non-believer, such questions have no weight for pondering because it is only a matter of believing or negating a certain belief.

What modern science ascertains as true, in the sense of its hypothetical models being verified as correct, so far, by empirical scientific methodology, is contraposed to belief in God. For modern science there is no convincing empirical evidence for God's existence, and it also claims to have better, scientifically tested explanations for how the world came about (it seems always to be a question of origins in linear time). This amounts to a tacit assertion that the mode of being with which the modern sciences, starting with physics, deal is the one pertinent also to the question whether God exists. But the modern sciences apply, either directly or indirectly, only to physical kinds of movement of physical, material beings. They are unaware of the ontology of productive-efficient movement on which they are implicitly founded.

In eschewing the philosophical psychology of an Aristotle in his De Anima, even the psyche of modern psychology has had to be broken down to consciousness, and this consciousness somehow, without further investigation as to what it is (its essence), reduced (literally: led back) to a material base for it to be taken seriously from a modern scientific viewpoint. In this way, since it lacks 'material substance' in itself, the reduced psyche's movements becomes materially manipulable, which is what all modern science is about, culminating in psycho-pharmaceutics, neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Something called the 'psyche' or 'soul' in the traditional sense is useless for scientific purposes; its study an unprofitable line of research amounting, seemingly, to mere speculation. It is tacitly (or not so tacitly) assumed that the human psyche is an epiphenomenon of some kind of physical — say, neuronal-cerebral — movement, as we read in the OED on one of the significations of 'epiphenomenon': "Applied to consciousness regarded as a by-product of the material activities of the brain and nerve-system."

This way of thinking, however, skips over and suppresses the question concerning what the psyche is as a phenomenon in its own right, i.e. without material reduction to the status of an epiphenomenon. How is the human psyche itself to be conceived, not as a kind of being, but as a mode of being? And if it turns out, employing phenomenological methodology (cf. On Human Temporality), that the meaning of being itself is temporal and, in turn, time itself a three-dimensionally temporal openness, then the question concerning the mode of being of any entity at all becomes one concerning its mode of presencing and absencing in three-dimensional time, to which the psyche belongs. The psyche's openness to the world is precisely its 3D-temporality (and not solely its temporally one-dimensional sense-perception, as it has been traditionally). Both three-dimensional time and the psyche are pre-spatial and pre-material, and as such not amenable to treatment by modern science with its narrow-minded, empiricist methodology. For us mortal humans, who are the ones prone to asking whether God exists, and prior to any debates between modern science and religious belief, the question becomes one concerning a mode of 3D-temporal essencing. As what/who does God essence in the three-dimensional temporal psyche?

The more fundamental, encompassing and liberating question, however, is that concerning three-dimensional time itself and how this temporal openness is passed through a fourth dimension to reach the human psyche. We belong to time. From this alternative starting-point, further crucial phenomena such as human freedom can be rethought.

Further reading: On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.

Aristotle's purely energetic god of the fair.

Newton mathematizes Aristotelean ontology

A widespread attitude and prejudice in modern philosophy of science is to dismiss Aristotle's scientific writings as empirically incorrect and therefore superseded by modern science, starting with physics. Due to its mathematical nature, modern physics is able to employ quantitative data to confirm or falsify its hypothetical models. Such confirmation or falsification relates to the predictions of movement generated by the models. Empiricist scientific methodology reigns supreme, with no alternative in sight, thanks in no small measure to the British empiricist way of thinking initiated by Bacon. 'Aristotle is old hat —  forget 'im', is the message, 'He merely speculates'. He retains interest only from the perspective of the history of ideas, a relatively quaint pastime for genteel scholars.

What then, if it turned out that the father of modern mathematized physics, Newton, could not have conceived and written his Principia Mathematica without having appropriated key concepts from Aristotle's ontology of productive movement, whilst simultaneously dropping their ontological import? There is no ontology of movement in today's physics, nor in any other modern science. Empiricist, 'evidence-based', scientific methodology employing theoretical models has obliterated any trace of ontological thinking in today's mind. The question concerning "the being as being", τὸ ὂν ᾖ ὄν  (_to on haei on_), where the second "being" is understood participially, i.e. as a partaking of being, is dead. To say nothing of the deeper and more radical question as to the meaning of being itself.

Is this simultaneous adoption and ditching of Aristotle's ontology of productive movement by Newtonian mechanics for the sake of calculative power over physical motion to be regarded as an advance and a boon for humankind, or rather as the opposite?

In contrast to modern physics, Aristotle's Physics investigates the participation in being of physical beings conceived as κινούμενα (_kinoumena_), i.e. material beings that can be moved. Hence there is a focus, in particular, on the questions: What is physical movement?, What is time? and How do physical movement and time relate to each other? The distinction between physical beings that can be moved (passively) and beings that can (actively) move themselves, i.e. living beings, is in the background. What life itself is as a mode of being in its own right is investigated in Aristotle's De Anima, Western thinking's philosophical psychology amounting to an ontology of life. The distinction between living beings that are 'in the psyche', i.e. (ἔμψυχον _empsychon_), and non-living beings that are 'without the psyche', i.e. (ἄψυχον _apsychon_) runs throughout ancient Greek thinking. The distinction falls by the wayside in modern scientific thinking that no longer knows about the ontological difference between a being and its mode of being. Modern science is even hell-bent on trying to make life from non-living matter, to hell with investigating the ontology of life as a mode of being.

Let us take a closer look at Newton's laws, first enunciated in 1687, by first citing Wikipedia: 

"Newton's laws of motion are three physical laws that describe the relationship between the motion of an object and the forces acting on it. These laws, which provide the basis for Newtonian mechanics, can be paraphrased as follows:

1. A body remains at rest, or in motion at a constant speed in a straight line, unless it is acted upon by a force.
2. At any instant of time, the net force on a body is equal to the body's acceleration  multiplied by its mass or, equivalently, the rate at which the body's momentum is changing with time.
3. If two bodies exert forces on each other, these forces have the same magnitude but opposite directions."
   

The first law, properly attributable to Galileo, is the law of inertia for physical bodies in loco-motion, i.e. change of position, in an homogeneous, three-dimensional Euclidian space arithmetized by real Cartesian co-ordinates. The law says that a net force acting on a physical body is required to change its speed and/or direction, a change in speed and/or direction being called acceleration. Acceleration by a net resultant force breaks the physical body's inertia.

The second law in effect states the negation of the first, specifying it further, as given by the famous simple formula f=m.a. Equivalently, the law says that the net force is equal to the rate of change of momentum, given by the formula for momentum, p=mv, with its rate of change in linear time given by the the differential equation, f=dp/dt=d(mv)/dt=m.(dv/dt), since the mass m is assumed to be constant. To be able to even write this equation, it must be assumed that time t itself is composed of instants mathematizable by a real, continuous, single linear variable that, in turn, allows instantaneous speed of a physical body to appear as a sensible notion enabling mathematical manipulation by employing the infinitesimal calculus. It never occurs to a modern physicist to question whether the notions of instantaneous speed and time composed of consecutive instants are at all phenomenologically tenable. In practice they prove themselves useful and effective, and are therefore left unquestioned.

The third Newtonian law simply states that for any force acting on a physical body there must be an equal and opposite resistant force emanating from the body passively being acted upon. Mathematically speaking, this is expressed as: every active force vector f is resisted by a negative vector -f.

One might now ask what this has to do with Aristotle's ontology of productive physical movement, most thoroughly investigated in Book Theta of his Metaphysics. At first sight there seems to be scant resemblance, but it will come to light when discussing the second law. 

The first Newtonian law postulates that the natural motion of a physical body is straight ahead along a line at uniform speed. In Aristotlelean physics, by contrast, the natural motion of a physical body is not through space, but from place to place, hence loco-motion (κίνησις κατὰ τοπόν _kinaesis kata topon_). There is no homogeneous space in Aristotle's physics. For celestial bodies the natural motion is circular, around the Earth, through the æther. For sub-lunar bodies, the natural motion is down or up, toward the centre of the Earth or away from it. Of the four elements, water and earth naturally move downward, whereas fire and air naturally move upward. There is no gravitational force, but only different kinds of natural motion. An external force or 'violence' (βία, _bia_) is required to shift a physical body from its natural motion. There is no effort made to calculate motions and speeds.

This differentiation of natural motions into celestial and sub-lunar is an impediment to mathematization. Hence an homogeneous, three-dimensional space of positions is adopted from Euclidean geometry and arithmetized with Cartesian co-ordinates. Places become positions in a mathematical space. In this space there remains only one kind of natural motion: along a straight line with uniform speed unless a net force, including a gravitational one, is applied. This has the advantage that linear mathematics is elegant and simple, enabling calculations of motions, albeit not without employing the infinitesimal calculus.

The second Newtonian law is where the Aristotelean ontology of productive movement comes in. This ontology proceeds from a phenomenological conception of δύναμις (_dynamis_) as the (ἀρχή μεταβολῆς ἐν ἄλλῳ ἢ ἐν ταυτῷ ᾖ ἄλλο _archae metabolaes en alloi ae en tautoi haei allo_), i.e. as the "starting-point governing a change in another or in itself insofar it is another". (Note that 'self' and 'other' are elementary ontological categories.) When this forceful starting-point is put to work, this is literally the 'at-work-ness' or ἐνέργεια (_energeia_) of the δύναμις on a physical body effecting a movement or change toward an end or τέλος (_telos_) which, in turn, is the product to be made that was initially envisaged in the εἶδος (_eidos_).

The paradigm for this ontology is τέχνη ποιητική (_technae poiaetikae_), the art of making, e.g. a carpenter making a table. The carpenter embodies the know-how for how to make a table, who envisages in advance the table to be made in an εἶδος or 'idea' of the table. The carpenter can only see the εἶδος in the mind (νοῦς,  _nous_) because s/he can see into the open temporal dimension of the future. The embodied know-how is the force that sets the movement of making going by putting the know-how to work in the at-work-ness of the know-how. The productive movement is guided by the envisaged εἶδος of the table, with the carpenter's 'logical' know-how selecting at each step what is to be done, including selecting which tool to use and correcting any mistakes in the productive movement. This continual selection of actions is done by the carpenter's λόγος (_logos_), where λόγος is here to be understood from its associated verb λέγειν (_legein_), one of whose deeper meanings, beyond 'to say', is 'to select', a pre-linguistic meaning. The skilful carpenter is the efficient force working on the material timber or ὕλη (_hulae_) who first has to select the appropriate timber, along with the appropriate tools. Working with the carpentry tools requires continual, selective corrections of the productive movement in order that the εἶδος is finally realized in the τέλος, or finished product, when the productive movement comes to an end in its ἐντελέχεια (_entelecheia_, or literally, its 'in-end-having-ness'). εἶδος and τέλος are both elementary categories conceptualizing how beings show themselves simply as beings for the mind.

There are therefore four essential elements to this ontology of productive movement:
i) the embodied know-how as the mover (efficient cause)
ii) the appropriate material on which the know-how is put to work (material cause)
iii) the εἶδος of the envisaged table to be produced (formal cause) and
iv) the τέλος as the end-product of the productive movement (final cause)

The third Newtonian law is simply an adaptation of the Aristotelean distinction between active and passive forces that is adopted and mathematized. This distinction is apparent already in the selection of the material to be worked upon by the know-how. The material has to have the passive force to resist the active force of the maker. It is no use trying to make a table out of water or rotten wood, for example. The passive force of the timber has to suffer its being shaped by the carpenter's active force into the various parts of a table and its being assembled into the final product as table. 

In the Newtonian adaptation of this Aristotelean ontology of productive movement there is a marked reduction. First of all, there is no mention of elementary categories; they are taken for granted and disappear into mathematical entities. The efficient force at work on a material physical body no longer has as an envisaged εἶδος and therefore also no τέλος, thus rendering it blind, with no insight into the temporal dimension of the future. With the elimination of both εἶδος and τέλος, there remains only the blind, efficient force, or δύναμις, working on a material body, or kind of ὕλη, temporally from 'behind', from 'earlier'. Both are mathematized as quantitative mathematical entities, to wit, a directed force as a spatial vector f in an homogeneous, three-dimensional, mathematical space, and matter reduced to a quantity of mass m, which is merely a real scalar in the vector space. The carpenter's know-how is reduced to a blind physical force satisfying the equation f=m.a, or, in words, force is equal to mass multiplied by acceleration in real, continuous, linear time. Linear time is assumed and required because the physical motion itself is governed simply by cause preceding an effect. The force's effect can be calculated along such linear time employing the mathematical operations of differentiation and integration in the infinitesimal calculus that was developed by Newton, and in parallel by Leibniz, precisely for this purpose.

Far from representing an advance over Aristotle's ontology of productive movement, Newton's mathematical mechanics could be regarded as an impoverishment that blinds the mind. The apparent advantage of being able to mathematically precalculate the motion of physical bodies is gained at the cost of losing sight of the phenomena of movement themselves. It can no longer be seen that the Aristotelean ontology of productive movement is applicable to only one kind of movement. This suppression of the phenomena has led to the attempt in subsequent centuries since Newton to extend the reach of mathematized power over movement to kinds of movement that are not amenable to such treatment: the movement of the mind, the movement of interplay in society, the movement of the economy, each of these kinds of movement requiring its own, specific ontology. Hence modern sciences such as psychology, sociology and economics are lacking their ontologically grounded foundational concepts. This amounts to a blindsiding of the Western mind for the sake of the absolute will to power over all kinds of movement. This will to power, however, is delusory, hubristic and therefore, despite its hyperbolical promises of progress in the well-being of humankind, ultimately highly destructive, especially once paired with the valorization movement of The Medium spoken of in numerous other artefactphil posts (e.g. Laws of movement & Energy, Hegemony of The Medium?).

Further reading: Aristotle Metaphysics Book Theta. 

Isaac Newton Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica 1687.

Martin Heidegger Aristoteles, Metaphysik Θ 1-3 Summer Semester 1931, Heinrich Hüni (ed.) Gesamtausgabe Bd. 33 Klostermann, Frankfurt/M. 1981. 

Movement and Time in the Cyberworld: Questioning the Digital Cast of Being De Gruyter, Berlin 2019.

On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.

Psychology without psyche without time

The modern science of psychology is lacking its foundational concept — that of the psyche itself. Not to worry. In the Modern Age it has been replaced by consciousness and subsequently consciousness has been reduced hypothetically to something generated causally by the neurological activity of the material brain, for that is something modern science can get a grip on. Today's neuroscience has set out on the futile quest to 'prove' empirically that this is so, without ever being able to say what consciousness itself (a mere 'quale' or 'quality' of matter?) is, not to mention, what the venerable psyche is. The modern, scientific mind imagines the psyche as something fuzzily spiritual, soulful, and rejects it out of hand.

The experimentally discovered neuroplasticity of the brain is said to offer therapeutic opportunities for 'rewiring' it, thus helping those with a psychological malady. Manipulation of a part of the soma is supposed to improve performance of the psyche-cum-consciousness. In this kind of research, tinkering with animals' brains is assumed to help in attempts to 'rewire' those of that other kind of animal assumed to be we humans. This kind of brain mechanics is what has become of psycho-somatic therapy, with the material soma trumping the immaterial psyche, whose very existence is put into doubt. The barbarism of this kind of thinking (scientific, evidence-based) goes unnoticed.

For ancient Greek thinking, the psyche (ψυχή) was the principle of life, signifying the self-movement of living beings and their sensuous openness to the world. Such self-movement is fourfold: change of where (loco-motion), of how much (quantity: growth, decay), of how (quality: maturing, aging) and of what (propagation, self-replication). Aristotle's De Anima is Western thinking's foundational book investigating the psyche, whose deep insights into what life is have been rendered superficial today. Hence there is no serious critical engagement with the question: What is life? It is answered with a short definition, such as self-replication (e.g. of DNA). 

Whether Aristotle's investigation of life as a mode of being has to be rethought and revamped is not on the agenda. His thinking has been written off as superseded by modern science because it allegedly does not account for the empirical data. Life itself is taken for granted as an empirically established fact, and science concentrates on finding the molecular building blocks of life and figuring out how their combination somehow springs to life, perhaps as a single-cell yeast in a lab somewhere. Astrophysics goes in search of moons or exoplanets on which such building blocks can be detected — on the hunch that living organisms will eventually be discovered there with help from the appropriate technological apparatuses.

The failure to re-engage with Aristotle's thinking on the psyche and human being itself has many consequences, starting with postulating without further interrogation that the human is a kind of animal. This latter is an axiom for all modern science, for it enables the will to power to get a material grip on the movement of human lives. Perhaps the psyche itself as a mode of being has to be completely rethought and deepened in connection with interrogating the Aristotelean hermeneutic casting of time as linear, and more specifically, as derived from counting it off physical movement that, in turn, is supposed to be governed by effective causality.

Human psychology is practised as kinds of therapy for psychic conditions and as techniques for manipulating human behaviour. The latter prove themselves to be extremely useful in marketing goods and services to the consumer, whose essential function is to realize sales revenues for capitalist enterprises. As a linch-pin in the gainful game, consumers are supposed to find happiness in consumption, and modern science has apparently even discovered happiness hormones, whose exudations under the application of appropriate advertising techniques can be measured. Much research goes into such manipulative techniques for the sake of (unknowingly) enhancing valorization of The Medium*. Market research itself is an established, well-paid part of the advertising industry that is crucial for turning over advanced capital, preferably as quickly as possible.

Psychological illnesses themselves have everything to do with the way of life in an historical kind of society whose movement is dictated by a principle of movement antithetical to the movement of human life. The hectic pace of living induces stress, anxiety and depression in many leading their lives under such conditions of accelerating turnover-time of globally valorizing capital. 

Insight is entirely lacking into the essential connection and grating contradiction between the human psyche's belonging to the three-dimensional openness of time (that is at the core of human freedom of movement) and the straight-jacket of the circular movement of ever-valorizing thingified value along sequential, linear time. The elementary question concerning the nature of time itself is not on the agenda.

* The Medium of thingified value itself remains invisible, entirely unknown to the social science of economics, as well as to any other modern science.

Further reading: CO2 and The Medium.

Laws of movement & Energy.

Capitalocene & The global law of movement.

On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024. 

Social Ontology of Whoness: Rethinking Core Phenomena of Political Philosophy De Gruyter, Berlin 2018. 

Movement and Time in the Cyberworld: Questioning the Digital Cast of Being De Gruyter, Berlin 2019.

Ideologically brainwashed suckers

Today we hear allegations from politicians leading the ostensibly Free World that the public is being brainwashed by "radical Left ideology" (MTG).

But what about the indoctrination of the population from birth through the media, starting with television, into the ideology of ruthless, dog-eat-dog capitalism under the guise of individualist freedom? Such indoctrination amounts to inculcating, hammering in with the heel of a boot, a set of ideas that explains the world more or less crudely and deceptively. Under this ideology, each individual has the opportunity to compete to earn income, to acquire property and, sweetest of all, the freedom to enjoy spending it on consumer goods and services. This consumption, in turn, realizes sales revenues for the capital advanced, from which profit is derived as a residue, once all costs have been deducted.

The ugly blemish in this ideology is that the more or less fair, more or less bruising, more or less violent competition for income produces both winners and losers, and that, via the (at least nominally democratic) political struggle over state power, the winners are able to rig the rules of play in the gainful game to ensure that they come out on top and hang on to their advantages, privileges, etc. And what are the rules of play? First and foremost, that the rights of private property be protected. How are these rights of dissociated private property exercised? For one, to enjoy the personal consumption afforded by spending income. For another, to deploy acquired private property to generate more income, untrammelled by the resistance of trade unions and environmental regulations, which drags down profits from their potential maximum.

And private property itself? It is the deceptive camouflage for the endlessly valorizing Medium of thingified value that is covered up precisely by the ideology of individualist freedom. Anyone daring to unmask this ruthless ideology for what it is, of course, is branded a "Left wing lunatic". But even those advocating a softening of the ruthless rules of play of the gainful game, say, by protecting workers' rights to organize in trade unions or by mitigating environmental destruction in social-democratic style are labelled "Left wing lunatics". And millions of indoctrinated voters, who have fallen for the ideology of unfettered individualist freedom and all it stands for, go along with this, even if they are losers in the gainful game. Demanding merely crumbs from the table, consisting of affordable groceries and cheap gasoline, they are what you call suckers, about whom W.C. Fields said: "Never give a sucker an even break." (1941) To be sure, never has the deep truth of this cynical saying, with some thought, been more disgustingly visible than today. It's a pity, only, that no one is looking deeper, including even those who are purportedly "rethinking capitalism"*).

*) Annual theme for 2025 at The New Institute in Hamburg (accessed 27 March 2025).

Further reading:  'An Invisible Global Social Value' TT&S Vol. 5 no. 2, 2024.

Capitalocene & The global law of movement. 

Laws of movement & Energy. 

Tale of the Qua: A Philosophical Comedy.

Adorno's maxim "kein richtiges Leben im falschen"

"Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen." from his Minima Moralia is known as Adorno's most famous maxim: "There is no correct living in false [living]." The sentence is elliptical, the last in the 18th mini-essay 'Asyl für Obdachlose' (Asylum for Homeless [People]) of Part 1 of the book. One interpretation of the maxim is that it concerns how "private life" (Privatleben) in a "social order" (Gesellschaftsordnung) mediated by "private property" (Privateigentum) is forced to be led 'falsely'.

But the situation is more dire: es gibt kein wahres Leben im verstellten — there is no true living in an untrue world in which the phenomena are fundamentally distorted or hidden altogether. The ambiguity of the phenomena allows the mind, i.e. our historically shared mind, to be caught in a thoroughly topsy-turvy world. The inversion and the resulting blindness are painless, the delusion near-perfect. 

Freedom is fused and confused with subjugation. A veneer of freedom covers up a relentless global law of movement in a medium that remains, even today, invisible (thus 'untrue') for the mind. It is insufficient to speak merely of private property and the freedom individuals enjoy exercising their private property rights, and then point out the many kinds of exploitation that private property ownership enables. One has to ask what the essence of private property is.

There is a fundamental difference between the correctness of facts and the truth of  phenomena. Understood philosophically, Adorno's maxim can be paired with another one reminiscent of Hegel: "Das Ganze ist das Unwahre." ("The whole is the untrue." Part 1, 29 last sentence) The essence, itself remaining hidden, shows itself on the surface of the whole in correct facts that cover up its truth. One indication of this inversion is Adorno's famous term "Verblendungszusammenhang", in which 'Verblendung' means 'blindness' or 'delusion'. The definition of this term given in Duden reads: 

"der Zusammenhang zwischen gesellschaftlichem Sein u. daraus sich bildenden falschen Vorstellungen vom Wesen der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft"

"the connection between social being and false ideas about the essence of bourgeois society arising therefrom"

This provokes the question: What is the truth of our social being in today's society? Or: what is the truth of our mode of sociation in this historical form of society that goes under various names, including modern industrial society, liberal democracy or bourgeois-capitalist society?

And the "false ideas"? Above all, that in our painless blindness we con ourselves that we're free in (what remains of) the so-called Free World. Free, above all, as individual players to engage in the competitive gainful game — either as winners or as losers, blind to the law of movement of the global Medium and its sweet poison seeping into every last existential cranny.

It's not just that we are desubjectified as mere cogs in the 'capitalist machine' and could one day overcome our 'objectification' to become the collective subject in charge of social material production and reproduction. It's that we have to question and recast who we are from the ground up, eschewing worn-out, pat, traditional answers. No freedom without truth, which has to be wrested from distortions through to utter hiddenness.

Further reading: Theodor W. Adorno Minima Moralia Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/M. 1951/1980.

Arguing positions — or interpreting phenomena?.

An Invisible Global Social Value TT&S Vol. 5 no. 2, 2024.

Laws of movement & Energy.

Capitalocene & The global law of movement.

On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.

Hegemony of The Medium?

Here some thoughts in the umbra of the disintegrating post-WWII political world order.

Hegemony usually applies to the "leadership, predominance, preponderance" of a state, "esp. the leadership or predominant authority of one state of a confederacy or union over the others" (OED), hence a political concept. In the twentieth century, we read, quoted in the OED, "the hegemon of the western hemisphere is the United States." (Forum Jan.­Mar. 1904 347 Cent. Dict. Suppl.) A political entity is composed of people, the polis being originally a togetherness of people under some kind of constitution that regulates how they live together and how the power of some over others is exercised according to law.

It seems to be a misuse of the word 'hegemony' to apply it to things or an idea. Freedom, for instance, is an idea, or even ideal, that a people can aspire to, and democracy as a form of government is regarded today as realizing an ideal of freedom in a state, but we don't say that the idea of democracy is hegemonic. Nevertheless it certainly predominates today in the West as an idea aligned with freedom or even as the idea of political freedom. Other ideas, such as justice or human rights, may predominate as guiding ideals in the modern world, but we don't say they are hegemonic.

Things themselves are not regarded as free, but may be used by us humans as means to realize our freedoms in living our lives. Life itself is a kind of movement as an exercise of our freedoms of movement. Freedom itself can only be grasped as a kind or kinds of movement. Our use of things from spear-heads through to super-computers running A.I. algorithms is understood as our human deployment of technology for our own ends and, as such, technology, it is said, cannot exercise any hegemony over us. It is our servant, invented by human ingenuity. Nevertheless, with the emergence of the cyberworld, digital algorithms automate control over movements of all kinds, including our own lives. The proponents of the ever-encroaching cyberworld proclaim that algorithmic control is all for the good, our own good, especially our convenience; all that is needed are some ethical guard-rails.

What is the case, however, when an idea becomes a thing, i.e. thingified, and hence moves in the world as thing, even with its own law of movement? This seems at first sight to be an idle, whimsical idea. After all, ideas are at home in the realm of ideas, but things are material, situated on the other side of the divide. How we humans value everything around us, including each other, is indeed ubiquitous. We cannot help but evaluate, estimate and thus appreciate or depreciate, like or dislike, desire or shun, enjoy or reject everything we encounter in the world. Our very social togetherness is borne by a constant mutual estimation of who each of us is, a kind of sociative movement I call interplay. Hence valuation, evaluation, estimation is practised in everyday life which can be conceived as guided by an ensemble of cultural values. In the modern age, at least in the West, the values of human rights have come to the fore as ideals to be lived up to and practised in any polity. Most states pay lip service, at least, to human rights as proclaimed in the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights. 

There is also a value that has been realized globally in an especially thingy way. The paradigm for this value-thing is money, which serves to sociate people economically through what has come to be called the cash nexus. But what is money? What is its essence, its specific whatness? At first, one could say, that money is the thingly embodiment of exchange-value and as such serves to mediate market exchange. The forms of appearance or 'faces' or 'looks' of this exchange-value are money and goods of all kinds, including services. But not all thingified value is exchange-value; it has further forms of appearance, starting with capital and wages, and proceeding to profit, interest and ground-rent, each of these being the income-forms of thingified value.

Capital itself is thingified value circling through its own peculiar movement via a series of quasi-Protean transformations of form that aims to generate more thingified value in the form of revenue than was first advanced in the form of money-capital invested in wage-earning employees and means of production. The principle or law governing this movement of capital is that The Medium of thingified value itself must be augmented, i.e. must accumulate or valorize. The residue remaining from the realized revenue after deducting all the costs of the production and circulation processes, comprising those for means of production/circulation, wages/salaries, interest and ground-rent must be positive, i.e. profitable. Otherwise the movement has failed and the continued existence of the functioning, entrepreneurial capital in question becomes doubtful.

The law (or principle) of valorizing thingified value is able to assert itself today globally without humans knowing anything about The Medium of thingified value. That is the beauty of this law of movement. It is a law of movement sui generis that no physical science can ever 'discover'. Why not? Because thingified value itself is nothing physical, but rather a thingified idea of estimation and evaluation realized behind the backs of the players practically sociating in economic life in a so-called 'free market economy'. Thinking from within the ontological difference is required to see it, but currently positivist thinking, that has closed off the ontological difference, has the upper hand. This closure of the mind ensures so far that The Medium remains inconceivable, i.e. without a concept. Liberal political thinking is thus unable to understand its own essential shortcoming, for it remains on the surface, pleading and striving futilely for the fairness of interplay among free individuals. The Medium circulating, valorizing below remains out of sight, beyond the mind's grasp.

Today we are witnessing how the United States, as the state most unequivocally dedicated to capitalism, and therefore tacitly to the law of movement of the valorizing Medium, is unknowingly, but for that all the more ruthlessly and effectively, asserting this law worldwide. The hegemony of The Medium is being exercised via a surrogate, camouflaged under the political slogan of America First, and no one is the wiser, not even right-wing Republican politicians nor oppositional left-wing activists. Instead of seeing The Medium for what it is, the capitalist economy is proclaimed to be the realm of individual freedom in which the players are free to play the rough, competitive gainful game, with its several winners and many losers. Tough luck, buddy, if you're a loser. The so-called Free World is founded on an equivocal idea of freedom that it strives to uphold, come what may. Hence the vilification and repression in the U.S. from the right of anyone calling attention to the ravages of capitalism. Conservatives in other countries follow suit.

The political hegemony of the United States, largely exercised through the U.S. dollar, is seen by many, since it is highly visible, but the weird thingy hegemony of The Medium remains invisible, beyond comprehension. The West's political hegemon is unknowingly itself subjugated to the hegemony of the latter's movements, rendering the 'Free World' a meticulously manicured ideology.

Further reading: On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.

Social Ontology of Whoness: Rethinking Core Phenomena of Political Philosophy De Gruyter, Berlin 2018.  

Laws of movement & Energy.

An Invisible Global Social Value TT&S Vol. 5 no. 2, 2024.

Capitalocene & The global law of movement. 

Seminal: Critique of Competitive Freedom and the Bourgeois-Democratic State: Outline of a Form-Analytic Extension of Marx's Uncompleted System Kurasje, Copenhagen 1984, reprinted 2015.

Philorock song Do the Da Capo

Another philorock song:

Do the Da Capo

Featuring Willy P. and Pleon Exia.