Demise of the liberal world order

It is hazardous to risk a diagnosis of the state of the world, especially if it claims to be philosophically informed and grounded. What does philosophy have to do with the empirical state of the world, anyway? On the other hand, what is an analysis of today's global state of affairs worth if it derives exclusively from empiricist political scientists, political analysts, sociologists, historians, diplomats, journalists, etc. without philosophical grounding? without the most elementary questions being asked? The empiricist retort is that empirical analysis gets along quite fine without the assistance of abstract philosophical thinking. Sociology has long since slipped into the role of truth-provider, eschewing any taint by what it calls essentialism. (And yet empricist thinking operates unquestioningly — and therefore dogmatically — with an essential determination of the human being as a species of animal.)

The so-called liberal world order was established at the end of the Second World War under the hegemony of the U.S., together with its Western allies who were victorious against Fascism. The defect in this victory was the existence of the Soviet Union that stood for quite another kind of society under heavy-handed state domination by a 'People's Party'. Hence the Cold War.

The liberal social value of fairness and its bankruptcy

At the core of this liberal world order was and remains the social value of fairness, both within the liberal democracies and in the power plays among nation states, the latter ideally managed by international organizations to maintain a state of affairs resembling an international rule of law. Despite major blemishes in this picture, including savage wars engaged in by the U.S. to defend what it calls the Free World, the world order held up pretty well, its imperialist underbelly well camouflaged, especially by the seductive ideology of the free individual. (But does the freedom of the Free World truly consist in individual freedom or in the freedom of movement of something else entirely, something sinister, non-human and inhumane?)

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, and the assertion of an aggressive laissez-faire capitalism labelled neo-liberalism, however, this world order has become unstuck. Neo-liberalism was directed against the social-democratic state that aimed at smoothing out some of the frictions and brutal excesses of a 'free market economy'. In the ideology of neo-liberalism, fairness as a social value was and is given only lip-service, and was reduced to the notion of a level playing field for competing players. These developments can be explained in various ways, more or less cogently and convincingly, by empirically analyzing the struggles that have been ongoing since ca. 1990, without ever posing the questions: What is fairness? What is freedom? What is power? The phenomena these three questions point to are all multifaceted.

The sad truth of liberalism

Here, however, I am not interested in such explanations, but rather in understanding the Achilles' heel of the liberal world order considered as an idea and ideal, or rather as a set of ideas constituting an ideology. As I said, the core value of liberal ideology is that of fairness of the interplay both within societies and internationally. Infringements of fair play in the interplay with one another amount to injustice. The players may be individuals, groups thereof, companies, institutions, states. Each of these has powers that are mutually estimated and evaluated in the interplay that is accordingly always also a power play (which raises the invariably skipped-over questions: What is interplay as a kind of movement? What is the kind of power at play in such interplay?). Each player strives to realize its self-interests whilst respecting fair rules of play on a supposedly 'level playing field'. Superior, judicial instances have the role of supervising and correcting the interplay to ensure it is in some sense fair and therefore just under the rule of law. The liberal ideal is that the national and international institutions are sufficient to maintain a semblance of fair play in the interplay of powers, a major part of which is economic.*

Where's the flaw in this liberal way of thinking in terms of fair interplay and fairness? A liberal society is conceived (hermeneutically) as composed of free individuals and collectivities thereof, including political collectivities constituting all kinds of associations, institutions and the organs of the state. The sociation (Vergesellschaftung) of such a society is ideally accomplished through free and fair mutual estimation in the interplay among the individuals enjoying their "Life, Liberty and Estate" with "Government [having] no other end but the preservation of Property” (Locke, Treatise of Government). The individuals' freedom is realized first and foremost in the exercise of their property rights in free and fair exchanges on all conceivable sorts of markets, deviations from which are to be corrected by the superior instance of power, the state, whose primary role is to uphold the rule of (above all, property) law.

Is the truth of the human being as social being to be a free individual as the elementary unit of a free society? The conception of the free individual in connection with the idea of a liberal society already includes its preconceptions, namely, that the human being is primordially a dissociated individual in an imagined state of nature who is first sociated with other individuals through the interplay of exercising their various property rights (cf. e.g. the social contract theories of Locke and Rousseau). (The preconception of dissociation already overlooks that the individuals are already human beings that share in something common, namely, human being itself. the question concerning the being of the human being goes not only unanswered but also unposed. Be that as it may.) The property rights are private property rights that presuppose a privation of association; the dissociated individuals, together with their private property of various kinds, starting with their individual labour powers, are supposedly first sociated through the interplay in which their individual property is evaluated with regard to earning an income, of whatever kind it may be (basically four value-thingly kinds: wages, interest, ground-rent, net profit). This is complemented by the right to spend one's income on anything offered on the various markets, which is an important aspect of the enjoyment of one's property. Incoming-earning is thus complemented by income-consuming.

All the individuals are engaged as players in the gainful game that presupposes that they are dissociated individuals only associated through the gainful interplay itself by evaluating their respective private-property income-sources in their corresponding thingly value-forms. The value-forms themselves are the thingly 'looks' or forms of appearance of liquid, Protean value going through a valorizing movement of transformation from one value-form to another to finally complete a circuit of value-augmentation. This is the underlying — today: global — law of movement of the Medium of thingified value (gen. subj.) to which the individuals — and all their institutions, political, social and economic** — are subjugated 'behind their backs'. The individuals' freedom is therefore in truth relativized by the all-dominating, limitlessly valorizing Medium, and individuals are only individuated as such by the Medium that both dissociates them on the surface of society as private property owners and also associates them in the gainful game via the thingly value-forms in contracts of many different kinds.

The ideal of justice in a liberal society based on the idea of fair interplay among free individuals is therefore untrue. It is undermined and hollowed out by the limitless valorizing movement of thingified value that asserts itself silently against any conception of fairness in interplay. Its coercion cannot be captured simply by a notion of unfairness, for the Medium's augmentative movement is as inexorable as a law of nature . In particular, the exercise of property rights in the gainful game cannot be free and fair in view of the law of movement of valorizing thingified value which dictates that advanced thingified value, in the value-form of capital, must generate a profit through its circling that can only be achieved as a positive residue remaining after costs are deducted from the gross sales revenues realized by the circuit — what was contractually agreed be damned. The costs comprise what is paid for labour-power, land and loan capital. This circumstance necessarily pits the iron principle of valorization against the lenders of labour-power and land, i.e. against living labour and the Earth. The enhancement of valorization dictates, via the competition among capitals, constant pressure to lower costs and accelerate the turnover time of capital and therefore to maximally exploit living labour-power and the Earth. In short, the principle of limitless valorization of the Medium is antithetical to life and asserts itself necessarily through incessant struggle with its antagonists.

Under the guise of 'free market' neo-liberalism in recent decades, the capital side in the gainful game, aided and abetted by a state slavishly devoted to enhancing 'economic growth' at all costs, has gained the upper hand by successfully degrading resistance by workers and civil society to its ruthless valorization. Discrepancies in income and accumulated wealth have reached unprecedented, hitherto unimaginable, obscene levels. Super-wealth and dire poverty hit ever new extremes. The discrepancies are self-reinforcing in a feedback loop, because accumulated income and wealth can be reinvested to generate even more income and wealth. Moreover, the rules of play for earning income imposed by the state (especially taxation law) have shifted (not least of all through media-ownership and political lobbying by big money) more and more in favour of ever-valorizing capital and, correspondingly, more and more to the detriment of wage-earners. The masses of ostensibly free individuals are hugely manipulable and dupable by propaganda in all media channels.

The ideal of fair interplay is increasingly seen through as a sham by the many less successful players in the gainful game. Liberal society, liberal democracy and the liberal world order are in crisis, but the truth of this epochal socio-ontological cast has yet to come to light. This would require, as an initial prerequisite, once again opening and passing through the ontological difference to the realm of ideas first explored by Plato. In other words, it would require a revival of truly philosophical thinking to lead the way in revising and recasting ideas through which elementary phenomena show themselves and the world is interpreted. 

The question concerning who — not what — we are (hermeneutically) as humans must come into focus for those few who are able to focus on it and explicate — not explain — it. Any kind of ethics is not up to the task, functioning only as a decoy distracting from deeper-lying (ontological and ultimately temporalogical) questions. As the search for truth, philosophy's endeavour is a "leading around of the entire soul" (περιαγωγὴ ὅλης τῆς ψυχῆς) and hence an historical recasting of who we are. In the present case, the reorientation of soul and mind requires, as a first step, deconstructing the ideology of the free individual covering up the ugly truth of what is called capitalism. But the task of deconstructing and recasting does not stop there; it has to go back to more elementary phenomena, to wit, those of (the meaning of) being itself and time, as I endeavour to show da capo and in extenso in my writings.

* In this post I do not speak of the full range of mutually estimative interplay in all its subtlety and nuances from love-making through to war through which one's standing as somewho comes about, but rather only of the mutual estimation of human powers and abilities as well as those of thingified value-forms (e.g. fertility of a stretch of land) through their thingly evaluation in the gainful game.

** Government economic policy and especially central banks have the indispensable role of (unknowingly) massaging the Medium, for its valorization movement is by no means smooth being subject to dislocations. The Medium itself is prone to both inflating and deflating, i.e. to getting out of kilter with the valuation of the sum total of what is actually produced and consumed. Hence the trial-and-error management of interest rates to alter how gross profit is split between entrepreneurial capital and finance (loan) capital. High interest rates hinder or discourage entrepreneurial capital from investing when the material side of the economy is already producing at a maximum.

Further reading: G.W.F. Hegel Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts Band 7 Werke Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/M. 1970.

John Locke, Treatise of Government various editions.

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

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

Stealing the land: ground-rent

The history of colonization is one of how the land was stolen from indigenous peoples by colonizing powers. Colonies could only be established by violence. The colonies were those of European powers: Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, ... The decolonization that began in the wake of the Second World War with the final collapse of European empires cannot be characterized as a history of the reappropriation of the stolen, colonized land by indigenous peoples. Today's situation is not so clear cut (see below). Imperialism has assumed a new form of appearance as the domination of foreign countries by valorizing thingified value in the forms, in particular, of foreign investment capital and the world's dominating key currency, at present, the U.S. dollar. Stealing land from indigenous peoples and maintaining established relations of colonial land ownership continue in new, more or less violent, more or less underhand guises.

Left politics have become dominated by the activism of decolonization on all levels, from the economic through the socio-political to the cultural. There is an unceasing flow of empirical information about the continuing injustices in every corner of the globe from south to north and west to east, featuring, among other things, stolen generations and stolen land. In a sense the same disturbing, sickening story of oppression and resistance is being told over and over with even new details and nuances.

What is missing is how these historical movements of colonization and decolonization fit with the essential nature of global capitalism. To ask what capitalism is, i.e. what its essential whatness is, seems a wayward, outdated enterprise. There are no takers for the task since 'essentialism' has become a swear word in the mouths of 'critical' empiricists who haven't the least notion of what an essence is. Critical histories and accounts, necessarily empirical in nature, seem to suffice, complemented by literary reworkings of these harrowing histories. There is an infinity of stories to be told that teach the same lesson of oppression and injustice to be remedied, but stories cannot reveal the essence that underlies their unrelenting sameness. The truth of capitalism cannot come to light in this way.

As I have said many times, the essence of global capitalism resides in the complex socio-ontological structure of thingified value endlessly valorizing through its forms via its Protean Medium. This deeper-lying structure appears on the surface of social life disguised as the gainful game with its four cardinal incomes and income sources.* The pertinent one here is the value-form called ground-rent, that springs from the land, specifically, from private landed property. Ground-rent does not figure in the discourse of decolonization, and cannot do so, because the politics and discourse of decolonization are thoroughly empirical. The fundamental value-form of ground-rent through which the Earth is drawn into and exploited by valorizing thingified value is entirely alien to and absent from the discourse of decolonization. Therefore the latter is reduced to endlessly repeating its harrowing story in every new empirical variants, as if this would disclose hitherto unseen truths.

The dilemma posed by private, landed property and how it is intermeshed with the movement of valorizing thingified value is therefore not confronted head on. It is seen only superficially through a distorting mist of fateful compromises between the freedom of privately owned land and the land rights of indigenous peoples, as if the basically European liberal concept of human rights were up to the task of critiquing the essence. Privately owned land is mostly income-generating in a multitude of ways from residential and commercial location through all kinds of agriculture and aquaculture to the extractive industries that leave the largest scars on the Earth. 

Instead of reclaiming their original lands, indigenous peoples are likely to settle for a share in the profits generated by the valorizing capital invested in their lands, if they have attained any rights at all through their struggles. This amounts to leaving the category of ground-rent intact in the global set-up, if only because it is invisible, and therefore cannot even be problematized.**

* Cf. the further reading.

** Ditto for the role of the category of ground-rent in understanding the shortage of residential real estate to house the populations of so-called advanced capitalist societies.

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

Hegemony of The Medium?. 

Capitalocene & The global law of movement.

Thingified value begets individualized freedom.

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.

Essencing as somewho in three-dimensional time

Ontological whatness

In traditional ontology, the kind of ontology whose provenance goes back to its originators, Plato and Aristotle, the classical question is τἰ ἐστιν; (What is...?). The answer to the question is to determine the whatness or essence of the being in question, which leads inevitably through the ontological difference to the realm of ideas (ἰδέαι, eidetic looks), of beings with its difference between the being and its mode of being, i.e. its 'being' understood participially as its way of partaking in being. This kind of questioning cannot survive and has not survived today's empiricist philosophy, just it was contested by scepticism in the times of Plato and Aristotle. From its inception genuine philosophical thinking has always been a struggle with its counterfeits that accompany philosophy as its shadow, as if it were only ever a speck of gold in the midst of a confusion of cheap fakes that many willingly fall for. After all, they are less demanding. But this is not the topic here.

Greek thinking concentrated on certain kinds of beings, namely, on physical beings, whose being Aristotle characterized as a synthesis of matter (ὕλη) and eidetic look (εἴδος), his first definition of οὐσία (_ousia_, lit. beingness, the so-called substantiation of the Greek feminine participle οὖσα of the verb 'to be'). This focus on physical beings is maintained through to Kant and Hegel. The spell of material whatness is only finally broken with Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, which approaches things not as so-called substances (a mistranslation of οὐσία that stuck) with properties, but existentially as practical things (πράγματα) whose eidetic look is Um-zu (in-order-to) or useful-for... in practical living. Being useful-for... is no longer an ontological category but an existential encapsulating what a practical thing is, its existential whatness.

Practical living, the realm of action, is traditionally the realm demarcated for ethics, but the existential determination of the whatness of practical things represents the intrusion of ontology into ethics in order to encompass it. Practical things' whatness as being useful for a particular practice embedded in everyday practices amounts to estimating and valuing them with respect to their use-value. For modern philosophy, with its seemingly immovable distinction between objectivity and subjectivity, admitting an existential ontology of practical things as use-values amounts to the anathema of mixing subjective evaluation with (scientific) objectivity, thus confusing ethics with ontology and upsetting the apple cart of the inside/outside distinction between subjectivity (consciousness) and objectivity. Such anathema is repudiated.

On the other hand — the bright side, so to speak —, breaking down the age-old separation of ethics from ontology opens the perspective of finally achieving another conception of ethics altogether no longer bogged down in questions of normativity and what ought to be. What comes into view is the prospect of investigating a kind of movement (πρᾶξις, praxis) other than physical movement upon which metaphysical thinking had been intensely focused and trained.

Temporalogical whoness 

Phenomenologically speaking, the estimative evaluation of things is unavoidable. We inevitably evaluate everything we encounter in the world in everyday life, valuing and devaluing, esteeming and disteeming, appreciating and depreciating it one way or another. The Greek word for value and esteem is τιμή, that has a wide range of meanings (esteem, honour, dignity, worth, value, price) applicable to both things and people, whats and whos. It is thus a pivotal phenomenon for bridging the realms of ontology and ethics, thus opening the prospect of rethinking them for the first time together.

If everything and everyone is evaluated in some way or other as pleasant/unpleasant, attractive/repulsive, likeable/unlikeable, interesting/boring, beautiful/ugly, good-for-something/nothing, valuable/worthless, etc. etc., then the investigation called ontology must be extended from considering what something is, i.e. its whatness or essence (L. essentia), to considering and conceptualizing who somebody is, i.e. their whoness. This whoness as an existential is inevitably bound to cause consternation and provoke not just incomprehension and criticism, but utter rejection and dismissal from entrenched philosophical 'positions' in the never-ending trench warfare waged by today's philosophical tiddlywinks. That's the way it's always been from the start.

Nevertheless, the phenomenality of our evaluative estimation of everything and everybody around us which/whom we encounter is hardly deniable, but the necessary adequate concepts are lacking. What is to distinguish this budding whoness from traditional whatness? It comes down to the distinction in the kinds of encounter had with things, on the one hand, and people, on the other. The kind of encounter with and among things is called interaction, which is the kind of movement to which metaphysical thinking has always devoted its attention, namely, physical movement. This is plain enough in the traditional distinction between action and reaction or between active and passive force, that goes back to Aristotle's Physics and Metaphysics, and it continues to hold sway in today's mathematized physics.

The kind of encounter with others, by contrast, is what I conceive as interplay, another kind of movement demanding its own conceptual thinking-through. It is crucial to distinguish between interaction and interplay, since reciprocity is lacking in the former. They are different kinds (εἴδη, eidetic looks) of movement in time. You may estimate something as useful for a certain purpose, and this estimation is one-sided; the thing does not, in turn, estimate you. Encountering somebody else, by contrast, involves estimating each other in some way or other within the very broad spectrum of how we can evaluate each other through all the gradations from appreciative esteeming to depreciative misesteeming. It is a two-way, reciprocating, mutually estimative interplay, even when one who is superior in who-status vis-à-vis an inferior who. 

Somebody's whoness therefore must be conceived (hermeneutically) as how they are evaluated and esteemed in social interplay. Such estimative social interplay starts with whether the players 'instantaneously' like or dislike each other in a fleeting encounter, whether they are entirely indifferent and neutral to each other in their mutual evaluations, or how they mutually evaluate each other's powers and abilities. The estimation and evaluation of things, on the other hand, is a one-sided matter of their evaluation not only practically but (especially today) above all commercially on the ubiquitous markets. Goods on the market allow themselves to be passively evaluated by consumers as being worth such-and-such a price, price being the quantitative determination of a thing's thingified value in its money-form.

The whoness of whos is therefore entirely different from the whatness of whats as they have been traditionally interpreted. Its core is mutual estimation through sociating interplay, a kind of movement sui generis. Interplay evades any attempt to bring it under the control of scientific knowledge, which has been more or less successful with its will to power over physical beings, since interplay cannot be construed as being played out along a time-line of efficient causality. As such, interplay is unpredictable, resisting its scientific mastery, despite all attempts to influence it, usually by various kinds of persuasion, including advertising and political propaganda, as well as cajoling, coaxing, wheedling, threatening, extorting, blackmailing, etc.

Who we are, i.e. as who we presence in sociating interplay, comes about through mutually estimative interplay; its eidetic look is that of somewho with a certain estimated status in the interplay of social life, whether high or low. An individual's powers and abilities, i.e. what they are good for, is only one component considered in the estimation. Engaging in sociating interplay is a kind (εἴδος) of essencing in three-dimensional time. We presence and absence for each other in our respective minds, mutually estimating, evaluating who each of us 'is', i.e. as who we show ourselves for each other. Such essencing for each other as estimated essents is not restricted to the present, and certainly not to the sensuous present. Somebody's reputation, for instance, necessarily comprises how they have been evaluated in the temporal dimension of the past; their having-been is a necessary aspect constituting their singular who-status. Everybody has a reputation, even if it is an imputed one based on hearsay or superficial, fleeting stereotyping. The colour of one's skin, for instance, is immediately and unavoidably evaluated in encounters with each other, even if subliminally, implicitly. Somebody's ambition (and 'dreams') directed toward the future also belongs to their whoness, since their self is a reflection from the world of future existential possibilities.

The mutually estimative interplay among us can be either fair or unfair, including all gradations and ambiguities in between. Fair interplay is at the heart of liberal political thinking, whereas unfairness colours the interplay with a kind of ugly aspect often poisoned by prejudice. By contrast, civility in civil society pertains to a kind of benevolent, even-handed, neutral, polite interplay. The core Christian value of ἀγάπη  (agapae, brotherly love, charity) amounts to a kind of benevolent interplay that allows for an appreciative estimation of who each of us is, i.e. of how each of us is estimated as somewho in social life, and it has room for compassion. Having affection for each other is one possible outcome of mutual estimation, just as mutual contempt or even hatred are. The spectrum for mutually estimative interplay is not only extremely broad, but also highly subtle and nuanced.

Presencing and absencing for each other in interplay as somewho must be conceived as an essencing of essents in three-dimensional time. The one-dimensional linearity of conventional time is too narrow to capture mutually evaluative interplay, drawing as the latter does on all three dimensions of time 'all at once', and that in a reciprocity whose intricacy surpasses any kind of thingly interaction. Newton's third law of motion for physical beings, that to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, is here totally untenable.

Difficulties of learning to think temporalogically

Learning to think through the cardinal kinds (εἴδη) of movement temporalogically in the openness of three-dimensional time is not for the faint-hearted. It entails, in the first place, passing through the ontological difference encapsulated by the Aristotelean formula 'the being as being' (τὸ ὂν ᾗ ὄν), and learning to see that being itself needs to be thought participially as partaking in this temporal openness, whereby being is superseded by temporalogical essencing, i.e. presencing and absencing in the psyche for the mind's hermeneutic understanding. Beings themselves may now aptly be called essents, so called because they presence and absence in three-dimensional time.

Entrance to the realm of ideas, even in the ontological sense, is replete with the debris of failed attempts to enter, as well as blocked and deflected by the boulders and decoys that have been rolled across, or placed enticingly near, the entrance. Hence, genuine, eidetic philosophical thinking is rare, and even more so with a shift from ontological to temporalogical thinking. Eidetic philosophical thinking's hallmark is a radicality that does not shrink back from questioning what seems to be entirely self-evident and beyond question, starting with what being itself means. It goes back to scratch to radically reconsider the questions of time and of (different kinds of) movement. It is an esoteric undertaking not suitable for wide, exoteric dissemination among the public. Nevertheless, such esoteric thinking shapes history from 'behind its back'.

Further reading: Social Ontology of Whoness: Rethinking Core Phenomena of Political Philosophy De Gruyter, Berlin 2018, esp. Chapter 5 'Ontology of Exchange'. 

Why three-dimensional time?.

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

Rapidly (un)changing world

Do you think today's world is
a) rapidly changing?
b) rapidly unchanging? 

The overwhelmingly empirically correct answer to this question is presumably a). 

The true answer is b).

Further reading: Arguing positions — or interpreting phenomena?

Philosophy as quest for truth.

Britischer Empirismus und Ontologie

Der britische Empirismus hat sich nie mit ontologischen Fragen auseinandergesetzt, sondern mit Erkenntnistheorie, d. h. mit der Frage, was gewußt werden kann, vorzugsweise mit Gewißheit. Humes Skeptizismus läuft auf die Behauptung hinaus, daß nichts mit Gewißheit gewußt werden kann, sondern nur durch Gewohnheit und Konvention oder „in der Regel“ durch Induktion. Das Verständnis des britischen Empirismus von Ontologie war (und bleibt) trivial und läuft lediglich darauf hinaus, zu klassifizieren, welche Arten von Seiendem existieren (ohne jemals zu klären, was „existieren“ bedeutet). 

Der Kontrast zu dem, was Aristoteles in seiner Metaphysik als Untersuchung von τὸ ὂν ᾗ ὄν (das Seiende als seiend, das Wesen als wesend) begann, könnte nicht größer sein, denn der Schwerpunkt liegt darauf, wie ein Seiendes am Sein (jetzt verstanden als der Infinitiv εἶναι des Verbs „sein“) teilhat. Das zweite ὄν in der Formel ist nämlich ein Partizip. Diese Teilhabe eines Seienden am Sein bedeutet seine Seinsweise, von denen es mehrere gibt. Daher sagt Aristoteles πολλαχῶς λέγεται τὸ ὄν (das Seiende wird auf vielfache Weise gesagt). Beispielsweise ist das Leben eine besondere Seinsweise eines Seienden, genau wie sein kategoriales Wo-Sein, wenn das Seiende ein ausgedehntes physisch Seiendes ist, das am Sein teilhat, indem es irgendwo einen Ort (τόπος) einnimmt (und daher für den Geist anwesend als an diesem Ort verortet). Das „als“ (ᾗ) in der Formel bezieht sich auf die (hermeneutische) Interpretation der Teilhabe des Seienden am Sein und wird daher das hermeneutische Als genannt, etwas, das nicht nur dem britischen Empirismus, sondern all seinen heutigen Nachfolgern, der Mainstream-Philosophie im Allgemeinen, völlig fremd bleibt.

Weitere Lektüre: Husserl's imperfect critique of empiricism.

Husserl's imperfect critique of empiricism

In his 1923/24 lectures published under the title Erste Philosophie (First Philosophy), Edmund Husserl continues his valiant struggle against empiricism. The first section, "Von Platons Idee der Philosophie zu den Anfängen ihrer neuzeitlichen Verwirklichung bei Descartes" (From Plato's Idea of Philosophy to the Beginnings of its Modern-Age Realization with Descartes) of his Kritische Ideengeschichte, ranges from Plato through to Descartes. Already Plato, who first opened the ontological difference with his uncovering of the idea in its proper sense, had to contend with sophistic scepticism. The second section, "Die Anfangsgründe des Versuches einer Egologie bei Locke und ihre bleibende Problematik" (The Principles of the Attempt at an Egology with Locke and its Lasting Problematic), follows in detail the line of British empiricist thinking from Locke (English) via Berkeley (Irish) to Hume (Scottish). 

I will not enter into an exegesis here of Husserl's critique of empiricism from Locke onward. Needless to say that its grip on philosophical thinking to the present day remains unrelenting. Rather, I will first content myself with a brief comment on Husserl's diagnosis on where philosophical empiricist thinking leads in Hume's scepticism, namely, "daß es nichts geringeres war als das Ende aller Philosophie und Wissenschaft selbst" (that it was nothing less than the end of all philosophy and of science itself; p.102). Empirical induction from singular instances to likewise empirical generalizations will never allow the mind to pass through the ontological difference to the realm of ideas, and that's just the way Hume wants it.* Empiricism was always at an advantage, from antiquity to the present day, for it seems commonsensical.

Where, according to Husserl, did philosophy go wrong? In short, Locke and his British empiricist bedfellows missed the lesson of Descartes' cogito cogitare, namely that consciousness is always necessarily consciousness of something which consciousness is directed, ex-tended, stretched out toward. This is the germ of what Husserl regards as his great discovery, the intentionality of pure consciousness, whose purity consists in its a priori, or transcendental, nature. A priori here means prior to any "äußere[n] Erfahrung" (external experience; 95 passim) of the natural world. Like Descartes, Husserl posits pure consciousness as absolutely certain. Its own absolute experiences are solely "das innere Erfahren" (the inner experience; 103 passim) of "das Bewußthaben des Ich von den Vorkommnissen" (the ego having consciousness of the occurrences; 103) in this "Feld der inneren Erfahrung" (field of inner experience; 103). Elsewhere (e.g. in his Ideen) Husserl terms such having-of-experiences "noetisch" (noetic), and the experienced occurrences themselves "Noema" (noema), both terms being derived from Greek νοῦς for 'mind'. Consciousness is thus mentally active.

Husserl performs his famous (or notorious) phenomenological reduction that brackets off the empirically given world to focus on this absolute, indubitable, inner experience with the aim of rigorously establishing a phenomenological science (genuine philosophy) essentially different from any empiricist science, natural or social, that today is regarded as the only kind of knowing worth its salt. From this perspective, one could say that Husserl's attempt to rescue an "eidetic science" from hegemonic empiricist science has failed dismally — at least for the time being. "Eidetic science" is only possible if the ontological difference between the ontic, empirical fact and the ontological 'look' or εἶδος is clearly visible for the mind.

Inside? Outside?

What is most striking from a phenomenological viewpoint is how Husserl insists unquestionably, without the shadow of a doubt, on the distinction between an outer and an inner sphere of experience. Especially to the contemporary mind it seems obvious enough. What is the inside/outside (or inner/outer, interior/exterior, internal/external) distinction supposed to mean? In the first place, this external world is supposed to be populated by real, physical things with their sizes, shapes, positions, movements or stasis, etc. in short, by extended things in space that is 'obviously' outside. For Husserl, internal consciousness has a consciousness of these external, physical things such as the blossoming cherry tree in his garden, the chosen example in his Ideen. This consciousness is presumably an inner experience of something outside; the blossoming cherry tree is a mental noema of consciousness's noetic experience. Husserl has no problem acknowledging that the cherry tree is a real, existing, physical thing, but now phenomenologically reduced. Notably he does not say what it means for something to be real or to exist; he does not pose the question concerning the meaning of being itself, as if it were self-evident.

Wiggle your big toe

This is all very strange. The blossoming cherry tree outside consciousness is stripped down by the phenomenological reduction to a mental noema inside. Let us try a phenomenological exercise to try to clarify this. Wiggle your big toe. You can feel your toe wiggling in a present bodily sensation, can't you? Your wiggling toe is physical, extended and thus, for Husserl, outside, yet your sensation is noetic and therefore inside. Furthermore, according to Husserl, the noetic sensation of which you are conscious is a consciousness of your toe as a noema. But in sensing your wiggling big toe you are with the toe itself which, according to Husserl, is outside. Now stop wiggling your toe, close your eyes and imagine recollectively the big toe you have been wiggling. In this recollection, your wiggling toe presents itself again to your mind from the (temporal dimension of the recent) past. You are still with your big toe itself, not with any surrogate internal image of it, aren't you, even though you are no longer sensing it? Why should sense perception in the present be superior to your recalling your toe non-sensuously to mind?

Similarly, the sounds you presently hear from your surroundings are of the sound-emitting things themselves, e.g. passing traffic. In your sense perception you are with the traffic itself presenting itself from the (temporal dimension of the) present. This is still the case when you recall how loud the traffic was last night, only that the noisy traffic now presents itself from the past, and no longer sensuously. Where is the supposed inside and outside upon which Husserl insists? You now have last night's noisy traffic in mind (but not in your head).

It would seem that by insisting upon a distinction between consciousness as a world of inner experience, on the one hand, and a world of things outside, on the other, Husserl is tying his thinking in knots. Leaving aside this distinction, your feeling sensuously your wiggling big toe is what I term a presencing of your big toe itself from the present to your understanding mind. Likewise, your presently recalling the loud traffic last night is a presencing of the traffic itself from the past to your mind. Likewise, you can turn your mind's attention to planning what groceries you are going to buy tomorrow, which amounts to focusing your mind at present on an occurrence presencing from the (temporal dimension of the) future (no matter whether you actually go shopping tomorrow). The three modes of presencing for the mind from three different temporal dimensions are certainly very different, with there also being a difference between sensuous and non-sensuous presencing from the present. The three temporal dimensions in their unity constitute a contiguous openness that reaches, i.e. is passed through to, your psyche as this unity. Your wiggling big toe is an occurrence occurring, i.e. presencing, in this three-dimensional temporal openness.

Turning its attention toward and focusing are characteristic of the mind's movement within the psyche that itself belongs to all-encompassing three-dimensional time that, as all-encompassing, has no outside and therefore also no inside. For anything or anyone 'to be' means for it to presence in and absence from the mind's focus in the three-dimensionally temporal psyche and thus to partake (participially) of time. The ancient term 'psyche' is preferable to 'consciousness' that, since Descartes, inevitably connotes some kind of inside. 'Outside' and 'inside' are, in any case, spatial terms referring to the category of physical whereness. The psyche and its mental capacity, however, are not tied to physical things located somewhere and presencing sensuously. The mind can move freely through three-dimensional time, no time machine needed.

* PS: British empiricism was never engaged with ontological questions, but with epistemology, i.e. with the question of what can be known, preferably with certainty. Hume's scepticism amounts to the claim that nothing can be known with certainty, but only by habit and convention or 'as a rule' by induction. British empiricism's understanding of what ontology is was (and remains) trivial, amounting merely to classifying what kind of beings exist (without ever clarifying what it means to 'exist'). The contrast with what Aristotle initiated in his Metaphysics as the investigation of τὸ ὂν ᾗ ὄν, (the being as being) could not be greater, for the focus is on how a being participates in being (now understood as the infinitive εἶναι of the verb 'to be'). The second ὄν in the formula is a participle. Such participation of a being in being amounts to its mode of being, of which there are several. Hence Aristotle says πολλαχῶς λέγεται τὸ ὄν (the being is said in many ways). E.g. life is a particular mode of being of a being, just as its categorial whereness is, if the being happens to be an extended physical being, which participates in being by occupying a place (τόπος) somewhere (and therefore presencing for the mind as being located at that place). The "as" (ᾗ) in the formula refers to the (hermeneutic) interpretation of the being's participation in being and is therefore called the hermeneutic As, something totally foreign not only to British empiricism, but to all its successors today, namely, to mainstream philosophy in general.

Further reading: Edmund Husserl Erste Philosophie Erster Teil Kritische Ideengeschichte Husserliana VII und VIII 1956/1959 Nijhoff, The Hague (Meiner, Hamburg 1992). 

Edmund Husserl Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie Buch I, Husserliana III/1 and V 1976/1971 Nijhoff, The Hague (Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg 1992).

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

'Husserls Krisis: Fragen an die transzendentale Phänomenologie' 2017.

The greatest danger

Could it be that the greatest danger for humankind is the victory of empiricist-positivist thinking over philosophical thinking? Since there are many brands of philosophical thinking today, the relevant one here has to be specified. I call it phenomenology, linking it especially to three names: Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger. Hegel's phenomenology was developed before the shutdown of the ontological difference by positivism (Comte et al.) in the mid-19th century, when the physical sciences were celebrating one breakthrough after another, setting up an envious model for emulation by any other kind of science, whereas both Husserl's and Heidegger's phenomenology are valiant attempts to salvage a kind of thinking that passes through the ontological difference into the realm of genuine philosophy, the realm of ideas, of εἴδη.*

Hence, for instance, Husserl advocates eidetic science (eidetische Wissenschaft), distinguishing it strictly from empirical science (empirische Wissenschaft). Fact (Tatsache) and essence (Wesen) should not be confused with one another (cf. Ideen Chap. 1). And yet today, insight into the essential difference between factual correctness (with which all modern science operates aided by hypothetical, empirically 'verifiable', theoretical models) and the truth of the phenomena themselves has been lost. This circumstance renders modern 'evidence-based' science a con, insofar as it is not aware of its baked-in preconceptions, its limitations, and posits itself as absolute. Such prejudiced cluelessness is an indispensable part of the job description for any modern (natural or social) scientist.

Today's academic philosophy is so shot through with analytic philosophy that, apart from rare, oddball exceptions, it is incapable of appreciating the ontological difference. Indeed, it is concerned with actively denying and suppressing it with its adversarial, debating-club style. The institutional filters to ensure that ontological thinking (or more radically: temporalogical thinking) does not gain a foothold are highly effective.

Some steps removed from the academy, there is also that renegade student of Hegel's: Karl Marx, whose phenomenological lessons from Aristotle and Hegel flowed into his thinking, culminating in the socio-ontological concept of thingified value as the load-bearing concept of his main work, Das Kapital. Unfortunately, Marx also compromised with empirical-positivist thinking that enabled his thinking to be taken up enthusiastically by good ol' British empiricism. This has resulted in the highly reputable social science of Historical Materialism, in which residues of any socio-ontological concept have been expunged so as to remain on the empirical surface of historical fact. This purging has also made Marxist theory more accessible to the working class. Marxists themselves were immunized at the outset against any danger of being 'infected' by genuine philosophical thinking by declaring the latter to be thoroughly 'idealist', as opposed to down-to-earth materialist. Marx himself, and Engels, are not free of blame for ditching philosophy, but the baby was thereby thrown out with the bath water. 

What capitalism is as an historical mode of material economic reproduction, i.e. its essence or whatness, namely, cannot come to light through empiricist concepts. All the many varieties of empiricist economics must miss the essence, for it is out of bounds. The key to gaining insight into what capitalism is is the concept of thingified value. Its various interlocking forms and mode of movement cycling through its forms as endless, ruthless, life-negating valorization, all depend upon a phenomenological, eidetic way of thinking that only can be practised by the mind's first passing through the ontological difference. 

Who today knows that the global law of movement is the pernicious principle of endless valorization of the Medium, whose deceptive form of appearance on the surface is seemingly innocuous, or even highly desirable, economic growth? To continually enhance our material well-being, ostensibly dragging untold millions out of poverty? The Medium's sweet, irresistable cocaine also seeps into every crevice of modern life in countless, often subtle and surprising ways, addicting mind and soul, inducing wilful blindness. Nobody really knows why endless economic growth is necessary, as if it were a matter of endless human greed as an 'anthropological constant' and of (the failure of) our collective, democratic, political will to suppress and bridle, if not stop, (the will to) economic growth. Well-meaning people talk naïvely today of the need for a 'circular economy' while the vociferous loyal defenders of the so-called Free World and its values (including, above all, unknowingly and covertly, the free movement of thingified value's Medium) do their darnedest to fortify the status quo against any attack.

Isn't the historical trajectory toward sustainability upon which we are apparently moving, with an Herculean effort of collective will, a half-measure that we kid ourselves is the solution to keeping the world ticking over for another century or so? Is our cluelessness, our seemingly imperturbable, complacent adherence to factual correctness as substitute for phenomenal truth, the greatest danger?

* It can be said that Heidegger's revising of traditional philosophy is more radical than Husserl's, for it goes beyond the ideas as the eidetic 'looks' of beings to question the very meaning of being itself.

Further reading: Edmund Husserl Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie Buch I (Text nach Husserliana III/1 and V) Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg 1992.

'Husserls Krisis: Fragen an die transzendentale Phänomenologie' 2017.

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

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

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

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.