Capitalocene & The global law of movement

Historical Materialist positivism

Historical Materialists have proposed the term 'capitalocene' as an alternative to the much-disputed 'anthropocene' as the title for a period in the Earth's history. Instead of humans, capital comes to the fore as the main actor in this history. Capital, in turn, has been subjected most intensely to investigation by Karl Marx. Das Kapital and associated writings remains a ground-breaking, momentous work.

The Historical Materialist interpretation of Marx's thinking has the upper hand vis-à-vis an interpretation that roots Marx's Critique of Political Economy — especially its analysis of the value-form — in his philosophical thinking that is indebted especially to Hegel and Aristotle. The Historical Materialist interpretation, by contrast, skips uncomprehendingly and occasionally with a quick genuflection, over the value-form. It has its roots in centuries-old British empiricism that was only reinforced and consolidated by the rise of positivism in the mid-nineteenth century. The birth of sociology with Comte sounded the death knell of philosophy. Since then it seems that only positive facts count. Academics committed to Historical Materialist are almost exclusively sociologists who may also claim to be philosophers. Although talk of ontology and social ontology has emerged in the last couple of decades as en vogue, no socio-ontological interpretation of Marx's Critique of Political Economy has gained any standing among Marx-influenced social scientists. They have to make do anyway with the impoverished conception of ontology and social ontology propagated by today's mainstream philosophy that likewise suffers under the closure of the ontological difference accomplished by empiricist sociology. 

All the more reason to do a 'da capo' and go back to the hour of birth of philosophy when fateful, fundamental concepts were cast in the astoundingly deep and fiery crucible of Greek thinking. They achieved their consummate articulation in Aristotle's thinking. It is these fundamental concepts that call for revision and recasting, e.g. the conception of the human being as a species of animal. It remains untouched in the debates over anthropocene, capitalocene, etc. that are generally couched in terms of 'survival of the human species'. No one interrogates who we are historically as humans; the question concerning whoness, an eminently philosophical, socio-ontological question, is never posed. Perhaps, as a first step, we should start to think of ourselves as mortals. Mortality is a determination of human being explored especially in Greek tragedy, and has an essential connection with temporality. 

The interpretation of the human as a species of animal dovetails superficially with the much later, mid-19th-century casting of the human in Darwin's theory of evolution, in which the human animal is interpreted as having evolved from 'lower' species, and most recently from the primates. Evolution theory itself is a positivist, story-telling science based on positive facts established by dating (in linear, chronological time) fossils found in the geological record, on archaeological excavations and on interpretive attempts to reconstruct how these earlier kinds of near-human animals lived. There is no attempt to interrogate more deeply the being of human being itself, as Greek philosophy did, even within its casting of the human as a kind of animal. Instead, one concentrates on brain size and shared gene pools.

The Historical Materialist notion of the capitalocene is one of many positions in the ongoing debate over what to do about climate change, etc. in order to save the human species and many other species besides. Unfortunately, the entire discussion of the capitalocene, degrowth. sustainable development (goals), environmental destruction, etc. (cf. the Wikipedia articles on Capitalocene and  Degrowth) is undertaken in the mould of empiricist-historical thinking, including its empirically based, hopefully predictive models, as if the concept of capital itself, toward which Marx directed his sharp mind, could be taken as read, as given, and one could speak unproblematically of capitalism (about which everyone 'knows') and argue merely over the historical periodization of capitalist development with a view to pin-pointing, for instance, when the capitalocene began and what historical events in particular (e.g. invention of the steam engine) were responsible for kicking it off, i.e. there is a controversy over causal explanation.

The neglect of a philosophical interpretation of Marx's critique (which is also a phenomenological critique of an historical cast of mind — our own modern mind), and the inherent inability of sociology to think socio-ontologically in a genuine fashion, are major impediments in the debate over degrowth to overcome the worst of capitalism. It is beset by an uncanny, complacent cluelessness about who we are and about the ontologies of fundamentally different kinds of movement that is covered up by voluminous empirical, historical studies serving as substitute.

 The law of global movement

The law of global movement, i.e. the principle of endless accumulation of thingified value, is abstract, but it is no more abstract than the three simple laws of motion postulated by Newton in the seventeenth century. Since then, Newton's mathematized laws of motion have been applied in a bewildering number of areas to precalculate and control all sorts of physical motion. No one complains about the abstractness of Newton's laws. Nor does everyone have to be familiar with them, or even know about them, for them to unfold their far-reaching ramifications in the world. In tandem with the likewise simple and elegant mathematical Maxwellian laws of electromagnetism (an extension of Newton's laws to the motion of electrons), they have turned out to be immensely useful across the entire spectrum of exercising power over physical movement. 

Unlike Newton's powerful laws of physical motion, the principle of endless accumulation (or valorization) of thingified value cannot be employed to precalculate and steer the valorization of thingified value. For it only states the principle that the advance of money-capital and its multiple transformations of value-form through its circular movement must obey if the circuit is to be successful, i.e. generate a residual surplus called net profit. Net profit remains for the capitalist enterprise or enterprises after all the costs incurred (basically wages & salaries, means of production including raw materials, interest, ground-rent) have been deducted. Thingified value itself is nothing physical, thus remaining invisible to all the physical sciences and even the social sciences, including sociology and economics. On the one hand it is astonishing that the social science of economics is lacking its foundational concept. On the other it is not astonishing at all, given the hegemony of empiricism and the positivist closure of the ontological difference. Only the various forms, or 'looks', of thingified value are visible on the surface of society, but not as such. It is the task of ontological thinking to bring these forms of appearance to light as forms of appearance of thingified value. Otherwise, value-forms such as commodity (goods & services), money, money-capital, wages, factories, blocks of land, interest, enterprises, joint-stock companies, etc. are just conceived as different things (factors of production), unimmersed in any sociating medium.

The principle of valorization plays out on the surface of society in the market-mediated competition among the many capitals and their competition with the suppliers of labour power, means of production, loan capital (finance capital) and land on many different markets. Only in this more or less bruising and brutal competition does it turn out whether an individual capital, a given capitalist industry, a national capitalist economy or even the global capitalist economy has been successful in a given circuit at actually valorizing thingified value. For individual income-earning players or certain segments of such players in a given industry or region of the Earth, the gainful game can be rotten and ruinous, with rigged rules of play. I call thingified value the Medium through which the multiple transformations of value-forms must proceed. The Medium sociates (via the surface form of contract between private property owners) all the players in the competition striving to earn their various respective sorts of characteristic income in what I call the gainful game. 'Thingified value' is my preferred translation of Marx's concept of 'verdinglichter Wert' that is usually rendered as 'reified value'. In Marxist discourse, reification has come to have a rather nebulous and equivocal meaning that I prefer to avoid. 'Valorization' names the generation of a net surplus of thingified value in the value-form called net profit (of enterprise) at the conclusion of a circuit of capital; it may be regarded as synonymous with 'accumulation'.

All of us have to earn a living one way or another, which boils down to earning income in one form or another through market competition, which in turn entails immersion in the Medium which, as such, remains invisible. All of us are therefore players in the competitive gainful game, not simply 'people' or 'subjects' who underlie the gainful game and could in some way (collectively, say, through democratic institutions) control it for our own collective ends. The converse role of earners of income is that of spenders of income, which makes consumers of all the players. The consumer is one of the essential roles, or character masks, in the gainful game required for circuits of capital to valorize; produced goods and services must be sold on (local or global) markets for capitals to realize the revenues (the 'top line') that decide whether the advanced capital has actually valorized with a positive surplus, the net profit (the 'bottom line'). The more money-capital thrown into circuits of valorization, the more is produced and the more the consumers must consume to realize revenue.

The global law of endless valorization of thingified value is an abstract, indifferent one that, in itself, pits mortals against each other in endless competition and conflict, and implements the rapacious exploitation and destruction of the Earth. The principle is also prone to calamitous crisis, when dislocations in the global circulation process occur, misjudgements are made by the investing capitalists, excessive bets are placed by greedy speculators on a 'good thing', market conditions change unexpectedly or countless other quirks and irregularities in the circular valorizing movement crop up. As a formal principle, it devours mercilessly and indifferently the material it requires: labour power (employees of all kinds) and natural resources. The mortal material of exploitation, at least, is able to offer resistance against the pressure of valorization exercised via the capitalist class, although today the Earth, too, is displaying its finite limits to endless exploitation, especially in the generation of the physical energy required to materially support the formal movement. 

The subterranean principle, however, has a shiny, appealing façade called individual freedom that most find irresistible, especially when their lives are materially comfortable and they have sufficient income to support a satisfying level of consumption. This deceptive appeal is exploited to the hilt by all those (unknowingly) upholding the principle of valorization, i.e. by those who knowingly support the so-called 'free' market economy of capitalism. They will literally stop at nothing to maintain the status quo. It seems to be a universal law for conservative political parties to tout deceptive slogans in which they proclaim their solemn commitment to 'freedom'. In view of the hidden rule of the valorization principle, freedom amounts first of all to the freedom of movement of thingified value seeking augmentation.

Stepping away from the gainful game?

How could we individualized mortals ever escape the pull of the law of endless valorization that entices with the promises of individualized freedoms? For, an essential feature of the Medium is that it dissociates, or sets free, mortals into competitive individuals, whilst associating them again only via the Medium. We are confronted with the questions i) whether we could ever, or ever want to, strip off our character-mask roles as players in the gainful game and ii) whether there could be, or already is, an alternative medium of sociation. 

Re i): This would involve becoming aware of our roles as income-earners and consumers in the gainful game. Through such reflection it is also possible to gain a distance from the gainful game rather than identifying with it unquestioningly. Is a lifetime playing the gainful game existentially fulfilling?

Re ii): The question concerning an alternative medium of sociation is related in essence to whether there could be, or already is, an alternative kind of sociating movement of our lives. Under the rule of the law of valorization, our lives are constrained to move in ways compatible, subterraneanly, with the never-ending circulation of globally valorizing thingified value. For millions of people, especially those earning a livelihood in so-called 'developing countries', this constraint means nothing other than having to live in abject poverty. Even millions earning a comfortable income through employment are not blind to an existential barrenness of the gainful game. We mortals sociate with each other, i.e. we live together sharing a world, in a kind of movement sui generis I call interplay whose countless variations in modes of play offer an existential richness not available in the gainful game. It is incalculable. So long as the law of valorization holds sway, this sociating interplay is constrained to play out in the Medium with its circular movement of endless accumulation of thingified value. In itself, however, sociating interplay is essentially a movement of mutual estimation between and among the players. 

The interplay is at core one of mutual estimation of each other's powers and abilities. This interplay can be fair or ugly depending upon appreciative or depreciative mutual estimation of who each of us is. As such, it is a power play among whos, benign or malign. Freed from the Medium, this mutually estimative interplay is not sullied from the start by meaner aspirations for gaining one of the many forms of thingified value. Unsullied interplay is often mutually beneficial and can even be mutually caring, a for-each-other rather than an against-each-other, as it mostly is in the competitive gainful game that is prone to descending into cut-throat ruthlessness. The interplay can also be bewilderingly complex and unpredictable, but this is no impediment as long as there is no need to master it from above, nor even measure it. In any case, this kind of sociating movement defies precalculation, defies the will to power over it. The prime concern has to be whether the sociating interplay is fair or ugly, and this becomes the domain of justice: to adjudicate and enforce the free and fair interplay among those living together is a given civil society.

The question then becomes whether it is at all possible and feasible for us to leave, or at least gain a distance from, the gainful game. This includes inventing and cultivating ways of making a livelihood together whilst avoiding immersion in the Medium as far as possible. We have to start with ourselves, asking who we are and as who we could cast ourselves, apart from merely filling character mask roles in the gainful game. The all-pervasive blindness vis-á-vis the invisible Medium of thingified sociation needs to be overcome. Otherwise the wood cannot be seen for the confusing multiplicity of empiricist-scientific trees. In view of ignorance of the global law of movement, there is no guide to see what is needed to weaken its ruinous grip on us. Instead we are misguided by those whose job it is to know better into ways of thinking and practices that do not even tendentially challenge the Medium's inexorable growth.

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

Laws of movement & Energy

Sustainability? Of what?

Social Ontology of Whoness De Gruyter, Berlin 2018.

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

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.

 

Laws of movement & Energy

Laws of movement

Western science is inconceivable without the laws of movement at its heart. These laws apply to physical movement; they are laws of physics that are asserted to apply universally throughout the universe. Conversely, any kind of movement deemed worthy of investigation by the leading Western science must be physical, the science of physics being regarded as the kernel of all Western science, and with physics' reach being gradually extended over the centuries since the enunciation of mathematized laws of motion in the seventeenth century. These laws are often said to be one of the greatest achievements of the Western mind. Newton and Galileo, along with others, are rightly held in high esteem to the present day.

Even though, since the emergence of Einsteinian relativity theory and quantum mechanics, Newtonian physics is regarded as superseded for certain ranges of physical movement, the repercussions and applicability of Newton's three simple and elegant laws of motion — the middle of which is simply f = m.a or, in words. force is equal to mass times acceleration — have proved to be immense, well beyond anything that Newton himself could ever have imagined. Maxwell's laws of electromagnetism, that take a step beyond Newton to capture the motion of electrons, have repercussions that have seeped globally into every niche of everyday and not-so-everyday life. Maxwell's laws remain laws of physics applicable to a kind of physical motion. Ditto for the laws of thermodynamics that deal with the motions of molecules. Quantum physics, too, postulates four physical forces, two of which apply to intra-atomic motions. The law of gravitation, too, whether Newtonian or relativistic, postulates a gravitational force to account for and calculate the motions of physical bodies, including astrophysical ones.

Note that I am speaking of laws of physical motion, not laws of physical movement, because in modern physics all kinds of physical movement have been theoretically reduced to loco-motion, i.e. change of place, or, more precisely, change of position in a mathematized (vector) space. Why was this reduction of Aristotle's four kinds of physical movement to just one kind necessary? The short answer is that locomotion, i.e. change of place, is amenable to mathematization; this was achieved by Newton and Leibniz in the seventeenth century with the infinitesimal calculus employing the real, continuous, linear time parameter, t. Mathematization, in turn, enables calculation and hence prediction, i.e. precalculation, of motions. It is no accident, but rather deeply premeditated, that all modern science, even beyond physics, measures itself (solely?) against the criterion of predictability. 

This, in turn, enables the reduction of all scientific method to empiricist methodology. All modern science, starting with physics, postulates hypothetical theoretical models which are tested in terms of their explanatory power in predicting certain sub-kinds of physical motion by gathering empirical data. (That's why quantum physicists worry about whether there are testable predictions generated my their hypothetical models.) Such empirical predictability serves as the criterion for scientificity. This scientific method verifies theoretical models which are then taken to be true, even though all that empirical data can ever confirm is the correctness of predictions via theoretical models. Otherwise, the model is falsified and the theory put in doubt as incorrect. The hypothetical theoretical model is required to fit the empirical data gathered, of whatever relevant kind.

This scientific method of modelling is transferred even to neuroscience which investigates neuronal motion in the brain and body with the aim of discovering laws of mental movement, as if the mind moved according to physical laws, as if the mind were something physical. The mind has to be conceived as somehow physical to satisfy the absolute will to power over all kinds of movement.

Energy

But what of energy, as announced in the heading? It definitely has a connection with physical movement. Today a problem with energy is recognized above all in the phenomena of global warming and climate change, both of which are palpable and indisputable for those without vested interests in denying it. The physical source of global warming has been correctly identified by physics as the emission of carbon dioxide (and also methane). The former gas is emitted by burning fossil fuels to generate electrical energy, i.e. the motion of electrons, to drive other motions (e.g. of machines of all kinds, including cars). The response to global warming consists in enormous global efforts, against the massive resistance of vested interests, to make the transition to renewable energies that do not require the burning of fossil fuels. The aim is to achieve sustainability, but who is seriously asking the question: Sustainability of what? Of humankind as a species of animal on a planet called Earth?

Enormous amounts of energy need to be generated to drive certain kinds of movement. Why so enormous? At first sight all these kinds of movement seem to be physical. But closer inspection shows that physical movement is interwoven with other kinds of movement, namely, the movement of interplay in social life and the movement of the economy as such. How we humans sociate with each other cannot be captured by any laws of physical motion, no matter how hard modern science tries to do so. The kernel of sociating movement is that of mutually estimative interplay, a kind of movement sui generis whose ontology, to date, has not registered at all in any of the physical or social sciences, nor in mainstream philosophy. Why is this so? The problem lies with the very concept of energy itself, whose origins, along with any other genuinely ontological concept, have today been relegated to oblivion.

Although today energy is taken to be something that simply physically exists (ontically, 'objectively', physically), it only 'exists' by dint of having been cast as such by a certain ontology of movement, namely, the Aristotelean ontology of movement, the only one that Western philosophy has yet properly conceived. (NB: Since the ontological difference has been shut down by positivist science, talk of an 'ontology of movement' is regarded as metaphysical nonsense.) Energy (ἐνέργεια) is a neologism coined by Aristotle as the middle term in his ontology of causal-efficient, physical movement. The term means literally the at-work-ness of a physical force (δύναμις). The four causes of physical movement elaborated by Aristotle — namely: final, formal, efficient and material — were reduced by modern science to two, namely, efficient and material. Why? For the sake of gaining a material, i.e. manipulable, hold on all kinds of physical movement to make them precalculable through mathematization. Newton's mathematized laws of motion are literally inconceivable without their foundation in Aristotle's ontology of physical movement. Since Newton, efficient physical forces go to work on material. They effect something or other in some sort of material and are thus sources of physical power over physical movements. Hence, in particular, the striving of modern psychology, today via neuroscience, to reduce the ψυχή of ancient Greek philosophy to the cogitating material brain. Hence also the tendentious talk of artificial intelligence as some kind of intelligence based on artificial neurons constructed to crudely model brain activity.

The pride of the modern physical sciences is to make endless progress in extending their precalculative power over physical movements of all kinds. They are driven by this absolute will to power over movement. In the face of global warming and climate change, is this absolute will to power to be reined in? Or is it to be encouraged and extended even more to solve our 'problems' with the climate technologically? The latter seems to be the case.

The Medium and the global law of movement: endlessly valorizing thingified value

It is overlooked in today's debates over climate change that efficient-causal power over movement is intimately entangled with another, non-physical kind of movement that escapes not only any kind of physical laws of motion, but whose ontology escapes attention altogether. This is the movement of the global economy, that, hardly anyone will deny, is a global capitalist economy. But what is a capitalist economy? Any kind of economy, as a way of humans producing and acquiring what they need to live, involves much movement, both physical and that of sociating interplay. A capitalist economy, however, requires more than that, for it is subject, or subjugated, to a certain principle, or law, of movement that is not physical but purely formal. 

What keeps the global capitalist economy moving is the formal, circular movement of thingified value through a series of interlinked value-forms whose sole law of movement is that advanced thingified value (in the form of invested, possibly borrowed, money-capital) return with a surplus. Thingified value's forms are ideas (ἰδέαι) that have been real-ized as things (res) of various kinds. The required transformations of value-form take place entirely within this Medium in which we all are unknowingly immersed as players in the gainful game. Only the value-forms of this Medium are visible on the surface of society. Nevertheless, we humans are thoroughly immersed in this Medium and subject to its effects, both propitious and poisonous. Yet we do not know that the globalized economy is only made possible by the sociating Medium of thingified value, which has seeped into every corner of the Earth and every nook of our souls.

To spell this out a bit (cf. An Invisible Global Social Value): advanced (borrowed) money-capital purchases means of production (including raw materials), hires labour power and leases land to produce goods and services that, via circulation processes, are sold on markets to generate revenue. All of these are value-forms. This revenue, as the gross return on the advanced capital, must exceed all the costs incurred in setting up and running the production and circulation processes if the law of valorization of thingified value is to be satisfied. This law holds inexorably for individual capitals (enterprises great and small), national economies and the global economy.

The formal movement of valorization of thingified value requires both the movement of sociating interplay and the physical movement of all that is required for (maximally efficient) production and circulation processes, subjugating these latter movements to its own formal conditions of valorization. Since valorization, aka accumulation of capital, is infinite, unlimited, never-ending, the need for physical energy to support valorization via production and circulation processes is also endless. There can never be enough. The endless need for physical energy for the sake of endless valorization drives global warming, climate change, as well as the continuing destruction of the Earth. But we are oblivious to the law of endless valorization.

For today's conventional thinking on sustainability, nuclear energy is attractive as an alternative source of energy generation because it relies on Einstein's equation from relativity physics: E=m.c(exp)2 , or in words: Energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared. From a tiny amount of radioactive plutonium mass, for example, an enormous amount of energy=physical movement can be generated through radioactive decay. 

Moreover, through a fusion reaction between atomic nuclei, endless amounts of physical energy could one day be generated without being saddled with the problem of how to dispose of radioactive waste. It would seem that sustainability of the endless valorization of thingified value would be secured by harnessing an endless source of physical energy for production and circulation processes. The global law of movement of endless valorization of the Medium would gain a new lease of life, but at the cost of continued destruction of the Earth nevertheless, and continued exploitation of its human material. The principle of valorization of the Medium as a formal law of movement is indifferent to the material it subsumes, namely, the Earth and us humans.

The perfect cover-up for this situation is our individualized freedoms of movement in the West that, it is said, need to be sustained, preserved, preferably at a high material standard of living, ironically, through continued 'economic growth'. It is overlooked that individualization is first made possible by the dissociation induced by the Medium of thingified value itself. We sociate via the Medium. Blinded by ideologies of individual freedom in democracies, we remain blithely oblivious to the law of global movement. The principle of endless valorization of the Medium remains invisible.

Further reading: An Invisible Global Social Value

Sustainability? Of what?

Capitalocene & The global law of movement

Social Ontology of Whoness

On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo,

Tale of the Qua: A Philosophical Comedy

Tale of the Qua: A Philosophical Comedy is the Aristophanic replay of my On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo, published by De Gruyter, Berlin 2024. 

A tale about how the Western mind came to be dominated by gods scheming behind the scenes to seduce and misguide mortals. The mind has been locked into a mind-set that only access to the Qua key could unlock and change, but mortals have become oblivious to it. The goddesses opposing the hegemony of the scheming gods are at a disadvantage. One of them, the Goddess of Fairness, has an affair with a mortal from which the beautiful Aiona is born. Caught in the tension of being semi-divine, she becomes the protagonist for unravelling the secret of the Qua key, whose liberation and turning could free the mortal mind from its fixation on control and gain. The control of movement is epitomized by the cyberworld, an artificial world populated by algorithms that dictate what movements at all are possible. The god of three-dimensional time, 3T, could offer a way out, if only mortals could come to see that Tempus, the god of one-dimensional time, restricts their freedom.

Seminars on the Phenomenology of Time

Handout to two Seminars on the Phenomenology of Time in the Centre for Time at the University of Sydney, at the invitation of Dean Rickles on 16 and 17 September 2024.

CO2 and The Medium

The Medium invisible

We all know about the dangers of global warning, climate change, and of the enormous political and technological effort being undertaken to achieve net zero CO2 emissions by 2050.  Neither those couching the struggle in terms of survival of the human species on planet Earth, nor the deniers of climate change and opponents of measures taken to reduce emissions because they disturb their business models, address the elephant in the room.That is unsurprising, because the elephant is invisible and cannot be pointed to without some trouble. Not even modern science, of whatever kind, that is relied upon as the repository of what we can know at all, can help in making the elephant visible. Another kind of thinking, another cast of mind is required to render the elephant visible.

The elephant is The Medium itself, which is nothing physical. The air we breathe, the physical medium we all share, is invisible to the sense of sight, but not to that of smell, and natural science has long since made the air visible in its physical and chemical theories. It can see and measure CO2 in the atmosphere and causally explain its deleterious warming effects, that need to be counter-acted, come what may. Climate-change deniers, by contrast, are unknowingly slavish devotees of The Medium, to which both the deniers and those struggling for sustainability are oblivious.

The question concerning the medium we share in society, the very medium that mediates sociation, is hardly raised. Theories of inter-subjectivity take the 'inter' to be self-evident, as if it were simply the physical medium. In social theories, the means by which we are mediated with each other and share a world are taken to be language, or exchange, or contract, or trade, or the cash nexus, or means of communication, or digital social media, or trust, or our values, etc. The last can be taken here to be our Western liberal-democratic values, including human rights, that are often regarded as indispensable means mediating our social cohesion.

But means of mediation are not themselves a medium.

Valuation

You could also say with regard to values that we humans value everything and everyone we encounter, evaluating, valuing, devaluing, esteeming, disesteeming, estimating, misestimating across a broad spectrum from loving dearly through neutral indifference to condemning, despising, reviling, hating. We don't just understand things, we also inevitably evaluate them. In particular, in our daily lives, we mutually esteem or misesteem each other constantly in ongoing interplay in every situation. In this sense, the whole world is valued in one way or another, and such valuing could be called a medium through which we humans are open to the world. Some aspects of the world we evaluate as good for us, and others as bad. Excessive CO2 emissions, for example, we evaluate as bad, as deleterious to our well-being. There is no way of escaping the medium of evaluating and valuing, despite modern science's vain striving to attain value-free objectivity vis-à-vis mere subjective judgement. Valuation could be identified as the missing 'inter' in so-called inter-subjectivity.

 The Medium's inexorable law of movement

As I have said, The Medium is invisible, not only to sense perception, but also to today's mind. It is one kind of medium of valuation, an historically specific and fateful one that has come over us. The Medium has many different looks, forms or faces that appear and disappear as The Medium itself moves through its required phases. Yes, The Medium moves according to its own global law of movement, and at its own, ever-accelerating pace, in a never-ending, fattening circle. Its law of movement may be called valorization. 

In taking hold historically, The Medium leaves its stamp and imposes its forms or faces upon everything and everyone everywhere, not just on the Earth. It taints even the Moon and Mars. It taints and maintains its grip on our mind without our ever noticing it. The Medium has seeped into every single pore of our sociating, more often than not with existentially poisonous effect. It intoxicates humanity on all levels. It impels all the forms of value to move along with it, according to its own inexorable valorizing movement that forever strives for expansion, for more and more. 

We humans, and especially economist humans, call this endless accumulative circular movement 'economic growth', and we worry when this growth slackens and even turns negative, for it seems to be the source of happiness. At the same time, the pace of our lives is dictated by the rate of turnover of The Medium itself, but we remain ignorant of it. There is unrelenting pressure to enhance accumulation by cost-cutting at the expense of all those employed, who live from wage income, and by speeding up the pace of work. We notice that our lives are hectic. The empirical social sciences, such as sociology and psychology, offer superficial explanations and perhaps feeble remedies. At best we have an inkling about The System or The Rat Race or The Competitive Gainful Game. It is experienced as oppressive, brutal and antithetical to our well-being. At the same time, The Medium dissociates, enabling individualized freedom of movement to shape lives through consumption in periods of prosperity, when The Medium is circulating and expanding smoothly. The Medium is thus existentially ambivalent. Our highly prized personal freedom of movement is trumped by the freedom of movement of the valorizing Medium

Nobody speaks of The Medium, even though it rules our lives through its subterranean movement. On the surface we lead our lives wearing the character masks of players in the gainful game into which, behind our backs, The Medium has cast us in set roles. We stubbornly delude ourselves that we remain, collectively, the underlying subjects of our own destiny. We struggle, through a veil of deep ignorance, and assisted by equally clueless economists, financial experts, central bankers, etc., to come to terms with the many anomalies (inflationary pressures, currency collapses, shortages, disruptions, downturns, slumps, crises, etc.) in the surface movement atop The Medium's endless valorization, employing the players for its own freedom of movement. The struggle on the surface assumes, in particular, the form of more or less deformed, more or less corrupt, democratic politics of state power, all the while fighting to maintain our cherished, individualized, personal freedoms, and voting mainly for the party that promises the best personal standard-of-living outcomes in the gainful game.

Further reading: An Invisible Global Social Value

Sustainability? Of what?

On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo,

Logos and Pancake

What is logos? And what does it have to do with pancake? I shall deal with these two questions consecutively.

What is logos?

τὶ ἐστιν λόγος; What is logos? ‘What is …?’ is the favourite question of ancient Greek philosophy, a question skipped over by the modern sciences because they already assume they know what they are talking about when they proceed to construct their models to explain why this or that happened or happens. For Greek thinking, by contrast, asking ‘What is …?’ leads to an attempt to determine the whatness or essence of something, which Aristotle terms its τὸ τὶ ἦν εἶναι, or ‘the what-it-was-ness’ of an entity, also known as the εἶδος (eidos) or ‘look’ which an entity presents of itself to the mind (νοῦς), i.e. the ontological look of its mode of being as somewhat. The full ‘beingness’ or οὐσία of an entity presented to (or presencing for) the mind is given by the unity of its εἶδος with its ὕλη, or matter. εἶδος is often rendered in English as ‘form’. 

How does this help in saying what logos is? And why is it important to understand what it is? The logos plays a prominent role in determining who we are as humans. The famous definition of the human being given by Aristotle determines how we conceive or interpret ourselves as human beings even today, namely as a species of animal. The Aristotelean definition runs τὸ ζῷον λόγον ἔχον, i.e. as the animal that has the logos or, in Latin, the animal rationale. The logos becomes thereby ratio, reason. The human being is thus cast as the generic animal having the specific difference of reason or intelligence that defines it as a specific kind animal at the top of the animal kingdom. Modern evolutionary theory adopts this cast of human being, i.e. the way in which the human being presents itself to the mind, as a self-evident fact and proceeds to study the evolution of the human animal as well as many other kinds of animal over vast stretches of linear time. 

As the rational animal, the human being is said to be guided by reason, or rather, that it should be guided by reason if it is to live up to its proper ontological definition. An irrational human being is regarded as something less than human, whereas reason itself is praised as the quality of the human being that has brought forth astonishing achievements. But substituting reason for logos only replaces one question by another. The Greek verb corresponding to λόγος is λεγειν, which signifies, apart from ‘to say, to speak’, also ‘to gather, to select’, similar to how Latin ‘legere’ signifies ‘to read’ or ‘to lecture’, also ‘to gather, to select’. The definition of the human being as ‘the animal that has the logos’ is therefore often given as ‘the animal that has language’. Having language is postulated as the specific difference that is supposed to set us humans apart from other animals. This is then contested by modern sciences such as biology and psychology when they attempt to demonstrate that other animals, too, or even plants, have language, or al least a recognizable rudimentary language.  

Logos as language is also interpreted as syllogistic reasoning. In formal logic, also inherited from Aristotle, you learn how to argue by applying rules of inference to the premisses that 'close them together' in the.con-clusion (_syl-logismos_, συλλογισμός) . Hence modern analytic philosophy is conceived as logical argumentation, with the analytic philosopher arguing for his position against other positions. This adversarial style of argumentative philosophy is taken to be self-evident, with debates being fought out among opinionated subjects each advocating and defending an -ism position. One attacks the other's premisses and/or his application of the rules of inference. The premisses asserted have to be factually correct; truth itself is conceived as empirically established factual correctness. Alternatively, a position may be regarded as a set of 'beliefs' that have to be shown to be untenable because they lead to patently false conclusions. Adopting and holding an -ism position takes precedence over opening one's mind to the phenomena themselves in order to understand them, to conceive them as well as you possibly can by moving arduously through and dismantling your own distorting misconceptions.

But what of that other signification of λεγειν as ‘to gather, to select’. Is the human being a kind of animal that is able to gather and select? One immediately thinks of early homo sapiens conceived as hunters and gatherers. However, the gathering and selecting performed by the logos must have a deeper connection with the essence of human being itself, with its very whatness or εἶδος. In general, the εἶδος is the eidetic look of an entity that presents itself to the human mind that is thus able to understand the entity concerned in its whatness, i.e. its what-it-already-was, i.e. its τὸ τὶ ἦν εἶναι. For Aristotle’s thinking, the eidetic look presents itself to the mind above all in the determination of that kind of movement the Greeks call τέχνη ποιητική, i.e. the technique or art of making, for which Aristotle developed his ontology of efficient, productive movement, the only explicit ontology of movement handed down from Greek thinking, and the one implicitly underlying all the modern sciences today in their unrelenting striving to master all kinds of movement, even those for which an ontology of productive, efficient-causal movement is unsuited. The art of making is guided by the maker’s foreseeing the eidetic look of what is to be made. The maker has this fore-sight as a know-how pertaining to the specific art, as when a wine-maker gathers in the harvest of grapes and selects those suitable for a sort of wine he has in mind, whilst sorting out those not suitable. 

Aristotle investigates the ontology of efficient-causal, productive movement in Book VIII (Theta) of his Metaphysics. This goes to show that the investigation of physical movement (κίηησις, μεταβολή) is itself metaphysical in the sense of ontological, i.e. a mode of being. The key concept for the attempt here to clarify what the logos is, is that of δύναμις μετὰ λόγου, that is, a power guided by the logos. The δύναμις (power, force) at work is ἐνέργεια (energeia, literally: at-work-ness), a movement on the way to bringing forth in actuality the fore-seen εἶδος (eidos) as the finished τέλος.(telos, end) This is where the legein of the logos comes into its own. The legein of the logos in the mind has the task of selecting what belongs to the fore-seen eidos of what is to be pro-duced, i.e. brought forth, and what does not, The selection is one of inclusion and exclusion looking into the temporal dimension of the future. An example will help to make this clearer. 

Pancake recipe as εἶδος

Making a pancake is an instance of τέχνη ποιητική belonging to the art of cookery. It requires the cook to fore-see in the mind (νοῦς) the eidos of the pancake that is to be finally made, the telos, which is the purpose for the sake of which (οὖ ἔνεκα) the cook is undertaking the making, along with all the steps that have to be taken, and those to be avoided, in achieving this end. The cook, possessing the know-how of cookery, has to select the appropriate ingredients, the flour, egg, salt and water, along with the appropriate tools, such as a frying pan (not a saucepan) and the hot plate of a stove (not the oven). Only a pinch of salt (not a teaspoonful) is required, and only a cup of water, and 100 grams of flour (not more). The ingredients have to be thoroughly mixed with a whisk (not a rolling pin) after sifting the flour into a basin of an appropriate size. The frying pan has to be given a little oil (not too much) and heated to an appropriate temperature. The mixture has to be poured into the frying pan and fried for the appropriate time (to avoid burning), being turned from one side to the other at the right time (not too soon, not too late). All this making requires knowingly including what has to be done and excluding what has to be avoided to actualize the envisaged eidos of a finished pancake as telos, which is the fore-seen end of the making, at which the movement of cooking comes to an end and has its end (ἐντελέχεια, literally, in-end-have-ness) of a pancake ready to eat. 

Further reading: On the interpretation of δύναμις μετὰ λόγου as selective (auswählend, ein- und ausschließend) cf. Martin Heidegger Aristoteles, Metaphysik θ 1-3 Vorlesung SS1931, ed. Heinrich Hüni, Gesamtausgabe Klostermann, Frankfurt/M. 1981 § 14 GA33:150ff.

Freedom & necessity in an ambivalent medium of sociation

The very medium that sets us free from one another is the medium that enslaves us. It is two-edged. Individualized freedom is negated, constricted and even nullified by an eerie necessity that the explanations offered by economic theories can never fathom, remaining as they do on the surface, superficial.

How so? In earning our livelihoods we dissociated individuals sociate with one another via the medium of thingified value, a medium with many different 'faces' or 'forms' including, in particular, money, goods & services, wages & salaries, interest, dividends and rent. The latter are forms of income, and all of us need and strive to earn income to spend, as consumers, on what we (think we) need to live well or live at all. The sociating medium of thingified value, of itself, imposes on us the necessity of our immersing ourselves in it for the sake of earning a living. The medium and its various forms remain invisible, however, for today's superficial thinking, that is ignorant of the ontological difference. Nevertheless, it is only by virtue of this globally all-pervasive medium that there is such a thing as a global economy.

As bearers of forms of thingified value (aka private-property owners) we are dissociated from each other as free individuals. This is the socio-ontological core of individualism. We sociate with each other through various kinds of exchange, starting with buying & selling (goods & services, means of production & raw materials, stocks & bonds, etc.), and continuing with hiring (especially labour power), borrowing (loan capital), leasing (land). All these myriad exchanges are mediated by the appropriate forms of thingified value on the basis of formal contractual agreement among the individual, income-earning and consuming, players, who otherwise remain dissociated from each other and are free to shape their individualized lives according to the amount of income earned. The gainful game for earning income is competitive, often brutally so. The winners in the gainful game enjoy and treasure their individualized freedom. They are unknowingly the most willing agents of valorization and, more often than not, its most ruthless.

The medium of thingified value, namely, has a life of its own. It moves cyclically through its various value-forms, subject only to the simple principle of valorization, i.e. advanced money capital (a form of thingified value) must return finally, bloated with a surplus value. Otherwise, its loss-making movement is self-consuming and must eventually cease. This applies to individual capitalist enterprises, large and small, national economies, as well as to the global economy as a whole. The valorization principle of movement of thingified value, i.e. its continued, endless, senseless accumulation, imposes itself as a necessary law on all, with greater or lesser severity, greater or lesser consequences. 

The formal valorization movement requires also its appropriate material: living humanity and the Earth, with all it has to offer, both living and non-living, for continued valorization. The formal principle of valorization inexorably drives the material movement of the capitalist economy, requiring ever more energy that can only be supplied by intensifying exploitation of the Earth. As principle of movement, valorization itself is indifferent to both humans and the Earth, which are subsumed and exploited under their appropriate respective value-forms. 

The difficult transition to renewable, sustainable energy is being undertaken today without insight into the limitless valorization of thingifed value. Insofar it is a blind striving that leaves the status quo intact.

Further reading: On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo, 

 An Invisible Global Social Value.

Parmenides' warning went unheeded

How did ideas as conceived originally by Plato as the 'looks' of beings as beings degenerate into becoming, with Descartes, representations inside consciousness and then further today into 'ideas' in the head? The last are then finally (apparently) reduced to neural configurations of the material brain by today's neuroscience that seems, once and for all, to have put the mind-body problem effectively to rest.

This degeneration of the mind runs parallel to another as a consequence of Parmenides' warning not having been heeded. Namely, he warned not to separate thinking from being:

τὸ γὰρ αὐτό νοεῖν ἐστίν τε καὶ εἶναι.  Diels/Krantz Fragment 3

 "For thinking and being belong together." *

This has been taken as a seminal formulation of so-called 'idealism' as a philosophical 'position' that fights to maintain its position against other positions such as (various varieties of) 'realism' and 'materialism', whereby the conception of the idea itself has been thoroughly misunderstood. Namely ideas are understood as being 'about' beings, i.e. ontic, rather than their being ontological interpretations of the being of beings, i.e. of their respective modes of being. Misinterpreted ontically, Fragment 3 seems to be saying some kind of magical formula: reality conforms to the way you think it is, with the consequence that, if you change your mind, reality will change in line with your thoughts.

But the idea is ontological, conceptualizing as it does a mode of being of beings through which the mind understands reality, i.e. the world. The idea in this sense is not individual, but shared in an historical time. The shared mind of a given time, its Zeit-Geist, is 'built' from the building-blocks of the ideas constituting in their interconnection the shared, inescapable understanding holding sway in an historical age.

By ignoring and misinterpreting both Parmenides' warning and Plato's ontological conception of the idea, the Western mind has gone 'pro-gressively' downhill i) to split thinking from being, with subjectivity on the inside and objectivity on the outside and ii)  to think thinking itself only ontically, with scarcely a trace that ideas in the philosophical sense are ontological.

The closure and suppression of the ontological difference can be blamed especially on Anglo-American philosophy in the guises of British empiricism, American pragmatism, analytic philosophy, etc. The closure is reflected inversely in the rise of positivism and the establishment of the reign of materially-, evidence-based scientific thinking. For this way of thinking, the evidence of the phenomena themselves is ignored in favour of constructing theoretical models that aim at somehow or other causally explaining, and thus predicting, various kinds of movements in the world.

All the more reason to go back to scratch to think again.

* For further alternative translations of Fragment 3, cf. my Parmenides article.

Further reading:  'Out of your mind? Parmenides' message'

On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo (De Gruyter 2024 in press)

Temporal Recasting of Who We Are

Abstract for talk, Recasting ourselves with Michael Eldred, at The New Institute in Hamburg on 15 February 2024 in the Program Non-materialist Conceptions of Human Flourishing

Program Chair 2023/24: Andrej Zwitter, Program Co-ordinator: Victoria Sukhomlinova

Recasting who we are da capo employing the methodology of hermeneutic phenomenology — what is that supposed to mean? What is hermeneutic phenomenology, anyway? And how does its methodology differ from that of modern, evidence-based science? There is an inconspicuous doorway to hermeneutic phenomenology encapsulated in an Aristotelean formula for the ontological difference and, more particularly, in a single Greek word (ᾗ Latin: qua, Eng.: as), through which we pass into the philosophical realm proper of the investigation of beings insofar as they are beings, i.e. their modes of being, i.e. ontology. The philosophical tradition since the Greeks has given us various answers to the question: What is distinctively human being, i.e. the humanness of the human?, the first being: animality with the specific difference of having language, reason. This has been variously modified up to modern science's casting of the human being as a species of animal that has evolved to have an unusually large, high-performance, cogitating brain — with no trace left of the ontological difference. Science does not even ask: What is the animality of the animal? and denies any knowledge of its mode of being, the anima or soul (ψυχή) as the principle of life.

A temporal recasting of who we are cannot be satisfied with these 'what' answers. It proposes going back to scratch to start again from the elementary phenomenon of time itself, but not the usual conception of some kind of one-dimensional, linear time that flows along. Instead I start from the openness of three-dimensional time to see where this path of thinking leads. Who we are is a consequence, first and foremost, of belonging to this 3D-temporal openness. Only from within it do we understand the world by interpreting how it presents itself temporally, i.e, how it presences and absences for the mind. Beings in the world thus become essents presencing and absencing in 3D-time, and ontology must even transform itself into temporalogy. Different kinds of essents have different modes of essencing, but all essence for our mind in 3D-time.

The hermeneutic mind has its own, characteristic kind of temporal movement and hence its own temporalogy of movement. We share the world with one another, sociating only by moving within the shared temporal openness, mutually estimating and esteeming who we are. We are not substantial beings with a material substrate, but relational beings who become who we are only in the estimative interplay with each other played out in 3D-time. Interplay itself is a further kind of non-physical movement in 3D-time also demanding its own temporalogical investigation. It cannot be conceived by an ontology of movement rooted in one-dimensional time, the ontology of efficient causal movement — upon which the modern sciences exclusively rely. 

In today's globalized world, however, the sociating estimative interplay is played out immersed in the all-pervasive medium of thingified value as the competitive gainful game for income. All of us, whether it be directly or indirectly, are ineluctably players in this game mediated by thingified value-forms going through their required transformations. This is yet another kind of (circular) movement in time with its own temporalogy. Although we play the gainful game on the surface as dissociated, free individuals, it is undergirded by the senselessly circling movement of endlessly accumulating thingified value that imposes its own necessity. The invisible, underlying principle or law of global movement is precisely this endless, accumulative circling of thingified value, which also calls for its own temporalogical investigation. Crises, disruptions, dislocations, frictions, etc. in this endless valorization erupt incalculably both globally and locally, thus intermittently reducing our prized individual freedom to nought. 

Further reading: On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo (De Gruyter 2024 in press).

Eldred-Nettling Time Scholarship at University of Sydney awarded

The Eldred-Nettling Time Scholarship in the Centre for Time at the University of Sydney has been awarded to a PhD candidate. The scholarship supports an approach to the phenomenon of time employing the method of hermeneutic phenomenology. 

The phenomenon of time has proved to be elusive — i.e. subject to misinterpretation — since the Greek beginnings of philosophy. This has fateful, but hitherto unrecognized, consequences for our world today. 

Further reading: Movement and Time in the Cyberworld

On Human Temporality (forthcoming De Gruyter)