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 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? The Medium's sweet cocaine also seeps into every crevice of modern life in countless, often subtle and surprising ways, addicting mind and soul. 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 being 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.

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.