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'.
On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.
No comments:
Post a Comment