How often have you changed your mind? It seems easy enough to do, especially if the change of mind is just a whim, an exercise of wilful caprice. Or you may change your mind if presented with new evidence, new facts, new information on some issue or other. And if you change your mind, you may also change your way of living, your habits, your behaviour, insofar as it is in your power to do so.
This applies also on the so-called collective level of many subjects. Hence market behaviour changes with advertising that stimulates the whims of consumers to shift to buy a certain good or service. Or, when confronted with a crisis, a democratic society may collectively decide to deal with it through their so-called agency exercised in the appropriate institutions. These include parliamentary debate and the mass media. This is called a sea change in public opinion or a change of mind on the part of the electorate, but when could it amount to a mind change?
This pattern of action and change of action under the power of collective will is identifiable from the small, personal scale to the large, even global scale. Insofar as they are viable, democracies are viewed as expressions of the will of the people as expressed through free and fair elections. This serves as an ideal for the so-called free world to live up to.
It would seem then, that 'we', as constituted in some sense by some sort of collectivity, from small to large and more or less institutionalized, can change our mind and thus have agency in the world, even on the global level with an issue such as climate change. This is the kind of thinking that proceeds from humans themselves having been cast historically as under-lying sub-jects (from Latin subiacere 'to underlie') endowed with consciousness and will from which action proceeds. How a plurality of individual subjects can be collected into some kind of collectivity is not raised as a question, but taken to be self-evident, as self-evident as the difference between one and many.
It is also said that 'we', i.e. each of us individually, can change our general worldview, or Weltanschauung, or rather, perhaps, that our view of the world can change. This amounts to more than a change of opinion, but is general, global. On its deepest level this corresponds to what the ancient Greeks call θεωρία (theoria) or speculation, i.e. a looking-at through which the world is understood, interpreted. Such theorizing has degenerated in our age to empiricist, hypothetical model-building and thus become superficial in a precise sense of remaining on the surface. It suffices that a theoretical model, including its core hypotheses, be 'verified' against properly gathered empirical data. Other considerations lacking empirical evidence are mere speculation. In this way, the Latin word 'speculation' has degenerated from a venerable term synonymous with θεωρία in the Greek sense to a pejorative one signifying mere guessing or musing without an evidential basis. Θεωρία in the proper sense, however, is the attempt, first undertaken by the ancient Greeks, to think through and conceptualize the most elementary phenomena that are mostly taken for granted as obvious. Looking back it can be said that Greek thinking didn't always get it right; that it skipped over, and in skipping over, misconceived certain elementary phenomena, starting with the phenomenon of time itself. As the heirs to Greek thinking, we are still stuck with this inadequate conception of time today.
That we (Western) humans have been historically recast with the advent of the Modern Age as willed subjects underlying events in the world is an epochal mind change that has recast our human interpretation of the world on a grand, fundamental scale. With it, the will and willed action come to the fore. We modern subjects are cast as willed agents of action that (but not properly: who) can effect change in the world on the basis of how we understand it to be as interpreted through 'our' values, our evidence-based science, etc. Change in the world can then ostensibly be effected by changing the opinions of individual subjects en masse by any available means of persuasion from advertising through appeals to self-interest and public debate to political ideologies, all aimed at changing behaviour on a collective level.
What remains basic is the will to will itself to which the modern under-lying sub-ject is, in turn, unknowingly sub-ject (from Latin subicere 'to throw under'). The agency of (collective) will has been cast as the ultimate, underlying basis for shaping the world for the better. The renunciation of will is conceived as a regression into passivity. The Declaration of Human Rights, for instance, is supposed to be, among other things, a plan for action to improve the world through goodwill, as if human will were the last instance, but is human will any match for the will to will? Stepping back from human will is a precondition for allowing the world to show itself undistortedly through its phenomena to the mind. This is more in line with what the ancient Greeks experienced as θεωρία, as speculation in the good sense. A fitting interpretation of the world is then offered to the human mind by getting close to the elementary phenomena themselves and allowing them to show themselves so that our shared mind can be rewarded with an appropriate, or at least more appropriate, interpretation. This is the endeavour of hermeneutic phenomenology.
In historical time, in its various ages, the world can show (and has shown) itself to the mind and thus be interpreted in fundamentally different ways. We live today in the age of human subjectivity vis-à-vis an objective world. The objective world purportedly out there beyond subjective consciousness in its incessant movement is then explained by modern science in terms of kinds of causal, and thus predictive, models, all the way down to merely stochastic, probabilistic, statistical ones that are able to master certain kinds of movement 'as a rule' within an acceptable 'margin of error'. These models then serve as a basis for human, sub-jective willed action in the world. The will to will remains silently supreme because it remains unquestioned. Movements and kinds of movement in the world that cannot somehow, more or less tenuously, be traced back to willed human action, preferably based on scientific, predictive knowing, are therefore, within this historical cast of mind, inconceivable. Today's historical mind has a blind spot, an eidetic macular degeneration, that could only be remedied by rethinking and thus recasting who we are.
Insofar as the step back enabled by hermeneutic-phenomological thinking reveals an inhuman will that overpowers human will, imagining ourselves to be willed subjects whose collective will underlies movements in the world turns out to be hubris and illusion. Rather, it is we mortal humans who unknowingly serve two hitherto hidden gods representing inhuman infinite principles of kinds of movement whose thinking-through the hubris of human subjectivity has shunned.
Further reading: On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.
Tale of the Qua: A Philosophical Comedy, an Aristophanic replay of On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo, arte-fact.org, Cologne.
