Search for (the truth of) life

Extraordinary, that we humans in advanced civilization are out there in the solar system, in our galaxy and beyond, with sophisticated instruments (telescopes of various kinds, space probes, spacecraft, rovers, etc.) looking for life, all on the assumption that life somehow emerged from matter. Hence a search for the purported building-blocks of life: water, certain elements, certain compounds, etc. We'd even like to do better than just hypothesizing that life emerged from complex chemical processes by actually making it ourselves, but have so far drawn a blank. No self-respecting scientist would dare to question this preconception of 'emergent' life essential to the paradigm.

We even send out DVDs and other inscriptions just in case and in the hope that some intelligent form of life out there, just like us, will pick them up and decipher them as the product of an intelligent civilization on Earth.

Why this wild goose chase? Do we know what life itself is? And do we know who we are ourselves? It seems to be unquestionable that we are a species of animal in a long line of evolution over millennia and even millions of years, hence a kind of what. This puts us into some kind of continuity with other animals. 'Animal' is synonymous with 'living being', i.e. a being endowed with (an) anima that animates it. But what is anima? Itself a kind of being? Or only a mode or way of being of which living beings partake?

Synonyms for 'anima', the Latin translation of Greek ψυχή (psyche), include 'breath (of wind)', 'soul', 'life', 'deceased soul', 'mind', 'psyche'. For modern materialist science these are all no-go areas, since its raison d'être is to reduce, i.e. lead back, all phenomena to material causality. That is why life has to be conceived as somehow 'emerging' (spontaneously?) from material processes as self-moving matter. Non-living matter can only be moved by something else called an 'external force'.

Modern materialist science is sceptical even of this conception of life as self-moving, since it denies any spontaneity of movement. It asserts that movements of living beings that seem to be spontaneous are materially caused by hidden physical processes in the organism. It denies that animate animals have anima. Is a living being then a being only apparently self-moving and self-replicating through automatic, non-living physical processes? Quantum indeterminacy is even roped in to explain the purported illusion of spontaneous movement. After all, quanta are supposed to be physical entities, so ostensibly material causes are not abandoned for this kind of explanation.

When it comes to evolution theory, that today is very much the accepted orthodoxy in modern science, strangely, breaks in the chain of materially causality are not only possible, but necessary. For, the genetic DNA governing the reproduction of a living organism is said to spontaneously mutate. DNA itself is prone to making mistakes when it reproduces itself. Moreover, teleological cause is also clandestinely re-introduced after having been banned as an inadmissible Aristotelean residue early on in the Modern Age. The telos of living beings is quietly assumed to be the striving to keep on living. Random genetic mutations may enhance a given species' chances of survival, hence fulfilling the telos of life by chance. Loser species in this survival-of-the-fittest struggle (only fortuitously uncannily akin to familiar capitalist free-market competition?) eventually go extinct. Evolution is thus hit-or-miss, lacking rigorous material causality and is also teleological. These anomalies do not seem to unsettle evolution theory's adherents one bit.

Modern science is concerned with explaining one thing in terms of another or others to construct a theoretical model whose empirical truth (i.e. correctness) can be provisionally affirmed until it is falsified by new 'facts' that may even force a paradigm shift to a new explanatory model. This is supposed to be how truth is empirically established, without ever asking for the truth of the phenomena themselves. The scientific gaze is always looking away from the phenomena themselves, taking them to be self-understood. Science's mission is to explain movement so as to theoretically master it predictively, no matter how weirdly construed the model. If it works, it's true.

Seems we're stuck with this dogmatic thinking as long as modern science maintains its grip on our mind and thus hegemony in the world. The truth of the phenomenon of life requires another kind of thinking. My own approach in On Human Temporality is hermeneutic-phenomenological and is restricted first and foremost to us humans. After all, we are most intimately familiar with ourselves. To be alive, in the first place, is to belong to the openness of three-dimensional time. Our psyche is, in the first place, this temporal belonging, and the first determination of human life as self-moving is the free, spontaneous movement of the understanding mind within the temporal psyche. Starting with the openness of three-dimensional time already breaks with material causality because three-dimensional time itself is nothing physical. The fixation of modern scientific thinking on material, physical movement is also broken to encompass other kinds of movement altogether. The living self-movement of our physical body can only be approached step-by-step on an accretive path of thinking to develop a concept of the empsyched, and thus entimed, body. The kinds of movement of which we humans partake are not exhausted with mental and bodily movement; they include, crucially, our living sociation with each other in kinds of mutually estimative interplay through which our genuine whoness is constituted. In today's world, this mutually estimative interplay is subverted by the unbridled valorization movement of thingified value.

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

Our Brains, Our Selves by Masud Husain

Our Brains, Our Selves (winner of the 2025 Royal Society Science Book Prize, supported by the Trivedi Family Foundation)

Masud Husain, Professor of Neurology and Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow at New College, Oxford

Here an excerpt from the book's blurb: "Is it our background that creates our identities? Or our families, where we lived, how we were brought up and educated, the jobs we’ve held? Yes, all of the above, but more fundamental than any of these is our brain. This is never more evident than if we lose even a single one of our cognitive abilities. People who develop a brain disorder can find that their identity, their sense of self, can undergo dramatic changes.

Through the stories of seven of his patients, acclaimed Oxford University neurologist Masud Husain shows us how our brains create our identity, how that identity can be changed, and sometimes even be restored. ..."

How does an eminent neurologist get from noting that "People who develop a brain disorder can find that their identity, their sense of self, can undergo dramatic changes" to showing "how our brains create our identity"?? If our brain is in order, can we be assured that we will have all "our cognitive abilities"? Is the movement of the mind synonymous with cognition?  In BBC4's Start the Week on 08/11/2025 the author even claims that "the self is an emergent property of the brain". 

Whatever happened to the insight that the material brain is an organ of the self? Hence that, if the brain is damaged, the self itself has problems?

In conventional, dry logic this inversion in syllogistic argumentation is called confusing a necessary condition with a sufficient one. A necessary condition (a healthy brain) does not suffice as a sufficient condition (e.g. for generating an identity, a self). Why is this confusion absolutely necessary? Because the ostensible necessary condition is a material one, whereas our identity is a characteristic of our immaterial psyche (or soul or consciousness) with which modern, materialist-empiricist science — and neurology in particular — has insuperable difficulties coming to terms, imbued as it is with an absolute will to power over all kinds of movement, including that of the mind itself. This absolute will to power has to latch on to material causes to be effective.*

Without the dogma of material causes as ultimate causes of psychic phenomena, among others, modern science would suffer a fatal intellectual blow. Therefore it has to espouse logical nonsense. Why is it that nobody points out that modern science wilfully inverts normal logic? Because it is dangerous to do so. The dogma of a one-way causal track from matter to any other phenomenon, be it psychic, social or what-have-you, is an ontological foundation of today's historical world. Empiricist scientific methodology cannot detect the dogma because it is too shallow, being able only to rig the questions it investigates to be compliant with its preconceived dogma. 

Beware s/he who questions this shaky foundation! S/he will not be burnt at the stake on Campo dei Fiori like Bruno was in 1600, at the beginning of the Modern Age, but instead suffer the fate of being complacently ignored by the powerful institutions that be (e.g. Oxford) and by the millions they continue to induct into this topsy-turvy, tunnel-minded way of thinking. From their perspective, the questioner has to be regarded as some kind of nutter. You're a leper crying in the wilderness, and others make a wide berth around you.

Nevertheless, there remains an exit from this inverted modern world for those brave few intrepid and capable enough to revise their own beloved, quietly indoctrinated prejudices right down to the interpretation of the most elementary phenomena. Hard, slow work!

* Hence the collapse of the mind into the brain (conceptually) already in the 19th century and the incipient interpretation of brain activity as computation that today AI can emulate and surpass as we slide ever deeper into the dictatorship of the algorithmically driven cyberworld. Note that, according to the blurb, "Masud is Editor-in-Chief of Brain, a leading international journal of neurology. First established in 1878, Brain is widely considered to be the most influential publication in the field..." The second half of the 19th century is the age of declared, virulent positivism, the march of progress in the physical sciences and the emergence of controversial Darwinian evolution theory that spooked English Christianity.

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

Western mind's dementia

A philorock song about the Western mind's dementia:

Mind Change.

For those who cannot swallow the status quo and are aware (and wary) of the multiple false alternatives on offer in response to a world in crisis. A crisis is a situation demanding a decision, but we Westerners want to have our cake and eat it too. In German the equivalent is, 'Wasch mich, aber mach' mich nicht naß' (Wash me, but don't make me wet).

A major symptom of dementia is forgetfulness.

The adequate response to our Western loss of mind and its seemingly immovable complacency is to do a da capo back to the roots of philosophical thinking with Plato and Aristotle in order to revise and recast their fateful interpretations of key elementary phenomena. Our dementia resides in our being unable to see any alternative to these fateful castings, or any point in attempting them, and so we just go on thinking in the same ruts, even while the depredations of the Medium of valorization are reaching ever new heights and its latest technological accomplice, the cyberworld of algorithms bent on monetization, has been unleashed upon us.

As the famous pithy line from Wagner says: 

"Die Wunde schließt der Speer nur, der sie schlug."
"Only the spear that opened the wound can close it."

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

Mind change

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.

Extinction (COP30 in Brazil)

My commentary on COP30 in Brazil: 

Philorock song Extinction. 

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 empiricist 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, eidetic '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, globally rampaging, 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 with their opinions are hugely manipulable and dupable by propaganda in all media channels. Freedom of speech degenerates to the freedom of capital to invest in mass media.

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. The question of whoness remains hitherto incomprehensible to the modern mind. As the search for truth, philosophy's endeavour is a "leading around of the entire soul" (περιαγωγὴ ὅλης τῆς ψυχῆς) and hence a radical 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 and liberal values 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, of (basic different kinds of) movement, 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 e.g. 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.