Arendt on phallic whoness

"In the section on Action in The Human Condition, Arendt does make use of the insight into plurality to introduce the problematic of how human beings “disclose” themselves “to each other” (24:176) as “who” (24:178) in “speech and action” (Gk: le/cij, pra=cij cf. 4:25), human plurality itself being “the basic condition of both action and speech” (24:175). She sees clearly that the question regarding “who somebody is” (25:181) has to be clearly distinguished from that concerning “what he is” (25:181), where this what is explicated as “his qualities, gifts, talents, and shortcomings” (24:179) that he “shares with others like him” (25:181). The shift of focus to what, that is determined in the third person singular, has “the result that his specific uniqueness escapes us” (25:181). By contrast, who someone is, is disclosed to others through
words and deeds, especially works and deeds of love, that reveal this who’s uniqueness, which is impossible “without a name” (24:180). Bearing a unique, proper name is hence a hallmark of whoness, but Arendt does not say as much explicitly, although this lies deep in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Nor does she use the term ‘whoness’ or ‘quissity’ to mark this dimension of social interaction among human beings off from the traditional category of ‘whatness’ or ‘quiddity’. “Who” for Arendt is in any case explicitly a category or dimension of disclosure, of revelation, and that within the shared public realm in which name-bearing “men” show to each other who they are through word and deed." (p.81) 

"This inconclusiveness and uncertainty constitute for her the “frailty of human affairs” whose remedy, she claims, was sought by the Greeks in the founding of a the po/lij as the “space of appearance” (27:198) in which “men” strive for “immortal fame” (27:193), i.e. a standing presence within togetherness with others whose standingness is given by the appreciative reflections from the others. The “prototype of action for Greek antiquity” is imbued with “the so-called agonal spirit, the passionate drive to show one’s self in measuring up against others that underlies the concept of politics prevalent in the city-states” (27:194). ... The end of the po/lij, its raison d’être, is therefore to provide the space of togetherness for the contestation among whos of their phallic, standing presence through speaking and acting. Phallic whoness as a mode of presencing is therefore the essence of the polis, i.e. of worldsharing,...Action, in Arendt’s sense, is therefore, properly speaking, the interplay of whos striving for phallic, standing presence in contest with one another whose result is, hopefully, lasting, indeed immortal fame. Such interplay is a power play. The ontology of phallic whoness, of course, is only ever tantalizingly implicit in Arendt." (pp.88f) 

Read on: Digital Whoness.

Deutschlandreise

Die freiheitliche demokratische Grund-Ordnung entlang,
Man fährt von Freiheit ab — und kommt in Ordnung an.

Hiatus singularity/universality

"Insofar as there remains a kind of questioning thinking in philosophy
and art beyond or outside or beside reason consummated in a purportedly
final, settled, absolute knowledge and ethical life, i.e. a kind of thinking in the
lacuna outside reason’s ambit hitherto, more or less in conformity with an
historically given casting of being, the recognition accorded to individual
self-consciousness as citizen by the “honour through the office that it
holds, through the business it operates and through its other working
activity” (Ehre durch das Amt, das er bekleidet, durch das von ihm
betriebene Gewerbe und durch seine sonstige arbeitende Tätigkeit, Hegel Enz.
§ 432 Add.) itself becomes vain and empty and cannot satisfy vital,
singular, thinking, questioning individuality. An uncanny hiatus, be it at
first ever so slight and inconspicuous, opens up, or rather, singularity and
universality were never truly closed together in a final historical
conclusion. Even in being acknowledged abstractly in its individual human
rights and enjoying the freedom of movement of particularity (which are
the great historical achievements of the West), singular individuality
therefore remains always eerily unhoused, ‘unbelonging’ and isolated
(vereinzelt, singularized, individualized) in the midst of historically
realized, ethically cemented reason, for it is left ill at ease with the claim of
infinite, absolute reason to have attained final historical consummation in
the social institutions of substantive, consolidated, objective spirit that
purportedly constitute self-consciousness’s highest identity, its ostensibly
unsurpassable, sublime belongingness to the world. In such an ever-broken
mediation between singularity and universality concretely realized in
ethical life, historical time sputters." (p.562)  Read on in Social Ontology.

Commutative and distributive justice

There is an ontological difference between commutative and distributive justice, i.e. between the fairness of social interplay and the allocation of the goods of living, whose root lies in the Aristotelean ontology of movement itself, which distinguishes between the du/namij (potential, power) as the starting-point (a)rxh/) of a movement and its e)ntele/xeia (actualitas, literally: 'having-in-the-end') as its realized outcome. This gap is mediated by e)ne/rgeia (literally: 'at-work-ness') or the movement generated by the power itself at work. Commutative justice concerns the potential of powers — in the first place, individual powers and abilities — in interplay with each other in the sociating interchanges of life, whereas distributive justice concerns what one has in hand securely in the end. The former is oriented toward freedom of social movement which, as potential, is risky and whose justness lies in fair play, whereas the latter is oriented toward having secure possession and fulfilled needs. Hence the conceptions of social justice are fundamentally and essentially already (socio-)ontologically at loggerheads. Social justice in the commutative sense means the fairness of interplay championed by the Anglo-Saxon liberal tradition, in which the fight for social justice amounts to a fight for civil rights in the sense of overcoming discrimination against certain groups in society (e.g. women, blacks, coloureds, gays & lesbians, foreigners, etc.). On the European Continent, however, and arising from the Social-Democratic tradition born of an historic compromise with Bismarck in the 1880s, social justice means 'naturally' the distributive justice of having one's living 'needs' securely fulfilled by the social welfare state. Any social arrangement smacking of risk and insecurity is therefore accordingly 'naturally' felt to be 'unjust', and this is the prime tenet of left-wing politics. Thus a simple socio-ontological difference underlies unbeknowns, and is the main motor of, the political struggles that are being fought out interminably in modern societies. The political players themselves are blind to this socio-ontological difference in which they are ensnared. 
Further reading. Potentiality and Actuality, Negative and positive freedom, Anglophone Justice Theory, the Gainful Game and the Political Power Play,  Why social justice is a specious idea

Seneca on becoming mere appendages

Idem evenit magnorum dominis patrimoniorum: accessiones illorum et appendices sunt. Epistulae ad Lucilium LXXXVII

"The same happens to the owners of great estates: they are their accessories and appendages."

In the Modern Age this would be called inversion of subject and object. Cf. Marx on the fetishism of reified value through which we supposed human subjects become mere appendages of its movement as capital.

Are we today becoming the appendages and accessories to the bit-string torrents incessantly coursing through the ever more pervasive and invasive cyberworld?

Seneca on dying powerfully

...vita, si moriendi virtus abest, servitus est. ... nulla tibi nova est, nulla non iam odiosa ipsa satietate. Quis sit vini, quis mulsi sapor scis: nihil interest centum per vesicam tuam an mille amphorae transeant: saccus es. ... Vivere vis: scis enim? Mori times: quid porro? ista vita non mors est? ... Quomodo fabula, sic vita: non quam diu, sed quam bene acta sit, refert. Nihil ad rem pertinet quo loco desinas. Quocumque voles desine: tantum bonam clausulam inpone. Seneca Epistulae ad Lucilium LXXVII

"...life, if the power of dying is absent, is servitude. ...   Nothing is new to you; there's nothing that isn't already hateful through satiety. What the taste of wines and cordials is, you know; it makes no difference whether your bladder passes a hundred or a thousand bottles -- you're just a sack. ...You want to live -- do you know how? You fear death -- what else? Is this life not death? ...  Like a fable, it isn't important how long life is, but how well it is acted. Nothing matters where you stop. Wherever you want, stop. Only impose a good ending."

The idea of dying powerfully with a good ending is alien to us today, isn't it?

Seneca on philosophizing

Non cum vacaueris philosophandum est, sed ut philosopheris vacandum est; omnia alia neglegenda ut huic assideamus, cui nullum tempus satis magnum est, etiam si a pueritia usque ad longissimos humani aevi terminos vita producitur. Non multum refert utrum omittas philosophiam an intermittas; non enim ubi interrupta est manet, sed eorum more quae intenta dissiliunt usque ad initia sua recurrit, quod a continuatione discessit. (Seneca Ep. ad Lucilium LXXII)

"Not when you are free is the time to philosophize, but you have to free your time to philosophize; everything else is to be neglected so that we devote ourselves assiduously to that for which there is never enough time, even if life is extended from childhood to the longest extremes of human age. It doesn't matter much whether you omit philosophizing or it is intermittent, for it doesn't remain where it was when interrupted, but, in the same way as something compressed springs back, whatever lets up from continuity recurs to its initial state."

Does this message from Seneca make any sense today? Who's listening? Philosophy's not for everybody, yet everybody, unwittingly or not, lives its consequences.