This interplay is itself recognized and honoured as a ‘look’ of freedom constituting the We of civil society. This We is still an abstract kind of We because it is an immediate, spontaneous outgrowth of the abstractly universal form of freedom residing in personhood. Nevertheless, the individuals are freely bound to this interplay, belong to it, find themselves and their selves as mirror reflections in it, and so affirm the interplay itself as realization of their own freedom. Civil society is therefore not merely abstract (because of its basis in abstract personhood), but is a concrete way of social living, a way in which the universal breaks down into endlessly complex, particular parts. Moreover, as a complex, concrete form of free interplay with its own socio-ontological dignity as a freely constituted, civil We, it is a form of ethical life with its own ethos. This ethos is that of fair play. The interplay in civil society can be either fair or ugly, and civil society is only truly free insofar as its ongoing interplay is fair in the double meaning of the word as both equitable and beautiful (cf. τὸ καλόν in Plato and Aristotle).

The acknowledgement of each free individual as being free to exercise its powers, first and foremost, its abilities of whatever kind, is at the core of the ethos of fair play. This means that the will to effective power over movement and change of all kinds of the traditional, metaphysical ontology of productive movement, becomes a will to mutually estimating interplay that cannot will one-sidedly any foreseen outcome, but only an outcome acknowledged by both sides as fair. The fairness of fair play depends upon each individual player being enabled to play to the best of its abilities under fair rules of play. These abilities are not necessarily of the economic kind, and can be related to all the numberless different forms of concrete ethical life that may be constellated on the basis of particular, concrete worldviews, but always within the abstract, universal forms of personhood that admit and can enable and sustain such concreteness. This being-within means that the freely and spontaneously arising concrete Gestalten of ethical life conform with individual freedom. In the first place, however, the fairness of fair play pertains to the fair rules of play under which the players in civil society earn their living, not merely in monetary terms, but also as the fulfilment of their particular, individual talents and abilities. Such talents and abilities are shown off in the interplay and are estimated and rewarded (or ignored or disparaged), and such showing-off and estimation in a contractual context enable the individual player to play, perhaps even fulfillingly and satisfyingly.229

It is no coincidence that the fundamental conception of justice inherited from Plato and Aristotle is that of fairness (ἰσότης, meaning also equitableness and equality). For the sociating interplay of civil society to be fair and just, each player must be on an equal footing with regard to the rules of play. The ethos of fair play thus infuses civil society with its own ethics which is abstract in the sense of admitting and enabling countlessly many different forms of concrete, historical, social life in different places and different times. The state governs in the spirit of this ethos of fair play insofar as it directs its superior, acknowledged and legitimated power toward attempting to achieve that balance in the rules of interplay that allow the power play to be called fair rather than ugly. This attempt to achieve the balance of fairness in the finite, concrete world, of course, is an infinite endeavour, albeit guided steadily by a view of fairness and fair play that must be interpreted anew in countless new playing situations that arise and in each newly arriving historical time.

The liberalism spurned and despised by Heidegger therefore contains nonetheless the germ of a civil society based on the (ethos of the) free and fair, competitive power interplay among individuals, reciprocally estimating and esteeming each other’s powers and abilities, and interchanging their fruits for each other’s mutual benefit. Such competitive interplay is how free individuals as power-centres come to cast their ownmost who-stands in the mirror of the world and is how the essence of human being as free concretizes itself in the world. Liberalism is thus — contra Heidegger — the very soil in which the grounding of human being as Dasein can properly gain root because Dasein and Mitsein, thought as a shared belonging together in the open 3D-temporal clearing of history that enables beings to be what they are and human beings to be who they are, corresponds to the interplay among human beings who are who they are only by virtue of this mutually mirroring and estimating interplay of their individual powers. Far from being substantial subjects in standing presence, the truth of human being as free is the competitively playful, self-interested, vieing among inhabitants who are able to bear the abstract freedom of personhood with its many degrees of freedom, taking advantage of them to shape their own existences. They concretize their lives in freely given commitments to others and within forms of ethical life to which they have become accustomed and affirm, whilst hovering over and affirming also the unfathomableness of the power interplay itself, fashioning their own singularity out of this fathomless interplay of powers, and enduring the irreconcilable tornness of the primal split between singularity and universality.