6.3.4Injustice of capitalist wage-labour per se?

A further possibility for injustice in the relationship between capital and labour is the famous “double freedom” (Marx) of the labourer, namely, “that as a free person he has disposal over his labour power as his commodity, and on the other hand that he does not have any other commodities to sell, that he is well and truly free of all the things necessary to realize his labour power” (...frei in dem Doppelsinn, daß er als freie Person über seine Arbeitskraft als seine Ware verfügt, daß er andrerseits andre Waren nicht zu verkaufen hat, los und ledig, frei ist von allen zur Verwirklichung seiner Arbeitskraft nötigen Sachen. MEW23:183). In short, the working class is excluded from ownership of the means of production and is forced to sell labour power in order to live. The labourer’s freedom is said to be only formal, i.e. only in sight, because under the conditions of the free exchange of commodities between formally free and equal persons, the capitalist as the wealthier owner of the conditions of production has the upper hand in dictating the terms of the wage contract since his wealth makes him more independent in wage bargaining.

It has been observed not only by Marx, but also by the ‘bourgeois sociologist’, Max Weber, that “the formal right of a worker to enter a labour contract of any content whatsoever with any entrepreneur whatsoever does not practically signify for someone looking for work the least freedom in shaping his own working conditions and does not guarantee him in itself any influence whatsoever on these working conditions”. (Das formale Recht eines Arbeiters, einen Arbeitsvertrag jeden beliebigen Inhalts mit jedem beliebigen Unternehmer einzugehen, bedeutet für den Arbeitsuchenden praktisch nicht die mindeste Freiheit in der eigenen Gestaltung der Arbeitsbedingungen und garantiert ihm an sich auch keinerlei Einfluß darauf.101)

From the outset it must be kept clearly in view that the question concerning the justice or injustice of the capitalist wage-labour relation as a socioontological question is not, and cannot be, the question concerning the injustice of factual relations in the world that are conceived as unjust within the hermeneutic cast of an historical age. The socio-ontological question must be a one concerning the essence of the capitalist wage-labour relation, not the question concerning whether reality corresponds to its essence. The fact that there are endless injustices in the world only shows that an understanding of what justice and injustice are enables factual injustice to be visible for understanding in the first place and therefore also on all levels contestable. When, for example, Marx graphically points out and depicts with copious empirical documentation the “despotic” (despotisch, MEW23:351) nature of the nineteenth century English factory system and its cruel conditions of work, this is understood by the reader as injustice only because the reader already has an understanding of what justice, what fairness is, an understanding itself cast in the forge of historical struggle over ideas.

The socio-ontological question, therefore, is whether the capitalist wage-labour relation is inherently, i.e. essentially unjust in the whatness of what it is. Such a question cannot be answered by empirical investigation. If it were essentially unjust measured against an adequate socio-ontological concept, as developed in this study, then social revolution to overthrow capitalist relations of private ownership and production would be justified and necessary. The relation between capital and wage-labour is a sociation between whos, not whats, because both the capitalist employer(s) and the waged employee(s) are whos who perforce engage in an interplay of estimation with each other. Such mutual estimation has many aspects, including the employer’s appreciation of the employee’s powers and abilities, the employee’s appreciation of the employer’s offer of wages and working conditions, the sizing-up, i.e. estimating, on both sides of their respective bargaining positions in the current market situation in the economy, the employee’s assessment of the employer’s offer for enhancing the employee’s skills, the employer’s assessment of the power of the employee’s trade union or professional association, the employee’s estimate of alternative opportunities for employment by other employers, etc. etc.

The interplay of mutual estimation between capitalist employer and employee is therefore two-sidedly a reciprocal appreciation of each other’s potentials, on the one hand, and, on the other, a reciprocal sizing-up of each other’s bargaining power over remuneration and working conditions. The latter renders the interplay as a power struggle that has the potential to turn antagonistic. Conversely, an agreement can be reached on either an individual or collective basis about conditions of employment with which both sides are satisfied. In this case, the interchange between capital and wage-labour is fair and equitable and commutative justice is satisfied. There is nothing inherent in, i.e. essential to, the interplay between capital and wage-labour on a collective basis that necessarily prevents fairness and equitability being achieved in the bargain struck, even when fierce power struggles precede resolution of the dispute. Such power struggles are part of that social movement called bargaining process in which each side flexes its muscles, i.e. exercises its respective powers, demonstrably, thus enabling each side to estimate the power of the other to assert its demands.

In particular, the struggle to improve working conditions, and so lessen the purported ‘despotism’ of the capitalist employer over the wage labourers, is only possible because those working conditions are measured against acceptable, just, fair working conditions, i.e. the phenomenon of working conditions is viewed against the conception of commutative justice of the power interplay between capital and wage-labour. Such commutative justice that shows itself as an idea to the social actors is the socio-ontological beingness of the interplay, i.e. its hermeneutic interpretation as the mode of being of the phenomenon of sociating interplay. Pointing out the factual existence, say, of miserable sweatshops can readily be admitted to be unjust in view of the idea of commutative justice and is no argument against capitalist wage-labour per se, but only a forceful argument in the context of ongoing power plays that these sweat-shop conditions be changed for the better under the guidance of an understanding of what constitutes just, fair working conditions. Reality is then brought to approximate its socio-ontological concept.

Insofar as fair conditions of employment can be struggled for within existing capitalist employment relations and attained historically without overthrowing capitalism, it shows that the socio-ontological concept of the power interplay between capital and wage-labour is congruent with the socio-ontological concept of commutative justice. Ongoing struggles over the enhancement of conditions of employment show that the power plays between capital and wage-labour never come to a final resolution in some kind of social ἐντελέχεια. Even gains made in establishing good employment conditions can also be subsequently lost. These ongoing struggles, however, are always conceived against the yardstick of commutative justice. The capitalist side of the employers, too, can appeal to this yardstick in struggles with, say, powerful trade unions whose power, through bloody-mindedness, can even destroy a capitalist employer or an entire industry. In this sense, commutative justice as a guiding socio-ontological idea or ‘sight’ kept continually in view by the struggling parties (as well as the public in general) cuts both ways. Hence, for instance, ‘propaganda wars’ may be fought out in the media over the justness or otherwise of workers’ or employers’ demands.

But is the capitalist wage-labour unjust in other respects according to a socio-ontological concept of justice as an interplay among whos? Is accepting a job and its conditions of employment per se an injustice? Is it an injustice per se that I subordinate my will to a capitalist employer, or is it an injustice only under certain factual conditions of employment that I can more or less adequately specify which constitute a commutative injustice? What constitutes an injustice in this context, of course, is not merely a matter of whether a practice is legal or illegal measured against statutes of legislation. As Marx and countless others have copiously pointed out, the ‘bourgeois’ legal system has historically ridden roughshod over workers’ legitimate rights, and it is easy also today to point to factual instances of the abuse of legitimate workers’ rights. Legality and legitimacy, legislation and right, factual injustice and essential injustice, however, must not be confused with one another. Here is not the place to discuss unjust legislation, because as yet we have no socio-ontological concept of government and state power, which will be developed in later chapters.

At present it is to be considered whether it is an injustice per se under a concept of justice other than that of commutative justice that the individual worker has to hire out his or her labour power to some company or other to earn a living and is not in a position to dictate just how he or she would like to work? Or is it a (commutative) injustice only if the factual working conditions themselves are grossly unacceptable, i.e. unfair and unjust? If factual working conditions are unjust in the sense that they contravene the law, then the judiciary can correct this injustice, but this does not concern us for the moment. If factual working conditions are unjust in the sense that they do violence to an understanding of commutative justice whilst at the same time being in compliance with the state’s positive law, then it is positive law itself that does not correspond to the concept of justice, and this law can be changed, most often through some kind of socio-political struggle to have that law changed. Through this movement of power play, reality comes closer to the socio-ontological concept of justice, which itself serves as yardstick.

Hence I return to the question whether it is an injustice per se for a worker to have to earn a living by hiring out his or her ability to labour to a capitalist entrepreneur and having to accept ‘alien’ working conditions which that worker is not able to posit him or herself, or only to a limited extent, in the preceding bargaining interplay over the employment contract? Since the working conditions are posited by another, namely, the company or its managing entrepreneur, the working conditions themselves are in this neutral sense ‘alien’, i.e. largely imposed by another, so there is justification in talking of an essential alienation, i.e. exposure to the otherness of another’s will, in the capitalist wage-labour relation owing to the whatness of what it is.102 For in accepting employment and hiring out my power to labour I am subject to the will of the capitalist employer within a more or less heirarchically structured organization. But is this alienation pernicious? Does it amount to an essential injustice that contravenes the socio-ontological concept of commutative or some other kind of justice? Or is it part of social human being itself to have to accept conditions of earning a living that one has not posited through one’s own free will?

It has been shown in preceding chapters that social being itself in sociating interplays among whos is itself a metabolism of myriad power plays among the many actors. This implies that the individual will that wills one life-movement or another is never an absolute positing, but always relative to the others who likewise will their own self-movements in leading their respective lives. The individual as always already sociated can never be autonomous. Even an absolute, despotic ruler does not have absolute power to subjugate all and sundry to his will, despite all the show that is made of the exercise of despotic power. An apparently absolute, despotic ruler is most often an entirely suspicious, paranoid ruler, for he knows that, despite all measures taken to nip subversion, from whatever quarter, in the bud, the absoluteness of his ostensible absolute power is ultimately a sham. For members of society in general it therefore cannot be the case that having to subordinate oneself to the will of another to a greater or lesser extent is a violation of the justness of the movement of sociating interplay. Only the total surrender to another as his or her property entirely negates and subordinates the will of an individual as the slave of another who is his or her master. Such total subjugation is indeed unjust when viewed against the idea or ‘look’ of justice conceived as the power interplay between and among players, each of whom is a free starting-point for his or her own life-movements. Therefore, endangering the lives of employees or impairing their health are unjust because commutative power interplays among human beings who are the sources of their own freedom of movement presupposes and requires in the name of justice that their very life and limb are not endangered by the capitalist employer. The fundamental concept of justice is therefore that of commutative justice, i.e. of fair play.

If, then, it is untenable to hold that every individual has the ‘inalienable’ right to determine its own working conditions without being interfered with by ‘alien’ influences, i.e. by others, then the question becomes, under what conditions alien working conditions are unjust. Are they essentially unjust if the worker does not have a ‘say’ in determining his or her own working conditions or mode of working? Is this ‘say’ sufficient merely through the fact that, as a free person, the worker is able to choose among the jobs on offer or negotiate with the potential employer on working conditions to some extent? After all, the prevailing labour market conditions at any given time allow a greater or lesser degree of leeway when striking a bargain over the conditions of employment. Or does this ‘say’ have to extend to co-determination of working conditions in some kind of internal company set-up in which the employees collectively, through their representatives, are able to shape working conditions in ongoing negotiations with the employers? Or is this possibility, historically realized above all by German social democracy, optional with regard to the question of commutative justice? Conceptions of fair and equitable conditions of employment are highly malleable historically and are themselves shaped by historical power struggles, but they are not arbitrary. Conversely, historical power struggles themselves are waged only in the light of conceptions, i.e. ideas, ‘looks’, of fair and equitable conditions of employment.

That competitive economic life is a struggle, a continual power play and does not guarantee success for all participants, but on the contrary produces also losers, does not speak for its injustice per se. Power interplays on the employment market that are rigged by prejudicial attitudes against certain social groups do merit being branded unjust because such attitudes are a refusal to properly estimate and esteem the powers of individuals with certain social characteristics as equally free players. Prejudice makes blind and offends the concept of commutative justice insofar as the players in the power play of mutual estimation are prejudicially underestimated and underesteemed. Furthermore, those who are unable to fend for themselves in the competitive economy, either temporarily or permanently, and for whatever reason, need help and charity from others. Charity itself, however, is not a matter of justice, and there is no right to charitable assistance. The issue of support for those who cannot help themselves will be discussed in connection with the social welfare state (Chapter 6.5).103

A further twist in trying to discover an essential injustice in capitalist wage-labour is to point to the capitalist’s ‘privilege’ in being at all in a position to hire employees. Why should some be in a position to do so while the ‘masses’ are forced to sell their hides? Apart from the envy that is blatantly apparent in such a claim, it amounts ultimately to an abolition of the right to hire employees altogether for, if everyone is in a position to hire employees and exercises this power, where are employees to be found at all? If everyone is potentially and potently a capitalist employer of wage-labour, then no one is. However, considering that free individuals of their own free volition shun the option of becoming an enterpreneuer, are perfectly willing to work for someone else, and can even find such paid employment entirely rewarding in all senses of the word, it is hard to see how the capitalist employment relation could be essentially unjust coming about as it does through a mutual estimation of powers. Rather, this kind of critique of capitalism is a lazy one driven by envy and the conviction that one has been badly treated by life; in short, it is driven by resentment. Moreover, the role of the entrepreneurial capitalist is itself a kind of occupation with its own not inconsiderable skills, effort, responsibilities and especially risks that is not for everyone and which deserves its own reward. The entrepreneurial role in a capitalist economy is one deserving its own estimation and appreciation.

Hence on all scores it cannot be maintained that the power interplay between capitalist and waged employee is essentially unjust. It is not based on an essential exploitation of the workers’ labour power through the extraction of surplus-value; nor is it unjust per se for workers to have to submit to the alien command of the capitalist to earn a living; nor is it unjust because some (the entrepreneurs) are able and willing to employ workers while others are not. On the contrary, the abstract social relations of capitalism are so Protean that even satisfying, rewarding working conditions can be achieved in general for the working class along with wages supporting even a comfortable standard of living. Since the multifarious power plays in a capitalist economy, including those over wages and conditions of employment, are ongoing, a comfortable standard of living attained can also be eroded, but this does not put into question the socio-ontological conception of commutative justice itself. And it must be kept in mind that worker satisfaction and the general standard of living are not the touchstone when considering the justice or injustice per se of wage-labour in capitalist sociative interplay.

I now leave the Marxian context of the justice or otherwise of so-called ‘capitalist relations of production’ assessed against the foil of a conception of commutative justice based on the socio-ontology of mutually estimating power interplay to consider the seminal Aristotelean concept of distributive justice. This will enable us to see whether today’s still very popular and pervasive idea and ideal of social justice in its European, social-democratic, redistributive sense, makes sense or whether its apparent self-evidence in many quarters needs to be shaken thoroughly by socio-ontological interrogation.

6.4The just distribution of the goods of living

I return (cf. section 6.2 above) to consider more deeply that second kind of Aristotelean justice, viz. distributive justice, concerned with the apportionment of the goods (and bads) of living in accordance with just desert. Whereas the socio-ontological character of commutative justice as fair play can be read off the sociating interplay of mutual estimation between whos (the basic sociating movement of society itself), the social movement of distributing goods according to desert has another mode of being altogether as another kind of social power interplay among whos — including the whoness of a superior instance of power — with different criteria of estimation. Distribution (allotment, apportionment) of the goods of living, whether material or immaterial) requires an apportioning instance that distributes according to a criterion or criteria of worthiness. Here I will consider first only the apportionment of material goods, leaving the consideration of that other major good of living, esteem itself, to a later section (cf. 6.7).

In the case of a small group such as a family, the pater- or materfamilias may be the superior apportioning instance who allots goods to the family’s children on the basis of a criterion of equality. Each child is to be treated evenhandedly without favouring one over the other in order, especially, not to generate envy among siblings. This kind of parental ‘distributive justice’ may well work well for a family composed of children who are not yet able to freely lead their own lives, but becomes problematic for any larger group or a whole society of free individuals.

First of all it has to be considered who is to be the superior apportioning instance. If the group’s general meeting is to have this role, then it must continually deliberate and decide on just distribution to individuals in the group. If this meeting’s resolutions are not to be arbitrary and capricious, varying from meeting to meeting, certain criteria for distribution must serve to decide apportionment. In larger groups or a whole society, the superior apportioning instance must be some kind of standing executive or government that is recognized as such a legitimate superior instance, usually by virtue of having been elected by the group’s or society’s members or, in yesteryear, by virtue of an hereditary line of descent. The phenomenon of legitimacy in connection with government will be considered later in Chapter 10. Here it is only important to see that distributive justice requires some kind of superior instance with the power to exercise over the social movement of apportioning to individuals (or groups thereof) on the basis of some criterion or criteria. Each individual has to be estimated by the superior instance of social power as to his or her deservedness for an allotment of goods. Conversely, the individual whos estimate the superior apportioning power as legitimate.

Hence, in the case of distributive justice, the horizontal power interplays between and among the players in mutually estimating each other no longer suffices, as it does in the case of commutative justice, for conceptualizing its mode of social being. Whereas commutative justice derives from the mutual estimating interplay among formal equals itself being fair and equitable, requiring correction by a superior judge only in the case of an infringement of fair play, in the situation of distributive justice, a ‘vertically’ superior instance of power is required from the outset to estimate apportionment and direct distribution according to certain criteria. If the apportionment is to be estimated as just, the criterion or criteria must not be arbitrary or capricious. This would be the case, for instance, with a despotic ruler whose hold on power were apparently so firm that he could ride roughshod with impunity over his subjects without regard to whether they esteemed him as legitimate ruler.

The originary sociating power interplays between and among the members of society estimating each other as whos according to their individual powers and abilities are now complemented by a power interplay between the members of society and its superior apportioning instance whose exercise of power is the actual social movement of distribution. Let us call this superior apportioning instance for the sake of convenience the state. The estimating power interplay between state and the members of society who are the state’s subjects, involving as it does mutual estimation, requires a socio-ontology of whoness to bring to light the beingness of this peculiar being, viz. the estimating power interplay itself, itself a kind of social movement.

The next question concerns the criterion or criteria for just distribution. The four criteria named by Aristotle, namely, free birth, wealth, nobility of birth and ability/ excellence (cf. section 6.2 above) must be supplemented by a fourth from modern times: that of neediness. First of all it must be noted that these criteria are incompatible with each other and therefore incoherent.104 Nobility of birth contradicts the equality of free birth (as a potential) and is therefore inapplicable in our modern democratic times of so-called universal human rights. Similarly, wealth as a criterion offends the equality of human beings, each of whom is the source of his or her own freedom of movement in casting and shaping a life. The criterion of ability and excellence already comes into play with the power interplays of mutual estimation among the members of society themselves and therefore the justness of these interplays can be decided already according to the criterion of commutative justice, which is fair play. There remain only two modern criteria: equality and neediness.

Equality itself is a problematic criterion, for it is ambiguous. Does the equality refer to each individual who as a (potential) power-source of its own freedom of movement, or to the outcomes of such freely exercised movements in the power interplays of mutual estimation with others? This is the socio-ontological difference between power (δύναμις) and its final presence (ἐντελέχεια). If the criterion of equality applies to the outcome of fair power interplays, then this amounts to the abolition of commutative justice altogether, for, as has been shown, the outcomes of power interplays among many whos are uncertain and unpredictable, so that an outcome of equality (say, of income earned) is merely fortuitous and not the rule. This would offend the criterion of realized equality if it is to be the criterion for distributive justice with the upshot that the outcomes of free and fair power interplays would have to be continually revised, i.e. levelled, by the state. (The modern welfare state actually does practise such continual revision of the outcomes of interplay; cf. the next section.) This would thoroughly dampen, if not extinguish, the incentive to engage in the power interplay of mutual estimation to earn income at all on the basis of the esteeming of one’s own powers and abilities by their being estimated in the universal reified measure of value, i.e. money, that mediates the interplay. Moreover, it would turn freedom as freedom of movement, that is, the movement of mutually estimating power interplays, into a sham.

Therefore, if at all, only a criterion of equality of starting-points, of potentials can be considered as candidate for a criterion for distributive justice. Accordingly, the state would have to ensure equality of opportunity for each member of society by enabling each individual to first develop his or her full potential for the power interplays of society. Such a conception of distributive justice is known under another name: the justice of equality of opportunity, and this is in line with conceiving freedom socio-ontologically originarily as the freedom of each individual to be the starting-point for his or her own freely decided life-movements without, however, guaranteeing successful realization. In this conception, freedom is conceived as it is, namely, as a characteristic of the individual potential or power that can initiate sociating movement. By contrast, it quickly becomes plain that to conceive freedom as a characteristic of realized outcomes is socio-ontologically incoherent, especially when this freedom is supposed to consist of equal outcomes.

Since the justice of equality of opportunity is not known under the name of distributive justice, I will leave it out of further consideration. Such justice implies the necessity that the superior power instance of the state apportion the wealth of society in such a way that each member of society has equal opportunity in starting to cast and shape his or her life. This applies first and foremost to the state’s providing a good education to each and every child, each of whom is an as-yet inchoate starting-point for leading and shaping a life. Such a right in the name of justice is uncontroversial today in the West, and also in other parts of the world, although its realization has by no means been achieved. And given the enormous individual differences and the differences in social situation within any society, it is plain that equality of opportunity is unattainable. Nevertheless, the ‘look’ of equality of opportunity is today firmly established for the mind as just and as such serves to guide the sociating movement, especially the political power struggles, in society. This is expressed, for instance, in saying that it is just to ‘give everybody a fair go’ or ‘a fair crack of the whip’. Such equality of opportunity is often conceived as the ‘look’ of a level playing field, an image adopted from sport where its meaning is plain. The justness of a competitive game of sport is seen to lie in equal starting-conditions of play for both sides, so that the game’s final score can be extremely uneven and yet is accepted as entirely fair. The competitive struggle of the play, too, may be extremely tough and relentless without impairing the game’s being perceived as fair. Such perceptions are not merely ‘subjective’ vis-à-vis some criterion of ‘objective fairness’ because fairness itself is only ever an hermeneutic conceiving-as... A subject/ object split makes no sense whatever socio-ontologically.

Accordingly, the outcomes of the competitive power plays of economic life are not subject to a criterion of justice so long as starting-conditions, i.e. the opportunities, are fair and equitable. Potentiality is given precedence of final actuality, as it must in any consideration of freedom. The power interplay of economic life does indeed result in a factual distribution of social wealth and total social income, and in general this factual distribution will be far from equal. Great discrepancies in the factual distribution of income and wealth within a society become problematic when those on the lower rungs have to struggle to make ends meet. They then do not see that they are ‘living well’ and become resentful against the very wealthy, in particular, whose lives with regard to income-earning, at least, are carefree. Moreover, the wealthy have more reified social power (cf. section 6.7 below) to throw around. This is not a question of distributive justice but of the political prudence of engendering a social whole in which each member, through exertion of his or her own powers, is able to lead a more or less satisfying life outside a state of destitution.

6.5Redistributive social justice, the welfare state and the alleviation of poverty

This leaves the sole remaining candidate for a criterion of distributive justice, neediness, to be considered. Accordingly, the needy poor are said to be deserving of a distribution of goods from the state which must estimate these needy as needy and therefore deserving. Such a state is called a social welfare state and distributive justice is renamed (i.e. misnamed) redistributive social justice. This is then no longer a power interplay of mutual estimation between equals, but a submission of the needy to estimation by a superior instance of power as needy. The needy subject has to be assessed by the state as needy in the state’s estimation according to criteria of neediness that are laid down in multiple regulations intended to define a neediness profile. To be able to do this, the state first requires the wealth resources to allot to the needy, which it must raise by taxation (or levies, which is taxation under another name) in order to redistribute the wealth of society. Hence such distributive justice is, strictly speaking, redistributive justice. Secondly, the state requires a bureaucracy to carry out the work of assessing the needy as to their (level of) neediness and allotting welfare benefits.

In modern Western societies, social welfare is provided by a state apparatus run by a bureaucracy according to government policy, administrative law and myriad regulations. The bureaucracy is an organized, organizational will of the state. As such a concrete realization of a purported (redistributive) social justice that is set up to deliver social benefits, the social welfare system is firstly subject to the criterion of its effectivity in achieving the envisaged just redistribution of wealth. Secondly, it is itself by no means immune to unjust actions perpetrated either by itself or its clients. In contrast to contractually based economic intercourse which is splintered into myriads of individual transactions, a bureaucratic apparatus is an organization run according to a plan and a policy laid down by government and legislation. The apparatus is supposed to function like an entire, unified organism with the will of the government and the legislature as its controlling head and many hierarchically organized bureaucrats constituting its executive administrative organs.

A complexly articulated organizational will is inevitably retarded in its execution by its multiple articulations through the wills of a multiplicity of bureaucrats acting according to countless regulations laid down by administrative law. This could be called the bureaucratic retardation in the realization of a practical conception of redistributive social justice as envisaged by government and legislature. Such bureaucratic retardation is the first appearance in this study of the phenomenon of the inertia of social movement (about which more later; cf. Chapter 7.9 and Chapter 9.8) which is to be discovered everywhere in social life. In the case of the practical institution and realization of a conception of (re)distributive social justice through the state’s social welfare apparatus, the lack of efficiency may be so great as to invert such purported social justice practically into absurd injustice such as self-contradictory ‘catch 22’ regulations or the capriciousness of bureaucrats. The inertia and inefficiency of this organized state will calls for comparision with sociation via the commutations in civil society mediated by reified value in its various forms, its principal one being money. But this is a secondary issue compared with that of the purported justness per se of redistributive social justice (see below).

As shown in Chapter 4.5, need itself is not originary but arises only from the usages within which the members of society customarily live their lives. Since there are many customary usages, those usages must be posited and defined which are deemed to give rise to socially acknowledged needs for which a needy person can apply for welfare benefits. This itself is a politically contentious issue giving rise to political power struggles within the state over which needs are to be estimated as deserving over against those estimated to be undeserving of being acknowledged as falling under the criterion of neediness. According to the criterion of state-defined neediness, redistributive justice is to apportion goods, generally in the form of monetary welfare benefit. A multitude of needs arising from very disparate usages must therefore compete for acknowledgement as needs within the profile of neediness defined bureaucratically by the state. In states where there is democratic government (cf. Chapter 13), there are interminable political struggles over the definition of neediness in the name of redistributive social justice in which there are no clear criteria but only political convictions and electoral weightings. What defines neediness therefore becomes more or less arbitrary and along with it the very justness of redistributive social justice. The socio-ontological concept of distributive justice therefore remains vague, since the goal of redistribution of income for the sake of satisfying need also remains nebulous. Neediness itself defies clear definition and along with it, the satisfaction of need as well, which turns out to be insatiability itself that continually pushes the social welfare apparatus to the limits. The nebulousness of need has led to some critics of redistributive social justice calling it simply a “mirage”.105

It is perhaps because of this nebulousness that Thomas Hobbes altogether restricts the notion of justice to free interchanges between persons, viz. “That men performe their Covenants made”106. The notion of an in-jointness of the social whole in its distribution of the goods of living (including, negatively, the distribution of the unavoidable adversities of living) goes back at least to Plato who, in his Politeia, describes the just polis as a polis in which its various main parts consisting of the rulers, the guardians and the commoners are in joint, i.e. are in the proper, balanced relation to each other in that each part fulfils its proper function in the functioning of the whole of society. Society is conceived as an organism, a conception which feeds down through the tradition to understanding society as a kind of organization organized for ends executed by organs functionally designed for that purpose. This leaves no room for the metabolism of civil society as a free — and therefore unpredictable — interplay among many players not under supreme control by a superior instance, whether it be a despot or some kind of totalitarian or all-caring social-democratic state. There is therefore an essential socio-ontological difference in the kinds of social movement (roughly: horizontal interplay vs. vertical, heirarchically controlled movement) in a state that lays down by law the rules of play for free commutations among free players, on the one hand, from one, on the other, that surveils and intervenes in these commutations to impose its own aims, in particular, according its self-posited conception of redistributive social justice.107

The very aim of satisfying need through redistribution is in truth a delusion insofar as need is always outflanked by the endlessness of human desire for more and more for the sake of living well (cf. Chapter 4.1). The satisfaction of need assumes on the contrary that neediness is finite and therefore somehow definable. This delusion regarding the satisfaction of need is entrenched, in particular, in all socialist and communist thinking, which has long seeped also into social-democratic political thinking widespread in so-called liberal-democratic Western societies today. Insofar as neediness and its alleviation become a matter of (redistributive) social justice, the fulfilment of needs itself becomes a right that citizens can then ‘rightly’ claim as an entitlement. These claims then ‘naturally’ grow under the impetus of endless human desire masked as need. And because this right putatively applies to everybody, it is then seen in the ‘look’, i.e. the idea, of a universal human right.

Since, however, the superior instances of power administering such redistributive social justice are nation states, the universal claim to the status of human right is pruned to that of the right of each citizen of a given nation state to be cared for by that particular state — to the exclusion of foreigners who are not estimated and esteemed to be legitimately needy in the name of social justice, but are deemed to be ‘social welfare refugees’ by those citizens feeling threatened by the claims of outsiders. Such fears can be fanned by skilful political demagogues. The definition of neediness in this sense, too, i.e. whether redistributive social justice is national or universal, thus remains an issue for endless political contestation.

The very name, social justice, is itself a usurpation and a pleonasm,108 for all justice is per se social, since it concerns how people live together in society and, in this context, the primary meaning of justice is commutative, i.e. that the commutations between individual whos in the sense of sociating power interplays of mutual estimation be fair and equitable.

Proclaiming so-called ‘freedom from want’ as a right in the name of social justice is itself politically motivated to lend weight to the claims of the needy in one sense or another to get more from the state. Poverty in a society is indeed a problem whose causes are complex and manifold, and its alleviation remains a continual challenge, for social living as a whole suffers when a significant minority is chronically unable to take care of itself. State welfare benefits can be important in tiding those over who are temporarily unable to fend for themselves, but a genuine alleviation of poverty depends on enabling the poor to gain a foothold in the income-earning interplay of mutual estimation itself. This is a tall order, but in this way they come to stand on their own feet and do not have to rely on state hand-outs. Such welfare benefits on the whole are in any case demeaning, for they demand that the prospective welfare recipient first subject him- or herself to the state’s bureaucratic estimation as to whether that individual fulfils the state’s definition of needy.

Far from encouraging the needy to take heart and learn to stand on their own feet in the power interplay of a capitalist economy, state welfare tends to further a dependency of its clients on the welfare state.109 This constitutes a major contradiction for civil society and the state, ubiquitously felt in political life: on the one hand, to keep the stimulus of individual self-interest sharp in giving incentive for independent, self-reliant individuals to provide for themselves through their own efforts, by developing and exercising their own abilities, thus building self-esteem, and, on the other, to care for the unsuccessful or unwilling players in the often tough and unpleasant competitive game, thus removing the motivation to care for themselves.

This tendency to encourage dependency is all the more the case when state welfare is seen as a right in the name of social justice. The ‘look’ of (redistributive) social justice as a socio-ontological idea is therefore itself thoroughly deceptive, although attractive to many, like a mirage in the desert. This ‘look’ is also antithetical to freedom, for freedom consists in the first place in each individual who being a starting-point freely deciding on his or her own moves in the sociating interplay. As Aristotle puts it, a free society consists in “free and equal persons sharing their lives in order to be independent selves” (κοινωνῶν βίου πρὸς τὸ εῖναι αὐτάρκειαν, ἐλευθέρων καὶ ἴσων Eth. Nic. V 1134a27)

The state’s helping the needy to get out of poverty is thoroughly in line with a socio-ontological conception of freedom as free and fair power interplay. The alleviation of poverty itself, however, is not a question of ‘social justice’ but of improving the social whole through enabling the poor to gain independence and thus also self-esteem. Charity, too, conceived as caring for one’s neighbour, is a good of living as a helping hand, but not a right that can be claimed in the name of so-called social justice.

Another perspective on poverty resulting from the uncertainties of the competitive interplay in economic life is that of insuring against unwanted events such as unemployment or sickness via the medium of reified value. Insurance works by spreading the risk of certain unforeseen events happening. The insurance premia paid to an insurance company by an individual can be a viable alternative to having ever to rely on the state to acknowledge one’s own neediness at a given juncture. Likewise, individual ‘rainy-day’ saving along with financial nouse and prudence in handling one’s own financial affairs serves as a buffer to the vicissitudes of income-earning. Both are aspects of a free individual’s responsibility to take care of him- or herself. Both these alternatives are also superior to the state’s doling out welfare benefits insofar as they do not demand submission to a superior instance to ascertain and acknowledge neediness, but require only that the individual conclude suitable insurance contracts or make suitable investments in advance for a rainy day.

6.6Esteem, honour and fame in social life with a focus on Aristotle and Schopenhauer

Groß ist nun, was für groß gilt; allein das heißt, daß letzten Endes auch das groß ist, was durch tüchtige Reklame dafür ausgeschrien wird, und es ist nicht jedermann gegeben, diesen innersten Kern der Zeit ohne Beschwernis zu schlucken ...

Robert Musil

Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften I Tl. 2 Kap. 96

Now great is what is held to be great, but this means that ultimately also that is great which is cried out to be such by competent advertising, and not everyone is able to swallow this innermost core of the times without trouble ...

By way of contrast, how do things stand with that other exemplary good to be socially distributed, namely esteem and honour, reputation and regard, social standing, public office and prestige, and the justice of such distribution? That such things are goods of living at all indicates that estimation by others as who one is constitutes part of living well in society. In fact, as has been shown in Chapter 6.1, the mutual esteeming of each other’s abilities is at the centre of the interplay called social being, i.e. the movement sui generis of sociation. The Greek name for these ‘values’ is τιμή or εὐδοξία.

Aristotle says already in the first book of the Nicomachean Ethics that the esteem in which one is held by others cannot be regarded as the good life and as the end of living together in community, “for it seems to reside more in the ones esteeming than in the one esteemed, whereas we inkle that the good is something inherent and cannot be taken away. Furthermore, they [men in practical life] seem to pursue estimation in order to assure themselves of their own good merit.” (οἱ δὲ χαρίεντες καὶ πρακτικοὶ τιμήν· τοῦ γὰρ πολιτικοῦ βίου σχεδὸν τοῦτο τέλος. φαίνεται δ' ἐπιπολαιότερον εἶναι τοῦ ζητουμένου· δοκεῖ γὰρ ἐν τοῖς τιμῶσι μᾶλλον εἶναι ἢ ἐν τῷ τιμωμένῳ, τἀγαθὸν δὲ οἰκεῖόν τι καὶ δυσαφαίρετον εἶναι μαντευόμεθα. ἔτι δ’ ἐοίκασι τὴν τιμὴν διώκειν ἵνα πιστεύσωσιν ἑαυτοὺς ἀγαθοὺς εἶναι· I v. 1095b25) Since men are esteemed because of their ability (ἀρετή), and not conversely, Aristotle concludes that “one can assume that ability or excellence is the end of life in the polity rather than honour” (ἀν τις τέλος τοῦ πολιτικοῦ βίου ταύτην ὑπολάβοι 1095b31). Life in the polity for Aristotle revolves around the pole of having (ἔχειν, ἕξις) excellent ability, i.e. of habitually practised good usages that one has acquired and has, rather than honour and esteem, which is a (mere?) reflection from others in their estimation.

Accordingly, the issue of the just distribution of standing in high estimation among the members of the community can only be a secondary one that derives from the ability and excellence that is lived habitually in the usages of everyday life. The distribution of such high estimation should therefore be made according to the worth of a person, and this worth is measured by ability and excellence, i.e. if it is to be just, the distribution of honours and public esteem, must be proportional to each individual’s respective ability and excellence inherent in themselves. It must be proportional to the individual merit that entitles to one’s share or μέρος. Moreover, since being means ultimately presencing,110 in order to be estimated, an individual’s powers and abilities must presence and show themselves in the open temporal clearing in which all sociation takes place in order to be, even if, and especially their estimation in society at large is contested or their excellence is not appreciated at all, but rather ignored.

Indeed, since honour and esteem for an individual depend upon those honouring and esteeming, and thus upon the regard in which they hold the one esteemed, and regard is nothing other than a kind of opinion and view depending upon how the esteemed person appears to and is appreciated by those esteeming, the honour and esteem accorded to an individual is an extremely fickle and unstable thing infected also with distortion and illusion. Whereas the ability and excellence of an individual shows itself and is manifest in the life practices of that individual, and the worth of a person is measured in the first place by their own ability as they show themselves off as themselves to themselves in self-esteem, whether this self-showing is appropriately reflected in the views held by others about this individual must be viewed with scepticism. The truth of an individual in their own ability and excellence, and how that individual assesses his or her abilities in self-estimation, on the one hand, and who they are held to be in the view of others, on the other, invariably diverge. In fact, for Aristotle, such ability and excellence is only properly recognized and estimated by others in the highest kind of friendship by a friend who likewise possesses ability and excellence; cf. Eth. Nic. 1156b7). Such friendship is rare and even barely possible for those who are ahead of their time, i.e who do not fit the average understanding of a time.

The fundamental problem with any notion of a just distribution of the social good of esteem is that, barring a system for at least nominally distributing esteem according to a rigid social hierarchy, esteem itself arises ineluctably from sociating interplay itself as the mutual estimation of each other’s abilities. That is to say, the good of esteem is essentially a commutative phenomenon of social interchange that evades any attempt to distribute it according to any criterion external to the interplay of mutual estimation itself. The concept of distributive justice, when applied to the phenomenon of the distribution of the basic social good of esteem, can thus be seen to be an incoherent concept, even more so than the already untenable concept of redistributive social justice (cf. preceding section). If esteem and honour were to be distributed according to inherent ability, the game of social estimation would have to result in abilities being reflected in public esteem in proportion to intrinsic merit, that is, according to the ability and excellence that entitles to the individual’s share. But how could this be at all possible? The myriad interplays of social living do not admit of any uniformity of estimation, to say nothing of estimation in proportion to intrinsic merit justifying a given reward, for what could be the measure of intrinsic merit? Since merit is a δύναμις, i.e. a potential, it must express, show, put itself to work in a movement that others can also see and assess, even when their estimation is often a misestimation.

There is also no conceivable instance, nor a system of social mores, that could enforce any posited ‘just distribution’ of public esteem and honour, since the esteeming and honouring lie in the realm of opinion, i.e. in how others hold somewho to be. Instead, only the merits of specific individuals can be publicly debated and whether their specific merits have been adequately rewarded and appreciated by the public for a time, by posterity, etc. There is certainly a notion of justice or injustice in this in the sense of just deserts, say, when an individual’s excellence is publicly noticed and appreciated post mortem or only in a later age. According public honour to an individual’s abilities and achievements remains always essentially controversial, and it is no injustice that the controversy may never cease. Not to mention fame and celebrity, whose allotment is even more capricious, relying as they do on the whimsy of mass public opinion.

On a more prosaic level closer to home, individuals can be happy and glad that their abilities are appreciated, acknowledged and esteemed in their own life-worlds, for this is how their standing as who they are is affirmed and assured in their everyday social world. But it hardly can be claimed that it is a socially actionable injustice when one’s abilities are not recognized and appreciated by one’s social milieu. In the first place, where is the judge who could decide? Moreover, since has been shown in Chapter 6.1 that the estimating of material goods is by and large equivalent to, or can be reduced to, the esteeming of abilities in the interchanges of daily life, this allows us to see also that even the just distribution of the material goods of living is an incoherent concept insofar as such factual, resultant distribution only comes about through the commutative interplay of having goods estimated as valuable through valuating interchanges.

The interplay of the exchange of goods would have to be itself abolished or tightly regimented in some way to impose some other distribution of material goods. But such an abolition would amount also to a violent distortion of the interplay of mutual estimation and appraisal of people’s abilities that makes up the fabric of social life. Abilities to perform and produce could not be estimated in the mundane form of monetary reward in a free interchange, but rather their rewards would have to be allotted by some superior instance of social power, or perhaps by a rigid traditional hierarchical schema of social evaluation that assessed individual merit in some inevitably rigid fashion (cf. feudal and caste societies). The acknowledgement and rewarding of individual merit would become also the outcome of a political power play, for instance, over places in a rigid social hierarchy as it was, say, in feudal China.

Furthermore, the good (i.e. ability and excellence) that is embodied and lived by a particular individual may be completely misrecognized and remain unappreciated and unaffirmed by others, especially if that good is not one current, common, familiar and therefore easily recognized in practical everyday life. The others must at least understand in some way the excellence and ability of an individual who in order to assess and appreciate them, but this is often not the case. For people can only honour, estimate, appreciate and esteem something they understand in some way. Those abilities which cannot be easily understood by average understanding are likely to be misunderstood, with the consequence that the person embodying that good, far from being honoured and esteemed, is held to be a misfit, eccentric, strange and alien. This is the lot of those extraordinarily creative ones who are ahead of their time and bring something into the shared world whose existence was previously unheard of. The first hearing is usually a totally misunderstanding mishearing and thus recognition is denied, or granted on the basis of a gross misunderstanding, to a creative individual who brings forth and shapes something that breaks the mould of average understanding. Arthur Schopenhauer remarks in this respect, “Some merits lie completely outside the sphere of understanding of the great majority, others they understand and acclaim when such merits first occur, but afterwards they have soon forgotten them.” (Manche Verdienste liegen ganz außerhalb der Sphäre seines Verständnisses, andere versteht und bejubelt er [der große Haufe], bei ihrem Eintritt, hat sie aber nachher bald vergessen.111) And, he notes, the fame of actions

...in der Regel sogleich eintritt mit einer starken Explosion..., während der Ruhm der Werke langsam und allmählich eintritt, erst leise, dann immer lauter, und oft erst nach hundert Jahren seine ganze Stärke erreicht. [...] Bei ihnen liegt dagegen die Schwierigkeit im Urteil, und sie ist um so größer, in je höherer Gattung sie sind: oft fehlt es an kompetenten, oft an unbefangenen und redlichen Richtern. [...] Dieser Hergang [der Herausbildung des leichten, ephemeren, falschen Ruhms oder aber des tiefen, dauernden Nachruhms ME] beruht eigentlich darauf, daß, je mehr einer der Nachwelt, d.i. eigentlich der Menschheit überhaupt und im ganzen, angehört, desto fremder er seinem Zeitalter ist.

Schopenhauer 1956 pp. 113, 114, 115

...usually arrives with a strong explosion..., whereas the fame of works arrives slowly and gradually, at first quietly, then louder and louder, and often reaches its full strength only after a hundred years. [...] With them, the difficulty lies in judgement, and this difficulty is all the greater, the higher the genus in which they are situated; often there is a lack of competent judges, often a lack of unbiased and honest judges. [...] This sequence of events [in which lasting, ephemeral or false fame respectively is established ME] is really based on the fact that the more someone belongs to posterity, i.e. properly speaking to humanity in general and as a whole, the more alien is this person to their own age.

Certain rare, extraordinary individuals are, first of all, recipients of a message112 for which they are sensitive that emanates from the mood of their time (or, more precisely: Zeitgeist, time-mind). The message itself may have been long coming from historical time, challenging a singular individual with his or her own idiosyncratic mixture of abilities to take on the task the message itself calls for, and thus developing his or her potentials to the full to be equal to actually being able to take in the message and energetically cast a singular work in casting his or her own self. The work cast contributes to casting the future, far beyond the individual’s own time and the Zeitgeist of his or her time, in which the work’s significance is often scarcely understood, grossly misunderstood, overlooked or ignored altogether.

I agree with Aristotle that honour and esteem accorded by others are “too superficial” (ἐπιπολαιότερον 1095b24) to be taken as constituting the end in which a good life is attained. Indeed, Aristotle provides as one possible definition of happiness (εὐδαιμονία Rhetoric I v. 1360b para. 3) in life together in a polity “independence of life or a life most agreeable with security [i.e. that cannot be brought to a fall]” (αὐτάρκεια ζωῆς, ἢ ὁ βίος ὁ μετ’ ἀσφαλείας ἥδιστος 1360b para. 3). The Greek word for ‘security’ here is ἀσφαλεία, which comes from the verb σφάλλειν meaning ‘to bring to a fall, to topple, to fell’ which is also related to the Latin ‘falsum’, falsity. That which cannot be brought to a fall stands firmly and has a secure stand. An individual who has gained a firm stand in existence stands in his or her own self-cast self and is insofar independent, does not waver and therefore cannot easily be brought to a fall. Such a life is happy and secure for it is not dependent on fickle affirmation by others.

Another meaning for the Greek word for independence, αὐτάρκεια, is ‘self-sufficiency’ or ‘self-reliance’. According to Aristotle, a man who is sufficient unto himself is strong enough (ἀρκεῖν) in his self (αὐτός) and happy. But what is the sense of self-sufficiency in this context? It does not mean merely that one has sufficient material goods of life to survive independently of others, but concerns the self-standing that one has attained in one’s self as somewho, that is sufficient unto itself and reliant on itself, nor in the sense that it is entirely independent of mirroring by others as who he or she is, but at least in the sense this who is able to fend off offence and attacks by others and draw on his or her own self-esteem to stand as self, despite others’ misestimating his/her self. Without having the mode of being of whoness in view, this phenomenon of a self-sufficient self-standing must remain invisible as a fundamental ontological-existential phenomenon. Since whoness is the social phenomenon par excellence arising from the movement of sociation in mutual estimating, my stand in my self as somewho can never be entirely cast out of my self. Already who I have become is an outcome of my mirroring interplay with others in the world.

Can it, then, be said that an individual is self-sufficient in the sense that it does not depend on the honour and esteem accorded by others, but stands in itself, without need of mirroring estimation by others? For, it must be asked, how does an individual at all come to an independent stand as somewho? My gaining of my self is not possible without the mirroring through others who reflect who I am or could be. If I am in my own life-movement, in the first place, my existential possibilities and potentialities, how can I come to see them and grasp and develop them without some kind of mirroring through others? Is not such mirroring of some kind indispensable to become who I could potentially be? These questions concern self-becoming rather than the estimation given to already attained accomplishments and a firm stand in these accomplishments as somewho. (No thing can have accomplishments, only somewho.) Aristotle rightly points to attained accomplishments (ἀρεταί) in oneself as primary in determining a successful life in community, whereas the estimation of these accomplishments by others is secondary. On the other hand, accomplishments and abilities that remain wholly unreflected by estimation in the social environment leave the individual in isolation and perhaps desolate.

The greater the accomplishment and the harder it is to understand in general understanding, the greater must be the fortitude (one rendering of Gk. ἀνδρεία, ‘manliness’) of the individual to attain a self-stand and self-esteem regardless of the regard accorded or refused by others. For the most part, we depend to a greater or lesser extent on the mirroring reflection by others to be who we are, i.e. to confidently maintain our stands in our respective individual selves. This mirroring as necessary component of experiencing ourselves as who we are implies that we can never be wholly independent and autistically construct our self-stands as somewho from within ourselves. To achieve our potential in actual accomplishments and thus to become who we are, we need the encouragement of estimation by others. Encouragement gives the heart courage to reach out (ὀρέγεσθαι), to strive for what is not yet attained. Your encouragement gives me courage, enheartens me to become who I could be in casting my self into my ownmost possibility and achieving my potential in accomplishments.

Our ineluctable exposure as sociating beings to mirroring estimation of our who-stands means, however, that each of us is open to flattery. As shown in Chapter 3.3, flattery is the phenomenon of others falsely mirroring, for their own self-interested advantage, an aggrandized view of who one is in one’s abilities, qualities and accomplishments. Since each of us strives to be somewho and to stand as tall as possible as somewho, each of us is prone to succumbing to the flatterer’s flattery. From sheer vanity, i.e. the vacuousness of worth that is covered over by self-over-estimation, we like to look in a magnifying mirror to see who we are. Each of us therefore has to discriminate whether the estimation given by others is genuine, i.e. not just whether it is genuinely meant, but whether it genuinely and soberly reflects our self-stands as somewho as measured by what we are capable of and what we have actually accomplished. The question is always whether the esteem accorded to us truly reflects our abilities and accomplishments, thus bolstering our self-esteem. Thus on the one hand, we cannot know who we are in our selves without the mirror of self-recognition held in the hands of others, but on the other, we must also take care to preserve a sober, independent and self-critical self-assessment of who we are.

Even when others genuinely and truly mirror who I am, the very abilities and accomplishments that justify me in my high self-esteem can raise me beyond my self. I then tend to over-estimate the existential possibilities that are open to me on the basis of my accomplishments and thus cast myself into projects that are beyond my potential that are then abandoned. Or I pretend to my self that I have great potentials that I then never wager to test by actually developing them; in my self-delusion I remain in constant procrastination. All projects of self-casting involve a risk, a certain boldness and daring and self-confidence to become who I can be, so there is no sure way of knowing whether my future castings overstretch my inherent potential without tenaciously trying. Moreover, in casting my self as a future possibility to be realized, I do not know where it will lead, for all self-casting is finite and bound by an horizon, namely, that of the open future into which I gaze in self-casting my self. The risk of failure in realizing my self in casting into the future must be somehow accepted. The courage to become my self is also the courage to risk failure as one of my future possibilities in the openness of 3D-time.

Nevertheless, there is a self-casting that amounts to self-inflation and hubris (ὕβρις), the central and constant theme of Greek tragedy. If I cast my self all too grandly into the future as a possibility of who I could become, the failure can destroy me utterly. The struggle to become my self is thus a dangerous game of self-casting out of the possibilities that I see or imagine arriving from the future. Since, as long as I exist, I continue to cast my self into the open temporal dimension of future, I am always becoming my self and there is the continual danger of over-reaching my genuine potential of self-becoming. Or avoiding perpetually the challenge of becoming my self through cowardly procrastination.

An independent self-stand means that life together in community requires that you do not necessarily share the views of what others hold you to be, but rather, on the contrary, you set a limit (πέρας) from within a firm stand enabling you to neglect or at least view at a distance the personal, individual regard and esteem in which you are held by others. Sharing the truth of presencing in the 3D-temporal clearing, insofar as it concerns the whoness of the individual self, thus assumes the form of fending off and critically assessing the particular regard in which you are held to be by others, thus maintaining the independence of your own self-assured truth of your self and also preventing yourself from being felled by the false, clueless or wavering and fickle views of others.

For the most part, and assuming that you do not simply conform to the views and visages that public opinion puts on offer as socially acceptable modes of self-casting, your own self, which is lived as your very own, singular existence within the openness of 3D-time, exercising your own abilities, has only obliquely to do with the regard, honour and esteem or otherwise in which you are held by others, i.e. with how you appear to and show off to others. Your very own truth in critical self-estimation and self-esteem, and the falsity or stupidity of others’ opinions about who you are as somewho are separate and contraposed. You have to be strong and independent enough in your own who-stand to set the limits of the disclosive truth of yourself against the false, reputation-felling or even reputation-boosting, flattering opinions of others, even though being somewho means precisely being exposed to the shared temporal clearing in which the mutually estimative interplay is played out through which you are held to be somewho or other by others. Even the honours accorded by others provide no firm basis for your own existence, that has to be led on the basis of your own insight into yourself, which is the same thing as your insight into your own world and your able or less than able practices and accomplishments within this world. Those who conform to the Zeitgeist, i.e. the time-mind, of their time, of course, have an easier time in being according self-affirmation and high estimation by their contemporaries.

There is something highly paradoxical, contradiction-ridden, about how individuals share a world ranked and graded according to who’s who. Not only is it the case that the views which people hold about states of affairs in the world are highly divergent and conflicting, so that the shared understanding of world is for the most part the sharing of misunderstanding and diverging views, and a squabble and strife over truth, but also the views which ‘people’ hold regarding a particular individual are at best partial and in any case at variance with and alien to the lived existence of that individual. The others are the aliens who alienate oneself from one’s self if one fails to draw the demarcation line and maintain a steadfast stand in one’s own independent truth of one’s own world-opening and one’s own abilities and accomplishments. To be my self I have to cast my very own self-world which cannot be made to depend upon the honour and esteem and regard or otherwise in which I am held to be somewho by others. And yet, to be human also means to share the temporal opening of world in an ongoing interplay of estimation with others and to be somewho in that shared world, so that the estimation accorded to me as somewho affects my own stand within myself. As already remarked, my stand within my self cannot be hermetically sealed off from others in a shared world. “No man is an Island, entire of it self.” (John Donne Devotions)

Aristotle does not treat this aspect of independence (αὐτάρκεια) but restricts his discussion to the security of ownership and the enjoyment of one’s own goods, of what one has acquired and owns (κτῆσις Rhet. I v. 1351a para. 7). This is not only because the open clearing of 3D-time within which ἀλήθεια can play its game of revealing and concealing is taken for granted by Aristotle’s thinking, but because the phenomenon of whoness situated within the temporal clearing enabling whos to show themselves as who they are in an interplay of first- and second-person and also third-person estimating opinion is not investigated explicitly. It is nevertheless whoness as an onto-hermeneutic dimension sui generis which complements that of whatness. Whereas whatness is the hermeneutic dimension corresponding to what became known in Greek and all subsequent grammar as the third person, whoness is the ontological dimension that corresponds, in the first place, to the mirroring interplay between first and second person. Grammatical categories are therefore not innocuous but themselves contain an implicit hermeneutic-ontological content that calls for explicit unfolding.

There is, however, another, more general concept of honour and esteem according to which the regard in which one is held by others does not concern the particularity of an individual existence, but rather only one’s general standing as a fit member of society (“taugliches Mitglied der Gesellschaft” Schopenhauer 1956 p. 70). To be regarded as a reputable person (which has already been investigated in Chapter 3 under the rubrics of reputation and person) means only that the individual adheres to the general mores of intercourse in civil society such as fulfilling one’s contractual obligations reliably and punctually, and not engaging in legally dubious practices to gain one’s own advantage at the expense of others. Schopenhauer writes with regard to this kind of honour that it “is not the opinion about particular properties attributable to this subject alone, but only about those properties usually to be presupposed which also this subject should not lack.” (Denn die Ehre ist nicht die Meinung von besondern, diesem Subjekt allein zukommenden Eigenschaften, sondern nur von den, der Regel nach, vorauszusetzenden, als welche auch ihm nicht abgehen sollen. 1956 p. 73) Schopenhauer contrasts this civil honour or respectability with fame and points out that honour “only implies that this subject is not an exception, whereas fame implies that the subject does represent an exception. Fame, therefore, first has to be acquired, whereas honour only needs not to be lost. Accordingly, the lack of fame is obscurity, something negative; the lack of honour is disgrace, something positive.” (Sie [die Ehre] besagt daher nur, daß dies Subjekt keine Ausnahme mache; während der Ruhm besagt, daß es eine mache. Ruhm muß daher erst erworben werden: die Ehre hingegen braucht bloß nicht verlorenzugehn. Dementsprechend ist Ermangelung des Ruhms Obskurität, ein Negatives; Ermangelung der Ehre ist Schande, ein Positives. 1956 p. 73)

The reference to obscurity indicates that fame is the phenomenon of some-who appearing or rather, showing off, as somewho in the shared open 3D-temporal clearing of society in a prominent, exposed position where they are held in high regard by public opinion, this high opinion being attributable to the individual’s perceived special abilities, merits and achievements. From the point of view of civic honour, a citizen can be content to live in obscurity in the sense that the honourability of an individual only becomes salient and visible in the temporal open when this individual’s honour and reputation are put into question and are perhaps tarnished, so that the individual is forced to defend them. An individual’s honourability in the sense of their standing as a respectable citizen is, as Schopenhauer says, “presupposed” and it only has to be defended when attacked by slander, i.e. when something is wrong and their standing as somewho in the community risks being brought to a fall by the dissemination of a questionable reputation. “The only counter-measure is a refutation of the slander with appropriate publicity and an unmasking of the slanderer.” (das einzige Gegenmittel ist Widerlegung derselben [der Verleumdung], mit ihr angemessener Öffentlichkeit und Entlarvung des Verleumders. 1956 p. 73)

The heading of the chapter in Schopenhauer’s book from which the above quotations are taken reads ‘About what one represents’ (Von dem, was einer vorstellt) and is concerned with “our existence in the opinion of others” (unser Dasein in der Meinung anderer, 1956 p. 57), so to speak, in the dimension of third-person otherness. The chapter title indicates that we present a view of ourselves to others in society and in turn, the others hold their own views about the view we present and represent, but it also indicates that Schopenhauer did not see the relational, not substantive phenomenon of whoness as such and the associated task of an ontology of whoness. Who we are in society is always a matter of presenting a view, representing ourselves hermeneutically as some-who (and not as a “what”, as Schopenhauer’s chapter heading suggests), showing ourselves off and, conversely, being held to be who we are in the mirror view of others both directly in first-and-second person encounters and in third-person opining. Being together in society is thus a phenomenon of truth also in the sense of mutually disclosing and showing-off who we are.

Disclosure here has to be understood in the broad sense which encompasses also its negation and deficient modes, including such phenomena as obscurity, misrepresentation of a person’s reputation in public opinion, slander, misrecognition of an individual’s special abilities and merits, and the like. Disclosure within the open clearing of 3D-time has to be distinguished from what Schopenhauer means by “representation” (Vorstellung) which for him is always representation within consciousness. For Schopenhauer, “the place in which all this [“What one is” and “What one has”, the titles of the two preceding chapters; ME] has its sphere of influence in one’s own consciousness. On the other hand, the place for “what” we are for others is inside alien consciousness; it is the representation under which we appear in it along with the concepts which are applied to this representation.” (Denn der Ort, in welchem alles dieses [was einer ist und was einer hat] seine Wirkungssphäre hat, ist das eigene Bewußtsein. Hingegen ist der Ort dessen, was wir für andere sind, das fremde Bewußtsein: es ist die Vorstellung, unter welcher wir darin erscheinen, nebst den Begriffen, die auf diese angewandt werden. p. 58)

Society is thus conceived by Schopenhauer as the interrelations or communication between consciousnesses in whose interiors representations are formed, i.e. a realm of intersubjectivity, as noted already in the Foreword, a problematic notion still virulent today assumed as self-evident. The dimension within which these separate, isolated consciousnesses could have anything at all to do with each other, i.e. the ‘inter-’ of intersubjectivity, remains an unasked question in Schopenhauer’s thinking, just as it is in all (explicitly or implicitly) metaphysical thinking, including pragmatism. In fact, it is unclear how such consciousnesses could have anything at all to do with each other or what the representations have to do with the persons in the world who are only ‘represented’, ‘re-presented’ inside consciousness.

6.7A just distribution of honour and fame in society? – The (non-)fame of creative recasters of an historical world

To return to the question of the just distribution of honour in society taking account of Schopenhauer’s insights into the phenomena of honour and fame, it can now be seen that honour in the sense of the respectability of a member of society is distributed in modern times equally to each worthy person in general, unless that person, through unjust actions infringing the generally recognized mores and norms of intercourse in civil society, has partially or wholly forfeited his or her reputation. As such, the status of being an honourable or ‘decent’ person is general, and even abstract, and has nothing to do with the individual’s particular abilities and merits or otherwise. The modern individual has an abstract worth (or dignity, as Kant would put it) corresponding to the abstractly sociating interplay of a market-mediated society. On the other hand, honour in the form of fame is only accorded to an individual insofar as the exceptional merits of that individual are seen, in some way understood, and estimated highly by society at large. Fame, or how somewho is talked about by others and so held to be, depends crucially on the famous who’s self-presentation being easily understood by large numbers who today are reached by the mass media for whom the criterion of easy comprehensibility is paramount. Their condition of survival is never to pose or allow any fundamental questions that would challenge ‘people’s’ average everyday understanding of how the world ‘is’, including of course, any questions even faintly touching upon the socio-ontological cast of world in our age.